North Carolina is one of the so-called Bible Belt states where the influence of evangelical Christianity is the strongest, according to Wikipedia.
Faith can work miracles, we are told.
And this is definitely the case in Mecklenburg County in the aforementioned state. It would seem the residents of the county (population: 1.1m) have an uncanny ability to rise Lazarus-like from the dead if the civil registry section of the county’s website is to be believed. 😀
Your ‘umble scribe has yet to ask Fred Smith, the elected register officer for a comment. In 2008 Fred ran as a Republican candidate for governor but was defeated in the primary. Now he’s reduced to dealing with the deceased in more ways than one.
One final thought: has the website been checked for accessibility for the no longer extant?
I fully sympathise, Larry. I would not be able to stand the lies, philandering, laziness, sense of entitlement, egotism and general sense of entitlement either. 😀
The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office has been in service since 2011. I wonder how many suitcases of booze the faithful feline has seen hauled over the threshold of that famous black door in 11 years?
Image courtesy of Wikimedia CommonsLadies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to a new unit of measurement, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as used yesterday by North Wales Online/Daily Post.
The particular context for the use of the Leaning Tower of Pisa was the planning application by RWE Renewables to Denbighshire County Council for a 90-metre-high meteorological mast on land at Mynydd Mynyllod, Llandrillo, near Corwen.
If planning permission is granted, the purpose of the mast the mast will be to collect wind data for three years to see whether the field is a suitable site for a wind farm.
According to Wikipedia, the height of Pisa’s famous tower is 55.86 metres from the ground on the low side and 56.67 m on the high side.
Your ‘umble scribe wonders what its equivalent is in football pitches, sizes of Wales and Stockholms (posts passim). 😉
If there’s one thing that characterises Reach plc’s regional newspaper titles it is lack of attention to detail, whether that is their use of English, captioning of photos, geographical location and so on.
Earlier this week visitors to the Bristol Post website (aka BristolLive. Ed.) were treated to an exemplar of this poor quality media production.
It’s not unusual for newspaper sites to encourage their visitors to sign up for newsletters as a marketing tool and thus increase their traffic.
However, the Bristol Post’s latest effort, which is posted on a page that seems to be syndicated across several different regional titles, appears to have been mistargeted, landing a direct hit on the banks to the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber estuary, rather than the banks of the Bristol Avon.
Hull – Bristol’s newest suburb?
This is not the first time (and definitely won’t be the last. Ed.) that Reach titles have played fast and loose with geography. Four years ago, the Bristol Post magically transformed into the Manchester Evening News (posts passim).
This action raises a number of questions, i.e.:
Is Hull Bristol’s newest suburb?
Are HullLive readers being invited to sign up to the BristolLive newsletters in the interests of balance if nothing else?
How many seconds would the average modern Reach employee have survived in post if magically transported back to the days when all regional newspapers employed sub-editors?
If you know the answer or can provide further elucidation, please comment below. 😀
It’s that time of year again, when the rumour circulates that Christmas has been cancelled to avoid upsetting members of other faiths.
This is of course pure nonsense whipped up by fearful and over-sensitive right-wing commentators in the media and has been debunked every time it’s been mentioned.
Who’s to say that adherents of other religions don’t enjoy the Christmas celebrations as much as followers of Christ? Jesus was after all born Jewish and under the name of Isa, is regarded as one of the twenty-five prophets of Islam
As proof that this year’s Christmas has not been cancelled by the anonymous PC Brigade, here’s a shot taken of the window of my nearest butcher in Roman Road, Easton. Please supply your own stuffing and cranberry sauce. 😀
Cancelling Christmas has a long history in this country, stretching back to the mid-17th century when, following the English Civil War, the the Commonwealth of England was governed by a parliament dominated by Puritans, who objected to certain practices they viewed as unbiblical, including the long-established feast of Christmas. In 1647, the English Parliament banned the celebration of Christmas, replacing it with a day of fasting and considering it “a popish festival with no biblical justification“, as well as a time of wasteful and immoral behaviour. Protests followed: pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities and for weeks Canterbury was controlled by rioters, who decorated doorways with holly and indulged in other practices bound to annoy the killjoys who have been with us ever since.
All of which brings us to the infamous Winterval. Frequently cited as the ultimate Cancel Christmas event, Winterval was nothing of the sort, but a mere two events held in successive winters in November and December 1997 and 1998 to encourage people to return to the newly rejuvenated city centre. These featured secular and religious events marking religious and other occasions, including Christmas, during those two months. Winterval has since become popular shorthand for misrepresented events to “rebrand” Christmas so as not to exclude non-Christians.
Another day, another dreadful headline from a Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror. Ed.) title.
Today’s comes courtesy of Wales Online and features 2 regular features: firstly the desire the pack the entire story into the headline (instead of that anachronistic practice of giving the odd hint about it. Ed.); and secondly ambiguity.
In my first job after graduating, part of the introduction to the company’s house style involved avoiding ambiguity at all costs.
This is evidently no longer the case in large swathes of the local press, especially where the titles are owned by the two big players: the aforementioned Reach plc and Newsquest Media Group Ltd.
Following the resignation as a backbench MP of the disgraced former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson, a by-election has been called for the North Shropshire constituency (where your ‘umble scribe was born and raised. Ed.), the Tory virtual one party state which has returned a Tory member in every poll bar one* since implementation of the so-called “Great” Reform Act of 1832.
Paterson decided to resign and leave what he called the “cruel world of politics” (if you want to see how cruel the world of politics is, Paterson’s voting record is online. Ed.) after public outcry following a botched attempt by part-time alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to save his pal from 30 days’ suspension from the Commons for what the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards termed an “egregious case of paid advocacy“.
Given its history, the contest should be a shoe-in for the Blue Team, given that the disgraced former member had a majority just short of 23,000 and that the large number of candidates standing will inevitably split the anti-Conservative vote.
Campaigning has already begun, with prominent and less prominent occupiers of those green leather benches in Westminster turning out to support their chosen candidate, in this case that Brummie barrister.
At which point step forward the honourable Mr Edmund Frances Hughes, who owes his position to the gullibility of voters in the constituency of Walsall North.
Except for the fact that Eddie did not so much step forward as trip over his own two feet and end up flat on his face on social media with one tweet.
Yesterday afternoon in a tweet featuring not only the Brummie barrister, but also Oliver Dowden MP, the former Secretary of State for Culture Wars, Eddie wrote:
Very positive day campaigning in Wem for the North Staffs. by-election.
Dr. Neil Shastri-Hurst would be an excellent MP, and already has a proven track record of public service.
Yes, you did read that tweet correctly. Eddie has moved Wem from the rural acres of north Shropshire to somewhere in the vicinity of the Potteries conurbation, which might have some effect on voters as regards the competence of the Blue Team.
However, it is not just the Conservatives’ drafted-in support that seems to be having problems knowing exactly where above the centre it is. That affliction also extended to their candidate himself, Mr Neil Shastri-Hurst, if a tweet by Harry Taylor is to be believed. Harry writes:
Just read that a voter in Wem was shocked that the Tory candidate thought he was actually in Oswestry (20 miles away!). This coming after Eddie Hughes MP thought he was in North Staffs – a constituency abolished in 1885 – is sending quite a message to voters.
High Street of the ‘North Staffordshire’ town of Wem. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
After all, if members of the governing party don’t even know what county or town they are in, how can they possibly be expected to cope with far more difficult stuff, like the complicated legal text of draft legislation?
*=In the first election held in the new constituency in 1832, North Shropshire was a two-member seat, returning one Tory and one Whig MP. After becoming a single member seat, the only time a non-Tory was elected was in 1904, when it was a Liberal Party seat for a mere two years.
One of those right-wing presenters had a bad day at the studio yesterday.
Step forward one Archibald Michael Graham, otherwise know as ‘Iron’ Mike, former editor of the Scottish edition of the Daily Mirror and former assistant editor of the Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.).
Yesterday he’d invited Insulate Britain spokesperson Cameron Ford, onto the TalkRadio breakfast show, where he is currently deputising for the dreadful Julia Hartley-Brewer, ostensibly to discuss Insulate Britain’s latest protest action, but more likely so that Ford could give him a good verbal kicking for the entertainment of the station’s none too large audience.
However, matters did not progress entirely to plan, leaving Iron Mike’s carapace pitted with rust as he ended up displaying his own stupidity, which has now gone viral around the English-speaking world.
The interview, which lasted less than one minute in total, starts with no style at all. Graham launches straight into an ad hominem attack on his guest – a carpenter by trade – claiming that wood is not a sustainable product, before trying to assert that concrete is a sustainable product, before being politely corrected. There then follow a period of silence before Graham ends the interview thinking he’s embarrassed his guest, whilst not having the nous to realise he has opened his mouth and inserted his foot up to the ankle, as per the video clip below.
In Tokyo there’s a special team of you men and women who help keep the streets clean with some elegant and graceful moves they perform whilst dressed in traditional Japanese robes and Western trilby hats.
Known as Gomihiroi Samurai (“litter-picking Samurai”), these environmentally conscious individuals have a unique approach to clean streets, as can be seen below.
The group have gained popularity on social media site TikTok, where they have gained over 300,000 followers, as well as on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
They’re all street performers and one of them, Naka Keisuke, told France 24 that the group thought they’d like to welcome visitors from around the world to a clean city when it was announced that Tokyo had been chosen for the last Olympic Games.
Given Bristol’s love for street performers, they’d go down a storm in the litter capital of the West Country… if they weren’t worn out by the sheer amount of filth.
The Daily Express, aka the Daily Brexit in some circles, was one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.) to leave to European Union, which if not promising a land flowing with biblical milk and honey, it was at the very least holding out the prospect of one where cake could both be had and eaten.
Following the resignation as a backbench MP of the disgraced former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen Paterson, a by-election has been called for the North Shropshire constituency (where your ‘umble scribe was born and raised. Ed.), the Tory virtual one party state which has returned a Tory member in every poll bar one* since implementation of the so-called 
