The non-work stuff.
Above: The US Ford Granada in a contemporary advertisement, as posted at americangranada.com. Not the European car, but the American one of the same name: the Ford Granada was marketed as a US alternative to a Mercedes-Benz. Not as overstyled as, say, the Ford Maverick, this was an extremely heavy car, and Ford’s marketing […]
Read More… from Retro moment: the first American Ford Granada
I keep telling people, most recently Mark Westerby, the producer, at last night’s Pecha Kucha where we both spoke, about ‘a cartoon strip that’s written by a six-year-old and drawn by his 20-something brother’. Except I encountered it so long ago that, beyond a few initial Tweets and a long browse of their website, I […]
Read More… from Remember when we had an imagination like this?
Matt Smith completes his first calendar year as the Doctor with a Christmas special, inspired by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Michael Gambon! Best guest star since Bill Nighy. And if that’s Katherine Jenkins, that’s an extra reason to watch this. (Hope she sings, and not the Singing Detective.) You may also like Is your […]
Read More… from Doctor Who’s Christmas ’10 special: US trailer
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)
This is nothing new to gamers (whose world I am not a part of—unless you count the last time I had a gaming console, which was 1984), though I found the opening sequence to the remade Goldeneye 007 game rather well done, apart from the colons. The Neuzeit typeface looks good here. As we’ve known […]
I can’t let the passing of Bernard Schwartz—a.k.a. Tony Curtis—go without some sort of tribute. I’ve bitten my tongue a few times this year on writing what I wanted to on this website. And with hindsight, I really should have just gone for it, as someone who preaches transparency. Yes, I do indeed have […]
Read More… from A tribute to Bernard Schwartz—that’s Tony Curtis to most of us
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 […]
Read More… from A guide to writing an Alarm für Cobra 11 episode
Maybe I plain did not watch the news on the 15th—goodness knows what I was doing to have missed that Peter Graves, best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, passed away, after suffering a heart attack. Today would have been his 84th birthday. I am a huge fan of Mission: […]
Is it just me, or does it feel like the budget for Alarm für Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei has been cut even more? This preview does not seem as spectacular as the last two seasons’ (and last season felt cheaper already). And where are Dieter and Horst? Back on March 11 on RTL. You […]
Read More… from First trailers for Alarm für Cobra 11’s next season
When Fiat was in the poo, I remember heading in to Italy and the cabs were a mixture of German and French cars, with a few Italian ones. Generally, it was a reflection of the state of the local motor industry: cab drivers are, perhaps subconsciously, patriotic and quite traditional. If they reject the local […]
Read More… from Taxis signal how a local car industry is going