Posts by Joe Wylie
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It wasn't dreamed up by, for example, some social misfit sitting in the British Museum Library.
It could just as validly be argued that the 19th C. robber barons over which Marx became so exercised were social misfits. Takes one to know one.
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Whereas I've come to the conclusion that Auckland doesn't exist. Aside from the motorway and the airport. And the skytower, which is probably made of painted balsa wood anyhow.
Brigadorkland?
The first time I flew across the Tasman was when we went to Melbourne in 1962. We went by TEAL flying boat which took off from the air base in Evans bay. I can’t remember how long it took to get to Melbourne but it seemed hours and hours, but again it was much faster than going by boat which took about three days....
Thanks for that Hilary, great stuff. That must have been close to the last TEAL flight out of Evans Bay. There's precious little that's been written down about what flying was like then from the ordinary passenger's point of view. There's a nice but all too brief description of travelling to Sydney by flying boat in 1942 in Ruth Park's A Fence Around the Cuckoo. Her "first glimpse of Australia felix" was the sunlit sandstone cliffs of the Eastern beaches. How low they must have flown back then.
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Emma, I'm pretty sure it's a Vauxhall. While the pic's a little fuzzy, nothing else had those chrome scoopy things on the engine lid.
From your story, though, I suspect it might have been a tad gruntier model than the one in the link above.
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But I tell you what, you guys tell me, here it is.
OK, I'll be a guy. My best guess.
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Remember those politicians who pointed to the Celtic Tiger as a model for NZ to follow? According to Brian Gaynor, one of the last bastions of reason @ the Granny, it's been neutered.
Karma, man. The abominable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toon series, along with a slew of other horrible productions, was cranked out in Ireland by teams of barely-trained mechanics with pencils. All made possible by tax-free status for the "arts".
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Its kind of like if a car were a hippopotamus.
Except a hippopotamus probably had a smaller turning circle. One sexy refinement shared by the Velox and its close rival the Mk. 2 Zephyr was electric wipers. General Motors still fitted primitive vacuum wipers to the Holdens of that era, for which the Cobbers were pathetically grateful. Powered by suction from the car's inlet manifold, when you took your foot off the gas in heavy rain the wipers slowed to nothing.
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Found it! It was actually Fantomas contre Scotland Yard, 1964. And this is the image that so impressed my young mind.
Now that is industrial-strength cool. While Fantomas may not have risen to quite the glorious heights of Diabolik, most vintage Eurovillains were seriously cool because they were portrayed as being heaps smarter than their law-enforcing opponents.
And they had much better cars.
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So we've now had one of those, the Snipe and both the Morris and Austin versions of the Landcrab 1800.
Is this the big-assed British motor thread?There was a mention of the big D Citroen, which somehow avoided the landcrab nick despite its traction avant propulsion. While it may have been a mechanic's nightmare once the drive train eventually packed up, unlike the Landcrab 1800 it wasn't cursed with electricals by Joseph Lucas, aka The Prince of Darkness.
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. . . you'd expect if the welfare state had been widely unpopular it would have been turfed out by a subsequent government.
Permissive society? Me generation? Remember those? No? Fran's pontificating is firmly in the tradition of a long line of forgettable journalistic monuments to harrumphing pomposity.
While Ayn Rand may never have achieved anything greater than cult status as a young person's author, she did manage to close the gap between mundburp and manifesto. For Fran, it's always a bridge too far.
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possibly, but its still a cool idea. rewriting history from a fixed point on like 1995's Richard III.
Not so coolly realised in the 1993 clunker Super Mario Brothers , which featured a parallel universe where dinosaurs had won the evolutionary race.