Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved. From a teenager’s perspective: home computers, with a modulator–demodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously […]
Read More… from In the 1980s, I thought society would evolve to become more efficient and smarter
I know Wikipedia is full of fiction, so what’s one more? I know, you’re thinking: why don’t you stop moaning and go and fix it if it’s such a big deal? First up, for once I actually did try, as I thought the deletion of a sentence would be easy enough. But the […]
Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, e.g.: Anyone alive during this period will be wondering, ‘Where’s Altavista?’ Just on visitor numbers, as opposed to visits per month, they were doing 19 million daily in 1996, 80 million daily in 1997. Goodness knows how many searches we were doing per day. Yet […]
George Hodan Those who remember Visual Arts Trends, a publication created and edited by my friend Julia Dudnik-Stern in the late 1990s and early 2000s, might recall that I didn’t have kind words about the Rt Hon Tony Blair and his government. In those pre-Iraq war days, one reader was so upset they wrote to […]
Read More… from The British media are telling you they want you to vote Conservative
As a child of the 1970s, I was exposed to this English word: new. Now, before you say that that isn’t anything special, for some reason, in the ’70s, there was an obsession with newness. It wasn’t like the news (by this I mean the plural of new) of Amsterdam or Zealand, but an adjective […]
The car Lee Iacocca will be remembered for, the 1965 Ford Mustang on the right. Before I found out about Lee Iacocca’s passing, on the same day I Tweeted about one of the cars he was behind when he was president of Ford: the 1975 US Granada. Basically, Iacocca understood that Americans wanted style. That […]
Read More… from Reflections about Lee Iacocca—unfortunately, not all of it is positive
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 incorrect—actually, cruel and inaccurate—look at mental health. It’s one of those […]
Postscripts: click here to read why I’m considering ceasing to post on NewTumbl, in November 2020. Click here to read about NewTumbl’s encouraging response in December 2020. And, just over a week later, how the site really has become too puritanical for its own good. Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl. I […]
‘There’s an old Polish proverb …’ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’ I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with what broadcasters put on. In the 1970s, my tastes weren’t too dissimilar from the general public’s, but as […]
What a coincidence to come across a letter from composer, arranger, conductor and former TVNZ bandleader Terry Gray, dated May 25, 1991, after I blogged about him on (nearly) the seventh anniversary of his passing. Here it is for others who may be interested in a little slice of Kiwi life. It looks like ITC […]