While I was out, I had noticed on Twitter a news item about an octogenarian, working for American Airlines, who was sacked for his use of the word faggot. I despise words like that, just as much as chink or nigger, but the question arises: should he have been sacked, losing some of his […]
Read More… from A bad choice of word, but what does the gay community actually think?
Gillian Anderson, Chicago-born, star of The X Files, grew up in North London and speaks with an accent that’s closer to Britain than the States. I noticed that she gets quite a bit of flak for this on YouTube comments, which is rather sad, perhaps revealing more about those who criticize her than anything else. […]
I found it very odd that Antiques Roadshow and Mythbusters were nominated for the reality TV category at the Emmy Awards. Based on the vocabulary I grew up with, these are not ‘reality TV’. I doubt many of us over a certain age would think of The Gong Show or New Zealand’s Top Town […]
Baidu Talk, which launched in September, has netted 1 million users already, according to PC World. Michael Kan reports that thanks to the service’s insistence that no aliases are used (registered users’ identities are verified with the People’s Republic’s government) ‘this has led to more “civil” discussions between users on Baidu Talk.’ It shows […]
Dear Chevrolet: even your own nation’s president calls the brand ‘Chevy’: You might want to rethink that memo. You may also like A whinge about whinging Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai Volkswagen’s scandal won’t spread to other German car groups How can we help those fooled into believing […]
Anyone notice just how quickly Air New Zealand planes are these days? It takes the grand total of ‘1:00 mins.’ to get from Auckland to Wellington, which equates to travelling at 18,360 mph or 29,520 km/h. I am not quite prepared to do that in case the G-forces squash me into a pulp. And if […]
I don’t have the other writers’ permission to show their side of this Facebook dialogue, but we had been chatting about growing the creative clusters here in Wellington as one of my mayoral policies. I wrote: Mostly by focusing on growing creative clusters and taking a bigger slice of the cake. So it is […]
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 […]
Read More… from I need to listen to some Fred Dagg before I go on
We might get critical over the upcoming uniforms, but the service on Air New Zealand that I experienced was very good. The staff was brilliant (deserving of whatever award was given to them), and the personal screens remain a lifesaver for in-air boredom. (I was surprised that Lufthansa, an airline I used to enjoy flying, […]
This is a punny one for my Swedish friends. I know this is an innocent warning sign, but when a foreigner comes and he has a different skin colour, his mind wanders on what it could mean! Here’s a bit of humorous context about a very inappropriate sign at the National Bank in Wellington, […]