Bristol

  • Save Felix Road Adventure Playground – the final push

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

    This blog has featured the campaign to save Felix Road Adventure Playground from closure before (posts passim).

    image of Felix Rd Adventure Playground
    Felix Rd Adventure Playground

    The email below has now been received from local councillor Margaret Hickman and requires no further explanation.

    Dear All,

    The community around Felix Road Adventure Playground would be so grateful if you could complete the on-line petition which is below. What we are trying to do is collect 3.5k signatures to trigger a debate in the council chamber. We want to ensure that a long term sustainable solution is found for all the adventure playgrounds in the city.

    Can you please sign the petition now on-line and forward this email to all your Bristol contacts.

    Thank you so much.

    Best wishes. Marg

    Here is the link to the e-petition to save Felix Road: http://epetitions.bristol.gov.uk/epetition_core/community/petition/2326

    As the adventure playground has been a valuable local facility for decades, I’ve signed the petition already; have you?

  • Bristol Post Balls – headline news

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    This blog has before drawn attention to the difficulty of devising an apposite newspaper headline (posts passim).

    No such troubles beset the Bristol Post as shown by the following headlines from today’s News section of the online version.

    screenshot of Bristol Post
    Read all about it! Click on image for the full-sized version.

    One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?

    Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂

    Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:

    I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.

  • Bristol Post Balls – verb conjugation

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The Bristol Post website carries an initial report today of a fire last night at Ashton Court, a 17th century mansion house in north Somerset owned by Bristol City Council.

    Allegedly penned by someone called DanielEvans1, the third paragraph of the piece reads as follows:

    A total of six Avon Fire and Rescue pumps and an aerial appliance were need to extinguish the fire in the early hours.

    An inability to conjugate the verb ‘to need’ correctly is evidently no barrier to employment as a journalist at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. 😉

  • A message to thieves

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    I’ve seen this fruit van a few times on Cumberland Road in recent weeks. At the foot of the offside door is a message to the light-fingered with a penchant for bananas.

    rear of fruit van
    Can other primates and other assorted fruit fans read?

    Only in Bristol… 🙂

  • UWE supplies refurbished PCs for internet cafés in Togo

    Steve WoodsBristol, Tech

    UWE's surplus office furniture and PCs off to Togo
    The container being loaded for shipping to Togo
    Bristol’s University of the West of England (UWE) has announced that a shipment of refurbished computers and office furniture has just arrived in Togo after an eight week voyage. The recycled equipment was refurbished by UWE student volunteers.

    The equipment is now being installed in 2 internet cafés in Lomé, the Togolese capital. Both internet cafés will be open to the public, although some time will be set aside each week for special user groups, such as orphanage children, who will receive computer training, and micro-finance clients. In addition, The cafés will provide a learning and employment opportunity for local people and aim to be profitable in about a year, earning income from providing internet access, printing and copying services.

    Jo Earl, from UWE Volunteering, co-ordinated students from UWE’s Department of Computer Science & Creative Technologies to make the computers ready for use.

    “Four volunteers worked as a team to assess the donated equipment, install operating systems and additional software. In total 84 PCs were shipped and the students worked really hard on a complex and time-consuming task,” said Jo.

    “After refurbishing the computers, our next big task was shipping the PCs from Frenchay campus,” continued Jo, who worked with UWE facilities manager Richard Bird on packing and loading the computers, printers, desks and chairs into a shipping container.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • Bristol Post Balls – the ghost train

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

    Yesterday’s Bristol Post featured a report on convicted murderer Paul Flint, who has absconded from Ford Open Prison in Sussex.

    Flint is believed to be in the Bristol area, the evidence for which is included in the following sentence:

    The latest reported sighting of Flint was on a train at Bristol Parkway station, heading towards Westbury-on-Trym, shortly after 6.20pm on Tuesday.

    There’s one major problem with that statement: no railway line runs between Bristol Parkway and Westbury-on-Trym. The closest any line runs to Westbury-on-Trym is the Henbury Loop line (posts passim), which has been closed to passenger traffic since 1964.

    Is there a chance that reporter Daniel Evans was confusing Westbury-on-Trym with Westbury in Wiltshire, which does have a functioning railway station – or does he live in a Bristol in a parallel universe where public transport provision is excellent? 😉

  • Bristol Post Balls – let it rain

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Certain parts of the country suffered from very heavy rain earlier this week. Where I was camping in the Black Mountains for the past week, we had some 3 inches of rain over the weekend.

    image of a row of umbrellas
    Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    The Bristol area was also affected by the torrential downpour. Sit back and marvel at the mathematical genius of an anonymous Bristol Post reporter in this report posted in the online version on Sunday and bearing the headline “Met Office issues severe weather warning as Bristol poised for 12 hours of heavy rain“.

    The forecast is for heavy rain from 10pm tonight, stretching through until 10pm on Monday, before heavy rain showers persist until 7pm.

    Excluding the heavy showers, I make that at least 24 hours. How about you? 🙂

  • Sea greens

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

    Yesterday I left the confines of Bristol and travelled down to the Bristol Channel coast.

    While there I was there I made time to visit an area of salt marsh to forage for marsh samphire (also known as glasswort), which is currently in the midst of its short season, which consists of the months of July and August only.

    image of marsh samphire
    Marsh samphire (Salicornia europaea)

    Samphire can be eaten raw or cooked. In the latter instance, no salt needs to be added to the cooking water as the plant has an inherent high salt content. It has a fresh, salty taste, crisp texture and makes a great accompaniment to fish and shellfish dishes, eggs or such specialities as salt marsh lamb. As samphire gets older and larger, the core of the plant becomes more stringy and the succulent flesh has to be stripped off the stringy core.

    Until the start of the 19th century, marsh samphire also had industrial uses: before the introduction of the LeBlanc process for the industrial production of soda ash, marsh samphire ashes were long used as a source of soda ash (mainly sodium carbonate) for making glass and soap.

    As regards the origin of the noun samphire, it is believed to be a corruption of the French name herbe de Saint-Pierre, i.e. “St Peter’s herb”.

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