5 posts tagged “switzerland”

[Cross-posted at Lucire] General Motors intends to overtake the Toyota Prius with its Chevrolet Volt—a vehicle that is an electric car first, with a petrol engine that only kicks in when extended range is needed. (The Prius, in layman’s terms, works the other way round, with a hybrid engine assisting the petrol one—though around town, the Prius tries to work on electricity only.) Sensibly, in these tough times, GM will sell the Volt as an Opel in Europe, a Vauxhall in the UK and a Holden in Australasia, and unveiled the Opel-badged version in Genève this week.
   Lucire TV will have more Salon de Genève footage, but for starters we feature Alain Visser, Chief Marketing Officer, General Motors of Europe launching the Opel Ampera, and talking about GM’s focus on electrifying the automobile. Other shots are of the Ampera, including its interior, filling up, and information on its propulsion system.
   It’s finally beginning to feel like the 21st century, rather than a hangover of the 20th.

[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.

To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
   Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
   This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
   But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
   The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
   I would rather hope that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.

   I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
   It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
   Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
   On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
   And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
   All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
   That’s really why I got into media.
   If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.

Fifth school shooting in a week? Astrologers do say that US school shootings do happen more often during Mercury retrograde, which we are in now.
   I imagine that there are some out there who feel isolated, unloved and pressured by society, a society that has gone off the rails from their perspective.
   The sort of society that sees, for instance, the whole Code Pink mess happen in front of its own eyes. Or corrupt politicians who have no understanding of the rule of law. Or a decline in values, Christian or otherwise, in most of the western world.
   This is nothing to do with weapons and the Second Amendment. I keep pointing out that the Swiss are far more armed than the Americans per capita, enough guns for every man, woman and child. And you do not hear of Swiss kids going to their schools and blowing other kids away.
   It tells you that there is something wrong with the environment these people are in. You can use the same argument to explain why some countries have more of one race in prison than another. There’s a disharmony, a hopelessness, for some, for which the only way out is to make a statement by taking others’ lives—and their own.

The titles to Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed are a great example of the late Maurice Binder’s 1970s’ work. This spy film, with music by John Barry and starring Julie Andrews (the real-life Mrs Blake Edwards) and Omar Sharif, is little known and one of the very few times Edwards did not collaborate with composer Henry Mancini. The visuals and the theme work beautifully and Binder shows his preference by this time for Swiss typography (the use of Helvetica for one). In the past I had shown some 1960s’ Binder work, but I think there’s still a lot of modernist beauty to this 1974 film’s opening.

Top Gear used to take the Geneva Motor Show pretty seriously, but with the new format, it hasn’t. No longer do we see Jeremy, Quentin, Michelle, Tiff and Steve fly to Switzerland. Still, it sent reps from the print edition to Genève to check out the cars, but we wound up with two so-so videos on YouTube.

   Car magazine did a better job, and TV isn’t even its forte. This 10-minute video is more informative than the laddie ones and reminds me of the earlier heyday of Top Gear.