ChristopherWhite.info

Double disclaimer: Firstly, I know some of Los Campesinos!, have had the pleasure of interviewing them and it’s been a long time since music has got me this excited. Secondly, I know that finding errors in the Guardian - or indeed any of the national news media - is like taking candy from a quadriplegic baby.

But I still feel compelled to give this nonsense a good going over. It’s a piece on Los Campesinos! for the new bands bit, by Paul Lester who, evidently, doesn’t like them very much. Fair enough. However…

“…if they’re going to invoke the majestic spirit of the Castillian peninsula they ought at least to have made the effort to get the cocking grammar right; there should be an upside-down exclamation-mark at the start of their name if there’s one at the end, like this: ¡Los Campesinos!“

There’s so much wrong with this I hardly know where to start. Oh, yes. Here: Mr Lester could at least get the spelling right - it’s “Castilian”, with one ‘l’, not “Castillian”. He could also get the cocking geography right. The Castilian region is a plain in central Spain. The peninsular that is home to Spain and Portugal is the Iberian Peninsular. Tool.

“Los Campesinos! (it means “Farmers!” in Spanish; how cute)…”

How cute? How patronising. And I’d dispute that translation - I’d interpret campesinos as ‘(specifically rural) peasants’ rather than farmers. (A quick check of my dictionary has confirmed campesino as meaning ‘country person’ or ‘peasant’, while the most common word for farmer is granjero in Spain, or estanciero in Latin America.)

“Our quirkysomething septet might aim for the joyous abandon of Broken Social Scene and Clap Your Hands, but really all they manage to communicate is a sense of self-stimulation; seven giddy fools with glockenspiels.“

Check out the semicolon misuse at the end of that sentence. What was that about grammar? Paul Lester can’t punctuate in his native language and he’s criticising others for a minor error in a foreign tongue.

“To be fair, they’ve only been together for 18 months (they played their first gig last year at some whoopee palace called the Fun Factory) and this is only their second single.“

Well, it’s their first single, and someone so dismissive of small venues as to refer to Fun Factory as “some whoopee palace” either shouldn’t really be writing about new bands or is incredibly lazy.

“And maybe it’s time for a cull.“

Too right it is.

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“It’s a common misconception, held by all truly stupid people.” - Kryten to the Cat, Red Dwarf series five. (I was, coincidentally, watching this today.)
I imagine many misconceptions are pretty common. Try this one:

Reporting on a case of parthenogenesis (or “self-fertilisation”) in a Komodo dragon, National Geographic have taken the opportunity for a nice, Christmassy “virgin birth” story. They’ve quoted Chester Zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates, Kevin Buley, as saying:

“Essentially what we have here is an immaculate conception.”

Which I guess in one sense is true, but only in as far as all animal conceptions are “immaculate”.

Immaculate conception doesn’t refer to the alleged virgin birth of the alleged son of god, but to the theory that at the time of Mary’s conception god allegedly intervened to keep her soul free from the stain of original sin, as a sinless life was necessary for her to bear Jesus.[1]

Who’s more foolish - the fool that said it, or the fool that printed it?

Ok, it’s not that important a distinction in the grand scam of things, particularly given what an absolute crock the whole story is anyway. But even I know this particular piece of Roman Catholic dogma, and probably the only person more anti-religion than me is flatmate Andy, who actually requested excommunication.

Those readers that know me[2] will be used to my misanthropy, but the general level of popular ignorance is beginning to frustrate me immensely (and I recognise that this is just intellectual snobbery, but there you go…). Having become mostly bored [3] of arguing on Comment Is Free, I’ve been sending the odd letter to The Northern Echo.

Some of the paper’s readers write in with “facts” so wildly inaccurate they’d make even Polly Toynbee blush, so I occasionally put my incredibly large knowledge base[4] to use disabusing them (for which read: pedantically pointing out mistakes[5]).

Unfortunately, the Echo’s features editor keeps cutting out comments such as “…as you would know had you availed yourself of the facts before commenting” and “…as the correspondent would be aware had they ever bothered to look it up”.[6]

Fair enough. It’s their paper and they can do what they like, and such remarks are perhaps gratuitous. But it’s a shame, because I firmly believe most of the world’s problems could be solved if people just bothered to sit down and actually read a book once in a while. Or at least we could have an intelligent discussion, without comments such as this made by some kid (who, it has to be said, was on my side) arguing with a street preacher: “They can’t have written down the Bible - they didn’t have any pencils.”

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1. Quite why a chap allegedly born 2000 years ago in Roman Judaea, who in all probability spoke Aramaic, would have a Spanish name is beyond me. I’ve heard him (not “Him”, thank you…) referred to as “Yeshua of Nazareth”, and one would think that the closest corresponding name is Joshua. Wikipedia says that: “The name “Jesus” is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself believed to be a transliteration of the Hebrew/Aramaic Yeshua or Yehoshua, meaning “YHWH is salvation”. I bet he got bullied for that name.
2. Which is all of them, bar those stumbling across this site looking for dead/imprisoned friends, the spambots, and Mickel’s dad. (More on statcounter trawling later…)
3. Please don’t look at this in Internet Explorer. I uploaded it to the school’s content managment system while working in Firefox, and, due to supreme idiocy, forgot to check it looked alright in IE. It doesn’t. At all.
4. Wikipedia.
5. As an example, one particularly stupid woman, responding to an earlier letter, claimed that Islamic terrorist couldn’t possibly have anything to with western foreign policy, as the twin tower attacks were before Afghanistan and Iraq. I pointed out that continued agression against Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was cited by Osama Bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa as one of the crimes of America, as she would have known had she informed herself before forming an opinion.
6. Yes, I’m aware that I have myself come out with some severely malinformed nonsense. I’ve already admitted it.

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I’ve held myself back a couple of times this week from blogging about appalling misuse of words, mainly “tragic death”[1]. But then I came across this on Wikipedia:

“An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet beyond the Solar System.”

What with “extrasolar” meaning “beyond the solar system”, I’m pretty sure we could’ve figured that one out, thanks.

But it reminded me of what something one of my classmates wrote back in those halycon[2] days of A-level physics. His essay on wedge-shaped films (don’t ask me… [3]) read as follows:

“Wedge-shaped films are films that are wedge-shaped. A film that is wedge-shaped is a wedge-shaped film. If a film were wedge-shaped, a wedge-film it would be.”

Look at that! Not only does it contain absolutely no information, the third sentence is exactly the same as the second but starting in the future conditional tense. That’s truly excellent slacking.

It’s almost as vacuous a statement as anything David “Dave” Cameron has ever said.

UPDATE: “Chris” points out in the comments that the third sentence is [imperfect] subjunctive, not future conditional. I am a ‘tard.
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[1] Incorrect use on two counts:

1. It’s (nearly) a pleonasm - As the word “tragic” is used to emphasise the sadness of the death, it’s an un-necessary word. One can assume deaths to be sad, unless, as Gary frequently points out, it’s Margaret Thatcher.
2. It just isn’t tragic. Hamlet Prince of Denmark’s death was tragic. King Lear’s. Not every youngster who comes a-cropper. As writer and tragoedian Michael Bywater says, “Tragedy implies an ineluctable movement, brought about by the victim’s own hubris, towards inevitable downfall”. Used, as it is so often in the press, to denote any death that could have been easily avoided, most recently Exeter student Gavin Britton, is the opposite.

[2] Crap, actually.

[3] Curiously, if you search for “wedge-shaped films” on Wikipedia, one of the resulting articles is Critical reception of Brokeback Mountain.

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Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars,
let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars

Will just sang that at me.

However…

Since Mars and Jupiter have inclinations to the ecliptic of only 1.85 degrees and 1.31 degrees respectively, there would be no discernable seasons, so spring on Mars and Juptier wouldn’t exist.

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