I learned the sad news that Norman Macrae, CBE, 旭日章, passed away on June 11, just shy of his 87th birthday. Norman was one of the great visionaries and forecasters of the 20th century, and served as deputy chief editor of The Economist till his retirement in 1988. Among his forecasts was the […]
Category: culture
Posts relating to culture, multiculturalism and cultural impact.
Let the Outrageous Fortune come
Almost any New Zealander will recognize this image: a cast photograph from the long-running TV series Outrageous Fortune. When I first heard of this show from Antonia Prebble, before she started filming, I have to admit I didn’t think the premise would see it last five years (and counting). But for New Zealand television […]
Chevrolet doesn’t understand branding
After the chaps at Autocar began following me on Twitter yesterday—after all, I had been reading the magazine since it was part of the Ministry of Magazines, in the post-Iliffe days—I noticed a Tweet about Chevrolet asking its dealers to not refer to the brand as Chevy. What? According to Autocar: A leaked […]
Chatting to TV, radio and internet journalists for the mayoral campaign
There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for stepping away for a few weeks do not include: (a) I was spending too much time […]
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A guide to writing an Alarm für Cobra 11 episode
Since my campaign fund-raiser on the 15th, I’ve had to take a back seat from blogging, though there is a lot to discuss about work, our city and other matters. And I would get back in to serious mode but for a nasty stomach bug that has kept me down—and taken away a bit […]
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Metro gives thumbs-up to Stefan Engeseth’s Unplugged Speeches
This is rather heartening to see, from the Metro freebie in Stockholm (the below is copied from the online edition): What’s in: Stefan Engeseth’s Unplugged Speeches series at the Regina Stockholms Operamathus (where yours truly gave the first edition). What’s out: the growing mounds of paper (rather appropriate in an eco-conscious nation). […]
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The rise of the city brand
I don’t have the other writers’ permission to show their side of this Facebook dialogue, but we had been chatting about growing the creative clusters here in Wellington as one of my mayoral policies. I wrote: Mostly by focusing on growing creative clusters and taking a bigger slice of the cake. So it is […]
Toyota’s recent “30-degree” scandal in China
Sam Flemming in Advertising Age mentioned the scandal that Toyota has been embroiled in inside China, before a lot of the bad press it received in the occident over “unintended acceleration”. This involved a netizen, an owner of a Toyota Highlander Sport, filming that his SUV was unable to get up a 30-degree incline, […]
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The Downfall of ‘Wellywood’
Necessity is the mother of all invention. I never thought some of the Der Untergang (Downfall) parodies could be topped, but I think this just happened. You may also like Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done Live from Level 3 The rise of the city brand Cities are, or at least […]
The ‘Wellywood’ sign: people power gets things done
That was a very interesting 30 hours. I found out about the ‘Wellywood’ sign yesterday afternoon, through Twitter, and Tweeted to say I hated it. Little did I know then that there was a huge Facebook group—6,000 strong at the time of writing—where Wellingtonians were making their voices known. And when I got there […]
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