This has hurt the companies image around the world.

Although the company had it’s biggest dip around Jan 2009 the shares have recovered since, yet are still down from there high in December 2009, and are currently on a downward trend.

So what is my beef with TOYOTA?

Not so much that I find their brand as boring as watching paint dry, but the fact that Toyota Tsusho Corporation (the business and procurement support arm of Toyota) has now taken full control of Subaru’s local operations as it acquired the remaining 50% stake Barloworld held. So that makes Toyota the 100% owner of the best damn motor car in South Africa, and that really pisses me off.

You see the SCOOBY is a legend, that sound of the horizontally apposed H4 motor, coupled to the race bread exhaust that grumbles and gurgles gives me gooseflesh. Knowing that those chops over at TOYOTA are now responsible entirely for the quality and safety scares me. I know that TOYOTA has always owned 16.5% of Fuji Heavy Industries, which controls Subaru, but that never bothered me until now.

I just cannot swallow the bitter pill of the TOYOTA control of such a purebread brand. I am heart broken.

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Thanks to all the wonderful BlaBlanians who supported our nomination into the 2010 SA Blog Awards, we’re pleased to announce that

Making the Top 10 Finalists list is already a huge achievement for us, especially when you consider that BlaBla is only a little over a year old in it’s present form. Add to that the fact that the category we’ve been nominated in (Best Group Blog) is the only category out of the 24 that includes entries from mainstream media sources -we’re up against sites like the Mail & Guardians’ Thought Leader for example – and you can appreciate that we are pretty darned stoked to be in the Finals alone.

The nomination phase is over, and it’s that phase that got us onto the list of Top 10 Finalists in our category. We now need you to again click on one of the links on the pages here,  and at the bottom of the Voting Page, enter your email address, confirm the anti-spam code and submit your votes. One final step needed to ensure that your vote counts is to click on the confirmation link that you’ll find in the email message you’ll receive shortly after submitting your votes. Again, this process is in place to ensure that only genuine votes are submitted to the judges, and that only one vote is made per person.

Here is an outline of the process:

Voting phase (vote for the best of the top ten nominees)

• Final voting for the top ten nominees will be open to the public from the 1st September 2010 till midnight 17th September 2010.
• Once again, only one vote per email address will be accepted.
• Voters will be asked to review the ten blogs per category in the finals and vote for their favourite blog in each.

How does the judging work and winners decided?

• Judges are each assigned 2 categories to judge (Best SA Blog of the Year, and 1 other).
• They will be asked to take the number of nominations a blog has received into account, but not base their vote solely on the number of nominations.
• Their vote during the voting phase will count 30% of the finalist weighting (the public’s will count 70%) so the number of public nominations still matter, however judges could sway a close public vote.

Here’s the list of the 10 Finalists in the Category Best Group Blog (Blogs with more than one author)

Some tough competition there. But with your vote counting up to 70% of the final decision, we could make the top 3 easily! So go Vote for us please. And tell your friends, family, colleagues, classmates, gang mates, tribe members and anyone else you know to do the same!

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• People born before 1946 were called The Silent Generation.
• The Baby Boomers are people born between 1946 and 1959.
• Generation X are those that were born between 1960 and 1979.
• And Generation Y are the people born between 1980 and 2010.

I’ll tell you why the others have their specific names in a later post. But for the time being, it’s the present generation that interests me the most.

So why do we call this last group Generation Y? I always thought that it was because Y comes after X – the previous generation – and that it’s because they are forever asking “why?”, questioning everything. But no. Here, according to the cartoonist Marc Beaudet is the real reason we call this lot Generation Y:

By the award winning French-Canadian cartoonist Marc Beaudet, originally published in the Journal de Québec, 2008.

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Once again the talented 3rd Year Students from the Swiss Hotel School are getting ready to open their annual concept restaurant to the public. This year diners will be able to relive the era of the Swinging Sixties for lunch and dinner for a limited one month period – and space is already filling up quickly!

The retro-60s theme runs throughout SIXTIES – from decor, to branding, to the names of (the extremely well-priced) menu items. The restaurant will offer a full á la Carte menu for dinner from Tuesday through to Saturday, business lunches Tuesday through to Friday (in and out within 45 minutes) and traditional Sunday roast lunches.

Here’s a sample of dishes from the menu:

• The James Brown “I Feel Good” Soup of the Day @ R18.00
• The Marilyn Monroe Prawn Cocktail (Timbale of prawns, avocado & lettuce) @ R28.00
• The Diana Rigg Tartlet (Goats cheese & caramelised onions with mixed peppers) @ R23.00
• The Jimi Hendrix Herb Pasta (Homemade pasta with a creamy wild mushroom sauce) @ R39.00
• The Ray Charles “Sole” Blues (Sole cooked in lemon butter, served with mash, asparagus & caper berries) @ R78.00
• The James Dean “American Boys” Steak (Fillet or Rib-eye steak, served with onion rings, garlic fries and a choice of sauce) @ R75.00

The full Dinner Menu, as well as the special Kiddies Menu, the Lunch Menu and the Sunday Roast Menu are all available to view online at the SHS website.

The limited season runs from 14 September to 10 October at the SHS Randburg Campus: Turaco House, 33 Bond Street (cnr. Surrey), Ferndale, Randburg.

Booking is essential via telephone to 011 789 9934, email to sixties.shs@gmail.com or via the website “Book Online” Link or at the Sixties on Bond Street Facebook Page. (And tell them Greg sent you!)

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“I have been through the stages of disbelief and shock, to anger and ultimately grief over the loss of the family I so badly wanted for my children,” she says in the magazine’s latest issue, out just days after her split from Tiger Woods was made official.

“My immediate plan is for the kids and me to continue to adjust to our new situation. I am going to keep taking classes, but my main focus is to try to give myself time to heal,” she says.

Obviously to read the entire interview in PEOPLE magazine you will have to purchase this Fridays issue…..

Of all the options she had to air her story, why PEOPLE? I would have thought OPRAH would have been the first choice……

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