Media | Steve Woods

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. 🙂
Stretch: the next Debian testing stable version

19/04/2015 Steve WoodsLinux, Media, Open Source, Tech

With Debian 8, codenamed ‘jessie’, currently frozen and due for release as the next stable release at the end of April (posts passim), many may have been wondering what the next Debian testing stable release will be.

However, this particular question has now been answered. Writing on reddit, user dimitrifromparis has revealed the next character from the Toy Story series of films to be used as a Debian release codename.

After the jessie release, there will be a new release codename, “stretch”, and testing will be an alias for that.

See the Debian wiki for an overview of past Debian production release codenames.

Besides testing stable, Debian also has a testing unstable version, named sid. Sid is never released as such and is named after Sidney, the boy next door in Toy Story who always broke his toys. Needless to say, Debian sid is definitely not recommended for production environments.
There, their, they’re Bristol Post

12/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

The minions of the Bristol Post, possibly under strain from toiling away at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth looking for the city’s blandest news content, seem to have particular difficulty with homophones, i.e. words that are pronounced the same as another word but differ in meaning and may differ in spelling.

This was amply illustrated below by a photo gallery posted this morning on the local organ’s website.

Should the Post’s ‘journalists’ wish to cure themselves of acute homophonia, help is at hand up at Bristol University.

Its website has a handy grammar tutorial page for the illiterati on the simple differences between there, their and they’re.

To quote from that page

There is the place, i.e. not here.

Their is the possessive form indicating belonging to them.

They’re is the contracted form of “they are”.

Have you got that, Bristol Post, if so Bristol University’s site also has a useful exercise to check whether the lesson has sunk in.
Lampeter: fears of council divide over language

09/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

Lampeter Town Council could have translation at its council meetings to allow more Welsh to be spoken after the mayor said she felt “guilty” that the council doesn’t use enough Welsh, according to a report in Cambrian News Online.

Mayor Cllr. Elsie Dafis is reported as saying that her term in that office had brought home to her the fact that the council could do more to promote the Welsh language and stated that the town council must do more, starting by enabling more Welsh to be spoken at council meetings.

Nevertheless, Cllr. Ellis’ idea did not find favour with a colleague – Cllr. Kistiah Ramaya. The latter had concerns that the move could divide the council and was concerned that having translation could sideline councillors who didn’t speak Welsh and might even dissuade non-Welsh speakers from joining the council.

Cllr. Ellis informed her colleagues that council could have a translator and equipment at their meetings for under £1,000 a year. However, Cllr. Ramaya said that while he supported the Welsh language, he felt that discussions could move on before non-Welsh speakers had received the translation of comments made.

Lampeter is the smallest university town in the UK, with a population including the university of some 4,000 people.

According to Wikipedia, Welsh is no longer taught at undergraduate level at the University of Wales in Lampeter.

Hat tip: Yelena McCafferty.
Has Mammon discovered irony?

06/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

Spotted this morning in the bowels of Bristol’s tawdry temple to consumerism, Cabot Circus.

In the words – and with the intonation – of the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes: “Shome mishtake shurely?”

No further comment is necessary.
Courts interpreting fiasco rumbles on… expensively

05/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

Although it may not be hitting the headlines in the way it was a couple of years ago, Capita Translation & Interpreting’s cack-handed execution of its interpreting contract for courts and tribunals with the Ministry of Justice continues to waste public money, as well as delay and deny justice (contrary to one of the few clauses of Magna Carta still in effect. Ed.), as evidenced by this cutting from the latest edition of Private Eye.

Hat tip: Sarrf London.

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