Earlier today: 2003

2004

Martha Stewart goes to jail and likens herself to Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela says his ANC newsletters had a far bigger circulation than Martha Stewart Living ever did and that the comparison is unjustified.
   John Kerry reports for duty, but gets hassled by Republicans for having too good a hairstyle and undergoing Botox treatments.
   Enemy agents inside the Ukraine, seeing how obsessed electors are with looks, try to give west-friendly Viktor Yushchenko an extreme makeover, but in reverse, to harm his

August: The original version of The Apprentice was set at McDonald’s, with contestants vying for an assistant manager’s position. If they failed, they would have to be demoted to make French fries, with the famous catchphrase, ‘You’re fried!’ The original host, Jim Cantalupo, CEO of McDonald’s, died in April 2004, after which Donald Trump, and his hair, negotiated to take over for the second season. Cantalupo was paid $50,000 per episode, but Trump negotiated a fee 10 times as much, and due to a typo, read the famous catchphrase as ‘You’re fired!’ The new catchphrase proved more enduring. Like the Miss Universe pageant, Trump has an ulterior motive: to find the best hair transplant donor.

chances. The urban population of Ukraine, cynical of all reality TV-themed propaganda, still overwhelmingly support Yushchenko. However, the rural population, who did not get decent reception, were still convinced by the agents’ efforts, and preferred the other guy.
   John Kerry’s hairstyle fails to win the US presidential election. John Edwards’s hair helps little, although the Democrats put as much emphasis on that as they did Al Gore’s khaki tones in 2000. The US re-elects President Bush and Vice-president Cheney, despite both men having less hair, in an upset victory for the Republicans.
   Donald Trump’s hair starts its own reality show, called The Apprentice. The object is to find the best hair transplant donor. During the show’s history, no bald man has ever won.
   The US concludes that it would have to stick with Microsoft Powerpoint after discovering there was, indeed, no new software inside Iraq.
   Peter Jackson feels vindicated by his experimentation with weird puppets in Bad Taste (originally developed as Kermit’s Worst Nightmare) as he takes home a lot of Oscars for The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King.

Returning Boxing Day: 2005

Labels: 2000s, history, humour, media, politics, TV

Posted by Jack Yan, 10:28  permalink

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We began the journey in March 2008 and we are now there: our website Autocade has reached 1,000 models, which means the beta tag gets taken off and we present the site to a wider audience.
   The 1,000th car is very unusual and I doubt many people outside Turkey, aside from car enthusiasts, have even heard of it.

Tofaş Doĝan (131). 1986–2002 (prod. unknown). 4-door saloon. F/R, 1581 cm³ (4 cyl. OHC), 1585 cm³ (4 cyl. OHV). Rebodied Fiat 131, which had been built under licence by Tofaş as the Murat 131. More high-line than Şahin. Fairly basic transport, initially with OHV engine, before newer OHC unit added in the 1990s.

   As I explain in the press release, which goes out tomorrow, the timing seems right for such a site. We are now accustomed to the brief ways of communicating, such as Twitter and Tumblr. And as shown recently in an issue of Wired, there is a trend toward “good enough”—products such as the Flip do not rely on the highest quality, but the ease of sharing information.
   My thanks to all those friends who have supported this venture during the beta phase.

Labels: Autocade, car industry, cars, media, publishing

Posted by Jack Yan, 10:51  permalink

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Photographed by Jonathan Hayward

Those celebrities do those grand farewell tours, only to come back a while later and do another one.
   I wonder if my farewell post at my Vox blog will be like that. The comments make very interesting reading as Pete and I dissect the site and give it a post mortem.
   This was a very interesting and poignant observation from Pete, whom I met when 20Six was still a cool, vibrant UK community (back in 2006):

In many ways I wish blogging never went mainstream, it was the worst thing that happened for it because it’s left a lot of people who loved it feeling like fish out of water and there are lots who don’t really do it now. (I note there are some who do, but generally.)
   I’m relieved someone else has said this as I had started to wonder if maybe I was just fading out and the community was still thriving in other places and with other people. It just feels like back then we all did it because we wanted too, in the main there was no agenda or anything it was just genuine desire to use this method of communication.

   I responded (some links not in original):

Every medium suffers this fate: newspapers were once respectable before Rupert Murdoch; email was a nice medium before spammers began harvesting addresses. Blogs were, by and large, civil places to exchange opinions before that descended into anonymous name-calling in comments. Now I see in New Zealand a florist has allegedly manipulated Google Maps to harm her competitors—what motivates someone to purposely destroy data that has been freely and publicly compiled for the common good?
   I still believe there is room for huge online communities, including some form of modern chat room (as we had discussed before). The world has moved on and maybe some are afraid of potential abuse, something we bloggers did not have to contend with back in the early 2000s. The sharing during the Clinton era seems to have evaporated, and we humans have been the undoing of that.
   I can understand why sites such as A Small World are so exclusive: they don’t want to see the same decline. There are harsh penalties for “friending” people you do not know, including lifetime bans. Snobbery, sometimes, can be our friend—something I never thought I would catch myself saying. Maybe that is the next stage, and Yappey itself is so far the sort of forum where we can exchange ideas quite freely without an agenda.

   It begs the question: what next for the online world? Oh, it’s not Facebook. I am talking about a site that respects its users.

Labels: civility, civilization, decay, internet, media

Posted by Jack Yan, 00:07  permalink

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