It’s been fascinating to watch Carlos Ghosn’s press conference in Beirut, and subsequent interviews, confirming my own suspicions back in November 2018 (as Tweeted and blogged). Carlos Ghosn's criticism of the Japanese justice system isn’t ‘one-sided’ as they claim. For 14 months, they controlled the narrative and the smear campaign against him. He and others […]
Tag: YouTube
Wide of the mark
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 […]
Breaking Hart’s
Usually, all our publications use Hart’s Rules. It’s well understood, enough compositors know it, and it’s a credible enough style guide for us to point at and use as a defence. There are some departures, which so far few have complained to me about. 1. Citation style. The OUP publishes The British Year Book […]
That’s not Blofeld, it’s Brofeld
I really had hoped that for the next Bond, we wouldn’t see ‘Brofeld’. I’ve never had a problem with M being a woman or Q being a nerd, but ignoring Fleming’s entire background for Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the Daniel Craig movies, and supplanting him into the Franz Oberhauser family as a foster brother […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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Huawei without Google: isn’t that a good thing?
I see Google’s going to stop supporting Huawei as a developer. How is this a bad thing? First, Huawei can still get the public parts of Android, since they’re open-source. Secondly, if they don’t get updates ahead of time, so what? When have western software companies rolled out bug-free updates? Based on my own […]
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Spoiler alert: The Avengers’ endgame
I’m hearing the young people talk about this lately. But we already know how The Avengers ends. Then they come back with some new cast members years later. John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Tara King (Linda Thorson) on board a rocket. You may also like Is your favourite 1980s’ celeb here? Not quite a […]
Navigating the Julian Assange arrest
I find it disturbing that some of the talking heads here we’ve seen are giving the Julian Assange story the same bias that much of the US mainstream media are. To me, it’s dangerous territory: it either shows that our media wish to be complicit with Anglo-American interests, that they do little more than repeat […]