Random Thoughts: Africa’s Wikipedia Problem?

Jul 28, 2013 |

In April this year, an American author, Amanda Filipacchi, wrote a piece titled Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists, on the New York Times website in reaction to the discovery that women were being moved from the American Novelists category to a sub-category American Women Novelists. Following that James Gleick, an American author, journalist and biographer, shared his thoughts expanding on this on the New York Review of Books blog, with his opinion piece, Wikipedia’s Women Problem. Early this year, in the Freakonomics Radio Podcast Women Are Not Men, there was a discussion on how...

read more

Heineken Dropped SA

Jul 25, 2013 | ,

There is something about travel that puts not only one’s home into perspective but also how we fit into the world as a whole. The diversity that is the human species and the planet we live on is phenomenal but few of us have the opportunity to truly experience it, even if it is a snapshot. I often travel for work and, although the access is great, it is hard to truly experience a place when coming through for 3 days, with most of the time spent working. Heineken, with its latest global campaign ‘Voyage’, is giving four men the chance to experience the soul of the planet. Voyage is a...

read more

Words From TV Fathers

Jun 23, 2013 | ,

The Good Men Project, which was started in 2009, is one of those sites and twitter accounts I follow because it often shares interesting thoughts related to the multi-dimensions of being a man. They define themselves as follows: We are a community of 21st Century thought leaders around the issue of men’s roles in modern life. We explore the world of men and manhood in a way that no media company ever has, tackling the issues and questions that are most relevant to men’s lives. We write about fatherhood, family, sex, ethics, war, gender, politics, sports, pornography, and aging. We shy away...

read more

Technology In The 80s

Jun 18, 2013 |

I remember life before the cellphone. I remember when my father's office moved from a normal typewriter to the advanced electric typewriter. I remember when they first bought a fax machine.  I remember marveling at how you could put a piece of paper in your machine and the person on the other side received an exact replica. I remember when people had telex addresses on their business cards. I also remember the sound a modem made when it tried to connect. Every time I think about it, I hear it. I remember holding my breath in anticipation of that last screech that meant you were finally...

read more

Dove And The Forensic Artist

Jun 13, 2013 | , ,

Sometimes brands get it right. In a desire to place their products and services top of mind, they create something that truly resonates. Something that speaks to the reality of our lives. Dove, with their Real Beauty Sketches campaign, got it right, in my humble opinion. At the heart of the ad is the idea that how women see themselves is different from how others see them. An FBI-trained forensic artist drew sketches of women featured from their own descriptions of themselves and from descriptions from others. As a man who has had to navigate the 'does this make me look fat?' or 'I wish my...

read more

Man Of Steel

Jun 10, 2013 | ,

It looks like film is the new battleground for cellphone manufacturers. The first instance I really remember of a phone having a significant 'role' in a film was Nokia's 3110 in the Matrix. More recently, Sony Xperia T has been pushed as the 'James Bond' phone and I've been to a couple of film premieres that were sponsored by smartphone manufacturers. The latest in this budding relationship between smartphone, in this case Nokia, and film is Man of Steel. Like many kids who grew up in the 70s and 80s, Superman was THE superhero. At some stage, the superhero space became extremely saturated...

read more