Notes
Rosa ClarĂĄ image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021.
The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recentlyâI believe it was commended in 1991 by the Society of Publication Designers, which I was a member of.
Lucire 46 cover for our 25th anniversary: hotographed by Lindsay Adler, styled by Cannon, make-up by Joanne Gair, and hair by Linh Nguyen. Gown by the Danes; earrings by Erickson Beamon at Showroom Seven; and modelled by Rachel Hilbert.
The second of three verses of the Scots College school song appears to be missing from the web. I posted them once on Facebook, back when people used Facebook, so of course it doesnât appear in Google.
We sang it, but I understand that the generation before, and the one after, didnât sing it. We seem to have been the anomaly.
In the interests of having them somewhere searchable on the web, and as the Secretary of Scots Collegians:
Weâll keep our tryst from day to day
And pledge our honour bright,
To follow truthâs unerring way
And march into the light.
Let God and right and the watchword be,
Let Scots have honoured name,
For joy be ours to know that we
Were heroes of its fame.
Corrections are welcome; these are to the best of my recollection.
The move to co-education at Scots several years ago means the song has had to change with the times, though I imagine that enough of us remember the lyrics to the other verses as they once were, and the old choruses, for me not to need to record them.
Itâs bittersweet to get news of the Chevrolet Corvette from whatâs left of GM here in New Zealand, now a specialist importer of cars that are unlikely to sell in any great number. And weâre not unique, as the Sino-American firm pulls out of entire regions, and manufactures basically in China, North America, and South America. Peter Hanenbergerâs prediction that there wonât be a GM in the near future appears to be coming true. Whatâs the bet that the South American ranges will eventually be superseded by Chinese product? Ford is already heading that way.
Inconceivable? If we go back to 1960, BMC was in the top 10 manufacturers in the world.
Out of interest, I decided to take four yearsâ1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020âto see who the top 10 car manufacturers were. I havenât confirmed 1990âs numbers with printed sources (theyâre off YouTube) and I donât know exactly what their measurement criteria are. Auto Katalog 1991â2 only gives country, not world manufacturer, totals and that was my most ready source.
Tables for 2000 and 2010 come from OICA, when they could be bothered compiling them. The last is from Daily Kanban and the very reliable Bertel Schmitt, though he concedes these are based on units sold, not units produced, due to the lack of data on the latter.
2000
1 GM
2 Ford
3 Toyota
4 Volkswagen
5 DaimlerChrysler
6 PSA
7 Fiat
8 Nissan
9 Renault
10 Honda
2010
1 Toyota
2 GM
3 Volkswagen (7,341,065)
4 Hyundai (5,764,918)
5 Ford
6 Nissan (3,982,162)
7 Honda
8 PSA
9 Suzuki
10 Renault (2,716,286)
If Renaultâs and Nissanâs numbers were combined, and they probably should be at this point, then they would form the fourth largest grouping.
2020
1 Toyota
2 Volkswagen
3 Renault Nissan Mitsubishi
4 GM
5 Hyundai
6 Stellantis
7 Honda
8 Ford
9 Daimler
10 Suzuki
For years we could predict the GMâFordâToyota ordering but I still remember the headlines when Toyota edged GM out. GM disputed the figures because it wanted to be seen as the worldâs number one. But by 2010 Toyota is firmly in number one and GM makes do with second place. Ford has plummeted to fifth as Volkswagen and Hyundaiâby this point having made its own designs for just three and a half decadesâovertake it.
Come 2020, with the American firmsâ expertise lying in segment-quitting ahead of competing, theyâve sunk even further: GM in fourth and Ford in eighth.
Itâs quite remarkable to me that Hyundai (presumably including Kia and Genesis) and Honda (including Acura) are in these tables with only a few brands, ditto with Daimler AG. Suzuki has its one brand, and thatâs it (if you want to split hairs, of course thereâs Maruti).
Toyota has Lexus and Daihatsu and a holding in Subaru, but given its broad range and international salesâ strength, it didnât surprise me that it has managed to have podium finishes for the last three decades. Itâs primarily used its own brand to do all its work, and thatâs no mean feat.
Iâm surprised we donât see the Chinese groups in these tables but many are being included in the othersâ totals. For instance, SAIC managed to shift 5,600,482 units sold in 2020 but some of those would have been counted in the Volkswagen and GM totals.
I wonât go into the reasons for the US manufacturersâ decline here, but things will need to change if they donât want to keep falling down these tables. Right now, it seems they will continue to decline.
With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, weâve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition.
There are pages all over the web on this, but nothing that seems to gather it all into one location. I guess Iâm adding to the din, but at least itâs somewhere where I can find it.
The issue we had today was spacing punctuation. I always knew the French space out question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons; as well as their guillemets. But by how much? And what happens to guillemets when you have a speaker who you are quoting for more than one paragraph?
The following, which will appear in the next issue of Lucire KSA in French, and also online, is demonstrative:
In online forums, it appears the spaces after opening guillemets and before closing guillemets, question marks, exclamation marks and semicolons are eighth ones. The one before the colon, however, is a full space, but a non-breaking one.
I should note that the 1938 edition of Hartâs Rules, which was my first one, suggests a full space around the guillemets.
When quoting a large passage of text, rather than put guillemets at the start of each line (which would be hard to set), the French do something similar to us. However, if a quotation continues on to a new paragraph, it doesnât start with the usual opening guillemets («), but with the closing ones (»). That 1938 Hartâs disagrees, and doesnât make this point, other than one should begin the new paragraph with guillemets, which I deduce are opening ones.
If the full stop is part of the quotation then it appears within the guillemets; the full stop is suppressed if a comma follows in the sentence, e.g. (Hartâs example):
« Câest par le sang et par le fer que les Ătats grandissent », a dit Bismarck.
Sadly for us, newer Hartâs Rules (e.g. 2010) donât go into any depth for non-English settings. Hartâs in 1938 also says there apparently is no space before the points de suspension (ellipses), which I notice French writers observe.
Looking at competitorsâ magazines gives no clarity. I happened to have two Vogue Paris issues in the office, from 1990 and 1995. The former adopts the same quotation marks as English, while the latter appears to have been typeset by different people who disagree on the house style.
This is my fourth language so Iâm happy to read corrections from more experienced professional compositors.
Long before Mad Men, and before I got into branding in a big way, I had an interest in advertising. One of the greatest send-ups of the industry was the 1990 Dudley Moore starrer Crazy People, set in the advertising industry against a politically incorrectâactually, cruel and inaccurateâlook at mental health. It’s one of those films that could never be made today, and for good reason. But there are some gems in it, as Moore’s character, Emory Leeson, embarks on “honest advertising”. It gets him committed to a facilityâwho ever heard of an advertising agency telling the truth, right?âuntil his ads become a hit, welcome by consumers who don’t want BS.
I came across this wonderfully copywritten and set ad from a PR professional in London trying to sell his Nan’s 1981 Volvo 244DL:
It’s bloody good. The copy kept me engagedâlike all good ads used toâand he’s done a reasonably good job with the Volvo Broad headline typeface (it was wider back in the day). The body text type should be Times rather than Baskerville, but considering the exact cut of Times isn’t available digitally (to my knowledge; it’s for larger text, and has very short descenders), there’s no wonder he opted to use another family.
It got me thinking: I’ve often posted the Crazy People Volvo ad in comments, as a humorous response. However, the ad doesn’t exist in a decent res online. The only ones that have wound up online are from screen captures from the movie. This 22 kbyte file is actually the best one around, save for one on the Alamy stock photo website that I found after the fact:
I couldn’t re-create the imageâI assume the only person who has it (or had it) is the art director of the film, or the photographer that was commissionedâbut maybe I could have a go at the type?
The digital Volvo Broad had to be widened 25 per cent, and I didn’t attempt to match the kerning.
The body type was the interesting one. I opted for Times Headline, since it wasn’t at a text size, but as I discovered, Volvo used a particular cut that had short descenders and was slightly condensed. I tried to match the leading.
Therefore, here it is, offered under Creative Commons with attribution to me for the typesetting, please, while noting the image is not mine:
Back in September, The Dominion Post claimed on its front page that I have an ‘accent’ that is holding me back. It was a statement which the editor-in-chief subsequently apologized for, and which she had removed from the online editionâyou can judge for yourself here if the claim was a falsehood. Still, despite having lived here for 37 years and having grown up here, I thought I had better take lessons from the great actor, Steve Guttenberg, on what a New Zealander sounds like, since evidently I was still too foreign for a newspaper reporter.
Head to around 49 minutes for Steve in the persona of Lobo Marunga, from Auckland, in The Boyfriend School, which aired in New Zealand as Don’t Tell Her It’s Me. Forget Sir Ben Kingsley in Ender’s Game.
My thanks to all those on Twitter and Facebook who complained to the newspaper back in September. The plus side is turning fictions like this into what they should be: a source of humour and entertainment.
Two years ago, I blogged about The Paradise Clubâs unavailability on DVD and the reasons behind it.
As a show nearly forgotten after 20 years, perhaps it isn’t surprising to find there are no Facebook fan pages for it. There is the one that Facebook generates from Wikipedia, but that’s it, as far as I can tell. The rest are for some adult clubs. Maybe one of them is for the below location in Wellington, New Zealand.*
But it’s Facebook, right? Surely anyone can set one up?
So, here âtis, one member strong: www.facebook.com/pages/The-Paradise-Club/227119843968264. Considering the Wikipedia-based one has 75, it might be nice to see a few more faces at mine. I realize my earlier post was hit by a number of Paradise fans, so this is a sort of shout-out to them.
Meanwhile, the Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11 Facebook group has dipped to 1,859 members, thanks to Facebook defaulting to spamming all members. The Lucire one has stopped its drop, and is rising again, though after four or five messages explaining how to remove oneself from Facebook’s default spamming.
As one friend on Facebook commented: it shouldn’t be my job to write these posts. Facebook should have informed its users better. But, as usual, transparency is not one of Facebook’s strong suits.
* Not that I went in. Not after that time I went to the Ponderosa bar on Blair Street in Wellington and said, ‘I’m Hop Sing. Is Ben around?’ and got a totally blank look from the bartender. You’d think that if your logo was one of the Cartwright brothers (it looks like Adam), someone would have informed employees how the name came about.