Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

He's never been shouted at in Wales apparently. Any Welsh ILXors out there to take up the challenge?

when I wrote to a very active councillor asking his permission to recommend him for a gong, he replied: "I would prefer not to seek such an honour."

George Monbiot believes in the honours system?

i nhad assumed that he was an 'hon' himself, but pops seems not to have been enobled despite all his service to the nation/conservative party.

I wouldn't have imagined him to be super concerned about national borders either but As far as I can discover, this is the only country in Europe that you cannot traverse by train without spending most of the journey passing through another. The only rail link that allows you to travel from north to south crosses the border near Llangollen and doesn't re-enter Wales until it approaches Abergavenny, 100 miles away kinda suggests otherwise - I mean this is a true statement, I think, but the specific importance of this eludes me

Think it means Monbiot's been caning the Snowballs and chocolate liqueurs since Christmas Eve.

Reminds me I need to go and buy another bottle of Warnink's.

Gonna be travelling that Abergavenny line on NYD, will pour one out for Monbiot as I exploit Wales for inter-England travel purposes.

This impulse arises from a number of observations: in two years of walking through the valleys and over the hills here, I have never been shouted at; the cafe in the local leisure centre serves smoothies in measures labelled "small" (about a pint) and "regular" (about two pints); when I wrote to a very active councillor asking his permission to recommend him for a gong, he replied: "I would prefer not to seek such an honour."

vs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maciejdakowicz/sets/1391696/

Dude Likes Holiday Home Better Than Real Home, film at 11.

god bless this humble little land

Those photos are tremendous (you imperialist polish dog)

The dude who took those came to a house party at mine earlier this year with a bunch of crazy Pole pals who drunk loads of my booze. It was pretty funny. They are rad photos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/21/police-form-696-garage-music

^^ guardian jumps on the anti-elf-and-safety/bungling-bureaucrats bandwagon.

I thought they'd already done a piece on this?

tbf bureaucrats often bungle. Or at least I'm one and I do.

i know, but it's good guardian manners to remain in denial about that. the overweaning state is a good thing, only disputed by mail readers, until it affects something really important, like grime music.

Racism.

wow, possibly the most narcissistic piece I've read in a long, long time:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/30/women-gayrights

Why did you read that? I didn't even bother looking past the caption.

Fair point!

how could you not be enticed by the caption?! treats are in store...

the RFs wrote that, "all feminists can and should be lesbians. Our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men. It does not mean compulsory sexual activity with women."

"We were trying to challenge the excuses used by some heterosexual feminists as to why they lived with Nigel or John," she says. "They said, 'Oh, but my man is OK,' as a way of refusing to look at the fact that some men really do hate women."

well, nigel i can vouch for, but john? he's a terrible man!

Because asserting that the person you are in a relationship with is OK inevitably leads to the denial of the existence of misogyny.

Stop pretending you think lesbianism is an exclusive members' club, and join the ranks. I promise that you will not regret it.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39288

I know it's not funny, but this strikes me as more serious: in their story on the IMF's doom report on Tuesday, they actually said, twice in the same piece, once as the photo caption, that the IMF estimate was that the economy shrank by 0.7% in 2008. The IMF estimate, as clearly shown in the report that the story was just parroting, is for 0.7% growth.

I find it pretty unbelievable that they can't seem to read a minus sign, but also that an economics correspondent wouldn't know that everyone is estimating small positive annual growth for 2008.

It's just nuts. How did they get the job?

Why would you trust anything they say about anything if they can't get stuff like that right?

I have "boned" two political lesbians. Anything can happen.

Poor Nigel and John. Gone the way of the music magazine and smoking in pubs.

I promise that you will not regret it.

This kind of amounts to a personal guarantee.

The last line should have been "No fat chicks, though."

I don't see what's so egregiously narcissistic about that political lesbianism piece. She talks generally about the phenomenon for most of the article, and then refers to her own case near the end. What's so terrible about that?

http://www.hope-academic.org.uk/HIR&D/Images/nigel_john.jpg

As useless as VHS, the dodo and the UK's manufacturing base.

xpost It struck me as "Political lesbianism: my story", along with those of some of her friends in what must be a very small circle.

Yeah, but if that's the most narcissistic piece you've read in a long, long time then you can't read the papers very often! Come on, how often do you read about political lesbianism in the mainstream press. I thought it was interesting enough.

I think it's interesting too but a piece written by someone who was capable of taking a step back from it would, assuming it amounted to slightly more than 'lol check these crazy dykes out', be a lot less obnoxious

Well, I dunno. How many mainstream newspapers in the UK would let a columnist talk about and advocate political lesbianism? I can't quite see what's obnoxious about it. But whatever.

It certainly covers some interesting ground, but I could do without the "my story" stuff. This goes for so much that passes for journalism though.

T/S: First person stories on political lesbianism vs getting really fucking important bits of news completely wrong.

Zing culture is a choice that we can make, and not a "condition" we are born with

Weekend is suddenly worse than it used to be with new redesign and Lucy Mangan going from forgettable columnist to irritating lol-advice girl.

gwuuuhhhhh

observer>>>guardian on a saturday

I picked up a copy of G2 for the first time in yonks the other week -- the very day the aforementioned political-lesbianism piece was in it -- because it had a piece by an old acquaintance of mine (this one) and it was marginally quicker to grab a colleague's paper copy than it was to look for it online.

Fuck me. G2: worse than it used to be? Jesus wept. I was astonished. There's still some excellent writing in there but what the FUCK is all that fluff at the beginning? It's woeful. And the bloody Williams woman wittering on about her baby ... good god.

I subscribe to the front-page RSS feed so I guess I'm spared a lot of that drivel when I "read the Guardian" every day ... I suppose what I'm reading is an approximation of the paper as viewed through the eyes of the duty website editor, but seeing as I'm assuming the duty website editor will be an experienced hack who knows a damn sight more than I do about what constitues The Guardian (and appears to be excluding exactly the right stuff), I'm more than happy with that.

Are these ffs on purpose?

Not with you, G00blar: what are you meaning?

lolgatures

And a ffi

This is what happens when the writer submits, e.g. a typeset PDF rather than plain text — and then the sub doesn't proofread to zap Unicode gremlins, natch.

Shit, yeh, sorry: I was skimming it so fast I missed 'em.

It'll be one of the myriad text-to-web fuck-ups: either their web-output process has suddenly stopped recognising InDesign's standard ligatures (possible; unlikely) or -- and I've seen this happen in a variety of ways with all sorts of non-standard characters, eg non-breaking spaces -- some wacky sub has decided to use manual ligatures in the print version, and what we're seeing on the web page is ... well, exactly that.

xpost Caek, I'd have thought the very action of importing text from a PDF into InDesign would make such things clear (although I can see how it might not). Not sure what you mean by "sub doesn't proofread" ... a sub is subbing, not proofreading, and if InDesign is *displaying* imported ligatures perfectly, you can understand how it might not be noticed. Hmm.

Whatever: it's a quirk of the Grauniad's production system, and is nowhere near as bad as the disaster we had the other week in which a 3000-word feature wentuponthewebsitewithnospacesbetween most of thewords.

wow

I knew you'd rep subs when I blamed this on them. I don't know the job title of the person responsible for this. (Who proof-reads, by the way?)

I get this sometimes when I paste from a PDF created by LaTeX, which does all sorts of ligature fancy stuffs, into a text editor (or web textarea) which understands unicode and tries to be too clever with these high unicode characters. Things look OK at a glance but all bets are off when you save and view in another program/HTML/whatever.

I knew you'd rep subs when I blamed this on them

Er, but ... I'm blaming subs too! ;)

Who proof-reads, by the way?

Ach, I was being slightly awkward for the sake of it there. The point is that something like that should ideally be picked up long before the proof-reading stage (by which I mean someone -- a sub, a desk editor, whoever -- reading over a final printed page shortly before it goes to press); it should ideally be spotted and fixed by whichever sub works on the copy on screen.

Of course, that depends on them being able to perceive the problem. If they're not expecting ligatures, and InDesign is parsing them perfectly on screen and in the printed product, then yes: I can see how the problem would only become apparent when the copy is taken back out of the InDesign/InCopy process. I'm assuming the Guardian's web output is automated: ie page elements are meta-tagged (headline, caption, body copy and so on) and it's automatically published to the web after the printed page is sent. So unless someone is then sitting reading everything as it goes up on the web -- which I think is very unlikely -- then stuff like this is going to be missed.

The most interesting thing is why it isn't happening more often, to be honest. But I'm making all sorts of assumptions about the Guardian's production operation here, which might be massively unfounded. If you really want, I'll tap up their head production honcho about it, but ... I don't really think it's worth it ;)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/25/women-upskirting

ColonialOutcast
25 Feb 09, 4:00am

Whilst taking upskirt photographs is sinister and sleazy, I would love to know if it is considered unacceptable to sneak a peak at a woman's knickers if the opportunity presented itself (wind gust lifting skirt/dress etc).

I don't see any harm in it myself, though I'm talking only a fleeting glance not leering.