The Sunshine Blogger Award’s 11 questions

Holly Jahangiri kindly nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award. I doubt I’d win, as I don’t follow the rules. I’m not even entirely sure what I’d win. But the questions seem a fun thing to do, especially now that I’ve decided to minimize my time on Facebook in favour of the blogosphere again (roll […]

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It’s all going fines at Volkswagen

General Motors’ fine in 1995 for 470,000 cars using defeat devices against EPA testing: US$11 million. Volkswagen’s fine in 2016 for 580,000 cars using defeat devices against EPA testing: potentially US$40,000 million (or $40 billion, as the Americans say). The local companies get off far easier in the US. In fact, GM can even get […]

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There can be only one, unless you forget to register your design: the Range Rover Evoque and the copycat Landwind X7

The stunning original: the Range Rover Evoque. There has been a lot of ongoing press about Landwind’s copy of the Range Rover Evoque (a road test of the Evoque comes next week in Lucire, incidentally), one of my favourite Sloane Ranger SUVs. There’s no way Landwind would have come up with the design independently, and, […]

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Time for a rewatch: Reza Aslan interviewed on CNN about Muslim violence

Found on my wall today. While it’s over three months old, the responses from Prof Reza Aslan of the University of California Riverside address a lot of the comments that have surfaced post-Charlie Hebdo head-on—which shows that we continue to go round and round the same arguments and not making an awful lot of progress. […]

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Autocade hits 5,000,000 views: what are its most read and least searched?

With Autocade exceeding the 5,000,000 page view milestone (it’s on 5·12 million), I thought it might be fun to look at a few of the models on the site: the most popular, the least loved, and the first on the site.    Looking at the stats, here are the most popular models. These shouldn’t be […]

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Let’s improve on the Wellington logo

The city’s new logo—it is not a rebrand if the underlying tenets are the same—has not met with much support.    The next question must be: all right, if we’re all so smart, can we do better?    Ian Apperley and I think we can. Ian approached me yesterday morning to ask whether we should […]

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419ers adopt a new technology: the postal system

Interesting to get this letter from the UK today, sent air mail from the Croydon Mail Centre, Surrey, on September 5.    The Nigerian 419 scammers have figured out that email is ineffective, so they are moving on to this brand-new technology: mail.    As with the last time I blogged about clumsy 419 attempts—a […]

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My second cousin’s in Outlaw Territory

I’ve made a brief mention, in the past, about my second cousin Vivian Lee, who is quite the illustrator. Her work will be published in the second volume of Outlaw Territory, out February 1. You can order it now from Amazon and it will be dispatched after release. You may also like Go for it, […]

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The changing accent of Gillian Anderson

Gillian Anderson, Chicago-born, star of The X Files, grew up in North London and speaks with an accent that’s closer to Britain than the States. I noticed that she gets quite a bit of flak for this on YouTube comments, which is rather sad, perhaps revealing more about those who criticize her than anything else. […]

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