When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大方, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, it’s marginally better than a kindergartener’s. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2½, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If you’re Cantonese, you’ll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, you’ll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a ‘dialect’. It can’t be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isn’t a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didn’t understand it would either use the site’s built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. There’s no insistence on ‘Speak English, I can’t understand you,’ or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap you’d expect. ‘Write in Chinese,’ ‘Why is a Cantonese person writing in English?’ ‘Think about where you are,’ and ‘I don’t understand you’ (to a comment I wrote in Cantonese—again supporting the argument that it isn’t a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but it’s strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether you’re American or Chinese, there’s nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
I’ve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but it’s the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
It’s the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like it’s one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
Here are April 2021’s images. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Tania Dawson promotes Somèrfield Hair Care, sourced from Instagram.
Austrian model Katharina Mazepa for Dreamstate Muse magazine, shared on her Instagram. This was an image that was removed from a PG blog at NewTumbl last year—apparently this was considered ‘nudity’ and rated M.
AMC promotes the Gremlin, the US’s first subcompact car. More on the Gremlin at Autocade; 1970 advertisement via Twitter. Volkswagen 1302S photographed in June 2018, one of the images I’ve submitted to Unsplash for downloading. I did have the owner’s permission to shoot his car.
St Gerard’s Church and Monastery atop Mt Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand, photographed by me and also submitted to Unsplash.
Facebook group bots: someone else was so used to seeing bot activity on Facebook, they made a meme about it.
Holden Commodore Evoke Ute, an example of ‘base model brilliance’. More at Autocade. Morris Marina ad via the Car Factoids on Twitter. Innocenti Mini 90 and 120 via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
The aerial shot of Rongotai in 1943 is from the Air New Zealand collection. This is a scan of a photostat Dad made for me in the 1980s. The piece of paper was getting a bit old so I thought it was time to make it digital-only. The ‘1929’ marks the site of the original Rongotai Aerodrome, I believe.
Instafraud, from Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter.
Alisia Ludwig, from her Instagram, photographer unnamed. Fiat X1/9 brochure, from the Car Factoids on Twitter. More on the Peugeot 508 (R23) at Autocade.
Model Skyler Simpson at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Tampa, photographer unknown, via Instagram.
All galleries can be seen through the ‘Gallery’ link in the header, or click here (especially if you’re on a mobile device). I append to this entry through the month.
It brings me very little pleasure to do these calculations. After reading Umair Haque’s January 24 piece on the UK’s poor response to COVID-19—at the time the country had, by his reckoning, the highest death toll per capita in the world—I decided to feed in the numbers again, as of 9 a.m. GMT today. Here are the percentages of positive cases out of total tests done, based on the official figures. I know it’s not scientific, but it gives me a rough idea of who’s doing worse and who’s doing better, relative to the last set (December 7, 2020), and, I hate to say it, the slap-dash response by some countries is prolonging our pain as a planet.
Brazil 34·50% ↑
Sweden 10·66% ↑
USA 8·42% ↑
Spain 8·27% ↑
Italy 7·51% ↑
France 7·08% ↓
Germany 5·62% ↑
India 5·27% ↓
UK 4·90% ↑
Russia 3·82% ↑
KSA 2·88% ↓
South Korea 1·36% ↑
Singapore 0·88% ↓
Taiwan 0·56% ↓
Australia 0·21% ↓
Hong Kong 0·152% ↓
New Zealand 0·146% ↓
He also notes that the UK was going to delay people getting their second vaccination shots. I hope the country has since changed its tune, but looking at the likes of Johnson and Hancock, who helped to gift the world the British mutation, I doubt they have the nous. Even my fifth form science will tell me this (original emphases):
Because science says so. Animal models already tell us that if the second dose isn’t had within about a month, the immune cascade vaccines trigger fails to happen. Immunity doesn’t result. Antibodies aren’t developed … What’s the upshot likely to be for Britain? The entire country’s vaccination program is likely to fail. There are going to be a whole lot of people who get one dose, but not the second in time, and most of those people will not develop immunity. Do you know what happens when you cross a halfway vaccinated population with a fast evolving virus? That’s right, vaccine resistance. Britain already made itself a perfect petri dish for new strains of Covid — but what Britain’s doing right now is making it the perfect petri dish for deadlier, more infectious, and much, much more vaccine resistant strains of the virus.
I have dear friends there, at least one who is immuno-compromised, and this is, to put it bluntly, a shitshow. I’m glad their daily infection numbers have now fallen under 10,000, but all this needn’t have happened.
I was looking through the old JY&A links’ section, which dates back to the beginning of the site in the 1990s (indeed, back to Windows 3·1, as we couldn’t use a file name with more than three letters in the suffix). The last revamp of its look was over 15 years ago, judging by its appearance, and, although I attempted to update it to the current template, I decided the result was duller. It’s not an area where too many images were used, and the old look was probably more representative of what it is: a relic of the original dot-com era. As I explain on the introductory page (which has been facelifted), one reason for keeping it is to honour link exchanges that I made with other webmasters at the time, but I doubt it’s examined particularly often. The main text column is wide on a modern screen, but it would have looked fine at 1,024 by 768 pixels 15 years ago.
One site that I linked, at its last update (which was probably around 2003 or 2004), was the humorous TV Dregs, which is written in a documentary style, about the lesser known TV shows that aired in the UK. The catch: every entry is fictional. It got me thinking about what it could have had if it were updated, and while I’ve done these jokes before (the Game of Thrones one I have cracked ad nauseam on social media), this was an attempt to write the entries in a TV Dregs style. They’re not as good as theirs but then I’m not a professional humorist. I might have to send them a note to let them know that 18 years after their founding, they’re still getting visits from me and eliciting some laughs.
Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011)
With Changing Rooms, Restoration Home, DIY SOS, and Love Your Garden each dealing with different aspects of home renovation, HBO responded with Game of Thrones, where seven teams competed to fix toilets, to win the coveted prize of the Iron Throne. Hosted by Channel 4’s Jon Snow, it featured celebrity appearances, notably from Sean Bean in the first series. Given the locations, participants often got wet and the show became known more for the nudity as clothes had to be dried; but the ideas in the show got particularly extreme with on-set weddings, and in series 4, poisoned wine, to force players to finish their toilets in record time so they could relieve themselves. Host Snow even appeared to have died on the show, though fans knew he was all right since he appeared on Channel 4 News the next day.
The Master (BBC, 2006)
With Doctor Who revived, the BBC were keen to capitalize on its success with a spin-off centring around its recurring villain, the Master, this time played by John Simm. Who alumna Billie Piper kicked off the series with the unforgettable voiceover, ‘My name is Rose Tyler. I had an accident and woke up in 1973.’ Set in the 1970s, with the Third Doctor exiled to Earth while the Master ran rampant with his weekly schemes, it was highly acclaimed, though certain fans were up in arms with the regeneration scene at the end of series two, when the Master turns into a woman (Keeley Hawes). The show was eventually merged back into Doctor Who, placating fans who were glad that the Doctor would not suddenly change gender.
The Master even dons the Ninth Doctor’s jacket
Colombo (ITV, 2003)
With the cancellation of Columbo in the US, after a final episode with Billy Connolly, producers were keen to continue the concept but, with interest in foreign-location police dramas (Wallander, Zen), it was retooled from the US setting to one in Sri Lanka, guaranteeing support from Asian diaspora. Still starring Peter Falk in a humorous fish-out-of-water tale, the gamble didn’t really work, since, as was pointed out at the time, only the supporting characters were played by Asians while the star remained white. It was also very predictable as Patrick McGoohan played the villain, albeit with different disguises, each week.
All galleries can be seen through the ‘Gallery’ link in the header, or click here (especially if you’re on a mobile device). I append to this entry through the month.
Click here for all months (or hit ‘Gallery’ at the top of the screen, if you’re on the desktop), here for December, and here for November. This post explains why I wound up doing the gallery here.
I append to this entry through the month.
I was led by this Tweet to have a peek at the Draft EU–UK Trade Cooperation Agreement and can confirm that on p. 931 (not p. 921), under ‘Protocols and Standards to be used for encryption mechanism: s/MIME and related packages’, there is this:
The text:
The underlying certificate used by the s/MIME mechanism has to be in compliance with X.509 standard. In order to ensure common standards and procedures with other Prüm applications, the processing rules for s/MIME encryption operations or to be applied under various Commercial Product of the Shelves (COTS) environments, are as follows:
– the sequence of the operations is: first encryption and then signing,
– the encryption algorithm AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with 256 bit key length and RSA with 1024 bit key length shall be applied for symmetric and asymmetric encryption respectively,
– the hash algorithm SHA-1 shall be applied.
s/MIME functionality is built into the vast majority of modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x and inter-operates among all major email software packages.
Two things have always puzzled me about the UK’s approach to getting some sort of a deal with the EU.
There are two Davids, Davis and Frost, no relation to the TV producer and TV host. As far as I can tell, despite knowing that the transition period would end on January 1, 2021, failed to do anything toward advancing a deal with the EU, so that the British people know there are new rules, but not what they are. The British taxpayer would be right to question just what their pounds have been doing.
If I may use an analogy: there’s an exam and the set date was given but no one has done any swotting. Messrs Davis and Frost haven’t even done the coursework and sat in the lectures and tutorials blankly.
The person who has done the least is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the British prime minister, who stumbled in to the exam room at the last minute without knowing the subject.
But never mind, sneaked into the room with his clobber is an earlier graduate’s paper! Surely he can plagiarize some of the answers out of that should the same questions arise!
I don’t know much about SHA-1 hash algorithms but the original Tweeter informs us that this had been ‘deprecated in 2011’ as insecure. However, I can cast my mind back to when ‘Netscape Communicator 4.x’ was my browser of choice, and that was 1998–2001. (I stuck with Netscape 4·7 for a long time, as 6 was too buggy, and in 2001 a friend gave me a copy of Internet Explorer 5, which I then used in Windows. This pre-dates this blog, hence Netscape is not even a tag here.)
This is a comedy–tragedy from the land of Shakespeare, and I wonder if it means that the British government is expecting things to get so bad that they will have to wind up using computer software from 20 years ago.
Or they just couldn’t be arsed over the last four years (yes, count ’em!) to do any real work, and hoped that no one would read the 1,259 pp. to find the mistakes.
To conclude, another bad analogy: it’s not really oven-ready despite all this time baking. However, it appears the ingredients aren’t as fresh as we were led to believe. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
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 Devil’s Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, ‘Wheel Man’, 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 there’s precious little about Smith online. His Wikipedia entry is essentially a version of his IMDB credits with some embellishments, for instance. It doesn’t even record his real name.
Don’t worry, it’s not another dig at Wikipedia, but once again it’s a reflection of how things aren’t permanent on the web, a subject I’ve 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 what’s on the ’net still: the World Wide Web is not the solution to storing all human knowledge, or, at least, not the solution to accessing it.
It’s 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 there’s 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. I’ve often suggested on this blog that we cannot fully trust technology, and that there’s no guarantee that even the official bodies, like the UK Companies’ Office, will have complete, accessible records. The computer is a leveller, but not a complete one.
It’s hard not to be in a bubble sometimes, especially when that bubble is safe in the southern hemisphere and away from wars and COVID-19.
With TVNZ having a New York bureau, we of course hear about how poorly the US is doing with COVID-19, and we also hear from the London bureau, where the numbers aren’t as staggering, so they don’t always make the six o’clock programme. Aljazeera English mentioned South Korea’s third wave, looking worse than the second, and I knew Hong Kong’s numbers were on the up.
However, right though the month of November, I didn’t calculate positivity rates at all, even though I had been doing them most months, sometimes multiple times a month. These were going on to my NewTumbl blog, which I’ve decided not to update for the time being, for reasons already outlined.
Doing them again since late October gave me quite a surprise. I knew Europe was having a rough time with it, but there was quite a change in the numbers. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that these rates were trending downwards for the majority of countries that I had been tracking; that is no longer the case. It’s rising almost everywhere apart from India, the KSA (which has sensibly and surely got its first wave down—I’ve seen days of under 200 infections), Singapore, Australia, and, of course, here in New Zealand.
For the first time since I’ve been doing these calculations, we are at the bottom of the table, a fact that I’m relieved about, but it does make me worried about the rest of the world. I have a lot of family in the US and Hong Kong.
The data come from Worldometers and they tend to source from official parties. I believe I loaded the page around 2200 GMT.
Brazil 25·77% ↑
France 10·86% ↑
Sweden 8·07% ↑
Italy 7·50% ↑
USA 7·33% ↑
Spain 7·12% ↓
India 6·57% ↓
Germany 4·11% ↑
UK 3·79% ↑
KSA 3·62% ↓
Russia 3·12% ↑
Singapore 1·25% ↓
South Korea 1·19% ↑
Taiwan 0·64% ↑
Australia 0·27% ↓
Hong Kong 0·159% ↑
New Zealand 0·158% ↓
Brazil 24·63% ↓
France 7·651% ↑
India 7·645% ↓
Spain 7·16% ↑
USA 6·67% ↓
Sweden 5·33% ↓
KSA 4·50% ↓
Italy 3·59% ↑
UK 2·80% ↑
Russia 2·64% ↓
Germany 2·15% ↓
Singapore 1·66% ↓
South Korea 1·02% ↓
Taiwan 0·55% ↓
Australia 0·32% ↓
New Zealand 0·18% ↓
Hong Kong 0·15% ↓
which were measured against a bunch from September 2.
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 Devil’s Juggler. He also wrote one of my favourite Dempsey and Makepeace episodes, ‘Wheel Man’, 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.