A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27, while Autocade’s origins are even older

A montage of 20 years of Lucire print covers.

Lucire turns 27 tomorrow (at the stroke of midnight NZDT as the day ticks over to Monday). After prompting by my friend Richard MacManus, I wrote a piece to mark the anniversary. Though after the song and dance of our 25th anniversary two years ago, I’ve kept it low-key.   Meanwhile, I’ve thinned out some […]

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Where is brand Aotearoa?

Five New Zealand customs' officers seated on a boat.

One thing holding back exports from Aotearoa New Zealand is the absence of a true, authentic national brand. I said this even back in the days of the 100% Pure campaign, which was much lauded. I cynically asked: can we really claim this when France and Germany outspend us on the environment as a percentage […]

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Recycle time

Thirty-plus years of my files are being recycled. Only a last few years are left to go. I kept them, thinking they might be of some historical use—maybe future entrepreneurs might want to see the efforts I put in to get the country’s first digital font range known, or building up Lucire from nothing. As […]

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Which other Glen A. Larson production did this girl group appear in?

  This girl group appears in three Glen A. Larson productions that I can think of, and probably appears in more. Switch, Knight Rider and Cover Up are the three I know of. Their fashions and hairstyles, plus those of the audience, would place this in the first part of the 1970s—by the time they […]

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For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward

The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]

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You never know where your interests will take you

A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa?   Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]

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Being part of the problem, but not seeing it

There’s no big secret that I changed high schools, from one where the experience was less than stellar to Scots College, where I felt like I fitted perfectly. During my second mayoral campaign, an old boy of the first place, Rongotai College, wrote to me via my feedback form sitting on his high horse, wondering […]

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Remembering Nehemiah Persoff, 1919–2022

Nehemiah Persoff as a corrupt Latin American finance minister, Phillipe Pereda, in the Mission: Impossible episode, ‘The Vault’ (1969).   I read that the wonderful Palestinian-born character actor Nehemiah Persoff passed away this month last year, aged 102. I remember Nehemiah most from the third-season Mission: Impossible episode, ‘The Vault’, which is among the best […]

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Nostalgic thoughts: what sparked my interest in fashion magazines, and Nike’s 10 rules for business

  I have told this story many times: I became interested in fashion magazines with a 1989 issue of Studio Collections. In fact, it was its fifth anniversary issue. I really liked the typesetting, photography and print quality. I was probably one of the few people disappointed when they went to desktop publishing and the […]

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A format so old, it’s new and radical

Above: I spy Natasha Lyonne and a Plymouth Barracuda. So the car is part of her screen identity? So it should be, it’s television. I might have to watch this.   Two very fascinating responses come up in Wired’s interview with director Rian Johnson on the Netflix release of his film Glass Onion. I’m not […]

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