Oddities

  • Cricket explained

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

    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.

    image of cricket fielding positions

    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.

  • Provided? No, neglected!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    Bristol City Council is a local authority that will seemingly stop at nothing to waste public money blowing its own trumpet.

    On the way back from the shops, this pointless sign by the flats on Easton Road caught my attention.

    sign in overgrown gardens stating provided by caretaking services

    The sign’s wording should be amended in my opinion to read “Neglected by Caretaking Services“.

    Council budgets all around the country are under pressure. In view of these financial constraints, here’s a suggestion for Bristol City Council: stop wasting money on pointless, self-aggrandising signage and you might find funds in the corporation coffers to cut the grass! 🙂

  • Generational change: graffito

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

    “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.

    grafitti stating punk is dad

    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? 🙂

  • Fortune and cowsay get egalitarian

    Steve WoodsLinux, Oddities, Open Source, Tech

    Fortune is a simple program that displays a pseudo-random message from a database of quotations that first appeared in Version 7 of Unix and runs on the command line on Unix-like systems.

    Cowsay is another simple program running on the command line which generates ASCII pictures of a cow with a message.

    I have used fortune and cowsay in the past to demonstrate the use of a pipe | which feeds the output of one program and uses it as the input for the next program.

    Today running fortune | cowsay yielded the message in the image below.

    cowsay showing output reading equal bytes for women

    The message is most apposite as half the human race is under-represented in IT and other technical fields.

    In March this year The Guardian reported as follows:

    In 2005, women made up 24% of computer science students. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 19%, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. A 2012 report from Creative Skillset found that only 29% of the interactive media industry in the UK is female, and the majority hold positions in art and design and communications rather than engineering.

    The Guardian’s report concluded that

    There is a long way to go before there is parity between the genders in the technology industry. But every baby step made has a tiny effect on the representational content of the diverse audience that uses software and hardware. Developers are known to develop solutions for themselves.

  • Gone!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

    As I walked down Midland Road in Bristol’s St Philips area this morning, all that remained of the Ebenezer Chapel (posts passim), East Bristol’s first Primitive Methodist place of worship, was a pile of rubble.

    site of now demolished Ebenezer Chapel

    Built in 1849, the Ebenezer Chapel had been a landmark in East Bristol for 165 years.

    Years of neglect by its owners and one week in the hands of demolition contractors have now ensured it is no more. 🙁

  • Ministerial photo opportunity

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics

    Last Friday, the Bedfordshire News website published a story of a visit by Defence Minister and Tory MP for Ludlow Philip Dunne to the hangars at Cardington, one of the major British sites historically involved in the development of airships.

    From the screenshot below, the visit provided a photo opportunity.

    screenshot featuring group looking like it's been excreted from giant bottom

    The ministerial party looks like it’s been excreted from or is about to be crushed by a giant bottom. Don’t ministers and their civil service minders ever check behind them before smiling for the camera?

  • Talking rubbish

    Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

    One perennial problem in the Easton district of Bristol where I live is fly-tipping, the illegal dumping of waste.

    trade and other waste dumped by communal bin for household waste in Stapleton Road, Easton
    Disgraceful! Trade & other waste dumped by communal bin for household waste in Stapleton Road, Easton

    Some areas – such as Stapleton Road (see above picture) – have persistent problems and last night I gave a short presentation at the latest Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting to try and encourage other residents and those who work in the area to get involved and make Easton a tidier place.

    I’m pleased to say I received whole-hearted support from local councillor Marg Hickman, who is equally concerned about the amount of litter on the streets (are fly-tipping and littering related; does one attract the other? Ed.).

    Flytipping can be reported online using the council’s dedicated report form. Some people use Twitter to do so too, whilst for those with a smartphone various third party applications are available, such as My Council.

    If anyone does draw attention to fly-tipping or litter on Twitter, you might like to add the hashtag #tidybs5. If you live elsewhere in Bristol you might like to adapt the #tidybs* hashtag, replacing the asterisk with the first figure of your postcode.

    Yesterday I did learn prior to the Neighbourhood Forum meeting that persistence pays off: via an email from the city council I learnt that several traders on Stapleton Road are or have been served with fixed penalty notices for fly-tipping by enforcement officers. It’s a start, but I get the impression that fly-tipping will be as hard to eradicate as a Hammer horror film vampire.

    Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015. Unless it sorts out fly-tipping and other environmental problems in Easton and the city’s other less prosperous areas (like the plague of flies, dust and other industrial pollution in Avonmouth. Ed.), the accolade should be amended to read European Greenwash Capital.

  • Caption chaos

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

    Being sloppy is one thing at which the Bristol Post consistently excels and the situation only looks to get worse following the announcement by David Montgomery of Local World – the owners of the Bristol Post – on the future direction of its titles and the role of journalists.

    Today’s most glaring howler features photographs with the wrong captions in this article, as illustrated below.

    incorrectly captioned photo from Bristol Post

    That’s the first locomotive I’ve seen with blonde hair! 😉

    The chaos continues with subsequent photographs in the series too.

    incorrectly captioned photo from Bristol Post

    How anyone can confuse a girl with a locomotive is anyone’s guess.

    Is the Post employing visually-impaired journalists?

    We should be told.

  • Almost 1 in 5 sites blocked by UK nanny filters

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Tech

    ORG logoThe Open Rights Group’s Blocked Project has revealed that nearly 20% of websites are blocked by web filters implemented by UK ISPs.

    Those affected involve Porsche broker’s website and a political blogger/mum hoping to read an article about post pregnancy care, yet they still get blocked by filters ostensibly designed to protect young people from adult content (which apparently includes talking about alcohol, smoking, anorexia and hate speech. Ed.), indicating that ISPs are acting as censors and arbiters of what is acceptable content for their subscribers.

    The extent of excessive blocking has been revealed by the Open Rights Group’s Blocked project, which is documenting the impact of filters. Web users can use a free checking tool where they can instantly check to see if a website has been blocked by filters. So far, the Open Rights Group has tested over 100,000 sites and found that over 19,000 are blocked by one ISP or another.

    One of the blocked sites is the political blog, Guido Fawkes. It’s being blocked by ISP TalkTalk, which puts the latter on a par with the not exactly democratic government of the People’s Republic of China.

    ISPs have also been criticised for the lack of information about how to get sites unblocked. Mum-of-one Marielle, said she was “humiliated” when she visited a shop run by mobile operator Three to find out how she could enable access to an article about post-partum care on her phone: “The manager told me that I couldn’t access filtered articles without entering a 4 digit PIN every time I wanted to read a filtered article because I had a PAYG plan” Marielle submitted a report to Three saying that the article had been incorrectly blocked, but didn’t get a response.

    Other sites that have been incorrectly blocked by filters include:

    www.sherights.com – this feminist rights blog was blocked by TalkTalk in April 2014. Its Editor-in-Chief says that as advertising revenue is generated by the number of site visitors and that being blocked, “directly impacts our bottom line. But, more than that, we are concerned with the message that blocking our site sends: that pro-woman, pro-equality, pro-human rights subject matter is somehow offensive, inappropriate or otherwise problematic.”

    www.philipraby.co.uk – Philip Raby, who sells and services Porsches, only found out that his website was blocked by O2 when one of his customers told him. Philip says that it’s difficult to measure the financial impact of being blocked but, “we must have lost some business and, of course, it doesn’t look great telling people the site is not suitable for under 18s!”

    Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group stated: “Through the Blocked project we wanted to find out about the impact of web filters. Already, our reports are showing that almost 1 in 5 websites tested are blocked, and that the problem of overblocking seems much bigger than we thought. Different ISPs are blocking different sites and the result is that many people, from businesses to bloggers, are being affected because people can’t access their websites.”

    The original impetus for the introduction of filters came from Claire Perry, the Conservative MP for Devizes, a vociferous campaigner for protecting children from adult material. However, she should have been careful what she wished for, as her own website (which features many references to pr0n. Ed.) has also fallen victim to the ISPs’ filters.

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