Light humour, dark copy

I really love Hong Kong 漫畫 or manhua, and found this in one of the boxes from the move.    This was before the days of our having a computer scanner, and I had photocopied it out of a magazine or newspaper. There were years the copier was on the blink and everything would come […]

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Boris Johnson is hardly Churchillian

I’ve heard world leaders describe the fight against COVID-19 as a war, and there are some parallels.    As any student of history knows, there was such a thing as the Munich Agreement before World War II. I’ve managed to secure the summarized English translation below.    For those wondering why the UK initially thought […]

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Is there a type that works from home more easily?

Olivia St Redfern has featured yours truly in her lockdown day 2, part 1 podcast, so I decided to record another response.    It brings to mind something Steve McQueen once said. ‘I’m not an actor. I’m a reactor.’ As in, he could react to a line from another actor.    Anyone who has seen […]

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Responding to Leisure Lounge

During the 2011 ‘snowpocalypse’, my friend, the drag queen Olivia St Redfern, produced a series of streamed video programmes called Leisure Lounge. If I recall correctly, the intent was to give people, who had not experienced snow in our city (it’s a once-in-70-year event), some light entertainment. I called in as ‘Charlie’ (with apologies to […]

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Don’t rely on an algorithm to choose your brand ambassadors

Here’s a cautionary tale found by Lucire travel editor Stanley Moss. His words: ‘Photographer Dmitry Kostyukov recently experienced a rich dialogue with an algorithm belonging to a Scandinavian swimwear company. He’d been auto-mistaken for a Y chromosome, and digitally invited to become a brand ambassador. Dmitry accepted, and received the sample suit of his choice, […]

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Don’t give the keys to the company Twitter to just anyone

A few thoughts about Twitter from the last 24 hours, other than ‘Please leave grown-up discussions to grown-ups’: (a) it’s probably not a smart idea to get aggro (about a joke you don’t understand because you aren’t familiar with the culture) from your company’s account, especially when you don’t have a leg to stand on; […]

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The standard Chinese New Year news report

Janos Perian from Pixabay Every year, I hear or read a news report along these lines here: It’s Chinese, or the lunar, New Year today, and Asian communities all over New Zealand are coming together with their families to celebrate. It’s the Year of the Rat, which means it will be a lucky and prosperous […]

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History of the 2010s: a look back at the decade that was

When I first wrote a satirical look back at the decade, which ran on this blog in December 2009 (on the old Blogger service, as I was helping a friend fight a six-month battle with Google to restore his blog), it was pretty easy to make up little fictions based on reality. This one, covering […]

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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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What’s all this Johnny Foreigner type?

After all that bollocks from the Hon J. Rees-Mogg, MP about banning the metric system from the Commons, I thought the Brexit-loving Tories would at least get this right. That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, don’t you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner […]

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