Hallowe’en is a peculiar American holiday. Come the evening, parents let their kids loose on their neighbours, dressed up in scary, silly or cute costumes. Looking all gothic, they proceed to knock on doors to ask for candy. Most adults indulge them, and stock up on sweets for the occasion.

But what if you stock up, and nobody came? What if the kids had a more reliable source for their sweeties and just went to their regular sugar man? To counter the costly impact of competition, Baltimore has issued “no candy” signs to known sex offenders. I kid you not.

Describing parts of Al Gore’s global brainwashing film, An Inconvenient Truth, as “alarmist”, a judge managed to find nine insupportable statements in the Oscar-winning jeremiad. He was ruling in a case brought to prevent its screening in British secondary schools. The case alleges the film is unfit for schools for being politically partisan, for containing serious scientific inaccuracies, and for being full of “sentimental mush”. Stewart Dimmock, the school governor who brought the case, said: “It’s a political shockumentary, it’s not a scientific documentary.”

According to the BBC, among the errors the defence could not explain were:

• Mr Gore’s assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland “in the near future”. The judge said this was “distinctly alarmist” and it was common ground that if Greenland’s ice melted it would release this amount of water — “but only after, and over, millennia”.
• Mr Gore’s assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming — the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.
• Mr Gore’s reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned “swimming long distances — up to 60 miles — to find the ice”. The judge said: “The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.”

The judge did call the film “broadly accurate”, and ruled that subject to suitable warnings and guidance notes to provide balance it can be shown in schools. But then, that goes for a lot of fiction.

The comments on a recent post about Burma became a rather interesting exchange, and I promised a more detailed reply. I wrote a response to a call by George Monbiot and Desmond Tutu for a boycott of Gary Player. The commenter who raised it, Leo Africanus, took it rather personally, though I seem to recall saying his view was “interesting” and “has merit”. I also called it “a disgrace” when Nelson Mandela did decide to dump Player as host of the Nelson Mandela Invitational golf tournament.

The main point here is that Gary Player’s reputation as a defender of Apartheid isn’t relevant. He may well be a racist sod and political opportunist. As I pointed out, I’m not about to take his word for it that he isn’t. I didn’t counter Leo Africanus’s arguments in this regard because I had no intention of defending Player’s history or character.

The sole reason given for the boycott call was that he had designed a golf course in Burma in 2002, and that its use by the junta there constituted sufficient reason for Nelson Mandela to distance himself from Player. That is the point on which I disagree.

If the problem really was his reputation as a racist throwback to Apartheid, he would have (and should have) been censured years ago. Even then, it seems arbitrary to single him out when a lot of other people qualify for the same treatment, and it would be rather contrary to the spirit of reconciliation, instead of revenge, for which Nelson Mandela himself became the icon.

Ostracising Player now, on the flimsy pretext that one of the many golf courses he designed was built in Burma — at a time when the political situation there was more promising than at any other time in recent history — smacks of hypocrisy.

And when Player’s own country, South Africa, couldn’t even be bothered to join a UN vote calling on the Burmese junta to cease its repression, let alone to support sanctions against the regime, idioms about splinters and motes, pots and kettles, come to mind.

Dene Smuts, the official opposition party’s spokesperson on communications, sure knows how to get quoted. Witness:

[Minister of Communications Ivy] Matsepe-Casaburri is simply not implementing recommendations. She seems to act as a law unto herself and an unguided missile. I intend to ask the committee to attend to this. The department is expected to appear before us this month and I intend to use this as an opportunity to tackle the matter and take it forward.

This was in response to the minister’s reported statement that said a Public Service Commission report which found “sufficient evidence” of several irregularities in the appointment of staff in her department was “incorrect”, and that she would take no action on its recommendations. This report lends support to recent allegations about fraud and corruption in the hiring practices of the Department of Communications (DOC).

The most elegant solution to these problems would be to fire the minister — you could pick from a smorgasbord of reasons — and merge her portfolio with that of the Department of Trade and Industry. Then require all current employees of the DOC to re-apply for positions in the new department. Two birds, one stone.