Rantings via Weblog (Click here to go to the Home Page!)

As Adrian Belew sang, "It's a mean old world when you have to live with incompetence and indifference."

There are some things that really, really annoy me. One of them is the antisocial practice of littering in public, which is what was done by the driver of this BMW motor car moments before I took this photo yesterday afternoon. In this case it was a smoking cigarette dropped out the window.

The driver was happy to proffer this sparkling gift in the public domain so I am happy to give them the oxygen of publicity here.

I'm chuffed to find that MSN and their friends have done the hard work and gathered together a bunch of examples of irritating language gaffs.

As another case of bad grammar on a road sign makes the headlines, MSN presents a

gallery

of the very worst examples of publicly-aired lazy punctuation and lousy spelling.

The one that bugs me - and it's not in the list - is the sign over some checkout tills at the supermarket that reads:-

10 items or less

ADDENDUM
The MSN page is no longer available so here is the next best thing that I can offer - a screen shot:-



And here is a link to the cached page:-

Illiterate Britian - cached

Here's a copy of an email I have just sent through to NTL. Am I being unreasonably harsh?

++ begin ++

Responding to yet another flyer offering the amazing NTL sevices, I visited your web site to see what is available. I followed your link to find out if my location is serviced by your cable network but the only option I was led to was the "sign me up" wizard. Excuse me, but I do not wish to go through that whole process without knowing first what is available to me.

This marketing approach is unusable.

Why do you CONSTANTLY badger me with these insane money-wasting propositions?

Get your process right or stop writing to me.

Without respect,

-James Collett.
++ end ++

UPDATE 03 Oct 2006
It's been a week and guess what? - no reply nor even a response from NTL. Imagine my surprise.

UPDATE 11 Oct 2006
It's been another week and still no word from NTL. I'm sure they are just working through a backlog....

UPDATE 20 Oct 2006
Still no response. But they have sent me more junk mail encouraging me to join up to their Cable service.

UPDATE 23 Nov 2006
Still no response. But guess what! - yet more junk mail has arrived encouraging me to join up to their Cable service.

Quote:-

Read the full BBC story, "New powers over death considered", here:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/uk/4660984.stm

I often wonder who the "critics" are, just as I often would like to meet the ubiquitous "they", who seem to be responsible for so much.

And it's easy for all and sundry to trot out the usual, tired exclamation of: "It's such-and-such-bad-thing by the back door!" And they often do.

But why on earth are these critics claiming that this proposal to allow "powers to refuse life-sustaining care" is euthanasia by the back door? It's clearly not. It's euthanasia crashing through your front garden in a sodding articulated lorry.

That's what it is.

I have been researching camcorders on the internet and I recently sent an inquiry through the "Contact Us" form at an online electrical retailer, namely www.121electricals.co.uk.

I sent this through over the Bank Holiday weekend break, on the Monday just passed. Even though the main page advertised that the shop was open for business, I did not expect a reply straight away. Yesterday (Thursday) I decided that I was now officially cross not to have received a reply and told them so, again using the same contact form on their website. I got a reply this morning, which included this:-
Argh, now they've put me in a spot. I cannot continue to be upset about the delay - mistakes happen and they've apologised - but now I have to decide if I am more enraged by the non-clause in the first sentence?

"We appear not to of received any previous email from you." What?

Thank you, Shirley Williams; thank you, Tony Bliar.

It's an outrage! People these days don't know their verbs from their nouns. I should coco.