Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.
Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.
Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.
Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.
Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.
More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.
Pink Floyd released their seminal album The Dark Side of The Moon in 1973. The album went on to be very influential in the decades to come. I first heard of the album in primary school, Mr Garrett talked about seeing Pink Floyd perform The Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley. I am not sure if he actually went to the concert or saw the film of it.
He was considered our coolest teacher with tales of swimming across the Suez Canal and having a dark green down belay jacket as a winter coat. This was before technical wear became mainstream.
Anyway back to The Dark Side of the Moon. It influenced so many different genres of music and subcultures. It was a popular soundtrack for relaxing at home and beloved even my the mod revivalists that I knew.
The reality was the the psychedelic aspects of the 1960s and 1970s had large scale youth appeal well into the late 1990s.
The voice recordings and ambient noise influenced sampling culture, though Pink Floyd wasn’t always happy about it. The alarm clock sound on Time was sampled by The Prodigy and Bomb The Bass were declined permission to use a sample from Money on a track dropped from their second album Unknown Territory.
Ambient rooms in clubs would see The Dark Side of the Moon and later Wish You Were Here albums played regularly. To celebrate the 50th anniversary, Pink Floyd launched an animation competition.
Generative AI was one of the go to techniques that artists went to in order to match the cosmic nature of the music. Some of the videos are beautiful to watch.
Concern about Christian Japanese
Fervent religious belief in Japan has led to two tragedies in modern Japan. The assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe associated with anger at the Unification church and the Tokyo subway attack with Sarin in 1995 by the Aum Shinrikyo sect.
Devout Christians are a small but visible community in Japan and many Japanese are uncomfortable around them due to these incidents. This leads to children becoming socially isolated in school and friends pulling away in adult life.
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) get a documentary that highlights the importance to popular music production.
Condor
Condor was British Railways attempt at containerisation, before the popularity of intermodal containerisation. It makes interesting viewing. It would be great if the UK and Ireland could take a similarly enlightened approach to integrated logistics now.
SKYN Japan
Skyn presents undressing softness – the latest brand film and campaign was released in Japan for Valentine’s Day. I was struck by how it about brings out empathy. The performing couples are nervous. They didn’t know what they’ll be asked to do next and they have to do it in public. This becomes even more obivous for the thousands who saw the film on an OOH digital billboard at Shibuya station. It comes across more sweet and loving, than erotic or sexual, which is different for the category.
Whiskas
Whiskas finding the purr in every cat is a really interesting and smart proposition. I love the way AMV BBDO did the creative around this proposition.
The idea of forbidden movies for me started as a child. There were certain things that I wasn’t allowed to watch. It was a big deal when I was allowed to stay up late on a Saturday night and watch Starsky & Hutch.
But movies that appeared later, were never open to me. So that created an aura of mystery and intrigue around these forbidden movies.
A cinema trip was something that I did maybe a dozen times prior to me turning 16, so television was my sole access to film full stop. Video shops came along a bit later.
Television used to feature movie trailers as part of commercial advertising. Judicious editing of footage into the trailer made ropey films like Hangar 18 seem much more attractive than they actually were. As an adult I can say that Darren McGavin and Robert Vaughn were wasted in the film. But it was a tough time for Hollywood and they needed to take what work they could get.
Being in school
In primary school and the beginning of secondary school there was a lot of bravado about who had seen what films. Death Race 2000 was a popular film to name drop because of its transgressive nature.
In reality the film was a Roger Corman produced black comedy that sparked their imagination. But the reality was a mix of imagination and third hand accounts from older family relatives made up the schoolyard mythology of Death Race 2000 and other forbidden movies.
Video tape
I had friends who went to art school and got tapes through them. For instance this interview by Geraldo Rivera with death row inmate Charles Manson together with a copy of Cannibal Ferox – an Italian exploitation film banned in the UK under the Obscene Publications act. Neither was ever screened on British TV.
The first time that I watched A Clockwork Orange was on a tape too. Stanley Kubrick asked for distributors Warner Brothers to remove A Clockwork Orange from UK circulation once it had run its corse at the cinema. The reason was media hysteria had built up around the film and alleged copycat crimes perpetrated. After Kubrick died, Warner Brothers put the film back into circulation and I got to see it in the cinema and own my own copy.
Although I had seen these films, I had watched them on noisy recordings, so it was like being at a drive through in the middle of a blizzard. But these under the counter copies only magnified the myth around these and other forbidden movies. The 051 art cinema in Liverpool and Moviedrome series on BBC did a lot to widen my film consumption and media literacy.
Exploitation cinema
Forbidden movies generally fell into one form of exploitation film genres. These were films that rode a current trend, were niche genres or had transgressive content of one sort or another. Out of exploitation films came the modern porn industry, spaghetti westerns, horror films, sci-fi and fantasy genre, blaxploitation films, LGBTQ cinema and the popularity of martial arts films in the west. They were typically shown in what were known as grind house cinemas in the US. These were cinemas that charged low prices and continually screened films one after the other.
Some film production companies such as Roger Corman’s New World Cinema and Cannon Pictures specialised in exploitation films. By the time home video and the video rental business came along there was a good body of content to draw from globally. For some reason Italy was a major source of content due to extensive experience dubbing into multiple languages. Italian films were also very transgressive to draw audiences in.
Content that was created to fuel cinema viewers landed on the small screen thanks to consumer video recorders. There was a single video standard (after Video 2000 and Betamax were outlicenced by VHS). At first VHS viewing was treated as something personal to the household. But eventually the law intervened.
On the childhood street were I lived until secondary school, there was a family who ran video rental shops and made hardcore pornography in a studio above one of the stores. Their films apparently starred several of our neighbours. They were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act and the father did prison time for it.
The media and government started to take a second look at exploitation genre films that had managed to get a release to video. A pressure group got the government to create a list of 72 films thought to be in contravention of the Obscene Publications Act and then brought in the The Video Recordings Act 1984 which required all films to get a classification as if it was going to be released for cinema display. Included on the list of 72 forbidden movies were works by Wes Craven, Sam Raimi and Dario Argento – all of whom have made a major impact on the history of the cinema and the art of film-making.
Exploitation films live on through its influence on mainstream film makers such as Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino and Roger Rodriguez. The modern equivalents of the exploitation production houses would be the likes of The Asylum who produce a lot of direct to Amazon Prime level films.
Mondo films to shockumentaries
Mondo films were pioneered in the 1960s by a duo of Italian directors: Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi. Jet travel had opened up the world, but long haul travel was only available to a privileged elite. Far flung parts of the world were largely a mystery to each other. Secondly, the world in a process of decolonisation. Jacopetti and Prosperi’s films showed that a documentary could be profitable at the cinema and could entertain. They weren’t without controversy.
They also inspired other directors to put together clips of salacious content as documentaries. The most famous of which was Faces of Death and its subsequent four sequels. The most controversial footage in Faces of Death was faked.
Found Footage
Found footage has been used as a cinema trope recently with the likes of the Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. But it started as a device in cinema with the release of Italian film Cannibal Holocaust which features on the UK list of 72 forbidden movies.
Moral panic
Moral panic accelerated by the tabloid press fuelled a lot of what happened in the UK film industry right through to the 1990s and beyond. The backlash against video nasties in the 1980s matched the backlash against Child’s Play 3 in 1993 when allegations were made that Jamie Bulger‘s killers were inspired by the film. That moral panic also came out again when one of them reoffended. Nowadays the panic is more focused on the internet.
The documented life
While film cameras were available in the pre-war period, much less people had access to their own film development lab. So ‘stag reels’ were able to be shot, but these were either personal films of the very rich, an inside film industry endeavour or involved organised crime.
The rise of home video in the 1980s changed things dramatically. The family that I mentioned early on who set up the pornographic film studio started with a video camera and recorder combo unit that they originally bought for filming weddings.
By 1984 the JVC GRC-1 camcorder provided consumers with a TV studio in a easily portable unit using VHS-C cassettes allowing for recording and immediate playback. Consumers started bringing these camcorders everywhere.
It reduced the cost of film making sparking an explosion in film making for local audiences from Nigeria to the Philippines.
The camcorder allowed things to be filmed that wasn’t previously possible, including every conceivable form of pornography that you could think of including ‘point of view’ or gonzo content. Accidents could be captured fuelling more series like Faces of Death.
Internet of everything
The internet opened up new opportunities for sales and viewership that non-authoritarian governments haven’t really controlled. If you have forbidden movies in one country, it could be available to watch or on DVD or Blu-Ray in another which saw a boom and then massive disruption in the media industry and made a mockery of banned or forbidden movies.
Smartphones
If the JVC GRC-1 pioneered the home TV studio, the smartphone mainstreamed the concept and online video platforms provided the broadcast infrastructure. Judicious use of a search engine allows you quickly to find content that exceeds anything shown on the video nasty list of forbidden movies. And it’s real from the war zones of the Middle East to the latest combat footage from Ukraine.
Chinese New Year or CNY 2023 in online shorthand meant that for many people through Asia and beyond we are now in the year of the rabbit. You may see CNY 2023 also called lunar new year or ‘spring festival’. This post is later than I usually do for Chinese New Year, but that delay allowed me to watch more adverts so that you didn’t have to.
Traits of Chinese New Year
The rabbit is one of 12 signs in the Chinese zodiac. During the festival a number of things happen:
Family members try to gather and visit wider family members. In mainland China, this triggers the world’s largest internal migration of people over a three week period. An article by Bloomberg estimated that mainland Chinese people will have made more than 520 million trips within the country by road, rail, water or air in the first 13 days of the new year
People stay up late together, this apparently helps to give longevity to your parents
There is a corresponding rise in food purchases, alcohol and other ancillary items. Depending where you are families may make dumplings together or toss bowls of noodles together in order to gain good fortune and prosperity
There is a tradition of buying new clothes. In Hong Kong, going to sleep in (new) red underwear is believed to give good luck. Having a red theme to clothes is supposed to help bring good fortune
Money. Money in currency and gold is gifted in red envelopes. Companies will pay their employees a lunar new year bonus, usually equivalent to one pay packet (a weeks wages, or a month’s salary was the norm in Hong Kong.) Bosses also give their employees a red envelope from their personal pocket.
There are media events. So in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia there is usually a ‘Chinese New Year’ song specially composed. Special films that are suitable for all age groups do well in the cinema such as Hong Kong’s ‘All’s Well that ends well’ series of movies
Consequently, from an advertising perspective this can be equivalent to Super Bowl Sunday in the United States or the Christmas season in the UK when brands drop their tent pole ad creative.
Ad dynamics
In general, the best adverts seem to come from Malaysia and Singapore rather than Hong Kong or China and CNY 2023 is no exception. Businesses that lean in particularly heavy to CNY 2023 advertising include telecoms companies, banks and financial services and health companies. Some FMCG brands also get involved, but that seems to be more sporadic in nature. Finally in CNY 2023, some sectors like airlines have more customers than they do available seats so there doesn’t seem to be a campaign by the likes of Cathay Pacific this year.
China
Apple
Apple puts on a film that showcases Chinese opera and tells an individual tale of persistence as part of its shot on an iPhone series of films.
https://youtu.be/HjHG5kzi85o
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola features a touching story about a family of rabbits celebrating lunar new year. I can’t embed here because Coca-Cola China seems to be using all YouTube’s copyright tools for some reason.
It apparently says:
Time will change, traditions will change, and the expectation of reunion will never change. A bowl of handmade dumplings evokes the taste of the New Year in memory. A can of Coca-Cola can fully release the beauty of reunion. The first words of reunion in everyone’s mouth are Coca-Cola® Cheers! Regardless of whether the dishes on the table this year are classic dishes or trendy New Year dishes, as long as they are paired with “Coca-Cola”, the magic of delicious food can be opened, and the whole family can welcome the new and beautiful “rabbit-morrow” together!
Translation by Hakumi Chan
Gucci
China is opening up and Gucci wants to get its share of revenge spending. Hence a lavish short film to celebrate the year of the Rabbit (and a platinum UnionPay card to buy it with).
Hong Kong
Asahi Dry
Japanese lager Asahi Super Dry put together this ad with surprising production values compared to other efforts in the market.
Malaysia
Bing Chilling
Bing Chilling is a local ice cream brand. It has an ear worm of a Chinese New Year song and manages to make the product fit naturally into the film – which is no mean feat.
https://youtu.be/vB633cGTP70
Khazanah Nasional
Khazanah Nasional Berhad (“Khazanah”) is the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia. The film about a ‘leap of fortune’ is an apropos theme to the brand.
KitKat
To celebrate KitKat pink ice cream Nestle’s ice cream marketers commissioned an advert that put together a catchy song and campy outfitted young people to create CNY 2023 perfection.
Listerine
Listerine mouthwash captures the tension of a family photo orchestrated by a demanding Auntie.
Magnum
Magnum is a mobile gaming app, as a brand think of it as a Malaysian analogue to Foxy Bingo.
Mercedes Benz
Pure product porn with a flimsy plot line of a reunion for Chinese New Year.
Pepsi
Pepsi focuses on nostalgia with a slice of romance in its advert.
A second Pepsi film encourages consumers to finish their canned drinks rather than having multiple cans partly used – a common problem during lunar new year gatherings. Creatively, you can see the influence of Hong Kong television programmes on wider asian culture to this day.
Taylor’s University
Malaysia’s system which games access to public education to the benefit of the Malay ethnic group has fuelled demand for private universities at home and abroad. Taylor’s University is a private university based in Selangor. This seven minute film comes across as your usual tearjerker, but has a couple of twists in the plot to keep you guessing.
TuneTalk
Malaysian pre-paid mobile carrier TuneTalk focused on how broken friendships and relationships are healed as part of the process of coming together through CNY 2023. Alex and Cindy will be reunited!
Watsons
Hong Kong headquartered pharmacy retail chain wishes you a Happy Beautiful New Year for CNY 2023.
Singapore’s incumbent telecoms company brings back the rival, but related Ang and Huang families for their fourth outing in their annual series Chinese New Year advertisements.
Tiger beer
Singapore’s Tiger beer did this advert for its home market. It also did experiential activities that tied into the advert too. The agency who did it is called Le PUB – nominative determinism in action.
Wider diaspora
HSBC Canada (in partnership with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco)
The case study speaks for itself and I can understand why it appeals to well heeled Vancouver residents who call Hong Kong home.
McDonalds US x Karen X Cheng
The US arm of McDonalds partnered with Karen X Cheng to create augmented reality based CNY 2023 with a QRcode type glyph on food packaging at participating restaurants.
The Patagonia vest recession was a phrase that I first heard touted by Scott Galloway to encapsulate the economy in 2022. In most recessions, the first sectors to go under are construction, retailing and manufacturing – blue and pink collar working class people suffer the blunt of lay-offs and site closures due to recession.
The kind of vest thought of when one talks about a Patagonia vest recession. It is called a Better Sweater vest and was popular with media firms, technology companies and investment banks as employee schwag.
recession, in economics, a downward trend in the business cycle characterized by a decline in production and employment, which in turn causes the incomes and spending of households to decline.
A recession generally isn’t felt uniformly across the economy. It doesn’t affect all households. In the past, the middle class might be affected but not as severely affected as working class people. My Dad had managed to move off the shop floor and into an office job in the shipyard as a planner. He was made redundant because he worked in heavy industry and he was in a minority compared to the thousands of other blue collar workers let go.
Not all businesses experience actual declines in income, for instance accountancy firms, business consultancies and change management firms may find a high demand for their services. However, there is a general expectation about the future being less certain during a recession. This causes businesses to delay making large purchases or investments and possibly look to reduce costs to conserve cash.
In recessions, the output decline can be traced to a reduction in purchases of durable household goods such as computers and washing machines by consumers. This drives a corresponding decline in corporate purchases of machinery and other equipment.
If the companies aren’t already running ‘just-in-time’ there reduction in additions of goods to stocks or inventories. Where ‘just-in-time’ is in place, the client reduces their forecast demand to their supply chain driving a similar effect. The greatest effect is likely on inventory; businesses stop adding to their existing inventories and become more willing to draw on them to fill production orders. Inventory declines thus have a double impact on production volume as it filters through the supply chain like a Mexican wave.
So what happened?
But the Patagonia vest recession was different. A number of things happened:
Technology stocks and start-ups had been swept up in a decade of irrational exuberance in terms of business values
Funding suddenly declined for startups. This was partly due to interest rates and a realisation that crypto-currencies weren’t worth what many investors had assumed. This led to a raft of redundancies
Crypto companies started falling one after the other. Prominent exchange FTX and related investment fund Alameda Research go under with allegations of fraud. Their rival Binance is ensnared in legal issues too
Cloud software firms suddenly find that their pay-as-you-go model can result in sharp cash flow declines which affect their profits
Big technology companies had staffed up to meet the COVID-19 related demand, found themselves with an employee overhang. This particularly affected e-tailing and cloud services business. They cut back on staff as they release poor financial results. BUT, the amount of people cut as a percentage was still below the proportion of head count Microsoft would have let go back when it practiced stack ranking. The mainstream media focus on the big numbers rather than the small overall proportion of lay-offs. Secondly those getting made redundant are finding it a reasonable market to get work outside the technology sector
Activist investors object to what they consider to be more indulgent projects like Meta’s deep investment in the future metaverse, which is a very long term bet
Meanwhile, services and manufacturing industry kept ramping up to meet supply-chain related challenges and meet latent demand. But had problems getting staff. You have restaurants that open up limited hours due to their problems hiring. Manufacturing businesses have been hoarding staff, because they know how hard it is for them to recruit
Inflation in the US is starting to come under control as supply chains started to balance out
Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that the Patagonia vest recession won’t bleed on to Main Street, but at the start it looked very different.
The Patagonia vest boom prior to the Patagonia vest recession
To the general public, awareness of the Patagonia vest as an emblematic garment of class came from the press photos taken at the Sun Valley conference hosted by private investment firm Allen & Co. which built up a bit of a reputation in terms of ‘speed dating’ for mergers and acquisitions deals. Media titans like the Murdoch family met Silicon Valley CEOs and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Telecommunications was represented primarily through the cable TV company executives who attended.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos decided to buy the Washington Post when he was at Sun Valley. It was also where the Time Warner | AOL merger was cooked up.
Cameras aren’t allowed inside the conference which operates in a Chatham House-style arrangement. So press photographers could only take pictures when people were arriving or leaving the conference centre. Sun Valley sat at the nexus of a media and technology sector boom over almost two decades. The bulk of the media photos showed people walking cropped at the knees or their grotch, which focused readers attention on the tops that they were wearing. And a uniform emerged to the general public. The uniform was the Patagonia vest to deal with the cool early morning and early evenings of Sun Valley. These vests were given out some years by Allen & Co.; but the Patagonia vest has extended itself far beyond Sun Valley.
It became such a cultural touchstone that the Sun Valley conference complete with vests was lampooned in a story arch of Succession.
From working with dot com clients to when I worked at Yahoo!, Silicon Valley fashion was bifurcated in nature. The reality of Silicon Valley couture is that many people wore a t-shirt jeans and layers like hoodies. Footwear would vary somewhere between sneakers and trekking sandals.
But the ‘MBA class’ of professional managers tended to wear collared shirts, ‘smart’ jeans or chinos. They may have worn a sleeveless pullover or fleece vest. Their venture capital counterparts who where probably their MBA class colleagues wore a similar uniform, with a bit more of lean towards Ralph Lauren country club friendly shirts or polo shirts.
Corporate branded wear started with bags. I had my share of corporate branded Timbuk 2 bags. Different engineering projects would have celebratory t-shirts for things like hack days. Eventually we started to see branded corporate wear, from the cringeworthy chambray or scratchy polo shirts issued to booth staff at an exhibition to hoodies and fleeces. I knew engineers who bragged about being dressed almost head to toe (sweatshirt material top, t-shirt, boxers and socks) in schwag that they had picked up for free as an anti-fashion statement.
You can see these dual styles in the TV show Silicon Valley. Coming from a creative agency background, I felt more at home in the hoodie wearing crowd.
Secondly, there was a cargo cult amongst try-hards in the early to mid-2000s there was a move towards turtle necks with Silicon Valley types looking suspiciously like architects as they tried to ape Steve Jobs. There has been a similar buzz has surrounded Allbirds sports shoes
The finance sector had its own transformation. Early dot com era west coast-based tech focused investment bank financiers such as Frank Quattrone mirrored the east coast convention of the tailored business suit, usually in grey with a conservative tie and pocket square. This would be paired with a set of brown shoes, usually loafers. You could buy the look at Armani, Barneys or Brooks Brothers depending on your budget.
The 2008 Great Recession hit the finance centre like a shockwave. There was a need to dress down. A few things drove this:
An Armani suit is an obvious target when you have Occupy Wall Street camped outside your place of work
Wall Street had to modernise and attract new types of talent and competed against tech firms
The need to mirror the look of the hedge funds and technology companies that investment bankers wanted to do business with. They already stood out with their east coast vibe, the outfits communicated that ‘actually we’re just like you’ with varying degrees of success
The look has morphed into a relaxed yet sophisticated uniform that drew on preppyness, or the Ivy League look and the country club vibe evoked by Silicon Valley VCs. This resulted in a grey or navy fleece vest paired with a button-down, chino pants, and maybe even leather sneakers. It fitted in with weekend wear in more high class neighbourhoods and didn’t scream privilege in the same way that traditional Wall Street did.
However this became a power validation all of its own, dubbed the “Midtown Uniform” by many for its popularity throughout Midtown Manhattan as the business casual look rolled across the cultural wallpaper of Wall Street.
Expired?
Patagonia haven’t enjoyed their vests being the punchline of a joke. They are a mission led company that looks to be sustainable and environmentally friendly. They’ve been described as the conscience of the outdoor industry. Patagonia doesn’t want its products sold on Amazon, not because it’s luxurious and exclusive. But because Patagonia believes that Amazon encourages thoughtless consumption and is bad for the environment. Being seen as the uniform of the privileged didn’t go down well. So in April 2019, Patagonia announced that it wouldn’t provided corporate branded clothing to financial institutions or fintech companies, preferring to focus on mission-led environmental businesses instead. Given its iconic status within these sectors, the news was given the kind of coverage that would usually be reserved for an uncharacteristically large drop in the S&P 500 index.
The case against fintech businesses is down to their rapidly expanding energy footprint, which I have covered in depth elsewhere.
While a clear successor to the Patagonia vest hasn’t become apparent yet, there are brands looking to take their crown such as
Cotopaxi – who are environmentally friendly, but also corporate friendly
North Face – have been doing some interesting work in more environmentally friendly materials and already well known in the corporate branding space
SCOTTeVest – famous for being traveller-friendly. It comes with routing for your headphone cables, a plethora of pockets and charging wires. Their CEO called the Patagonia stance PR BS
Grandfathered in
Secondly, Patagonia decided that it wouldn’t leave long term customers in the lurch, which probably means that your favourite investment bank or big tech firm is safe from the customer purge.
According to Corley Kenna, senior director of global communications at Patagonia, customers and the press had inquired as to “whether we’re leaving ‘bros out in the cold.’” Kenna confirmed again that long-term customers would be grandfathered in.
And those left in the economic cold can still enjoy a Patagonia vest recession. I am thankful that it wasn’t called the Carhartt or Chore coat recession signalling a creative class layoff-led recession.
Periscope films have managed to digitise a treasure trove of content. Back when I worked in an oil company I had to read around to learn how an oil refinery works a macro-level. I wish that I had seen this film How an oil refinery works put together by Shell for an American audience some time in the 1950s.
How an oil refinery works gives you a good understanding of fractional distillation, vacuum distillation and catalytic or ‘cat’ cracking. The three of which still are at the core processes at an oil refinery today. There are additional ancillary steps that happen depending on the oil make up such as desulphurisation or sulphur removal including removal of sulphurous compounds called mercaptans and removal of nitrogen impurities.
The experience of watching How an oil refinery works is far different to reading Modern Petroleum Technology by the Institute of Petroleum, or even this article on Encyclopaedia Britannica – which would have been my first go-to port of call at my local library back then. More on materials related topics here.
Porsche 935 K3 or what my dreams as a 10 year old looked like
As a child my bedroom wall was dominated by a world map from the early 1970s given out by the shipping line Lambert Brothers to a friend of the family who was a dentist who had a side line in cargo brokering at one time. The rest of my wall was given over to Ferrari and Porsche posters. Dominant among which was the Porsche 935. At the time, you could write to companies, claim you were doing a school project and they would send you back a press pack stuffed with black and white print photos. I even had a Burago model car of the same livery as this.
If my parents have kept hold of all this stuff, it would be a worth a small fortune on eBay, but I suspect it all got thrown out over time.
This video is the stuff that my dreams were made of.
Steve Hsu interviewing Dominic Cummings
I have a lot of time for American Taiwanese physicist Steve Hsu, so its surreal hearing him interview Domnic Cummings in his podcast. There is a less bombastic Cummings on show.
Takuya Nakamura
This week I listened to Takuya Nakamura’s set on The Lot Radio
