Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ - absolutely rubbish writing

Not funny. I've tried being polite and nice to Auntie about this and they can't even be bothered to respond, let alone fix their awful, amateurish writing. So I am just going to be rude about it, and hope that that annoys the fool who wrote it and the fool - perhaps the same fool? - who doesn't want to change it. That would at least give me some minor gratification.

Here we go.

There's a really lovely slideshow giving a timeline of the Shuttle here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14056002

- which features, in the first sentence of its first caption, this gem of moronic illiteracy and insensitivity:

• "The space shuttle was conceived as a concept long before man had even stepped on to the Moon."

CONCEIVED as a  CONCEPT?

CONCEIVED AS A CONCEPT?

I mean come on. What else does the person (= Year 10 Work Experience kid, presumably) who wrote this think happens to concepts? Did they actually manage the rather gifted trick of writing this without actually reading what they had written? Let's try some more excellent writing:

• "The space shuttle was conceived as a banana"
• "The space shuttle was bananaed as a concept" 

Both of these are just as good, and as meaningful, as the sentence currently in use. Moreover, they are less ugly. I recommend the BBC use more bananas.

Sheesh. Rubbish writing, Beeb: 2/10 for effort and 0/10 for your lousy manners. I diskard you.

Please don’t let the Year 10 Work Experience Kid write the press releases. Really.

A couple of corkers from the press release for the Grand Opening (yay woo) of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London.

The infamous sweeping forecourt, unique to a London hotel in its size and presence, provides a fitting entrance for the new hotel that will also showcase restored gold-leaf ceilings, ornate wall murals and the spectacular grand staircase.

The famous staircase, widely revered as the most majestic in England with windows measuring over 50 feet and crowned by an elaborate vaulted ceiling, has been featured in many films and music videos most notably Batman and the Spice Girl’s video for their debut single ‘Wannabe’.

Come on, toughen up, girls! Get out a dictionary and a grammar primer and do some not-very intensive study on one or two very easy topics. Either that, or give the work to – or at least, please please please, have it checked by – someone who actually uses English carefully. Or, y’know – just read it through before you publish it. That would be good too.

It’s been done by a professional PR company and, whilst I don’t want to sound too much like my own grandmother, it’s just plain sloppy.

I have wroted to them with my boring, smallminded, anal-retentive curmudgeonly complaints because hey, that’s the kind of relaxed dude I am. I even sent them, in the spirit of being lovely and nice, a bijou linkette. (Sadly, I was too lazy and/or narked to even try to sort out their Scary Batman And Singular Spice problem. But ho hum.) Will I, do you think, get a lovely, nice and helpful reply and some lovely and nice chocolate bunnies to thank me for my trouble? Dear Reader, watch this space.

The "Harry" construction and why it's funny (if you're me)

Harry Introducers

This blogological entity or emuārs is about the "Harry … -ers" construction, which is most familiar to me in its original form of "Harry Sliders" for a collection of slides - or indeed, more likely - a slideshow.

I said some time ago that I'd try to explain my use of this construction and, being possessed of a brain with impressively sieve-like properties (though less useful for draining pasta), immediately forgot. A kind friend reminded me that I said I'd do this, and I am happy to oblige. I only hope that after all this you think it's worth it … the mountains hath travailed and brought forth a mouse, an ting.

Harry Disclaimers

Before I really get going, a quick disclaimer. I know perfectly well that not everything I find funny seems so hysterically sidesplitting to much of the rest of society. Or perhaps all of it. I have lost track of the number of occasions on which the appalled expressions of those around me (frequently my children, yes, now you mention it) have alerted me, far too late, to the fact that whereas I thought I was, like, really flying, I was actually more, ah, in fact, er, crashing and burning. The controls are locked, we're in a deep deep nose-up stall, the escape hatch is jammed and in any case my parachute's on fire. Yikes. Chiz sa Molesworth. We're going in. Mayday mayday mayday. Launch the buoy. (Oops sorry wrong film but you get the picture.) Launch the boy. (Different film altogether, please don't distract me.)

Anyway yes, thank you, I do understand that it's not really that funny. I just like using it, it being in effect a blast from, and a mild reverence to, the past … and I suppose I am mildly addicted to it. It makes me vaguely smile, in a vaguely vague sort of way … however if you're already too irritated by all this you'd probably better go and do something more productive - your pools coupon for example - but do feel free to pop in later when Mr Thompson will serve tea and cakes by the Great Yew Hedge, weather permitting. You will be most welcome.

Harry Definers

You can add "Harry" before and "-ers" after many words. I am not sure of the rules and I seem to have mislaid the user manual, but I think it works better if you're describing an activity rather than a simple object. Thus "Harry Sliders" - the Urtext as far as I'm concerned - seems to me to be more likely to mean presenting or watching a slideshow than merely some slides, though it will extend to both. Similarly if I said, say. Harry Skaters it's probably more likely that I meant the act of going skating rather than a pair of skates. (Or any other fish. [Sorry.]) As I say I'm not really conversant with the full set of operating procedures for this construction, but I think you can apply it to a very wide range of concepts.

Harry Snaggers

Stretching the point a little my Bruvver and his Dear Wife Bless Her have pointed out that you'd run into severe problems with Harry Christophers, director of utterly superduper singing persons The Sixteen. Applying the rules strictly would of course render this talented gentleman as "Harry Harry Christophersers". This is why the rules must be rewritten, or perhaps even written, to exclude such silliness. I diskard it.

Harry Contextualizers

I think that it's meant to sound terribly upper-class, British, public-school, prep school, nannies and governesses, twittish, and so on, in a somewhat old-fashioned way. (Please be aware: if you are not familiar with the British usage, then "public school" may very well not mean, when you hear it, what it meant when I said it. Do please feel free to look it up and marvel at the rich vein of misunderstanding that we've created. In short, a BrE "public school" is very far from being public.) I'll come back to this context, which we may perhaps label "Braying Upper-class Ninnies" or BUNs, later.

Harry Explainers

As some of you know, I went to a slightly strange but interesting semi-posh school in Bristol. It was certainly not a (BrE) public school (my dears, the shame) but it was quite respectably founded under a charter from Queen Elizabeth - no, not the present one - and was a bluecoat school, and so on. I could, nay should, write rather a lot more about this place and how I ended up there, but not, you may be relieved to hear, on this occasion. I am leaving it unnamed not because I'm ashamed of it, but just to thwart lazy Googlers; this isn't a piece about the school. If you want to look it up then combining the name of the old dear who gave it its charter with the fact that such places were often, incongruously to modern ears, described as hospitals, would get you there before you can say Carr, Hartnell, Ramsey or Bird.

At the said three-letter establishment I was taught by David Perkins, one of the most gifted teachers I've ever met. Dave is the reason I speak German. If he'd been a geography teacher I daresay I'd be good at or interested in geography right now; likewise physics or maths. But German was his thing and so it became, in a pale reflection of the master, one of my things too. Don't get me wrong - there were plenty of other very good teachers at that school, as well as a couple of geniuses (and, yes, the occasional dunderhead or two). It's just that JDP stood out head and shoulders (metaphorically if not in actual physical stature, aha) among the teaching staff for me. It's all a bit odd given his massive lifelong passion for the licensed barbarism called "rugby", an activity I put much effort into avoiding, but it somehow didn't matter that I was so much at odds with him over this other hugely important aspect of his life at, er, Koo Eh Hah. He was just an utterly fantastic German teacher.

With Dave there were quite a lot of running jokes, standard procedures and so on - little things that made his lessons a bit special and made you feel like you were part of a particular group, almost a gang, because you were a student of German. It was all part of his mystique, I guess, and hence part of his magic as a teacher.

Dave seemed to spend all or most of his holidays in German-speaking countries … I suppose memory may be making me exaggerate but that's how it looked to me back then. I know it sounds obvious but this is actually very inspiring to students - he's going out there and seeing and doing the stuff you talk about in lessons, and using, as a normal everyday activity, the language that might otherwise seem to you just to be an academic subject. So what, some of you are thinking, isn't that just what language teachers do? Well, maybe, but clearly not all of them. I was taught French for some years by a nice old chap, long since redeployed to that Great Classroom in the Sky, who I swear never once gave me the impression that there was anything to the language - a culture, or some people, perhaps - beyond the O-level exam. So it's fair enough to say that for me this aspect of JDP's involvement in German was terribly important and influential.

One happy outcome of this regular visiting of German-speaking countries was that Dave came back with many, many photographs of the places he'd seen. These were in the form of 35mm slides. (Note to young people: these are oh never mind.) We then had slide shows, usually in JDP's room, so that we could be shown the wonders of where he'd been. These made a deep impression on me and established Germany and its neighbours as places I wanted to visit for myself. (I can still remember very clearly the excitement of finally getting to see, for real, the originals of JDP's slides of Cologne Cathedral or the Goldenes Dachl or the Königsee - it felt like an absolute vindication, that, whatever it had taken to get there, it was all worth it.)

These fabulous slide shows were, of course, Harry Sliders and so, of course, the origin as far as I'm concerned of the phrase.

Harry Speculators

What this explains is where I got it (JDP) and why I like it (JDP) but doesn't really clarify anything else - why did he use it, where did he get it?

My guess is that it is or was a known usage rather than an invention of Dave's. I suppose that a bit of research might help me here, but I haven't done it - so sue me. Jabnaas. If you know anything about this usage that might help, please do drop me a line.

And why, pray, did Dave Perkins like this usage? Again, I can only speculate - I'm certainly not going to bother him with trivia like this! Dave was certainly not, himself, a Braying Upper-class Ninny (or BUN, do try to keep up). Interestingly, though I've characterized the school as semi-posh, quite a few of the staff really weren't posh, or weren't in many other ways quite what you'd expect. I'm thinking for example of David Lewis, a genius of an English teacher, who was clearly and openly sceptical about the whole posh-ed thing and indeed the claims of some of us to be not too posh, or not so posh, or at least not as posh as him over there … or something. (Ah, scholarship boys and their inverted snobbery … but that's another story.) Anyway, the excellent David, with his dangerously bolshie attitudes and tendency to lead us astray, eventually moved on and when last I heard was a priest in Liverpool: education's loss was undoubtedly his flock's massive gain.

But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is merely that, in contrast with what you might perhaps expect, some of the teaching staff had a healthy sort of cynicism about this semi-posh school and its semi-posh kids and were certainly not averse to a bit of gentle p*ss-taking at times.

So, to cut an overlong story - er well, perhaps not short per se but maybe a nanometre or two less long - I think that "Harry Sliders" was JDP gently mocking us and our (and his!) rather comfortable setup there. It was gently amusing and affectionate, and a small but not wholly insignificant part of the JDP German-teaching setup. For some reason it has stuck.

Harry Summarizers

And that's pretty much the whole thing. I know it's turned into really more of a piece about a brilliant German teacher than it is about a silly little jokey usage, but there you go: that's the Harry Backgrounders. I still use it, as you have seen, and at work I still say “Harry Sliders” when we are doing slide shows, and have even done so in group emails announcing them. This meets with looks of mild bafflement but, hey, I am used to that anyway … 

Location:Stockport,United Kingdom

LCD information screens, or is it garbage?

So here I boringly am having a boring wait for an outpatient clinic at the Whitt. Did I mention that it's boring? Ah yes, good, because it is.

Hurrah! The National Health service has provided a lovely big screen to provide information and stave off boredom. Ahem, yes indeed.

On the screen are lots of adverts. These cover a range of topics - some are straight NHS information, for example smoking and depression services, infection control in hospitals, welcome to this department, and so on. Others are just ads, but with I guess the intention that they're at least potentially relevant to people sitting here bored off their skulls (did I mention the boredom?) so there are dentists, hotels, estate agents and quite a few minicab firms.

The NHS stuff is mostly well-made and coherent. The commercial stuff is more variable - some of it's good, some is poorly designed and/or illiterate.

So far so good - it's mostly not a bad service, though I note that there really are are quite a lot of screens … if you were to watch it because you were looking for a particular piece of information, you might get to wait quite a long time for it to come round. I think this limits the usefulness if the service; indeed, if you can't use it easily to find out information then why is it there? Maybe it could just be pictures of flowers and bunnies instead, if its main function is really to be wallpaper? But them you couldn't charge businesses - other perhaps than flower suppliers and bunny breeders? - to put their ads up here. Hmmmm.

Here, though, is the real showstopper. Well it's two of them, really, but they are not unrelated.

There are two menu-like bands top and bottom of the screen. They are independent of the main screen content. The top one has, prominently, the time and date, and the lower one has a short scrolling message.

The message says:

"Welcome to the department. Watch this screen to see up to date waiting times."

This is an excellent idea - indeed if I were given the choice I'd prefer some information on waiting times to more minicab adverts. And you certainly see this message plenty, as it's the only item in its own little scrolling section so it repeats every 16s or so. Sadly it doesn't seem to have got past the "excellent idea" phase as the promised waiting times never actually appear. You can watch all their lovely ads as long as you like, but you don't see any waiting times. I could do with this as it's now 35 minutes after my appointment time and still not a squeak. So, without wishing to be horrible, I do feel that this part of the service is a complete failure, as it makes a promise on which it does not deliver.

The other problem is simple, amusing and really quite pathetic. Remember the top band with the date and time in? Well, the clock is half an hour slow. If it's now 1220 then the clock claims it's 1150. Like, connected, man. That says it all, really: once we've seen that we don't really need to know much more about how this service is used and valued, because it isn't. It is mostly a waste of space, a nice little earner wearing the stolen clothing of an information system. I diskard it.

Location:The Whittington Hospital

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ - Ferry unlikely speeling

I would like to thank BBC Radio 6music for brightening my day once again, albeit in a rather minor way.

The front page currently says:

In The Joy Of 6 podcast, Matt Everitt talks to Byran Ferry about some of his influences in The First Time.

That is all. Yes, Tamsin, yes, yes, I should probably get a life. Ho hum. Tell you what, if I ever do, I’ll drop you a line and tell you how it’s going – OK?

Actually I should perhaps make it clear, having rather rudely laughed at them twice this morning, that I do absolutely love 6music. It is simply the best thing out in many ways. And yes I did listen to it before it was threatened, thank you very much. 

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ – Dr Dosh?

There was an interesting slip of the tongue this morning in a news bulletin in the Shaun Keaveny show (with Andrew Collins sitting in) on the entirely lovely BBC Radio 6music.

This news item was about the decision that Michael Jackson’s doctor, Conrad Murray, is to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter. In the bulletin I heard, however, the newsreader said, just for a moment before correcting himself, “Dr Conrad Money”. Oopsie bumbum!

Obviously not a national scandal on the level of the famous “Jeremy Hunt” thing (I understand that a radio person accidentally called him “James Hunt” – er, or something) but it did make me sit up and take notice and smirk into my cup of tea (which failed to smirk back).

Disclaimer: this blog explicitly disclaims everything it possibly can disclaim under English law. Further, it non-explicitly disclaims everything else. Then it swaps position, like the old bloke in “Geri’s Game”, and disclaims everything all over again from the opposite angle (Venn diagram available on request [small fee payable]). Further, this blogological entity is a work of amusement and/or bemusement and not to be taken seriously under English, American or even Antarctic law. Finally, the author of the blog has no money so your suing him is not going to end up with you buying a new speedboat anyway.

ISM here all week ladies and gentlemen

From an Incorporated Society of Musicians online petition about instruments on planes:

Have you had any difficulties when travelling with a musical instrument? If you have, please tell us about your case.

Boom boom!

Egg security - also available in English

This is from Egg's home page for Payment Verification. I don't think I can give you a direct link as they use session-aware URLs. Anyway, the page begins:

Like many other banks, payment verification is an extra security measure we're introducing to help prevent unauthorised transactions on your account.

I always think it's a good idea to proofread these things, or, even better, ask someone else to do so. Your mileage may vary, though. 

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ – no teeth or claws?

This may just be something odd about my always-tenuous grasp of language, so if you are not interested or amused please do move along swiftly and leave me giggling alone here. I'll be fine, really.

I very much like this current BBC News headline:

• Montana woman fights bear with courgette

This alone has pretty much made my day. I sit here, I read it, then I read it again, and again, and it just kind of effortlessly flips back and forth between the two meanings like one of those trick postcards, or a Magic Eye picture or something. And, I must be truthful, I cannot see how it is easily fixed in a short headline, or perhaps at all, so I am (typically) laughing but not helping. Tsk.

The thing, however, which has propelled me right out over the edge and is currently giving me mild breathing difficulties is the line that they've used to link to that story from the News front page:

• Woman repels bear armed only with a courgette

For some reason - and I could not, for a large sum of money or even for some nice yoghurt, tell you why - this removes, for me anyway, all ambiguity and makes it absolutely clear that it is the bear, not the woman, who had the courgette. I can only guess that it was worded carefully to have the opposite effect, but it has triggered something in my tiny, weary brain and it's almost making me cry, and I need to go and have a nice cup of tea and a lie down. Marvellous marvellous stuff.

More on Attlee and how to spell him correctly if you are, erm, 10 Downing Street

It has been pointed out to me by a delicate but usually reliable source that it may be construed as unhelpful to moan at 10 Downing Street (about their continued inability to purge the embarrassing misspelling “Atlee” from their webbity website) without actually explaining just what the current, ah, ishoos are.

I’m not sure about this (is it really a bit too spoon-feedy?) but the delicate but usually reliable source is someone I hate to argue with (and I never win) and maybe it will be useful or amusing or something, so here goes:

1. Parliamentary statement on Trident (4 December 2006) at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page10532 – last paragraph contains “the Atlee Government” as illustrated above. Doh! indeed, Tamsin.
2. History Audio at http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/prime-ministers-in-history/history-audio – under the header “Welcoming the United Nations”, the Attlee graphic has a bad filename and bad alt text too – two instances of “Atlee”. The bad spelling is not visible on the main page, but still needs fixed.
3. Clement Attlee (in Welsh) at http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/welsh-history/welsh-pms-in-history/clement-attlee – main photo at the page top. Unsurprisingly it has the same problems as the page mentioned above – the graphic has a bad filename and bad alt text.
4. Syr Winston Churchill (in Welsh) at http://www.number10.gov.uk/history-and-tour/welsh-history/welsh-pms-in-history/winston-churchill – visible on the page, under the second-to-last subhead “Y Prif Weinidog nesaf” we have this: “Clement Richard Atlee 1945-51 Llafur.” I’m like no way man.
5. Italian Attlee at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page12769 – same problems as the second and third examples above – bad filename and bad alt text for the graphic.

These were found on a quick Google search but I am sure that if you worked there you could do better than this when you were on a search-and-destroy mission for “Atlee”. Also please note that this Google search finds a couple of instances which no longer have the problem, so presumably the pages were corrected after the last time Google indexed them.  These are “Spanish Attlee” and the main Attlee page in Prime Ministers in History – so that’s good, and well done No. 10 because these are fixed already – hurrah!

And that concludes the voting of the Belgian jury.

Open letter to the web managers at 10 Downing Street

Hey guys,

Here’s a suggestion.

Learn to spell “Attlee”.

Come on, it’s not rocket science. Make a big notice and put it on the office wall or something. Make the next person to misspell it buy doughnuts for the whole office. Work out a strategy for checking and correcting (ermmm, quality control anyone?). Just do something.

Having it still spelt wrongly now is, frankly, pathetic and shameful. He’s been dead since 1967 – it’s not some novel new name of whoever won X Factor last week! I mean, dammit, I’ve been writing to you about it for years. You haven’t really taken any notice, and I must, sadly, conclude that you’re a bit incompetent. Is that unfair? If so, I’m sorry, and do please explain how so.

Here are a few Handy Hints on getting it right:

1. Do a site search for the spelling “Atlee”. Use Google, use your own web software, whatever. If you don’t know how to do this, please write for instructions (and send money).
2. Search again, more carefully, because, to be honest, you’re not very good at this, are you?
3. Have another go. This time check source code, look at the names of graphics, check in your alt text. Check carefully.
4. I know it’s pretty tough but you’re 10 Downing Street, you can do this.
5. Do it again and again until it is impossible for me or anyone else to find Attlee spelt incorrectly anywhere, in no matter how obscure and trivial a place, on your site. Don't guess that you might have done it right: know that you have.
   
6. Hurrah! You’re done. Have a nice cup of tea.

There you go. Have a great day.

With best wishes

Vogel von Neustadt
Concerned Citizen

He’s a funny old chap, that G*d. (The Odeon lays it on the line.)

As I write, it is still a bit cold and snowy and icy all over the UK.

The Odeon has an interesting take on what has been going on:

“Selected cinemas have been affected by adverse weather.”

Now, I have to confess that I find this statement theologically very interesting and actually rather exciting. I do wish that a Bishop would read this blog, then maybe she could give us an authoritative comment … though non-Bishops are of course also very, very welcome.

nidbaabeth™ - a sanity-saving new concept

Oh thank goodness, a claimed neologism that doesn't turn out to mean 400 things in Danish or have been bagsied by 976 other bloggers six years before I thought I'd thought of it!

nidbaabeth™: No, I don't blog about absolutely bl**dy everything that happens!

You read it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

I shall return to this. (Please see also the FIQ. Thank you.)

I had also considered:

ntidbaabeth™: No, Tamsin, I don't blog about absolutely bl**dy everything that happens!

... but, let's be honest, it is a poor thing beside the glory that is nidbaabeth™.

Thank you for visiting. Vogel out.

Rabbi 'offered cocaine for sex'

Has there ever been a finer headline? I mean, what's missing? I suppose that something about Web 2.0 would have been nice, or maybe a mention of reality TV or sustainable energy - but even so that's pretty good going.

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™: Also submerged underwater too? (fixed)

(inarticulate howls of protest fading out into sobbing …)

Look, is it just me or is there something horribly wrong with this sentence?

A car was also submerged underwater too, he added

It comes from the Beeb’s news story Canal leak floods family's home. I mean, if that’s good writing, then is this one better?

Additionally, a car was also submerged underwater by immersion too, he added

- (three-all, yes!) and presumably this is even nicer – nicer, indeed, than bunny-wunnies:

Additionally, a car furthermore was also submerged underwater by immersion in the flood too, he added

- and so on. 4-4! Why stop there? I could go for 5-5 you know …

Go on, then, answer the question – is it just me? I mean, I think it’s terrible writing and it troubles me that no-one looked at it before announcing it to a squillion people, because I think the Beeb should be a champion of good writing and careful editing. But hey: YMMV.

Oopsie-Beebs-a-blog™ – Cymbals are grand; or not. (fixed)

NYYYYYAAAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHH. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. THNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

I’m sorry but sometimes a really good session of News Rage™ is helped along with a little scream.

Right, so Boris opened a new version of How to Cross Oxford Circus today, which is good.

The BBC reported it, which is good, with a bit of video, which is also good. And they gave us a nice set of photos, which is good too. All good so far.

In the BBC report they said this:

London Mayor Boris Johnson unveiled the crossing by striking a cymbal.

… which is not good. It’s even right up at the top, where many people are still reading.

They perhaps got it from the Mayor’s press release, which said this:

… the road was officially opened by the Mayor who struck a two metre high cymbal …

No, no, no, no, no Auntie, that is NOT a cymbal. Really really not. Please do some research.

No, no, no, no, no Boris’s press people, that is NOT a cymbal. Really really not. Please do some research.

I have, as usual, because I am such a sad git, wroted to them. It was, I hope, a humorous and pleasant email message, which may with luck have made someone smile. (Or possibly want to hit me … hmmm occupational hazard I guess.) It even suggested (to the Beeb anyway) a number of starting points for finding out what it really is. (For example, do you think, Tamsin, that the word “Paiste” could perhaps be a manufacturer’s name? Yes, good girl, you may indeed use the telephonic device to contact them and politely enquire just what that large instrument might be. Well done, you shall have a shilling.)

I mean, really.

And yes, I know, I know. Usual disclaimers apply. Thames not set on fire, no lives endangered, income tax rate remains unchanged. The Beeb were just copying the press release (because that’s how you do reporting, right?) and Boris’s press people were told something, or guessed it, and were too busy to get it right. And it’s trivial, and London’s children will probably not fail GCSE Music just because that’s what they think a cymbal looks like. Fine … It’s just sloppy, is all, and makes me sad. And fat, but that’s another story. (Do you think I can sue?)

Update (some time later): I had a nice reply from Paiste, who said:

“This is [a] Paiste Symphonic Gong. We assume it's a 60".”

So there you go. Would it really have been so hard for someone (that is, someone other than me) to check, instead of just assuming that they “knew”? Sigh. But, like I say, no actual harm done … unless of course you think ignorance is bad (oops).

Oopsie-Beebs-a-Blog™ – witless over Whitleys. (fixed)

Auntie has an interesting story about a WWII bomb being blown up on the site of a 1940 Whitley crash. The story is quite good until the author’s imagination gets the better of them and they write:

“The crew of the plane all safely ejected from the aircraft.”

Ejected? Really? I don’t think so.

I don’t mean to be rude but I do wonder what the journalist was trying to accomplish here. In earlier references (this particular story is a kind of rehash based upon there maybe being more dangerous remains to dispose of) like this and this they get it right, sticking to words like parachuted and baled out, but it’s only in this last one where the need to rewrite - and perhaps to try to sex it up a little? - has led the journalist into sad (but funny) error.

Ho hum. I have wroted to them. I wonder if they will fix it, and/or send me an amusing reply? The Beeb is sometimes quite remarkable in these matters. I will keep you posted, dear reader.

Oh yes, there’s a nice photo gallery here too, in case you’re interested.

Vogel out. Jump jump jump.

Appendix The First (and only): for those Benighted Persons Who Are Currently Going Uh Well Like What’s Wrong With That Then Er Yuh Duh?

Articles from Wikipedia (the online encyclopaedia anyone can ruin):

• The elderly Whitley bomber, designed in the mid-30s and obsolescent at the outbreak of war;
• The ejector seat, first used for real in 1942, barely making it into a very few production aircraft by 1945, and far from commonplace for a few more years after that: to most intents and purposes a post-WWII technology.

Are you starting to see the problem, Tamsin? Attagirl!

Update (a little later in the day); it now reads:

“The crew of the plane escaped from the aircraft.”

- which reads rather weakly to me, but is at least true. Sadly I have had no funny email from some nice BeebEditPerson to make me laugh. Ho hum. But well done Auntie for correcting it.

No, no, no, no, no, NO! 2/10, poor effort, see me.

Look. Heaven knows I have tried to help but this is frankly NOT GOOD ENOUGH:

Dear Valued Customer,

Lloyds TSB has sent you a mail to update your account but still you are unable to complete your account details,As a result of this, We are making an extra security checking on all of our Customers account in order to protect their information from theft and fraud.

Update Your Account [link saferized by Vogel’s Safe-o-Links™]

What can we do when standards have slipped this far? I blame the parents.

Horrible crap disaster reporting

Distraught relatives prepare for the worst as they wait for news of Air France flight 447, which disappeared off the radar between Brazil and France early on Monday.

Well thank goodness they were allowed to do so in the calm and privacy of, er, having 63 cameras shoved up their noses. I should think that that will have made them feel much better, plus we the public really needed to see those photos. Come to think of it, maybe they could be asked to pose again, looking a touch more photogenic, and with more tears visible please? And get that woman to move her hand so we can see her grief-stricken face better? That would be nice.

I know I sound like a retired colonel, more and more so, but really, is there no room for restraint at all in a story like this? Hmph.

My sensible part

Goodness me!

Someone purporting to be the Abbey has kindly written to me to ask me to log into their site and sort my account out. Oddly their site is not at Abbey.com as you might expect

Unfortunately, we are unable to verify your online banking account successfully. To ensure your protection, we've now blocked access to your sensible part of your accounts.

I must say that I am a little upset about them having blocked access to my sensible part. I guess I'll just have to live with it. Ah me.