Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

Yesterday I was invited to go and watch "Miss Matieland", the beauty pageant thing for Stellenbosch University. You know the type of thing: all the girls parade around wearing stuff, they say "I wish for World Peace", and then one indistinguishable hot chick wins and nine other indistinguishable hot chicks don't.

Of course, I should make it clear that I absolutely disapprove of such events. They encourage the objectivization of women, and show disrespect to the female gender. I was outraged that such an event should be happening in our town, and only went along so I could sit there with a disapproving frown and a sneer on my face all the way through. I disapprove of treating objects like women.

On the upside, the whole place was absolutely swarming with belters, and the ten finalists were HAWT too. I thought the girl who came third (i.e. second princess) should definitely have won, if not the girl who was first princess, but the winner was quite a belter too. It was fun. They did feed us redbull-and-champagne beforehand, though, which is not something that a diabetic should really drink. But banya, hey?

On Monday I went to watch the movie of the Phantom of the Opera. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I know that I really wanted to watch it when it was performed in Capetown and Joburg, but being stuck away in Grahamstown is not conducive to that sort of thing. So this movie was the closest I could get to it. And I must say I was really impressed. The music, of course, is amazing - I have never watched it before in any form, and I really enjoyed watching out for the themes of the various characters (the most recognisable being the phantom's theme) as they get blended in with the other songs - for example, at the end of Masquerade when the phantom gatecrashes their little party. The characters, I thought, were particularly well cast - who knew that Minnie Driver would be a good Carlotta? I was a bit surprised that they showed us what the Phantom's disfiguration was - does that normally happen? I always thought it was left a bit of a mystery, since there isn't much that could really cause the amount of abuse he got?

Anyway, I recommend watching the movies, even if you are a die-hard fan of the performance. It was good.

Young foxes, or kits, scamper in a cage in Siberia, Russia, where they are part of a 45-year research project to domesticate foxes. Each generation has been selectively bred for tameness - fearlessness and nonaggression toward humans. By now the foxes in the project behave like pet dogs, barking and wagging their tails at humans.

Also like pet dogs, the domesticated foxes can "read" human cues (pointing, for example) much better than their wild cousins or even tame chimpanzees, according to a new study published today in Current Biology. The study authors call such behavior social intelligence. They say its appearance in domesticated foxes may help us better understand how intelligence developed in humans and other animals.

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