(if you don’t get them, then feel free to choose another exciting post on this blog to read, the rest won’t make that much sense to you!)
Anyway, at the time I thought it would be fun to create a couple, and I promised myself that when I had time I would give it a stab. That was a year ago, and I finally got round to doing it. So here are a couple of my own:

And a slight variation on this last one, for local flavour:

In the internet age buzz is everything. Heroes are made and broken online, and those who breathe the rarefied air at the top of the social media stratosphere are the kingmakers.

So here, then, is a question. If the US were to hold their election tomorrow, who would win? Too broad a question…and one answered already by dozens of polls and surveys by news organisations across the US. So let us narrow it a bit. What if the only voters were those who are active online?
Pew Internet & American Life Project has some interesting data on internet usage. They reckon that 73% of adults in the US use the internet. The most active age range is 18-29, of whom 90% use the internet, closely followed by 30 – 49 (85%) and 50 -64 (70%). Internet usage is highest among the wealthy – 95% of those who earn $75 000 or more go online. So if you’re young, rich and American, it’s hard to imagine you doing anything else other than logging on, writing emails, checking your Facebook status and watching videos on YouTube. No surprises there.
OK so now we have our electorate, how about our candidates? In the internet generation, anything goes. So let’s put the real candidates on the ballot – Barack Obama and  John McCain. But we need a control group….someone who is firmly a part of the Internet generation and is capable of creating a kind of buzz all of their own. Britney Spears. Perfect.

Now to the voting process. Instead of voting in a polling booth behind a little curtain, let’s hold the election completely online and elect a President based only on the buzz that each candidate creates among the net faithful. Surely there can be no better sign of endorsement than someone giving of their valuable internet time to read about and watch someone? It’s easy to put an “X” next to a name. It’s a truer test of popularity if, in the privacy of your own home and in your own time, you are searching for and consuming information about someone. Because in a voting booth you have limited choice. Online you have access to information and news about millions of people. And so you make choices that, in today’s number crunching world, can lead us to all sorts of confusion.

But before I go any further – a caveat. I did Standard Grade maths at school. I have never studied statistics. Taking what I am about to do seriously would be like going up to a 7 year old playing “Doctor Doctor” and asking them to perform open heart surgery on you. Or asking Richard Catto for a sane opinion. Don’t do it. This is amateur stuff, and I make no apologies for it.

I’ve taken several indicators of online “buzz” – an attempt at trying to see how much noise each of our three candidates is making online. These indicators are: YouTube Channel views,  YouTube Subscribers,  number of YouTube video results, the number of fans each has on Facebook, and the number of members each has in a “negative” group on Facebook. Then I looked at Digg and Del.ico.us and measured how much each candidate features there, and wrapped it all up in a simple Google number – the number of pages that emerge as search results for the candidate’s name, and the number of Blog mentions tracked for each candidate by Google.

Here are the results of my number crunching, all neatly arranged in a graph.

(click on the image to see it larger)

The result, I am happy to say, is heartening. Britney Spears will not be the next President of the USA or Cyberspace or anything anytime soon (although some would argue that Sarah Palin is not that far off. I’m just saying.). Barack Obama leads the way with the lion’s share of the electorate’s attention.
With his youthful message of change it is hardly surprising that Obama commands cyberspace. He announced his running mate by SMS, he has teams of people just focused on the internet buzz he is creating (*waves – hi guys!*) And, let’s face it, watching John McCain try and master the internet is like watching your dad dance at a wedding.

So there’s my poll. I’ve done my bit. Pundits…..Go!

“What a co-incidence,” I said, “That’s my name too.”
“I’ll just get your key.”

Off she hurried. I’m loath to use the world “bustled” because that conjours up images of a rotund B&B owner, wiping on her crisp apron the floury evidence of warm and crusty bread having just been popped into the oven while clucking around her guests like long lost friends. Ms R Water was nothing like that. Ash dripping from her top lip, she hurried through a western-style pub door behind the desk with poodles in tow. “He’s here,” I heard her announce to the gathered staff at the back. I’m sure I heard a celebratory “Whoop”. Dewy-eyed she returned with my key and instructions to follow her to my room.

The journey through the hotel backyard to my room was an adventure in itself. Stepping over dogs, rabbits and, I swear, a mongoose, I nodded sagely when my hostess gestured to a peacock or Guinea Fowl or something (fauna and flora have never been my strong point, so take that mongoose thing with a pinch of salt) and told me that they were likely to walk on my roof tonight and wake me up. As it turned out they didn’t. What did wake me up – repeatedly and relentlessly – was a rooster that decided to “cock a doodle doo” himself to a hoarse whisper on the half hour, every half hour from 2am, just outside my window. Walking to my car the next morning, grumpy from my interrupted sleep, I spied the smug rooster, well, let me call a cock a cock — I spied the smug cock under a nearby tree. Its night of hard work had worn it out, and so it now lay in a deep slumber of its own. I tiptoed over to it, leaned forward and positioned my mouth more or less where I imagined its ear to be. Or maybe it was its ass. Anyway, I leaned toward a tightened orifice. At the top of my lungs I yelled “BOKKE”. Nothing. No dramatic flurry of feathers or that useless panicky thing cocks do with their wings. Zilch. Unsatisfied by my experience with the cock, but quietly pleased at scoring a point over nature, I stood and turned toward my car to see a flutter of frilly curtain in the office window. I gave the spying receptionist a wave and a cheery smile, threw my room key at the mongoose and hopped into my car to start the dusty trek to Potch.

I was in the area as part of my ongoing attempt to get a handle on South African arts festivals. When a small town like Potch stages Aardklop, which tens of thousands of people flock to in the name of the arts, then it’s worth taking a look to see what they’re doing right and what I can learn from them for the benefit of my own employer.

Before arriving, a journalist told me of the outcry that ensued after he reported that Aardklop was like a giant “Kerk Bazaar”. That may be a little harsh, and a comparison that conveniently ignores the cultural passion that runs through the festival. But I can see how he arrived at that description. The massive “Fees Terrein” is basically a patch of lawn enclosed by several streets that have been shut down, giving way to marqueed and caravanned food and craft stalls. While impressive in its size, there’s not much by way of variety. It seems that sosaties are big in Potch. Lamb sosaties, beef sosaties and chicken sosaties. Sosaties on a bun and then, cunningly and to give the illusion of choice, two sosaties on a bun. Sosaties made and sold by a staggering number of NG Kerks and their derivative offshoots (Reformde, Gereformde, Hergereformde and so on). Others braaied on long rows of sizzling grids and sold by means of signs promising that, of all the sosaties in Potch, these are the best — until the next few steps, anyway. Now don’t get me wrong, I love sosaties as much as the next man. But a slice of Bovril toast would have been good in between. They could even sell it on a stick if it makes someone feel better.

And then there was “Mr Mushroom”. Now Mr M is a creative thinker. Obviously well aware of this crowd’s love of food on a stick, he wacked up not just one two or three, but four stalls selling what can only be described as a crumbed mushroom sosatie. Genius.
In case you’re wondering what has precipitated the national stick shortage, I can reassure you that, after Aardklop, supplies will return to normal.

So the food is all well and good, but what of the art? What indeed. I counted a healthy 98 productions on the Festival programme – a good mix between music, theatre, lectures and dance with a sprinkling of children’s theatre thrown in. And there were lots of recognisable names on the bill, such as Sharleen Surtee Richards, Lionel Newton, Frank Opperman, Zane Meas and Chris Chameleon. There’s also powerful, touching and tear-jerkingly beautiful work, like the Lara Bye directed Yellowman. But, and this is likely to be a contentious observation, as with the ABSA Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn, it’s not these 98 productions that give the festival its identity. It’s the multitude of music stages that spring up around town like mushrooms (I told you Mr. M was good). It’s the devastating truth of many of these Festivals that the arts take a back seat. In the front are a procession of pretty boy Westlife wannabees, singing and strumming songs that, to my ear anyway, all blend into one. Now I love live music. I really, really love it. When it is performed by the real deal – non-plasticky South African artists with genuine talent. And it’s not a language thing. I count Karen Zoid, Koos Kombuis, Chris Chameleon and Valiant Swart among my all-time favourite acts, regardless of the language in which they sing. So there’s nothing more depressing to me than stepping out of a mind-blowing performance by Valiant Swart, who I saw playing to a paltry audience of about 20 people in Oudtshoorn earlier this year, and coming face to face with a 5 000 strong crowd weeping over the Cambells and that musical abomination Japie or Gawie or whatever his name is (you know, the one with the hair who massacres Bryan Adams’s songs. If you don’t know him, you certainly know the type). It’s just wrong.

Now I’m not suggesting that festivals should swim against the tsunami of populism. It is what it is. If the masses want to flock together to watch Kurt Darren and Ghapi (that’s the guy) then they must do that and they will be urged along by mindless television talent searches, which, by the way, I love. No-one said I had to be fair or consistent. Salivating big record companies will milk the opportunity and achieve stratospheric CD sales. Sponsors see all the commotion and pay a premium to put their brands in the heart of the experience. Everyone’s happy and that’s all fine. But when that’s the dominating feature of a gathering of people, then you’re not at an arts festival with some music. You’re at a music festival with some arts. So let’s call it that.

Some will argue that what happens on music stages counts as the arts. And they are probably right, especially if you apply a broad definition of the arts that covers anything that is an expression of self, be it on canvas, through song or words. But I’m not talking about philosophy here, I’m talking branding. If you’re staging an event, you should call it something that reflects either the prevailing impression that is created of what you are, or it should describe what you want to be. I think too many events in South Africa pass themselves off as “Arts Festivals” to loosen the purse strings of those who want to get behind the arts. But in staging the event, they tend to default to the crowd-pleasing (read “ticket selling”) shows that stretch the definition.

That said, I have the utmost respect for the men and women who run other festivals in this country. I’ve met a lot of them and they’re constantly under the terrifying triple-whip of funding, logistics and ticket sales. They tend to do it with aplomb and passion, which is why it works. And my hat goes off to the sponsors too who are under increasing pressure to get “bang for their buck” and find a way of moving money off massive sport budgets to the arts. Between them, the major festivals and their sponsors are responsible for tens of millions of rand finding its way into the pockets of our artists, writers, directors and producers and anyone who gets on a stage in front of an audience deserves a cut. Yes, if I’m being honest, even Ghapi. Maybe.

And while on the subject of honesty, a note to the owners of the Rapid Waters Hotel. May I suggest a name change? There was nothing rapid or watery about where I stayed. Let’s be honest, it wasn’t very hotel-ly either. Since we’re all on a learning curve, here’s a tip. In Grahamstown there’s a guesthouse called “The Cockhouse”. I’m sure they’ll let you use the name.

(Source: http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/diary.asp?show=President%20Mbeki)

No, you nerd, the important thing here is not that he only scored a Google pagerank of 4/10 for importance (relative to Jacob Zuma whose Wikipedia page scores 6/10, making him 20% more important). It’s the fact that his official diary is telling us what we’ve all known for years. He’s not doing anything.

This got me to thinking about politicians who have too much time on their hands and the trouble they can cause. The US Congress is a good example (they have, after all, an unpopular lame-duck president from a different party presiding over them, and everyone is more interested in the Obama-Clinton race than in actually getting something done). So the “Joint Economic Committee” had a choice. Either finish off that game of strip poker they began during the Clinton impeachment campaign a few years back (the honourable representative for Wisconsin still regrets how Edna failed to point out the hole in his jockeys before he left for work that morning); or analyse 10-million flight records supplied by their pals over at the Department of Transportation. OK, let’s be honest. Those humourless jobsworths over at DOT didn’t actually send the data over. Someone just found the pages turned upside down in the photocopy machine while they were trying to make copies of the lunch menus.

In any event, data, or so the saying goes, is only data if it is read and a press release is issued. So it had to be analysed. Or at the very least the most junior member of the committee could be persuaded to stop playing Grand Theft Auto on his laptop, and told to cut and paste everything into Excel to see if anything interesting came up. He was, and it did.

Apparently, the committee found, US airlines are responsible for the biggest economic tragedy since, well, Ronald Reagan.

Last year, in America alone, 320 million hours were lost due to flight delays. That, dear voters of Puerto Rico (who everyone now seems to give a damn about), is unacceptable.

Let’s do the sums.

320 000 000 hours = 13 333 333,33 days = 1 904 761,90 weeks = 36 630,04 years

Now the average life expectancy of Americans is 77,9 years.

So the number of lifetimes lost a year through flight delays = 470,22

Or, consider this. What if the amount of time spent waiting around airports or circling overhead was instead focused on a more noble pursuit? The good members of the Joint Economic Committee can think of nothing nobler than the Nobel prize for Economics. (In fact many of them are hoping to be awarded it in a year or two). The average age that people are awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics is 67. And so, without airline delays, we could have found 546,72 more prizewinners.

Or maybe movies are your thing. While waiting for their plane, Americans could watch the new Indiana Jones film 154 838 709 times. I’ve seen it once, and regretted it. Imagine the mass depression the nation would face if every second person had to endure it? (There are 304-million people in America).

You get the picture? Now you know why the committee was so stunned. One of them mentioned it to a mate on the “Committee for the Environment” while they stood next to each other at the congressional urinals during a lunch break (staring fixedly at the wall in front of them, ignoring the foot tapping from Larry Craig in the stall behind them), who rushed off to tell Al Gore. Gore crunched some numbers, projected them onto the cinema-sized computer screen behind his desk, checked his hair and then clambered aboard his forklift ladder to take a closer look. He was amazed. And so, breathlessly, after checking his hair again, he had to tell us just how amazed he was. As a result of flights being delayed, an extra seven million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide was being released into the air. That’s more than the annual emissions of Namibia, Iceland, Fiji, Swaziland, the Falkland Islands and Samoa combined.

And — let us not forget — this data considers only flights from US airlines. Imagine if Nationwide, Aeroflot and Kulula were added to the mix. Al Gore would do himself an injury trying to show how high those graphs go. The study also fails to count hours spent searching for lost luggage (which, as I’ve already demonstrated, logically leads to more lost Nobel Prize winners). British Airways and Terminal 5 have a lot to answer for.

So what does all this have to do with President Mbeki?

Well the answer is fairly obvious. He’s been accused of late of being an absentee president — jetting around the world while his country burns. His diary, meanwhile, appears empty which means he’s either lying next to his pool sipping cocktails, or he’s stuck at an airport somewhere. Based on what the US Congress is telling us, I reckon the latter is more likely. But don’t worry. He’ll be back with us in 470 lifetimes. And not a moment too soon.

“This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits … I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)”

Andrew was a major in the US army and, last week, became that nation’s first 2008 fatality in what Borat so aptly calls the “war of terror” in Iraq. He had prepared a final blog post in the event of his death and a friend agreed to click the “publish” button should anything happen to him. It did, and so his friend obliged.

Olmsted specifically asks in his last blog “that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side.” So as much as I want to emulate American comic and satirist Dennis Miller who would say at this point: “Now I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but …” (and then proceed to go off on an eloquent diatribe about something or other, usually other), I won’t.

I just want to use Olmsted’s last post to ponder a couple of things. Well, not the post itself, but the fact of the post. And if I may borrow a technique from fellow blogger Ndumiso Ngcobo, I’m going to bulletise my thoughts in no particular order:

• This evening my four-year-old daughter came to me in tears. She had broken a small china teapot someone had given her for Christmas. I fixed it with glue, and her world was OK again.
• My six-year-old son is beside himself with anticipation. Tonight the tooth fairy will visit our house for the first time (what’s the going rate these days, by the way?). His world is good.
• The weekend’s Sunday Times carried a blow-by-blow account of Jacob Zuma’s charge sheet. Things don’t look too great in his life at the moment, although he does have a fourth honeymoon to think about.
• Barack Obama had a good week by fending off the used-car salesman John Edwards and the shrill, smug, shifty Hilary Clinton in the first Democratic primary of the 2008 race. That’s not only good for him, but probably for all of us. Even better news is that most of the Republican voters in Iowa decided to go along to the Democrats’ caucus instead.
• We took our Christmas tree down this evening, confining it to another year in its cardboard box on the dusty shelf in the spare-room cupboard.
• I finished reading Andrew Feinstein’s book a couple of days ago, and am some 200 pages into Mark Gevisser’s biography on Thabo Mbeki. Between the two of them I’m finding myself fluctuating between outrage and empathy, a strange mix of emotions.
• We still don’t know what happened to Madeleine McCann.
• There’s something called “Deathlist”, which lists famous people expected to die in 2008 (if you find yourself on the list, by the way, don’t stress too much … they only had a 5% success rate in 2007).

In preparing this week’s Mail & Guardian podcast, I came across this series of facts:
In 12 months’ time … the world’s oceans will have risen by another inch or so; there will be about another 200-million people on the planet; and about 36 000 more species will have become extinct. We’ll have a fairly good idea of who the next South African president will be; the US will have elected its new president; the Olympics in Beijing will have come and gone; there will have been another Harry Potter movie; and we’ll be 18 months away from the Soccer World Cup. And it’s not all good news … there will probably be another album by Britney Spears and another reunion of a Sixties rock band.

So where am I going with all of this? Sadly, I have no idea. These are just things on my mind right now. And it just seems to me — and perhaps this is the hangover from the festive season of love speaking — that the world is sort of poised for something at the moment. I’m not usually one given over to sentimentality or sissy things like emotions, and I’m certainly not someone who sleeps under a glass pyramid atop a web of tightly woven lentils. I just have this hunch that 2008 is going to be remembered.

But as we all settle in to our 2008 lives (which, let’s face it, are not that different from our 2007 lives), maybe it’s time to take stock of a couple of things that are real and important. Maybe it’s a tooth fairy; maybe it’s a charge sheet. Perhaps right now the biggest thing in your life is a broken china teapot, or maybe it’s a lost primary. Maybe you’re excited about what lies ahead for this country; perhaps you’re depressed about what’s going on now. There’s a chance you feel sorry for Thabo Mbeki and will feel even sorrier for Hilary Clinton come November. Maybe you couldn’t care less about either or about the fact that Fidel Castro is making his sixth appearance on the Deathlist.

But whoever you are and wherever you are, dwell for a moment on the fact that someone was sent into a war (or chose to go into a war, I don’t know) and had the foresight to leave his friends and family with something in case he never came back. Now that’s class. Hats off to Andrew Olmsted.

In fact, even saying I’m not a big fan of theirs is a bit disingenuous. I’m a complete non-fan who would have been hard pressed to hum a single Tull tune. I don’t actively dislike them; they have just never featured on my radar. I dimly recall my parents owning an album, and I think I saw a video of theirs on Pop Shop in the early 1980s, but that’s the extent of my contact with the band.

So off we went to the new Grandwest Arena. (Good job on the venue, by the way. It’s about time Cape Town had somewhere other than a disused velodrome in the middle of nowhere to stage concerts.) And there I encountered tosser number one — a big, burly biker guy wearing one of those black T-shirts with the old South African flag on it, and the words “100% Boer” printed underneath. It occurred to me that he had almost got it right. Substituting the “B” and the “r” with a “P” and an “s” respectively would have been more accurate, but I wasn’t going to let half-brain ruin my evening.

That was the job of others — three more tossers, two in the form of MCs and the fourth the lead singer of Jethro Tull, Ian Anderson. Let’s start with the MCs.

Tasked with warming us up for a good evening out were Barney Simon (he of former radio glory and stalwart of South African music; not to be confused with Barney the Dinosaur, although apart from the purple thing, is an easy confusion to make) and some dolt who introduced himself as being a DJ on 94.7 in Johannesburg. This then caused him and Barney to embark on a Johannesburg love-fest — they decided it would be a hoot to tell everyone how rubbish Western Province rugby is, how crap the mountain is, and how their planes were delayed at the airport. Hilarious stuff. They then went on to introduce the opening band — an OK outfit called Voodoo Child — hyping them as the biggest band in Johannesburg [insert impressed audience noises here].

Now I used to live in Johannesburg, and still love the place, but how dumb do you have to be to come to Cape Town, act as if Jo’burg is the centre of the universe, tell us that because a band are big in Johannesburg we have to love them, and then proceed to trash Cape Town? Very dumb. And just to prove how dumb they were, Barney and friend embarked on this little bit of banter:

Barney: So Jethro Tull have been around for a very long time
Dolt #2: Yes, they have — although I don’t remember their early years like you can, Barney, haw haw haw.
Barney: No, Dolt, in fact can you name any Jethro Tull songs?
Dolt #2: Um, err, no, Barney, you’ve got me there.

Stunned silence. Here was this jerk who has walked on stage at a Jethro Tull concert, dissed the city’s rugby team, told us how fabulous everything from Johannesburg is, and then admits — in front of 6 000 paying Jethro Tull addicts — that he can’t name a single song by the band. 100% Boer looked like he wanted to rip him apart with a koeksister twister.

That’s how dumb he was. Clearly DJs at 94.7 aren’t coached on how to use the internet. It would have taken him five minutes to pop along to Wikipedia and brush up on the band when he accepted the job — after all, he probably got paid something in the region of R10 000 to fly to Cape Town, have a few beers and spend five minutes on stage. If I had been the promoter, I would have sent him back to Jo’burg with a swift kick in the arse and no cheque. Tosser.

And then we get to the last tosser of the evening: Ian Anderson, lead singer of Jethro Tull. The band are great. They are the Real Thing … genuine rockers from an era when quality musicianship still counted. Even as someone who knew little of their music I enjoyed the show. Until the end, which shouldn’t have been the end.

During an intricate guitar solo, someone in the audience whistled. It’s what people at concerts do from time to time. It’s called “getting into the spirit of things”. Ian Anderson stopped playing and berated the audience, complaining that the whistling put him off his playing. Except no one was sure whether he was joking or not. So, the moment he began to play again, more people whistled. So Ian threw a strop, and stalked off to the back of the stage to sulk.

There is of course a delicious irony in the fact that one of the band’s biggest albums was called The Whistler, but that was lost in the blue haze of petulant huff. Anderson then came back, indicated to his band that they should wrap it all up. After the song, they did, and they walked off stage and into the Cape night without so much as a nod and a smile, leaving behind 6 000 slightly confused fans.

I suppose we can hope that they bumped into MC Tosser backstage and had to endure his company for the time it took for their cab to arrive. It’s called justice. As for the audience, well, having paid R400 and upwards for our tickets, I reckon that we were entitled to a little more courtesy. Even a forced “Good night, we’re old and tired and extremely grateful that you bothered to come along tonight, but now we must sleep” would have been nice. Tosser.

If not doing crime is playing a role in fighting crime, then I’m cool with that. If the president or Pallo Jordan wants me to don a flak jacket and get out there, leopard-crawling through the streets of Johannesburg looking for baddies, then they’ve got the wrong guy. I briefly considered a career as a policeman but then saw how badly they get paid for walking counter-intuitively toward gunfire instead of running like the blazes in the other direction.

Asking the nation to “all play a role in fighting crime” is abdicating responsibility. It’s also encouraging vigilantism, a slippery slope that could only end badly. It’s not our role to fight crime, just as it is not our role to fix potholes in the road or to speed around in those bright red shiny engines putting out fires. There are people who are employed to do those things, and get paid to do them. I just have to do my own job, pay my tax bill and then all of that comes as part of the service.

Sure, if I become aware of a pending crime I should report it. If I am contemplating doing something bad, then I should stop it. And I should raise my children to know that crime is bad, honest work is good. But that’s where my role in fighting crime begins and ends. I can do no more.

It’s not like other national priorities. Tell me that I have a role to play in alleviating poverty and I can see that: I can employ people, contribute time and money to NGOs working with the poor, and so on. Tell me that I have a role to play in educating our people and I get it — I can help my domestic worker to put her daughter through college; I can help her complete her own studies.

In a small way I can help with those. But I can’t help fight crime. I can help prevent crime — by building higher walls around my house, getting vicious dogs and lining the inside of my car with high-voltage electric wire — but those measures aren’t fighting crime. They’re protecting me from criminals. The problem has not been solved — it has just been diverted to the unfortunate guys down the road who haven’t yet had the croc-infested moat dug around their property.

There’s a loveable redneck singer called Charlie Daniels who once penned the poetic lines “Now I’m not the kind of man who would harm a mouse, but if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house, I got a 12-gauge shotgun waiting on the other side”. I’m with him. I don’t have a gun of any description, but if an unarmed someone tried to break into my house and I caught him, then I’d do my best to beat the living crap out of him. If he had a gun, I would pretty much do what he told me to do. It’s called the law of averages and when they’re against you, accept it and move on.

The problem with the words of our government on the issue is that they might embolden me to do something stupid and think, “Hey — the Prez said I should fight crime, so let me take on this dude with a gun … where’s my potato peeler?” Get real.

Those urging us to “do our bit” are engaging in a wily psychological trick — getting us to believe that we’re all in this together and we must unite to fight crime. In other words, don’t apportion blame for a crime rate that makes a holiday in Hanoi in 1966 seem like a honeymoon. If there’s lots of crime, then we haven’t been pulling our weight. And we must take the blame rather than place it at the feet of those who are actually paid to take care of it. Genius piece of spin.

In the UK, millions of Britons (and expat South Africans) are glued to their screens. Halfway round the world on the tip of Africa, millions others join in. Everyone holds their breath. The ref blows his whistle. For eighty minutes these men give their all while we sit on the edge of our seats. Then the final whistle goes, and it is all over.

South Africa have lost the final. England are awarded the Webb Ellis Trophy for 2011, snatching victory from the reigning champions in green and gold.

OK, so the heading of this blog is deliberately misleading and provocative. But I’ve got your attention now, and what I have to say is important.

Even if we do win the World Cup on Saturday — and I think we will — we’re still likely to lose it in 2011. Let me explain …

Once the tournament is over and messages of congratulations from every opportunist member of Parliament and government have been dispatched simultaneously to the team and the media, the dust will settle. And Jake White, the deserving hero of the tournament, will be scanning the Careers section of the Sunday Times looking for a new job.

We’ll then enter a new era of South African rugby. Politicians and administrators, increasingly frustrated with a lack of transformation in the game, will turn up the heat, impose more and more restrictions on team selection and try and fast-track transformation at a level of the game where it simply will not work.

Don’t get me wrong — I also think that transformation in the sport has been too slow. There are one or two black stars in the Bok team but it is inexcusable and embarrassing to us as a nation that, today, 17 years after we had the first taste of freedom and 13 years after our first elections, the team does not feature more black players. And its not an issue of window dressing — the team should feature black players who deserve to be there because, had we been serious about transformation over the last 17 years, we would have groomed plenty of young talent who could today hold their own on the world stage. But we have failed to do so.

The youngest member of the team is Francois Steyn, and he is a phenomenon. He was two and a half years old when Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Where are all the other kids who were born in 1987? Why was there no talent scouting for young black talent at the time when Francois and his peers were first picking up a rugby ball at Grey College in 2000, six years after our first election? Who should have been doing that scouting? The answer is simple — those charged by the minister of sport with transforming and leading the game … the official structures, provinces and national body.

The fact is that the provincial rugby unions and South African Rugby Union (Saru) have failed dismally to produce a development programme that makes a difference. Had they done so, we’d be seeing a difference in the national team. So today, embarrassed at their lack of progress, they look for scapegoats. And they escalate transformation to the highest level of the game where inexperienced and badly coached players of all races will quite simply get thumped, demoralised and cast aside, regardless of their potential. And where, for political expediency, they can say the word “quota” and grab a few headlines.

The most recent financial statements available on Saru’s website are from 2005. In that year they generated income of R355-million, mostly from sponsorships and the sale of TV rights. They spent 9% of their income, or R32-million, on “development”. Fair enough — that’s a whack of cash and should go a long way. Except it hasn’t. The team is still largely white. Incidentally they also spent R19,4-million on sponsorship commissions. I’m not saying anything, just pointing it out.

South African rugby fans want the best team to take the field so that we can win Tests and the World Cup. We don’t care what colour the players are — just look at how Bryan Habana has become Loftus’ golden child, embraced by even the most hardened Blue Bulls supporter. It’s not about the colour of a player’s skin. It’s the colour of the jersey that counts. So we’ll shout and scream and burst several blood vessels along the way. It’s our job to get behind them — it’s what fans do.

And the national coach wants his team to win. Jake White has picked the best possible squad to take to France (oh just shut up Luke Watson fans, we’ve heard you), and will likely succeed because of it. Had he been given a pool of equally talented black players who had been groomed as long as the white players had been, and exposed to top coaching and first class competition, he would have taken them. It’s his job to pick the best team from what’s available — it’s what coaches do.

But you don’t just matriculate and get into the national team. You play club rugby, you turn out for your province. That’s where you get exposure to fierce competition, proper coaching and mentoring by more experienced players. The fact that we have so few players of colour in the national team is not Jake’s fault, nor is it the fans’ fault. It is because talented youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds aren’t getting spotted, sent off to Saru funded academies and coached by the best the country has to offer. Saru is to blame. It’s their job to grow the game. And they’re not doing it.

So let’s enjoy the euphoria if we win on Saturday night. And let’s share the pain if we don’t. Either way, our team did us proud. But if Saru insists on fulfilling its development mandate on national level, ignoring transformation and change where it really counts and where it is actually meaningful, then don’t expect to feel the same way in four years time.

It is basing its thoughts on a whole range of factors — weather patterns (thanks, Al Gore), holidays (Eid, Christmas etc), special events (Rugby World Cup) and what you bought this time last year. I have now added one more variable to the system — expect to see an abundance of soup and cheese and bread in every Woolworths in the southern suburbs of Cape Town on Tuesdays from now on. That’s the night we like to call “Survivor-soup-and-cheesy-bread” night. Yes, we’re that sad. But every opportunity a family gets to eat together and do something together should be taken. So we toast Jeff Probst and cheer on the grubby Yanks with, um, toast. And cheese. And soup.

But back to the computer. Woolworths call it the “foods forecasting and replenishment system”. We’re going to call it Arnold. No real reason. I just think it is an appropriate name. Arnold is used to, um, forecast demand for foods and decide how to replenish supply. But sometimes he goes horribly wrong.

Let me explain, but I’ll start with a disclaimer … I love Woolworths. I think whoever is responsible for conceptualising its food halls should be given some sort of prize — nothing less than a Nobel Prize for Humanity will do. Its food is brilliant, fresh and innovative. I have no problem paying slightly more for it … it’s that good.

Last week it was my turn to stop to pick up the necessary ingredients for the Tuesday family feast, so I pulled in to the Woolworths at Constantia Village at about 6.30pm. The clock was ticking. I was in a reward challenge all of my own.

Stepping into the store, though, felt like stepping into a geographical space-shifter. I was no longer in leafy, abundant Constantia. I was in downtown Harare where people shop with suitcases stuffed with banknotes, peering hopefully at empty shelves, willing them to miraculously fill before their very eyes.

The cupboard was bare. Very bare.

So I did what any enterprising hit-chasing blogger would do. I whipped out my cellphone and took a couple of pictures of the empty shelves …

Here’s one …

… and here’s another.

There were more, but I think those two make the point.

I collared someone suit-like and nervous at the door and asked him where all the stock was. He was very apologetic and polite — even though he didn’t work at that particular branch — and promised to pass my concerns on. I seriously doubt he went to head office and said: “The Lankester children aren’t having soup tonight and it’s all our fault.” It’s more likely that he said: “There’s some nutter walking around our store taking pictures with his cellphone.”

During the photography exercise I attracted some attention from a security guard who walked a little too close once or twice, and some more suits glancing nervously in my direction. Stressed suit at the door was on his cellphone. I doubt Woolworths has a Vegas-casino-style back room, but I didn’t want to hang around and find out. I could just imagine sitting, strapped to a chair, with some brutish lug prodding the last remaining baby marrow up my nose demanding that I delete the pictures off my cellphone. Or pelting me with the contents of a bag of Chuckles (the new dark-choc-and-mint ones, please, should I have the choice). Time to leave.

Because it is the responsible thing to do, and because I was intrigued to know the answer to the question “Where was the manager of the Constantia Village branch when the second-last packet of minestrone soup was being lifted off the shelf by a jowly housewife at around 1pm? Or the last French loaf? Or organic veggies? Or free-range beef? Or chunky, fat-free cottage cheese (plain)?”, I contacted Woolworths.

More to the point, I contacted its press office. With the kind of urgency and empathy that big corporates invoke when faced with a “potential PR problem”, the good folk at Woolworths fell over themselves to investigate. They did. And, unlike various other corporates (ahem, Vodacom — see previous blog) they actually replied. And they did so with cogent, non-patronising answers. Clearly they take this reputation thing seriously.

As they pointed out to me, they also hate it when their shelves are empty. Because empty shelves stop people buying stuff, which stops them earning money, which is what they are there to do. Duh. The empty shelves at Constantia were a problem, I was told, partly explained by a particularly bad week compounded by a gremlin that had crept into an algorithm somewhere and … whoah … back up there, cowboy. Algorithm? You mean a computer sitting somewhere was monitoring chocolate-mousse levels and alerting the factory pumping it out when the mousse was running low? Where is this computer? Can I see it? Will it be my friend? What’s its name? Arnold.

I learned that the process of getting milk from the cow to the fridge at Woolworths is way more complicated than one would think. Enter Arnie (we’re that close now). It is what happens when geek meets retail. In practice it is really just a set of variables that is twiddled and tweaked to predict exactly how many avos the Hyde Park branch will need. They look at how many they sold at the same time last year, and they ask whether demand for an avo is something that rises and falls according to other factors.

So Arnie ticks along, spewing out predictions Nostradamus-like to anyone who comes along and asks the right questions. That’s all done a couple of months in advance. It’s freaky — Arnold has already decided how many people in Constantia are going to be buying mince pies come December. He knows what you’re going to do before you even think of doing it.

So that’s how Woolworths places orders with its suppliers. Then goods arrive at the warehouse, and from there stores are sent their allocation from the total supply. That’s done on the basis of another calculation, executed the day before the stock arrives. That algorithm looks at how much of each item the store has in stock, how much it anticipates selling and therefore how much it still needs to meet demand. Then the trucks trundle off to do their deliveries.

Inevitably, though, because human beings insist on getting involved in work that computers could quite happily do on their own, glitches creep in. An order is split into two loads; the computer just notes the first load and assumes there has been an under-delivery. The next day there will be an over-delivery to compensate, which means all the other stores in the area are not sent their quotas. It’s a downward spiral that results in the kind of empty shelves I saw at Constantia.

I have some sympathy for the computer. Generally speaking we blame these charming, inanimate objects every time something goes wrong. As I write this, Arnie is strapped to a chair in a back room with a burly, red-faced manager yelling at it: “Where is the Lankesters’ soup? Answers, you bastard, give me answers …” And of course no answers will be forthcoming. He only speaks in algorithms and, let’s be honest, no one really understands those.

So my family was deprived of their soup but, if we’d been living in an area that was being oversupplied, we could have had all the soup we wanted. It was an accident of geography, coupled with an over-eager-to-please computer called Arnold, who is currently staring down the barrel of a virus-infected syringe.

Woolworths tells me it is constantly working on these algorithms to make them work better. I take that to mean they are threatening Arnold with a Britney Spears screensaver. Meanwhile, the Constantia Village branch has been labelled something called a “priority pick”, which means it gets first options on all supplies leaving the warehouse. So if you live close by and suddenly find all you need every time you go into the store, then you have me to thank. Apologies to you lot in Claremont, but your soup is over at our branch waiting for me to pop in tomorrow. Arnold says I am going to, and who am I to disappoint?