media

  • Auntie’s hardware malfunction

    Back on 2nd February 2004 singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson issued a statement attempting to explain the 38th Super Bowl half-time show controversy, during which Jackson’s right breast was exposed. In that statement the phrase wardrobe malfunction was coined.

    Fast forward to August 2025 and it would appear that the nation’s quasi-state broadcaster has had what can only be described as a hardware malfunction in which the wrong sort of device was exposed.

    Earlier today BBC Breakfast had a long segment about the 30th anniversary of the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system.

    As this is TV there were some visual props on hand, as shown in the screenshot below.

    Screenshot showing Windows 95 upgrade pack, a pile of floppy disks, MS-DOS 6 installation pack and a Macintosh SE

    Observant readers will have noted that the hardware used is in fact a Macintosh SE, a machine manufactured and sold by Apple between March 1987 and October 1990.

    That’s right! It was discontinued five years before Windows 95 was introduced.

    Furthermore, the Macintosh SE also ran on Apple’s Classic Mac OS, not MS-DOS and Windows.

    In bygone times, the BBC used to brag about the accuracy and trustworthiness of its broadcasting. It still does, but that boasting appears to be on very shaky foundations indeed.

    Who else likes the smell of facepalm in the morning? 😉

  • Unwelcome to Scotland

    Later today, the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, is due to land in Scotland for a bit of recreational cheating – assumed to be of the golfing rather than the extra-marital kind – at his two resorts of Turnberry on the Ayrshire coast and Menie in Aberdeenshire (“Twinned with Epstein Island”) in a break from his mission to Make America Grate Again (or something similar. Ed.).

    Scotland’s The National has of course, put the news on its front page, but does not stoop to the sycophancy that The Donald craves and has come to expect.

    Front page of today's The National featuring a photo of Trump's eyes above the headline Convicted US felon to arrive in Scotland and the byline Republican leader, who was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, will visit golf courses

    The only people your ‘umble scribe has noted are actually looking forward to The Felon’s visit are the Scottish First Minister John Swinney and the alleged Prime Minister of the Untied Kingdom, one ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, both of whom have arranged to hold meetings with tRump during his Scottish sojourn.

    Meanwhile the Scots are planning a traditional warm welcome – hopefully carrying the force of emotion of the late Janey Godley.

    The late Janey Godley outside Turnberry holding a sign reading Trump is a cunt.

    Full details of the Scottish protests are available on Stop Trump.

    The front page has apparently had a mixed reception in the USA.

  • Coloured curvaceousness

    Some consumer clickbait from yesterday’s Bristol ‘Live’, a Reach plc local news title.

    Screenshot of article from Bristol Live with the headline Flattering £38 Next dress that looks great if you're curvy in four colours

    Articles for the same product also appeared in other Reach plc titles such as the Manchester Evening News and Birmingham ‘Live’, although their readers were not informed that curvaceousness comes in four colours, as were the good burghers of Bristol.

    The reason for this is because the headline writers on those papers can recognise ambiguity, unlike those at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

  • The entire history of English in 22 minutes

    After Mandarin Chinese and Castilian Spanish, English is the third most spoken native language in the world today, as well as the world’s most widely learned second language, according to Wikipedia.

    How it reached that position is a long and complicated story which has been reduced to a 22 minutes’ historical romp by the excellent Rob Words on YouTube.


    Rob’s story of English from its earliest origins to the present day starts a long way from the shores of present-day England or even the eastern shores of the North Sea of what is now Frisia, northern Germany and Denmark where most of the origin stories for English start.

    No, Rob starts in Asia around the shores and land between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea where it is believed the original ancestral language of English began, before moving both west and east to become the ancestors of the modern European languages and those of the Indian sub-continent based upon Sanskrit, the so-called Indo-European languages. For want of an actual name that has survived down the centuries, this ancestral language is referred to as Proto-Indo-European.

    On the move westwards, the branch of Proto-Indo-European from which English developed is known as Proto-Germanic, which predated not just English and German, but also Dutch, Frisian and the Nordic/Scandinavian languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.

    The story of English on the island of Britain actually begins in the 5th century after the departure of the Romans and mercenaries from across the North Sea who eventually settled are involved.

    The influences of subsequent invasions – such as the Vikings and William the Invader‘s wine-drinking, Francophone former Norse marauders are also noted, as are the roles of Shakespeare, Caxton‘s printing press (especially Chancery standard English. Ed.) are all covered as is the effect on English of England’s/Britain’s role in invasion, conquest and colonisation since the mid-sixteenth century.

    Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video as much as me; and learn something too, which I definitely did.

  • Ambiguity

    The dictionary definition of ambiguity is “the fact of something having more than one possible meaning and therefore possibly causing confusion“.

    Any sensible person would therefore believe that ambiguity has no place in a newspaper headline.

    However, newspapers are not written nowadays by sensible people: or so it would seem.

    This is exacerbated by the modern media practice of trying to cram the entire story into the headline in a condensed form, as shown by the screenshot below of this piece from the Daily Post, a title in the Reach plc stable which serves the north of Cymru.

    Headline - Prisoner on run with smiley face tattoo and links to North Wales

    For the benefit of passing illiterate Reach ‘journalists’, an unambiguous version of the headline would read “Prisoner with smiley face tattoo and links to North Wales on run”.

    It has since been rumoured that the smiley face tattoo has been recaptured by police. 😉

  • Car park to be replaced by jargon

    In a further perceived blow to Bristol’s allegedly long-suffering but volubly vocal motoring lobby, Bristol City Council has announced it is investigating alternative uses for two current car parks, according to Bristol247.

    One of the two, near the SS Great Britain down the city docks and known as the Maritime Heritage Centre Car Park, is being investigated as a site for up to 150 flats. However, the fate of the other behind the Counts Louse (which some insist on calling City Hall. Ed.) is completely different; it’s due to be superseded by, er, jargon, i.e. special words or expressions used by a profession or group that are difficult for others to understand, in this instance something termed a last-mile micro-consolidation hub.

    Thankfully a picture showing what this could look like has been provided by WSP, the city council’s chosen gibberish partners.

    Yer tiz, as we say in Bristol.

    Image of the so-called last-mile micro-consolidation hub.
    Image courtesy of WSP

    According to WSP, the gibberish “will provide a sustainable solution for freight deliveries, reducing reliance on traditional vans and supporting the city’s decarbonisation goals”.

    Note how yet more jargon has to be used to explain the initial gobbledygook. If two loads of jargon are required to explain a fairly simple concept, perhaps the verbal diarrhoea merchants need to have a long sit down and a rethink. 😀

  • BBC exclusive – bronze rusts!

    The BBC loves to boast about the quality of its journalism.

    However, every now and again, it manages to publish an untruth so egregious and also stupid that one wonders how it gained a reputation for high class output in the first place.

    To continue our story, we must travel to Nottinghamshire and the banks of the River Trent.

    In April members of the police Underwater Search Team found a corroded ship’s bell during a routine training exercise and brought it ashore for a closer look, where the name Humber Prince emerged after the item was cleaned.

    The bell was formerly attached to a vessel originally known as the Esso Nottingham, which was built in 1956 and subsequently re-registered as the Humber Prince in 1964 by Hull-based company by John H Whitaker Tankers, which used to ferry hydrocarbons on the river.

    The ship's bell - before and after cleaning
    Photo courtesy of Nottinghamshire Police

    When the BBC published its version of the story, a remarkable thing happened; the bell had turned rusty.

    However, there is no mention of rust or any other metallic corrosion in Nottinghamshire Police’s original press release.

    From the photos on the police press release, it is obvious that the bell is made of brass or bronze, not a ferrous metal such as iron or steel, which typically rusts as it corrodes.

    Wikipedia’s page on the ship’s bell gives full details of the typical materials used.

    The bell itself is usually made of brass or bronze, and normally has the ship’s name engraved or cast on it.

    May I suggest that the BBC’s author writes out 100 times “Iron and steel rust. Other metals corrode!

  • Gone quishing

    QR code with link to one of the reference articles for this postIn recent times, QR codes have started to be exploited in phishing attacks, as reported and explained by The Daily Record. This has given rise to another neologism and such attacks are also known as ‘quishing’.

    The phenomenon has been very prevalent in Cymru recently, as noticed by the Rhyl Journal.

    Denbighshire County Council and Conwy County Borough Council has urged residents to take care, as neither use QR codes as a payment method at council-run car parks.

    Similarly, more than 20 fake QR code reports have been made regarding parking meters across the promenade in Llandudno.

    For comprehensive advice on fake QR codes and how to avoid them, plus other scams visit Stop Scams UK.

    NB: The QR code at the top of this post contains a QR code to one of the links used in the piece.

  • For UK, see England

    Ever since Æthelstan became King of the English in 927 CE, some in England – starting with Æthelstan himself – have had difficulty recognising where England ended and the rest of the world began. Indeed Æthelstan meddled so much in the land of the Scots that they allegedly nicknamed him “The Bastard“.

    Given the dominance of England within the Untied Kingdom, this has persisted down through the centuries that separate the present from the days of Ælfred of Wessex‘s grandson.

    The latest manifestation of this Englandshire = the entire UK occurs in yesterday’s online edition of Bristol ‘Live’, the city’s unfortunate newspaper of warped record, which managed to defy both demographics and geography in one awful little puff piece masquerading as “news“.

    A screenshot of the headline of the offending article is offered below.

    Headline - UK's smallest city an hour from Bristol is as charming as York and Canterbury - but has far fewer tourists. Byline - The smallest city in England has plenty to offer visitors and yet it remains off the beaten track.

    Although Wells is described in the piece as “England’s smallest city“, there is no empirical evidence provided of its lack of size. Your ‘umble scribe used a little-known research technique called using a search engine to provide an answer; in this case 5 seconds’ work gave a census population figure of 12,000 for Wells.

    However, Wells is not the Untied Kingdom’s smallest cathedral city. Cymru has two cathedral cities that together have a combined population of well under Wells’ 12,000 souls. First of all there’s Llanelwy/St Asaph (pop. 3,485) and Tyddewi/St Davids (pop. 1,751), which is actually the UK’s smallest cathedral city in terms of number of residents.

    Your correspondent is surprised that today’s ‘journalists’ are not familiar with this research technique he often uses, which is recommended they use as a matter of course. 😀

  • For UK read England (and English)

    On Monday the country’s best known toolmaker’s son ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, in a vain effort to stem the flow of support for the Farage fascist fan club otherwise known as the Reform Party UK Ltd., made a major announcement on immigration racism and xenophobia, namely to the effect that he was in favour of both, despite a side serving of the usual ‘I’m not racist, but…

    His speech met generally with condemnation from the left and varying degrees of praise from those on the right, such as ‘Honest’ Bob Jenrick, some of whom also believed he hadn’t gone far enough to be beastly to those pesky forrins to whom they would have been even nastier.

    Anyway, this was a speech in which Starmer embraced his inner Enoch Powell, echoing phrases from the latter’s notorious and deeply offensive ‘Rivers of blood‘ speech from 2nd April 1968. Where Powell remarked that the country’s white population ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country‘, Starmer stated that the UK risked becoming an ‘island of strangers‘.

    Another ill-conceived utterance in his speech was that immigration and immigrants had done ‘incalculable harm‘ to the country. In particular, this drew justifiable ire from many whose grandparents or great-grandparents had migrated to Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries along the lines of ‘how dare he…‘. This reaction from tax campaigner Richard Murphy is a prime example of this sentiment.

    Quite right, Richard. They come over here and do irreparable harm by (say) keeping the National Health Service running, paying their taxes and so on.

    Another facet of the toolmaker’s son’s speech centred on his remarks about the use of the English language. Starmer is on record as saying:

    Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.

    A remark of a similar nature and of the same import was also made on Starmer’s social media account.

    Which language? Starmer is conflating English, the language of England with the whole of the Untied* Kingdom, parts of which have their own indigenous languages, like Cymraeg or Gaelic. He seems completely ignorant of the fact that modern English is the product of three waves of historical incomers, i.e. immigrants, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc. who arrived after the Romans left in the 5th century CE, Norse Vikings who settled here and the French-speaking Vikings from Normandy who invaded in 1066. There are very few words from Britain’s indigenous languages in modern English.

    The fact that modern English is a mongrel language brought by immigrants also seems lost on Starmer.

    However, this imperative to speak English has not gone down well in either Scotland or Cymru (where Cymraeg has equal legal status with the language of invasion. Ed.), as The National reports.

    In Cymru, the radio personality, TV presenter and influencer Jessica Davies took to X/Twitter to make her feelings known.

    Starmer's original post reads If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense. So we're raising English language requirements across every main immigration route. Jessica Davies responds with If you live in Wales you should speak Welsh. Or are we not doing that?

    Well done, Keir. By your racism you have shown that you are well and truly a product of your father’s profession.

    * = Misspelling is deliberate.

Posts navigation