Author: Carrie

  • Tabloids in “making stuff up” shocker

    Whenever you see the phrase “political correctness gone mad” in newspapers, it’s usually a sign that you’re being lied to: a few years ago, tabloid newspapers regularly printed stories about PC madness – replacing black bin bags with green ones, that sort of thing – that they’d simply made up. It seems that the tradition…

  • The loneliness of the cow-themed calendar creator

    From time to time, journalists encounter a big problem: you pitch a daft idea, the editor loves it, you get commissioned to do it… and you realise with a sinking feeling that it was a really rubbish idea that isn’t anywhere near as funny as it seemed when you first thought of it, but now…

  • The UK’s proposed new piracy laws: the good news and the bad news

    The good news: changing the format of legal music – eg ripping your CDs to MP3 – will become legal. The bad news: under existing copyright legislation, it’s illegal to bypass “technical protection measures”, ie. copy protection. I’ve seen nothing suggesting the “go ahead, rip your CDs” changes will address that at all, or that…

  • Plane makes emergency landing due to… flatulence

    Seriously. An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence, authorities said. The Dallas-bound flight was diverted to Nashville after several passengers reported smelling burning sulfur from the matches

  • Glasgow logic

    Glasgow does things differently to other cities: for example, when it was agreed that Glasgow really needed a bypass to relieve the ever-growing traffic problem, they built it right through the middle of the city. The same inspired approach to transport can be seen in Glasgow’s underground railway system, which shuts before the pubs do…

  • Things I don’t understand, part 2031

    From a press release about networking kit: Specifically developed to deliver a high level of performance Does that mean the other stuff is specifically developed so it *doesn’t* deliver a high level of performance?

  • Mobile phone study proves that phone radiation eats your brain

    Only joking: still no evidence of any harmful effects. The study looked at 400,000 people, many of whom have been using mobiles since 1984, and it included both analogue and digital handsets. As The Register notes: the study found that long-term mobile phone users had a slightly lower incidence of cancer than the general population,…

  • What the world needs right now is yet another closed music system

    That’s what Sony seems to think, anyway. From Wired: Next holiday season could see a new approach from Sony in the MP3 player space — one that could resemble Apple’s iTunes/iPod combo or Microsoft’s similarly-unified Zune approach *bangs head off desk*

  • Big Brother is reading your blog

    Blimey. Via Guido, the Home Office says: We have 12 librarians that monitor blogs on a daily seven day week basis. Presumably that’s 12 well-paid librarians… nice work if you can get it, eh?

  • An open letter to Girls Aloud’s management company

    Dear Girls Aloud’s management company, Have you spotted the difference between the Girls’ original material and their cover versions? Yes! The cover versions are all shite! Stop it! Love and kisses Gary