Words Dept.: archive

As you will no doubt have noticed, this site looks a bit different today. I’ve got me a new super-minimalist theme called Stripped by Upstart Blogger. I’m a fan of minimal, functional design and, since the emphasis round these parts is on words, this theme is perfect because all the other distracting stuff is dumped [...]

I accidentally nearly deleted this blog earlier, causing me great shock and distress. This is a test post to make sure it’s working again. Please, God, let it live.

It’s just struck me while watching Question Time that Sarah Sands, the “consulting editor” (whatever that means) of the Daily Mail is the reincarnation of Sally Smedley from Drop the Dead Donkey. Same clothes, same hairstyle, same jewellery, same voice, same disconcerting stare. Sally Smedley, Globelink News (left); Sarah Sands with colleagues from the Daily [...]

Applying any kind of critical thought to the optimistic fluff churned out by a lot of senior business people and their PRs at the moment is, it seems, tantamount to treason. As such, I’ve been told off/whinged at a couple of times in the last fortnight for contributing to the mysterious art of “talking us [...]

What I tell them is nine-tenths bullshit and one-tenth selected facts. – Stephen Carter, recently appointed chief of strategy to Gordon Brown, while chief operating officer of NTL in 2001. Alleged in a class-action lawsuit filed in New York. This quote appears on page four of today’s Observer. Meanwhile, on page five is another quote [...]

I can’t be the only person to have picked up on the fact that the latest advert for Asda has an instrumental version of the theme tune to Dad’s Army running in the background. The advert makes reference to a survey that says rival Tesco has a load of cheap prices. It then goes on [...]

Earlier tonight I saw a delightful bit of PR puff on BBC1′s The One Show about the O2 Arena – aka the Millennium Dome – being the most popular concert venue in the world, ahead of Madison Square Garden in New York. Strange, because according to the Manchester Evening News earlier this week, the MEN [...]

What the hell was Carol Vorderman doing advertising Bernard Matthews Chicken Drummers – six for a quid at Farmfoods – during the ad break for Hugh’s Chicken Run tonight? This was a programme exploring the issue of chicken production that illustrated the conditions in which standard supermarket chickens are reared – shit-and-piss-covered, fat, immobile and [...]

Time for the new series of MasterChef (which is no longer called MasterChef Goes Large, for some reason). This is my favourite place to hear the mysterious phrase “plates of food” repeated endlessly for half an hour. It sounds like it should be Cockney rhyming slang. Plates of food = dude (or something). Sadly, it [...]

I was in Tesco’s earlier, looking at the three-quid DVDs, and I couldn’t help but snigger at the covers of the latest exercise videos that no-mark female soap stars have brought out to cash in on the post-Christmas diet boom. Rather than going for a walk, or to the gym, it seems some desperate fatties [...]