Anthony Fabian’s terrific film about Sandra Laing is to be released in South African on January 22. About time.

There is quite a bit of handwringing going on about the danger the high prevalence of HIV in South Africa poses for the half million visitors expected to descend upon the country for next year’s World Cup. Read the full article

…that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about (you can read about my Enquirer experience here). A lot of people used to assume that the Enquirer simply made up many of its stories about celebrities, or at least embroidered heavily on the truth. Actually, with a few unintended exceptions, the  rag got its facts right, or at least right enough that they would stand up in court if they ever had to. Read the full article

Until Sunday afternoon, I had never heard of Fred Roed. Then another complete stranger re-tweeted a link to something Roed had written on his blog, Ideate, along with the item’s title: Eight Reasons Why It’s Great to Be South African.  The re-tweet showed up in the stream of tweets containing the phrase “South Africa” I have running as a ticker in my Firefox browser. Clear?

It sounded interesting, so I clicked on the link and read what Roed had to say. He was funny and engaging, so I too re-tweeted him, then added Ideate’s RSS feed to my Google Reader and Roed to the list of people I follow on Twitter. For good measure, I bookmarked Roed’s post on my del.ici.ous account, which automatically sent it to my Friendfeed, my Facebook page and, potentially (I haven’t made installed the necessary plug-ins yet) members of my Ning and Linked-In networks. Still with me?

If none of that makes sense to you and you are in the marketing or PR business, you may be in danger of going the way of the buggy whip maker. This process is at the very heart of how memes – and you had better get used to that word, too — are made in the age of social media. Read the full article

I’m well into this primer, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith,  on how to use the social web as a marketing tool and the basic behaviours involved. The authors seem a bit ashamed at having slaughtered trees and confess their book is a “$25 calling card” designed to increase their standing in the world of people who still wield power and yet view social media with disdain, if they even acknowledge its existence. The book makes some very good points, also some very rudimentary ones on how not to be “that guy” – the guy at the poker table who doesn’t know he’s the sucker. Key take away so far is on the need to be “one of us” — part of the community you are trying to convince — rather than “one of them” ie the organisation or company you in fact represent. Takes balls on the part of your employer to go along with this, but the example of Robert Scoble at Microsoft helps. Up next on my reading list, Shel Israel’s Twitterville. Been following Shel on Twitter and this looks to be a treat. There’s a lot of ubuntu in the social media community — and I’m not referring to the Linux variant.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award its annual peace prize to President Barack Obama has left a lot of people, even his admirers, slack-jawed. Some perspective might help. The use of flattery as a means of nudging the powerful has a long history. “Praise and counsel have a common aspect,” said Aristotle. Read the full article

South Africans are master improvisers.  Give them a challenge, and they will, as the saying goes, make a plan.  It’s a great strength. One sometimes worries, though, that this strength may be the artifact of an underlying weakness. Maybe South Africans would not be such terrific problem solvers if they did not so often make things so difficult for themselves to begin with. Read the full article

We are nine months into President Barack Obama’s first term and the barbs are flying. By some accounts he’s a Nazi, by others he’s a Communist, by still others he sees George Orwell’s 1984 as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale. In the midst of his nationally televised address to Congress on health care reform, a congressman from South Carolina, a famously intemperate state which started the American Civil War in 1861 to keep its slaves, yelled “You lie!” Read the full article

Should African farmers care whether President Barack Obama succeeds in pushing serious health care reform through the US Congress? As odd as it may sound, they may have a real stake in the outcome of what to most would seem an exclusively domestic tussle. Here’s the connection. Read the full article

A CNN producer holidaying in SA professes to being saddened by Johannesburg’s high walls and razor wire. It’s a common enough lament and I too regret the need for razor wire and its electric equivalents. With the walls I have no trouble. In fact, they are a feature of the city I like. I’m into privacy and having my space to myself. Also you can grow nice things up walls. Wisteria, for example. American suburbs tend to be horribly exposed places. You pay a couple of million dollars for a tract mansion and still have to live in plain sight of your neighbors. My preferred urban dwelling would be modelled on the typical house in Pompeii – facing entirely inward around a pair of small courtyards. They didn’t build them like that because of the crime rate.

What is the likely impact of the Zuma administration’s decision to reverse its predecessor’s s stance on the apartheid reparations claims that have been crawling through the US courts for the past six years? Could it speed a resolution? Or will it rekindle the otherwise fading embers of worry about South Africa’s investor friendliness post-Polokwane? The jury is out. Read the full article

Canada is a very large place, seriously in the market for more people. It was not, however, aching for the company of Brandon Carl Huntley, 31, late of Mowbray, a Cape Town suburb. He was in the country illegally. His resume, according to newspaper accounts, included stints as a carnival worker and as a garden sprinkler salesman, positions Canada is manifestly able to fill from its current reserves of human capital and which would not classify his departure from South Africa as contributing greatly to any brain drain. Read the full article

When F Scott Fitzgerald wrote that there were no second acts in American lives, he had been working as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He did not mean that Americans could not reinvent themselves. They do that all the time. He meant that in their rush to cut to the chase, they had a tendency to jump straight to the third act from the first. This rang true as America remembered Senator Edward Kennedy this past week before laying him to rest alongside his two older brothers in Arlington Cemetery. Read the full article

The Obama administration is working hard to breathe life back into relations between the US and South Africa that had become stale, tetchy and, on occasion, downright venomous. That is good news for anyone working to promote South Africa’s global reputation. It helps when what is still the richest and most powerful country on the planet wants to see us the way we want, and need, to be seen. Read the full article

Writing in Friday’s New York Times on the Caster Semenya affair, Gina Kolata, the paper’s respected medical writer, paraphrased Dr Maria New, an endocrinologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, thus: “The Bantu, a group of indigenous South African people, often are hermaphrodites.” This was subsequently amended on the Times’ website to: “The Bantu, a group of indigenous South African people, maybe more predisposed to being hermaphrodites…” More predisposed than whom was not specified. Read the full article

To tell the truth, I am not entirely looking forward to the release of “Invictus”, Clint Eastwood’s film of John Carlin’s magisterial book, “Playing the Enemy”, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Springbok captain François Pienaar. The book, director, and actors promise a knockout  picture, of course,  and one dares hope it will reinforce positive memes about South Africa’s better angels. What I dread is the accents. Read the full article

I am dictating this column to my laptop. An inexpensive piece of software is converting my words into text with surprising accuracy. Such technology, in the view of Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, is bad news for low skilled workers and for the skilled whose taxes will have to support them. The former, unable to command a living wage, may well, Clark thinks, have to become permanent wards of the latter. Read the full article

As President Barack Obama struggles to build consensus on an overhaul of the American health care system, he could be forgiven for wishing he was working under South Africa’s constitution rather than his own. The system is desperately broken.  The SA constitution, by enshrining  justiciable rights to health care and other basic needs , would give Obama badly needed leverage to get it fixed. The US constitution, admirable though it is in most respects, is rooted in distrust of government and makes the task devilishly tricky by design. Read the full article

I do not handle Kafkaesque situations well. My wife has on more occasions than I care to remember had to rescue me from self-destruction when tangled with authority that does not make sense. Read the full article