Words Dept.: archive

Ofcom has ruled that an advert about the congestion charge shown on ITV earlier this month directed viewers to a website that “contained material that was almost exclusively in support of the congestion charge” and, as such, broke the Television Advertising Code rules on political impartiality. You might think this is quite a serious [...]

There seems to be a reasonable chance that the situation in Thailand is going to escalate in the next few days, which is causing me quite a bit of stress because I’m due to fly there for a three-week holiday at the end of next week. Hopefully it will all settle down in the next [...]

I’m not sure which is more irksome. Is it making an extraordinarily stupid video linking the proposed Greater Manchester congestion charge to a violent assault on a young woman, or is it sending out a mud-slinging press release that acknowledges the video has been withdrawn but still seeks to make political capital out of the sorry affair?
Well, here’s the [...]

I went to see the Le Corbusier exhibition in Liverpool yesterday. It was pretty good, although I found the layout a bit confusing – I prefer a chronological approach rather than a thematic one if it’s not a subject I’m especially familiar with. I’d also have liked a bit more of a focus on the [...]

By far the most hideous aspect of this year’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here is the various idents for Iceland that appear around each ad break. They feature a range of party food that looks so disgusting it could easily become the subject of a Bushtucker Trial.
Firstly, what the hell is a [...]

It’s a month to go until the result of the referendum on the Transport Innovation Fund and peak-time congestion charging in Greater Manchester – and the debate is moderately warm!
Stockport council, led by Liberal Democrat Dave Goddard, is opposed to the TIF bid and has been a target of particular attention from the Yes campaign. [...]

Just before going to sleep last night I attempted to have a US election-based multimedia experience, which involved taking the laptop to bed (my intentions were pure) and surfing various sites to do with the vote. This, I am led to believe, is the done thing among web-savvy news hunters of the 21st century.
Twitter, in [...]

This is quite depressing and also quite funny at the same time. It’s a drunk journalist from the Birmingham Mail boasting about his attempts to file a story on the US election while horribly pissed. His solution is to copy and paste it from the BBC, while revealing the fact to someone holding a video [...]

A minor rumpus is breaking out on Dave Hill’s London blog at the Guardian over claims by Tory Troll (aka Adam Bienkov) that journalist and beloved national treasure Andrew Gilligan has been “sockpuppeting”.
For those unfamiliar with the term, sockpuppeting means creating a “fake online identity” to praise yourself or some other entity with which you are associated, without disclosing the [...]