Johan Palme

In 1851, Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth invented a better beehive and changed beekeeping forever. The Langstroth Hive didn’t spring fully formed from one man’s imagination, but was built on a foundation of methods and designs developed over millenia.

Beekeeping dates back at least to ancient Egypt, when early apiarists built their hives from straw and clay (if you happen to find a honeypot in a tomb, feel free to stick your hand in it, you rascal, because honey lasts longer than a mummy). In the intervening centuries, various types of artificial hives developed, from straw baskets to wood boxes but they all shared one thing: “fixed combs” that must be physically cut from the hive. These early fixed comb hives made it difficult for beekeepers to inspect their brood for diseases or other problems.

In the 18th century, noted Swiss naturalist François Huber developed a “movable comb” or “movable frame” hive that featured wooded leaves filled with honeycombs that could be flipped like the pages of a book. Despite this innovation, Huber’s hive was not widely adopted and simple box hives remained the popular choice for beekeepers until the 1850s. Enter Lorenzo Langstroth.

Langstroth wasn’t a beekeeper by trade. As a minister, he presided over a flock instead of a colony. After graduating from Yale in 1832, when the school was still led by an ordained minister, the Philadelphia-born Langstroth went on to become a pastor in Massachusetts and then, a few years later, a principal at a women’s school. It was around this time that he took up beekeeping as a means to mitigate severe bouts of depression—because nothing eases the mind like the incessant droning of drone bees.

Langstroth pursued his hobby with the methodological rigor befitting his academic and theological background. He began by reading previous works on beekeeping and building hives following Huber’s designs, eventually experimenting with other types of construction. The process taught him the mechanics of beekeeping but also revealed that there was still some room for improvement. As Langstroth writes in his 1853 book Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee: A Bee Keeper’s Manual:

“The result of all these investigations fell far short of my expectations. I became, however, most thoroughly convinced that no hives were fit to be used, unless they furnished uncommon protection against extremes of heat and more especially of cold. I accordingly discarded all thin hives made of inch stuff, and constructed my hives of doubled materials, enclosing a ‘dead air’ space all around.”

This “dead air” gap—known today by the delightfully architectural term “bee space”—would have an added benefit. Langstroth discovered that bees would not build a honeycomb in a one-centimeter space—anything bigger, they would build a comb, anything smaller and the bees would fill it with propolis, the resinous composite also known as “bee glue” that bees make to construct their hives.

The notion of bee space, combined with the knowledge gleaned from the Huber hive, convinced Langstroth that “with proper precautions, the combs might be removed without enraging the bees, and that [bees] were capable of being domesticated or tamed, to a most surprising degree.” Realizing that honeycombs could be safely removed from the hive, Langstroth designed a system of removable frames that were suspended from the top of the box and set off from its sides by a one-centimeter gap. Thus, bees could build their combs in each frame, and the frames weren’t stuck to one another or to the box with propolis; they could be easily removed, replaced or moved to other hives without disturbing the bees or damaging the combs. Using Langstroth’s hive, it was now much easier to inspect and attend to the bees, and of course, to collect the honey. This was a very big deal in 1851 when honey was the primary means of sweetening food.

The hive was fabricated by a local cabinetmaker and fellow bee enthusiast Henry Bourquin, and the two men manufactured and sold the hive for several years. In a savvy marketing move, Langstroth opened his book on beekeeping with an advertisement for his hive enumerating its myriad benefits:

“Weak stocks may be quickly strengthened by helping them to honey and maturing brood from stronger ones; queenless colonies may be rescued from certain ruin by supplying them with the means of obtaining another queen; and the ravages of the moth effectually prevented, as at any time the hive may be readily examined and all the worms, &c., removed from the combs. New colonies may be formed in less time than is usually required to hive a natural swarm; or the hive may be used as a non-swarmer, or managed on the common swarming plan. The surplus honey may be taken from the interior of the hive on the frames or in upper boxes or glasses, in the most convenient, beautiful and saleable forms. Colonies may be safely transferred from any other hive to this, at any season of the year, from April to October, as the brood, combs, honey and all the contents of the hive are transferred with them, and securely fastened in the frames.”

Despite earning a patent on the design in 1852, other beekeepers began to copy Langstroth’s hive and the minister-cum-beekeeper spent years unsuccessfully defending his design from infringement. By the end of the century, Langstroth’s hive—or reasonable facsimiles of it—became the preferred hive for professional and amateur beekeepers, and it is still the most common artificial hive in use. And, in perhaps the greatest compliment that could be given to an industrial innovation, what was once a design feature—removable frames—is now, in most states, required by law.

Top: Samuel Fosso, La Femme Américaine Libérée des Années 70,” 1997.

Bottom: Zanele Muholi, “Miss D’vine I,” 2007.

September: Highlighting African Photographers

The day before Tom Ford's presentation, one of his models injured himself playing football. Given the time and effort fashion's consummate control freak would have invested in model selection, there was no way Tom was letting Igor go. He simply rustled up some Tom Ford crutches: i.e., he covered a standard-issue pair with velvet. As Igor hobbled by, Ford detailed the improv in one of his drolly self-aware asides. Like the one a few minutes earlier, when he described white as the new black—"though I don't want to sound corny."

Corny or not, white was the foundation of Ford's Spring collection, and it was one reason why the clothes were just about the most energized menswear statement he has made to date. That's because the other reason was that Ford went hog wild for color: to be specific, the kind of tones that sing when they're sat next to white. An eye-popping palette of lilacs, cobalts, pinks, turquoise, and jade—in patterns to match—was forceful enough to hold its own against the hurricane of color, pattern, and texture that Ford kicked off with his last women's collection. And his most decadent indulgences—the shawl-collar evening brocades, the silk smoking jackets, the elaborately embroidered shoes—looked quite literally brilliant in their shiny new shades.

With everything else that was going on, Ford was smart to keep his suits streamlined—nipped jacket, cuffed pants with a single pleat—and his sportswear classic, if a lacquered nylon anorak topping a white turtleneck and a swirling psychedelic swimsuit could be considered such. Well, maybe that would have been the case in the early seventies, a moment that continues to hold Ford in a powerful grip. So powerful, in fact, that you might almost wish our own era could surrender to its horny, confident sophistication, and make the real world go away. Then we could see what Tom sees. Until such transference occurs, this collection is more than enough to be going on with.


—Tim Blanks

prepaidafrica:

Rue 114 is a Ghanaian fashion brand that caters for the plus-size woman. Launched in 2011 by Serwah Asante, the brand celebrates beauty in all shapes and sizes.  Forget ‘forgiving’ black and boring pastels – their latest collection in particular is bold, beautiful and anything but understated.

(via Bold and beautiful dresses - Voices of Africa)

Movie Credits 1

"A whole new aesthetic is emerging, mirroring the unfinished, blurry and often chaotic world of social media: a world based around 140 character messages, a constant stream of status updates and unpolished, behind-the-scenes style imagery. There’s no time for nostalgia or reflection here, no patience for understatement or subtlety. Everyone is chasing the next Instagram-worthy moment. The internet aesthetic is all about piling on the drama to get noticed and that means being bold, colourful and often a little brash. If you add in a dollop of controversy, all the better."

The Internet Aesthetic: How the web is changing the clothes we wear | Metro News

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

Trying to catch up on the huge variety of things saved over the summer while out on our most recent jaunt for Venue, I've got an awful lot of quick links, now less-than-current news items, and a few longer reads that you've no doubt seen elsewhere at this point, but I thought I'd go through and choose a few for posting.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

In this case, we're looking at a telephone tower in downtown Stockholm, one that stood from roughly 1887-1913, and that served at least 5,000 local phones lines—lines that take on the literal feel of a sketch or drawing as they stretch over the streets like some urban-scale loom enthroned over the city, weaving conversations together from every district. It's a cast-iron stupa through which all voices must pass.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

There are a few more photos available at the Tekniska Museet's Flickr set, but here is a selection of some of the most interesting—

[Images: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

—including a street scene of people walking to or from home with this strange skeletal structure seemingly waiting for them at the end of the lane, listening and dystopian—

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

—or this view of it blending into its urban context. It could almost pass as a cathedral or as the intimidating battlements of an unfinished electromagnetic fortress in the middle of the downtown core.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

The weird and invisible mysticism of the phone system is laid bare, its nervous system exposed above the roofs of Stockholm and strung up on a tower like the pelt of some rare and conquered animal, forced to host even our most inconsequential conversations.

[Image: A telephone tower in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of the Tekniska Museet].

(Spotted via Gizmodo).

“Yesterday I read like five magazines in the airplane— it was a nine hour flight— and three out of five magazines said “Diplo: the mastermind behind M.I.A.’s politics!” And I was wondering, does that stem from [Pitchfork]? Because I find it really bonkers…And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female or that people from undeveloped countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-haired and blue-eyed. After the first time it’s cool, the second time it’s cool, but after like the third, fourth, fifth time, maybe it’s an issue that we need to talk about, maybe that’s something important, you know.”

-

M.I.A (via mmatangi)

UGH, YES!!!!

(via 2brwngrls)

Abandoned terrapin turtles purchased 25 years ago at the height of popularity for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been harming wildlife and changing the ecological character of England's famed Lake District. Once an orbital center for the lives of poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the landscape is now infested with discarded pets purchased for their imaginative resemblance to kids' toys and comic book characters.

Terry Bowes, a regional zoo director interviewed by the Guardian, has become "exasperated at the routine abandonment of creatures," he explained, "that suffered the misfortune of becoming fashionable at the time of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze."

"I was thinking what we could do about them all," Bowes told the paper, "and then I heard about another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film coming out soon and steam came out of my ears. I was thinking, 'Oh no, this is only going to get worse.'"

Human ownership of changing animal species responds to the quirks of popular appeal, we read, including hit films and toy lines: "Pets are just as vulnerable to fashion as anything else, said Bowes, as we passed three enormous European eagle owls he said were abandoned by their owners after they outgrew Harry Potter, and a trio of perky meerkats he said were probably originally bought after seeing the star of the Compare the Market insurance ads." The region is an open-air zoo of animals that have escaped from popular media.

Surely, though, in a sense, this is just the latest, albeit inadvertent iteration of the infamous American Acclimatization Society, a group of literary-minded naturalists in 19th-century New York City who made it their bizarre goal to "introduce to the U.S. every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s scripts." As Scientific American writes, "The Acclimatization Society released some hundred starlings in New York City’s Central Park in 1890 and 1891. By 1950 starlings could be found coast to coast, north past Hudson Bay and south into Mexico. Their North American numbers today top 200 million." Shakespeare, the Bible, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—all cultural artifacts and unintended animal blueprints for infested landscapes yet to come.

(The recent documentary The Elephant in the Living Room is worth a view here, for anyone interested in the unforeseen—or, far more often, willfully overlooked—negative side-effects of exotic pets).

Lucian Matis

fashizblackdiary:

Orange Culture - LFDW 2012

havesexwithghosts:

Sun Ra on location in California for Space Is The Place, early 1970s

invisibility-spell:

lesbianese:

i love this so much

'la dame bleue' alexander mcqueen s.s2008 (a show he dedicated to isabella blow)

with special guest FERD SHUPPS as Gemini

Rockford Files Episode 0401: The Lindquist Prediction

We’re pleased to announce that The Old Reader will officially remain open to the public! The application now has a bigger team, significantly more resources, and a new corporate entity in the United States. We’re incredibly excited to be a part of this great web application and would like to share some details about its future as well as thank you for remaining loyal users. We’re big fans and users of The Old Reader and look forward to helping it grow and improve for years to come.

First off we want to say that it’s rare to have an application that inspires as much passion as The Old Reader has as of late. We think that’s a sign of greatness and all credit for that goes to the wonderful team that has been running the show including Dmitry and Elena. We’ve gotten to know them pretty well this past week and they are smart, honest, and passionate people. We’re happy to announce that they are still a part of the team and we hope they will be for a long time to come.  The new team will be managing the project and adding to the engineering, communications, and system administration functions.

So now for the future. The Old Reader is going to retain all of its functionality and remain open to the public. Not only that, we’re going to do everything in our power to grow the user base which will only accentuate the things that make this application special. To facilitate these improvements, we’re going to be transitioning The Old Reader to a top tier hosting facility in the United States this coming week. It’s going to require some downtime and for that we sincerely apologize, but it’s also going to mean A LOT more servers, 10x faster networks, and long-term stability. We realize that doesn’t make the downtime easy but rest assured that things are looking up.

Over the coming weeks we’ll talk more about the new team of The Old Reader. We’re looking forward to introducing ourselves and making significant improvements to this incredible application. Thanks for reading and thanks for using The Old Reader!

“

How can something be random on purpose? Well, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, stores its goods in a chaotic disorder. But only at first glance, because there’s order behind the apparent disarray. It’s called chaotic storage. […]

Intuitively, most people would store similar goods together, virtually sorting them according to predefined characteristics. This would place all books in one section of the warehouse and all toys in another section.

But that’s not necessary in a chaotic storage system. The products only need to share the most basic requirements with regard to storage (i.e. temperature, humidity). Further characteristics don’t have to be considered. In a chaotic warehouse, all kinds of different articles may lie directly next to each other, such as books, toys, sport equipment, electronics, DVDs, jewellery and digital cameras. […]

The term “chaotic storage” is by the way only justified from a human point of view, but is not at all correct from the standpoint of a computer. For a warehouse management software, a chaotic storage system is nothing more than a sequence of calculations and database operations.

”

- Amazon – leading the way through chaos | SSI SCHÄFER BlogSSI SCHÄFER Blog

Guo Pei makes amazing dresses. Source: http://pinterest.com/pin/92816442293732854/

thisisnotafrica:

"African proverb"? Half the Sky attributes a quote evidently by JE Kwegyir Aggrey (so says Google search) to an entire continent.

"Escape from the White-Savior Industrial Complex: The Game" is a spoof of the representations of “Third World” women in “Half the Sky Movement: The Game.”

WOMEN’S MONTH ICONIC PHOTOGRAPH: Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf - Liberia, 1985.

Whilst I’m not exactly sure about the details surrounding this photo, at this point in her life Sirleaf had become an outspoken activist to then President Samuel Doe’s brutal military regime. She was also campaigning as Vice Presidential candidate at this time, in 1985 after her return from exile, in opposition to President Doe. Due to her critique of the Doe government, Sirleaf was sentenced to ten years in prison for sedition and put under house arrest. Sentenced in August of that year, she was released in September after international outcry.

Though she was removed from the presidential ticket, Sirleaf decided to run for a Senate seat in Montserrado County. The elections, widely condemned as being neither free nor fair, saw Doe and the National Democratic Party win the presidency and large majorities in both houses. Sirleaf was declared the winner of her Senate race but refused to accept the seat in protest of election fraud. Sirleaf would later be arrested in November, 1985, after a failed coup was staged by Thomas Quiwonkpa, a former chief commander of the Liberian army. Sirleaf would be released in July 1986, fleeing to the United States secretly afterwards.

This picture was taken sometime during her campaigning and/or her release from being imprisoned after Quiwonkpa’s failed coup.

Sirleaf supported Charles Taylor’s rebellion against Doe at the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War in 1989, and helped to raise money for the war effort. This caused Sirleaf to later be recommended a 30-year ban from politics. She later opposed Taylor’s handling of the war and campaigned against him during Liberia’s 1997. Following this, Sirleaf was charged with treason and fled the country in exile to neigbhouring Ivory Coast.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf went on to become the first woman to occupy the position of head of state in an African country and was inaugurated in 2006.

In 2011, Sirleaf was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with fellow Liberian Leymah Gbowee.

AUGUST: Celebrating African Women

thagoodthings:

soulbrotherv2:

Take the Impossible “Literacy” Test Louisiana Gave Black Voters in the 1960s

By Rebecca Onion

This week’s Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 4(b) of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of changes in voting procedure in jurisdictions that have a history of using a “test or device” to impede enfranchisement. Here is one example of such a test, used in Louisiana in 1964.

After the end of the Civil War, would-be black voters in the South faced an array of disproportionate barriers to enfranchisement. The literacy test—supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education but in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters—was a classic example of one of these barriers.

The website of the Civil Rights Movement Veterans, which collects materials related to civil rights, hosts a few samples of actual literacy tests used in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi during the 1950s and 1960s. In many cases, people working within the movement collected these in order to use them in voter education, which is how we ended up with this documentary evidence.  [Continue reading.]

10 mins for 30 questions,

One of the questions was

Spell backwards, forwards.

UPD: We have received a number of proposals that we are discussing right now. Chances are high that public The Old Reader will live after all

Since we launched first public version almost a year ago up until March 2013 we have been working on The Old Reader in “normal” mode. In March things became “nightmare”, but we kept working hard and got things done. First, we were out of evenings, then out of weekends and holidays, and then The Old Reader was the only thing left besides our jobs. Last week difficulty level was changed to “hell” in every possible aspect we could imagine, we have been sleep deprived for 10 days and this impacts us way too much. We have to look back.

The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all. The “life” variable was out of equation: you can limit hours, make up rules on time management, but this isn’t going to work if you’re running a project for hundreds of thousands of people. Let me tell you why: it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that. We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday. Talk about “laid back” attitude now. And I won’t even start describing enormous sentimental attachment to The Old Reader that we have.

We would really like to switch the difficulty level back to “normal”. Not to be dreaded of a vacation. Do something else besides The Old Reader. Stop neglecting ourselves. Think of other projects. Get less distant from families and loved ones. The last part it’s the worst: when you are with your family, you can’t fall out of dialogues, nodding, smiling and responding something irrelevant while thinking of refactoring the backend, checking Graphite dashboard, glancing onto a Skype chat and replying on Twitter. You really need to be there, you need to be completely involved. We want to have this experience again.

That’s why The Old Reader has to change. We have closed user registration, and we plan to shut the public site down in two weeks. We started working on this project for ourselves and our friends, and we use The Old Reader on a daily basis, so we will launch a separate private site that will keep running. It will have faster refresh rate, more posts per feed, and properly working full-text search — we are sure that we can provide all this at a smaller scale without that much drama, just like we were doing before March.

The private site?

Accounts will be migrated to the private site automatically. We will whitelist everybody we know personally, along with all active accounts that were registered before March 13, 2013. And of course, we will migrate all our awesome supporters and people who donated to keep the project running (if you sent us bitcoins, please get in touch to get identified). Later this week your account will get a distinct indication whether it will be migrated to the private site or not. If you see that message and believe that it’s wrong, or if all your friends are getting migrated and you are left behind — please, drop us a line.

Give me my data!

You will have two weeks to export your OPML file regardless of our decision. OPML export link is located at the bottom of the Settings page — use the top-right menu to get there. All posts that you saved for later by using Pocket integration will obviously remain in your Pocket account.

But you could…

For those who would like to start the usual “VC, funding, mentor” or “charge for the damn thing” mantras — please, spare it. We’re not in the Valley where it might be super-easy, and, after all, not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. We just love making a good RSS reader.

We really want The Old Reader to be a big and successful project, with usable free accounts. But this is not possible to achieve with what we have, so unless someone resourceful takes over the project and brings it to the next level, it is not gonna happen. We had over 2 000 new registrations after the blackout last week. This is amazing and sad at the same time.

If anyone is interested in acquiring The Old Reader and making it better, we are very open and accepting proposals at hello@theoldreader.com. We would be waiting for them for two weeks, supporting and maintaining The Old Reader as usual. Please don’t write us if you don’t have resources to maintain a site used by tens of thousands of people every day, or if you don’t know how you would improve The Old Reader. And please spare our time if you just want to buy the domain name and park a bunch of silly ads there — it’s not going to happen.

We value our community very much, and we will either pass the project to somebody who we know is going to take a good care of it, or we will switch it to private mode.

What next?

From one point of view, it’s not a big deal: “RSS is obsolete”, nobody died, we don’t owe anybody anything, you name it. Also, there are a lot of good readers around to choose from, a large part of them is smaller than The Old Reader and had not experienced growing pains of 80 000 daily active users in no time. But for us, it’s heartbreaking.

I will finally get back to work on my small studio — Bespoke Pixel — which has been run by my awesome partner all this time. Dmitry will keep being bright young software developer, making scalable and beautiful projects. Our team will stay together, and will keep working on making the private version of The Old Reader awesome.

We feel great responsibility for the project. We’d rather provide a smooth and awesome experience for 10 000 users than a crappy one for 420 000.

Sorry, each and everyone if we failed you. You are an incredible, supportive and helpful community. The best we could possibly hope for.

All the love,
Elena Bulygina and Dmitry Krasnoukhov

sandandglass:

“They couldn’t even wait for 2 hours. It takes Texas less time to disenfranchise minority voters than it takes for them to barbeque a pig.”

“

If you ignore the part where this code is utterly crappy, you can see that it actually sends out an email every-time the reservation page changes. I set it to run once a minute, and I let it run.

After a while of running this script I had captured a good amount of data. One day I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 4am), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 4:01am. It quickly became obvious that these were reservation bots at work.

After a while even cancellations started being taken immediately from under me. It started being common receiving an email alerting of a change, seeing an available time, and it being gone by the time the website loaded.After a while even cancellations started being taken immediately from under me. It started being common receiving an email alerting of a change, seeing an available time, and it being gone by the time the website loaded.

”

- Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF

In my years working in technology, I have learned a few things. These lessons have become oft-repeated refrains when speaking to people, so I thought I'd collect them so I have a link to send folks when needed.

1. Given enough time, any object which can generate musical notes will be used to play the Super Mario Brothers theme on YouTube.
2. Judging by their response, the meanest thing you can do to people on the Internet is to give them really good software for free.
3. Three things never work: Voice chat, printers and projectors.
4. Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation. (See The Law of Fail.)
5. Any new form of electronic communication will first be dismissed as trivial and worthless until it produces a profound result, after which it will be described as obvious and boring.
6. If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault. (See the post on this topic.)
7. Most websites treat "I like it" and "This is good" as the same thing, leading to most people on the Internet refusing to distinguish between "I don't like it" and "It's not good".
8. When a company or industry is facing changes to its business due to technology, it will argue against the need for change based on the moral importance of its work, rather than trying to understand the social underpinnings.
9. People will move mountains to earn a gold star by their name on the Internet.
10. The only way to get useful feedback from people on the Internet is to ask questions that are actually answerable, instead of open-ended.

Bonus rules which apply equally on the Internet and off:

• Never argue against logic with emotion, or against emotion using logic.
• We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves. (That's pretty much where this blog started, 14 years ago.)

TODAY’S CLASSIC TUNE: Lebo Mathosa - Ntozabantu

Today would’ve been Lebo Mathosa’s 36th birthday.

The former Boom Shaka member and highly successful solo artist, who began her professional music career at the age of 15 and was able to forge her way through an industry dominated by men, passed away in 2006 at the age of 29 after her driver lost control of the vehicle they were in.

After leaving her kwaito group Boom Shaka in 1999, starting out as a member of the four-piece in 1994, she went solo and her debut album Dream achieved gold status after only four weeks. At the 2001 South African Music Awards (SAMAs) Mathosa went home with the Best Dance Album award for Dream, Best Female Vocalist award, and Best Dance Single award for her first release, Intro, off of the same album.

She was also nominated for a British MOBO Award in 2006.

Known for her signature dyed hair, charming and outspoken attitude, Mathosa was openly bisexual - all characteristics that often saw her being compared to the late Brenda Fassie.

The above song is one of my all-time favourite Lebo Mathosa songs, and I had the pleasure of meeting her briefly at a concert a few months before she passed.

RIP Lebo Mathosa, you are missed!