An A-board spotted today on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol 1.
A number of questions arose in your correspondent’s head upon seeing this.
Firstly, who is Mac and why is this exclusive service being offered to him/her in respect of computer hardware?
Would the owner of the sign fix my broken kit if my name wasn’t Mac?
Has a greengrocer diversified into the hardware repair business?
I think we should be told. 🙂
This week the House of Commons is due to debate the Investigatory Powers Bill, the latest version of the Snoopers’ Charter (news passim), that will allow the United Kingdom’s police and services to regard the entire UK population as potential organised criminals, suspected terrorists and other assorted ne’er-do-wells and enable those same services to monitor the UK residents’ internet traffic and telecommunications.
In advance of the parliamentary debate and to publicise the illiberal nature of Home Secretary Theresa May’s bill, the Open Rights Group installed a public toilet on a busy Friday afternoon in Brick Lane in east London. However, the public toilet was not all that it seemed; it was a toilet with a difference.
The Open Rights Group has also provided a helpful, fact-packed page for MPs on the Snoopers’ Charter to brief them ahead of the debate.
Originally posted by the author on Bristol Wireless.
One of the joys of the illiteracy of the Bristol Post – the city’s newspaper of warped record – is the unintentional humour the manifestations of that lack of skill inspire.
Such an instance occurred yesterday when the Post reported, with a local angle of course, on the reopening of the inquest into the victims of the Birmingham pub bombing by the IRA on 21st November 1974.
One of the survivors – Frank Thomas – now happens to live in Bristol and the Post’s reported duly managed to get rumble and rubble confused, as shown in the following screenshot of the article’s first paragraph.
Should any passing Post hack wish to avoid future confusion, the definitions of rumble and rubble are helpfully transcribed below from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.
Rumble (n.) – a low continuous sound.
Rubble (n.) the piles of broken stone and bricks, etc. that are left when a building falls down or is destroyed.
As published yesterday on the Bristol Post website.
Unfortunately, the reporter concerned fails to tell readers how the car was able to stay in the saddle, given the inability of the car’s wheels to fit into the stirrups. 😉
Very soon after graduating and getting my first job with Imperial Group, I was taught by my then manager to avoid any ambiguity when writing. Times have clearly changed!
Although they are more likely to be seen in upland areas of south-west England, Wales, the north Pennines and Lake District and much of Scotland, sightings of ravens are not unknown in the low-lying city of Bristol.
Your ‘umble scribe has seen single ravens around Temple Meads railway station, as well as in such inner-city districts as Easton. More often than not, I have heard the raven’s distinctive call before seeing it with the naked eye.
The largest number I’ve ever spotted at one time was a few weeks ago, when I sighted three ravens circling over Barton Hill, being mobbed by aggressive members of the area’s resident gull population.
Ravens have long featured in European mythology. In Irish mythology, the goddess MorrÃgan alighted on the hero Cú Chulainn‘s shoulder in the form of a raven after his death. In Welsh mythology ravens were associated with the Welsh god Bran the Blessed, whose name translates to “raven.” According to the Mabinogion, Bran’s head was buried in the White Hill of London as a talisman against invasion.
In Norse mythology, Huginn (from the Old Norse for “thought”) and Muninn (Old Norse for “memory” or “mind”) are a pair of ravens that fly all over the world, Midgard and bring the god Odin information.
In England a legend developed that the country would not fall to a foreign invader as long as there were ravens at the Tower of London (invasions are averted by the simple expedient of clipping the wings of the resident ravens. Ed.). Although this is often thought to be an ancient belief, Geoffrey Parnell, the official Tower of London historian, believes that, like so many other legends of the British Isles, this is actually a romantic Victorian invention.
In western culture ravens have long been considered to be birds of ill omen and death, partly due to the negative symbolism of their all-black plumage and the eating of carrion.
As in traditional mythology and folklore, the common raven features frequently in more modern writings such as the works of William Shakespeare, and, perhaps most famously, in the poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. Ravens have also appeared in the works of Charles Dickens, J. R. R. Tolkien and Stephen King, amongst others.
Ravens have also featured in song. “The Three Ravens” is an English folk ballad, printed in the song book Melismata compiled by the appositely named Thomas Ravenscroft and published in 1611, but it is perhaps older than that.
The music and lyrics are set out below. The latter are in their original 17th century orthography, with the refrains in italics.
The ballad takes the form of 3 ravens conversing about where and what they should eat. One tells of a newly slain knight, but they find he is guarded by his loyal hawks and hounds. Furthermore, a “fallow doe”, an obvious metaphor for the knight’s pregnant (“as great with young as she might go”) lover or mistress comes to his body, kisses his wounds, bears him away and buries him, leaving the ravens without a meal.
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
Downe a downe, hay down, hay downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
With a downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be.
With a downe derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe
The one of them said to his mate,
‘Where shall we our breakefast take?’
‘Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a knight slain vnder his shield.
‘His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their master keepe.
‘His haukes they flie so eagerly,
There’s no fowle dare him come nie.’
Downe there comes a fallow doe,
As great with yong as she might goe.
She lift vp his bloudy hed,
And kist his wounds that were so red.
She got him vp vpon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake.
She buried him before the prime,
She was dead herselfe ere euen-song time.
God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman.
Your correspondent does not know what the three ravens circling Barton Hill found to eat, as dead knights are not exactly common in that part of the city. 😀
Microsoft has a reputation for forcing unwanted updates and upgrades on users.
Its actions reached a new nadir when it made Windows 10 a recommended update for users of earlier versions – 7 and 8.* – of its operating system.
Since this occurred there have been numerous reports of the new operating system installing itself without either user consent or much warning.
One of the most public of these attempted upgrades happened 2 days ago live on air at TV station KCCI of Des Moines, Iowa, as per the following screenshot.
That’s right! With impeccable bad timing, Windows 10 update barged unannounced into Metinka Slater’s heavy rain and thunderstorms update. However, the TV meteorologist managed deal professionally with the unwelcome intrusion into her work and switch quickly to an alternative video source to continue her broadcast, as shown by the following video.
Eggs have long been associated with Easter since for Christians the Easter egg is a symbol of Christ’s empty tomb.
The custom of the Easter egg originated in the early Christian community of Mesopotamia, which stained eggs red in memory of the blood of Christ, shed at his crucifixion.
This practice still survives in Greece where hard-boiled eggs are dyed bright red to symbolise the spilt Blood of Christ and the promise of eternal life. They are also cracked together to celebrate the opening of the Tomb of Christ.
In more recent times since those of the early Christians of Mesopotamia egg hunts have become a fixture of the Easter events calendar.
However, here’s one event from recent years from Lakewood Springs in Illinois that sounded a little too intimate for comfort…
Happy Easter! 🙂
Last Thursday I was in Shrewsbury, county town of the county of my birth. Shrewsbury is steeped in a wealth of medieval history, including plenty of ancient street names, amongst them the intriguingly titled Grope Lane.
Grope Lane in Shrewsbury is a narrow alley connecting High Street and Fish Street in the heart of the old medieval town, as shown on the location map below.
As with many towns in the Middle Ages, Shrewsbury’s Fish Street (and nearby Butcher Row. Ed.) are named after the trades that occupied them. However, Grope Lane is also reputed to be linked to trade – this time the pleasures of the flesh.
Wikipedia has an excellent page on this street name in its unsanitised version.
Gropec*nt Lane, says Wikipedia, was a street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas… Gropec*nt, the earliest known use of which is in about 1230, appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and c*nt (our medieval forebears were less sensitive and more earthy in their use of language than their modern descendants, as anyone who had read Chaucer in the original Middle English can testify. Ed.). Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities.
Towns and cities with active quays or ports often had an adjacent Grope(c*nt) Lane, as in the case of Bristol, although that street name recorded in the reign of Edward III (1312-1377), was subsequently changed to Hauliers Lane and has since been changed again (see below).
Although the name was once common throughout England, changes in attitude resulted in its replacement by more innocuous versions such as Grape Lane. A variation of Gropec*nt was last recorded as a street name in 1561.
In Shrewsbury a street called Grope Countelane existed as recently as 1561 and connected the town’s two principal marketplaces. At some unspecified date the street was renamed Grope Lane, which it has retained to the present day. In Thomas Phillips’ History and Antiquities of Shrewsbury (1799) the author is explicit in his understanding of the origin of the name as a place of “scandalous lewdness and venery”, but Archdeacon Hugh Owen’s Some account of the ancient and present state of Shrewsbury (1808) describes it as “called Grope, or the Dark Lane”. As a result of these differing accounts, some local tour guides attribute the name to “feeling one’s way along a dark and narrow thoroughfare”.
Other towns and cities in England also had their own local Grope(c*nt) Lane including the following:
Beware if you ever visit the gents at the Bull Hotel at Fairford in Gloucestershire; the vitreous china might attack you.
Last Friday’s Wilts & Gloucestershire Standard reports that a customer who smashed the toilet to bits claims he was acting in self defence.
The unnamed Kempsford man claims he was about to be attacked and smashed the toilet to attract the attention of other patrons.
However, the local constabulary were unimpressed by his assertions and he’s due to appear before Cheltenham Magistrates on 24th February.
Hat tip: Dr Bob Irving.
Where Bristol has the Bristol Post, formerly the Bristol Evening Post, as its newspaper of record (warped. Ed.), the Potteries has The Sentinel, formerly the Evening Sentinel.
Both newspapers now belong to the Local World stable and share many common features: the content management system running their websites, difficulty in distinguishing editorial content from advertising, a cavalier attitude to the correct use of the English language and so on.
Yesterday’s Sentinel carried a report of a railway signal failure in the Stafford area.
The report was helpfully illustrated with a photograph as per the screenshot below.
The photograph is also helpfully captioned, as follows:
DELAYS: Rail services have been hit by signalling problems at Stafford.
It is evident for a number of reasons that the anonymous members of the Sentinel’s “Digital_team” who put together this report are no great users of the railway network.
Firstly, the photograph shows semaphore signals. These are not used at Stafford, which lies on the West Coast Main Line, where semaphore signals were removed and replaced with colour light signals many decades ago.
Secondly, the plate on the signal mast identifies the signals as part of the Severn Bridge Junction signal complex.
Thirdly, what is the Abbey Church of St Peter & St. Paul in Shrewsbury doing in the background, lurking behind the largest sempaphore signal box in the country? 😉