Accounts of encounters and experiences all around Johannesburg, with countless people and interesting places
AI and ChatGPT The news has been awash lately with talk about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched at the end November 2022. A post recently loaded on a local Residents’ Association site, immediately made me wonder if this was my first exposure to ChatGPT’s authorship. It was littered with ornate […]
Read More »You strike a woman, you strike a rock It is an understatement to say I am grateful to our investigative journos here in South Africa who have done such an extraordinary job in exposing so many of the shenanigans and shameless corruption and misuse of public funds. In the light of this and all the […]
Read More »A giant tree has fallen What a legacy Drew Lindsay has given Jozi. Apart from the deeply felt loss and sadness for his family, friends and colleagues, his passing has left a huge gaping hole in Jozi’s creative community. This gentle giant of a man who embraced all with his wide smile, his quirky humour, […]
Read More »Family business takes on a whole new level of meaning when it comes to Parkhurst Hardware There are many shops in the ‘burbs which have reached institutional status – Parkhurst Hardware is one such. Located on trendy 4th Ave in Parkhurst (obviously) alongside the pavement cafes and eateries where the beautiful people quaff cappuccinos and […]
Read More »Cry the Beloved Country. What do we do in times like this? Watch the news to keep abreast? Weep for those small businesses and informal traders who have lost everything; for all those who will lose their jobs; for the further disruption of the vaccine roll-out; for the possible shortage of oxygen, essential medications, and […]
Read More »Some things are very South African, in fact probably very Joburg. The cry of the mielie-seller with her trolley, the leather worker on his wonky chair with his pile of shoes and sundry items, single sweets and fruit laid out on a sloping makeshift table at the corner vendor, waste pickers with their massive load […]
Read More »Parks as sites of activism In addition to being places of leisure and recreation, parks and public spaces are containers of values, bounded spaces of inclusion and exclusion, sites of political, social and cultural activism whether overtly or by default. During the 1980s in the height of Apartheid repression people’s parks in South Africa were […]
Read More »Load shedding (planned) versus power outage Eskom, a South African parastatal, is the country’s main supplier of electricity. For reasons too depressing and lengthy to go into here, there is a serious national shortage of power supply. So for some 12 years now South Africa has been subjected to what it terms ‘load shedding’, which […]
Read More »In B.C days – not millennia ago – just Before Covid, a friend and I were walking along the Spruit at Delta Park. We saw a man with a home-made poop-scoop, hard at work around the local land mark known as the Blue Bridge which crosses the Braamfontein stream. I was fascinated and went to […]
Read More »How did Lucy get her name? Do you know where Lucy the 3.2 million year old Australopithecus Aferensis got her name from? Lucy was found in many pieces in 1974 in Hadar north-east Ethiopia by a paleoanthropologist, Donald Johansen. When the expedition returned to camp after working at the recovery site, the Beatles “Lucy in the […]
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