Author: Carrie

  • Little bigmouth

    This picture was taken at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary this morning, and it’s the first of what I suspect will be very, very many baby pictures. We’ve just had our twelve-week scan, Mrs Bigmouth is positively radiant and little baby bigmouth is, we’re told, doing very well indeed. So come 6th October or thereabouts, I’m going…

  • One job ad sums up the problem with health reporting

    Posted to a journalism forum: Men’s Fitness is looking for an experienced staff writer to write and edit the Nutrition and Health sections of the magazine. You don’t need to be an expert on health matters, but you do need a proven record of producing sharp, witty and accurate copy for a consumer title.

  • Twat nav

    There’s a nice wee story in the papers about the school bus driver who entered the wrong information into his sat-nav system and took a bus full of kids to Hampton Court in London rather than their intended destination, Hampton Court Palace. I think the AA’s advice should be printed on all sat-nav systems. “Take…

  • Let there be lightbulbs

    Ah, the joys of trying to be environmentally friendly. I recycle my rubbish and even my cardboard  – or at least I did until the binmen emptied the special cardboard recycling bag, left the empty bag at the side of the road and it blew away in the wind, quite possibly ending up on an…

  • Sunday Times photo competition: bastards

    This week’s Sunday Times went into great detail about a photography competition for landscape snappers, but strangely didn’t highlight that you have to pay to enter: £7 for one image, or £25 if you want to send in the maximum of fifteen. Given that the total prize pot is £20K, if 1,000 people enter 15…

  • Gamekeeper turned poacher

    I reckon that these days, about three-quarters of the work I do involves writing tutorials. It’s not the most glamorous kind of journalism, for sure, and writers who don’t do it often look down on those of us who do – but I really like doing it,  and in the case of Windows Vista magazine,…

  • ID cards – it’s about curtains

    This is not my idea – I saw it on a site, possibly Fark, today – and the original was worded much better than this half-remembered paraphrase, but hopefully it’ll survive my mangling: Not wanting ID cards or over-the-top state surveillance isn’t because you’re up to no good; it’s about privacy, the same way you…

  • Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

    You can just hear the windmilling chords, can’t you? Anyway. Mark Mulligan at Jupiter Research has posted something interesting this morning about Lily Allen’s iTunes experience. She said that iTunes was: “bullying people into corners by making sure they have extra, you know, extra songs so they can put them on the front page. And…

  • This isn’t about health. It’s hysteria

    The good people of Belmont in California want to expand the city’s smoking ban to the point where the only place it will be legal to smoke is in your own home – provided that home is completely detached (such homes, apparently, cost around nine hundred thousand dollars). Smoking in your own car, by yourself:…

  • Making music: an itch you can’t quite scratch

    I don’t usually hang around message boards – when you spend all day on the internet the last thing you want to do when you finish work is spend all night on the internet – but I’ve been intrigued by a conversation on jockrock.org about music. In a rare, non-sweary thread people are talking about…