Once more the little paper shows their small minds to the world. Flipping through my RSS feeds I come across a fairly definitive headline and short description of a story:
Bomb attempt diverts US flight from Herald Sun | World News
AN American Airlines flight from New York to LA has been diverted after a passenger reportedly tried to detonate a bomb mid-flight.
Clicking on the link takes you to the far more prosaic story:
OK, OK, so picking on the little paper is like shooting fish in a barrel… but surely sometime, somewhere, somehow, they could employ a high-school graduate or even a monkey from the zoo to proof-read these stories before they publish them:
…It lasted another 5km until the alleged driver and her teenage passengers finally abandoned the car when the tyre came completely away from the rim and made a run for it.
What happens when you combine stupid people with cars? Here’s a local genius who may have spent too much time watching Hollywood movies and lost track of reality just a wee touch. Courtesy of my favourite fish-wrapper, the Herald Sun:
Man in hospital with head injuries after jumping from car at 90km/h
A 21-YEAR-OLD man who jumped out of a moving car while he was driving it at nearly 90km/h is in hospital with serious head injuries.
“…diagnosed with a brain.”
The little paper seems to have a bit too much reliance on automatic spell checkers and too little reliance on human proof reading. Too many times they manage to put gibberish, nonsense or just plain inaccurate information in their RSS feeds, but get it mostly right in the online article. Today takes the cake — albeit somewhat tastelessly:
Ballesteros brain tumour shock
from Herald Sun | World News
On it goes…
Drivers find cyclists a road hazard from Herald Sun; State News
MORE than 60 per cent of Victorian motorists find cyclists are a road hazard, according to research carried out by insurer AAMI.
…
Anything to sell more newspapers, split the population into “us vs them,” pick a minority and stir, this is the way of the little paper.
It contains such gems as “47 per cent of Victorian car drivers have had a close call with a cyclist,” but somehow seems to neglect to ask what percentage of motorists have had a close call with another motorist.
One chopper anyway. I wonder what it was all about? From before noon until at least four o’clock the police helicopter went around and around and around Oakleigh, there were no sirens, no fires, the trains were still running, but the chopper just kept going up and down Warrigal road, past the shops, sometimes right over the house, other times a bit to the south. Later in the afternoon we watched the police board a train at Huntingdale station and go from carriage to carriage while it waited at the station, then get off empty handed and allow the train to proceed.
Same newspaper, same story, just check the difference in wording!
15:28 it is reported as:
A MAN playing cricket with his family has been killed and his daughter’s partner was badly hurt when a fight broke out with a second group of people on a beach.
Only an hour and a half earlier, at 13:51 it opened with:
A MAN playing a game of beach cricket with his family has been killed by thugs who pelted him with beer bottles and hit him in the head with the bat.
Can someone take a cluestick to the newspeople who write gibberish such as the following:
The 2.54 pm Williamstown train was expressing from Footscray to Spotswood at the time of the accident.
and:
…said he heard the train sounding its horn as it expressed through the level-crossing.
Go to any dictionary you can find and look up the verb expressing, there is only one definition that I know and it aint the one that they’ve made up, nor is it an act that a train is likely to perform!
from The Age News Headlines:
Freeway crash leaves one dead
One person dies and three others injured after a car strikes a tree on the Tullamarine Freeway.
What the? Bloody dangerous roads those freeways, trees sticking out the middle of them for motorists to just drive into. Is there going to be an investigation into why there is a tree on the freeway? I guess its a change from people driving into each other, picking on the trees for a change….
Melbourne’s little paper outdoes itself today, with a headline and article reading:
Military goat toll mounts
THE total number of goats killed after experiments by British military scientists since 2001 stands at 69, the Ministry of Defence said today.
Ministry of Defence scientists use goats in the tests because, it is claimed, their reactions are similar to those of humans.
Hmm … maybe some of the website application developers should use goats for testing their user-interfaces before releasing the applications on us at work.
Herald Sun Sunday Shark Attack Terror Shock Horror News! The Herald Sun excels itself at magnificent Capitalised Attention Grabbing Headlines.
On a related note, why are motorist deaths always reported as “the motorist died after hitting a tree” and with motorcyclists it always seem to be “the motorcyclist lost control and died after hitting a tree?” Don’t motorists lose control? Do the trees just run out and hit them in the middle of the roads?
Branches broken off by our local newspaper delivery Seven days a week we get the Age delivered in the mornings; for the first year or so that we lived here, whoever was delivering it managed to sling it up alongside or underneath the car — no problem, other than having to grovel around on our knees some mornings to get it out. About a year ago they changed their approach, it gets lobbed over the fence and lands bomb-like in the courtyard-sized front garden.
Interesting changes to the wording from the first report which appeared on the Age website credited to AAP, and the second one, printed in today’s paper.
The website version:
Webber urges drivers: watch for bicycles
April 3, 2006 - 6:24AM
Formula One star Mark Webber has urged Australian motorists to take a leaf out of the European book and pay more attention to cyclists on the road.
Webber, who admits to being a huge cycling fan, said while motorists in Victoria had improved in their attitude towards cyclists in the last five years, the rest of the country was not so patient.
Courtesy of The Age:
A woman was bitten by a lion at Melbourne Zoo after slipping her hand inside the enclosure to get a flower, the zoo confirmed today.
It is the second time in the past month that an animal has injured a visitor at the zoo.
The incident has prompted a review of perimeter security around the lion enclosure, with electric fencing to be installed to prevent lions getting close to the barrier.
The Age newspaper has excelled themselves. In an article about Apple opening an iTunes store in Australia, they’ve gone and stated that:
iTunes is the only site where iPod users can legally download songs.
I guess they haven’t noticed the thousands of songs that are legally available at thousands of legitimate websites because the legal copyright holders has put them there. Just because I can’t pay Apple for music, doesn’t mean that it’s illegal to pick up Teenage Fanclub’s eight songs, for example!
The newspapers seem to be relying more and more heavily on spell-checkers and less and less on proof-reading articles. There was a masterpiece today that provoked much mirth on various cycling mail lists:
[http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8831097%255E13569,00.html]
Costal areas on cycle watch
By RAJIV MAHARAJ
March 1, 2004
A low hovering over the Top End may yet develop into a category one cyclone…
I do not think that is the word you meant to use…
From The Age:
Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists
A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months’ jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling in a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart’s East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it, Justice Alan Blow said.
Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists
A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months’ jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart’s East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it, Justice Alan Blow said.
Brothel Probe Goes Too Far
Probably one of the more spectacularly eye-watering headlines I’ve seen in a newspaper all year. Jo and I spent half the afternoon sniggering and warning each other to “beware of the brothel probe.”
There’s a scary letter to the editor in The Age today. Entitled “Time to get rid of the two-wheeled killing machines,” its from a guy who has apparently written many times before. Apparently everytime there’s mention of motorcycling in the news, he has a rant and wants them off the roads completely… “for their own good.”
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
