Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved. From a teenager’s perspective: home computers, with a modulator–demodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously […]
Read More… from In the 1980s, I thought society would evolve to become more efficient and smarter
Andrew R. Tester/Creative Commons It’s pretty hard to deactivate one’s Facebook. When I ceased posting in 2017 and reduced my activity to client stuff and group management, I made sure that I had no more Facebook sign-ons left. But it turns out that Lucire’s Twitter-to-Facebook page script relies on my account. I did look […]
Read More… from Social media sheeple don’t know they’re sheeple
Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years. He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is ‘rigged’; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle […]
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 […]
The car Lee Iacocca will be remembered for, the 1965 Ford Mustang on the right. Before I found out about Lee Iacocca’s passing, on the same day I Tweeted about one of the cars he was behind when he was president of Ford: the 1975 US Granada. Basically, Iacocca understood that Americans wanted style. That […]
Read More… from Reflections about Lee Iacocca—unfortunately, not all of it is positive
Long before Mad Men, and before I got into branding in a big way, I had an interest in advertising. One of the greatest send-ups of the industry was the 1990 Dudley Moore starrer Crazy People, set in the advertising industry against a politically incorrect—actually, cruel and inaccurate—look at mental health. It’s one of those […]
I see British filmmaker Steve McQueen has remade Lynda La Plante’s Widows. I was younger than he was when it aired, and didn’t appreciate the storylines to the same extent, though I have recollections of it. What I did recall was a Smith and Jones sketch, which had a voiceover along these lines: […]
Read More… from Remakes: Widows joins other Euston Films series
‘There’s an old Polish proverb …’ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’ I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with what broadcasters put on. In the 1970s, my tastes weren’t too dissimilar from the general public’s, but as […]
There was an Epson bag hanging from the back of my bedroom door, hidden by larger bags. I opened it up to discover brochures from my visit to a computer fair in 1989 (imaginatively titled Computing ’89), and that the bag must have been untouched for decades. I’ve no reason to keep its contents […]
Read More… from A three-decade time capsule hanging on my door
I sincerely hope I’m wrong when I say that the passing of Kiwi composer, arranger and conductor Terry Gray went unnoticed in our news media. I only found out last month that Terry died in 2011. As a kid of the 1970s and a teenager of the 1980s, Terry’s music was a big part […]
Read More… from In memoriam, Terry Gray, British-born New Zealand composer, 1940–2011