Iâve bought Don Blackâs The Sanest Guy in the Room, which is a great readâyou know that itâs piqued your interest if you can do 110 pages in a single sitting. Thereâs more to go, and itâs entertaining learning a bit about the backgrounds to his songs, âBorn Freeâ arguably his best known. (I do know there are insurance commercials with the song, so I hope he, and the families of John Barry and Matt Monro are getting decent royalties from themâthough itâs pretty bad I have no idea which company itâs for. I assume itâs a successor firm to AA Mutual.)
Don has been very humble in this book and in one part, excerpts his favourite lyrics that others have written. In my mind, however, Don is the top man in his business, and it seems right that I highlight a few of my favourites out of his extensive repertoire and honour him. These come to mind, in no particular order. Many show a good use of rhyme, and all evoke imagery. The repetition of a root word is also clever. And theyâre âsingableâ. As someone who works with the English language professionally they appeal to me for their ingenuity and, in some cases, brevity. Surprisingly, by the time I chose 10, I realized I had not included any of his James Bond lyrics.
Any errors are mine as I recall the songs in my head.
But how do you thank someone
Who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
(âTo Sir with Loveâ, from To Sir with Love)
Youâve been dancing round my mind
Like a bright carousel.
(âIf There Ever Is a Next Timeâ, from Hoffman)
While your eyes played games with mine
(âOn Days Like Theseâ, from The Italian Job)
This way Mary, come Mary,
While the sun is high,
Make this summer the summer that refused to die
(âThis Way Maryâ, from Mary, Queen of Scots)
Walkabout,
And as you wander on
Reflect and ponder on
The dreams today forgot to bring.
(âWalkaboutâ, from Walkabout)
The me I never knew
Began to stir some time this morning.
The me I never knew
Arrived without a word of warning.
You smiled and you uncovered
What I had not discovered.
(âThe Me I Never Knewâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
Most people stay and battle on with their boredom
But whatâs the sense in dreaming dreams if you hoard âem?
(âI Belong to the Starsâ, from Billy)
Love has no season,
There are no rules.
Those who stop dreaming are fools.
(âOur Time Is Nowâ, from the Shirley Bassey album The Performance)
Main attraction, couldnât buy a seat
The celebrity celebrities would die to meet
(âIf I Never Sing Another Songâ, as originally performed by Matt Monro)
Thereâs so much more for me to find,
Iâm glad Iâve left behind behind.
(âIâve Never Been This Far Beforeâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
I hadn’t expected this reply Tweet to get so many likes, probably a record for me.
I knew my parents couldnât afford The Lettering Book, so I went without, which forced me to create my own typeface designs. Later I became the first digital typeface designer in this country.
It is true. That book was NZ$4·99 in 1979, when it was offered through the Lucky Book Club at school, at a time when many books were still priced in cents. Some kids in the class got it, and I admit I was a bit envious, but not having a book in an area that interested you can drive creativity. While my parents didn’t make a heck of a lot in the 1970sâwe flatted and didn’t own our own car at this pointâthey would have splashed out if I really insisted on it. After all, they were sending me to a private school and their sacrifice was virtually never going out. (I only recall one night in those days when my parents had a “date night” and my maternal grandmother looked after meâand that was to see Superman II.) But when you grow up having an understanding that, as an immigrant family that had to largely start from scratch in a new country, you have a rough idea of what’s expensive, and five bucks for a book was expensive.
As an adultâeven when I was a young man starting out in my careerâI did not regret not having this book.
Someone in the thread asked if I ever wound up buying it. I never did: as a teenager I managed to get my hands on a very worn Letraset catalogue, which ultimately proved far more interesting. But it is good to know that, thanks in large part to my parents’ and grandmother’s sacrifices, and those in my partner’s family who helped her in her earlier years, we could afford to buy this book if anyone in our family asks for it.
Were we fleeing anything when we came to Aotearoa? We left Hong Kong in 1976 because my parents were worried about what China would do to the place. In other words, what’s happening now is what they hoped for me to avoid. They called it, in the 1970s. And here I am.
Boris Johnson: usually a talented delivery, but with conflicting substance.
I spotted The Death of Expertise at Unity Books, but I wonder if the subject is as simple as the review of the book suggests.
Thereâs a lot out there about anti-intellectualism, and we know itâs not an exclusively American phenomenon. Tom Nichols, the bookâs author, writes, as quoted in The New York Times, âAmericans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told theyâre wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that arenât true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.â
I venture to say that the “death of expertise” is an Anglophone phenomenon. Head into Wikipedia, for instance, and youâll find proof that the masses are not a good way to ensure accuracy, at least not in the English version. Head into the German or Japanese editions and you find fewer errors, and begin to trust the pages more.
Given that many of âthe peopleâ cannot discern what is âfake newsâ and what is not, or who is a bot and who is not, then itâs absolutely foolhardy to propose that they also be the ones who determine the trustworthiness of a news source, as Facebook is wont to do.
I canât comment as much on countries I have spent less time in, but certainly in the Anglosphere, Iâve seen people advance, with confidence and self-authority, completely wrong positions, ones not backed up by real knowledge. You only need to visit some software support forums to see online examples of this phenomenon.
When I visit Sweden, for instance, thereâs a real care from individuals not to advance wrongful positions, although I admit I am limited by my own circles and the brief time I have spent there.
Itâs not so much that we donât value expertise, itâs that the bar for what constitutes an expert is set exceptionally low. Weâre often too trusting of sources or authorities who donât deserve our reverence. And I wonder if it comes with our language.
Iâll go so far as to say that the standing of certain individuals I had in my own mind was shattered when we were all going for the mayoralty in my two campaigns in 2010 and 2013. There certainly was, among some of my opponents, no correlation between knowledge and the position they already held in society. It didnât mean I disliked them. It just meant I wondered how they got as far as they did without getting found out.
Fortunately, the victor, whether you agreed with her policies or not, possessed real intelligence. The fact she may have political views at odds with yours is nothing to do with intelligence, but her own observations and beliefs. I can respect that (which is why I follow people on social media whose political views I disagree with).
In turn Iâm sure many of them disliked what I stood for, even if they liked me personally. Certainly it is tempting to conclude that some quarters in the media, appealing to the same anti-intellectualism that some of my rivals represented, didnât like a candidate asserting that we should increase our intellectual capital and pursue a knowledge economy. No hard feelings, mind. As an exercise, it served to confirm that, in my opinion, certain powers donât have peopleâs best interests at heart, and there is a distinct lack of professionalism (and, for that matter, diversity) in some industries. In other words, a mismatch between what one says one does, and what one actually does. Language as doublespeak.
So is it speaking English that makes us more careless? Maybe it is: as a lingua franca in some areas, merely speaking it might put a person up a few notches in othersâ estimation. Sandeep Deva Misra, in his blog post in 2013, believes thatâs the case, and that we shouldnât prejudge Anglophones so favourably if the quality of their thought isnât up to snuff.
Maybe thatâs what we need to do more of: look at the quality of thought, not the expression or make a judgement based on which language itâs come in. As English speakers, we enjoy a privilege. We can demand that others meet us on our terms and think poorly when someone speaks with an accent or confuses your and youâre. It gives us an immediate advantage because we have a command of the lingua franca of business and science. It gives us the impunity to write fictions in Wikipedia or make an argument sound appealing through sound bites, hoping to have made a quick getaway before weâre found out. Political debate has descended into style over substance for many, although this is nothing new. I was saying, although not blogging, things like this 20 years ago, and my students from 1999â2000 might remember my thoughts on Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign as being high on rhetoric and light on substance. Our willingness to accept things on face value without deeper analysis, lands us into trouble. We’re fooled by delivery and the authority that is attached with the English language.
Youâll next see this in action in a high-profile way when Facebook comes forth with more comment about Cambridge Analytica. I can almost promise you now that it wonât hold water.
Not that Asian countries get this right all the time, but generally, when a 95-year-old speaks, we (as in many of us with Asian heritage, and by ‘Asian’ I mean a lot of cultures that make up the 3,700 million people on the continent) tend to listen and we revere their experience. And WWII veteran Harry Leslie Smith, who is one of the more active people of his generation, brings us a warning about where Brexit and other developments around the world are taking us.
The excerpt from his book, Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future: a Call to Arms, in The Independent, headlined âBrexit threatens everything I fought for in the Second World War. On my 95th birthday, this is what I need people to knowâ, makes for sobering reading, and if we don’t heed his words, we could be heading into trouble. Even if you support Brexit, it would still be advisable to read the excerpt and ensure that the future that he foresees doesn’t come to pass.
Quite telling is this:
Unlike today, no political party in my youth advocated the isolation that Brexit will bring to Britain. Instead all insisted that our military and political survival depended on cooperation and integration with other nations. Yet today, the political descendants of Winston Churchill are turning our nation into a hermit kingdom whose wealth and ingenuity are being squandered for an idealised notion that we are still a mighty power that the nations of the world want to trade with on our terms.
I have to agree with him there. When a very good friend of mine, whose opinion I respect greatly, and who voted for Brexit, indicated that New Zealand would be at an advantage, I had to point out that even before the UK joined the EEC, our share of trade with the nation was already declining. We had to look for other trading partners, including ones far closer to home to us. While there’s some truth in that UKâNZ ties could be strengthened, don’t expect a bonanza. If our two-way trade with the EU is worth NZ$19,986 million (Treasury figures, year ended March 31, 2017) and the ONS believes the UK alone accounts for ÂŁ2,500 million (roughly NZ$4,800 million), then some quick calculations (I realize the periods may differ) indicate that the UK accounts for 24 per cent of the total. But the EU, in total, accounts for 14·5 per cent of our trade. In other words, the UK alone accounts for around 3·5 per cent of trade with us. That’s a fraction of what it was in the 1960s, when New Zealand was a sort of Little Britain (no, neither Little Britain nor the historical sense of that term), when Japanese cars were just an occasional distraction on our roads. We have new friends with whom we trade and I don’t think we’re as nostalgic for the days of Empah as Farage, Johnson, Gove et al. We seem to be more realistic, and we realize the war was a long time agoâand we had to be tougher, in part thanks to the UK’s membership of the EEC.
It’s not just Britain: Smith doesn’t have great things to say about the US president, Donald Trump, either, especially when he recounts the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt.
And:
The baby boomers were bequeathed by my generation a society built upon a bedrock of personal sacrifice and a commitment to social and economic justice. Yet all of our accomplishments, from the NHS to council housing as well as our unfinished work trying to ensure a more equal Britain, was pawned off by them to the hedge funds, tax-avoiding corporations and political parties that believe governments should be run like businesses.
Whereas once upon a time, both Conservative and Labour wanted to uphold the institutions that helped make the UK a decent societyâas National and Labour did hereâmodern ideology has changed the right into something that people like my parentsâwho voted National for decadesâsimply don’t recognize today. Even in my lifetime, which is less than half of Smith’s, I find some of the ideas that are being peddled mere caricatures of conservatism. There’s a whole generationâlet’s call them ‘Thatcher’s children’âwho don’t know any differently.
Smith doesn’t conclude with this in the excerpt, but I will, as I think it’s a strong paragraph:
And now with our nation in chaos over Brexit, and fascism becoming as great a threat to our security as it once was in the 1930s, the majority in this country and the western world sit like the inhabitants of Pompeii the day before Vesuvius destroyed their city and their lives, ignoring the warning calls of imminent destruction.
Once again, collective memories are incredibly shortâwhich is why older people who have real experiences they can share so clearly need to be listened to. I mean, why wouldn’t you?
Interesting to get this perspective on âBig Techâ from The Guardian, on how itâs become tempting to blame the big Silicon Valley players for some of the problems we have today. The angle Moira Weigel takes is that there needs to be more democracy in the system, where workers need to unite and respecting those who shape the technologies that are being used.
I want to add a few far simpler thoughts.
At the turn of the century, our branding profession was under assault from No Logo and others, showing that certain brands were not what they were cracked up to be. Medinge Group was formed in part because we, as practitioners, saw nothing wrong with branding per se, and that the tools could be used for good. Not everyone was Enron or Nike. There are Patagonia and Dilmah. That led to the original brand manifesto, on what branding should accomplish. (I was generously given credit for authoring this at one point, but I was simply the person who put the thoughts of my colleagues into eight points. In fact, we collectively gathered our ideas into eight groups, so I canât even take credit for the fact there are eight points.)
In 2017, we may look at Ăberâs sexism or Facebookâs willingness to accept and distribute malware-laden ads, and charge tech with damaging the fabric of society. Those who dislike President Trump in the US want someone to blame, and Facebookâs and Googleâs contributions to their election in 2016 are a matter of record. But itâs not that online advertising is a bad thing. Or that social media are bad things. The issue is that the players arenât socially responsible: none of them exist for any other purpose than to make their owners and shareholders rich, and the odd concession to not doing evil doesnât really make up for the list of misdeeds that these firms add to. Many of them have been recorded over the years on this very blog. Much of what we have been working toward at Medinge is showing that socially responsible organizations actually do better, because they find accord with their consumers, who want to do business or engage with those who share their values; and, as Nicholas Ind has been showing in his latest book, Branding Inside Out, these players are more harmonious internally. In the case of Stella McCartney, sticking to socially responsible values earns her brand a premiumâand sheâs one of the wealthiest fashion designers in the world.
I just canât see some of the big tech players acting the same way. Google doesnât pay much tax, for instance, and the misuse of Adwords aside, there are allegations that it hasnât done enough to combat child exploitation and it has not been a fair player when it comes to rewarding and acknowledging media outlets that break the news, instead siding with corporate media. Google may have open-source projects out there, but its behaviour is old-school corporatism these days, a far cry from its first five years when even I would have said they were one of the good guys.
Facebookâs problems are too numerous to list, though I attempted to do so here, but it can be summed up as: a company that will do nothing unless it faces embarrassment from enough people in a position of power. Weâve seen it tolerate kiddie porn and sexual harassment, giving both a âpassâ when reported.
Yet, for all that they make, it would be reasonable to expect that they put more people on the job in places where it mattered. The notion that three volunteers monitor complaints of child exploitation videos at YouTube is ridiculous but, for anyone who has complained about removing offensive content online, instantly believable; why there were not more is open to question. Anyone who has ventured on to a Google forum to complain about a Google product will also know that inaction is the norm there, unless you happen to get to someone senior and caring enough. Similarly, increasing resources toward monitoring advertising, and ensuring that complaints are properly dealt with would be helpful.
Googleâs failure to remove content mills from its News is contributing to âfake newsâ, yet its method of combatting that appears to be taking people away from legitimate media and ranking corporate players more highly.
None of these are the actions of companies that want to do right by netizens.
As Weigel notes, thereâs a cost to abandoning Facebook and Google. But equally there are opportunities if these firms cannot provide the sort of moral, socially responsible leadership modern audiences demand. In my opinion, they do not actually command brand loyaltyâa key ingredient of brand equityâif true alternatives existed. Duck Duck Go might only have a fraction of the traffic Google gets in search, but despite a good mission its results arenât always as good, and its search index is smaller. But we probably should look to it as a real alternative to search, knowing that our support can help it grow and attract more investment. There is room for a rival to Google News that allows legitimate media and takes reports of fake news sites more seriously. If social media are democratizingâand there are signs that they are, certainly with some of the writings by Doc Searls and Richard MacManusâthen there is room for people to form their own social networks that are decentralized, and where we hold the keys to our identity, able to take them wherever we please (Hubzilla is a prime example; you can read more about its protocol here). The internet can be a place which serves society.
It might all come back to education; in fact, we might even say Confucius was right. If youâre smart enough, youâll see a positive resource and decide that it would not be in the best interests of society to debase it. Civility and respect should be the order of the day. If these tools hadnât been used by the privileged few to line their pockets at the expense of the manyâor, for that matter, the democratic processes of their nationsâwouldnât we be in a better place? They capitalized on divisions in society (and even deepened them), when there is far more for all of us to gain if we looked to unity. Why should we allow the concentration of power (and wealth) to rest at the top of tech’s food chain? Right now, all I see of Google and Facebookâs brands are faceless, impersonal and detached giants, with no human accountability, humming on algorithms that are broken, and in Facebookâs case, potentially having databases that have been built on so much, that it doesnât function properly any more. Yet they could have been so much more to society.
Not possible to unseat such big players? We might have thought once that Altavista would remain the world’s biggest website; who knew Google would topple it in such a short time? But closer to home, and speaking for myself, I see The Spinoff and Newsroom as two news media brands that engender far greater trust than Fairfax’s Stuff or The New Zealand Herald. I am more likely to click on a link on Twitter if I see it is to one of the newer sites. They, too, have challenged the status quo in a short space of time, something which I didn’t believe would be possible a decade ago when a couple of people proposed that I create a locally owned alternative.
We donât say email is bad because there is spam. We accept that the good outweighs the bad and, for the most part, we have succeeded in building filters that get rid of the unwanted. We donât say the web is bad because it has allowed piracy or pornography; its legitimate uses far outweigh its shady ones. But we should be supporting, or trying to find, new ways to advertise, innovate and network (socially or otherwise). Right now, Iâm willing to bet that the next big thing (and it might not even be one player, but a multitude of individuals working in unison) is one where its values are so clear and transparent that they inspire us to live our full potential. I remain an optimist when it comes to human potential, if we set our sights on making something better.
My good friend Stefan Engesethâs Sharkonomics hit China a year ago, and itâs been so successful that the second edition is now out. It looks smarter, too, with its red cover, and Iâm sure Chinese readers will get a decent taste of Stefanâs writing style, humour and thinking.
I even hope this will pave the way for translations of his earlier works, especially Detective Marketing and One: a Consumer Revolution for Business (the latter still remains my favourite of his marketing titles).
Iâve written a brief quote for Sharkonomics and the publisher (with some nudging from Stefan) has taken the time to make sure my Chinese name is accurately recorded, rather than a phonetic translation of my Anglo transliteration, which, of course, then wouldnât be my name.
Stefanâs inventive and innovative thinking might seem left-field sometimes, till some years pass and people realize he was right all along. Take, for example, Google wanting to build a high-tech neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, announced in October. Notwithstanding the hassles Google has created on its own turf in Silicon Valley, itâs the sort of project we might expect from the giant now. But would we have expected it in 2007? Probably not, except Stefan did.
In 2007 (though he actually first floated the idea a year earlier), Stefan blogged about his idea for Google Downtownâwhy not make real what Google Earth does virtually? Why not shop at places that already know all your personal preferences, if thatâs where things are heading? The town would have free wifi and youâd be paying for it with âyour selfâ (the space, Iâm sure, was intentional). In 2008, 500 people heard his plans at a conference and laughed. The following year, he met Eric Schmidt and mentioned it to him. Eric paused and didnât laughâand maybe the idea sunk in.
Itâs not the first time Stefan has hatched an idea and it gained legs, from Coca-Cola delivering its product through taps to Ikea making flat-pack fashionâboth have wound up being done, though the latter not quite in the way Stefan envisaged.
PS. (September 17): How much worse can it get, as I continued through? A lot.
On p. 320, we get an admission that Parissien was wrong on p. 314: the Honda Accord was the first Japanese-branded car to be made Stateside. At least an earlier error was corrected. But they begin again on p. 321: Parissien claims the V30 Toyota Camry dominated the US mid-size car market (it was never sold outside Japan; he’s thinking of the XV10, or the Japanese-market Scepter, which was badged Camry). Correcting his error on p. 322, the Camry was not specifically targeted at the US; it was Toyota’s attempt to create an efficient car from the ground up, and it was not done in 1980, but 1982 (the 1980 Celica Camry was not sold outside Japan). The Paykan deal was cemented long before George Turnbull got to Iran (p. 324), though local content rose in the 1970s for it to be truly Iranian-made and Parissien might mean the shifting of the engine tooling there, if I’m being generous. There is only one world, not multiple ones (also p. 324), unless Parissien knows something about parallel universes that the rest of us don’t. Surely Chrysler managed to launch its T-115 minivan (Dodge Caravan, Plymouth Voyager) before Renault launched the Espace (p. 330), and the Triumph Acclaim was never called the ‘Ronda’ (p. 334), though its successor was.
On p. 360, in a single paragraph, Parissien makes several errors. The MG 6 launched as a five-door car, not his claimed four. There is no such thing as the Roewe 150, in China or elsewhere. The MG 3 has five doors and is not a three-door counterpart to the 6. The five-door MG 6 launched not in 2011, but in 2010, and the Magnette name was only used in the UK for the four-door. The founder of Chrysler was Walter Chrysler, not Walther (p. 364). The Lancia Delta only became a Chrysler in the UK and Ăire, as far as I know (p. 365), and remained a Lancia in most countries. The Belgian designer is Dirk van Braeckel, not van Braeckl (p. 368); Mercedes-Benz never bought an 18·53 per cent stake in Volkswagen (p. 369); and CitroĂ«n’s BX was not the last car in that range to have ‘pneumatic suspension’ (p. 372). The Malibu was not a Saturn, but a Chevrolet (p. 375), and Buick was never sold off (p. 376). The Ford Mondeo did not replace the Telstar in all Asian markets (p. 377), and it shared far more than the ‘windscreen, front doors and rear’ with the Contour and Mystique (in fact, the rear was not shared, though there were common engines, platform, and plenty more). It’s not entirely certain that the US market judged the Contour to be too small (p. 378), but there was a lack of marketing (which would have made an even better story than the one Parissien writes about). Ford subsequently filled the Contour’s niche with the smaller Focus Stateside. The CD338 Fusion was never sold in Australia (also p. 378). Ford never resurrected the Taunus in Germany under Alan Mulally (p. 381)âthis invention is incredible. VAZ did follow up the 2101 with something similar after it ended production in 1983 (not 1984, p. 382), viz. the 2105, which was about as similar as one could get to the 2101.
On p. 384, Parissien claims Acura’s Legend sales were ‘disappointing’, after saying they were ‘beginning to sell rather well’ 50 pp. before. The Hindustan Ambassador was not based on the 1954 Morris Oxford (p. 389): that car was actually the Hindusthan Landmaster. The Ambassador was based on the 1957 Morris Oxford III, and was in production from 1959, not 1958. The Red Flag (or Hongqi) marque was not reborn on an Audi A6 (p. 391), but the marque had been used on a version of the Audi 100 C3 from 1988, and no Hongqi bore an AudiâChryslerâHongqi brand name. The Chinese company is Dongfeng, not Dongfen (p. 391), and Parissien’s claim that the Everus was sold in the west (p. 392) is news to me, as I am sure it is to its own management. I’ll stop there for now.
P.PS. (September 18): Some bedtime reading, or should I say error-finding, last night. On p. 394, Toyota and Aston Martin did not jointly develop the Cygnet: Toyota developed the IQ in 2008, and Aston Martin converted that car to become its Cygnet, and ‘hot hatch’ is a very optimistic description for a city car. Toyota did not launch the Cygnet in 2008 as Parissien claims, nor did it have a say in what customers were expected to purchase the Cygnet: it was aimed specifically at existing Aston Martin owners, not ‘Toyota and Aston expected initial demand to be limited to those who already owned an Aston Martin sports car.’ It was certainly no ‘eccentric experiment’ of Toyota, but of Aston Martin. Volvo never made a model called the A40 (p. 395), and I bet Nissan is surprised to find that the original Qashqai was designed ‘at the firm’s Milan design centre’ (p. 397) when it was designed in London. Maserati never launched a Jeep-based SUV called the Kubang (p. 397), but it did have a concept of that name, and the Levante appeared in 2016 after the book was published. There is no such car as the Porsche Cajun, and if Parissien refers to the smaller Porsche crossover, then that is called the Macan, and it has five doors, not the claimed three (p. 397). The Volkswagen New Beetle was not on a Polo platform (p. 399), but a Golf one, as was its successor (though a newer Golf); and Ford would dispute that its Mustang is a sedan (p. 401). If J Mays’s first name is J (as footnoted), then there is no need to refer to him as ‘J. Mays’ (p. 401). The Ford Ka’s name is not derived from StreetKa (p. 402): that was a model spun off from the Ka in 2002; and some would regard the Mk II model was being superior to the Fiat 500 on which it is based (especially as Fiat adopted some of the changes for its own model). I have yet to see a Smart with a Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star or marque anywhere, unlike Parissien who seems to think they are badged Mercedes (p. 403), and a Smart SUV does not exist unless Parissien is reporting again from his parallel universe (p. 403). There is also no such car as the Kia Exclusive (p. 410).
That’s a nice conclusion. Since my previous blog post, Dr Libby Weaver’s people got back to me within 24 hours. Although no notes from her seminar were available, we decided that I should get a Dr Libby book, which duly arrived. Here âtis:
Goes to show they were on the ball when the mistake was picked up, a credit was given to me for the photo, and they were prepared to remedy things by posting a book to me. We turned a negative into a positive: a winâwin all round. Sometimes all it takes are two parties prepared to be reasonable and find something mutually agreeable. Certain world leaders would be advised to emulate that.
My good friend Stefan Engesethâs 
