A trip to BBLUG

Saturday just gone, being the fourth one in the month, saw the Bristol & Bath Linux User Group (BBLUG) gather for its regular monthly meeting at the Knights Templar near Temple Meads to drink beer, talk and endure what the J. D. Wetherspoon regards as food (tip: stick to a burger for the sake of safety).

This month’s meeting was unusually well attended: over 20 humans and 1 dog (Bails’ Chloe, sadly left outside) and two fluffy Tux-type penguins. The Bristol Wireless crew put in a good appearance again (Bails, Rich, BenG and myself), whilst members from further flung reaches (Chippenham, Weston-super-Mare) also swelled the numbers. Good to see some new faces too among the usual suspects, including at least one who, from looking at the BBLUG home page, thought it was moribund, then checked the mailing list archive and found we were very much alive

Peter (on the left in the picture) gave an impromptu Gimp tutorial having struggled through a Linux Format project during the week with the help of the mailing list.

Anyway, next month’s meeting coincides with OpenStreetMap.org’s open mapping weekend in Bristol; any takers out there, please visit the wiki page.

As British as croque monsieur*?

Bristol’s Evening Post is not exactly renowned for the quality of its journalism. Perhaps that should be rephrased: Bristol’s Evening Post is well known the poor quality of its journalism; and today’s front page of the online edition does not disappoint, featuring the following advertisement:

Yes, that’s right, according to the evening paper published when the good burghers of Bristol are stirring from their beds, Le Creuset is British! Merde alors!

With howlers such as these, I hope they are advertising for a decent sub-editor in the situations vacant columns.

*A croque monsieur, for those that don’t know, is a toasted ham and cheese sandwich – that well-known favourite of French café society.

Knowle West… respect!

At the start of this week the media were falling over themselves to report the government’s latest public order gimmick – the establishment of 40 so-called ‘respect zones’ in various local authorities around the country.

According to the BBC, the idea behind these zones is that they will provide parenting classes, meetings between police and the public and “intervention projects” to tackle so-called “neighbours from hell”.

Needless to say, Bristol City Council is one of those involved and has picked on one of its favourite target deprived areas – Knowle West – for this stunt. It’s not that Knowle West, like any deprived community, does not have its problems with feral youth, drug dealing and the like. I reckon I know how the residents of Knowle West like to have their community stigmatised in this way: exactly the same as the good folks of Easton did when Stapleton Road got wrongly labelled by the media as the most crime-ridden street in the country.

On Monday’s launch date Knowle West duly saw a flying visit from Tony McNulty, the Home Office Minister with responsibility for policing and security. The Evening Pest carried a report on McNumpty’s visit.

There’s a budget of £6 mn. available to fund the scheme. If shared equally, this works out at £150,000 per local authority. Given that all local authorities waste public money and Bristol provides just about the worst value for money service going, I cannot see this making much of a difference, whereas spending £6 mn. on additional police just might have.

Finally, when I was young I was taught that respect had to earned and couldn’t be bought. This £6 mn. looks like the government trying to buy it.  Just as it can be gained, respect can also be lost and as long as politicians, the police and others in authority who used to have the respect of the community keep telling lies and generally misbehaving they do not deserve any respect at all.

Weather – wise or otherwise?

US journalist Martha Gellhorn once described the British weather along the lines of ‘a national catastrophe, bravely borne by the natives’. And last two Thursdays, when the country was lashed by storm force winds and rain, have been catastrophic.

Compared with the rest of the country, Bristol escaped lightly from the storms. However, on the first of those Thursdays, Easton’s Bannerman Road Primary School had part of its roof blown off, resulting in the kids being sent home early.

Bannerman Road School – after the storm

There’s no doubt that we’re having some strange weather: just a couple of weeks ago I saw hazel catkins for the first time this year – the earliest I can remember in 5 decades.

Over the weekend it has suddenly turned cold: apart from a few days’ worth of frost just before Christmas, there’s been no winter in Bristol at all; maybe that’s all about to change and the fuchsia still flowering in my garden will finally shed its leaves before spring arrives again

Normal service resumed

I’ve been having a bit of a break over the Christmas and New Year period, hence the three weeks’ hiatus in postings. However, I have not been keeping my eyes closed. Here are a couple of the things that caught my eye on the language front.

Firstly, that great institution W H Smith seems to have changed from a newsagent and bookseller to a greengrocer, given the perhaps misplaced apostrophe (aka the greengrocer’s apostrophe) in its voucher reproduced below:

I wonder if they’re now selling newspaper’s, magazine’s and book’s?

Secondly, I’m indebted to the Rotten Boroughs page of Private Eye for drawing my attention to the language deficiencies of Bristol City Council. In December this local waste of public money passed a motion regretting “the actions of past Bristol citizens engaged in the slave trade”. However, either for reasons of political correctness or an inability to find the spellcheck on the word processor (hint: try F7), the victims were referred to throughout as ‘Afrikans’. As the Eye helpfully pointed out, this spelling clearly places Bristol City Council in the same class as such inclusive groups as the Wehrmacht’s Afrika Korps and the apartheid regime of Zuid Afrika.

Furthermore, if you read the Council’s press release on the motion, you’ll see not only that they can’t decide who wrote it (multiple choice authorship for press releases: is this a first from BCC?), but the greengrocer’s apostrophe crops up in the penultimate sentence of the third paragraph:

It’s full text is set out below.

Clearly, the Council did not take my advice of a few years ago that they use part of the education budget for adult literacy classes for their staff!

Anyway, now that normal service has been resumed, I shall have to get round to moderating the comments that have accumulated; if yours is in the queue, please be patient.