press – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

of death and celandines

The past week has been less than positive in many ways and, judging from the screenshot below, I’m not the only person to feel that way.

BBC headlines May 3 2013 - it's all about death

Of the headlines for the top ten most popular stories, five contain a variant of the word ‘death’.

Whether the local election results (stories 1 and 2) have anything to do with the BBC readers’ apparent morbid obsession, I don’t know.

Perhaps they’ve been unable to get through to the new NHS 111 service (story 10) and while waiting for their urgent but non-life-threatening health problems to be attended to they have felt the need to console themselves with reading how things could be worse.

The screenshot is from a couple of days ago (“thanks!” to the reader who sent it to me) and it suited this week’s aura of negativity.

I was beginning to feel things were never going to improve.
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socket it to me

EDIT: Of course the title should say socket to me. Having posted it with the typo in, though, I shall be honest and leave it “as is.”

When I travel, I still try and keep working, so am pleased that many trains now provide electrical sockets where I can plug in my computer.

The labelling of this one intrigued me, though:

power socket in train: "laptops and mobile phones only"

Can someone please enlighten me as to what other appliances people carry with them that they might be tempted to use while travelling by train?
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write – edit – censor

I know a number of people who work for Spanish publications and call themselves redactores. Until recently, I thought they were simply writers.

Looking at the RAE gives a single meaning for redactar:

1. tr. Poner por escrito algo sucedido, acordado o pensado con anterioridad.

This doesn’t help me much, so I checked with a Spanish friend from the world of publishing who told me that redactar is not the same as escribir as it involves drawing together ideas and editing them into a coherent form. One example he gave was “you can’t redactar a shopping list.”
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out of his element

Having seen some huge birds of prey recently, which may or may not be Iberian eagles, I have a tendency to watch the skies when out walking.

This morning there was a blob high up which looked vaguely like the waspish ultra-light we often see. Since it was making no noise, and seemed to be hovering rather than going anywhere, it was clear, though, that that wasn’t what it was.

When I got close enought to see, it turned out to be a helium balloon:

This reminded me of a story I’d seen early in the week about medical helium stocks running low while the gas is squandered in balloons.
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millions and billions

Rabbit reading by Lance Tooks — drawing courtesy Lance Tooks

I was intrigued by the BBC website Magazine story entitled Do the dead outnumber the living?

My attention was caught in particular by the table at the end showing a total for the number of people who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791.
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