I suggested some time ago that the BBC should be renamed the SBC because of its move to Salford, a cultural desert on the outskirts of Manchester. It seemed clear that its main purpose was no longer to serve the people of Britain in general but only those dwelling in the former home of Britain’s worst painter, a place where outsiders are shot on sight.

Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps it should still be the SBC but with the S standing for Sports. It has long been clear that the BBC regards sport as more important than anything else on its schedule but today they plumbed new depths. Five Live, which has the advantage over Radio 4 of starting its news broadcasting an hour earlier, at 5 a.m., decided to ditch its news and the 5.30 ‘Wake up to Money’ programme in favour of a tennis match featuring Andy Murray. There is actually a Five Live Sports Extra station, but that had cricket on it. Clearly the SBC is in the right place. Somewhere where no-one cares about news or the state of the economy.

Tags: british Broadcasting Corporation, Salford Broadcasing Corporation, Sports Broadcasting Corporation, Dumming down

This blog is created in Rapidweaver using the standard blog page. Although I sometimes hand-code, Rapidweaver is great software because it allows you to produce a site very quickly and make it look pretty well exactly how you want. A particularly important plug-in for Rapidweaver is Stacks (especially the very elegant Stacks 2). This has spurred the development of many individual stacks which add functionality. I particularly like Seydesign’s new ZipBar stack which adds a particularly elegant menu bar to your page. I have been experimenting with it on a number of unpublished pages and have just used it to rework a rather cumbersome page on the danckwerts.com website. I particularly like the way that the page’s colour scheme can be matched in seconds.

Tags: rapidweaver, Internet, ZipBar, Seydesign, Stacks 2

One of the abiding mysteries of spam is just how incompetent much of it is. Here is a splendid example which I rescued from my spam folder:

Greatings my sweetheart!You are disturbed by administration of sites of acquaintances.You are the member of this group.One of our members interested in you and we send you the message delivered from MemberName=‰MiraOldy‰This WOMAN wishes to get acquainted with you.There is HER message:Greetings the stranger, are Written by me to you from the big country of Russia, I have read your profile,and you are interesting for me, I see you as a pleasant interlocutor,I wish to get acquainted with you better and to exchange photos and not only.I will be very glad if our relations do not stop on that that we will communicate only on correspondence,I‚ll be glad to meet you one day.I will tell a little bit about myself:I‚m very nice, sociable and cheerful girl.I‚m 27 years old, growth 169, my eyes are brown, hair dark, weight of48 kg, a sports constitution. I regularly visit fitness the centre to support the figure both to be in shape and to like men.If you are self-assured and trust that can deserve my attention that write)) we will look that will turn out∑∑∑∑)Mira.

A few years ago, I’d have suspected that this was a machine translation, but I don’t think there is a translation engine out there which would make such a hash of things. Certainly Google’s translation software would have made a much better job of it. I can only assume that there is somebody out there with a very exaggerated idea of his or her command of the English language.

Tags: Internet, Spam, google, Translation

Although it is quite near to publication (anticipated Spring 2012), Peter Varey’s book on my uncle, P. V. Danckwerts, is still evolving and the subtitle has changed from ‘The Blitz, bomb disposal and beyond’ to ‘brave, shy, brilliant’. I have read an early draft of this book and think it is fascinating. How many people’s lives combine bomb disposal with an academic career as a Cambridge professor? Peter was, I believe, the only Fellow of the Royal Society to be awarded the George Cross.

Tags: P. V. Danckwerts, Chemical engineering, bomb disposal, Varey, george Cross

Why did I ever get dragged into discussing politics and economics? They are important but, let’s face it, boring.

Here is a far more interesting question: why do type designers always create such hideous upper-case thorns? On the extreme left of the illustration above is a capital thorn. It is not very elegant but at least the bowl doesn’t run nearly the whole height of the letter. Below are the lower- and upper-case thorns from Minion Pro. See how squat and bulbous the upper-case letter is. What it is crying out for is a descender (at least in fonts such as Minion which have a descending letter J).

Tags: typography, Letter thorn, Old English