Reflections

Well, when I saw that Firefox 3 was out, I immediately went to download it.  I have been happy with Firefox over the years, and expected another well-designed piece of software.

So far I have experienced the following problems:-  Gigantic text, which has to be adjusted every time I use the browser.  Gigantic pages, which are too wide for my screen.  These had to be adjusted by going to a very obscure file and altering some parameters.  This has worked on some web pages, but not, unfortunately, all of them.  Large icons, which leads to big spaces between lines of text.  The appearance of many sites is horrible now.  And most seriously, the loss of my Firefox 2 bookmarks.  I managed to recover my IE bookmarks, but not those I have accumulated during the years I have used Firefox.  As with the other errors I went to the support areas and tortuously made my way through the morass of technical information.  All to no avail, because I discovered that my Firefox 2 bookmarks folder had been overwritten with unwanted Mozilla bookmarks.

Losing one’s bookmarks is potentially so serious, I am astounded that Mozilla has released this software as it is.

I read somewhere that this is in fact a so-called ‘release candidate’ version of the browser, but there is no indication to that effect on the Mozilla site.

I am seriously considering going back to Internet Explorer, and you have to be pretty desperate to do that.

The so-called ‘anti-terror’ bill, permitting the government to extend the period in which a suspect can be held without charge for 42 days, has been passed this afternoon.

Gordon Brown described the legislation in terms of ‘principles’. He has obviously not learned that if you have a principle, then you stick to it, even if circumstances change. The kind of disposable morality exemplified by this legislation is typical of the way this government has been operating over the last thirteen years.

I started working for the Labour party when I was a boy, stuffing leaflets into envelopes. At the time, Clement Attlee was the Prime Minister. I was a Labour councillor for 12 years until I retired last year.

When I recall the work I did for the Labour party I feel nothing now but a sense of shame. They are pulling us into a world in which I, certainly, don’t belong. A world in which individual liberty counts as nothing beside the authoritarian posturing of a government of which all the great Labour legislators of the past would feel thoroughly ashamed.

Thank you, Diane Abbott, for a great speech. Had there been more than a handful of MPs in the chamber, your eloquence might have opened a few eyes. Let us now hope that the Lords will send this misbegotten bit of legislation back to the Commons.

“These were the high points of the day, in terms of scuffles.”

- BBC News report on the demonstrations accompanying the progress of the Olympic torch through London

It is a principle of the legal system of this country that suspects cannot be held for longer than 28 days without charge.

The justification offered for changing this, and increasing the length of time people can be held without charge, is that the current terrorist threat justifies this change in the law.

The thing about principles is that you uphold them always. You don’t change them because you feel it would be more convenient to do so.

“Some of the clearest pictures of the universe ever taken,” said the BBC announcer this evening, talking about the latest high-definition astronomical photographs. He didn’t explain how the cameraman actually got outside the universe to take them, nor how they managed to get a lens of sufficiently wide an angle to encompass the whole thing.

You might find my reaction to the sloppy use of English somewhat over the top, but I feel that if we continue to have a cavalier attitude to what words actually mean, we will eventually find ourselves in Babel.

“Teenagers are getting as little as three hours sleep a night, due to modern technology”

That was another headline from today’s television news. It appears that this is a story which is claiming that video games and computers are causing sleep-deprivation in children.

The way the story is presented makes it completely meaningless. The phrase ‘getting as little as three hours sleep a night’ is like those ’savings of up to 50%’ claims made by stores. You might find that some unpopular item is indeed marked up at 50%, but nothing else is. Unless an actual study has been done of the sleeping habits of teenagers, this has all the hallmarks of a made-up story, to go in the archives with all the other anti-internet stories that have been appearing recently.

If indeed, computers and video games were causing sleep-deprivation in youngsters, then it would show that they work as entertainment. Perhaps in that case we should be exploring further how they might be used in the service of education.

“Teenagers are getting as little as three hours a sleep, due to revision,” doesn’t have quite the same alarmist appeal.

The coverage of real news stories is bad enough at the moment, without our having to endure made-up ones as well.

The BBC’s standards continue to decline, despite recent criticisms.

On today’s News 24, introducing a story about a fine of £400,000 levelled on two companies whose negligence resulted in the deaths of 9 people, the female announcer described it as ‘a huge fine’. The burden of the story was that, of course, it was a derisory amount, and the judge was unable to level any more because he was constrained from doing so.

The concluding contribution of the male announcer was: “The families extremely very upset.”

The BBC has recently been in the spotlight over two issues. One was the editing of an incident involving the Queen and an American photographer. For those who didn’t see it, the Queen was sitting in a confection of silks and satins, and the photographer asked her to remove her tiara so that she would look less ‘dressy’. ‘Dressy?’ said the Queen. “Dressy? What do you think this is?’ (indicated her whole outfit). Anyway, a subsequent picture of the Queen apparently walking out saying, ‘I am not going to change anything’ was in fact a shot of her walking in, something which rather fictionalised what happened. I had some sympathy with the Queen, who must have to put up with stuff like this all the time. I have none, however, with the director who fraudulently changed the sequence of shots.

He subsequently appeared, saying with some satisfaction that he hadn’t been asked to resign. He should have been.

The other issue was another fraudulent action on the part of the BBC in the programme ‘Blue Peter’. A technical fault meant that the winner of a competition couldn’t be contacted, and a child who was in the studio anyway was asked to ‘stand in’ for the winner.

What shocks me about both these epidodes is that in both cases deception was seen as a legitimate way of dealing with an issue. To me, it is symptomatic of the appalling slump in standards of the BBC. A couple of decades ago the service could be trusted. That is no longer the case.

With illiteracy, dishonesty and a failure of personal accountability pervading the medium, the BBC needs to get its finger out in a big way if it is going to claw back the reputation it once had. I somehow doubt whether the corporation has the people in influential positions who could carry out this change.

A pity.

A recent edition of Points of View contained several complaints about a TV title which used “you’re” to mean ‘your’.

The general consensus was that the person concerned should have been fired. If the TV companies, particularly the BBC, followed this advice, surely they would have no titlers or sub-title writers left. It is not the hapless semi-literates who were hired to a position for which they were completely unsuited, it is rather the people who hired them. It is the human resources officers and, ultimately, the managers who have been responsible over the years for the deterioration of the verbal aspect of programming.

It’s not a new problem. I remember decades ago, a newsreader who gave Abergele a pronunciation so bizarre it is worthy of recording. Instead of putting the accent on the third syllable, she put it on the second, so the resultant name sounded like “A-burger-lee”.

The BBC in particular has been for a long time somewhat cavalier about the pronunciation of names close to home, in particularly Welsh ones. By way of contrast, I remember the painfully precise pronunciation one newsreader used for the name “Hawaii”, in which the glottal stop made it appear that the BBC’s microphone had momentarily cut out. It appears that truly foreign names are worth taking trouble over.

Contrast this with “Plaid Cymru”. This Welsh Nationalist party was formed almost 80 years ago, and the BBC’s announcers still haven’t managed to get the pronunciation right. They manage the first word most of the time. Plaid rhymes with ‘side’. But when it comes to Cymru, nine times out of ten you hear the second letter have the same ‘oo’ sound as in the southern pronunciation of ‘hook’ or ‘book’. It doesn’t. The Welsh word ‘cwm’ is pronounced like that, but it means ‘valley’. “Plaid Cymru” translates literally to Welsh Party, and the ‘cym’ part sounds like ‘come’.

It doesn’t take much work to get this right. All you have to do is read a book – or even visit Wales. But the vast resources of the BBC are insufficient for this basic level of training for a newsreader or commentator. Perhaps because they have lost their sense of responsibility both to the language and to their viewers.

According to the subtitles which move under the picture in BBC News 24, the heiress Paris Hilton was sent to prison because of ‘alcohol-related wreckless driving’.

Presumably this means that from now on if you drink and drive it will be necessary for you to crash, so as to avoid a prison sentence.

It also means that the BBC, in employing people who are close to illiterate to write its subtitles, is demonstrating only too clearly the value it places upon the language we all speak.