Teaching the Austrians to Swear

Grumpy records are being well and truly broken now. If it is not enough to reverse into a skip, and 4 weeks later to be on the receiving end of the discipline of the St. Gallen traffic police, I have now succumbed and started to watch “24”.

For those if you unfamiliar with this, this is a series of eight dramas, each played out in real time (including adverts), where Jack Bauer has 24 hours (hence the name) to complete the mission. So that’s 24 hours times 8, less the editing out of the adverts, which  make up about 25% of the time. So this is 144 hours of viewing time. No time to write blogs. I need to get watching.

Quite a lot of “I do love you Jack, but we only have 24 hours to save the world” (with apologies to Flash Gordon).

Nigel Rogers challenged me once to see if I get through “The Killing” in one week, which is a mere 20 hours. He had completed this himself over a Christmas period, as a good way of digesting all that turkey.

Initial thoughts after only sixteen hours viewing is that Jack “you’ve got to trust me on this one” Bauer is definitely a man you don’t want on your side.

Target for completion of this project is somewhere around the same time as the completion of the High-Speed Rail Link.

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I know that it was only in the last blog that I continued the theme of “Safety in the Kitchen”. Our recent trip to Seefeld, in Austria, has provided me with further proof of the dangers of kitchens, lounges and even restaurants, all of which are obviously designed by midgets.

Some sadist decided to put a chandelier in our hotel room immediately above the point where I stood up, after a busy and intense 75 seconds of blog-writing. Is it compulsory to wear a crash helmet for writing?
As for this, I am almost speechless. In the time that it took to order and drink a hot chocolate, I succeeded in hitting my head twice. Perhaps I really shouldn’t be allowed out without a crash helmet. More to the point, second time around caused an explosion of frustration, a torrent of English expletives and references to sadistic dwarves, that had the locals reaching for their dictionaries.

It’s good to know that I am are contributing to the improved knowledge of my beloved mother tongue.

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It is at least a couple of weeks since I have criticised the BBC news, so it must be time again.

Meaningless puns must rank pretty high in the league table of persistent irritations of the media. I guess that the journalists think that it is amusing, so in a post-Leveson world, we need to keep them sweet or they might write nasty things about us, in the public interest of course.

Also high up this newly founded league table (open for sponsorship deals) is the meaningless and redundant adjective. There is obviously a list of nouns that journalists learn at journalist school, which may not be used without the correct prescribed adjective.

Thus “Red-heads” are always fiery. I don’t know whether this is actually true or not, having not known many red-heads in my life, with the exception of my son-in-law and my grandson. At 3 1/2 , Bradley has not had much of a chance to display these characteristics and his mum wouldn’t let either of them, if they tried.

And “Devastation” is always terrible. I tried to conceive of “mild devastation” or “low-levels of devastation”, but failed. How about “The Devastation was not as bad as expected.” This actually has some meaning, but unfortunately lacks news impact.

It could be my own feeble imagination. I can understand “Scattered showers”. How about “scattered devastation”? “The Devastation moved in from the west, turning south-east towards Norwich…..etc”. Doesn’t quite fit, does it.

17 years old is apparently a “Tender Age.”   The words “…..at the tender of age of 17” were reported only a couple of pages away from a report of a 14 year old girl doing things that I didn’t know went on in the world or were even possible. I think that I am at the tender age of 60 and my dad is at the tender age of (nearly) 90. There is nothing tender about the age of 17 these days at all. You ask any teacher.

The final piece of journalistic nonsense came at Christmas where a death was reported as “Being doubly tragic, as it was during the Christmas period”. Try telling that to the mother of a child who died earlier in the month, that her tragedy was only half that had it occurred later in the month.

This is not only nonsense. It is offensive. Just occasionally journalists should learn to use their brains.

I am on a roll now and can keep this up for ever, but will save it for when I have run out other rants.