Oddities | Steve Woods

Robins named stand after folker Fred

10/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s an astonishing revelation in today’s Bristol Post, the city’s most unreliable source of news: the late Fred Wedlock (pictured right), the local folk singer best known for his UK hit single “The Oldest Swinger In Town”, has had a stand named after him at Bristol City‘s ground at Ashton Gate.

This emerges from a report written by Ian Onions, the Post’s political editor, over a lifelong Robins fan’s wait for the club to honour its pledge over its 1990s ‘Buy-a-Brick’ campaign.

A screenshot of the article is also shown as confirmation of the existence of the Fred Wedlock Stand.

Ian may be a knowledgeable chap when it comes to politics and the skulduggery down at the Counts Louse (Bristolian for “City Hall” © Mayor George Ferguson. Ed.), but when it comes to the beautiful game, he really doesn’t know his onions, since it was dear old Fred’s grandfather Billy (pictured left) who played for and captained the Robins, as well as playing for the England squad and it is after him that the stand is named.

Ashton Gate also has a Williams stand. I wonder if Post reporters believe this was named after Andy of that surname rather than a former player. 😉
Bing Translator shows its cluelessness again

05/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Tech

This blog recently drew attention (posts passim) to the fact that Microsoft’s Bing Translator tool had difficulty distinguishing English from Norwegian.

It now seems this is not the only two languages with which it has trouble since it also cannot differentiate between Dutch and English, as per the following screenshot of a tweet from Hallen FC from my Twitter feed this afternoon.

I wonder if the rest of the Beast of Redmond’s software offerings are as reliable as Bing Translator. 😉
Can’t tell Norwegian from English? It must be Bing Translator

31/08/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

According to Wikipedia, Bing Translator “is a user facing translation portal provided by Microsoft as part of its Bing services to translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.”

Or it would be if only it could actually recognise languages accurately.

Twitter uses Bing Translator as an interface ostensibly to help users with languages they do not know.

However, Bing Translator still has some way to go before it recognises languages accurately, as shown by the following screenshot.

Whilst it is understandable that online machine translation tools can occasionally get confused between closely related members of the same language family (Google Translate has been known to confuse Norwegian and Danish. Ed.), this is the first time I can recall such a back end helper being a real tool and getting muddled over languages as distinct from one another as English and Norwegian.

Perhaps any passing Microsoft developers would care to explain this anomaly in the comments below.
Separated at birth?

31/08/2015 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics

As a fan of Private Eye’s Lookalikes section, the other day I couldn’t help noticing there was more than a passing similarity between Michael Fabricant, the implausibly-coiffed Tory Member of Parliament for Lichfield, and Iggy Pop, that occasional insurance salesman and singer-songwriter, musician and actor, better known to the US Internal Revenue Service as James Newell Osterberg, Jr.
Tidy BS5’s dancing bin man – full version

28/08/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

The completed full version of the Tidy BS5 bin man video (posts passim) has now been released.

Many thanks to Andy Reid for his masterful brush strokes and majestic moves for the camera for last Sunday’s Make Sunday Special on Stapleton Road, which looked especially spruced up for the day (the splendid chaps who battle its litter daily must have heard Mayor George Ferguson would be turning up! Ed.).
Pomicide – word of the year?

07/08/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

I’ve written before of my love of the live cricket commentary on Radio 4 long wave (posts passim).

However, I could hardly believe my ears during the latest match in the Ashes series being played at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.

England won the toss, elected to bowl first and put Australia into bat. Before lunch Australia were all out for 60 runs (including extras), clocking up the worst batting performance by an Australian team in an Ashes match for some 8 decades.

If I couldn’t believe my ears, one can just imagine how well such a shambolic performance with the bat went down in the Australian media.

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s sports headline writer perhaps encapsulated feelings best with the back page headline “It’s Pomicide“, as per the photograph below.

Whilst I take a rather ambiguous attitude to newspaper headline writers and their frequently inappropriate use of puns, the invention of Pomicide strikes me as most apposite. Should I recommend it to the Oxford English Dictionary for its word of the year accolade?
PDF – a religion?

16/07/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.

Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?

Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs.

Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.

Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.

PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.

No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. 😉
Network Rail messes up on dog fouling

14/07/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

One of the great tools not available to previous generations of those producing print for public consumption is the spell checker – an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.

However, some people and/or organisations still seem reluctant to use them, such as UK railway infrastructure operator Network Rail, which chickened out on the occasion shown below and thus qualified for a residency in Homophone Corner. 🙂
Mini Ashes fever reaches BS5

08/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Tech

It’s the first day of the first test match in Cardiff of the latest Ashes series being played between England and Australia.

One household in Beaumont Street in the Easton area of Bristol has entered into the spirit of the occasion, as shown below.

As it’s the postage stamp-sized front garden of a terraced house, the players are a mix of Playmobil* and Lego figures, not life size.

Note the loving preparation that’s gone into the pitch, an uncovered one (naturally) in line with traditional British values and thus guaranteed to cheer the most outspoken of cricket commentators – a certain G. Boycott.

Talking of Mr Boycott, if you’re a fan of the Test Match Special radio commentary on the BBC, add to your enjoyment of the excellent commentary by Aggers, Blowers et al.; make sure you’ve got your Boycott Bingo card ready for when the world’s greatest living Yorkshireman sounds off (posts passim). 🙂

* Irreverent IT news site The Register has a sizable Playmobil archive.
New amenity in Lawrence Hill

06/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics

Over the weekend a new amenity – either an art installation or a new public convenience – has appeared on the A420 Lawrence Hill in east Bristol.

If the latter, it’s conveniently located next to the site of Lawrence Hill’s original Victorian public lavatories, sadly demolished some years ago by Bristol City Council and the site sold off to developers.

Public convenience or crap art installation?

Continuing with the theme of convenience, if it is a new public lavatory – whether provided at public expense or by the private sector – it will no doubt come as a relief to the thousands of commuters from Kingswood, Hanham and other parts of South Gloucestershire who clog up the A420 inbound on weekday mornings and outbound on weekday evenings respectively.

However, I suspect it is the work of east Bristol’s shadowy network of fly-tippers, in which case it needs reporting to Bristol City Council. 🙂

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