He's a 12-year-old leopard sporting the green and gold colours of Bafana Bafana, and who at one time "decided to dye his hair green as he felt it would be the perfect camouflage against the green of the football pitch". See him in action here.

Zakumi - a Mascot with attitude, via FIFA.com:

The name "Zakumi" is a composition of "ZA" standing for South Africa and "kumi", which translates into "10" in various languages across Africa.

Zakumi was born in 1994 and will be sixteen in 2010 - as young as South Africa's democracy.

Again via FIFA.com, Official Mascot unveiled:

The original creator of the design is Andries Odendaal from Cape Town, and the mascot costume itself was produced by Cora Simpson of Cora's Costumes cc in Boksburg. "Zakumi is a proud South African and, as such, an ideal ambassador for the first African World Cup." explained Danny Jordaan.

I know Andries as a fellow interactive designer and developer - he was the huge talent behind Wireframe back in the early days of new media establishment in South Africa and more recently consulted for HIVE. He has received wide spread recognition for his work (check out Whizzball for example) and is considered one of the foremost Flash and Director developers in the world. Congrats dude, another feather in your cap!

Zakumi is by far the best FIFA World Cup mascot when you consider his predecessors, or as arbitraryuser put it so well, "breakfast cereal characters". It's also nice to see the mascot fully dressed again. ;)

Laaddduuuuummmaaa!

Read more at IHT.com: Leopard Zakumi leaps into World Cup spotlight

Quite inspiring, I especially love the floodlights and nighttime illumination. But from an aerial perspective I still think it looks like a giant toilet bowl, as I mentioned before (last paragraph). I suspect it will grow on me though since I drive past it almost weekly.

The stadium at Green Point and supporting infrastructure for 2010 is the single biggest capital project Cape Town has ever undertaken.

More reading: Green Point Stadium on Wikipedia