You’ve got to be there, you know it. It’s one of the most prestigious tournaments on the golfing calendar. The Golf Tournament. It’s nice, because it’s not hosted. It’s not in aid of anything. It’s still sponsored by Coca-Cola, I think, but I suspect that it soon won’t be. So it’ll be like you and your mates down at your local club: totally unremarkable, except that you’ll be playing with Gary Player, Mark McNulty, John Bland and Vincent Tshabalala, and the proceeds go to buying drinks afterwards.

This is the farce that is (or rather, was) the annual Nelson Mandela Invitational, traditionally hosted by Gary Player. First, Desmond Tutu echoes a call by George Monidiot to boycott Gary Player because one of the many golf course he designed happens to be in Burma, and Monidiot supports a boycott of anyone who does business with Burma because he doesn’t like the Burmese junta. Granted, who does like that backward, murderous regime?

Gary Player has been good enough for the organisers for seven years running, so allegations about a business deal in Burma five years ago, or worse, his alleged support for Apartheid in the 1960s, really don’t wash. Now, suddenly, he’s a pariah? Besides, there are no sanctions against Burma, and there is disagreement over whether there should be. The course was built at a time when pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi had been released and things were looking more positive than they do today. South Africa just recently voted against a UN resolution to place pressure on the regime, citing some procedural nonsense for what really was teenage rebellion: “Yay, we’re on the Security Council now, so we’ll throw our new-found weight around by proving that we don’t have to vote for anything the US supports.”

Essentially, current events in Burma provided an opportunity for political grandstanding by a far-left fool who masquerades as a journalist, and a priest, and they jumped at the chance, stomping on Gary Player’s head in the process.

Three weeks ago, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, which owns the event, reportedly withdrew the invitation to Gary Player, despite the flimsy grounds for the boycott call.

Now, with four weeks to go to the tournament, and the player list almost complete, it’s withdrawing. Completely. And taking its name with it. So it can officially sue, someone, whoever now organises it, for hosting this site.

It’s a disgrace. It’s arrogant bullying and grandstanding. It’s politically incompetent. It’s going to cost someone a lot of money. If this disaster turns out to reflect badly on the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, it has only its trustees to thank.

Be afraid, be very afraid. If you’ve been eating pork sausages, ham, polony or bacon, you’re going to die.

Okay, you’re going to die anyway, but a new study says you should rather die without eating smoked, processed, cured, salted, or preserved meat. Or any red meat whatsoever. To make it easier to remember, simply add this to the list of things you shouldn’t consume much, if any, of: alcohol, tobacco, white bread, toasted brown bread, milk, butter and margarine (or margarine and butter, depending on who you consult), salt, pepper, anything that makes food taste better or last longer, fried food, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, canned food, carbonated soft drinks, sweetened anything, spicy food, chocolate, coffee, tea… In fact, just assume you can’t eat something, unless otherwise specified by government, or an agency of the medical or parma pharmaceutical industries.

According to details published in the LA Times, for example,

Once an individual reaches the 18-ounce [~500g] weekly limit for red meat, every additional 1.7 ounces [~50g] consumed a day increases cancer risk by 15%, the report said. Every 1.7 ounces of processed meat consumed a day increases cancer risk by 21%, it added.

So if you eat a kilo of red or processed meat a week, your cancer risk is at least 150%, possibly 210%. Be terrified.

On the ham and bacon issue, it would seems the Jews and Muslims, who listened to God, got it right. To the Christians, Peter explained that in a dream he was presented with a great feast on a picnic blanket (think Wal-Mart, Tesco, Spar), “wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.” When he refused to eat it because it was “common or unclean”, God told him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

The grammar is tortured, but the meaning is clear. Peter might have appeared to be a sandal-shod communist on acid, but he clearly was a PR for the global corporate retail oligopoly, trying to make a good little consumer out of you.

You thought you could get away with eating carrots and nuts? Wrong. The European Union has just set the safe limit of beta-carotene and selenium intake to the equivalent of two carrots and two brazil nuts, according to an article published by a group that claims to tell you what doctors don’t, and is devoted to pushing pills.

Which makes it clear that this whole food health scare thing is a propaganda effort by Big Pharma. Its profit margins on dietary “supplements” (read: “substitutes”) are around 40%, according to the most recent market study by the US Food and Drug Administration. The study is eight years old, so who knows how big it is these days? I’ll bet the FDA is in cahoots with the Big Pharma pill pushers, which is why it stopped publishing research on the subject. Perhaps maybe the pill pushers just threatened to stop paying tax, which would put half of the civil service out of work.

The pill pusher’s poison plot is hoping to make us realise that food is bad for you, and the only way to live is to consume only vitamin pills. Of course, they need the EU and other governments to publish laws that limit the permitted quantities of active ingredients, to keep the costs down and profits up.

On the other hand, I’m a heretic and an apostate. I reckon living increases your risk of death to near 100%, so you might as well eat steak and drink beer. Besides, if I die under suspicious circumstances, it’s not like officials will investigate the pill pushers or government agents. They’ll just blame it on my lifestyle.

Lifestyle. There’s another bad thing. Causes death too, you know.

Since leaving Facebook (the story of which is told here, here, here and here) I’ve been waiting with some anticipation for news of Google’s plans for social networking. Paul Jacobson has found some news on the subject. Says he:

As I understand this plan, Google is releasing a bunch of APIs, probably initially focussed on Orkut, to be rolled out across most, if not all, of Google’s properties. This would result in a kind of social network/interactive layer over these sites and services. Developers would be able to develop apps based on these APIs, presumably for distribution across the Google network and use on Google’s sites.

… I think this is going to be a new beginning for a new paradigm of the social web.

Sounds promising. Very promising.