The big and the small of it

Spotted on the Lucire website today, an advertisement for Consumer magazine.    It’s a Flash animation, suggesting that not all car insurance policies are perfect. The opening frame shows a car with oversized coins for wheels, and the wheels shrink to a more standard size at the end of the animation.    The copy reads, […]

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Retro moment: the first American Ford Granada

Above: The US Ford Granada in a contemporary advertisement, as posted at americangranada.com.   Not the European car, but the American one of the same name: the Ford Granada was marketed as a US alternative to a Mercedes-Benz. Not as overstyled as, say, the Ford Maverick, this was an extremely heavy car, and Ford’s marketing […]

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An ideal surfing camera, and why we love the Saab 9-4X more

My friend Gareth Rowson is now review editor for WideWorldMag.com (alongside his design practice). Here is his test of the waterproof Oregon Scientific ATC9K Action Camera, filmed while surfing at Vazon in Guernsey. I thought this was very nicely shot.    Less well shot, but significant, is the official video from Saab USA about its […]

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Wellington’s most dangerous intersection (in fiction)

While chatting about the movie Shaker Run with one of our Lucire team (who was not born when the film was made), I noticed that the intersection at Courtenay Place–Taranaki Street–Dixon Street was rather treacherous in 1980s’ fiction (start at 1’56”):    Fast forward to 1986 and the Hong Kong film 最佳拍檔千里救差婆 (marketed as Aces […]

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How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada

I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]

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By all means, enforce parking, but it’s not a licence to write fiction

Today was a good reminder why we cannot trust a foreign company to look after our parking, and why things need to be brought back under council control.    Parking enforcement is not about profit. Karen was unduly issued with a parking ticket in a P5 space after hours. And I received one today. You […]

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A fancier 1,200th car on Autocade

Writing about cars calms me. So call me a freak. And maybe I’ve just needed to chill more in this last month as we head into the last few months of the mayoral campaign.    It surprises me that Autocade has reached 1,200 models: 100 in the past month. And since I knew we were […]

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It’s ‘Chevy’—even President Obama says so

Dear Chevrolet: even your own nation’s president calls the brand ‘Chevy’: You might want to rethink that memo. You may also like A whinge about whinging Volkswagen’s scandal won’t spread to other German car groups Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai How can we help those fooled into believing […]

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Replacing a social network near you: real life

As news emerges that teenagers have spent less time on Facebook, and there are more profiles getting closed on the social network, Sony has released its newest trailer for The Social Network. After 9-11, it’s time to tell the “other” story of the ’noughties. And if Facebook is the topic of a Hollywood film, then […]

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The trouserless journalist

As some of you know, I was at Cape Kidnappers last week, visiting the Napier area for the first time. (I tried getting there last October, but this was as far as I got.)    It was for the Audi A8 launch, and we at the office had a good laugh at this lovely and […]

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