I was quite pleased with this little bit culinary ingenuity, if I say so myself. It’s entirely possible that someone has done this before, but seeing as Google searches on “bayleaf salt” (and variations) produce gazillions of results for the Bayleaf restaurant in Salt Lake City, cyber evidence of this is not easily at hand.

OK, so here goes. Bay leaf is one of my favourite herbs, but the hardness of the leaves means that using them is not straightforward. Well, not like basil or thyme, for example. For dinner a couple of nights ago, I was keen to get the fresh bay leaf taste into some steaks I was cooking. So, I tossed a handful of bay leaves into a mortar with a few tablespoonfuls of salt and pestled it until the salt had turned green. I seasoned the raw steaks with the salt about 45 minutes before cooking them.

I was delighted to discover the bay leaf flavours well-infused into the steaks. Yum!

(I’d be interested to hear about other interesting herb salts, so please feel free to leave comments)

“We are not thinking machines,” claims neurology professor Richard Restak, “We are feeling machines who think.” This statement implies that we humans are not quite as rational as classical economists would have us believe, and ties right in with the work of Dan Ariely, Daniel Kahnemann and others. Essentially, people who operate with the dispassion of Mr Spock (OK, I know he’s only half human) are as much a fantasy as the entire Star Trek storyline.

The motor vehicles I’ve owned have all been selected on the basis of practicality and affordability. And, even if I could have afforded something sexier it’s unlikely I would have bothered because I’ve never been any kind of petrol head. So, for me motoring has been all about thinking.

On a purely rational level, sports cars – whether they fall into the supercar bracket, or not – make no sense at all. Most of them have no space for golf clubs, they would look really stupid with a mountain bike hanging off the back of them, there’s hardly any space for people, and they spew greenhouse gases. That’s before one has filled the petrol tank, bought a R30 000 set of tyres, or anything related to keeping it on the road.

But, jeez, when you paddle down a gear to pass another vehicle and go roaring past in less than a second, or fly around corners at impossible speeds, that’s a feeling that is powerful enough to convert even the most staunch auto agnostic. And, of course, the feeling is spontaneous, involuntary, just smacking you in the gut, no computation required.

I spent a week in June as a guest on the Rogue Rally (loads of images on their Facebook page), during which 40-something supercars, comprising most of the best-known marques, sped around a variety of roads, racetracks and even along an Air Force runway. Driving in that convoy (while we were able to hang onto the back of it) was a huge thrill. Apart from the speed, there was also a huge sense of occasion – how often does one have that many Porsches, Ferraris, McLarens, Lamborghinis and others all sharing the same road? Wherever we went, people formed instant crowds, taking pictures on a variety of mobile devices.

Yes, every part of it was wrong. The expense, the speed, the carbon emissions, you name it, but damn, was it fun!

We had a track day in Welkom. In Kimberley, there was a 400m drag race, which got very interesting when the farmer who owned the adjoining land gunned his Toyota Hi-Lux straight at the oncoming McLaren and Porsche, forcing them to veer off the road. It could have been very messy.

In Bloemfontein we raced radio-controlled cars (actually, we kept crashing them). Then, we drove through the magnificent Golden Gate Park en route to Dullstroom. The following day we drove over the Long Tom pass to Graskop, where 2.8 km of national road near God’s Window had been closed for us. Each car had several runs on the empty road, which was a heap of fun (my host let me go two or three times).

After overnighting in Hazyview we drove to the Hoedspruit Air Force base, where we had a morning of racing on the runway. From there, we drove to Pilansberg via Magoebaskloof.

I love a road trip, and this was a particularly good one (even though we dodged hundreds of potholes). There was banter with the fellow participants, many of whom are from completely different backgrounds. There were party nights. There were comedians, DJs, a beat boxer, Zulu dancers and Kingsley Holgate. The landscapes – all of them – were beautiful. There was even a Samsung Galaxy S4 that fell into a soiled toilet bowl – and kind of lived to tell the tale.

Sometimes we think too much. We just need to DO and FEEL. We may be amazed by the new experiences that we end up enjoying (even if they are wrong on every rational level). I was.

In the old, paper-based days, the most important sources of Thoroughbred information were the Stud Book and the Racing Calendar. The former recorded the foals born over a designated period, along with their sires and dams, while the results of each season’s races were published in the Racing Calendar. As long as you had access to the books, all the information was available, but any research took days.

All this is tailor made for databases, accessed in seconds over the Internet, whether from computers or smart phones. Of course, when Charles Faull’s team at Form started digitising this type of information in the early 90s, Tim Berners-Lee had only recently proposed the World Wide Web, and first generation mobile phones were not yet on the scene. It took years before PCs achieved the processing power and storage capacity of today’s smart phones.

Over the past year I’ve been working with the Form team in creating several digital resources for horse racing, the most recent of which is the full record of the Vodacom Durban July, all the way back to Campanajo’s victory in 1897 (www.julyhandicap.info – much of the history unfortunately switched off for maintenance at the moment). As you scroll through the results, you see that it truly is the ‘July’ handicap, with the biggest deviation coming in 2010, when the FIFA World Cup pushed the July out to the 31st.

A horse race – especially when contested by champions – is a dramatic event, worthy of a poet’s best efforts. But there is some fairly basic and inviolable science that fells the efforts of all but the very mightiest of equines.

Newton’s Second Law is as valid now as it was 300 years ago. Put simply, the weight carried by a racehorse has a measurable drag effect. This, of course, is the basis for the handicap. Since 1970, just three top-weights have won the July, which says something for the power wielded by the handicapper.

One of the most significant components of JulyHandicap.info is the FMR (Form Merit Rating), which reveals some colossal performances by horses who never won the July. The mare Olympic Duel carried 57.5kg to a one-length third behind Spanish Galliard (54.5kg), Model Man (57kg) ran the three-year-old Bush Telegraph (49kg) to a length and a quarter, and any discussion about weight-carrying in the July would inevitably include William Penn who carried 26 lb more than Chimboraa when he finished half a length back in second. Or, how about Milesia Pride getting beaten a length and a quarter in 1951 when he carried 37 lb more than the winner?

With this merit assessment as a foundation, the team has also produced a mobile-based preview of the 2013 Vodacom Durban July, along with a complete race card of the day’s racing. Whatever smart phone you’re carrying – as long as 3G bandwidth is not overwhelmed at Greyville – you’ll have the entire day’s racing on your phone. Visit RaceForm.info to get the inside track on all the July Day action.

Being in the marketing and sales arena myself, I find it intriguing how companies address the issue of getting their customers to buy (or enticing people to become customers in the first place). I received the letter below from a large courier company, with whom I opened an account some time ago. However, I never got around to using it, because at the same time I’d been using Citisprint for some stuff, and ended up using them more and more, because their rates are good, service efficient and friendly. You get the picture.

So, at a time when a charm offensive might actually be more effective, this is the letter I got from the Large Courier Company:

To whom it may concern

Thanks for your understanding.

This is a prime example of the Accounts/Admin tail wagging the dog. An account with zero transactions cannot possibly cost you anything to maintain. Goodbye, Large Courier Company.

(Oh, by the way, you do know my name, because I filled in a multi-page document that extracted reams of personal information. Addressing me “To Whom It May Concern” is proof enough that I am better off without you).

A few months ago (in March, to be precise), I started noticing little rainbow flashes below streetlights lining my various routes around Cape Town. It’s amazing how such small things – almost always in peripheral vision, especially for a driver – can become so visible. I later discovered that these were crystals that had been installed as part of Infecting the City.

There is an obviously aesthetic element to refracted light, but I particularly loved the element of surprise. There was no fanfare or announcement; the artist spent a week hanging them, and then left them awaiting discovery. What a cool way of infecting the city, I thought.

I’m not going to attempt a definition of art beyond the aesthetic, or its potential to provoke or stimulate thinking.

In the name of art, photographer Clayton Cubitt has filmed a series of women reading from a favoured book. They are seated at a white table, the background is draped black and they are dressed elegantly. Out of sight, under the table, the photographer’s assistant is applying a high-powered vibrating massage device, with generally inevitable consequences. This aspect is not revealed during the video, so from the uninformed viewer’s perspective, the woman initially experiences difficulty in reading fluidly, eventually stops reading altogether, recovers her composure, and then ends the reading.

Even though Stoya (the above video) is in porn, the experience held its own surprises for her, as she writes about (here). You may also want to have a read of Clayton Cubitt’s interview with Salon.

Sexuality is such a complex issue, with so many sensitivities around it, that one could probably do just about anything with a sexual angle and get away with calling it art. Provoking thought or conversation is pretty straightforward in this territory, and the voyeuristic component of material with a sexual angle ensures that it ticks the aesthetic box.

In a sense, sexuality is hidden from view in much the same way as the colour spectrum hides within ordinary light, until refraction reveals its beauty. The rainbow flag, as a gay symbol, represents diversity, but in this context it could be just as meaningful to all the rest of us.

Instead of glowing with the joy of a confidently lived sexuality (dare I say “pride”) most of us live in the spectrum between discomfort, lack of confidence and outright shame, with a few little flashes of rainbow…