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 top joke.
I have a ringtone on my phone for SMSs, namely Derek Flint’s ringtone from In Like Flint.
If I mention In Like Flint, in my circles there’d be about one person every two years who’ll get what I mean.
Twenty years ago, everyone would have said, ‘Who’s Derek Flint? That’s Austin Powers’ ringtone!’
Today, some of my younger readers will ask, ‘Who’s Austin Powers?’
So far, only a tiny handful of people get my reference when I say, ‘Dear guards, Jeffrey can be taken off suicide watch. Signed, Epstein’s mother.’
No, what Epstein did to his victimsāchildrenāis no laughing matter.
However, I don’t think I’m alone in needing humour as an anchor for my sanity when the news is abhorrent.
As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isnāt anything special, for some reason, in the ā70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasnāt like the news (by this I mean the plural of new) of Amsterdam or Zealand, but an adjective that was adapted to really emphasize that you should pay attention and consume, consume, consume.
Perhaps the earliest exposure was a Tomica model I had: the Blue Whale Crown. The base plate and box read āToyota New Crownā. Even as a child, I wondered: what happens to the old Crown models? And what happens to this Crown model when a new new Crown comes out? It didnāt matter: Toyota wanted us to live in the present and bask in the newness, and back in the early 1970s, this Crown certainly looked like nothing that had come from Toyota prior, or since. It was almost saying, āYes, we know it looks weird, but hey, itās ānewā, so that means itās good!ā
The real car flopped (relatively speaking; they still shifted plenty given top Japanese managers still needed transportation), and it was the last generation of Crown to be sold in the US, but to me it remains iconic, even if it is garish. After a mere three years on sale, very short even by Japanese standards, its āNewā successor emerged in 1974 with all the idiosyncrasies gone. Conservatism ruled in this segment, at least till fairly recently. The old toys hung round, still ānewā, so even if your parents bought you one in 1975 or 1976, you could still relish the adjective.
It wasnāt a case of Japlish. It was all over television as well. When we emigrated here, the Anglophone television introduced me to The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Never mind that I had never seen the old Dick van Dyke show at this point. This was the white-haired man doing the New Zealand Fire Service PSAs. Everyone knew him. And why was it The New? Because we needed to be told that despite the same network in its home country (CBS), Dick van Dyke wasnāt playing Rob Petrie, but a new character altogether. Please donāt take this as a continuation of the previous one.
Here are the News:The New Dick Van Dyke Show; The New Perry Mason; and The New Avengers.
Van Dyke, in his autobiography, recounts a fan coming up to him berating him for leaving Laura (Mary Tyler Mooreās character from the earlier The Dick Van Dyke Show), so itās not as though the qualifier worked; goodness knows how the same fan would have computed The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on the same night as The New Dick Van Dyke Show. Maybe that was proof that Rob had left Laura or vice versa and they were forging ahead with their separate lives. The New Dick Van Dyke Show wasnāt alone. A couple of years later, there was The New Perry Mason (1973), starring Monte Markham in the title role (though no one ever called him āNewā). The Fred Steiner theme was nowhere to be heard. Iāve seen a few of these, and they are pretty good in a 1970s sort of wayāwhich is to say more exterior filming and more flash cars (product placement was growing) on the back lot and on location. To make it more confusing, when Perry Mason returned in a bunch of TV movies in the 1980s, starting with Perry Mason Returns, it wasnāt Markham, but original actor Raymond Burr once more. You see, it wasnāt The New Perry Mason Returns. The New Perry Mason starred a different actor, so I can comprehend its Newness, and at least the presence of another actor underscored this. It didnāt do that well, which is probably why hardly anyone remembers it. Probably more people remember Markham as the Seven Million Dollar Man. Iām not kidding.
One that I do remember extremely well was The New Avengers, in 1976. Again, given when I was born, I had no exposure to The Avengers, but The New Avengers was a favourite of mine then, and I bought the DVDs when I saw them decades later. Unlike the other two series, this was a direct continuation, though it wasnāt explained just how John Steed returned to Earth after Tara King blasted them both into space when they had their Endgame in 1969; but we do know they enjoyed Laurent Perrier champagne when they got back. Itās a third definition of new as far as the TV shows were concerned, with the same motive: if you want to be seen as in, hip and groovy, come watch the new.
Perhaps more obscure were one-off TV movies: Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977), which had the same cast (grandmother aside, as actress Blossom Rock was ill), and where the new serves no useful purpose other than attempting to sell us on newness where there is none; and The New Maverick (1978), which sees the return of James Garner as Bret and Jack Kelly as Bart, though thereās no sign of Roger Moore as Beau (presumably too busy being James Bond) and Robert Colbert as Brent, but it did introduce a first cousin once removed called Ben Maverick (Charles Frank). I imagine Ben is the new Maverick, and a short-lived TV series, Young Maverick, did appear afterwards.
No one really did much more New shows after thisāit seemed to be a 1970s phenomenon. With one exception: CI5: the New Professionals in the 1990s, an attempt to recapture the glory days of The Professionals but winding up more like episodes of Bugs. There, new sort of meant old, reminding us that some of the writing and directing was out of step with late 1990s’ audience expectations; and, with the greatest of respect, showed that certain parties were past their prime. By then, we had had seven episodes of Bodyguards, which perhaps showed how a modern-day Professionals might be. All that needed was to be āladdifiedā for the FHM audience, at least in theory, and certainly, after 9-11, there may have been some scope for an élite, globally coordinated, anti-terrorist squad (which is what The New Professionals suggests the fictional CI5 unit morphed into, probably to accommodate its backers and the South African location filming in some episodes). But in 1998, there was less of an appetite for revival shows, especially when the top-rated series were ER and Friends, and the Americans were a year away from The Sopranos. Britain, meanwhile, was gripped with the tension of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the FHM lads were more than catered for by Babes in the Wood.
PS., December 6: How could I forget this item of regular childhood viewing? From the US, in 1979.
I thought I could be archaic on a few thingsāI still use diphthongs in text in our publications (Ʀsthetic, CƦsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at ā/100 km and too few countries use km/ā. However, even I had to cringe at Jacob Rees-Moggās style guide as revealed by ITV. This has now been circulated to his House of Commons staff. It is not satire.
His first rule is āOrganisations are SINGULARā. (No, this isn’t licence to write ‘Organisations is singular.’) I donāt mind this as itās one I adopt myself (admittedly inconsistently), but note the spelling of the first word. Itās French. The correct spelling is organizations, and the switch to the French in the Anglosphere appears to have happened postwar. Go to English books that are old enough, and youāll find the z to be more commonplace. (Please donāt comment that z is āAmericanā before doing some research.)
His sixth rule is āDouble space after fullstopsā. Now, the last word should be two words, but the rule itself has even been abandoned by the newspaper that Rees-Moggās father edited for so many years. Most compositors in Britain abandoned large spaces at the start of the 20th century, by my reckoningāmy interpretation of the reading studies by Tinker et al is that the single space is sufficient, and web convention agrees. If we are to follow The Times in, say, 1969, we also need to insert spaces around certain other punctuation marks. If you find a copy from around that time, I can promise you it won’t be easy to read.
What is apparent to me is that the rules have been typed up, at least, by an amateur, which accounts for the poor spacing and inconsistent capitalization, and generally it shows a disregard for professional style guides (again, we return to The Times). Sometimes, the acorn does fall far from the tree.
I note that Imperial measurements are to be used again: none of this newfangled metric system nonsense. As I do some transactions in pounds sterling, I am going to refresh my memory on shillings, half-crowns and thruppenny bits in case currency decimalization is reversed. You never know, Johnson’s Britain may find the decimal system too Johnny Foreigner for its liking. ‘They cannot, and will not, change our sausage!’
Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote:
It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit.
I responded that Americans like big numbers. It’s a big country, and everything must sound more impressive, even yuge. Therefore:
Rest of world: Audi 100
USA: Audi 5000
Rest of world: 2019 Range Rover Evoque
USA: 2020 Range Rover Evoque
āBlack Fridayā
Western world: Friday 13th
USA: Friday 23rd (it was this year, anyway)
1,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one thousand million’
USA: ‘one billion’
1,000,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one billion’
USA: ‘one trillion’
I realize Americans mean something different when they say ‘Black Friday’ (and it doesn’t mean we need to adopt a change in definition, though judging by the last two we probably will), and I realize how their model years work (and they have nothing to do with calendar years).
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donāt think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was āracist AFā.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnāt happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenāt racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesā phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeāmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iām changing my business slogan to āWorth more than my mate Krishna.ā
Thereās the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itās one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheās absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleās Republic of China donāt like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weāre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherās family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherās drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnāt have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canāt tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and āAsianā population ā¦
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingās Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
āAt leastā is right. My father was born in the mainland where åå ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iām willing to bet thereās an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatās true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iām not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnāt feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: āChineseā meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: āAsianā became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston āTwo Wongs donāt make a whiteā Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itās not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itās used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itās why āMy best friend is Asianā is racist in more than one way.
2010s: āChineseā means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weāre moneyed, apparently, so much that weāve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of āChinese-sounding namesā by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iāve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youāre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youāve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donāt want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnāt the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donāt have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is āunityā insofar as Iāll stick up for someone of my own race if theyāre the subject of a racist attack. Iāll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weāre not automatons doing Beijingās bidding.
Iāll lazily take Tze Mingās conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenāt even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.
I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.
Thereās a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know itās not an exclusively American phenomenon. Tom Nichols, the bookās author, writes, as quoted in The New York Times, āAmericans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told theyāre wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that arenāt true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.ā
I venture to say that the “death of expertise” is an Anglophone phenomenon. Head into Wikipedia, for instance, and youāll find proof that the masses are not a good way to ensure accuracy, at least not in the English version. Head into the German or Japanese editions and you find fewer errors, and begin to trust the pages more.
Given that many of āthe peopleā cannot discern what is āfake newsā and what is not, or who is a bot and who is not, then itās absolutely foolhardy to propose that they also be the ones who determine the trustworthiness of a news source, as Facebook is wont to do.
I canāt comment as much on countries I have spent less time in, but certainly in the Anglosphere, Iāve seen people advance, with confidence and self-authority, completely wrong positions, ones not backed up by real knowledge. You only need to visit some software support forums to see online examples of this phenomenon.
When I visit Sweden, for instance, thereās a real care from individuals not to advance wrongful positions, although I admit I am limited by my own circles and the brief time I have spent there.
Itās not so much that we donāt value expertise, itās that the bar for what constitutes an expert is set exceptionally low. Weāre often too trusting of sources or authorities who donāt deserve our reverence. And I wonder if it comes with our language.
Iāll go so far as to say that the standing of certain individuals I had in my own mind was shattered when we were all going for the mayoralty in my two campaigns in 2010 and 2013. There certainly was, among some of my opponents, no correlation between knowledge and the position they already held in society. It didnāt mean I disliked them. It just meant I wondered how they got as far as they did without getting found out.
Fortunately, the victor, whether you agreed with her policies or not, possessed real intelligence. The fact she may have political views at odds with yours is nothing to do with intelligence, but her own observations and beliefs. I can respect that (which is why I follow people on social media whose political views I disagree with).
In turn Iām sure many of them disliked what I stood for, even if they liked me personally. Certainly it is tempting to conclude that some quarters in the media, appealing to the same anti-intellectualism that some of my rivals represented, didnāt like a candidate asserting that we should increase our intellectual capital and pursue a knowledge economy. No hard feelings, mind. As an exercise, it served to confirm that, in my opinion, certain powers donāt have peopleās best interests at heart, and there is a distinct lack of professionalism (and, for that matter, diversity) in some industries. In other words, a mismatch between what one says one does, and what one actually does. Language as doublespeak.
So is it speaking English that makes us more careless? Maybe it is: as a lingua franca in some areas, merely speaking it might put a person up a few notches in othersā estimation. Sandeep Deva Misra, in his blog post in 2013, believes thatās the case, and that we shouldnāt prejudge Anglophones so favourably if the quality of their thought isnāt up to snuff.
Maybe thatās what we need to do more of: look at the quality of thought, not the expression or make a judgement based on which language itās come in. As English speakers, we enjoy a privilege. We can demand that others meet us on our terms and think poorly when someone speaks with an accent or confuses your and youāre. It gives us an immediate advantage because we have a command of the lingua franca of business and science. It gives us the impunity to write fictions in Wikipedia or make an argument sound appealing through sound bites, hoping to have made a quick getaway before weāre found out. Political debate has descended into style over substance for many, although this is nothing new. I was saying, although not blogging, things like this 20 years ago, and my students from 1999ā2000 might remember my thoughts on Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign as being high on rhetoric and light on substance. Our willingness to accept things on face value without deeper analysis, lands us into trouble. We’re fooled by delivery and the authority that is attached with the English language.
Youāll next see this in action in a high-profile way when Facebook comes forth with more comment about Cambridge Analytica. I can almost promise you now that it wonāt hold water.
My good friend Stefan Engesethās Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and itās been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and Iām sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefanās writing style, humour and thinking.
I even hope this will pave the way for translations of his earlier works, especially Detective Marketing and One: a Consumer Revolution for Business (the latter still remains my favourite of his marketing titles).
Iāve written a brief quote for Sharkonomics and the publisher (with some nudging from Stefan) has taken the time to make sure my Chinese name is accurately recorded, rather than a phonetic translation of my Anglo transliteration, which, of course, then wouldnāt be my name.
Stefanās inventive and innovative thinking might seem left-field sometimes, till some years pass and people realize he was right all along. Take, for example, Google wanting to build a high-tech neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, announced in October. Notwithstanding the hassles Google has created on its own turf in Silicon Valley, itās the sort of project we might expect from the giant now. But would we have expected it in 2007? Probably not, except Stefan did.
In 2007 (though he actually first floated the idea a year earlier), Stefan blogged about his idea for Google Downtownāwhy not make real what Google Earth does virtually? Why not shop at places that already know all your personal preferences, if thatās where things are heading? The town would have free wifi and youād be paying for it with āyour selfā (the space, Iām sure, was intentional). In 2008, 500 people heard his plans at a conference and laughed. The following year, he met Eric Schmidt and mentioned it to him. Eric paused and didnāt laughāand maybe the idea sunk in.
Itās not the first time Stefan has hatched an idea and it gained legs, from Coca-Cola delivering its product through taps to Ikea making flat-pack fashionāboth have wound up being done, though the latter not quite in the way Stefan envisaged.
Well done, Wikipedia, you got something right. It only took you 12 years. Nick, who appears to be a senior editor at the site, fixed up the complete fabrication that a user called ApolloBoy entered about the āFord CE14 platformā in 2005, after I wrote a pretty scathing piece on Drivetribe about Wikipediaās inadequacies, in part based on an earlier blog post I wrote here.
I am grateful to Nick who I expect saw my story.
However, errors still abound, and as I pointed out in Drivetribe, another user called Pmeisel, who appears to have been an automotive industry professional, said back in February 2005 there was a real confusion between development codes and platforms on Wikipedia.
While Nick has largely fixed the problemāhe has noted that it was the European Ford Escort of 1990 and its derivatives that CE14 should refer to, and not much earlier American carsāthere remains the lesser one that there is still no such thing as a āFord CE14 platformā, just as there is no such thing as a āFord C170 platformā, and so on.
Ford did not use these codes to refer to platforms, they used them to refer to specific models.
Letās see if the Wikiality of this page will at least begin to disappear from the ānet, 12 years after ApolloBoy made up some crap and allowed it to propagate to the extent that some people regard it as fact.
I have enquired into Wikipedia from time to time, enough to know it is full of mistakes. But the errors do seem to happen far more often in the Anglophone one. Perhaps those of us who speak English are more willing to commit fictions to publication. Goodness knows we have seen an example in print, too. Does this culture lend us to being far less precise with a poorer concern for the truthāand does that in turn lead to the ease with which āfake newsā winds up in our media?
Other than for the landline, Iāve never bought a phone before. Each cellphone has come as a result of a company plan or a loyalty gift from the telco, but when my Huawei Ascend Y200 began needing resets several times a dayāIāve had computer experts tell me this is the phone, or the SD card (like any endeavour, itās hard to find agreement; this is like saying that the problem with an axe lies with the handle or the blade)āI decided to replace it. Plus, having built websites for clients it seemed only fair to have a device on which I could test them on an OS newer than Android 2.3, and after a few days I have to say the Meizu M2 Note has been worth every penny. (The Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 was on the shortlist but the Meizu performed better in online tests, e.g. this one.)
You can find the specs on this device elsewhere, in reviews written by people far more au fait with cellular technology than me, but a few things about arriving in the mid-2010s with such a gadget struck me as worth mentioning.
First, I opted for a blue one. Theyāre usually cheaper. Since I have a case for it, I donāt have to put up with the colour on the back anyway, so why not save a few bucks if the guts are the same?
Secondly, itās astonishing to think in five inches I have the same number of pixels as I do in 23 inches on my monitor.
Thirdly, cellular battery technology has come a heck of a long way. (Down side: you canāt replace it in this device.)
But hereās an absolutely wonderful bonus I never expected: itās Google-free. Yes, the Flyme OS is built on Googleās Android 5.1.1, but the beauty of buying a phone from a country where Google is persona non grata is that Iām not stuck with all the crap I had on the Telstra Clear-supplied Huawei. No Google Plus, Google Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps and all the other stuff I had to switch off constantly. I could have had the phone rooted but it never was a big enough priority, even with my dislike of the big G.
I donāt know how much ultimately gets back to Google through simply using its OS, but Iāve managed to keep away from signing in to any of their services. In this post-Snowden era, I regard that as a good thing.
The phone booted up for the first time and gave me English as an option (as the seller indicated), so the deviceās OS is all in the language Iām most fluent in. However, itās not that weird for me to have Chinese lettering around, so the apps that stayed in the Chinese language are comprehensible enough to me. There is an app store that isnāt run by Google, at which all the apps are availableāInstagram, Dolphin Browser, Opera Mini, plus some of the other admin tools I use. Nothing has shown up in my Google Dashboard. The store is in Chinese, but if you recognize the icon you should be all right, and the apps work in the language youāve set your OS to.
The China-only apps arenāt hard to dispose of, and the first ones to go were Netease, Dianping (I donāt even use an Anglo dining review app, so why would I need a China-only one?), Amap (again, it only works in China, and it can be easily reinstalled through Autonavi and its folded paper icon), and 116114, an app from a Chinese telco. Weibo I donāt mind keeping, since I already have an account, and I can see some utility to retaining Alipay, the painting app, and a few others.
And having a Google-free existence means I now have Here Maps, the email is set up with my Zoho āboxes, and 1Weather replaces the default which only gives Chinese cities.
What is remarkable is that the Chinese-designed default apps are better looking than the western counterparts, which is not something you hear very often. The opposite was regularly the case. A UI tipping-point could have happened.
I also checked the 2G, 3G and 4G frequencies against Vodafone New Zealand’s to ensure compatibilityāthere are at least two different M2 Notes on the market, so caveat emptor. Vodafone also recommends installing only one SIM, which suits me fine, as the other slot is occupied by a 64 Gbyte micro-SD card.
The new Flyme-based-on-Android keyboard isnāt particularly good though, and I lose having a full set of smart quotes, a proper apostrophe, and en and em dashes, but far more obscure Latin-2 glyphs are accessible. Iām not sure what the logic is behind this.
I had an issue getting the Swift keyboard to install, but Iāve opted for Swype, which, curiously, like the stock keyboard, is missing common characters. Want to type a g with a breve for ErdoÄan? Or a d with a caron? Easy. An en dash? Impossible.
This retrograde step doesnāt serve me and there are a few options in Swype. First, I had to add the Russian keyboard, which does give an em dash, alongside the English one, though I havenāt located a source of en dashes yet. Secondly, after copying and pasting in a proper apostrophe from a document, I proceeded to type in words to commit them to my personal Swype dictionary: itās, heād, sheāll, wonāt, etc. This technique has worked, and while itās not 100 per cent perfect as thereāll be words I missed, itās better than nowt.
I see users have been complaining about the omissions online for three years, and if nothing has been done by now, I doubt Swypeās developers are in a rush to sort it.
Swypeās multilingual keyboards are easy to switch between, work well, but I havenāt tried my Kiwi accent on the Dragon-powered speech recognition software within.
Going from a 3Ā·2 Mpixel camera to a 13 Mpixel one has been what I expected, and finally I get a phone with a forward-facing camera for the first time since the mid-2000s (before selfies became de rigueur). Itās worth reminding oneself that a 13 Mpixel camera means files over 5 Mbyte are commonplace, and thatās too big for Twitter. Iām also going to have to expect to need more storage space offline, as I always back up my files.
I havenāt found a way to get SMSs off yet (suggestions are welcome), unlike the Huawei, but transferring other files (e.g. photos and music) is easier. Whereas the Huawei needed to have USB sharing switched on, the Meizu doesnāt care, and you can treat it as a hard drive when connected to your PC without doing anything. That, too, has made life far easier.
Iāve been able to upgrade the OS without issue, and Microsoft (and sometimes Apple) would do well to learn from this.
It leaves the name, Meizu (é ę), which in Cantonese at least isnāt the most pleasant when translatedāletās say itās all a bit Goblin King. Which may be appropriate this week.
Iām not one who ever gets a device for imageās sake, and I demand that they are practical. So far, the Meizu hasnāt let me down with its eight cores, 16 Gbyte ROM and 4G capability, all for considerably less than a similarly equipped cellphone that wears an Apple logo. And itās nice to know that this side of Apple, one can have a Google-free device.
The Cambridges with their new daughter in her first public appearance; photograph from the Press Association.
I haven’t followed the news of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s new baby much, but I was interested to note that when Kensington Palace announced her weight, it was in Imperial only. None of this foreign metric rubbish in the Empah, thank you:
The baby weighs 8lbs 3oz. The Duke of Cambridge was present for the birth.
— Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) May 2, 2015
I’m not complaining, since I still have weights and heights in Imperial in my head, being of that “transition generation” that was taught both at school. I still need to do mental arithmetic when the news tells me, ‘The suspect is 183 cm tall.’ I can tell you because of this Tweet, the royal baby and I weighed the same at birth; had they told us this in metric, I couldn’t have made the comparison.
I am wondering if the choice not to cite the weight in metric was intentional. Judging by my feed, there are plenty of royal-watchers younger than me. Forget pounds and ounces, they might not even know who Gorbachev was. I occasionally refer to the old weights and get puzzled looks, so, outside of the United States, are they still that familiar to people?
My good friend Stefan Engesethās 
