2 posts tagged “advance”

Condé Nast Portfolio November 2007

Every now and then, there’s a magazine that captures my imagination. In 1988, it was Autocar; by the early 1990s, it was Wired, then Fast Company by the end of the decade. Now, the magazine (other than any I publish!) is Condé Nast Portfolio.
   I’m annoyed that, like Business Week, Portfolio is next to impossible to get in New Zealand, though Advance can count on me as a subscriber now. As a business magazine, it is intelligently written and beautifully presented: think of it as Business Week meets The Atlantic Monthly. Design-wise, it’s a tad over-ornamented and olde worlde American, but that text typeface is beautiful and I could read it all day. It is intelligently written, but not in an inaccessible way—like the Atlantic.
   Lucky Yanks can subscribe for a dollar a month whereas I have to pay the full US$60 to get them Down Under, but at around NZ$7 an issue, it’s not a lot to ask. Postage alone won’t cover that seven bucks, and I should know.

Low res NZ PM with RM Gull E10

Some Americans already think that PM Helen Clark is Ms Photo Op, without the substance. That was the first thing that came to mind when this pic came through from the Ford Motor Company today.
   Considering that New Zealand had natural gas-powered cars when I was a youngster in 1980 (until the National government thought they might be bad for us in the mid-1990s and really pushed us toward good, healthy and cheap petrol) and Todd Park was experimenting with a methanol-powered Mitsubishi in 1983, you can see why I am not terribly impressed with news that we have this revolutionary, new biofuel pump serving E10.
   Little compares with our having a 20-plus-year lead on the rest of the world with LPG and CNG, something this country fails to acknowledge time and time again. Probably to cover up its own inadequacies and lack of vision.
   E10, phooey. Sure it’s a step in the right direction, but such a little step compared to the advances we were making against OPEC in the late 1970s. We should be crying about how our lead and knowledge have been flushed down the toilet, and how no one other than regular citizens gives a toss.