h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A bakery next door announes "You´re Snack´s"...I stay away.

Very tempting to try MY Cashpoint.

(I wonder what the best type of van would be?)

PH today:

- customers who wake up at 3:15 on a friday with really urgent things that need to be done NOW!

- managers who same...

- people going on about how they don't like facebook. Fine, don't use it. Don't friend everyone who wants to if you do and then moan about it, and switch off the sheep throwing apps. For some of us it's a good way of getting in touch with people we've lost touch with for one reason or another.
As Bea said it can be a great resource for help and only this weekend it worked that way for me too.

PH - Supermarkets that put on a big show of being disabled-friendly, providing wheelchairs, electric buggies etc - then block the aisles with big baskets of discount goods or piles of boxes

PH - language-related again:

What happened to the word "Japanese"?????????

All the headlines on the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown - at least on the BBC website - have been about The Japan disaster, The Japan situation, etc.

Today's headlines from the BBC Home Page:
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On the front page of the Times Online today:
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The Guardian today says <> (And I double checked, there is NO colon after the word Japan) I was placated a little on noticing that within the actual article they say "the Japanese government" and "The Japanses Prime Minister"


Even the Daily Express makes a better job of it, although still hesitant to decline the word "Japan" in its headlines

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I suppose it is space-saving headlinese, but it still seems odd to me. If they said "England disaster" for example, you would expect the article to be about cricket or football.

.. meant to add on the "Syria" thing... there was certainly room for that additional "n".

DON'T MENTION THE WAR!!!

japaneseprobably invokes images of bridge on the river kwai, in too many media types minds

Well, that did occur to me, but using "Japan" instead of Japanese sounds like the way a 6-year-old would talk. And surely the BBC and the Guardian are above such superstition.

i think in the publics mind

the people of japan, are these sad victims of natural disasters, a lot of whom wear surgical masks

while the japanese are the cruel merciless opressorswho commited atrocities during WWII

the Beeb often tailors its language to situations, see how the shi'tes of gulf war 1 became the shia of gulf war 2

if japanese were thrown around the Beeb as much as 'japan' has been, we would now be seeing the old, "they deserve it for what they did to my grandad in burma" etc.

You've read Littlejohn's "article" I take it?

as for the Japan, Syria thing in the papers - the Americans do it all the time with Belgium, so much so that I have now started to corrct them when I hear it in real life. I kid you not, I've done it several times with "he's a Belgium"

"i think in the Daily Mail readers' mind"

Corrected that for you, Taff.

"English" has just as many letters as "England" and takes up less room in most fonts because the "i" is so narrow...

This "downdumbing" in the media...sometimes I feel like an old *flatulence* when still remembering and using proper grammar and spelling.

The BBC is certainly not above making grammatical and typo errors, especially online. I sometimes think they are at risk of becoming the 'Grauniad' of online news coverage.

I read somewhere that interns are responsible for posting news on the BBC website. I have no idea if this is true, but perhaps it would account for some of the typos etc.

This reminds me of a PH: Reading some online BBC news items to find the same information is repeated a few paragraphs down the page. This is either sloppy reporting or the BBC assuming its audience has a low attention span.

I also find that some online BBC news reports resort to the old discredited format of concentrating on how many British were affected or harmed in a given situation.

Also, using its own correspondents as sources of expertese rather than as objective reporters is far too prevalent amongst all its news reportage, and its more than about time this stopped.

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Peter Sissons wrote about this recently and how it was a bit of a culture shock for him after ITN. Basically the BBC decides upon it's editorial approach to a subject and then reinforces this by interviewing other BBC employees who answer according to the briefing sheet. Sissons claims he was once told to prepare a piece about some subject or other and when he said he needed time to research it, he had a copy of the Guardian tossed at him and was told "Don't bother, it's all in here". He also claimed that political interference was far more prevalant at the BBC, specifically citing an example where he was obliged to only ask Harriet Harman "soft" questions in a pre-election interview.

It's frankly ridiculous to pretend that a media organisation totally at the mercy of government largesse can in any way be independent, no matter the protestations to the contrary.

PHoD ... women using the phrase "hun" ... as in "Hey hun" or "You alright hun?" ...

Answer by calling them "Hen".

PH: All this "make it so" guff. Is there some rule that sci-fi characters must sound pompous?

"Give me the co-ordinates for blah blah blah."

"IT SHALL BE DONE!"

Starship commanders are lost for the want of a good to lighten them up.

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I completely agree. In spite of my petty hates above I have enormous respect for the BBC. Each successive government complains the BBC is biased against it, and then curbs its spending power to an almost impossible degree.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see why the BBC can't be entirely independent of the government, including establishing its own budgets and license fee. The government should just grant an indefinite charter for the BBC to broadcast and leave it well alone. Although other media organisations may be run on a for profit basis, they are pretty much left alone to manage their own affairs, so its about time the BBC was allowed to do the same.

Atticus, AMEN, BROTHER, AMEN! I wanna work for that crowd; it&#39;s hard to get in but suprisingly easy to be tossed out.


PH: of course I have heard about the protests in London. They’re all over the radio! (I&#39;m trying to get my UCAS statement done and turned in so the radio’s going, not the TV.) What purpose does sneering at me “Have you seen the protests in your new home?”

Bugger off! as Frankenstein’s Creature says! I know I might not even get a place in a London uni, but if I do, does not mean I will go on every protest I see. I support what they are doing (the main message, that is, not whatever else is going on), but I did not know about it til last night. If I wanted to go, I would have. Once is enough, and our voices were not heard. What makes us think this time will be any different? Does it make a difference that Ed Miliband is speaking at Hype Park? Probably not. He’s probably been bottled a time or two.

I don&#39;t care what the hell you think of my decision, sister dear. Bugger off!