Above: The Levdeo (or Letin) i3, not exactly the ideal model with which to commemorate another Autocade milestone.
Autocade will cross the 23 million page view mark today, so weâre keeping fairly consistent with netting a million every three months, a pattern that weâve seen since the end of 2019.
Just to keep my record-keeping straight:
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
I see on my 22 millionth page view post I mentioned there were 4,379 entries. It hasnât increased that much since: the site is on 4,423. I notice the pace does slow a bit once the year kicks off in earnest: itâs the Christmas break that sees me spending a bit more time on the website.
Who knows? I may spend more on it again as Iâm tiring of the tribalism of Twitter, and, most recently, being tarred with the same brush as someone I follow, even though I follow people I donât always agree withâincluding people with offensive views.
On April 4, I wrote there:
Earlier today @QueenOliviaStR and I were tagged into a lengthy thread, to which I donât think I have the right of response to the writer.
First up, I salute her. Secondly, she may disagree with how I use Twitter but I still support her. Thirdly, she should rightly do what she needs to in order to feel safe.
I donât wish to single out any account but if you go through my following list, there are people on there whose views many Kiwis would disagree with.
Some were good people who fell down rabbit holes, and some Iâve never agreed with from the start. So why do I follow them?
As I Tweeted last week, I object to being in a social media bubble. I think itâs unhealthy, and the cause of a lot of societal angst. Itâs why generally I dislike Big Tech as this is by design.
Secondly, if I shut myself off to opposing views, even abhorrent ones, how do I know what arguments they are using in order to counter them if the opportunity arises?
I would disagree that I am amicable with these accounts but I do agree to interacting with some of them on the bases that we originally found.
Ian, who is long gone from Twitter after falling down the COVID conspiracy rabbit hole, was a known anti-war Tweeter. I didnât unfollow him but I disagreed with where his thoughts were going.
The person who tagged us today didnât want to be exposed to certain views and thatâs fair. But remember, that person she didnât like will also be exposed to her views through me.
Iâll let you into something that might shock you: for a few years, when the debate began, I wasnât supportive of marriage equality, despite having many queer friends. It was more over semantics than their rights, but still, it isnât a view I hold today.
If this happened in social media land, I might have held on those views, but luckily I adopted the policy I do today: see what people are saying. And eventually I was convinced by people who wrote about their situations that my view was misinformed.
And while my following an account is not an endorsement of its views, by and large I follow more people with whom I agreeâwhich means the positive arguments that these people make could be seen by those who disagree with them.
People should do what is right for them but I still hold that bubbling and disengagement are dangerous, and create a group who double-down on their views. Peace!
Maybe itâs a generational thing: that some of us believe in the free flow of information, because that was the internet we joined. One that was more meritorious, and one where we felt we were more united with others.
We see what the contrary does. And those examples are recent and severe: weâve seen it with the US elections, with Myanmar, with COVID-19.
This isnât a dig at the person who took exception to my being connected to someone, and yes, even engaged them (though being ‘amicable’ is simply having good manners to everyone), because if those offensive views targeted me I wouldnât want to see them. And it is a poor design decision of Twitter to still show that person in oneâs Tweets if they have already blocked them, just because a mutual person follows them.
It is a commentary, however, on wider trends where social media and Google have created people who double-down on their views, or opened up the rabbit hole for them to fall intoâand keep them there.
It did use to be called social networking, where we made connections, supposedly for mutual benefit, maybe even the benefit of humanity, but now it’s commonly social media, because we don’t seem to really network with anyone else while we post about ourselves.
Unlike Alice, people donât necessarily return from Wonderland.
My faithâwhich I donât always bring up because one risks being tarred with the evangelical homophobic stereotypes that come with it in mainstream media and elsewhereâtells me that everyone can be redeemed, even those who hold abhorrent views.
Itâs why I didnât have a problem when Bill Clinton planned to see Kim Jong Il or when Donald Trump did see Kim Jong Un, because engagement is better than isolation. Unlike the US media, I donât change a view depending on the occupant of the Oval Office.
Iâve also seen some people who post awful things do incredibly kind things outside of the sphere of social media.
Which then makes you think that social media just arenât worth your timeâsomething I had already concluded with Facebook, and, despite following mostly people I do agree with, including a lot of automotive enthusiasts, I am feeling more and more about Twitter. Instead of the open forum it once was, you are being judged on whom you follow, based on isolated and rare incidents.
I donât know if itâs generational or whether weâve developed through technology people who prefer tribalism over openness.
Sometimes you feel you should just leave them to it and get on with your own stuffâand for every Tweet I once sent, maybe I should get on to some old emails and tidy that inbox instead. Or put up one of the less interesting models on Autocade. Not Instagramming muchâI think I was off it for nearly a month before I decided to post a couple of things on Easter Eveâhas been another step in the right direction, instead of poking around on a tiny keyboard beamed up to you from a 5Âœ-inch black mirror.
The computer, after all, is a tool for us, and we should never lose sight of that. Letâs see if I can stick with it, and use Mastodon, which still feels more open, as my core social medium for posting.
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilâs Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, âWheel Manâ, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
Yet thereâs precious little about Smith online. His Wikipedia entry is essentially a version of his IMDB credits with some embellishments, for instance. It doesnât even record his real name.
Donât worry, itâs not another dig at Wikipedia, but once again itâs a reflection of how things arenât permanent on the web, a subject Iâve touched on before after reading a blog entry from my friend Richard MacManus. And that we humans do have to rely on our own memories over whatâs on the ânet still: the World Wide Web is not the solution to storing all human knowledge, or, at least, not the solution to accessing it.
Itâs easy to refer to the disappearance of Geocities and the like, and the Internet Archive can only save so much. And in this case, I remember clearly searching for Murray Smith on Altavista in the 1990s, because I was interested in what he was up to. (He died in 2003.) I came across a legal prospectus of something he was proposing to do, and because it was a legal document, it gave his actual name.
Murray Smith was his screen name, and I gather from an article in The Independent quoting Smith and his friend Frederick Forsyth, he went by Murray, but the family name was definitely Murray-Smith. Back in those days, there was a good chance that if it was online, it was real: it took too much effort to make a website for anyone to bother doing fake news. My gut says it was George David Murray-Smith or something along those lines, but thereâs no record of that prospectus online any more, or of the company that he and Forsyth set up together to make Frederick Forsyth Presents, which I assume from some online entries was IFS Productions Ltd. Some websites’ claim that his name was Charles Maurice Smith is incorrect.
Looking today, there are a couple of UK gazette entries for George David Murray Smith (no hyphen) in the armed forces, including the SAS in the 1970s, which suggest I am right.
Even in the age of the web, the advantage still lies with those of us who have good memories who can recall facts that are lost. Iâve often suggested on this blog that we cannot fully trust technology, and that thereâs no guarantee that even the official bodies, like the UK Companiesâ Office, will have complete, accessible records. The computer is a leveller, but not a complete one.
After I posted that I would leave NewTumbl (not quite those wordsâI said I would still return to check out a few people I followed), I had a very nice note from Alex, one of the US folks there whose posts I regularly enjoyed, along with those of Marius and a few others. Alex reblogged my post and you can see his additional words here. Below was my response (italics added). He’s faced ridiculous actions against his posts as well, which I allude to. I suspect he’s slightly older than me (he recalls actress Angel Tompkins, for instance, after I posted about herâand I’ve a feeling he remembers her in period, not in reruns), but not by much.
If I hadnât mentioned this on Twitter, I might not have had a hunt for it. When I first came to this country, this was how TV1 started each morningâI believe at 10.30 a.m. prior to Play School. I havenât seen this since the 1970s, and Iâm glad someone put it on YouTube.
I had no idea, till I was told on Twitter by Julian Melville, that this was adapted from the National Film Unitâs very successful 1970 Osaka Expo film, This Is New Zealand, which was quite a phenomenon, but before my time here. And I wouldnât have given it any thought if it werenât for American Made airing on TV last weekend, where the RPOâs âHooked on Classicsâ was used in the score, and I got to thinking about Sibeliusâs ‘Karelia Suite’, op. 11, which was contained within that piece. Iâm not sure if our lives were enriched by these interconnected thoughts or whether YouTube and this post have just sucked up more time.
Here are the images that have piqued my interest for December 2020. For November’s gallery, click here (all gallery posts are here). And for why I started this, here’s my earlier post on this blog, and also here and here on NewTumbl.
Time for another podcast, this time with a Scottish theme. I touch upon how fortunate we are here in Aotearoa to be able to go to the ballet or expos, and, of course, on the US elections (thanks to those who checked out my last podcast entry, which had a record 31 playsâsure beats the single digits!). That leads on to a discussion about A. G. Barr, Richard Madden, and Sir Sean Connery, who never said, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’
A very quick note, probably more for me than anyone else: the 4,300th model went up on Autocade tonight. It was slightly deliberate, since I checked the stats for the site to see we were up to 4,299. Iâve a folder of models to be added, and I admit I scrolled down a little to see what piqued my interestâhaving said that, itâs what I usually do anyway. But there was a desire not to add yet another two-box crossover (had enough of those for a while) or any model that would lead me to be obsessed about a full line (DAF 33, anyone?). As the 1980â4 Pontiac Phoenix is already on the site, the 1978â9 entry went up. (Yes, I disagree with Wikipedia, which has Phoenixes starting in 1977, which is true, but it was mid-year, it was officially part of the Ventura line, and Phoenix doesnât appear in the 1977 full-line brochure.) Wikipedians can do it their way, and Iâll do it mine.
At some point I’ll add the Oldsmobile Omega for 1975â9 and we’ll have the X-cars for those years all up.
Iâm sure there are many, many more examples of this tune being used to promote TV networks, but it seems to be a standard in at least three countries I know, and probably far more besides.
It is, of course, âStill the Oneâ, which ABC used in the US to celebrate being the top-rated network there in 1977 for the second consecutive year. It was rare for ABC to be on top, but I think the general consensus was that jiggle TV got them there.
Australia, which has always had a lot of US influences, then used it for Channel 9 in 1978 and included the original American footage. It would have been properly licensed but in the days before YouTube, and less international travel, few would have known of the origins.
It was then adapted for the Murdoch Pressâs Sky One satellite network in the UK the next decade (did they first see it in Australia?), before being revived by 9 in Australia in 1988. It was adapted once again for TVNZâs Channel 2 here in New Zealand to kick off the 1990s.
The slogan was used regularly by 9 as the 1990s dawned though new songs replaced the original, and by the end of the 1990s, both Channel 9 and its NBN sister were using the familiar tune again.
Was that the end? In 2003, WIN, another Australian network, brought it back for their promos. As far as I can tell, WIN, a regional broadcaster, doesn’t have a connection to 9, but instead has an agreement with the Ten Network there. Just to make things confusing, 9 was using it at the same time, and it continued to do so into the mid-2000s.
A quick internet search on Duck Duck Go reveals it was originally a song performed by the band Orleans in 1976, from their album Waking and Dreaming. The song was written by the then-married Johanna and John Hall. It charted at number five in the US. Given that it was used by ABC in 1977, it would have been a familiar tune to Americans at the time. I wonder if the Halls expected it would become a TV network standard in so many countries, and what did they think?
Let me know if there are other countries and networks that used thisâI’ve a feeling it went even further!
I was chatting to another Tweeter recently about the Ford I-Max, and decided Iâd have a hunt for its brochure online. After all, this car was in production from 2007 to 2009, the World Wide Web was around, so surely it wouldnât be hard to find something on it?
I found one image, at a very low resolution. The webâs not a repository of everything: stuff gets removed, sites go down, search engines are not comprehensiveâin fact, search engines favour the new over the old, so older posts that are still currentâsuch as this post about the late George Kennedyâcanât even be found. This has been happening for over a decade, so it shouldnât surprise usâbut we should be concerned that we cannot get information based on merit or specificity, but on novelty. Not everything new is right, and if weâre only being exposed to whatâs âinâ, then weâre no better at our knowledge than our forebears. The World Wide Web, at least the way itâs indexed, is not a giant encyclopĂŠdia which brings up the best at your fingertips, but often a reflection of our bubble or what the prevailing orthodoxy is. Moreâs the pity.
I canât let this post go without one gripe about Facebook. Good news: as far as I can tell, they fixed the bug about tagging another page on your own page, so you donât have to start a new line in order to tag another party. Bad news, or maybe itâs to do with the way weâve set up our own pages: the minute you do, the nice preview image that Facebook extracted vanishes in favour of something smaller. Iâll check out our code, but back when I was debugging Facebook pages, it was pretty good at finding the dominant image on a web page. Lesson: donât tag anyone. It ruins the ĂŠsthetic on your page, and it increases everyoneâs time on the site, and that can never be healthy. Time to fight the programming of Professor Fogg and his children (with apologies to Roger McNamee).
Top: The post Facebook picks up from an IFTTT script. Above: What happens to a post that once had a proper image preview after editing, and tags added.
I hadn’t expected this reply Tweet to get so many likes, probably a record for me.
I knew my parents couldnât afford The Lettering Book, so I went without, which forced me to create my own typeface designs. Later I became the first digital typeface designer in this country.
It is true. That book was NZ$4·99 in 1979, when it was offered through the Lucky Book Club at school, at a time when many books were still priced in cents. Some kids in the class got it, and I admit I was a bit envious, but not having a book in an area that interested you can drive creativity. While my parents didn’t make a heck of a lot in the 1970sâwe flatted and didn’t own our own car at this pointâthey would have splashed out if I really insisted on it. After all, they were sending me to a private school and their sacrifice was virtually never going out. (I only recall one night in those days when my parents had a “date night” and my maternal grandmother looked after meâand that was to see Superman II.) But when you grow up having an understanding that, as an immigrant family that had to largely start from scratch in a new country, you have a rough idea of what’s expensive, and five bucks for a book was expensive.
As an adultâeven when I was a young man starting out in my careerâI did not regret not having this book.
Someone in the thread asked if I ever wound up buying it. I never did: as a teenager I managed to get my hands on a very worn Letraset catalogue, which ultimately proved far more interesting. But it is good to know that, thanks in large part to my parents’ and grandmother’s sacrifices, and those in my partner’s family who helped her in her earlier years, we could afford to buy this book if anyone in our family asks for it.
Were we fleeing anything when we came to Aotearoa? We left Hong Kong in 1976 because my parents were worried about what China would do to the place. In other words, what’s happening now is what they hoped for me to avoid. They called it, in the 1970s. And here I am.
Earlier today Strangers, the 1978 TV series created by Murray Smith, came to mind. Smith created and wrote many episodes of one of my favourite TV series, The Paradise Club (which to this day has no DVD release due to the music rights), and penned an entertaining miniseries Frederick Forsyth Presents (the first time that I noticed one Elizabeth Hurley) and a novel I bought when I first spotted it, The Devilâs Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, âWheel Manâ, which had quite a few of the hallmarks of some of his other work, including fairly likeable underworld figures, which came into play with The Paradise Club.
