Friday roundup: more blogs, Flickr, Nemi

So our blogroll is starting to settle down but we have a couple more additions.

North Downs and Beyond isn't related to language but it's written by my line manager and shows that it's possible for journalists to have lives outside their publications. Plus, even if you don't have much interest in "thoughts and reports of the natural world from north Surrey", the photography is nice – as you might expect from an art editor.

TootsNYC regularly comments on The Engine Room, and recently started up her own blog about words. Check it out – but remember to come back!

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You may or may not have noticed, but The Engine Room now has a presence on photo-sharing website Flickr. At the moment all I've uploaded are some of the photos that you've already seen in my blog posts, but just as soon as I work out how to get the pictures off my mobile phone and onto my work Mac, then there'll be lots of new things to gawp at. I'll keep you informed.

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Lastly, I really did intend not to carry on with the language-related comic strips, but then I saw this Nemi in yesterday's Metro (see, the London freesheets are good for something). As usual, click for a larger image...


Incidentally, I am currently taken with the word 'cruciform'.

I say, let the puppy die!

Vegetating happily at the seaside I no longer have to deal with butchered English on a daily basis (cheer up JD, the first 20 years are the worst*). But my torpor is occasionally disturbed by TV adverts.

No doubt charity appeals have to be powerful if they are to do their job but one animal charity has taken the theme of "give us the dosh or the puppy dies" to a new low. Showing viewers a series of victimised pooches is fair enough. Asking for a regular donation is fair enough. But the ad agency copywriter went a step too far with the promise that "if you sponsor a dog you'll receive a certificate and THE DOG WILL WRITE TO YOU". Seems to me that if a dog can read and write it can damn well go out and get a job like the rest of you.


*When I read this before posting it I fell to wondering if it shouldn't be "worse" rather than "worst", because if you're comparing two things, eg "the first 20 years" with the rest of your time in the engine room, worse would clearly be called for. Then I thought, "what the hell, I've retired" so I'm off to the beach.

Teachers, doctors, pupils and statistics

I love the ambiguity in this clipping taken from Personnel Today magazine (and sorry it's wonky, that's just my usual inability to cut and/or scan things straight):


Does this mean that 12% of teachers who have been attacked by a pupil subsequently needed to visit a doctor, or that 12% of teachers have been attacked by a pupil and subsequently needed to visit a doctor?

If you can't see or don't care about the difference, you might not want to become a sub...

Headline: Lorry Hijackers Sought

Our news editor has drawn my attention to a news story on Northern Ireland web directory 4NI which has an amusing if slightly worrying headline:

Lorry Hijackers Sought

It appears that criminal masterminds are becoming bolder in their recruitment techniques...

Monday round-up: web resources and Peanuts

I didn't manage a Friday roundup last week because I was still on my web design masterclass, so this is either a much delayed Friday roundup or a one-off Monday roundup depending on your preference.


Firstly, some web resources that were mentioned in my class and that could be useful to webmasters, web production staff or bloggers:

• Image*After – a free image library, with no need to register. I usually use Morguefile myself, but this seems a good alternative.

• iStockphoto – a cheap image library working on a credits system. Owned by Getty, I believe.

• AccessColor – checks the legibility of text on any given web page. Seems that this here blog is just about legible.

• Browsercam – test your site on any browser and operating system. It's a paid-for service, but a free 24-hour trial is available.

• W3C Markup Validation Service – lets you see how rubbish your (and everyone else's) html actually is.

• Web Page Analyzer – calculates the size of any given web page and the download time based on various download speeds.

• Zen Garden – a smart example of what can be achieved through CSS. Although not by me.

• EasyRGB – lets you do lots of things with colo(u)r, including finding complementary colours and working out colour themes.
  

You can find some other 'production desk tools' in the sidebar on the right of the blog (you will have to scroll down past the blogroll).


If none of the above is of interest, perhaps the following punctuation-themed Peanuts will appeal (and I know we had a subbing-themed Dilbert last week, but it's just a coincidence):

Commentator: 'It doesn't get better than that'

I'm currently on a two-day 'web design masterclass' and rather busy as a result, so today's post comes courtesy of an email that Chris Frumplington sent us a few weeks back. He wrote:

Here's something that amused me recently.

Snooker player, Ali Carter, beat Peter Ebdon on Wednesday. For the first time ever, Carter is through to the semi-finals of the World Championships.

The commentator (Clive Everton, I think, but don't quote me on that) said, "It doesn't get better than that."

But it quite clearly does: it gets much better if a player gets into the final, doesn't it? So, was this a journalistic gaffe or a mere error of logic? Or just another example of sports commentators getting carried away with themselves?

Thanks, Chris. It's been a while since we've had an amusing sports or sports commentator-related post:

Who nose who'll win?

Two TV bloopers

Daily Mail and Liz Goddard's 10-year-old baby

A rather unfortunate choice of pullquote and photograph in a Daily Mail anti-abortion story today. As you can hopefully see from the scan below, the photograph is of a mother with a baby; the adjacent pullquote reads:

'Doctors said he'd die in ten minutes. Now he's ten years old.'

So that baby's 10 years old. Huh? Such a severe case of arrested development doesn't exactly strengthen the anti-abortion argument. Admittedly, the caption below the photograph then explains:

Liz Goddard and Will, at seven months. Today he is a healthy ten-year-old

However not only is this page element much smaller than the photo or the pullquote (and therefore less likely to draw the eye), but it implies that Liz Goddard was seven months old when the photo was taken...

(Click on the image below to see a larger version.)

Typo of the week: allow wheels

Great typo in a vehicle specification submitted to the subs' desk:

Optional extra – allow wheels £2,900

Um, I would have thought that for a vehicle to be allowed wheels was more of a necessity than an optional extra.

It should of course read 'alloy wheels £2,900'...

Iron Man uses moderate language

We recently received the following email from Neil:

The Iron Man film trailer – which seems to give away WAY too much plot and is too long – says at the end in usual disclaimer-fashion: "Contains moderate violence and moderate language.”

All I have is visions of the so-called Iron Man talking in moderate English language like a Conservative politician: “Sorry to blow you up old chap”, “Get me out of this bloody suit!” etc...

Neil, the warning I saw actually read: "Contains moderate violence and one use of moderate language". So I am assuming that, apart from that one use, all of the dialogue in Iron Man is thoroughly immoderate...