BBC drama, this autumn and winter

15.12.2010/13.45

Don’t know how I could have missed this. Oh, yes I do: I was running for ofﬁce. Now that I’m not, I want to give the BBC a bit of a push, because these dramas look awesome. Aurelio Zen, with Rufus Sewell, looks like my sort of drama, and begins the ﬁrst week of […]

Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai

12.12.2010/00.26

As I made links for the last post, I noticed there were a lot of comments on AROnline about the replacement for the Roewe 750, the Chinese car that is based on the old Rover 75. The replacement will be on the Opel Insignia platform, owned by GM. It’s been followed by a lot […]

Retrograde steps for our cellphones

07.11.2010/10.26

Last week, our company’s Nokia 2730 Classics arrived as part of a contract with Telstra Clear, of whom we’ve been a customer since the 1980s. They are a reminder of how technology is regressing. Remember that scene in Life on Mars, where Sam Tyler, or Samuel Santos in La chica de ayer, tells Annie […]

How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada

02.11.2010/09.57

I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]

Endorsements from Sir Michael Fowler and others—and why the Paul Henry débâcle matters

05.10.2010/01.58

Yesterday, as some of you know, Sir Michael Fowler endorsed me, saying that I am the ‘intelligent’ mayoral candidate and he likes the programme I have outlined for our city. It goes beyond what is on my campaign site, of course—the programme includes plans to bring Waterfront Ltd. back under council control, increased transparency through […]

I need to listen to some Fred Dagg before I go on

11.03.2010/05.54

To be conﬁrmed is an interview with the BBC, in my politician guise. I have not been on radio in the other hemisphere for something like seven years, and that time it went to some of the most way-out places (it was UN Radio). I have one reservation only: my accent goes all over the […]