SA Rocks

OK, so we may suck at Olympic sports, but at least we can cook.

Team South Africa has returned home to a heroes’ welcome after winning five medals at the Internationale Kochkunst Ausstellung (IKA) in Erfurt, Germany. These include a gold medal in the Hot Kitchen (warm dishes) category, three silver medals and one bronze in the Cold Kitchen(cold dishes) category. The IKA, commonly known as the “Culinary Olympics”, is the oldest and most prestigious international culinary competition in the world and the first competition took place in 1900. Today, the event has grown to more than 750 chefs from 34 nations, and has events for individual competitors as well as national, regional, student, and military teams.

Team South Africa comprises 11 chefs and two logistics officials, and is managed by Garth Shnier (Executive Chef at Sandton Sun Hotel in Johannesburg). Executive Chef of Vergelegen Wine Estate situated in Helderberg, Henrico Grobbelaar, also individually won a silver medal for his contribution.

Although they are partly sponsored, none of the team members get paid for their involvement in the competition, and have to cover their costs with ticket sales and personal funds. If you would like more details of who the team members were, click here.

Team SA came first in the Restaurant of Nations component of the competition (also known as the Hot Kitchen), earning the Team their first gold medal in this competition in 16 years. For this event the team was required to prepare a three course meal for 110 people that reflected South Africa’s unique cuisine. Here’s what they made:

* a crayfish tomato terrine starter with curried crayfish flan, butter poached crayfish, mustard dill cured salmon trout, corn salad and a cucumber raita;
* a main course of beetroot and thyme-marinated springbok loin, creamed barley with juniper braised springbok shoulder and smoked porcini mushrooms, truffled celeriac purée, with a beetroot and pomegranate jus; and
* a uniquely South African dessert of naartjie and chocolate malva pudding, naartjie sorbet and a mascarpone and Van Der Hum macerated fruit slice.

Let’s hope that Team SA’s win boosts South Africa’s profile as a rocking fine dining destination ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Well done, Team SA!

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Apparently we are better off now than we were 14 years ago as a nation. Or at least that’s what Saarf (South African Advertising Research Foundation) has to say about the matter of South African household incomes.

I love hearing things like this. We’ve all heard these almost dogmatic statements that South Africans love to make such as “The gap between rich and poor in SA is only widening.” Well Booha to that.

The average South African household income has risen from R2435 in 1994 to R6537 per month.

This is a staggering 264% and nearly 20% increase per year. And low and behold it is not the super rich that are pulling the averages up, it is the middle segment LSM 5 to LSM 9 that has increased.

In fact the percentage of the population in the LSM 1 -4 segment has decreased with a whopping 32% since 2001. This is a spectacular narrowing of the gap between rich and poor.

LSM 4 has increased but the significant drop is in the LSM 1-3 segments while LSM 10 has remained the same. 78% of the population are in the LSM 4- 10 groups, and 22% in the LSM 1-3 group. In 1993 the LSM 1-3 group represented over 40% of the population. source: iconoclast

Let’s be honest, if I was ever going to trust stats from research conducted it would be from the Advertising Research Foundation cause you know they want to know exactly how much money each household has to spend and on what!

So the next time you are at a dinner party, smack the naysayers with some Saarf facts.

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Recently I have been doing a lot of blogging about voting, voter education, political parties and similar topics.

It is fitting that the Zoopy Gauteng team attended a Round Table discussion held by 702 Talk Radio – who evidently are doing a sterling job to raise political awareness in SA.

Much was said about democracy in yesterdays debates and discussions. Here are a few videos from various parties talking about their opinion of democracy in SA:

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Wow I haven’t thought of, seen or heard of this ad in AGES. What a cheese-ball-filled-ripper!

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I picked this video/presentation up from Erik’s blog, White Africa. It’s a presentation he did at Pop!Tech.

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My recent DA blog post sparked some very interesting, strange and debatable points. The one that intrigues me the most right now (and probably for the next 6 months) is voter education. Below is a comment I published as a response to someone asking me to “convince them to vote”. Firstly I am really shocked and surprised that I need to convince anyone to vote, but this is my response however rushed and off the top of my head:

Basically, you can tell me that the parties are all failures, all liars, all cheats, bigots or whatever you think but at the end of the day they aren’t all like that. They do some very promising work and actually do (alot of the time) try to better the public. You can moan and tell me that your area has had a pothole for two weeks, yes but so have many others.

The reason that you should vote is very simple: Democracy is based on a voting system. If you do not vote then you are allowing a party in to government that actually isn’t representative of the people, but rather a small faction of the people. Our democracy would be in a much better working order – especially with a proportional representation system – if more people voted, votes were fought for and people held their governments and political parties to task with their vote. But right now the parties know that all they need is roughly 8million votes to win an election. It’s apathetic voters that allow parties and politicians to get away with murder.

Imagine if the ANC completely lost the next elections because the people weren’t happy with their outcomes. That would send a message to every party out there that South Africans want results. But in fact, the message we send is: “Ah, you know, you screwed up but I don’t really care enough to tell you with my vote and help educate others to vote so you can take power again and carry on in the same way.”

Voting matters. You can deny it until you die but the fact is that voting matters.

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This is a video I found on HomeComingRevolution and was posted on Youtube by MoneyWeb.

The video shows a Breakthrough between Mushroom Farm and Marlboro Portals.

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André van Rooyen and I met up recently at Capello’s in Sandton. We got to talking about copyright, images online, ownership and the like.

I have been dying to try and get something off the ground as an initiative to help SA Rocks Flickr group contributors. André was the first one to come to me with the idea of printing a book of his photographs and getting his work out there. I am more than happy to announce that we have (well mostly André) successfully used Blurb.com to set up André’s very first photographic book: The Fairest Cape.

Get to Blurb now and

BUY THIS BOOK!!!

The Fairest Cape

My romance with the light and the seas off the Cape, in images

You can head over to blurb where André has his book on sale. You can preview the first 15 pages of the book and get a taste of what you’d be buying. The quality of the paper (the actual book) is great and André has designed himself a magnificent piece of work.

I would really implore you to head over and buy his book, let’s support local online enthusiasts who have hobbies that make our country look absolutely phenomonal.

I would also like to ask you to blog about the book and let your readers have a look at his work and spend some money! Prices start at $22.95 excl shipping and local taxes.

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I absolutely love Joburg at this time of year. There is on simple reason for this.

If you have an incredible view from your apartment, flat, office or are driving down a road with an amazing blanket of purple on the floor then take a snapshot and send it to me, I’d love to see it.

Here is the reason for loving JHB right now:

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I have just completed the SA Blogosphere Census called SPEAK UP! presented by 24.com, Afrigator and Amatomu.

Interesting concept this census is. I was asked for my input before the census went live. I think that there are some interesting questions that are sure to yield some VERY interesting results at the end of it all.

There are some questions that worry me and I am sure will worry others such as the finances, users, pageviews and that sort of information. I was reluctant to give away some of the information but at the end of the day, I’m not pulling in a million people a day on the site and everyone knows it, so who cares!?

So, do yourself and the rest of us a favour and let’s end the debate about blogs, how many, how big, how much etc etc, head over to the PushPlay sponsored SPEAK UP! census and get started now!

I’d like to also suggest that you blog about the census and tag people who you think should take the census and blog about it too!

So I am tagging Mike, Matt, Tertia, Cherryflava, Charl and Chris.

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