The British media are telling you they want you to vote Conservative

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 […]

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The 1970s: when TV shows were New

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 […]

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What’s all this Johnny Foreigner type?

After all that bollocks from the Hon J. Rees-Mogg, MP about banning the metric system from the Commons, I thought the Brexit-loving Tories would at least get this right. That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, don’t you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner […]

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Wikipedia acts swiftly when criticized, bans an editor for life

When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipedia’s abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform.    One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, […]

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On Boris Johnson’s strategy, Ken Clarke nails it

Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.) Ken Clarke nails Boris Johnson's oh so transparent strategy 👏 1. Set conditions which […]

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An expat’s thoughts about Hong Kong

Studio Incendo/Creative Commons 2·0 As an expat, I’ve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. There’s no straight answer to this. Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order. The British never gave us universal suffrage, so the notion that it was all roses before 1997 is […]

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When you let amateurs like Rees-Mogg write style guides

I thought I could be archaic on a few things—I still use diphthongs in text in our publications (æsthetic, Cæsar), the trio of inst., ult. and prox. in written correspondence, and even fuel economy occasionally in mpg (Imperial) because I am useless at ℓ/100 km and too few countries use km/ℓ. However, even I had […]

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I’m still doing election campaign posters, just not what you thought

If I think so little of Big Tech, why do I remain on Twitter?    Because of some great people. Like Dan, who Tweeted:   If Boris Johnson’s Leadership campaign slogan isn’t ‘Give Britain a BJ’ then he’s not the man I though he was. — Dan (@AceMcWicked) June 24, 2019   Followed by:   […]

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Today’s thoughts on Twitter

Momentmal/Pixabay Random thoughts in the last few minutes, blogging as a means of bookmarking: Prediction: sick of all the tracking, advertising and endless bugs, people begin using the telephone feature on their cellphones nearly exclusively. — Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jackyan) May 25, 2019    You never know, we may see a rise in the demand […]

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There must be a different metric system on our roads these days

The new metric system: I’m following the car in front at the correct distance. Cf. the drivers in the other lanes. Now that I live in the northern suburbs, I have to go on the motorway far more frequently. It’s become apparent that New Zealand has had a complete change of measurement system and I […]

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