The other week my YouTube feed proposed a channel of intriguing title: Beard meets food. I am not sure why this was presented to me, but because I deliberately turn off Google’s surveillance systems (insofar as I can), Google’s algorithms keep coming up with a default potpourri of wildly irrelevant offerings. This was one of … More How to eat a burger bigger than your head in one sitting
Between about 1250 and 1150 BCE an essentially ‘globalised’ and multi-national civilisation based around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed into ruin. The collapse was violent, relatively swift, and marked the effective end not just of the age in which bronze was the primary alloy, but of multiple nations including the Hittite Empire, Mycenaean Greece, Kassite-era Babylonia, … More The late Bronze Age collapse and our future
In recent months I’ve found myself pulling up in traffic queues to find the car suddenly filled with low-frequency thumping of the kind I’d normally associate with a failed big-end bearing. Every time it’s been the car ahead of me, which has its stereo blasting away for the benefit of everybody in a wide radius. … More Car stereo systems and gorilla chest thumping
Something I’ve noticed online of late is the number of people who believe they are experts in fields in which they’re manifestly not qualified. The ones I’ve run into clearly believe themselves to ‘know more’ even than those qualified and professionally working in that territory. On my experience of them, such people don’t want to … More The problem with self-appointed online experts
This week’s events reveal something disturbing about our society. When some guy slapping another at the Oscars makes more headlines than the war in Ukraine and all the other troubles of the world, I have to wonder what’s going on. To an extent it’s predictable. The entertainment industry is a big business like any other, … More Something wrong with society’s priorities
The occupation of New Zealand’s Parliament grounds by a disparate group of protesters – ostensibly over the Covid mandates, but representing a multitude of causes and apparently without a single organiser – follows similar occupations in Canada and elsewhere. It’s a disturbing development. Protests usually focus on an issue. They are usually led and organised … More New Zealand’s parliamentary protest and the lessons of 1848 Europe
Back in January 2021 I published a rather gloomy post speculating that the year would be worse for the world than 2020. It was. By the end of 2021, New Zealand – which had escaped the pandemic until then – was amidst a Delta outbreak and struggling to keep Omicron out. The science was underscored … More And so 2022 backs into view, complete with butt-trumpet
Something that annoys me about household cleaning products is that they’re often not labelled ‘cleaners’. It’s usually ‘cleanser’. A one-letter difference that carries a world of advantage for sales. Though to my mind it shouldn’t. My problem is that ‘cleansing’ is also used as a euphemism for genocide. You know – ‘ethnic cleansing’. One of … More Household cleaning products and their annoyances
I worked for many years in corporate communications. The organisation ran on buzzwords. They were amazing ways to get ahead. All you had to do was invoke them and you were in. When I joined, the buzzword was ‘budgeting’. Everything had to be budgeted, meaning properly planned and costed ahead of time. However, most of … More How to get ahead with buzzwords
It’s 52 years this week since the first moon landing. For all the politics shrouding Apollo, it captured a dream: the idea that humanity could – if it wanted – conquer any challenge, no matter how difficult. And, back in the 1960s, that moon landing was really difficult. That dream faltered, but now there’s a … More Remembering the dream in the age of a billionaire space race
Matthew Wright 
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