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.
The error has since been corrected to read Gaza conflict: 72-hour ceasefire agreed by both sides.
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.
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.
The Law Society Gazette reports today on Capita’s failures to provide interpreters for Cardiff Crown Court.
His Honour Judge Burr adjourned the case until the following day (17th July) as no Mandarin interpreter had been provided by Capita.
When the case returned to court on 17 July there was still no interpreter, following which the judge – possibly in desperation – asked a defence barrister to trawl Cardiff’s Chinese restaurants to find an interpreter.
However, after 2 consecutive days of failures, Capita did manage to provide an interpreter when the defendant was brought to court for the third time.
The same report states that a similar problem had occurred at the same court on 15th July when the case of another Chinese defendant, Liu Guiying, had to be adjourned.
Capita naturally denies there have been any failures in Cardiff. A Capita spokeswoman is reported to have stated the company “does not have a record of unfulfilled bookings for Cardiff Crown Court that match the name and dates provided,” adding that for the second case – that of Liu Guiying – Capita assigned an interpreter but that the court had made the booking for the wrong time (Capita blaming courts for its own failures is a ruse that’s been used before. Ed.). The spokeswoman also remarked that the interpreter could not make the revised time, as well as stating that Capita “continued to try and source an alternative interpreter up until the day of the booking and kept the court fully informed throughout”.
Update 30/07/2014: This story was reported on the Daily Mirror’s website yesterday. In the Mirror’s piece, Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter MP is quoted as saying; “This is the latest example of how the criminal justice system under David Cameron has descended into a complete farce.“
Over in Swansea, Bristol Post owners Local World have a local news title – the South Wales Evening Post, which describes itself as “Wales’ largest selling newspaper“.
As such, one would have thought that such a boast was based upon hard-hitting stories and investigative journalism.
However, this is not so.
Just like its Bristol counterpart, the South Wales Evening Post also has an approach to what constitutes news and headlines which could be described as parochial, i.e. narrow in outlook or scope.
Hat tip: Marjory Smith
According to Wikipedia, street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed on streets and roads for various purposes. It includes benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic lights, traffic signs, bus stops, tram stops, taxi stands, public lavatories, fountains, watering troughs, memorials, public sculptures, and waste receptacles.
The communal refuse bin in the picture above is street furniture, the office chairs lazily left beside it are not; they are fly-tipping.
Tackling fly-tipping, litter and waste in some parts of Bristol can seem at times like nailing fog to the wall and the fly-tipping shown above has been notified to Bristol City Council via Twitter and complete with the #tidybs5 hashtag (posts passim).
Besides Twitter, fly-tipping can be reported to the city council by:
The most direct reporting route is using the fly-tipping form as the report is sent directly to the department concerned, whereas the other methods require the report to be forwarded.
“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.
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? 🙂
On Friday Linguist Lounge’s Facebook page carried a disturbing report on the abysmal quality of interpreters – or more specifically one interpreter – used by Capita Translation & interpreting. It is reproduced in its full horror below.
We’ve received a report that today Capita sent an unqualified Portuguese interpreter to a court in England. The linguist is reported to have summarised court proceedings, using English terms for unknown words such as “guardian”, “placement”, “local authority”. The judge was said to have been made aware of this after the hearing, however, the defendant was left stressed and anxious, without any understanding of what was going on inside the court room.
When is the Ministry of Justice going to terminate its failing contract with Crapita? Will that have to wait until a change of government next year?
In the meantime Crapita will continue to be rewarded for poor service and public money will continue to be wasted.
The phrase Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which is the national motto of both France and Haiti, has changed subtly since the former adopted it formally during the 3rd Republic at the end of the 19th century. 🙂
According to a couple of my Twitter contacts, West Midlands Police are currently looking at their interpreting contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, a name not unfamiliar this blog.
The first indication of this came yesterday from Agata McCrindle.
West Mids Police are reviewing their interpreting contract. Officers completing questionnaires. Sgt I spoke to said no improvement in 2 yrs.
— Agata McCrindle (@polish_linguist) June 26, 2014
This was followed later by Geoffrey Buckingham, Chairman of the Association of Police & Court Interpreters (ACPI).
If @WMPolice dump the @Capita_ti contract, will a proper service resume? Will #proterps trust them?
— Geoffrey (@Geoffrey_M_B) June 27, 2014