Cycling Vintage Postcards - Gino Bartali with Giordani Bike

Another in my postcard collection from that trip to the Giro d'Italia in the 1990s.

The rivalry between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi is well documented on Wikipedia, so I won't attempt to add to the existing catalog of observation and opinion on the subject. Gino was a legend in his own right, even without the rivalry that stopped a nation.

Personally blessed by 3 popes, and known as Gino the Pious, he died at the grand age of 85 in 2000 after open heart surgery .

Like all postcards, I struggle to guess if it's a fake or real. Finding it in an Italian flea-market in 1994 gives me some confidence it's not a digital print, as technology was not that great then. Nor had the internet made a global market for cycling memorabilia.

I found one the same recently on eBay in Italy for 15 euros that looks pretty similar, though the signature has some interesting variations and the picture has a pure black and white treatment where mine has a blue tone. You decide which is real!

International differences - getting a job in America

The startup I went to work for in the USA, now rolled up into a company called PreVisor, was in the serious business of selecting employees for Fortune 500 companies of all kinds.

The scale of the USA employment market is massive. Walmart for example, have over a million employees, turning over at an unbelievable rate (because the job sucks!), and over 12m job applicants a year. Most apply on-line, so how do you deal with that many resumes in your in-tray?

ePredix was a genius idea, providing an online, short psychological assessment which scored in real-time a view of the suitability of the person for the job. One key was that it was legally defensible, asking job-relevant questions that truly predicted the likelihood of success in a job.

This test was what we were competing with.

If you can't read the questions, click on the picture and it will open in a new window.

And think about what you'd be prepared to say to get a $6/hr job at a Rent-A-Center branch in Arkansas.

International differences - the philosophy of Click & Clack

If you have never listened to Car Talk, then you have not lived. It is probably the #1 syndicated show on radio in the USA, and listened to by a wide variety of people - many not interested in cars at all.

Starting out as a mechanical advice show on Public Service radio, it morphed through the personalities of the Magliozzi brothers into a sociological and philosophical series of pithy observations, through the lens of a mechanic. As vehicles became less and less fixable by the average American, the show became more and more about people.

Our neighbour in Minneapolis had been on Car Talk - she was famous! You have to have an interesting car problem, which you line up weeks or months in advance, then the show calls you live on air.

Their podcasts and books are priceless - check them out on iTunes. Make sure you get to the end, where they will make up a set of phoney credits for the show.

Here's one of my favourite moments of Tom and Ray's reflections on life in the USA (and its difference to life elsewhere), in their newspaper column from July 2003.

Don't get me started on Americans and guns.

International differences - another in the series

NZ Sports Culture.

Can you tell I've just been going through some old folders from our time in the USA? Hence all the posts in this series.

This cartoon was a complete surprise to me when I opened the Minneapolis paper one day. Made me homesick.

Priceless.

International, but not worldy. The true meaning of POOF

The stated aim of this blog was to reflect on the cultural differences that sometimes trip us up when crossing international borders - you think you know what is going on, but in reality it is something quite different.

I hung onto this email from 2003 as one of the prime examples. ePredix, whom I worked for in San Francisco and Minneapolis, were part-owned by a large, successful, global consulting form Personnel Decisions International.

As Australians and kiwis we had a bit of a chuckle at this faux pas, but my time since has given me cause to wonder about the blunders we all made in reverse!

Nice save Cindy Marsh.

The Psychology of Amplifiers

I do love XKCD.

Lonely Planet Band for Christmas

The band added Robbie William's Let Me Entertain You to the Espy set and went wild again celebrating the end of 2009 in style. Once again supported by Sparkle Motion, who performed a tight version of their Espy set and showed their musicianship.

Bunch of miscellaneous photos, as always biased towards Slabotomy's #5 guitarist.




Here's a taste of the skills of Mark Broadhead shooting bands and events.