A belated look back at 2013

I must have had a busy end of 2013, as I never posted my trade-mark summary of the year as viewed via my Tumblr. Here ’tis, better late than never.

January 2013
Lucire has a facelift online—by December 2013, this “new look” would be history. Kylie Minogue is on the home page as the first story with the new look. Seems very retro now.
   Cliff Curtis plays a non-Māori with a standard American accent in Missing. Maybe no one really knows about New Zealand in Hollywood, unless you are Jemaine, Bret, or a Hobbit.
   Kim Dotcom launches Megabox but it’s still not fair or sustainable for content creators, says Russell Brown. You just don’t hear much about this these days.
   Jaguar is happy that the Tata procedures’ manual is four sides of A4 instead of Ford’s three-inch thick one. Free from US bureaucracy, it now produces good cars. This might apply to other things concerning the US of A.

February 2013
Dick Prosser doesn’t get stood down by New Zealand First after racist comments, and Shearer and Key are OK with that, too. Prosser’s relieved he doesn’t work for TVNZ.
   On Instagram, the OHMS hashtag reveals very little that is On Her Majesty’s Service.
   Google claims that it cannot crawl for a file that never existed—the first of some serious bugs from the search engine giant.

March 2013
Theorizing a remake of Back to the Future, with Justin Bieber and Will Ferrell. Yes, I thought that sucked, too.
   Malala Yousafzai’s story is retold in cartoon form.
   Tumblr reaches 100 million users; Instagram is plagued by Instaspam.

April 2013
One reviewer equates Bruce Willis’s John McClane in the new Die Hard movie with Mr Magoo: ‘Remember those old Mister Magoo cartoons where the doddery old bald guy would blunder around various locations, leaving chaos in his wake while constantly insisting “I’m on vacation”?’
   Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was foretold in The Final Cut in the early 1990s. I watched it then. The remake was totally different. For a start, a lot of Thatcher Cabinet politicians now look like their Spitting Image caricatures.
   Googlebot keeps making false accusations about malware, as I document Google’s latest folly. Why do people depend on this website? And, more to the point, isn’t libel covered by US law?
   Adam Rayner and Eliza Dushku try to reboot The Saint in a remake, with Roger Moore and Ian Ogilvy in cameos. The series is yet to be picked up.

May 2013
Royal Wedding build-up as the Swedish Crown releases a photograph of HRH Princess Madeleine with her fiancé Chris O’Neill. Swedish men give up hope of courting her.
   Colvin Inglis: ‘Wellington isn’t dying—John Key flew into Wellington Airport and misinterpreted what “Wellington Terminal” meant.’

June 2013
The Royal Wedding of HRH Princess Madeleine and Chris O’Neill. It becomes one of Lucire’s most-read articles in June.
   Edward Snowden becomes the whistleblower of the year. Later, when I am stuck at the Russian Embassy behind its gates in Wellington, I note that I was ‘snowed in’. Snowden has inspired new language.

July 2013
Dzohokhar Tsarnaev gets on the cover of Rolling Stone. People complain that Rolling Stone glamorized him without reading the story which doesn’t glamorize him. Some media cover this without mentioning this point.
   PM John Key dismisses GCSB protesters as misinformed or politically aligned.
   The death of Mel Smith. Will Matt Lucas still dress up as Andy Pipkin?

August 2013
Facebook and Instagram stop people from saying thank-you, either failing such comments or calling them abusive.
   Stuart Munro writes, at the al-Jazeera English website: ‘The major driver of the GCSB bill has been the improper use of the agency by John Key. This bill was thrown together on the fly to cover the PM’s embarrassment arising from his misuse of GCSB resources to spy on Kim Dotcom. With an honest PM, the legislation might not be problematic—but Key makes personal and intemperate use of the GCSB. He is therefore incapable of providing impartial oversight to the GCSB, and that leaves this bill fatally flawed. It will have to be scrapped, and the current GCSB will have to be disestablished in favour of a more scrupulous organisation.’

September 2013
The Australian General Election, and Tony Abbott provides fodder with quotations suggesting he might not be all there. He wins anyway.

October 2013
Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special is coming. I eventually watch it on Iplayer after testing it out watching Strictly. This reminds me of how much Britain has changed in the last 30 years. Today, Bruce Forsyth is on BBC1 on a Saturday night, Terry Wogan is on the radio, and Tories are in Number 10. Nothing like it was before.
   Google breaks another promise. In 2005, it stated, ‘There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.’

November 2013
The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, which must also mean the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.
   The origins of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air are revealed in this fictional entry by yours truly: ‘To entertain the populace during the Troubles, The Fresh Prince of Bel Fast was a Northern Irish sitcom about a young Catholic man from Derry who is forced to live with a Protestant family to the east of Belfast. It later spawned an American remake starring Will Smith. It was known for its theme, which concluded, “I looked at my kingdom, I was there at last / To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Fast.”‘

December 2013
Pinterest puts spammers into your feed.
   The Hobbit cartoon in the 1970s was a much quicker way to get Tolkien’s novel dramatized: in and out in 90 minutes.
   There ain’t nothing like a Dame: Penelope Keith gets a DBE—and I mark this with a Morecambe & Wise clip. Seems appropriate.


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