Irreverent and sometimes irrelevant thoughts.
In the news: Julian Assange. While the prosecutor in Sweden is denying it, the lesson here seems to be: publish a Wikileak naming anti-Taliban Afghan sources and risk getting them killed, and nothing happens to you. Publish a Wikileak embarrassing the United States, and get the whole media talking, while you’re charged with rape. […]
Read More… from The Julian Assange affair looks like a Smith and Jones gag
During the Paul Henry débâcle, I was surprised to find that I had friends who joined the pro-Henry groups on Facebook. This included friends whom I thought were cosmopolitan and internationally minded. It dawned on me that they were probably supporting the first Paul Henry who many of us encountered, when we were watching the […]
From the ‘Whatever happened to …’ and the ‘My God, is (s)he still alive?’ files comes this promotional video for the (Norwegian) TV2 show Gylne Tider, with a bunch of celebrities lip-synching ‘Let It Be’ (including, appropriately, Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli). Sir Roger Moore kicks it off, but right after, you’ll catch (inter […]
BBC2’s Mongrels was probably the best thing on telly for me in 2010. Hustle suffered from being filmed in Brum and the scripts weren’t as good (the “Kylie Minogue” scene being one of the few highlights); Ashes to Ashes’ ending was disappointing and the whole series felt cheap; Luther had a few too many […]
I signed up to the Igovt site for the New Zealand Government today, allowing citizens a single log-on for e-government services (such as the Companies’ Office, where we have to file annual returns). In case you forget your password, you can choose from a variety of security questions they can ask you. The following […]
A quick tribute to Leslie Nielsen—the ‘OC’—and the world’s favourite Danish–Canadian guy, who died today at age 84. And don’t call me Shirley, either. You may also like I wanted to grow up and be the Dean Martin version of Matt Helm A year of random thoughts: 2014 in review History of the 2010s: a […]
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, […]
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 […]
Read More… from Wellington’s most dangerous intersection (in fiction)
Hopefully we can get an answer on this from Doubleclick. I fed the following in to its publisher form tonight: Hello there: we currently deal with Gorilla Nation Media, an ad network that calls Doubleclick code … While we can control the ads that we get via GNM—as we can equally do with Burst Media—we […]
I love how ‘Capital Day’ is always fun in The Dominion Post: you can’t believe the mileage I got out of its story implying that I could fix Wellington’s weather earlier this year with a fluxcapacitor. I even think it got me a few votes from people who didn’t see the irony (or the impossibility). […]