“Congratulations, you’ve won a free holiday – all you have to do to claim your prize is come to our offices on Wednesday at 6pm.”

The timeshare industry makes suckers of the public. Now one company is taking a blogger to court for pointing this out.

It’s not every day that noseweek is used as a battering ram by both sides in a fight. But the pesticide wars (noses99,100&109) being fought in the vineyard-enveloped Riebeek Valley have taken just such a turn and noseweek has been accused of bias by several upstanding people in the town; of stirring up a storm in a brandy-glass, of being anti-farming, anti-tourism and anti-dorp.

At about the same time that Groote Schuur’s world-famous heart transplant unit came unstuck in June last year, another of the country's symbols of optimism and scientific progress, the deep space radio telescope at Hartebeeshoek, also – literally – ground to a halt when the bearing on which the massive dish turnscollapsed.

Was the flamboyant billionaire's display the raving of a lush, or did he calculatedly render his evidence invalid?

The plump, razzled-looking billionaire arrives at the rundown courthouse in the backstreets of Joburg’s Alexandra in convoy, with no less than eight bodyguards, all black-suited and looking as mean as they can muster.

Hard to believe – but early last year ABSA Commercial Property Finance rushed to lend Joburg’s notorious Theodosiou brothers close on R900m, secured by bonds registered on their various illegally-built shopping malls! Absolutely predictably, the bank hasn’t received a bean in interest or monthly repayments since.  By the time you read this it will be R970m.

R4.1-million-worth of luxury yacht turned out to be an unseaworthy dud. The yacht, declares a marine expert, has “unacceptable boatbuilding flaws that are potentially life-threatening”. Laurence Steytler of Bigfoot Trading Trust spent almost four pages describing the flaws that had rendered the boat inoperable.

With a shocking post-operative survival rate, South Africa's pioneering transplant unit is on the brink of collapse. During the first half of last year two of the three patients given heart transplants died.

The small number of heart transplants being done at Groote Schuur means that not only are students not getting the required learning opportunities, but their teachers are also getting out of practice.

It won't be easy to claim rights to ancient knowledge of natural medicines like geranium extract. The 'new deal' regarding intellectual property rights is that developing countries may now seek to protect their indigenous knowledge.

For a judge who now specialises in the arcane business of intellectual property, Louis Harms “enjoys” a rather higher profile than he might care for – as he discovered recently on applying for the position of deputy judge president of the Supreme Court of Appeal.

What's an out-of-work-minister-in-the-presidency to do? Essop Pahad has recently found his way onto the Sahara board – having resigned from his political job in the wake of his boss, Thabo Mbeki, being turfed out of his.

Johannesburg newspaper The Star last month reported that various of Lolly Jackson’s Teazers strip joints had been raided and assets removed by revenue inspectors. In response Jackson told the newspaper that SARS must have its figures “screwed up” as he regularly pays taxes.

Are any members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) embarrassed?

In November, astonishingly, they honoured Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko for his “outstanding contribution to the Olympic movement”. Not a month later his KGB thugs were beating up human rights demonstrators in Minsk.

The shit is steadily hitting the fan at Insurance Sector Training Authority (Inseta) – CEO Mike Abel and his sidekick, Shirley Steenekamp, senior manager learnership, have both been suspended (noses108 &110). The Inseta council, however, is claiming that this in “no way implies guilt on [the part of] the suspended parties”.

Where on earth were the auditors and accountants? When large sums go missing it’s a question that’s all too often not even asked, never mind answered.

It certainly wasn’t addressed when it was discovered that, for years, the victims of Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff’s R500bn pyramid scheme had been some of the world’s leading financial institutions.