Cape Town’s water crisis and other updates

  Well-organised journalists keep detailed diary notes on the stories they have written, with the objective of writing updates. This is how the media knows when to descend on the courts when a murder trial finally starts. Or the updates could be on Twitter. From my lazy post-city desk where I opine and inform about random topics, updates rarely occurs to me. Yet the same subjects crop up again and again: climate change, global warming,…

Continue reading

Rising sea levels and apocalyptic fiction

I’d always thought my song about the mountain dwellers ending up on waterfront row because of rising sea levels was not to be taken too seriously. It was an apocalyptic view of what might happen if it didn’t stop raining and, moreover, not a terribly original idea as it turned out. But the risk of flash flooding from above-average rainfall is only half the problem for people living down there, at sea level. A loyal…

Continue reading

The risks of losing our digital photos and memories

Whenever I think about going through our thousands of family and travel photos, be they in digital form, colour prints or scanned to the computer, I develop what migraine sufferers assure me is not a migraine, just a headache. The problem begins with the lack of a system. Few people other than professional photographers or serious hobbyists catalogue their photos and negatives in a logical way. So good luck looking for that photo of your…

Continue reading

Censorship, guns and the right to arm bears

  I was idly wondering if I should have a go at George Christensen for pulling that silly, anti-greenies gun stunt at the firing range but self censorship kicked in. What if he knows where I live? I blanched. The process known in journalism school as ‘self censorship by osmosis’ still kicks in, even 18 years down the track. You may have assumed I was about to jump into the very deep pool of acrimonious…

Continue reading