If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Birmingham City Council has admitted sending out leaflets which showed its US namesakes skyline instead.
About 720,000 pamphlets praising Brummies for their recycling were sent around the city at a cost of £15,000.
But instead of showing landmarks such as the [...]

There’s a great quote in the current edition of The Week, given by Doc Mtusi from the Zimbabwe Finance Ministry to Cape Times:
The unpatriotic hoarding of food gives the impression that we have a problem, which clearly we haven’t, except in the South African media’s mind. We do not call it starving, we call it [...]

The BBC launched the iPlayer today. After months of user testing (or non-testing in my case, since I was sent a beta test invite some months back but have yet to take it up), it reckons it’s ready to go. Roll-out will be carefully managed, and ramped so that progressively more applicants gain to the [...]

I don’t know how this happened, especially as my privacy settings were such that only my friends and students in my networks could view my photos… It’s quite unbelievable and I am very pissed off…
What I find quite unbelievable is the naivety of the person who made this comment, as quoted in The Guardian. Not [...]

The Evening Standard: grammar’s not an issue. Looks like spelling could do with some work, though.

‘If the customer is an extremely strict vegetarian, then we are sorry the products are no longer suitable, but a less strict vegetarian should enjoy our chocolate,’ said Paul Goalby, corporate affairs manager for Masterfoods.Source: BBC News
Masterfoods has gone temporarily insane. Actually, I suspect it’s a less than temporary measure, as it’s a cost-saver, but [...]

How’s this for confusing? On the one hand (if you search long and hard enough), there are apparently grants for greening up your home by adding wind turbines of solar panels to your roof. That’s something I was hoping to do after moving, particularly when the next generation of more efficient turbines comes out later [...]

You can tell a lot about who reads a paper (or magazine) from its letters page. Here’s a snippet of truly extraordinary logic from last night’s London Lite mobile mailbox, on the gay adoption furore currently grabbing headlines.

The Transport Security Administration oversees safety in the American skies and maintains a list of items you can and cannot take on a plane in the USA. It’s so illogical.
Permitted items include
Screwdrivers up to 7in long
Scissors up to 4in long
Up to four books of matches
Nitroglycerine sprays (up to 4oz)
Knitting and crochet needles
Corkscrews
Forbidden items include
Duty free [...]

It’s a conspiracy.
The government wants to introduce toll roads across the UK.
Drivers would be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis, with black boxes in their cars working out how far they drive on toll roads. (Source: BBC News)
Douglas Alexander, the Transport Secretary, outlined in a leaked letter that…
It would also help to pave the way for [...]