As a fan of Private Eye’s Lookalikes section, the other day I couldn’t help noticing there was more than a passing similarity between Michael Fabricant, the implausibly-coiffed Tory Member of Parliament for Lichfield, and Iggy Pop, that occasional insurance salesman and singer-songwriter, musician and actor, better known to the US Internal Revenue Service as James Newell Osterberg, Jr.
The completed full version of the Tidy BS5 bin man video (posts passim) has now been released.
Many thanks to Andy Reid for his masterful brush strokes and majestic moves for the camera for last Sunday’s Make Sunday Special on Stapleton Road, which looked especially spruced up for the day (the splendid chaps who battle its litter daily must have heard Mayor George Ferguson would be turning up! Ed.).
I’ve written before of my love of the live cricket commentary on Radio 4 long wave (posts passim).
However, I could hardly believe my ears during the latest match in the Ashes series being played at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.
England won the toss, elected to bowl first and put Australia into bat. Before lunch Australia were all out for 60 runs (including extras), clocking up the worst batting performance by an Australian team in an Ashes match for some 8 decades.
If I couldn’t believe my ears, one can just imagine how well such a shambolic performance with the bat went down in the Australian media.
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s sports headline writer perhaps encapsulated feelings best with the back page headline “It’s Pomicide“, as per the photograph below.
Whilst I take a rather ambiguous attitude to newspaper headline writers and their frequently inappropriate use of puns, the invention of Pomicide strikes me as most apposite. Should I recommend it to the Oxford English Dictionary for its word of the year accolade?
Amongst some technology enthusiasts free and open source software is promoted with a zeal approaching that of Christian evangelism, i.e. the preaching of the gospel or the practice of giving information about a particular doctrine or set of beliefs to others with the intention of converting others to the Christian faith.
Does this mean that free and open source software – also referred to by the acronym FOSS – is now a religion?
Richard Stallman – founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – has been known to appear at events in pseudo-religious garb masquerading as his alter ego, St IGNucius of the Church of Emacs.
Since the foundation of the FOSS movement a couple of decades ago, there have been many developments in information technology and the working of the internet.
Of these one of the most notable is the development by Google of predictive search terms; as one types, Google tries to anticipate the final search string. This can have some interesting results, as evidenced by the screenshot below.
PDF – Portable Document Format – was originally a proprietary standard developed by Adobe Systems. It was released as an open standard on 1st July 1 2008 and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008, at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts.
No information is available as to when Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are to be released as open standards under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization. 😉
One of the great tools not available to previous generations of those producing print for public consumption is the spell checker – an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.
However, some people and/or organisations still seem reluctant to use them, such as UK railway infrastructure operator Network Rail, which chickened out on the occasion shown below and thus qualified for a residency in Homophone Corner. 🙂
It’s the first day of the first test match in Cardiff of the latest Ashes series being played between England and Australia.
One household in Beaumont Street in the Easton area of Bristol has entered into the spirit of the occasion, as shown below.
As it’s the postage stamp-sized front garden of a terraced house, the players are a mix of Playmobil* and Lego figures, not life size.
Note the loving preparation that’s gone into the pitch, an uncovered one (naturally) in line with traditional British values and thus guaranteed to cheer the most outspoken of cricket commentators – a certain G. Boycott.
Talking of Mr Boycott, if you’re a fan of the Test Match Special radio commentary on the BBC, add to your enjoyment of the excellent commentary by Aggers, Blowers et al.; make sure you’ve got your Boycott Bingo card ready for when the world’s greatest living Yorkshireman sounds off (posts passim). 🙂
* Irreverent IT news site The Register has a sizable Playmobil archive.
Over the weekend a new amenity – either an art installation or a new public convenience – has appeared on the A420 Lawrence Hill in east Bristol.
If the latter, it’s conveniently located next to the site of Lawrence Hill’s original Victorian public lavatories, sadly demolished some years ago by Bristol City Council and the site sold off to developers.
Continuing with the theme of convenience, if it is a new public lavatory – whether provided at public expense or by the private sector – it will no doubt come as a relief to the thousands of commuters from Kingswood, Hanham and other parts of South Gloucestershire who clog up the A420 inbound on weekday mornings and outbound on weekday evenings respectively.
However, I suspect it is the work of east Bristol’s shadowy network of fly-tippers, in which case it needs reporting to Bristol City Council. 🙂
Perhaps the most visible aspect of Bristol’s year as European Green Capital is the year’s sponsorship by local transport monopolists FirstGroup.
As a result, there have been some strange coloured – one might almost say greenwashed – buses thundering through this proud and ancient city, as captured below.
However, FirstBus has also been able to buy a ‘greenwash-lite‘ version for its sponsorship that consists of the Bristol Green Capital logo slapped on top of its usual ‘Barbie‘ livery.
The flanks of the Barabie double-deckers now have the Bristol Green Capital logo splashed across their sides, whilst the single-deckers have a smaller version the logo above the driver’s cab.
Whilst public transport is a greener option than using a private motor car, emissions from the diesel fuel on which buses run.
According to Wikipedia:
It is reported that emissions from diesel vehicles are significantly more harmful than those from petrol ones.Diesel exhaust contains toxic air contaminants and is listed as carcinogen for humans by the IARC (part of the World Health Organization of the United Nations) in group 1. Diesel exhaust contains fine particles which are harmful. Diesel exhaust pollution was thought to account for around one quarter of the pollution in the air in previous decades, and a high share of sickness caused by automotive pollution.
Any resemblance between the full greenwash livery and the British Racing Green livery of the old Bristol Omnibus Company is purely coincidental.
Whatever would Blakey say? 😉
Do you know how many press and PR officers are employed by Bristol City Council?
Go on, have a guess!
If you didn’t know, the latest available figure is 43, according to this Press Gazette article from April 2015 on its the Freedom of Information Act request which asked 435 city, borough and district councils across the UK how many people they employ in their communications departments.
Bristol City Council actually has the equal third largest press and PR staff of all local authorities in the UK, a position it shares with Sheffield City Council:
Remember that figure of 43. Now try and guess how many ‘streetscene‘ (litter & fly-tipping) enforcement officers Bristol City Council employs. The people that deal with prosecuting the abuse of communal bins by traders (posts passim) and the like.
The answer is 6. That’s equivalent to one council enforcement officer for over 71,600 residents.
The answer was revealed in a FoI request I submitted back in November 2014, as per the transcript below.
Kindly disclose the number of streetscene enforcement officers employed by Bristol City Council during all financial years since April 2010 to the present day.
There were seven streetscene enforcement officer [sic] employed between April 2010 and March 2014. From April 2014 until present day there are six.
That’s right! Six enforcement officers for the whole of Bristol. However, there’s enough grot and bad waste management behaviour just in Easton and Lawrence Hill wards alone to keep all 6 of those officers permanently occupied.
Returning to the number of officers per head of population outlined above, Bristol City Council has one press/PR wonk per 1,000 inhabitants.
Anyone would think the local authority was suffering a public relations crisis.
Awards recognising local people and businesses which support the environment have been launched by the Bristol Post, the rag of that name reports on its website today.
The article continues that the Bristol Post Green Capital Awards will celebrate those people who are making our city a greener, healthier, happier place to live and work.
The article does quote the chairman of Bristol 2015 – a company established by the city council to run this year-long green-tinged public relations exercise – admitting that Green Capital has not reached all parts of Bristol.
That being so, I’d like to see an alternative set of awards that won’t go to the usual suspects amongst Bristol’s great and good and their pet vanity projects. Let’s call them the Greenwash Capital Awards.
Some of these can be awarded already.
For starters, there’s the Green Transport Award, for which there can only be one set of winners, namely the selfish individuals who all drive their vehicles containing just one person into the city from the surrounding areas of South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath & North East Somerset, causing congestion, pollution and getting in the way of local bus services.
Then there’s the Green Waste Management Award. This prize should I believe be split between the citizens of Bristol who managed to generate 18% more waste for landfill last year, Bristol City Council, which seems to be labouring under the delusion that exporting what would go to landfill to Sweden for incineration in power stations is a good idea and finally the people – both traders and others – who think that the BS5 postcode area is the natural home for the city’s fly-tipping.
How about the Habitat and Biodiversity Destruction Award? There’s a clear winner for this one: the four councils making up the West of England Partnership and their ludicrous transport white elephant, the Metrobus scheme.
Finally, for the time being there’s the Green Waste of Money Award. That goes to all the money wasted to date on so-called ‘arts’ projects as part of Green Capital.
If you can think of any further worthy recipients of a Greenwash Capital Award, please add them in the comments below.