http://www.ugo.com/?cmpid=le_mgid_ugotsg_weap#img=17
Yesterday this self-confessed ‘trusted publisher’ published a still image from Torchwood with the phrase;
“Weevils are the mysterious humanoid aliens from beyond the time/space rift that happen to reside in Cardiff, England. If you encounter one, the best thing for it is the very matter-of-factly-named Anti-Weevil Spray.”
This is how people end up believing the world is flat. They read it on the internet where everything, of course, is true. Ugo is large – by their estimations, their reader base is ’2 million visitors worldwide who are highly influential trendsetters and lifestyle mavens with a passionate curiosity for “what’s next.” ‘. That’s a pretty significant number of people who might now believe that Cardiff is in England.
If any of them has an interest in Torchwood they probably (hopefully?) know that the show is based in Wales. But then if the editor and/or publisher of this article didn’t bother checking their facts and didn’t already know that Torchwood, the show they’re posting about, is based in Cardiff Wales – what hope have we got?
I emailed the VP/Editor in Chief;
Dear Chris,
After reading the following with image 17/142 of ‘Today’s Top Stories’;
“Weevils are the mysterious humanoid aliens from beyond the time/space rift that happen to reside in Cardiff, England. If you encounter one, the best thing for it is the very matter-of-factly-named Anti-Weevil Spray.”
I would like to inform you that Cardiff is in fact the capital city of Wales – which is not, under any circumstances, a part of England. I see that the BBC have been credited as the source and so it is, I suppose, possible that the mistake was theirs in the making – but I doubt it, since the BBC have a sizeable office in Cardiff and I’m sure the people who work there know that they don’t travel to England every day to find their desks.
I implore you – for the good of the uneducated masses that us Welsh folk have a hard enough time convincing that we are not English – please correct the above quote to read ‘Cardiff, Wales’. Or at least, if you think this will lead to much confusion, ‘Cardiff, UK’.
Yours with sincere hope,
Delyth Williams
And forwarded the email to their general complaints department. I received no reply. I guess they’re fine with leaving the uneducated masses uneducated. As of posting, the image still reads ‘Cardiff, England’.
Grrr.
http://gawker.com/5619136/
I despair. Absolutely. What state is humanity coming to? If I had superpowers I’d break the land mass of north America into lots of itty bitty pieces and scatter them across the globe, throwing the inhabitants into the midst of all the people they hate the most but know nothing about.
(Apart from the Americans I know who actually know shit about the outside world; I’ll make you guys a special place with peaches and ice cream and unicorns and rainbows. 
)
Friday evening I was eating a tangerine when Jaco let the dog in, who saw that I was eating something, and ran over all waggy-tailed with his ‘whatcha eating whatcha eating whatcha eating?!’ expression. So I said, ‘It’s an orange, Finstie, you won’t like it. Citrus.’
And he sat.
Yesterday I was raking the cut grass in the garden when something hopped away from the rake. I investigated, found a wee bitty toadlet, which nicely solves the mistery of what we’ve dubbed the ‘tick beasty’ living in the overflow drain thingy. We didn’t know if it was an amphibian or a cricket, but whenever it’s damp out something pipes up with a loud TICK! TICK! noise. I’ve never seen it until now because it lives in a pipe in the drain thing (which is like a miniature pondy thing with moss and stuff; quite a nice little home for a frog).
Anywhoo, here’s Tick Beasty.
If we approach quietly and find ourselves a camouflaged spot amongst the sofabushes, waiting patiently and eagerly, we might catch ourselves a glimpse of the rare, lesser-spotted Pixie Monster. Most frequently found in north-western Europe, this species has been known to harbour innate travelling instincts and can sometimes be found in other regions of the globe, though in far less frequent numbers than its home terrain. Nonetheless, wherever we find ourselves stumbling upon this fascinating beast, we will find that it is quite proficient in recreating the creature comforts found in its original environment. Creeping forward to peer through the cushions, we see now that it has built itself a nest of fleecy blankets, cats and hot water bottles; this is common behaviour for the Pixie Monster in the colder seasons, for even though this species originates from what can be a very cold climate, it takes great pleasure in snuggling up at even the slightest hint of chill in the air.
Ok, enough of that. It’s COLD! For SA, anyway. There was frost on the car this morning. FROST!! In SOUTH AFRICA! IN OUR GARDEN! It was awesome. It’s bloody freezing here though. Jaco developed a cold (man flu, oh noes!) last Thursday and after being freezing in bed most of Sunday night I started getting the symptoms yesterday; this morning, my throat’s a bit sore and swollen and my nose, to its credit, is putting up a good fight against the snotmonsters.
What have we been up to? Not much. Playing games! \o/ We play a French MMO called Dofus (the game’s also in English but the developing company is French and it’s the biggest/most popular MMO in that neck of the woods, hehe); they’re beta-testing another MMO set in the same universe called Wakfu and Jaco’s Dofus account has beta access so I’ve been playing on that too. It’s mostly in French because they haven’t translated much of it yet, but that’s half the fun – clicking a button and not knowing what the hell it’ll do, hehe. They’re also running the occasional contest where entrants get beta access on their accounts so I’ll be entering one this month; they’ve provided a graphics pack and a grid and the contest is to use the images to make a beach map, and the best beach will be put into the game. It’s fun, albeit rather tedious – yesterday I got the base down; it’s a relatively small grid, 1204 x 989px, and with the size of their tiles I ended up putting down over 700 layers of beach and ocean! Needless to say, Photoshop was a bit laggy towards the end, hehe. Today I’ll work on building the terrain of the beach some, and then all that’ll be left is to pepper it with scenery (they’ve provided things like flora, stones, seashells, etc.).
We went to the mall on the weekend. Picked up a big bottle of Hazelnut flavour coffee syrup (my mum got us a selection of small Monin syrup bottles for christmas and there’s only a teeny bit left in two of the bottles, the rest are empty, and we’re hooked now so we had to get more nommy flavours!). We also found a few good DVDs – Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais (I streamed it and watched back when I was living in the UK but Jaco hasn’t seen it and it was a good movie); and four disks with episodes of the Clone Wars series on ‘em. Possibly the complete first season, I’m not sure how many there were; they were selling the disks separately with 4-6 episodes per disk. We saw the movie, which was the pilot for the TV show, a few weeks back and we’ve heard that the show itself is better than the movie, which we enjoyed.
Speaking of the mall – it was raining heavily when we went there on Saturday and as such everybody and his dog chose to use the paid underground parking for cover rather than the free up-top parking, because SA people are lazy and will circle the car park for hours waiting for a spot near to the entrance to the mall instead of taking one of the several million free spots a few rows back so obviously they didn’t want to run the several meters from their car into the mall through the rain (including us ). We found a spot, but some jerk with a big mercedes had parked in such a stupid, obnoxious way that he’d left half of his spot open and was taking up some of the spot next to him. Fortunately, we have a small car;
We expected to come back to find our tires let down, window smashed, or some other form of rage enacted upon our little blue Taz for preventing him easy access to his driver seat, but found it unscathed. I guess (hope) the guy realised what an idiot he’d been and drove away shame-faced and humiliated. Plonker.
Sunday 2nd May, comment I left on hellopeter.com:
Last night, May 1st, my partner and I went to the last screening (10:45pm) of Iron Man 2. It was, I believe, the second day of release in SA so I assume that the movie had been playing, most likely on the same screen (#1), for two days.
I have to ask myself why Ster Kinekor would show one of the biggest blockbusters of the year in a cinema with a faulty main speaker that flicked on and off every few minutes, its absence leaving us with naught but a bassy mumbling, with a blurry circle about a third of the size of the screen right in the middle of the picture, and with the whole picture being misaligned enough to leave a bright line across the bottom of the screen beneath the black aspect ratio strip.
When we went to complain after the movie, there was not a staff member in sight. We knocked on doors, poked our heads into staff areas – nobody. Sure, it was the last showing – but surely there should have been some member of staff about. Were they hiding, fully aware that they were going to get complaints?
This is atrocious service. In the past year I have yet to see a movie in Ster Kinekor that didn’t have a projection or sound problem. You call yourselves a cinema?
Had a call from the manager at our local Ster Kinekor the next day assuring us that the speaker was being fixed and that they were aware of the projection problem. Had a follow-up email from him:
As per our telephonic discussion, please accept my sincere apologies for the poor sound quality experienced while watching Iron Man2.
This was due to a technical malfunction and is currently being repaired.
I would like to invite you and your partner back to Ster Kinekor to watch a movie of your choice at our cost.
The complimentary tickets can be picked up from management at any time.
Emailed him back tonight:
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your attention in this matter and for contacting me promptly with a reply. It is appreciated.
You’ll notice that I am emailing you rather late – my partner and I are just back from seeing Robin Hood, the 8:15pm showing in Cinema 1 at Somerset Mall – the same screen on which we saw Iron Man 2 two weeks ago.
It seems that the speaker problem is still not fixed; although somewhat better than when we saw Iron Man 2, the faulty speaker still appears to be intermittently on and off. Of course I understand the nature of technical malfunctions and it is entirely possible that whoever you contracted to fix the speaker did rather a shoddy job. These things happen.
What I can’t understand, however, is why your projectionist apparently vanished before checking whether or not the reel was playing properly – nor why any of your projectionists, for the past year that I have been (regrettably) seeing movies at Somerset West Mall, seem to stick around after loading the reel. Do you, perhaps, hire your projectionists from the nearby Monkey sanctuary? That would explain the problem. To exemplify, this evening’s showing of Robin Hood played, from the very absolute beginning of the movie, at a slight misalignment which resulted in a bright strip being visible across the bottom of the screen throughout. Second to that, and rather more annoying, was the appearance of a black and otherwise unidentifiable object on the left hand side of the screen half way through the film that remained until the end. What I am about to confess to you is no word of a lie – I have NEVER seen a movie at any Ster Kinekor that didn’t have a problem; misaligned, out of focus, sideways, upside-down, devoid of sound, incorrect aspect ratio… Perhaps at this point you are wondering (as am I) why I bother going back. If it wasn’t for e-bucks and ‘free’ movie tickets I would be far more acquainted with the staff at the nearest Nu Metro, I can assure you.
People pay money to see movies at Ster Kinekor. They do so because, at present though perhaps not for very much longer, the experience of seeing a movie at the cinema on a big screen outweighs the experience of home viewing. I am sure that The Powers That Be at Ster Kinekor realise that they are competing with the home cinema experience which, with the ever decreasing price and availability of larger screens and more rewarding sound systems, is fast growing to provide some real competition. Why, then, do you provide such a shoddy viewing experience? Surely it is in Ster Kinekor’s best interests to ensure that the people who pay money to see movies at their theatres will have such a flawless experience that they will return time and again? Broken speakers won’t do this. Hiring a monkey for a projectionist certainly won’t do this.
Please, I implore you; if you do nothing else then at least make sure that your reels are loaded properly, are projecting properly, and continue to project properly for the length of the movie. In short, consider hiring people who actually care about the movie industry and the service they are providing, rather than sitting in a sanctuary eating bits of fruit and peeing on the tourists.
Kind regards, I live in hope…
I DO live in hope. Can’t wait for the reply… Sigh. Otherwise, Robin Hood was a good movie. Very entertaining. Ah, my dearest Russell, if only you new the travesty I had to sit through to watch you…
WelshPixie