Media | Steve Woods

Greenwash Capital news: streets of Bristol to get filthier

01/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics, Social Media

In a move that will put yet another black mark against they city’s undeserved year as European Green Capital, the streets of Bristol are set to get even filthier than they are already.

Today’s Bristol Post reports that the number of street cleaners in Bristol has been cut by nearly a fifth since Bristol City Council took waste management and street cleansing back in-house last month from contractors Kier Group, those well-known supporters of former worker blacklisting outfit The Consulting Association.

Fly-tipping on Pennywell Road, Easton

According to the Post, the council-run Bristol Waste Company (BWC) has notified “30 to 40” agency workers at the Hartcliffe depot that they would no longer be required as of yesterday (Monday). This will cut their numbers by about one-fifth. These workers deal with street cleaning and collecting fly-tipping.

In addition, the Hartcliffe staff claim they have not been consulted on the cuts and accused the council of trying to save money at the expense of cleanliness (Bristol City Council has a long and proud tradition of avoiding and/or messing up consultation. Ed.).

Furthermore, the Hartcliffe depot staff also claim they been provided with inadequate equipment to do the job. One anonymous worker is quoted by the Post as saying:

Some of the guys haven’t been given clean gloves or protective gear, and many are still working with Kier equipment. The protective clothing is not adequate, and we have to deal with needles and dog poo and stuff.

If there are insufficient staff available at BWC for the job in hand, perhaps Bristol City Council could reassign staff from elsewhere: ideal candidates for redployment and kitting out with a fluorescent uniform, safety gloves, boots and a broom would be those working in the local authority’s overstaffed press and PR department.

In other Greenwash Capital news, it would appear that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson couldn’t really care less about the city’s cleanliness according to the tweet below from Kerry McCarthy MP.

Synonyms for unimpressed include apathetic, disinterested, unconcerned, undisturbed, untroubled and unmoved.

If Kerry’s report of her meeting with the Mayor is accurate, that is a most disturbing development in the person whose supposed job is to take care the best interests of the city and its welfare.
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?
Tidy BS5 in the council chamber

21/07/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

Today there’s a full meeting of the elected members of Bristol City Council at 6 pm.

Each council meeting has a slot of 30 minutes allotted to statements from members of the public to raise concerns.

This evening’s meeting will be treated to 2 statements by Tidy BS5 campaigners, namely Hannah Crudgington and your ‘umble scribe.

In addition, Hannah will be screening a video of one minute duration to the assembled councillors and officers.

Hannah will also be making a statement to councillors after her video. This statement reads as follows:

I have made my home and set up my business in Easton of the last 12 years or so.

It is extremely sad to report that after an initial improvement and vibrancy, the last five years have seen a huge deterioration and this is largely due to ill thought decisions by people without practical experience of the area at grass roots level.

Bristol City Council has been made well aware of the issues of waste in BS5 and yet the problems are getting worse. In the last year, it has gone from fly tipping and litter to fly-tipping, litter and a horrendous stench. So it is no longer an annoyance or inconvenience but more a health hazard.

So what is Bristol City Council doing to resolve this, what are your time scales and finally would you put up with this?

My statement will be:

It is with a sense of profound despair and regret that I’ve watched the problem of litter and fly-tipping in the Easton area over the past few decades.

Given that Bristol is European Green Capital for 2015, it’s an absolute disgrace that scenes such as those in Hannah Crudgington’s video are a daily occurrence in the inner city.

However, fly-tipping and litter are not just an eyesore; they are a health and safety risk, attract vermin such as rats and gulls, make people feel insecure on the streets and attract anti-social behaviour; residents have observed people urinating on piles of fly-tipped rubbish and using the communal bins installed by the council as a screen for defecating in the streets.

Would you tolerate this in the area where you live? We refuse to.

Concerned residents have been raising these matters with local councillors and council officers for well over one year. Given the glacial pace at which Bristol City Council moves, it has taken that long for streetscene enforcement officers to turn their attentions to Easton and Lawrence Hill. Whilst I appreciate the enforcement officers’ efforts I feel that their presence may be a matter of too little, too late.

Furthermore, the total number of these enforcement officers is very small: there are only 6 of them to cover the whole city, far too few for the size of the city’s problems with litter and fly-tipping, which it must be remembered is not exclusive to the 2 wards in which I and other Tidy BS5 campaigners are working. I regularly receive reports – as I’m sure ward councillors do – of problems with litter and fly-tipping in Ashley, Bedminster, Fishponds, St George, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston, to name a few more areas of our city blighted by environmental crime.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the city council employs 43 press and PR officers – more than seven times the number of streetscene enforcement officers. This suggests to me that the city council has a warped sense of priorities: it has a real citywide problem with litter, fly-tipping and other environmental crimes; it does not have a problem with weasel words.

Communal bin in Villiers Road, Easton attracting dumped furniture

The one real disappointment is that Bristol’s elected mayor George Ferguson will not be in attendance at the council meeting. Our George has junketed off to Rome, where he has deigned to give the Pope an audience.
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.
Coming soon: the Greenwash Capital Awards

24/06/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities, Politics

Awards recognising local people and businesses which support the environment have been launched by the Bristol Post, the rag of that name reports on its website today.

The article continues that the Bristol Post Green Capital Awards will celebrate those people who are making our city a greener, healthier, happier place to live and work.

The article does quote the chairman of Bristol 2015 – a company established by the city council to run this year-long green-tinged public relations exercise – admitting that Green Capital has not reached all parts of Bristol.

That being so, I’d like to see an alternative set of awards that won’t go to the usual suspects amongst Bristol’s great and good and their pet vanity projects. Let’s call them the Greenwash Capital Awards.

Some of these can be awarded already.

For starters, there’s the Green Transport Award, for which there can only be one set of winners, namely the selfish individuals who all drive their vehicles containing just one person into the city from the surrounding areas of South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath & North East Somerset, causing congestion, pollution and getting in the way of local bus services.

Selfish commuters clogging Bristol’s M32 inbound

Then there’s the Green Waste Management Award. This prize should I believe be split between the citizens of Bristol who managed to generate 18% more waste for landfill last year, Bristol City Council, which seems to be labouring under the delusion that exporting what would go to landfill to Sweden for incineration in power stations is a good idea and finally the people – both traders and others – who think that the BS5 postcode area is the natural home for the city’s fly-tipping.

One of the regular but ephemeral arts installations on Stapleton Road; is it critiquing the throwaway society?

How about the Habitat and Biodiversity Destruction Award? There’s a clear winner for this one: the four councils making up the West of England Partnership and their ludicrous transport white elephant, the Metrobus scheme.

Finally, for the time being there’s the Green Waste of Money Award. That goes to all the money wasted to date on so-called ‘arts’ projects as part of Green Capital.

If you can think of any further worthy recipients of a Greenwash Capital Award, please add them in the comments below.
Tidy BS5: plus ça change…

18/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Politics

Coming into the Bristol Wireless lab this afternoon,I found that the weekend spring clean by 2 of our volunteers had thrown up a copy of “renewal“, bylined “the newsletter of Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Renewal” dated March 2006, over nine years ago.

Turning to page 12, the subject matter seemed to have a familiar look to it, as per the scanned and cropped page below.

Fly-tipping, litter, rubbish, graffiti: these all sound like themes currently receiving the attention of the Tidy BS5 campaign by local residents and councillors, ably assisted and supported by Up Our Street.

The 2006 article then goes on to give telephone numbers for residents to call to deal with these matters. The telephone number for reporting street cleaning matters and abandoned cars, etc. has since changed to 0117 922 2100 and readers may find it more convenient to report these and other problems online.

The fact that so little has changed, reminds of a quotation from the late Tony Benn.

There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.
Braking bad

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

The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

Got it now?

Good! 🙂
New Conservative government descends on Westminster – picture exclusive

08/05/2015 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics

Any resemblance to the new Mad Max Fury Road film is purely coincidental.
Post exclusive: Bristol Rovers change kit

23/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s a hidden exclusive in today’s online edition of the Bristol Post. Unknown to the fans and probably the club itself, the Post reveals that Bristol Rovers now play in “blue and white stripes“, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, here are the three strips currently used by Bristol Rovers. Please note the only stripes are on the alternative away colours and have one thin blue stripe. The pattern used on the regular strip is commonly known as “quarters“.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Post also mentions in the article that Catalonia’s CE Sabadell FC (who are in the Spanish Segunda División. Ed.) play in a strip “similar” to that of Rovers. FC Sabadell’s current strips are shown below and yes, the home strips do look very similar, even if the teams’ respective league positions do not; Rovers are chasing promotion from the Conference, whilst Sabadell are fighting relegation.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Let’s hope the players of both teams are more on target than Bristol’s alleged newspaper of record. 🙂

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