Modern masculinity doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel

When Douglas Bader recorded in his log book on the aeroplane accident that cost him his legs, he wrote, ‘Bad show’.    It was men like Bader, Audie Murphy, Claire Lee Chennault and Douglas MacArthur that my father spoke of as heroes from his childhood.    There were plenty more from our own culture but […]

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Tesla or SpaceX doesn’t like you? They’ll say you’re an active shooter

What does Tesla do to whistleblowers?    They tell the cops you’re an active shooter.    Apparently, this case about a gentleman called Martin Tripp emerged in 2018 but only today were the police documents released, and are worth reading.   Above: Two of the pages from the Storey County Sheriff’s Office over the false […]

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The newer the Instagram, the buggier; and why no one should use Google Drive

I’ve discovered that the newer the Instagram, the buggier it is. We’ve already seen that it can’t cope with video if you use Android 7 (a great way to reduce video bandwidth), and, earlier this year, filters do not work.    I downgraded to version 59 till, last week, Instagram began deleting direct messages as […]

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Seasonal Canadian humour

My thanks to Sydney-based photographer Robert Catto for linking me to this one, especially near the festive season.        It is funnier than the one I took in Sweden many years ago, which in pun-land could be racist:        The sad thing is, at some point, the majority will not get […]

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Facebook takes away user control over their own advertising preferences

Facebook’s advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working.    Over the years I’ve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if they’re uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you […]

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Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed

People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.    Last month, Bob Hoffman’s excellent The Ad Contrarian newsletter noted, ‘I believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, […]

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The 1970s: when TV shows were New

As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isn’t anything special, for some reason, in the ’70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasn’t like the news (by this I mean the plural of new) of Amsterdam or Zealand, but an adjective […]

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A couple of days before it became official: thoughts on PSA and FCA linking up

Companies in FCA’s and PSA’s histories did once produce the Plymouth Horizon, so historically there is some precedent to a trans-Atlantic arrangement—not to mention the type 220 and 179 minivans and the commercial vehicles currently in PSA’s and Fiat’s ranges. This is a few days old, but it’s nice to know that these hurriedly written […]

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