The bleeding obvious

Another example of the journalistic art of stating the perfectly obvious, this time courtesy of The Australian reporting on the sad death of a 15 year old girl at a railway crossing, the latest in a series of railway deaths recently (my bold).

The girls's death comes a week after a three-year-old boy was struck by a train in regional Victoria and died in hospital the next day.

Last month, a 70-year-old woman was killed by a train at a level crossing at McKinnon railway station.

Police believe she was standing on the wrong side of the pedestrian safety barrier when struck by a city-bound train.

Oh, you think? Hard to see how the train could have been travelling on the wrong side of the barrier without the article being about a deadly derailment. Oh well, I suppose it makes a change from wildly inaccurate or inappropriate picture captions.

The cake is a lie...

... and so is the floor, the walls and the idea of which way is up.

More art for gamers here

Great discoveries of this blog #1 *

When you've got absolutely nothing else Bonjela works quite well on insect bites. Okay, 'great' might be overstating things but don't say I never tell you anything useful.

* It's highly unlikely that there will be a #2.

Occupational therapy

From Watts Up With That.

Chuckle. Do go read the rest.

Watch for the crashes

What? No crash? No accidents at all with all those rules being broken left, right and centre? With all those pedestrians, drivers, cyclists and trams using that same space? Nothing at all, almost like people are managing to just get along by themselves? Not entirely unlike those places in Holland - also being tried in London, I believe - where they've done away with some or all of the rules governing priority for who's riding what coming from where and leaving it for people to sort out on their own. On the other hand you probably couldn't make that work with all junctions and I'm not sure Flinders and Swanston would be one anyway. Still, it doesn't change the fact that all that rule breaking didn't actually hurt anyone. Food for thought.

PS - maybe it's the camera angle and the music but I have an urge to spend the rest of the weekend playing SimCity.

Too close to reality

'Are you a customer of ours?'

Tilting at windmills

Click for linky

... soon after being installed [at the Gorran School in Cornwall] the wind turbine became faulty and after a few months seized up - showering the school's playing field with debris.
Since then the school has been locked in a battle with suppliers Proven Energy which has now gone into administration leaving the school with little hope of any money being returned - and a pile of scrap in their field.

Having seen this earlier I was going to blog it later on today, but I see Watts Up With That have already done a thorough job on it, including the fact that the debris with which it showered the playground included two fucking turbine blades lessons have not been learned as well as the local community's apparent inability to treat this as a learning experience - they're now spunking away half a million pounds on two 'community turbines'. Nip over to WUWT and have a read of the whole thing when you can. I can't add anything other than the cynical observation that someone, or several someones, in Big Eco is probably getting wealthy off places like Gorran. Which would be fine if what was provided in return actually worked.

Could have been put better - UPDATED

'Live blog'? Really? You don't think that perhaps that's an unfortunate phrase to use?

And has this obsession at The Teletubbygraph with live blogging got a little out of hand? Of all the things you could live blog is the death of a well known businessman, or even the death of anyone at all, the right sort of event? It lends itself to ongoing stories, so floods, earthquakes, political party conferences and other disasters are all suitable for live blogging. But this? How's that work?

1.55 Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has died.

2.20 Steve Jobs still dead.

2.40 He's still dead.

3.05 Still dead.

3.20 The Daily Telegraph has spoken to medical experts who have confirmed that not being alive is a very common symptom of being dead.

3.30 Steve Jobs persistently not alive at this point.

3.45 Still not alive.

For Pete's sake, Tele, you've probably got obits for every other famous name all teed up somewhere ready to go the moment they drop off the twig, and sometimes before. Why not just dust it off, update it and click publish? The only reason I can think of for live blogging this is that Steve Jobs' death has been falsely reported a few times by reputable sources as well as hoaxers (that one was only last month), so there's an outside chance of an update to the effect of 'It's just another bloody hoax' around half five or something. Since even Apple's home page is showing a tribute photo and 'Steve Jobs 1955-2011' - which The Tele must know as they've used it too and they said where they got it - this seems a lot less likely than parts of the MSM still trying to work out this new media thingummy.

As for Steve Jobs himself, whatever I've had to say about his company (and there's more on the back burner) and some of its products, his death is still sad. I'm not joining this trend for mourning people you've never met, but the guy had a family and 56 is no age at all these days.

UPDATE - Oh, Christ.

Click for linky

Still busy, but... - UPDATED

... not so busy that I can't find a few minutes to join in taking the piss out of The Mail for this:

It's almost like they're making up the news as they go along or, as Newsthump suggested, from time to time they occupy a parallel universe (a Dacreverse?) in which things happen a bit differently.

The Daily Mail is insisting that it published family reactions and prosecutor quotes to an Amanda Knox verdict that was never delivered due to a brief trip to an alternate universe.
[...]
Daily Mail reporter Nick Pisa told us, “It definitely happened, I saw it with my own eyes. There’s was a flash of light and then Amanda Knox was crying, before being taken back to prison – and all the prosecutors were celebrating.”
“I took copious notes and then there was another flash of light.”
“I filed my copy quickly like any good reporter, only to find out that in this universe she was found not guilty. I’m as shocked as anyone.”
Media analysts have suggested that this latest incident points to to the fact that the universe is clearly ganging up on the Daily Mail...

Hopeless knobs, they really are.

UPDATE - see the whole thing in all its glorious failicity over at Max Farquar's. The cunning bugger screencapped the whole thing before The Fail could take it down. Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Quote of the day

Okay, to be fair on Victorian Water Minister Peter Walsh, talking here about Melbourne's biggest dam reaching 50% full for the first time in seven years, this really ought to be called "Incredibly selective quote of the day" but never mind.

I can't have thoughts as the minister...

Occupy Wall Street...

... and then what, you clueless bunch of fucknuts? Going to throw America's captains of industry from the roofs of their own buildings, are you? Should be pretty fucking entertaining given the US has a national debt on the order of fifteen trillion dollars. Now, what's Mandarin for, "Nice one, you fucking idiots"?

Cunts.

More light blogging

But in the meantime I thought I'd add to the list of shotgun library photos on stories about airguns and photos of wolverines on stories about bears and other bum captions with an Aussie example. And you don't need to be much of a petrolhead to see where The Age's Drive section have gone wrong here.

The car in front might still be a Toyota but they use a different slogan for Aussie adverts - d'oh, what a feeling!