Media | Steve Woods

Red menace in SW1

11/10/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics

Your ‘umble scribe recalls a phrase from his Cold War childhood – the Red Menace. This was a term used at that time to describe the Soviet Union or an “international communist conspiracy”; an alternative was the Red Scare. By the time of the Cold War, the Russian revolution and establishment of the Soviet Union caused widespread concern among the political elites of the major powers for many decades.
However, Larry the Downing Street cat (aka Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Ed.) has been dealing with a red menace of his own in the shape of Reynard the Fox.

Any connection of Larry’s interloper with Keir Starmer’s Labour Party should be dismissed. The fox’s colouration far too dubious to be allowed into his nominally red party. 😀
Welsh ‘tumbleweeds’ threat

02/10/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Tories are averse to taxation and using said the monies thus raised to fund public services for the benefit of all.

Today’s Nation Cymru reports that Wales will become a land of ‘betting shops, tanning salons and tumbleweeds [sic]’ if a proposed visitor levy (aka a tourism tax. Ed.) currently being consulted upon by the Welsh government in a hysterical outburst from one Andrew RT Davies, alleged leader of the Conservative group in the Senedd.

Writing in yesterday’s Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.), Davies laid into the traditional class enemy, stating ‘Labour sit, like a lead foot, pressed down on the windpipe of Welsh business‘, adding that the proposed visitor levy would risk ‘livelihoods in our communities‘ as one in seven Welsh jobs is reliant on tourism. Davies is voicing the severe criticism of the proposed tourism levy from business organisations the length and breadth of Wales. Davies himself wrote that if the levy were introduced, ‘Wales would be nothing but betting shops, tanning salons and tumbleweeds‘.

Coming to Wales soon? Tumbleweed in bloom in the Mojave desert.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Many countries – and the constituent local public authorities of nation states – around the world already apply a tourism levy. After all, why should local taxpayers pick up the tab for the pressures tourists put on the public purse in popular visitor destinations?

Speaking from experience, on his last visit to the Greek island of Crete, your ‘umble scribe noticed a distinct lack of betting shops, tanning salons and – most importantly – tumbleweeds despite paying a 5% tourism levy everywhere he stayed overnight. 😀
Reach Welsh titles’ exclusives: Hurricane Ian drops rain on Wales

30/09/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

At the time of writing, Hurricane Ian, the ninth named hurricane of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, is off the coast of North and South Carolina on the eastern seaboard of the United States. Any remnant of said hurricane, downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it starts crossing the Atlantic, is not expected to dump any of its remaining rain on the shores of Great Britain for many days yet.

The exact location of Hurricane Ian comes courtesy of the USA’s National Hurricane Center, as shown below.

However, this has not stopped both Wales Online and the Daily Post (aka North Wales Live. Ed.), the 2 Reach plc regional news titles covering North and South Wales respectively, from coming up with similar misleading stories (fairy tales surely? Ed.) on today’s pages of their respective ‘news‘ websites. The Daily Post story can be seen here and the Wales Online story here. Note also the use of ‘amid‘ in the Wales Online headline (posts passim).

Which hurricane, Daily Post?

Same question to you, Wales Online.

If the fourth estate cannot even get the names and locations of extreme weather events correct, what else should they not be trusted about?
Fossil fuel mined with weasel words

22/09/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media
Q: when is a land reclamation scheme not a land reclamation scheme?

A: When it’s actually an open-cast coal mine covering four square kilometres of south Wales.

Which transports us Merthyr Tydfil and its inappropriately-named Ffos-y-fran Land Reclamation Scheme, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘major opencast coaling operation‘ to the town’s north-east.

Ffos-y-fran: open-cast coal mine or proper land reclamation scheme? Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The scheme’s operators have this week filed an application to keep mining coal there for a further nine months until June 2023, according to Wales Online, with landscaping of the site completed by December 2024.

As revealed by the Wales Online article, the main aim of the scheme is the mining of 10 million tonnes of coal.

In your ‘umble scribe’s opinion, this is not reclamation in either of its definitions, i.e.:
- the activity of getting useful materials from waste (unless the land itself is regarded as waste. Ed.); or
- the activity of making land that is under water or is in poor condition suitable for farming or building.
It is the pure and simple plundering of highly polluting fossil fuels for profit at a time when a climate crisis is occurring due to the past profligacy of homo sapiens – a misnomer if ever there was one – with fossil fuels, to which there is still no end in sight, especially under the less than benign apology for a government of one Mary Elizabeth Truss, which seems committed to continue fossil fuel extraction and shale gas in particular.
Shropshire Star journalist gives up after enigmatic byline

19/09/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

The screenshot below is the full extent of an article* which has appeared this morning on on the Shropshire Star website.

You’ve got the headline, what more do you want?

Given the modern journalistic tendency of trying squeeze the whole story into the headline, perhaps there was no need to write much more than a tokenistic byline, concerning which your ‘umble scribe would be most grateful if any readers knowing what the gfgfgfg byline signifies could offer their thoughts in the comments below. Thanks! 😀

* = The article has since been removed.
The Iron Lady’s successor – a ferrous weathercock

11/09/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

The rise of the Thatcher fangirl, one Mary Elizabeth Truss, to the office of prime minister of the English Empire cannot be regarded as universally welcomed. Indeed her candidacy for the leadership of her party was supported by fewer than were seduced into putting an X against the name of her predecessor, one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Truss garnered 57% of the vote for leader by party members, cf. 66% for the lying scarecrow).

In her incarnation as Johnson’s Foreign Secretary over the last couple of years in Johnson’s cabinet of sycophants and Brexit zealots and during the party leadership campaign, Truss has hardly shone, managing top lose friends and alienate people, particularly important ones with whom the government wishes to negotiate trade deals, in particular the United States (a trade deal with the USA is regarded as the Holy Grail by those politicians who worship at the altar of Brexit. Ed.), by picking fights with those beastly foreigners on the other side of the so-called English Channel over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which she threatened to tear up, thereby trashing this country’s reputation as a firm believer in upholding international law.

Nor have those beastly foreigners turned a blind eye to Truss’ roundabout route to arrive at the black-painted door of Number 10. They are only too aware that Truss started out as a member of the Liberal Democrats who is on record as supporting the abolition of the monarchy.

During the Brexit referendum campaign, Truss still supported the country’s remaining in the European Union, only to do a 180 degree about turn before being elevated to high political office by the blonde scarecrow.

In her climb up the Tory political ladder, Truss has made no secret of her admiration for the dreadful Margaret Hilda Thatcher, aka the Iron Lady, whose manner of dress and publicity stunts Truss has shameless emulated.

Putting her changing political views and her imitation of Thatcher together, the French media have this week been referring to the English Empire’s fifth Tory prime minister since 2010 as the ‘Girouette de fer‘, i.e. the Iron Weathercock, as per the following typical example.

Headline reads “Iron Weathercock: Europe reacts to Liz Truss becoming British prime minister
More poor Reach plc quality control

31/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

Genius (or should that be genious? Ed.) headline writing from today’s Daily Post, alias North Wales Live.

Is the entire editorial team asleep at their desks?

Such a glaring spelling mistake and the obvious lack of quality control remind your ‘umble scribe of a Mark Twain quotation regarding a still extant US newspaper, i.e.

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.
Gentrification reaches fly-tipping

30/08/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics

Like many other parts of the city, the Easton area of Bristol has been subject to an immense wave of gentrification in the last decade or so, with all the usual signs: rocketing house prices, overpriced bacon butties made with sourdough, etc.

Indeed, local house prices have risen so dramatically within the city that an old college mate’s son and his partner couldn’t afford to buy anywhere in BS5 and eventually had to move to Cheltenham in order to find somewhere more affordable than Bristol’s inner city.

Last year the Bristol Post/Live published its own guide on how to spot the signs of gentrification.

It would be fair to say that gentrification has given rise to some local resentment on the streets, as shown below.

The signs of gentrification have even started showing in the types of items fly-tipped on local streets (in a sort of waste-related version of trickle-down economics. Last month your ‘umble scribe reported his first ever fly-tipped futon base and one of his other tasks today is to notify the council of this morning’s sighting of a fly-tipped golf bag on St Mark’s Road.

Fore!
Bristol Post/Live exclusive: music venue moonlights as property developer

29/08/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

As a linguist, your ‘umble scribe has, during his working life, always used language as a precision tool. Were using le mot juste can mean the difference between a one-off job or repeat business is confined to linguists is unusual or not, is a matter for conjecture, There are certain other professions where the use of the right vocabulary is vital, particularly in the law and in the field of intellectual property (e.g. trade marks, patents).

It often does not apply in the world of journalism, where a columnist may be taking a deliberately ambiguous angle.

This accuracy of language definitely does not apply to the titles of the Reach plc stable of local news titles, including Bristol’s (news)paper of warped record, the Bristol (Evening) Post and the accompanying Bristol Live website.

As a prime example of this is contained in Thursday’s piece about the redevelopment of Trinity police station.

The headline implies that the as-yet unnamed music venue itself will be building the housing, not some developer who has just realised that, due to the proximity of entertainment, the building bill will now be augmented by the addition of acoustic insulation.

The police station to be demolished and redeveloped just happens to be over the road from the Trinity Centre, with which your correspondent has a long association (posts passim).

What is obvious from perusing the article is that the person(s) writing the headline is/are different from the one who write the article. This seems to be standard practice.

Furthermore, it is also evident that the headline writers do not carefully read what reporters have written, as shown by the latest version of how the story is presented on the paper’s website, with the soon-to-be former cop shop itself transformed a new music venue.

Sacking all those sub-editors a few years ago to save some money has really paid off in terms of the quality of your ‘journalism’, hasn’t it, Reach plc?
Welsh language payment machine baffles monoglots

14/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

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Rhyl on the North Wales coast attracts many non-Welsh-speaking visitors to its golden sands (your ‘umble scribe was once a regular visitor there as a child since our Sunday school outings all went there. Ed.) and views of the Liverpool Bay wind farms. However, its council-run car parks have pay and display machines set to Welsh as the default language; and this has been frustrating those who cannot read, speak or understand even basic instructions in Welsh, as yesterday’s Nation Cymru reports.

According to the article, “Queues developed as non-Welsh speakers struggled to work out how to pay for their parking at Rhyl’s central underground car park near the promenade, which is administered by Denbighshire County Council.”
Furthermore, the council’s machinery also seemed to have difficulty recognising bank debit cards.

A local with basic Welsh fluency described the experience of one monoglot: “The man stormed off when the machine repeatedly failed to accept his bank card. ‘Why are the instructions only in Welsh. Not many people in Rhyl speak Welsh’.”

A spokesperson for the local authority defended the default Welsh language option, stating:

We would like to remind people that there are two other machines available in the Rhyl Central car park and people can use the pay-by-phone smartphone app with location code 804281 as an alternative way of paying.
Our pay and display machines default to Welsh, but there is a large grey “language button” that people can press to change the language. This is explained on the machines.

Perhaps grey is not a suitable colour for the language button; perhaps the council need to change this to red and white in the style of the English flag or red, white and blue in the style of the Bloody Butcher’s Apron (which some still call the Union Jack or Union flag. Ed.). 😀

Update 15/08/22: Monday’s Nation Cymru has yet another story on the inability of users to operate a second parking machine ‘in bloody Welsh’, this time from the other end of the country, Caswell Bay, on the Gower peninsula near Swansea.

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