I’m too old to like cartoons

Saturday, 6th September, 2008

I watch Family Guy. A lot. It’s a cartoon, and I’m 33 years old.

Growing up (ha!), my favourite cartoon was the Roadrunner, due entirely to the ineptitude of the Wile E. Coyote character, who really should’ve have the title role for this cartoon.

This article http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2008/09/06/hi_im_a_mac_beep_beep/ is brilliant. The link made between the “I’m a Mac…” adverts and the Roadrunner cartoons is spot on.

So, basically, I’m such a big fan of the Mac (and more generally Apple) because I used to watch Roadrunner cartoons.

I can’t wait to see how my life turns out now that I watch so much Family Guy…

6

Sep

I’m not even trying

Saturday, 6th September, 2008

It probably looks like I’m picking on the BBC at the moment, given that this is my third recent post about how bad their news service is, but they just make it so easy. I’m not spending hours and hours reading their content, looking for things to pull them up on. They are just so inept that you don’t have to look particularly hard to find things that they have fucked up.

Take this little gem:

That’s 17 words. They have managed to make a complete mess of writing 17 words.

1 Comment

4

Sep

BBC news style

Thursday, 4th September, 2008

I love this stuff. Those that know me will know that I love to spot mistakes and gleefully point them out, especially in the areas of spelling and grammar. I’m not saying that I don’t make mistakes; I know that I do, but I don’t make them often, and I certainly don’t make the types of mistakes that are listed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7595509.stm

I agree with most of these. I also agree that our language isn’t a fixed structure, and the notes given in the above article that state accepted uses of some of these grammar anomalies are perfectly acceptable to me.

What isn’t acceptable to me is the continual reference to BBC news style guide. It’s almost as if they are using the existence of this ‘style guide’ as justification for all the horrendous mistakes that their journalists make when ‘writing’ their copy. If they can pass off all of the grammatical errors that litter the news content of the BBC by referring to their style guide, then it must be hundreds of thousands of pages in length.

28

Aug

Reportage

Thursday, 28th August, 2008

I’m getting more and more pissed off with the news reporting that we’re forced to endure these days. A particular bugbear of mine is the BBC. Their television reporting is awful, but their online stuff isn’t any better.

Take these two articles for example.

As I read these articles (particularly the second one) it jumped out to me how much irrelevant padding material is used in order to reach the required word count, and I’m seeing it all over the place now.

I read news reports to get facts. I don’t need anything else, just the facts. Tell me what happened, when it happened, where it happened, and if possible why it happened.

In both of these news ‘reports’ there’s a mention of the victim’s impending GCSE results. I can’t see what relevance this fact has in any of these two stories. The first story is about a young girl that got knocked down by a lorry and died. The second story is about a teenage boy who fell from some flats and died.

The fact that both of these youths were due to receive their GCSE results adds nothing to the stories; it is there simply to pad out the story, so that the ‘journalist’ meets their required word count. The only other reason to put non-facts like this in a story is for the shock factor: they want the reader to feel that extra pang of guilt about what they’re reading.

It really annoys me.

And don’t get me started on Mihir Bose.