Ever since the takeover of the Local World newspaper titles by Trinity Mirror in October 2015, several Local World titles seem to or actually have given up on reporting serious local news preferring to give preference to what are essentially advertorials (e.g. restaurant reviews) and trivia instead of the hard work of investigating corruption and wrongdoing in the local corridors of power and/or amongst the
city’s so-called great and good.
This certainly seems to ring true if one examines the Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record.
Today’s most spectacular piece of trivia from the Temple Way Ministry of Truth concerns an encounter with an unpleasant object in the men’s toilets of McDonalds, not a caterer likely to feature in the aforementioned restaurant reviews (McDonald’s restaurants is a well-known modern oxymoron. Ed.).
When allowed to comment, Post readers are not shy in expressing their views, as shown by the exchange below on the offending article.
As alluded to above, most of the Post’s alleged online news content can accurately be described as “clickbait“, which is defined by Wikipedia as “web content whose main goal is to entice users to click on a link to go to a certain webpage or video. Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the “curiosity gap,” providing just enough information to make readers curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content“.
Listening to Radio 3 this morning, presenter Petroc Trelawny announced that today is Pi Day, an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Following the US date format style (MMDDYY), Pi Day is celebrated 14th March, since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π. Pi has to date been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point.
A Pi pie. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The earliest known official or large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organised by by physicist Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where he worked, at which fruit pies were consumed.
Besides maths and the sciences, Pi also turns up in the arts. In literature for example, in Terry Pratchett’s fictional Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork, Unseen University is a school of wizardry staffed by a faculty mostly composed of indolent and inept old wizards whose main function is not teaching, but eating big dinners. The University’s unofficial motto is “η β π”, or “Eta Beta Pi” (Eat A Better Pie).
Still in world of literature, Life of Pi is a fantasy novel by Yann Martel, which was adapted into a 2012 film of the same name directed directed by Ang Lee.
Finally, Kate Bush’s 2005 album Aerial features the track Pi.
Happy Pi Day! I shall be celebrating by eating a pastry product. 😀
Every day in the UK people are being seriously injured or even killed by vehicles which apparently have minds of their own or are not under the control of a human being.
If you need confirmation of this fact, just open any local newspaper or visit any local news website.
Bearing the headline “Pensioner driving a mobility scooter dies after being hit by truck in Burnham-on-Sea“, this is a tragic tale, whose first sentence reads:
An 80-year-old man has died after being hit by a pickup truck while driving his mobility scooter in Burnham-on-Sea.
Further details are then provided by a police officer who confirms the absence of human intervention the other party involved in the incident. The officer is quoted as saying the following:
At about 11.50am, a Nissan Navara was travelling along Oxford Street and, having turned into Adam Street, was in collision with the man who was on his mobility scooter.
Nowhere in the article – short though it is – is there any mention of the Nissan Navara having a driver.
This phenomenon of vehicles without drivers but with a mind of their own is not confined to the West Country either.
The crash involved a black Ford Ka and a black Ford Fiesta.
The driver of the Ford Ka, an 18-year-old woman, sustained serious head injuries.
Why is such a peculiar style of wording used for press reports of road traffic collisions? Are the highways and byways of the country really full of driverless, out of control vehicles with a sadistic or psychopathic streak?
Probably not.
The likely explanation for this curious style of reporting is that the majority of road traffic incidents ending in collision and injury will involve either insurance liability or criminal liability or both. The wording used carefully avoids attributing any blame.
Furthermore, these collisions are often referred to as “accidents“. The last thing the majority of road traffic incidents are is accidental since the majority of them involve either driver error, as shown by the graph below.
So, are the country’s roads full of metal boxes intent on causing harm to humans? Unlikely, but they are full of frail, fallible humans in charge of potential killers.
In amongst the blizzard of snow-related news coverage, one significant item of information has been overlooked by almost all of the media: the Met Office, formerly an executive agency and trading fund of the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, is now part of major British supermarket chain Asda Stores Ltd., which is itself owned by US retail giant Walmart, Inc.
Indeed, the only part of the mainstream media to pick up this news yesterday was the Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of (warped) record, as shown by the screenshot below of that mighty organ’s home page.
Unless the above headline and tagging are yesterday’s deliberate mistake by the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, it is most baffling why such a momentous government asset disposal has not been mentioned elsewhere.
Finally, Walmart is rumoured to be such a hands-on company that the heating in all its stores is controlled from corporate headquarters. This blog trusts that Met Office employees are prepared for such control-freakery.
They make your ‘umble scribes spirits lift knowing that winter will be banished in the not too distant future and spring is waiting in the wings.
Above is a picture of snowdrops taken this morning on All Hallows Road in Easton.
The last time this blog had a specific post on snowdrops, it was dated late January, so these are the earliest flowering snowdrops your correspondent has ever encountered in Bristol.
Given this early appearance of snowdrops, how long will it be before the next signs of spring – such as hazel catkins opening or flowering croci – occur?
Last week’s post on east Bristol’s Wain Brook (posts passim) attracted considerable interest on social media amongst local residents with a love of local history and maps.
These interested parties included a member of the original team that put together the online Know Your Place mapping project, who commented further that he’s currently working on a flood mapping project that will include a number of Bristol’s hidden watercourses.
Yesterday another peek over the bridge parapet at Lawrence Hill revealed that there’s now less of the Wain Brook to be seen as the works progress: it can still be seen flowing left to right in the masonry inspection chamber.
However, this hidden watercourse will soon disappear once more beneath the trackbed: and who knows how long will pass before it once more sees the light of day.
Metal plates cover the top of the Wain Brook culvert
What is the hapless US customs officer featured below going to do when he finds out there’s a Paris in France as well as Texas, an Athens in Greece as well as Georgia and Boston is named after a market town in Lincolnshire in the UK?
The “FourTracking” entails increasing the capacity up Filton Bank by replacing the two sets of tracks that were removed between some 35 and 40 years ago. The route up Filton Bank is used by mainline services to both South Wales and the Midlands, as well as by local rail services.
On the section of Filton Bank between Dr Day’s Junction and Stapleton Road station, the majority of the current work entails clearing away 3 decades of detritus and refurbishing the infrastructure, including the original drains in the cutting. At Lawrence Hill station, this has included refurbishing a culvert, as I found out looking over the railway bridge the other day.
A small culvert being refurbished right next to Lawrence Hill railway bridge. What hidden waters does it contain?
I was intrigued by the slight curvature of the culvert as drains are normally straight. What could this be?
To find the answer your ‘umble scribe had to search maps dating back to the late 19th century. These are available through Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place website.
No clues were forthcoming from the 20th century maps and other resources available. However, the 1880 Ordnance Survey mapping for Lawrence Hill revealed what the culvert actually was. It carries the Wain Brook – one of Bristol’s hidden watercourses – under the railway.
If you examine the image below, it will be noted that Lawrence Hill railway bridge lies between the two sections of the Wain Brook then running above ground – one to the right of the bridge past the “Wainbrook Works” and the other section to the left past open ground (now a park).
Very little information is available online about the Wain Brook itself. Judging from the map evidence its source seems to be in the region of Plummers Hill in St George and in times gone by it flowed across the fields that were to become St George Park. After the park’s creation, the Wain Brook was used to feed its ornamental lake.
From can be surmised from the sparse clues available, from Lawrence Hill the Wain Brook – still in culvert – flows down Lincoln Street (site of the Wain Brook Elderly Persons Home. Ed.), past Gaunt’s Ham Park and through St Philips and the Dings (where some 200 years ago it flowed through withy beds) to empty into the River Avon at a point near Bristol Temple Meads station.
In the early 1800s Barton Hill was described as a small rural hamlet comprising mainly of wheat fields and orchards with a stream, The Wain Brook, running through and dominated by two large houses namely, Tilley’s Court and Royal Table House.
The earliest historical reference to the Wain Brook that my research has turned up dates back to the 13th century, when in the manor of Barton Regis (present-day Barton Hill) there was a meadow belonging to St Mark’s Hospital called ‘Wainbroke’ (after the Wain Brook) that extended between the ‘meadow of the hospital of St Lawrence of Bristol and the meadow formerly of Richard de Pisa’.
The hospital of St Lawrence of Bristol was Bristol’s medieval leper colony (St Lawrence was the patron saint of lepers and leper colonies were always established beyond the built-up areas of medieval towns and cities. Ed.), which was founded by King John in 1208 when he was Earl of Mortain. The hospital’s establishment gave its name to the whole area. Lawrence Hill roundabout now occupies the vicinity of the site where the hospital is thought to have stood.
If readers have further information to add about the Wain Brook, please feel free to comment below.
The print edition of Scotland’s The National newspaper has an interesting take on the latest Brexit shambles, a comedy of epic proportions if only it were no so tragic.
No further comment required.
Readers may like to leave their comments below on the likely impact of Brexit. 😀
Spotted on Devon House in Whitehall Road, Bristol, this morning.
This fine old building, which has a Georgian core, is currently being refurbished for some sort of supported or sheltered housing scheme.
However, whoever thought up the “Supported Independence” text on the sign doesn’t really understand English and probably couldn’t even begin to say what constitutes an oxymoron, i.e. an epigrammatic effect, by which contradictory terms are used in conjunction. .
