January 2023 gallery

Here are January 2023’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.     Notes Rosa Clará image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021. The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recently—I believe it was commended in 1991 by the […]

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The missing second verse

The second of three verses of the Scots College school song appears to be missing from the web. I posted them once on Facebook, back when people used Facebook, so of course it doesn’t appear in Google. We sang it, but I understand that the generation before, and the one after, didn’t sing it. We […]

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GM and Ford keep falling down the top 10 table

It’s bittersweet to get news of the Chevrolet Corvette from what’s left of GM here in New Zealand, now a specialist importer of cars that are unlikely to sell in any great number. And we’re not unique, as the Sino-American firm pulls out of entire regions, and manufactures basically in China, North America, and South […]

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Spacing in French: figuring out how to punctuate professionally

With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, we’ve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition.    There are […]

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Volvo: boxy, but good

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 […]

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The Rongotai years

This came up today at Victoria University where an old client of ours asked about my 2013 campaign. I remembered there was something about education that I wanted to address at the time.    One of the stranger emails during 2013 came from a former classmate of mine at Rongotai College. A brilliant guy at […]

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Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done

Back in September, The Dominion Post claimed on its front page that I have an ‘accent’ that is holding me back. It was a statement which the editor-in-chief subsequently apologized for, and which she had removed from the online edition—you can judge for yourself here if the claim was a falsehood. Still, despite having lived […]

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The Paradise Club’s Facebook page (not an adult joint)

Two years ago, I blogged about The Paradise Club’s unavailability on DVD and the reasons behind it.    As a show nearly forgotten after 20 years, perhaps it isn’t surprising to find there are no Facebook fan pages for it. There is the one that Facebook generates from Wikipedia, but that’s it, as far as […]

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