I found it very odd that Antiques Roadshow and Mythbusters were nominated for the reality TV category at the Emmy Awards. Based on the vocabulary I grew up with, these are not ‘reality TV’. I doubt many of us over a certain age would think of The Gong Show or New Zealand’s Top Town […]
Category: culture
Posts relating to culture, multiculturalism and cultural impact.
Bingo! Merry Christmas!
Here’s a Christmas treat, an hour in to Christmas Day in New Zealand. Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, filmed in 1977 33 days before the crooner’s passing, featured a duet between Bingo and David Bowie. Taped on September 11, 1977, the special aired after Crosby’s death, on November 30. The set is supposedly the […]
Civility is a good thing
Baidu Talk, which launched in September, has netted 1 million users already, according to PC World. Michael Kan reports that thanks to the service’s insistence that no aliases are used (registered users’ identities are verified with the People’s Republic’s government) ‘this has led to more “civil” discussions between users on Baidu Talk.’ It shows […]
Starting Upstairs, Downstairs this weekend
I know I did this on November 23 on my Tumblr, but I have to share this joke with the Ashes to Ashes fans out there. Will the opening of Upstairs, Downstairs on Boxing Day on BBC1 (at 9 p.m.) begin with the Alexander Faris theme tune (see also below), or will Keeley Hawes […]
A new Eric and Ernie clip
I wonder if I should get part of the Broadcasting Fee, the way I promote the BBC. I like real-life dramas, particularly about recent history. BBC2’s Eric and Ernie, to be shown on January 1 at 9 p.m., looks very good. A new clip came out on YouTube 12 hours ago. The earlier […]
“Liking” something on Facebook takes an awfully long time
There are things I “like” on Facebook, but as they can be run by organizations, I don’t see the need to reveal all my private information to them. Once upon a time, it was quite easy to stick these “likes” into my limited profile friends’ category on friends. But a few months ago, Facebook […]
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Even as Liu Xiaobo gets a Nobel prize, Beijing can be smug
As I watched actress Liv Ullmann read Liu Xiaobo’s address, ‘I Have No Enemies’, on BBC World, I was quite moved. The address is what the Nobel Prize-winning author and intellectual delivered prior to his sentencing by a Red Chinese court for subversion. What is fascinating is the dignity with which the words […]
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Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai
As I made links for the last post, I noticed there were a lot of comments on AROnline about the replacement for the Roewe 750, the Chinese car that is based on the old Rover 75. The replacement will be on the Opel Insignia platform, owned by GM. It’s been followed by a lot […]
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Roy Axe gives a sincere look at his career
Keith Adams is well known to many motorheads out there. We probably encountered him initially at his excellent AROnline, formerly The Unofficial Austin–Rover Resource. More recently, some of us have got to know Keith as a writer for Octane, where his well researched articles remind me of some of the best motoring journalists’ work. They […]
Wikileaks’ brand of transparency is the enemy of the establishment
There are probably two things, chiefly, that fuel support for Julian Assange. First, the idea that the mainstream media are not independent, but merely mouthpieces for the establishment. There’s some truth to this. Secondly, the fact that Wikileaks is revealing, this time, things that we already knew: that governments are two-faced. While […]
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