Backburner

Getting from Swansea to anywhere in the Midlands isn’t the easiest of tasks. It’s a journey I do about three to six times a year, and it’s a pain. I’ve tried the M42 (now with added ‘why not use the hard shoulder as well?’ madness), bits of the M40, the M1, the M69, the A46. It’s a nightmare of scary five-lane junctions springing from nowhere, of turn-off-this-road-to-stay-on-it idiocies, and generally bad junctions. I’ve tried everything…

…well, nearly everything anyway. Everything except this novel route. It was Microsoft who asked you where you wanted to go … Continue Reading

A brief notice, for those in the UK near any form of digital television right now, that BBC Four are about to start showing the excellent Huw Edwards series Bread of Heaven, looking at the history of religion in Wales. It was received very well when it went out here at the end of last year. You might like it too.

(Edit: Well it’s too late now – and unusually, the first episode isn’t getting repeated. Still, the website is well worth a look.)

This entry is dedicated to all those who don’t quite think things through.

A note for Conservative politicians. When participating in an otherwise pedestrian debate on the BBC’s charter renewal, do try not to go off on one about a children’s programme, enjoyed by thousands of your constituents’ kids, solely on your knowledge of the games on its tie-in website. It’ll only make you look stupid and get you talked about on Newsround.

A note for garage owners. When a computer programmer phones you asking for a replacement key for his car, please don’t tell him that it … Continue Reading

Another year means another Banished Words List from the Lake Superior State University. I’m only too happy to rid ‘webinar’, ‘carbs’ and ‘blog’ (as opposed to ‘weblog’) from my vocabulary, but what worries me about these lists is all those dead words, with nothing suggested to take their place and carry on The Natural Evolution of Language. At the same time, there are other modern phenomena which deserve words of their own. Shouldn’t words be created to encapsulate their definitions? Of course they should. Definitions like:

1. (adverb) A way of complaining about an event or happening in such a way … Continue Reading