Spats

I saw a guy yesterday in the building wearing spats. Spats! He was under 30 and wearing a suit. And actual SPATS.


For illustration purposes only. Actual spats are worn slightly higher on the shoe with a longer trouser.

Are they making a comeback? What meeting did I miss?

Moving forward together

How would you feel if your city council decided to commission its own theme tune? Would you be glad it had decided to forge a distinctive identity for itself, the town and its residents, albeit at taxpayers’ expense? Or would your immediate response involve a great deal of swearing?

How about, to pluck an example at random, if the city council in question was Stoke-on-Trent and its specially written theme song sounded like this?

You will find, perhaps by the expedient of fast-forwarding, that things really pick up after the 2:08 mark.

Media in "echo chamber" shock

You may remember, if only for its startlingly rubbish illustration [right], this story from October last year about an “evolutionary theorist” predicting that the human race would, after tens of thousands of years, eventually split into two sub-species.

Last Thursday night I was catching up on my NEWS when I noticed that the article had suddenly and unaccountably appeared in the “most emailed” section of the BBC News website. In the small hours of the morning the “most emailed” stats can be affected by a tiny amount of activity; sometimes just one person can effect a change in the rankings. It struck me as odd that such a non-story should resurface but I didn’t think anything of it.

The next day the Daily Mail ran this story, which by now will be pretty familiar. Five will get you ten I stumbled across the traces of panicked research sparked by a late-night email along the lines of, “Bloody hell, Steve, we need filler. Just reword this, will you.”