Daily Archives: Sunday, July 13, 2014

  • #tidyBS5 gains momentum

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Social Media

    After the last Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum meeting where I talked about fly-tipping in my area of Bristol (posts passim), it was suggested to me that I devise a hashtag for use on Twitter and elsewhere to help highlight the problem. My answer was #tidyBS5.

    The hashtag and its use have now been given another boost by publicity in the fortnightly Easton & Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Management email bulletin.

    image from newsletter featuring tidybs5

    There’s also a meeting with councillors and officers on fly-tipping and rubbish in just over a week’s time to which I’ve also been invited. Let’s hope it ends in some proper enforcement and action to make scenes like the one below a thing of the past.

    image of Stapleton Rd fly-tipping

  • 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? 🙂