This is one of those things I have to note down otherwise it’ll get lost to time. And you won’t see this mentioned during ‘Chinese Language Week’ here.
In the old country (å°å±±, or Taishan, China), when my father was a boy in the 1930s and 1940s, there were some whÄnau in the village who had been to the United States, where his paternal grandfather had settled. When conversing with them about their experiences in foreign lands (specifically, 金山), they said a few things that confused him then, but as an adult it all clicked.
One was when they spoke of their travels to 金山. They claimed, â€˜èˆ¹é æ‰“鑼船尾è½å””度.’ As a child, Dad would think, ‘Wow, that ship must have been massive.’ He knew that if someone had 打鑼 in one village, the next village could hear it. Conclusion: the length of the ship between the bow and stern must be greater than the distance between two villages.
As an adult, ‘The buggers tricked me. No wonder they couldn’t hear 鑼 at the bow of the ship. They would have travelled in the hold!’
The second one was in response to, ‘What are movies like?’ I imagine cinemas were thin on the ground during wartime, so he could only ask those who had been to the US. Their response, ‘打煙塵.’ Hitting smoke and dust? (Note that these have to be pronounced in Taishanese, not Cantonese, and definitely not Mandarin, for this story to make any sense.)
Again, as an adult, who wound up grasping English better than many Anglophones, he realized the old å°å±±é˜¿ä¼¯ had seen westerns, where they fought Indians, or more specifically, Injuns.
The third one was, ‘What’s it like speaking English?’ The reply: ‘婀籮心.’ He never figured that out as a child—it sounded like gibberish. Again, when older, having learned English, he realized what they meant: all the same.
Bear in mind those early travellers, or immigrants who were returning to visit the old country, wouldn’t have had great jobs and learned little English. It isn’t surprising in this context that they had pidgin phrases, ones they could fool a boy with.
Archive for the ‘China’ category
å°å±±é˜¿ä¼¯è¿”鄉下講英文
12.10.2021Tags: China, Chinese, family, history, humour, language, Taishan, Taishanese, USA, å°å±±
Posted in China, culture, humour, interests, USA | No Comments »
October 2021 gallery
01.10.2021Here are October 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month. Might have to be our Instagram replacement!
Notes
Chrysler’s finest? The 300M rates as one of my favourites.
The original cast of Hustle, one of my favourite 2000s series.
Boris Johnson ‘wage growth’ quotation—what matters to a eugenicist isn’t human life, after all. Reposted from Twitter.
For our wonderful niece Esme, a Lego airport set. It is an uncle and aunt’s duty to get decent Lego. My parents got me a great set (Lego 40) when I was six, so getting one at four is a real treat!
Publicity still of Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me. Reposted from Twitter.
Koala reposted from Twitter.
Photostat of an advertisement in a 1989 issue of the London Review of Books, which my friend Philip’s father lent me. I copied a bunch of pages for some homework. I have since reused a lot of the backs of those pages, but for some reason this 1989 layout intrigued me. It’s very period.
Fiat brochure for Belgium, 1970, with the 128 taking pride of place, and looking far more modern than lesser models in the range.
John Lewis Christmas 2016 parody ad still, reposted from Twitter.
More on the Triumph Mk II at Autocade. Reposted from Car Brochure Addict on Twitter.
The origins of the Lucire trade mark, as told to Amanda’s cousin in an email.
More on the Kenmeri Nissan Skyline at Autocade.
Renault Talisman interior and exterior for the facelifted model.
The original 1971 Lamborghini Countach LP500 by Bertone show car. Read more in Lucire.
More on the Audi A2 in Autocade.
Tags: 1960s, 1967, 1970, 1970s, 1971, 1977, 1980s, 1989, 2000, 2000s, 2014, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, actors, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, Audi, Audrey Hepburn, Australia, Autocade, BBC, Belgium, Bertone, Boris Johnson, British Leyland, car, celebrity, China, Chrysler, COVID-19, design, email, England, Eon Productions, family, Fiat, film, friends, futurism, Genève, Germany, graphic design, high-tech, Hong Kong, humour, Hustle, Italy, James Bond, JY&A Media, Lamborghini, law, Lego, London Review of Books, Lucire, Marcello Gandini, marketing, media, Nissan, parody, politics, Red China, Renault, retro, RTL, science fiction, Scotland, Switzerland, technology, toy, trade mark, Triumph, TV, Twitter, typography, UK, USA, Volkswagen
Posted in cars, China, culture, design, gallery, Hong Kong, humour, interests, marketing, media, politics, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
Have you driven a Ford … lately? Probably not
13.09.2021
Ford’s Brazilian line-up, 2021. Once upon a time, there were locally developed Corcels and Mavericks; even the EcoSport was a Brazilian development. Today, it’s Mustang, a couple of trucks, and a rebadged Chinese crossover.
We heard a lot about the demise of Holden as GM retreats from continents at a time, seemingly in a quest to be a Sino-American player rather than a global one. We’ve heard less about Ford shrinking as well, though the phenomenon is similar.
Ford’s Brazilian range is now the Mustang, Ranger, Territory (which is fundamentally a badge-engineered Yusheng S330 from China with a Fordized interior), and Bronco. It’s beating a retreat from Brazil, at the cost of tens of thousands of jobs (its own, plus associated industries’) in a country that already has 15 per cent unemployment.
Their reasoning is that electrification and technological change are driving restructuring, which seems plausible, till you realize that in other markets, including Thailand where there’s still a plant making Fords, the company is fielding essentially trucks, the truck-based Everest, and the Mustang.
Ford warned us that this would be its course of action a few years ago, but now it’s happening, it makes even less sense.
Say it’s all about (eventual) electrification. You’d want vehicles in your portfolio now that lend themselves to energy efficiency, so that people begin associating your brand with it. Trucks and pony cars don’t fit with this long-term. And I still believe that at some point, even before trucks commonly have electric powertrains, someone is going to say, ‘These tall bodies with massive frontal areas are using up way more of the juice I’m paying for. We don’t need something this big.’
Let’s say Ford quickly pivots. It sticks a conventional saloon body on the Mustang Mach-E platform (which, let’s be honest, started off as a Focus crossover—the product code, CX727, tells us as much) in record time. Would anyone buy it? Probably not before they see what the Asians, who don’t abandon segments because they can’t be bothered working hard, have in their showrooms. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, and countless Chinese marques, have been building their goodwill in the meantime.
It’s why two decades ago, I warned against DaimlerChrysler killing off its price-leading brand, Plymouth. You never know when recessionary times come and you want an entry-level brand. Before the decade was out, that time came, and Chrysler didn’t have much it could use without diluting its existing brands’ market perceptions to have some price leaders.
Ford retreating from B- and C-segment family cars, even CD- and E-segment ones, means it’ll find it difficult to get back into those markets later on. A good example would be the French, who don’t find much success in the large saloon market generally, and would find it very hard to re-enter in a lot of places.
I realize the action isn’t in regular passenger cars these days, but the fact that Fiat, Chevrolet and Volkswagen still manage to field broad lines in Brazil suggests that the market still exists and they can still eke out some money from their sales.
It’s as though the US car firms are giving up, ceding territory. And on this note, Ford has form.
In the 1990s, Ford’s US arm under-marketed the Contour and Mystique Stateside, cars based on the original European Mondeo. I saw precious little advertising for them in US motoring press. As far as I can tell, they wanted to bury it because they didn’t like the fact it wasn’t developed by them, but by Ford’s German-based team in Köln. ‘See, told you those Europeans wouldn’t know how to engineer a CD-segment car for the US.’ The fiefdom in Dearborn got its own way and later developed the Mazda-based Fusion, while the Europeans did two more generations of Mondeo.
In the 2000s, it decided to flush the goodwill of the Taurus name down the toilet, before then-new CEO Alan Mulally saw what was happening and hurriedly renamed the Five Hundred to Taurus.
It under-marketed the last generation of Falcon—you seldom saw them on forecourts—and that looked like a pretext for closing the Australian plant (‘See, no one wants big cars’) even though by this point the Falcon was smaller than the Mondeo in most measures other than overall length, and plenty of people were buying similarly sized rear-wheel-drive saloons over at BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
The Mondeo hybrid has been another model that you barely hear of, even though the Fusion Hybrid, the American version of the car, had been on sale years before.
Think about what they gave up. Here, Ford once owned the taxi market. It doesn’t any more as cabbies ultimately wound up in Priuses and Camrys. Had Ford fielded a big hybrid saloon earlier, Toyota might not have made inroads into the taxi market to the same extent. Ford almost seems apologetic for being in segments where others come to, and when challenging the market leaders, doesn’t put much effort in any more.
Objectively, I would rather have a Mondeo Hybrid than a Camry, but good luck seeing one in a Ford showroom.
Maybe Ford’s smart to be putting all its resources into growth areas like trucks and crossovers. Puma and Escape have appeal in the B- and C-segment crossover markets in places like New Zealand. They’re fairly car-like now, too. But to me that’s putting all your eggs into one basket. In countries like Brazil and Thailand, where Ford doesn’t sell well resolved crossovers in these segments, it’s treading a fine line. I look at the market leadership it once had in cars, in so many places, and in 2021 that looks like a thing of the past. More’s the pity.
Tags: 2021, Brazil, business, business strategy, car, car industry, China, electric cars, Ford, history, JMC, marketing, strategy, Thailand, truck, USA, Yusheng
Posted in business, cars, China, globalization, marketing, USA | 1 Comment »
September 2021 gallery
02.09.2021Here are September 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month. It sure beats having a Pinterest.
Sources
The 2016 Dodge Neon sold in México. More at Autocade.
IKCO Peugeot 207. More at Autocade.
Double standards in New Zealand media, reposted from Twitter.
The cover of the novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Nice work on the use of Americana, which does take me back to the period, but I’m not convinced by this cut of Italian Old Style. I just don’t remember it being used that much.
Daktari’s Cheryl Miller as the new Dodge model, in her second year, promoting the 1971 Dodge Demon. This was a 1960s idea that was being carried over with minor tweaks into the new decade, and it didn’t work quite as well as the earlier Joan Parker ‘Dodge Fever’ advertisements (also shown here in this gallery).
House Beautiful cover, January 1970, before all the garishness of the decade really hit. This is still a clean, nicely designed cover. I looked at some from the years that followed on House Beautiful’s website, and they never hit this graphic design high mark again.
That’s the Car and Driver cover for my birth month? How disappointing, a Colonnade Chevrolet Monte Carlo.
French typesetting, as posted on the typography.guru forums.
Read books, humorous graphic reposted from Twitter.
My reply in the comments at Business Desk, on why it made more sense for me to have run for mayor in 2010 and 2013 than it would in 2022.
Seven years before its launch, Marcello Gandini had already styled the Innocenti Mini. This is his 1967 proposal at Bertone.
JAC Jiayue A5. More at Autocade.
Phil McCann reporting for the BBC, reposted from Twitter.
Car and Driver February 1970 cover. As a concept, this could still work.
Tags: 1960s, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1970s, 1971, 1972, 1974, 2010s, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2021, actress, Aotearoa, BBC, Bertone, book, Brexit, British Leyland, Business Desk, car, celebrity, Chevrolet, China, Chrysler, Dodge, FCA, Fiat, film, France, GM, graphic design, Hollywood, humour, IKCO, Innocenti, Iran, Italy, JAC, Lamborghini, layout, licensing, magazine, Marcello Gandini, marketing, mayoralty, media, México, modelling, modernism, New Zealand, Peugeot, politics, PSA, publishing, Qatar, racism, retro, Saudi Arabia, Sawahel Aljazeera, Stellantis, technology, The New York Times, Twitter, typography, UK, USA, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara
Posted in business, cars, China, design, France, gallery, humour, interests, leadership, marketing, media, New Zealand, politics, publishing, technology, typography, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
Can a no-name mouse take the place of a Microsoft Intellimouse?
01.08.2021I’ve occasionally had good luck with ultra-cheap Chinese mice. Years ago, I bought one, with very simple left and right buttons and a scroll wheel, and it proved to be one of the most comfortable I owned. The wheel didn’t run smoothly at first but a quick trim of the plastic, and it’s been fine since.
This US$3·89 mouse (price at time of writing) was a similar case. I ordered it to see if it might be better than the NZ$75 Asus ROG Strix Evolve mouse, and that was bought to replace my favourite, the Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1. One of those was being used after my Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 died—like the Intellimouse, these had large bodies that people with bigger hands, like me, can use.
As those in a similar predicament know, mice have shrunk over the last decade, so finding a replacement takes months as you read the specs and, in some cases, visit the stores to see if they have anything.
A Tecknet mouse proved too low by a millimetre or two to be comfortable, but when I saw this no-name unit being sold by a place called 7 Elves Store (did they mean dwarves, as in Disney?) on Aliexpress, I decided to take a punt. (The specs suggest the brand name is Centechia, but it’s nowhere to be found on the device or in the heading and description.) And for US$3·89 plus (sorry) my share of carbon emissions from the air freight, it didn’t cost me much to find out.
It arrived a few weeks ago in damaged condition. The buttons did not work at all, and once again I had to make some simple repairs to get it working. It’s too light. The plastic is of a crappy grade. And the details on the base of the mouse suggest whomever wrote the text had not been in the occident much, if at all. I don’t like the lights because I don’t care if a mouse has pulsing RGB effects since (a) my hand is over it and (b) I’m looking at the screen, not the mouse.
But here’s the thing: it fits my hand. It’s nowhere nearly as comfortable as those old Microsoft mice, but as a cheapie that I can take in my laptop bag, it does a better job than the Tecknet. It’s not as comfortable as the Asus, but it beats every other mouse, that is, the ones I didn’t buy, that I’ve seen in the shops. On the whole, I can use it more than the Tecknet, and it will do when I’m travelling or out of the office, though I still haven’t found the holy grail of a decent sized Microsoft mouse. (The revived Intellimouse, as I may have mentioned earlier, is asymmetric, and its shape doesn’t work for me.) I’m not sure why this is so hard for mice manufacturers: you’ve all peaked a bit early, and none of the improvements you’ve made have advanced the ideas of user comfort and ergonomics.
For those who care about this stuff, here’s the Aliexpress link.
Tags: 2020s, 2021, Aliexpress, Asus, China, computing, design, Microsoft, mouse, office, Tecknet
Posted in China, technology | No Comments »
July 2021 gallery
02.07.2021Here are July 2021’s images—aides-mémoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Star Trek: 1999 reposted from Alex on NewTumbl. Didn’t Star Trek and Space: 1999 share a producer?
Publicity shot for French actress Manon Azem, from Section de recherches.
Charlie Chaplin got there first with this meme. Reposted from Twitter.
I realize the history page in Lucire KSA for July 2021 suggests that you need a four-letter surname to work for Lucire.
The 1981 Morris Ital two-door—sold only as a low-spec 1·3 for export. Reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Ford Capri 1300 double-page spread, reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Alexa Breit photographed by Felix Graf, reposted from Instagram.
South America relief map, reposted from Twitter.
From the Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei episode ‘Abflug’, to air July 29, 2021. RTL publicity photo.
Lucire’s Festival de Cannes coverage can be found here. Photo courtesy L’Oréal Paris.
Last of the Ford Vedette wagons, as the Simca Jangada in Brazil, for the 1967 model year. The facelift later that year saw to the wagon’s demise.
Ford Consul advertisement in Germany, announcing the 17M’s successor. Interesting that the fastback, so often referred to as a coupé, is captioned as a two-door saloon, even though Ford did launch a “standard” two-door. More on the Consul in Autocade here. Image from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Tags: 1910s, 1960s, 1966, 1967, 1970s, 1972, 1980s, 1981, 2010s, 2020, 2021, actor, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, BL, Brazil, Cannes, car, cartography, celebrity, Charlie Chaplin, China, Chrysler, COVID-19, culture, electric cars, Facebook, film, Ford, France, Geely, Germany, history, humour, Lucire, Lucire KSA, media, Mercedes-Benz, modelling, newspaper, parody, popular culture, privacy, publishing, retro, RTL, South America, Sweden, TV, Twitter, UK, USA, Volvo
Posted in cars, China, culture, design, France, gallery, humour, internet, marketing, New Zealand, publishing, Sweden, technology, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
Time to abandon Meizu Music: 8.2 is a lemon
21.04.2021That didn’t last long. Within a day, this was what Meizu Music showed:
The songs, all 1,229 of them that I had fed in manually, are still there, and they still play, but the question remains: for how long? If they don’t show in the list—I told you computing devices were forgetful—then how long before the program fails to play them at all? Not only were the songs gone from the list, the few MP3 files that were on the phone’s RAM (from dynamic wallpapers and recordings) don’t show, either!
I really didn’t want to chance it but you just have to conclude that Meizu has released a lemon, and if in a year they still can’t get it right, then it’s time to abandon it.
I could go with Migu Music but I wanted something with the functionality of the old Meizu Music. After trying several apps, I’ve settled on an advertising-supported Muzio Player. It’s not perfect—the cover artwork doesn’t show for everything, and updating it manually for an album doesn’t see it shared with the individual tracks within—but it does the job for the most part. And, like every other app I trialled, it picks up the music on the SD card.
Since I keep phones for some time—the old M2 Note is repaired—it’s going to be a long time before I’d contemplate a replacement for the M6 Note. But when I do I doubt it’ll be another Meizu. After being a cheerleader for the brand in the late 2010s, they’ve really fallen behind in customer service and, how, software development. Whomever else is willing to go the Google-free route is going to get my vote.
Tags: 2021, cellphone, China, Meizu, software, technology
Posted in China, design, technology | 3 Comments »
Facebook whistleblower gets fired; and a workaround for Meizu Music’s inability to find your SD card
19.04.2021This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired.
Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course Facebook denies it, but once again it’s backed up by a lot of evidence from Zhang, and we know Facebook lies. Endlessly.
Facebook claims it has taken down over ‘100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior,’ but I repeat again: if a regular Joe like me can find thousands of bots really easily, and report some with Facebook doing next to nothing about them, then 100 networks is an incredibly tiny number in a sea of hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, 100 networks is tiny considering Facebook itself has claimed to have taken down milliards of bots.
And people like me and Holly Jahangiri, who found a massive number of bots that followed the Russian misinformation techniques, have been identifying these since 2014, if not before.
Zhang reveals how likes from pages are inflating various posts—forget the bots I’ve been talking about, people have manufactured full pages on the site.
She uncovered one in Honduras, and then:
The next day, she filed an escalation within Facebook’s task management system to alert the threat intelligence team to a network of fake accounts supporting a political leader in Albania. In August [2019], she discovered and filed escalations for suspicious networks in Azerbaijan, Mexico, Argentina and Italy. Throughout the autumn and winter she added networks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Ecuador, Iraq, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan, Paraguay, El Salvador, India, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Ukraine, Poland and Mongolia.
Facebook was inconsistent with what it did, and its own self-interest interfered with it taking action. In other words, Facebook is harmful to democracy, and not just in the US which has received most of the occidental news coverage. On Azerbaijan, Zhang wrote in a memo:
Although we conclusively tied this network to elements of the government in early February, and have compiled extensive evidence of its violating nature, the effective decision was made not to prioritize it, effectively turning a blind eye.
She was ultimately fired for her trouble, Facebook saying she wasn’t doing the job she had been hired for.
So if you are going to work for Big Tech, leave your conscience at the door. That blood on your hands, just ignore it. Red’s such a fetching colour when it’s not on a balance sheet.
Little Tech can be troublesome, too. Last year, Meizu updated its Music app after a few years of letting it languish (a familiar theme with this firm), and it was a real lemon. It wouldn’t pick up anything on my SD card, at the location the old Music app itself saved the files. When I could still access the Meizu (English-language) forum, I managed to post a comment about it. Only today did I realize someone had responded, with the same issue.
I can read enough Chinese to get the phone to do a search for local music files, and the only things it could pick up are what’s on the phone RAM itself, not the card. There’s no way to point to custom locations such as a card (even though there is a custom search, but it applies to the phone only).
Above: Meizu Music will only find music on the phone’s RAM—in this case sound files that come with the dynamic wallpaper and a couple of meeting recordings I made.
Eventually I restored the old app through the settings, and all was well. It would occasionally forget the album cover art and I’d have to relink it (who says computers remember things?), but, by and large, Music 8.0.10 did what was expected of it.
Until this last week. The phone insisted on upgrading to 8.2.12, another half-baked version that could never locate any SD card music.
Sure I could just move the entire directory of 1,229 songs to the phone, but I wondered why I should.
Restoring the app would work only for a few hours (during which I would try to relink the album cover art, ultimately to no avail). Blocking the new version the app store did nothing; blocking the entire app from updating did nothing. Blocking network access to the Music app did nothing. Essentially, the phone had a mind of its own. If anyone tells you that computing devices follow human instructions, slap them.
Above: I asked the app store to ignore all updates for Meizu Music. The phone will ignore this and do what it wants, downloading the update and installing it without any human intervention.
I had a couple of options. The first was to make Migu Music the default—and I had used that for a while before I discovered I could restore the Music app. It’s passable, and it does everything it should, though I missed the cover art.
The other was to find a way to make Music 8.2.12 work.
There is one way. Play every one of the 1,229 songs one by one to have Music recognize their existence.
Using ES File Explorer, you head to the SD card, and click on each song. It asks which app you’d like to open it. Choose Music. Repeat 1,228 times.
Above: I finally got there after doing something 1,229 times. As a non-tech person I know of no way to automate this easily. I can think of a few but developing the script is beyond my knowledge.
Whoever said computing devices would save you time is having you on. They may have once, but there are so many systems where things are far more complicated in 2021 than they were in 2011.
You may be asking: doesn’t ES let you select multiple files, even folders? Of course it does, but when you then ask it to play them, it ignores the fact you’ve chosen Music and plays them in its own music player.
And even after you’ve shown Music that there are files in an SD card directory, it won’t pick up its existence.
It’s at odds with Meizu’s Video app, which, even after many updates, will find files anywhere on your phone.
For a music player with the same version (8) it’s vastly different, and, indeed, inferior to what has come before.
How’s the player? Well, it connects to the car, which is where I use it. But so many features which made it appealing before are gone. Editing a song’s information is gone. Half the album cover art is unlinked (including albums legitimately downloaded through the old Meizu music service), and there’s no way of relinking it. European accented characters are mistaken for the old Big 5 Chinese character set.
The only plus side is that some songs that I had downloaded years ago with their titles in Big 5, as opposed to Unicode, now display correctly. That accounts for a few songs (fewer than 10) of the 1,229.
I know Meizu will do nowt, as its customer service continues to plummet. I may still file something on its Chinese BBS (the western one is inaccessible and, from what I can tell, no longer maintained by anyone from their staff), but it’s highly unlikely I’ll be brand-loyal. It’s yet another example of a newer program being far, far worse, by any objective measure, than its predecessor, giving credence to the theory that some software developers are clueless, have no idea how their apps work, have no idea how people use their apps, or are downright incompetent. It’s a shame, as Meizu’s other default and system apps are generally good.
In the future, I’m sure someone else in China will be happy to sell me a non-Google phone when it’s time to replace this one.
Tags: 2019, 2020, 2021, Big Tech, bot, cellphone, China, computing, corruption, customer service, Facebook, justice, media, Meizu, music, newspaper, politics, software, technology, The Guardian
Posted in China, design, internet, media, politics, technology, USA | 3 Comments »