Oddities

  • NL: PSV Eindhoven introduces wifi at stadium; fans protest

    Steve WoodsOddities, Social Media, Tech

    PSV Eindhoven logoPSV Eindhoven supporters launched a vehement protest against the introduction of wifi at the their Philips Stadion ground during their side’s 6-1 home victory over NAC Breda in their opening game of the season, according to yesterday’s Guardian.

    Fans displayed one banner reading: “F*ck Wi-Fi, support the team”. Placards with crosses running through the wifi signal were also held aloft before the match. Supporters’ groups believe the introduction of wifi is just the latest of a series of decisions by the club intended to gentrify the crowd at home matches.

    However, the club’s website has a slightly different take on the introduction of wifi. The game against NAC Breda marked the test phase of the ‘Connected Stadium’ project. All visitors had free access to the internet, social media and email via the ‘PSV’ network. This is the first time in the Netherlands that a stadium has been equipped with a wifi network. The club is also asking users for feedback.

    First posted on Bristol Wireless.

  • West Country confusion

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    The Western Daily Press is a stablemate of the Bristol Post and seems to share many of the latter’s afflictions – the same ugly Brutalist building on Bristol’s Temple Way, poor English, dodgy photo captions and the like.

    It was therefore no surprise to encounter a prime example of confused reporting this morning, as illustrated by the screenshot below.

    screensot of garbled article from Western Daily Press

    If one examines the article to which the news page above relates, three disparate elements seem to have been combined by reporter Geoff Bennett (who also writes for the Bristol Post. Ed.) and his associates, i.e.:

    • a headline referring to widespread outbreaks of salmonella food poisoning in hospitals in England;
    • a cuddly kittens picture and apposite caption; and
    • a report on the court case of the alleged groping barber (who was cleared by the court. Ed.) which gave rise to Friday’s sexist Bristol Post front page (posts passim).

    There is nothing like good, unambiguous reporting of the news – and the Western Daily Press is capable of nothing like it!

  • Telegraph on prolonged peace mission

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities

    A typographical error in a headline on the Telegraph’s website envisaged a long lull in the present conflict between the Palestinians in Gaza and the state Israel which has now been raging for more than 3 weeks.

    headline stating 72-year ceasefire agreed by both sides

    The error has since been corrected to read Gaza conflict: 72-hour ceasefire agreed by both sides.

  • Cricket explained

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

    The second Test series between England and India is currently taking place in Southampton (it’ll be day 3 today. Ed.) and my radio is tuned to the epic poem that is the BBC’s Test Match Special from 10.25 until the close of play each day, with the likes of Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and Geoffrey Boycott (posts passim) filling the air with their wise words and wit.

    Cricket is a complex game that can take a long time to understand fully and I’m still occasionally baffled by the commentators. For the uninitiated, the many different laws and the strange names for positions on the field can seem overwhelming. For instance, which other game has a position on the field called ‘cow corner’*?.

    Below is a simple explanation for the uninitiated, which I originally heard at school decades ago as a brief summary of the game for foreigners.

    You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.

    For those who need help with fielding positions, Wikimedia Commons has helpfully provided the following graphic.

    image of cricket fielding positions

    Note that the fielding positions would be reversed for a left-handed batsman.

    * Cow corner = the area of the field (roughly) between deep mid-wicket and wide long-on. So called because few ‘legitimate’ shots are aimed to this part of the field, so fielders are rarely placed there – leading to the concept that cows could happily graze in that area.

  • Provided? No, neglected!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Bristol City Council is a local authority that will seemingly stop at nothing to waste public money blowing its own trumpet.

    On the way back from the shops, this pointless sign by the flats on Easton Road caught my attention.

    sign in overgrown gardens stating provided by caretaking services

    The sign’s wording should be amended in my opinion to read “Neglected by Caretaking Services“.

    Council budgets all around the country are under pressure. In view of these financial constraints, here’s a suggestion for Bristol City Council: stop wasting money on pointless, self-aggrandising signage and you might find funds in the corporation coffers to cut the grass! 🙂

  • Generational change: graffito

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

    “Punk is dead” is a phrase recalled from my early twenties and apparently dates from 1978. Furthermore, “Punk is Dead” is also the title of a song by the legendary anarchist punk band Crass.

    This morning a variation on the phrase drifted into my Twitter feed, as shown by the photograph below.

    grafitti stating punk is dad

    For today’s younger people, about the age that I was when punk first emerged, the leading lights of punk rock such as The Clash, Sex Pistols and their contemporaries have probably been added to the likes of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and other more typical exponents of “Dad Rock“.

    Additional research has revealed that “Punk is Dad” is the title of a song by Berlin-based band Ohrbooten.

    Could the graffito be cheap promotion for Ohrbooten’s offering – or is it just bad spelling? 🙂

  • Fortune and cowsay get egalitarian

    Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

    Fortune is a simple program that displays a pseudo-random message from a database of quotations that first appeared in Version 7 of Unix and runs on the command line on Unix-like systems.

    Cowsay is another simple program running on the command line which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message.

    I have used fortune and cowsay in the past to demonstrate the use of a pipe | which feeds the output of one program and uses it as the input for the next program.

    Today running fortune | cowsay yielded the message in the image below.

    cowsay showing output reading equal bytes for women

    The message is most apposite as half the human race is under-represented in IT and other technical fields.

    In March this year The Guardian reported as follows:

    In 2005, women made up 24% of computer science students. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 19%, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. A 2012 report from Creative Skillset found that only 29% of the interactive media industry in the UK is female, and the majority hold positions in art and design and communications rather than engineering.

    The Guardian’s report concluded that

    There is a long way to go before there is parity between the genders in the technology industry. But every baby step made has a tiny effect on the representational content of the diverse audience that uses software and hardware. Developers are known to develop solutions for themselves.

  • Gone!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    As I walked down Midland Road in Bristol’s St Philips area this morning, all that remained of the Ebenezer Chapel (posts passim), East Bristol’s first Primitive Methodist place of worship, was a pile of rubble.

    site of now demolished Ebenezer Chapel

    Built in 1849, the Ebenezer Chapel had been a landmark in East Bristol for 165 years.

    Years of neglect by its owners and one week in the hands of demolition contractors have now ensured it is no more. 🙁

  • Ministerial photo opportunity

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics

    Last Friday, the Bedfordshire News website published a story of a visit by Defence Minister and Tory MP for Ludlow Philip Dunne to the hangars at Cardington, one of the major British sites historically involved in the development of airships.

    From the screenshot below, the visit provided a photo opportunity.

    screenshot featuring group looking like it's been excreted from giant bottom

    The ministerial party looks like it’s been excreted from or is about to be crushed by a giant bottom. Don’t ministers and their civil service minders ever check behind them before smiling for the camera?

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