ChristopherWhite.info

This morning I’ve removed restrictions on gun ownership, lowered the legal age to buy alcohol, deregulated gambling, legalised drugs and prostitution, reversed the budget defecit, been elected to a historic five terms in office with the fourth term seeing me receive 88.5% of the popular vote… and then got blown to bits by religious extremists.

Stupid game.

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Question: How does being able to memorise the values of council tax bands for Wales make me a better journalist?

Presumably there is an answer, or we wouldn’t have to study it, but I can’t fathom what it might be.

I’m currently revising my for Public Administration Part 1 - Local Government exam, the joys of which I shall be experiencing this afternoon. The course is far more targetted towards the newspaper and broadcast options than it is to us magazine students, since they will in al probability be starting their careers in local media, and local government will be a frequent source of stories. There are, by contrast, precious few local news magazines.

The really frustrating thing is that anyone remotely engaged with the world - which I’d like to think I am - should know much of this stuff already. The new models of leadership following the Local Government Act 2000, for example - which is how Hartlepool wound up with a monkey for a mayor, and Middlesbrough with an ex-cop of questionable honesty. Or the media and public’s right of access to meetings, or the methods by which central government controls local government.

Having studied the latter it might prove useful in an entirely different way.

My parents’ local authority is threatening to fine people for not recycling (because they’ll get a bollocking for failing to fulfill some EU quota or other). I don’t think they have the authority to do so. So I might make some trouble.

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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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