Category: topical

poems not bombs

I wrote recently about the automatic responses from WordPress when you publish a blog post, and how one of my posts was greeted with:

"This is your 494th post. Bomb!"

In the comments to that post, it was suggested that perhaps this was intended as an imperative, but I assure you I am not responsible for the story that prompted this blog post.

The original headline that is referred to comes from hoy.es and reads: Una poesía provoca una alerta por bomba – ‘poem causes bomb alert’ – a news story from Badajoz earlier this week. If your Spanish is up to it, please go and read the post on quadernodenotas, if not, you’ll have to make do with my hurried – and somewhat ‘creative’ – summary.
Continue reading “poems not bombs”

scheduled water fights

Guardian headline:man charged over water fight
The Guardian have published a story about a guy being charged for arranging a ‘water fight’ using BlackBerry Messenger.

The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.

Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
Continue reading “scheduled water fights”

it’s not unusual

I suppose it’s difficult for journalists to maintain the momentum of a story that continues for months without very much actually happening. Which presumably accounts for the Evening Standard story headlined:

Assange ‘acts like a moody teenager and is hunted by women’

I thought teenagers were mostly moody due to a lack of attention from the opposite sex, but I guess it’s been a long time since my adolescence.
Continue reading “it’s not unusual”

censorship, censure and nonsense

An email with the subject line ‘escultura censurada’ caught my attention a couple of days ago and had me wondering whether the sculpture in question had been censured or censored.

fountain - el baño de Ataecina

Reading on, I think both verbs were appropriate.
Continue reading “censorship, censure and nonsense”

the value of good writing

There’s a story up on the BBC website at the moment that quotes Charles Duncombe, “an online entrepreneur”, as saying that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut online sales in half. (For Spanish readers of the blog, there’s a Spanish version of the article available on “BBC Mundo”.)

Duncombe is apparently “shocked” at the poor quality of written English of staff recruited by his companies.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

Continue reading “the value of good writing”