facepalm | Steve Woods

Signal failure

13/02/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

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? 😉
A new perishable commodity: nuclear missile submarines

11/02/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

It’s said that “to err is human“; and journalists are no exception to this.

Some while ago, a hapless hack at the Bristol Post, disclosed to an unbelieving city readership that bridges have a shelf life (posts passim).

Now it seems that bridges have been joined on the shelf by another perishable commodity – submarines carrying the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

Reporting today on the pro-Trident stance of Bristol MPs Kerry McCarthy and Karin Smyth, political correspondent Patrick Daly lets the cat out of the bag:

The four submarines, which carry nuclear warheads, are due to come to the end of their shelf-life by the late-2020s…

A Vanguard class submarine capable of carrying Trident missiles leaving the Forth of Clyde. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For those who need some explanation of the definition of shelf life, Wikipedia has a very useful article which starts as follows:

Shelf life is the length of time that a commodity may be stored without becoming unfit for use, consumption, or sale. In other words, it might refer to whether a commodity should no longer be on a pantry shelf (unfit for use), or just no longer on a supermarket shelf (unfit for sale, but not yet unfit for use).

As one of these four submarines is supposed to be at sea at all times, perhaps Mr Daly would care to explain to his readers, why the quartet is cluttering up the quartermaster’s stores instead. 😉

Alternatively, perhaps Patrick could learn the definition of the term “service life“. 🙂

Update 12/02/16: The piece has since been amended and the offending “shelf-life” replaced.
Tautology headlines

28/01/2016 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

From today’s Bristol Post: a piece of tautology so compelling it’s repeated twice in the report!
Evening Standard trumpets typo on Twitter

12/12/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

This morning saw a typo as bold as brass courtesy of London’s Evening Standard.

The Standard’s tweet intimates the raid on Ms Ora’s home was carried out by a gang which recently raided the home of Simon Cowell, an event which caused orthographical problems for Bristol’s own Western Daily Press (posts passim).
Spelling or sleeping?

05/12/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Social Media

There was a great clanger in a tweet this morning from Bristol’s Western Daily Press, the sister publication of the Bristol Post (and joint occupier with it of Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth. Ed.) and likewise subject to many of the latter’s failings with the English language.

Here’s an image of the tweet in question.

The morals of this tale are clear: if you run a tawdry TV talent show orthography is as dangerous as shut-eye if housebreakers are around; if you run the social media account of a mediocre regional paper, learn to proof-read before posting online*! 🙂

* The spelling error in the tweet originally appeared in the article itself, but has since been corrected.
Bristol Post balls – rescued from the rescue services?

01/12/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

There seem to be times when confusion is rife in the Bristol Post’s headquarters on Temple Way. This was exemplified yesterday by the headline in this report, of which a screenshot follows, just in case Post hacks realise a mistake has been made.

In spite of the headline, Post reporter Emma Flanagan fails to explain in her article why anyone would need rescuing from the fire brigade after a night out.

Furthermore, there is no explanation either for the logic behind Bristol’s City Docks having their own fire brigade.

Perhaps kind readers could help her out and provide plausible reasons in the comments below. 🙂
The importance of accurate writing (and reporting)

24/11/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

From Southampton’s Southern Daily Echo.

No comment necessary.

Hat tip: Bristol Radical History Group.
Windows NT 3.1 software crash brings Orly airport to standstill

13/11/2015 Steve WoodsOddities, Tech

Last Saturday, Orly airport‘s air traffic was severely disrupted, leaving thousands of passengers stranded on the ground, Le Monde Informatique reports. The cause: a computer failure of the weather data management system running on Microsoft’s antediluvian Windows NT 3.1 operating system.

Computer system failures in the aeronautical world are nothing exceptional, but always have a far-reaching effect, stranding thousands of passengers on the ground. This is exactly what happened last Saturday at Orly which had to halt of all its inbound and outbound air traffic for more than half an hour. Besides the inconvenience caused, it’s above all the origin of the failure that is somewhat surprising. According to the French satirical paper Le Canard Enchaîné, it was a failure linked to the Decor (Diffusion des données d’Environnement de Contrôle d’Orly et de Roissy = Orly & Roissy Environmental Control data distribution) system managing data provided by Météo France that was the culprit.

The surprising fact was this software is running on the Windows NT 3.1 operating system released by Microsoft 22 years ago, i.e. an operating system no longer supported at all by Redmond, with all the risks this involves in security terms, especially as it is connected to Météo France’s computer systems.

“The traffic was not particularly heavy on Saturday morning. But imagine during the Paris Climate Change Conference, the manoeuvring of heads of state disrupted by a piece of software dating from prehistoric times. What will that look like?”, stated an engineer quoted by Le Canard Enchaîné. When contacted by the satirical paper, the Transport Ministry gave an assurance that “equipment modernisation is planned for 2017” (no need to rush, then! Ed.).
Turnip tops = clitoris; Google Translate strikes again!

04/11/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

Today’s Guardian reports that organisers of the “Feira do grelo” food festival in As Pontes in Galicia were shocked when their event celebrating the culinary delights of turnips tops, a traditional staple turned out to be celebrating a rude part of the female anatomy.

To quote The Guardian’s piece:

But for the past few months, the small town was marketing a very different kind of festival after it used Google Translate to put the Galician word grelo into Castilian Spanish, ending up with it inviting people to take part in a “clitoris festival”.

And quoting yet again:

It meant the town’s “Feria [sic] do grelo” or rapini festival – held every February with tastings and awards for the best grelos – became “Feria clítoris” in Spanish.

Clitoris? Yes, according to Google Translate!
Furthermore, The Independent adds that the error was not discovered until Castilian-speaking rapini fans visited the site to read about the upcoming festival and found themselves reading about a local clitoris festival instead of the benefits of the local vegetable.

The humorous consequences were fully reported in The Local.

The Castilian Spanish version of the town council’s website’s content about the festival included such howlers as “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine,” and “Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy.”

The reason for this embarrassing howler is that Google Translate mistakes the Galician grelo for the Portuguese word grelo – which is both the word for the vegetable as well archaic slang for clitoris.

“It’s a very serious error on the part of Google and we are thinking about making an official complaint for Google to properly recognise the Galician language so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” said town hall spokeswoman Montserrat Garcia.

Along with Spanish, Galician is an official language in Spain’s north-western region of Galicia, where over 2.4 million people speak the regional tongue.

Hat tip: ashleyrpz.
Spiritual leader moonlights as police officer

14/10/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Reading the captions on photographs in the local press can be a real education.

For instance, thanks to those dedicated people who write captions for articles on the Bristol Post website, I now know what a branch of discount retailer Lidl looks like, although I shall have to travel to Paignton to see the real thing.

However, far greater secrets can be revealed by photo captions. An article in yesterday’s Bristol Post revealed that, unknown to the rest of the world, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is actually a police officer in Avon & Somerset Constabulary, as shown by the following screenshot.

His Holiness must have found some body-altering drugs during his recent visit to the Glastonbury Festival! 😉

Posts navigation