Author: Carrie

  • A.A. Gill explains how journalism works

    From the intro to his most recent book, Previous Convictions: The joy of being a hack is that there is a back room of people far cleverer, more experienced and adept than I working to make me look clever, experienced and adept. If on occasion I fail to do so, naturally it’s their fault.

  • Going to see your gran? Glasgow Council thinks you should pay

    Glasgow Council has hit on a new wheeze to fight congestion: it wants to charge people to park everywhere. That means employers would charge their employees, leisure centres would charge their members and out-of-town shopping centres would charge their customers. And it also means that people would pay to park on residential streets they didn’t…

  • Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there

    I haven’t been called a child killer for a while, so let’s talk about Killer Wi-Fi again, shall we? Gary Robertson’s show on BBC Radio Scotland this morning was about mobile phone masts, although inevitably killer wi-fi featured in there too. Gary’s a decent bloke and I do wonder what he makes of some of…

  • A quick quiz for Glaswegian drivers

    What should you do if the traffic lights 200m in front of you turn red? Should you (a) slow down and stop? Or (b), accelerate hard, shoot the red light long after the pedestrians have started crossing and then panic-brake to a frightened halt mere inches in front of a pregnant woman? If the answer…

  • Compensation culture comes to Scotland

    Daily Record, via Fark: A STUDENT left paralysed after falling 30 feet from scaffolding on a night out is suing the firm who put it up. Ross Campbell says K2 Specialist Services should accept some blame for his accident because their scaffolding was too accessible and unsteady. He said: “I want to know where the…

  • Balance (or: stop giving nut-jobs a voice)

    Imagine you’re a journalist, writing a story about the families who lost loved ones in 9/11. Would you print the views of someone who said that 9/11 never happened, and that the families were all part of a zionist plot, in the interests of balance? Or let’s say you’re writing about the deaths of soldiers…

  • What I really want in Leopard

    Per-application volume control. Not the Tiger approach – you have one volume control for system alerts and one for everything else – but the Windows Vista approach, where you can set individual volume levels for different things.  That way when some arse embeds audio in their site or Flash ad, it doesn’t play at the…

  • Minor irritations

    * Inbound sales calls that say “we’re with X firm” and want to talk about my mobile phone upgrade/the end of my warranty on whatever. You’re bloody liars. You’re a third party and you’ve been given my details by Orange/Sky/whoever despite my careful ticking of the opt-out boxes on absolutely everything. I’d complain to all…

  • Manhunt 2 “banned by the BBFC”

    The problem with censor-baiting games is that sometimes, you can take it too far. Rockstar Games’ Manhunt 2 has achieved the dubious honour of being only one of two games to be refused a rating in the UK. … The reasoning behind the decision is that, according to BBFC director David Cooke, “Manhunt 2 is…

  • WTF?

    You need to see the photo accompanying this Sun article. [Via Fark]Â