Oddities | Steve Woods

Conservative manifesto shocker

21/04/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

When the UK’s not at all unelected Prime Minister announced her intention to seek parliamentary approval for a snap general election earlier this week, I asked my Twitter followers via a poll who was likely to be writing the Conservative Party manifesto.

The poll is now closed and there’s a surprise winner.

Your correspondent was fully expecting the party’s manifesto to be written by the usual suspects – the owners and editors of the British right wing press, but alas Twitter – or the part thereof with which I’m in touch – thinks differently.

The question that must now be asked is whether Conservative Party Central Office have time to translate the party’s manifesto into English and Welsh (if for once the Tories have stopped treating Wales as an English colony. Ed.) from the original Russian once Vladimir Vladimirovich has completed his draft? In the immortal words of Private Eye: I think we should be told! 😀
Post exclusive: broadcaster now runs Bristol hospital

12/04/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Tech

The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record, has recently revamped its website, which now uses the standard template for Mirror Group titles.

In addition, the standard of what passed in recent decades for journalism from the title seems to have taken a dive too. Whether this is related to the change of template cannot be corroborated.

One thing that has not changed is the inability of the Post’s reporters to concentrate on the most relevant facts of a story.

An example from today is shown in the screenshot below.

The story itself relates that the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) suffered 3 cyber attacks involving ransomware last year.

This is only to be expected if major organisations continue to base their IT infrastructure on Microsoft’s insecure operating systems.

For me, the important point was on the front page as shown in the screenshot, according which the BRI now comes under the aegis of the National Health Service, although for some unfathomable reason, there is no mention whatsoever in the article itself of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

To echo the purported words of a proper, old-school journalist, the late Bill Deedes, “Shome mishtake shurely?” 🙂
Recognition

12/04/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics

On Tuesday March 21st, your correspondent had a special appointment to keep up at the Mansion House in Clifton, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of Bristol.

The occasion was the presentation of Lord Mayor’s Medals to what Jeff Lovell, the current Lord Mayor, described in his opening remarks as “community champions”.

Only some 20 medals are awarded each year and your ‘umble scribe was a recipient this year.

Receiving the medal from the Lord Mayor. Picture courtesy of Up Our Street

According to the citation, I was commended for my work in the voluntary and community sector in East Bristol, including all the Tidy BS5 efforts to make Easton and Lawrence Hill a cleaner, more pleasant environment.

However, I was not the only recipient with a BS5 postcode. Three other locals received recognition.

Hannah Crudgington was recognised for her work for Tidy BS5 (particularly her videos. Ed.) and her efforts to show a more positive side to Easton than is generally given by the local media.

Bruce Yates was commended for his work in turning around local youth organisation Baggator at The Pickle Factory in All Hallows Road, as well as his work for RADE Bristol, which campaigns for inner-city clean air and against efforts to install polluting standby electricity generating plant in the city.

Last but not least, Amy Harrison received a medal for her work for Up Our Street.

All four of us are shown in the photograph below.

The BS5 recipients of the Lord Mayor’s Medal. Picture courtesy of Up Our Street.

It was, all told, a lovely afternoon, which was made even more special by a surprise visit by my eldest niece Katherine and boyfriend Martyn, who were subsequently treated to a night on the tiles in Easton.
Chronicling allergy

09/03/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

At least once a week, the Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record, comes up with an exclusive, although this might not be immediately apparent to the casual reader.

Today is no exception as, buried in this report on the recall of dodgy products is the revelation that some people are allergic to written records of discrete events organised by date, as revealed by the following screenshot.

No illiteracy or lack of proof-reading skills should be inferred concerning the alleged “journalist” involved. 🙂
After fake news, fake translation

11/02/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics

Fake news (also called misinformation or lies. Ed.) is a term that has come to prominence recently, even though its dissemination is a far older phenomenon.

The goods and services which could be classed as fake have now been joined by another – “fake translation“. Kenya’s Nairobi News reports that a tour guide at the Serengeti National Park in neighbouring Tanzania has been arrested after incorrectly translating a tourist’s comments about the country and its people from English into Swahili.

The guide is said to have been arrested on unspecified charges on Thursday on the orders of Tanzanian Tourism Minister Jumanne Mghembe.

In an undated video clip, the tour guide translates what an English-speaking woman is saying and instead of conveying the original message’s meaning, decides to skew the visitor’s kind remarks about country completely.

An example is given below.

Visitor: “Hi. My visit to Tanzania has been beautiful and gorgeous. The people are fabulously wonderful and friendly. Greetings are always jambo. I am happy to be here. The land is beautiful, the animals are wonderful.

Tour guide: You Tanzanians complain/cry a lot about hunger. Everyday you cry about hunger when you have flowers at home. Why don’t you boil the flowers and drink [them]. It is not good to cry/complain about hunger.

The minister may have ordered the unnamed guide’s arrest as he felt the guide was either mocking the tourist or mimicking President John Magufuli, as some of the guide’s remarks echoed those used by the president at a rally last month when he called on people to stop complaining about hunger.

Tanzania is popular with tourists due to its wildlife and stunning scenery and markets itself as “The Soul of Africa“.
Stare-struck hack?

17/09/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Modern British society seems obsessed with celebrity culture: this is no more evident than in the mainstream media; and such is true of Bristol’s (news)paper of (warped) record, the Bristol Post.

It would appear that no sooner does a Z-list non-entity have something to do with the city than the illiterati that constitute the current reporting staff of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth than they are lost for words – or for le mot juste at the very least.

This is evident in a puff piece in today’s online edition featuring some nobody off some dire TV talent show, as per the obligatory screenshot below.

So Bristol Post, is a nobody off the telly looking intently at a show at the Hippodrome or taking part in it? In the immortal words of Private Eye, I think we should be told.
Chronicle exclusive: the vanishing station

04/09/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.

Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.

Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.

Bath Spa railway station. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.

The site of Bath Spa railway station according to the Bath Chronicle

For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉
Unusual choice of starter

26/08/2016 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

The image below of part of a menu originates from Australia and comes courtesy of Twitter.

Before I reply and choose my starter, can anyone tell if the child is a) organic and b) free range? 😉
Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures

26/08/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.

The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.

The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.

Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.

To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.

As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?

* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
Bing: tin-eared translation

17/07/2016 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

When it comes to machine translation online, Google Translate and Microsoft’s Bing Translator are serious rivals, not only for custom, but also for the awful quality of the translations they provide.

Social media platform Twitter has – for reasons best known to itself – decided to use Bing to provide translations of tweets in languages other than the user’s mother tongue.

However, it’s not very good, suffering as it does from an inability to deal with context.

Take the screenshot below from a tweet posted by your correspondent earlier this afternoon, who clicked on the Bing translation link out of curiosity.

Bing has managed to mangle my tweet, which contains a colloquial French expression (i.e. “du bidon“) into the incomprehensible “your reporting is Tin“, complete with capitalisation that was not in my original text. Bidon can indeed be a tin – or can or container – in French, but it also has the meaning of belly or stomach too. Furthermore, besides being a noun, bidon can also be used an an adjective, in which context it means phony or bogus.

Wordreference.com has a brief forum thread on the phrase “c’est du bidon“, which passing Bing Translation developers may like to read.

In the meantime, if any readers out there are contemplating saving money by using online translation tools instead of a human being, you may like to reconsider.

Readers interested in why I was retweeting something aimed at the Mail Online website may like to read Tim Fenton’s post debunking the Mail’s Bataclan torture rumours.

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