YouTube thinks I’m a Nazi. There, I’ve said it. I watched one YouTube video and now it’s decided I’m a rabid, right wing lunatic with Nazi sympathies.
I just watched one video, officer. Just one. And now it keeps recommending Nazi propoganda to me.
And what was the video? What has made YouTube decide I’m a Nazi?
This one:
Yep, watching the Conservative chairman making a monumental dick of himself on “Question Time” has – in the eyes of YouTube – made me a Nazi sympathizer. Here’s what it recommended for me today:
Now, I knew old Eric was a touch right-wing but Mein Gott - arrgh, what am I saying?
Ah, Human Perception. And how easily it can be tricked. This “impossible motion” illusion – created by Kokichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Kawasaki, Japan – has won the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Here, wooden balls appear to run up four inclined slopes. It’s only when the angle changes you realise that your mind is playing tricks on you.
Here’s the video, you’ll have to watch a random advert first for which apologies but it’s worth waiting for!
Ah, Stratford. Birthplace of Shakespeare, possibly the finest writer in the English Language. Which makes the inability of any of its residents to place apostrophes correctly all the more puzzling.
Now, before the pedants write in, I know that spelling in Shakespeare’s day varied pretty wildly – Shakespeare himself used 3 or 4 different spellings of his own surname and – interestingly – never actually used the spelling that we universally use today. But we’re talking about apostrophes not spelling and anyway this is the 21st century not the 17th. And it’s my blog and I get irritated by apostrophe misuse so there.
So, picture the scene. I get to the car park, take my ticket, park up and wander into Stratford. And what do I see? This:
Now, it hardly needs me to point out that the birthplace belongs to Shakespeare, therefore it should be Shakespeare’s Birthplace. I ranted about this to Beloved for a while who responded with her usual sympathy by running off with the kids as I got my camera out. “Where’s the apostrophe gone?” I shouted as I chased after her, “Where the hell is the Apostrophe?”
Not to worry – found it:
Collectable’s? Why the hell has “Collectables” got an apostrophe in it? And look at where the error is – not on a home-printed bit of paper stuck up in a window but in a huge fabric awning. For God’s sake, did no-one check? Is no one else bothered?
Strewth, I need a sit down and a nice cup of tea. What about this place? This looks like it might be….arrgggh!
Oh. My. God. The “Plural of a word ending in a vowel” conundrum claims another victim. Breakfasts, Salads and Specials all fine, but clearly it’s Coffee’s, Tea’s and Panini’s. Except it isn’t. Obviously.
What’s painful about all this is that Stratford is a tourist hotspot. There are people from all over the world milling about this town and are being presented on every street corner with mild-meltingly ignorant signage. The first was printed by the local council and no-one noticed or cared about the absent apostrophe. The awning above the souvenir shop must have cost (I’m guessing) several hundred pounds and neither the manufacturer or the shop owner noticed or cared about the errant apostrophe in the plural. The sign outside the cafe reveals a lack of the most basic knowledge of English (or – perhaps worse – a guess at a rule that doesn’t exist) and yet it stays there for month after month, year after year. That stupid sign in Bainsbury’s (see Whats’ Happening) is still there because no-one cares, no-one gives a toss.
My daughter enjoys English but I regularly see apostrophe errors in her homework not being corrected by the school. “Oh, we don’t want to correct that,” the teachers say, “We don’t want to disturb the creative flow.” Well, pardon me, but we’re not trying to turn out a class full of J.K. Rowlings. What we need are people who can spell and punctuate properly when they enter the world of work. Because, when a job application lands on my desk, I don’t think “Oh, look at that clever use of metaphor there”, I don’t think “What clever alliteration!” No, I think, “this daft sod has put an apostrophe in the wrong place, I don’t think I’ll bother calling them back” – and their covering letter and CV go straight in the bin. So to hell with the creative flow, quite frankly. Very few people write fiction for their job (apart from Daily Mail journalists and technical documentation authors).
Depressed I return to the car. I’m depressed for the future generation; depressed that so many examples of apostrophe misuse can be found in Shakespeare’s home town; depressed that no-one – including the council – seem to care. I reach in my pocket for the carpark ticket …
“this tickets” – seems to sum it all up really, doesn’t it?
I love this guy and this little song sums up the Daily Mail rather neatly. Rather like the awesome “London Underground” song (http://bit.ly/4pAPAM) I find myself singing this at inopportune moments. If you’re a Guardian reader, you’ll love this. If you’re a Daily Mail reader – well, I’m sure you find some way to blame this on immigrants or Jonathan Ross or something.
This actually reminds me of an incident several years ago when I was working as a software engineer in Manchester for a large (now mostly deceased) British manufacturing company. Anyway, this particular company *owned* its building, a rather ramshackle old place with mouse traps in odd corners and condensation running down the walls. But it was theirs and they’d paid for it and that was that.
However, along comes new management who decided that this old, ramshacking, mouse-dropping and condensation soaked eye-sore was no longer suitable for the thrusting, dynamic, go-getting company that this 70-year old instituion had become. So a move was organized to a brand new business park about a mile from the old building.
There were, it has to be said, a few problems with this:
1) The new building boasted some of the highest rents per square foot in the whole of Manchester.
2) It was in the middle of the roughest (and largest) council estate in the whole of the UK.
3) It did not have secure car-parking.
4) A combination of (2) and (3) meant that the local pubs were doing a roaring trade in car stereos and most of the employees ended up driving home at least once in a draughty car with no music.
5) The building did not have air-conditioning (despite fact (1) above).
So – picture the scene. It’s the height of summer and the temperature in the building is about 90 degrees farenheit. One of the employees opens her window in “tilt” mode and continues to work at her desk, luxuriating in the light breeze (and the sound of car-alarms) that was now wafting through the double-glazed unit. Work, that is, until the weight of the window caused it to pull free of its hinge and the whole assembly fell on top of her, breaking her shoulder and curtailing any further keyboard operating duties.
Having dragged her off screaming in an ambulance (which had lost its stereo whilst the crew were inside), a note went around banning the opening of windows with immediate effect. The temperature in the building was now well over 100 degrees F most days. Someone in management had the bright idea of setting up a couple of industrial fans at one end of the open-plan office and switching them on. This simply turned the oven into a fan-oven with the added benefit that any paper on desks that was not held down by mugs or keyboards or monitors or whatnot would be hurled into the air from where it fluttered around like chaff from a World War II bomber.
Complaints were met with the inevitable “nothing we can do” responses. Free chilled water was provided but the heat meant it didn’t stay chilled for long so that after a while it began to taste like drinking your own urine.
By Friday morning, the office was beginning to look like the Mars scene on “Total Recall” when the boss has turned off the air supply and all the mutants are dying on the floor. Except that the employees looked worse. I wandered down to a conference room on the ground floor (mumbling words like “Water, water…”) and tried to fire up our demo equipment ready for the make-or-break demo to the customer that afternoon.
The computer would not fire up. It was too hot. It said so on the little LCD panel on the front.
I told this to my boss who reacted with the insightful and dynamic way I’d come to depend on. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
“We’ll have to open a window and get some air in there.”
“We can’t open a window, we’re not allowed.”
“Okay, then, we can’t do the demo.”
“But we have to do the demo.”
“So what do you suggest? I can’t just give it a Solero and tell it to pull itself together. It’s too hot, we need to get air in there.”
He looked like a man crushed under the shear bloody unfairness of it all. Then, amazingly, he brightened. “Hang on, I’ve got an idea,” he said. “I’ll be back in a tick.” And off he went.
When he returned he was holding a piece of paper. I’d sort of assumed he’d gone off to find a mobile aircon unit (or perhaps to check on his car stereo) but no – a piece of paper. “What are you going to do with that?” I asked, “Wave it in front of the server until it cools down?”
“Could you sign there?” he said, unfolding the paper and giving me a pen.
Wiping sweat from my eyes I read the content of the paper. It was full of hereinto’s and hereinafter’s and other bits of legalese but basically it said that if the window fell in and broke any of my limbs, or killed me, or did anything else to put a dampener on my day, that they, the company hereinafter referred to as the bastards would not be responsible.
I looked up. “You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Why not?”
“You want me to sign a disclaimer that says if your crappy window falls on me when I’m doing your demo for your customer on your premises, you won’t be responsible? What’s in it for me, exactly?”
“Er…”
“I’m not signing that, do you think I’m mad? There has to be a better way. And whatever it is, you’d better come up with it quick because they’ll be here in a few hours and it’s going to take 30 minutes of that to get the temperature down in here.”
“Right….” and off he went. And so we had Plan B. Plan B consisted of a couple of guys from services turning up with a huge piece of wood which they then screwed to the wall in front of the window. We could then open the window, knowing that if it did fall in it wouldn’t drop into the room thanks to the afotermentioned huge piece of wood. So it came to pass that our demo to a major prospective customer in our swish new office building with the highest rents per square foot in the whole of Manchester took place in the shadow (literally) of a massive plank of wood screwed across the window.
It was shortly after that I started looking for another job….
Ah, delightful Croydon. Wandering through the town centre one lunch time in search of something to eat that (a) hadn’t already been eaten the night before and (b) wasn’t laced with saturated fat, I found myself in Apostrophe Horror.
Witness this delight:
The creator of this sign has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. After all, they avoided the usual trap of sticking an apostrophe before the ‘S’ when the singular of the word ends in a vowel. So “Paninis” is correct in the strictest sense that it doesn’t need an apostrophe. I say strictest sense because “Panini” is already plural (in the original Italian), but this is a very common mistake and – whilst irritating – does not concern us here.
The sign writer has also managed to pluralise Potato correctly. All splendid. Which makes it all the stranger that they suddenly decided to stick an apostrophe in Breakfast’s.
Then, staggering away from this horror, I got caught in a pincer movement. This was waiting for me around the corner:
That’s my friend Rob by the way, helpfully illustrating the issue! There’s our old “plural of a word ending in a vowel” conundrum again!
Here we go, here are the top three contenders for the “it” parade as judged by me, your friendly neighbourhood apostrophe watcher.
Simple rule - possessive form of “its” is “its” – not “it’s”. “It’s” is always a contraction of “it is”. There have been innumerable examples of this schoolboy error reproduced on these pages from lots of different sources so we should all be familiar with this issue by now.
Okay – (cue music, cue Alan “Fluff” Freeman voice), at number 3 we have (da, da, da, da, da dah….da da da dah….) the “Argos Catalogue” with their smash hit “iPod Nano”:
“…makes it’s debut…” FAIL (da da da da da dah….da da da dah…..)
At number 2, we have “Leeds Tropical World” with their smash, “Temporary Closure Notice”:
“…it’s annual maintenance work…” FAIL (da da da da da dah…da da da dah……)
But at number 1, and holding on to its number one slot due to the astonishing source of the error is (and I can hardy believe I’m typing this), “The Times” with their smash hit “Leader Page on 23rd January 2010″:
“Sum of it’s parts…” FAIL “da da da da da dah….da da da dah….”
That’s all for this week, see you next time for more “it” parade entries!
Another reader contribution from Jamie who posts this howler from David Lloyd Fitness. As Jamie says: “David Lloyd sent me an email with an interesting offer of a free month’s subscription to entice me back and re-start my membership. This image shows the “apostrophe horrors” (I’m going to ignore the preposition error since, technically, ‘preposition errors’ are only applicable to Latin grammar).”
“What’s interesting is that the apostrophe error actually infers that I would get “months” of free membership, as opposed to “a month’s” free membership. I wonder how the Membership Department would interpret this?”
I think you should take them up on it, see what they say!
On a side note, it would appear that a Mr Huw Davies-Thomas is the head of Member Relations. Can I suggest to Mr Davies-Thomas that if he really wrote that, then he ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself. And if someone else wrote it, then he should be (a) thoroughly ashamed of himself for employing someone so mind-meltingly stupid and (b) thoroughly ashamed of himself for not proof-reading it before putting it live.
