I have often been amazed by the linguistic tangles conductors often find themselves in when they try to “talk posh” during announcements. Clearly they are not trained about the importance of plain English. This problem was covered excellently by the Guardian’s Mind Your Langauge blog calling for railspeak to be terminated.

Another recent article on the BBC News website looked over some of the dodgy phrasing of railway delay excuses. The cryptic but common explanations include “tanking train toilet” (the loos won’t flush) and “poor railhead adhesion” (the track is slippery).

On the ubiquitous “signalling problems”, the article notes that this is usually caused by cable theft.

I don’t know why they don’t say ‘It’s because some so-and-so has stolen 150 yards of cable.’ That’s going to get people on-side.

This evening my eyebrows were raised by a tweet I spotted from the National Rail Enquiries ScotRail Twitter feed.

DISRUPTION CLEARED: Trains are now running normally between Edinburgh and Glasgow Queen Street / Stirling #fb

12 October 2011 20:40 via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@NRE_ScotRail

National Rail

This “DISRUPTION CLEARED” is a dead body. It can’t just be me that feels that there could be a more sensitive way of describing this than “DISRUPTION CLEARED”.

This the accompanying article to my contribution to this week’s edition of The Pod Delusion. Parts of it are based on a previous article, What is STV playing at?

You can listen to the full podcast below.

In a recent episode of The Pod Delusion, Mark Thompson spoke about the good old days when ITV was still a federation of regional television stations. He outlined how, in England and Wales over the past ten or fifteen years, ITV’s regional diversity has given way to a bland umbrella brand.

But not all of the nooks on the ITV network have succumbed to the juggernaut. Four of the ITV regions are still independently owned, and three avoid using the ITV brand. In the Channel Islands, Channel Television still owns the franchise, even though it uses ITV1 branding. But in Northern Ireland, viewers are greeted by idents for UTV. And where I live, in Scotland, the two ITV regions operate as STV.

I can say with authority, given that I live here, that the reality of regional broadcasting on Channel 3 is not quite as rosy as Mark Thompson would like to remember. It certainly is not as quaint and charming as the ITV we remember from our youth — and, incidentally, it was delightful to hear the idents and jingles during Mark’s report.

Sadly, STV is a bit of a basket case. Apparently strapped for cash, for the past year or two it has been embroiled in a dispute with ITV plc that has only served to disadvantage viewers. ITV is trying to gain money that has been allegedly been owed by STV for over ten years. Meanwhile, STV is dropping as many ITV programmes as it can get away with in an apparent attempt to stop owing any more money.

This means that many of the ITV network’s most popular drama programmes have been dropped by STV. This has left Scottish viewers with no options if they want to watch some of the best British commercial television programmes.

Publicly, STV say this is all a brave stance for regional broadcasting in Scotland. That does not really explain why most of the replacements have been cheap imports, films and repeats. As amusing as South Park may be, it is not exactly an adequate replacement for the likes of Kingdom. Incidentally, South Park is seemingly supposed to count as Scottish programming because, in the words of STV director of broadcast services Bobby Hain, it is “mischievous and cheeky… just like the Scottish people.”

Bobby Hain often singles out Al Murray for particular criticism. He reckons that Scots cannot relate to a comedy cockney landlord, forgetting that there is in fact nothing Scots enjoy more than laughing at English stereotypes.

This strategy certainly is not being done for the benefit of the Scottish people. We can tell this because the ratings have largely fallen through the floor. Infamously, STV once ditched Agatha Christie’s Marple in favour of the film Blue Crush — because crap surfing movies set in Hawaii are really Scottish, right? It was a disaster for STV. You could almost have squeezed the viewers into a large football stadium. With just 6% of Scottish television viewers watching it, this made it the least watched of the five main channels in Scotland.

STV have recently broadcast Fitz, the woeful 1990s American remake of Cracker. Presumably they have done this because it is supposed to count as Scottish, despite the fact that it is American. In fact, Fitz more accurately describes what STV viewers go through when they realise that their favourite programme has been replaced by a low budget michty-me, jings, crivvens and help ma boab bag of shite.

Because when STV are showing “regional” programming, it is a parochial embarrassment. One of the programmes it’s pushing most is The Hour. Imagine a cross between The One Show and Live From Studio Five, with a twentieth of the budget and presented from a shed. That barely describes the horror.

In the evenings, STV broadcasts STV Casino. This is the sort of gambling programme I railed against in a previous edition of The Pod Delusion.

More ambitiously, STV sought to find out the Greatest Scot. Among the nominees for the title was John Logie Baird, the inventor of the television. What Logie Baird can’t have foreseen was that his compatriots would be unable to watch anything decent on it.

Soon enough, STV will run out of “Scottish” topics to make programmes about. What next? The History of the Word ‘Outwith‘? Barry Ferguson’s Greatest V-Signs? Susan Boyle’s Ten Favourite Ditches?

Maybe there will be a celebration of the Scots language and / or dialect, with a version of Countdown played in the Scots tongue. Sadly, the only exciting action would be a Buckfast-fuelled brawl surrounding the precise spelling of words like ‘airse’ (‘erse’?) and ‘bawbag’ (‘ba’bag’?).

This new found love for “local” programming really is rich coming from STV. This is a station that, just a few years ago, would do anything to avoid showing locally produced programmes. It transparently sought to meet its quota of regional programmes with cynical late-night repeats of Weir’s Way and extra editions of Scotland Today Interpreted For The Deaf.

This all makes me wonder just what the ‘S’ in STV stands for. Is it ‘Scottish’? Or is it ‘stultifying’? ‘Stupid’? ‘Sellotape’? In fact, I think it’s probably ‘shite’.

Mark Thompson’s idea is a nice one, but is based on a rose-tinted view rather than the reality we Scots have to live with just now. It is true that something needs to change in order for ITV to survive. But the solution to that is surely obvious when you think about it — they should bring back Blockbusters.

When I first bought the domain name for this blog, I considered buying the .com address. But I decided it was too expensive. I preferred doctorvee.net, but that was just as expensive as a .com address. In the end, a .co.uk address gives me a half-decent domain name for a pretty cheap price.

A while back I saw that someone had bought doctorvee.com. Perhaps egotistically, I suspected they had bought it in order to sell it to me for a sky-high price. Turns out it was this DJ bloke. I doubt anyone actually confuses me with him, but it was slightly disconcerting when I discovered that someone was using “my” moniker.

This is a pitfall of modern communications. There are far too many top-level domains floating about the place. I could have hoovered up .com, .net and whatever else. But there doesn’t seem to be much point when just buying a .co.uk does the job for a cheap price.

I’ve just got to come to terms with the fact that I’m not the only doctorvee in the world. On some popular websites — notably Skype, eBay and YouTube — the username ‘doctorvee’ had been taken before I got round to it. I originally stuck with ‘doctorvee’ as a result of a frantic search for an email address that wasn’t being used by anyone else. Of course, all the sensible ones had been taken.

Now that ‘doctorvee’ is, as it were, my brand, I sometimes feel the need to sign up to any web service that is invented just so that I can have doctorvee, just in case I need to use it. I bought duncanstephen.co.uk just so that I could have it. I’ve had it for over two years now, and only recently have I found something vaguely useful to do with it (basically I use it as a place to beg people to give me something resembling a job).

Recently I had to visit the websites of all the local councils in Scotland. In most cases it’s easy enough. Just Google the area and most of the time the first result will be what you’re looking for.

Not always though. There were a couple of near misses. For instance, searches for both Orkney and Shetland took me to tourism websites for those areas. I suppose that is understandable enough. More people are probably interested in tourist information than local government information for those areas. Even so, the council websites were not so far down the page on Google.

Try finding the website for the local authority in the Outer Hebrides though. Before reading on, try it. As I write, a Google search for ‘Outer Hebrides’ will not help you find it. I gave up after the fifth page.

It is a bit of an anomaly. For local government purposes, the group of islands is officially known as Na h-Eileanan Siar, but good luck finding someone south-west of Mallaig who actually calls it that. The official name change only came into effect from 1997.

The area is also well-known as the Western Isles, and funnily while Googling ‘Outer Hebrides’ will get you nowhere, ‘Western Isles’ will do the job no problem without you having to resort to typing in Gaelic.

The domain name is cne-siar.gov.uk. CNE-Siar being short for ‘Comhairle nan Eilean Siar’. But despite having a Gaelic web address, you are presented with a home page written in English, with little Gaelic to be seen.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, the amount of Gaelic content on the entire website is completely dwarfed by the amount of content in English. Even in the Gaelic homepage, almost all of the navigational links are in English, and to pages written in English.

I am sure that residents of the Outer Hebrides are all very aware of the name of their local authority. So in that sense you might wonder why it’s an issue. But what about people who don’t live there and don’t have the modicum of Gaelic required to remember the website address? The blurb on the home page is clearly aimed at the potential visitor to the Outer Hebrides, but thanks to its web address it can’t reach out to them as well as it might.

The name change happened in 1997. I wonder if today the name change would be less likely to happen because of SEO concerns, even with all the attempts to keep Gaelic alive.

The case of a language barrier is almost understandable though. I still struggle to understand why Clackmannanshire Council did not decide on an address such as clackmannanshire.gov.uk or even clacks.gov.uk. Instead, it is clacksweb.org.uk. It’s not even a .gov.uk address. What’s that all about?!

Once I phoned Fife Council and the guy on the other end told me to go to fifedirect.com to find all the information I needed. Aside from the dreadful customer service (what if I didn’t have easy access to the internet? Might that have been why I was phoning?), it was just plain wrong. fifedirect.com is occupied by a squatter. Perhaps he meant fifedirect.gov.uk.

It would be wrong to imagine this is a problem affecting government only. In the mid- to late-1990s, when many businesses were taking their first tentative steps onto the web, marketing departments ran amok, getting in the way of common sense. Instead of publicising a simple web address like [brand-name].com, web addresses were sometimes centred on the contemporary marketing campaign.

For instance, Boots spent years trying to encourage people to visit wellbeing.com. How are any customers supposed to remember that? Today, it redirects to boots.com. Much better.

To this day, B&Q’s web address is diy.com. I’m sure they’re very proud of the fact that they own diy.com, but does it not dilute the brand? Absurdly, B&Q’s website does not even mention the term ‘DIY’, except in reference to ‘diy.com’. Sensibly, bandq.co.uk redirects to diy.com, but bandq.com takes you nowhere.

All-in-all, what a minefield. There can be few things more important when setting up the website than getting a decent address for it. But it is surprisingly common for a decent website to be let down by a bad web address.

I side with Ken Smith on this occasion though. I hate spelling mistakes and love to point them out. Only yesterday I saw a greengrocers’ apostrophe and instinctively growled. But that is only because I am a cheeky wee pedant. Deep down, I know that the rules of the English language are strange and, ultimately, pointless.

What is the purpose of language? I would say language is what allows people to communicate with each other. Accordingly, rules should develop naturally, and as long as the two parties communicating understand each other all is well. However, for grammar fascists, language rules are just an opportunity to crack the whip.

It is worth remembering that a strict one-size-fits-all suite of language rules is a very modern concept. Standardised spellings only came in when some smart fellow decided to become the first lexicographer and hoodwink people into believing his services were vital.

William Shakespeare did not even have a standardised spelling for his own name. Was he wrong? If we follow the joke that the easiest mark in an exam is for spelling your name correctly, it looks like Shakespeare himself would have failed his English GCSE.

Now, hopefully you have noticed that I like to take care over my spelling and suchlike. But this is a personal choice that I took because I believe that adhering to these rules allows me to reach the widest audience possible. That, and it means I don’t get bombarded by complaints from snobs.

If someone else is content to spell things incorrectly but can still convey their message to its intended recipient then that is their personal choice. There is nothing wrong with people deciding how they can speak and write for themselves.

Language has always evolved naturally, and I see no reason why that should stop now. The purpose of a dictionary is to record language as it is written, not to tell people how to write it. If different people spell things in different ways, then that is just part of life’s rich tapestry.

After all, we tolerate and even celebrate — and rightly so — variations in pronunciation in the English language. Only the snobbiest of snobs would demand that everyone speaks RP. In this age where regional accents are celebrated, we usually find we have no trouble understanding people. So why should people also be expected to write in the same bland, standardised, colourless RP all the time?

What gets me is the sheer snobbery of some people who insist on “correct” spellings. Who is to say that you are right and they are wrong? Closing your ears and stomping your feet complaining about how thick the other person is does not get anyone anywhere. Is there not room for some give and take, just as there is when having a conversation with people who have a different accent?

Ideas of Civilisation attempted to show how ludicrous Ken Smith’s suggestion is by filling his post with a myriad of misspellings. Of course, were Ken Smith’s idea to take hold and language was allowed to evolve naturally, we almost certainly would not face a wholesale dumping of the dictionary, with standards completely replaced by arbitrariness. Instead, new standards would emerge while the most common misspellings would be tolerated.

Txt spk is the perfect example. Snobs may turn their nose up at it, but there is no denying that this development which emerged naturally has had an important influence in simplifying the language and removing barriers to communication. In fact, it is an ingenious solution to the problem we all face, stuck with the QWERTY system which was originally designed to slow typists down. What is wrong with people using their initiative to speed things up again?

Then there is the text message itself, where brevity is key. Messages are limited to 160 characters which means you have to keep it short if you want to avoid being charged double or even triple your normal rate. The new standard of abbreviations is a clever and natural way to evade this restriction.

That is not to mention instant messaging, where speed is as important as clarity. When you are having a fast-paced IM conversation, it is only sensible to take the odd short cut. It should be no surprise that in an age where we rely more heavily than ever on inefficient keyboards and restrictive technologies that new standards should emerge.

Moreover, what is wrong with “embarassing”, “beleive” or “pleasent”? Or even the odd “there” instead of “their” or vice-versa? You would still know exactly what I meant were I to use those spellings. Any exam marker with two brain cells to rub together would know that as well. If he were to mark down someone for putting one ‘r’ instead of two even though the meaning is still perfectly clear, then that would make him a petulant, authoritarian shit.

Describe each driver in one word.

I managed to mess up my comment a little bit — I forgot about the last two drivers, so those answers remained from the list I copy-n-pasted from. So here are my answers.

Fernando Alonso – Winner
Lewis Hamilton – Impatient
Giancarlo Fisichella – Ageing
Heikki Kovalainen – Promising
Felipe Massa – Nepotism
Kimi Raikkonen – Playboy
Jenson Button – Plucky
Rubens Barrichello – Slowing
Nick Heidfeld – Quick
Robert Kubica – Fortunate
Ralf Schumacher – Rubbish
Jarno Trulli – Train
David Coulthard – Trusty
Mark Webber – Unlucky
Nico Rosberg – Potential
Alexander Wurz – Rusty
Kazuki Nakajima – Fore!
Vitantonio Liuzzi – Overlooked
Scott Speed – Misnomer
Sebastian Vettel – Fast
Adrian Sutil – Unknown
Christijan Albers – Nice
Markus Winkelhock – Leader
Sakon Yamamoto – Loadsamoney?
Takuma Sato – Kamikaze
Anthony Davidson – Anonymous

Let us not forget that before Alonso burst onto the scene, Formula 1 was not even televised in Spain! (Apparently this is inaccurate — see the comments.) At least prior to Hamilton F1 was a regular fixture on British television screens. So it should be no surprise that some Spaniards are pretty rabid Alonso fans. This has led to some rather colourful goings-on on the internet.

One of the strangest was the mass invasion of nationalist Spaniards on Ed Gorman’s rather good blog for Times Online. The rabid one-sidedness of the Spanish commenters was quite a sight to behold, and it became all the more entertaining when they began to adopt Anglophone names in a bid to disguise their favouritism.

I suppose it is always possible that someone called George posting on the internet can have terrible English. Have Your Say is testament to this. But seeing Victor screaming to Ed Gorman, “I WANT TO SEE THE EVIDENCES!! GIVE TO ME THE EVIDENCES!!” doesn’t quite convince.

Of course, Ed Gorman did not help himself much by being so blatantly biased (in the opposite direction) himself. And this is the very problem. The British media talks through its arse on one end, and the Spanish media talks through its arse on the opposite end. It is no wonder that different groups of people have ended up with such radically differing views as to what has happened during the season.

In Britain, Fernando Alonso is viewed as a moaner, while Hamilton’s own moans (post-Monaco and post-Belgium) have been downplayed. While Alonso’s comments about not getting equal treatment at McLaren have often crossed over into the realms of the ridiculous, let us not forget that Hamilton was the first to run crying to the media about his treatment at McLaren following the Monaco Grand Prix, long before Alonso hinted at any such levels of discontent.

Meanwhile, in Spain, this season has been viewed as one massive conspiracy against Fernando Alonso. As Keith Collantine notes, the claims are easily debunked.

Why would McLaren want to sabotage the efforts of their own driver? Moreover, why would they go out of their way to upset him when he is a double World Champion? If McLaren were acting in their own self-interest to sabotage the season, it’s not exactly worked out well for them, has it? This season has been one long PR disaster for the team.

This is why I have such a short fuse when it comes to nationalistic sports coverage. I suppose being a Scot I am naturally wired up to have a sensitive bullshit detector when it comes to nationalistic sports coverage. But while for most of my compatriots it stops at pro-English bias in sports commentary, I find myself equally exasperated by all biased commentary — pro-Scottish, pro-British, pro-Spanish, pro-whatever.

Part of me really hopes that Lewis Hamilton fails to win the Championship today just to burst the ridiculous bubble that the British media has blown up. The ridiculous “weekend of British supremacy sporting success” was already dealt a blow yesterday with England’s failure in the Rugby World Cup. With all eyes on Lewis Hamilton today, I really hope the media ends up with egg on its face.

The bias exists in team sports as well. Holyrood Watcher wrote about it today in relation to the rugby. But at least I can understand it with team sports. International rugby is one sport where a team is set up specifically to represent a country.

Formula 1 is a team sport — but the teams do not represent countries. It is also an individual sport, and in no way does it make sense to constantly make references to “Britain’s Lewis Hamilton” or “Spain’s Fernando Alonso” as though their nationality made a blind bit of difference to anything. You might as well talk about “blond Kimi Räikkönen” or “the right-handed Felipe Massa”.

Because you can bet your bottom dollar that Lewis Hamilton doesn’t want to be World Champion “for Britain”. He wants to be World Champion for himself. For an explanation, I wrote here about sportsmen and nationality some months ago.

The recent obsession with F1 drivers’ nationalities particularly saddens me because every single one of the drivers who will be racing at Interlagos this afternoon is an absolute hero. They all do extraordinary things, putting their lives on the line. I can never get my head round how these drivers can travel at 200+ mph, routinely experiencing forces of 5+ gs, yet still manage to hit the apex of a corner, inch-perfect, and complete lap times consistent to a couple of tenths of a second.

It astonishes me. These drivers are super-human. Extraordinary achievements are being made routine. Yet, what is the media coverage reduced to? “Let’s support Lewis Hamilton because he’s British, and let’s throw stones at Alonso because he’s foreign.” It sickens me. To do certain drivers down because of where they happen to come from, when they are every bit as much of a hero, is just not on.

The media’s fixation with nationalities offends me. To me, “Britain’s Lewis Hamilton” (as the media apparently has to call him, by law) does not exist. Nor does “Spain’s Fernando Alonso”, “Finland’s Kimi Räikkönen” or even “Japan’s Sakon Yamamoto”. They are Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Räikkönen and Sakon Yamamoto: extraordinary, super-human, heroic motor racing drivers. Every single one of them. No matter where they came from.

But I don’t like the implication from the biased British media that Hamilton was found “not guilty”. Remember that Sebastian Vettel’s punishment was taken away from him. There has only been one major piece of new evidence since Sunday, and we all know what that shows.

Of course, the British media is absolutely unbearable when it comes to this sort of thing. Mark Blundell was on ITV this morning criticising the fact that the stewards have never driven a Grand Prix car before, so they’re bound not to know what it’s like. That’s funny, I don’t remember him making such a criticism before, but there you go.

It’s also quite amusing because Blundell would know a lot about not being qualified for your job. He is, after all, a broadcaster who has a shockingly poor grasp of the English language.

Funny also how all of the other Grand Prix drivers seem to have been criticising Hamilton as well. Mark Blundell conveniently ignored this point. After being grilled by his colleagues, Hamilton said:

It was a bit disappointing because I knew a few of the drivers there and I didn’t expect them to say certain things.

Perhaps it’s time to admit when you are in the wrong.

In a way, the FIA couldn’t really have risked giving Hamilton a larger penalty because they would have been accused of manipulating the championship. It’s a sign of the sorry state of affairs that the FIA has found itself in. It is constantly being accused of bias one way or another and of manipulating this and that.

There are a few measures that I would like to see the FIA bring in to help prevent this.

1. When the race result is announced, it should not be changed

   I think there should be a time limit on when the race result can be changed. This is not to say that teams should not be able to appeal or that stewards should be unable to punish bad driving. But there should be a time limit for when a team can appeal a result. Something like six hours for instance. This does not even necessarily mean that the result has to be set in stone — just that we know what is going on. For a race result to come under question several days after the event is simply unacceptable.
   (This would be the case for drivers breaking the rules, but should be different in case a car is found to be illegal. But illegal parts on a car ought to be caught during scrutineering anyway.)

2. Stewards in one race should not rule on something that happened in another race

   For the second time this year, the stewards have found themselves ruling on something that happened in another race. This week the Chinese GP stewards had to discuss something which had already been discussed by the Japanese stewards. This is not on really. It is like a referee at a football match giving someone a yellow card for something a footballer did in his previous match.

3. Make penalties more sensible and predictable

   Whenever somebody is in trouble, you simply do not know what kind of punishment they are going to get. I once saw somebody referring to ‘The FIA Random Penalty Generator’ and it really is true. Disqualification? 10 place grid penalty? Drive through penalty? Start the race from the pits? Points docked? Seconds added to your time? We just don’t know which of these punishments will be used at a particular time. The stewards appear to award penalties in a completely arbitrary manner. It is no wonder people wonder about possible FIA bias. This must be sorted out, as a matter of priority.

What happened during the Japanese Grand Prix is actually a good case in point. Robert Kubica was given a drive-through penalty for being involved in an accident with Lewis Hamilton. Now, Kubica’s move was quite ambitious and he was unlikely to be able to pull it off, but did it really merit a drive-through? After all, other drivers crash into each other all the time and never get so much as a slap on the wrists. It’s kind of seen as part of the territory of motor racing.

You have to wonder when Fernando Alonso got whacked pretty hard by Sebastian Vettel. Unlike Hamilton, Alonso sustained quite bad damage to his car. Did Vettel get punished? Of course not — the FIA is biased against Alonso and in favour of Hamilton.

I know some people don’t believe me when I say that the FIA is biased in favour of Hamilton and that he is the successor to Michael Schumacher in this regard. To me, it is clear in the FIA’s eyes that the departure of Schumacher has left a void, and they have decided that Wonder Boy Britain’s Lewis Hamilton shall fill that void. (I believe it is actually illegal to say ‘Lewis Hamilton’ without prefixing it with ‘Britain’s’.)

There is a resentment about the fact that Alonso was able to beat Michael Schumacher fair and square, when Schumacher had no excuses. Alonso is the only driver ever to have managed this (apart from possibly Mika Häkkinen, and he only did it once, not twice like Alonso did).

But don’t ask me if the F1 establishment favours Hamilton. Ask the F1 establishment itself.

Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has hailed Lewis Hamilton as the saviour of the sport…

“Lewis Hamilton has been a real breath of fresh air and has resurrected Formula One,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper quoted commercial rights holder Ecclestone, who is not in Shanghai, as saying…

“We lost a big hero in Michael Schumacher but in Lewis we have another. But for him, I’m not sure where the sport would be heading.”

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

There is no doubt that the mess that the FIA and Formula 1 as a whole currently finds itself in is directly the fault of its power-mad President Max Mosley. A lot of people have been criticising the FIA’s bad management recently (not just the Hamilton investigation, but the bungled email to the teams about tyres at Fuji).

Max Mosley seems to do business on the basis of personal vendettas and the FIA’s institutional pro-Ferrari bias rather than anything to do with notions of fairness or merit. This year’s witch-hunt against McLaren is a case in point — all to do with Max Mosley’s personal dislike of Ron Dennis.

Then there are the extraordinarily offensive comments he made about Jackie Stewart, somebody who had the cheek to criticise the FIA’s handling of the Stepneygate row. Doesn’t he know that people are not allowed to criticise Mosley?

Mosley said: “There’s one particular ex-driver who because he never stops talking, never has the chance to listen — so he doesn’t know what’s going on.

“He said the FIA’s decision would not have worked in a civil court. He has no qualification to say that.

“Then he starts saying this is personal between me and Ron Dennis, at great length, because everything he does is at extreme length.

“It’s annoying that some of the sponsors listen to him because he’s won a few championships. But nobody else in Formula One does — not the teams, not the drivers. He’s a figure of fun among drivers.”

Mosley, presumably alluding to the tartan trousers and cap Stewart wears to races, added: “He goes round dressed up as a 1930s music hall man. He’s a certified halfwit.”

The comment about Jackie Stewart being a “certified halfwit” is seen as a reference to Stewart’s dyslexia. Damon Hill says all that needs to be said in his letter to Autosport magazine.

Update: Pitpass also has a good article on Max Mosley’s comments about Jackie Stewart.

With such contemptuous regard for his fellow inhabitants, one has to wonder what Mosley really feels about the diminutive former second-hand car salesman who not only facilitated his entry to Planet Paddock but has allowed him to enjoy the sort of totalitarian power trip his name prevented him enjoying in the real world.

You don’t often see professional media outlets referring to the fact that Max Mosley is the son of fascist leader Oswald Mosley. Some believe that Max Mosley really wanted a career in politics, but was advised against it due to who is father was. So rather than fucking up the country, Max Mosley decided to go into motor racing politics instead so that he could fuck up motor racing.

Rhys Wynne and Rich Minx think that blogging gives you lots of skills that employers find desirable. The Devil’s Kitchen has added his thoughts here and asks if there are any more skills that anyone can think of.

I can think of plenty. Not all of these are necessarily skills that employers may be looking for. Some of the items show how I have improved as a person as well. Warning: I have removed my modesty cloak.

Here is the list.

Twenty reasons why I will put my blogs on my CV

1. Blogging has improved my writing skills

   When I started blogging at the age of 16, my writing was awful. Over time, I have learned how to better communicate my opinions. Not all of that is just down to me becoming smarter as I get older. While I like to think that I am now a fairly good writer, I am still not a very good speaker (in fact, I may have become a worse speaker — my speaking grades were always my best in English). My recent appearance on the radio shows this.

   Clearly, I have had a lot of practice at writing by now. But I have also learned from other bloggers’ bad writing. It is true that a lot of blogs are not very well written. As such, I have read a lot of bad writing. This has taught me the value of good writing. Reading bad writing teaches you how to write well much more than good writing does. So I have learned from the mistakes of others as well as my own.

2. It has taught me to be less narcissistic

   Contrary to the stereotype of self-obsessed bloggers typing away to themselves in their LiveJournals, blogging has actually taught me to be less narcissistic. Over the years I have learned that if I write obsessively about myself, it is a massive turn-off for readers.

   If you were to trawl through the archives of this blog stretching back almost five years (I do not recommend doing this), you would find plenty of terrible, self-obsessed, introspective blog posts that are unreadably embarrassing. You don’t find me writing as much about my personal life these days because these posts were almost always ignored by my readers.

   This does not mean that writing about myself is a no-go area. This post, for instance, is all me me me. Writing about your personal life is necessarily bad. A lot of the time it can be really good; rewarding for both the reader and the writer. But this only happens if you have got an interesting story to tell and a deft way of telling it. I usually don’t have an interesting story to tell, and I have learned to accept this.

3. It has taught me to think about my audience

   Related to the above point, blogging has taught me how to take others into account. Rather than using my blog as a place to let off steam, I now think to myself, “Will this be interesting to anyone else?” This is because my moody emotional rants were ignored by readers, and they usually looked embarrassing to me by the next day.

4. It has helped me build relationships and “network”

   The blogosphere is essentially the world’s biggest social network. When I link to or leave a comment on another blog, and they do the same to my blog in return, essentially a relationship is being formed. As such, blogging has taught me how to cultivate important relationships better. (More on this below.)

5. It has made me become tolerant of other people’s views

   While online communities are usually famous for their trolls, I think blogging has actually made me a more reasoned and civil debater. Reading blogs has also taught me much more about political ideologies and philosophy than three years of studying economics and politics at university. I now have a much better understanding and appreciation of political views that I do not agree with.

6. It has made me more thick-skinned

   Even if I have become more civil, that doesn’t mean that others have. Anonymous trolls can say incredibly spiteful things, and even those who are not anonymous can be startlingly robust. Being the recipient of blunt comments and emails over the years has taught me how to deal with angry people when I am in the right and how to take it on the chin when I am in the wrong.

7. It has made me a better researcher

   On a blog, if you are making a point you have to back it up with evidence for it to hold any sway. Over the years I have learned how to find what I am looking for. This might sound trivial. After all, anyone can use Google. But there is a knack to it. Plus, I have learned how to use various tools to keep track of interesting information. The number of long-lost articles that I have retrieved from my del.icio.us account is astonishing. In fact, I have done that very thing in the process of writing this post.

8. It has made me knowledgeable on an eclectic range of subjects

   My blog covers a range of subjects. This can work against the blog, as it does not have a coherent purpose or unifying theme. But it has worked in my favour personally. Thinking about ways to blog about a day’s events or news or little random thoughts that pop into your head can get you thinking about a wide variety of topics in ways that you may otherwise not have.

9. It shows commitment

   Despite the amazingly low barriers to entry, the blogosphere is still a tough place to thrive. Anyone who has started blogging knows this. In my first year or two of blogging, I was very close to completely giving up several times. It is a tough commitment for all kinds of reasons. Reading and responding to other blogs as well as promoting your blog are time consuming. Dealing with blogger’s block and those early days when nobody is reading can be demoralising. But I stuck at it and learned how to make blogging a routine activity.

10. It shows that I am good at time management

    Again, blogging is difficult if you have several activities on the go at once. As my life has become busier in the past couple of years, I have also learned how to juggle activities and prioritise. If this means having to let go of the blog for a bit, then so be it.

    Sadly, being busier than I used to be means that I do not blog as much as I used to. Hopefully I make up for this by going more in-depth when I do post.

    I still aim to write at least a few posts per week. During busy periods of your life, it can be difficult to dedicate enough time to your blog to stop it from going dormant. Keeping this in mind has improved my time management skills.

11. It has improved my self-discipline

    I don’t like to have draft posts sitting unpublished. If I have an idea, I want to get it out there. In essence, the deadline is now. This can mean blogging when I am not in the mood.

12. It shows that I can meet deadlines

    This point does not apply so much to this blog, which has no strict deadlines (only deadlines in the vague sense of the two points above). But Scottish Roundup is a different matter.

    At Scottish Roundup, a post is due to appear every Sunday. When it is my turn to write the roundup, I like to stick to this deadline strictly. The only way to do this is to spend Saturday night writing the post. It’s not the most fun way to spend a Saturday night. But I have a deadline to meet, so I’ll meet it.

13. It shows organisational skills

    Admittedly, I do not write every post at Scottish Roundup. I have brought on board other regular and guest writers. This means getting in contact with people and arranging who will be writing when, as well as discussing suggestions for improvements to the website.

14. It shows enterprise

    I can hardly take full credit for the idea of Scottish Roundup. I took inspiration from the Britblog Roundup and the Scottish Political Blogs Review. But I took the initiative to tweak those previous ideas to create a new website. I also had to work to promote the blog and encourage other bloggers to participate.

    Also, it is one thing to write for a publication (be it physical, online or whatever else). But it is quite another to set up your own publication and for it to be moderately successful.

15. $$$

    I have also learned how to make money from blogging. It is not a great deal of money, and nowhere near enough to even begin to dream of becoming a professional blogger. But it is surprising how much you can earn from doing something that you enjoy.

16. Attention from the mainstream media

    As a direct result of this blog, I have appeared on Radio Scotland three times and this week Radio 5 Live was added to the list. (There have been a few other missed opportunities too due to me not checking my email often enough and not having reception on my phone.) This blog has also been mentioned on BBC News Online, The Guardian, Telegraph.co.uk, Slate and The Herald. (Details on the Best of page.)

17. It has made me learn HTML and CSS

    I also had to design the theme for Scottish Roundup. I have designed several other themes and templates for my blogs over the years. The design of this page, as well as the writing on it, is all my own work.

18. It demonstrates computer literacy

    For obvious reasons.

19. It has taught me about search engine optimisation

    Search is mega important these days, and every company in the world wants to come at the top of relevant Google results. Over the years I have learned the various techniques that can help achieve this and I have gained a feel for the sort of things that Google likes about certain websites.

20. It has improved my problem-solving skills

    Because when something (in the template, with a plugin, etc) goes wrong, I need to take a long hard look at it, work out what has gone wrong, why it has gone wrong and how I can fix it.

It is not all good news though. Obviously the good outweighs the bad, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. But I have to recognise the downsides.

Three reasons why I might not put my blogs on my CV

Besides the ones I wrote about in the previous post.

1. For me, blogging hasn’t been social

   I mentioned above that blogging has helped me forge relationships. But these are all online relationships. Of all the great bloggers that I communicate with, I have not yet physically met a single one of them. The closest I have come is a few times when I was spotted by other people, but I didn’t realise until a comment was left on my blog! Also, I have never attended a blogmeet.

   On the bright side, this is not the case for everyone. Otherwise, blogmeets would not exist. Perhaps this is more a reflection of my personality rather than the fact that I am a blogger. I am a natural introvert. Plus, it is surely only a matter of time before I meet another blogger.

2. Am I getting enough fresh air?

   Okay, this is another unfair stereotype about bloggers. But I do mean this half-seriously. I mentioned above how difficult it can be to juggle various activities when you have a blog. So say you enter a busy period of your life. You have a number of extracurricular activities, but because you are busier one of them has to go.

   Maybe you like going on walks, occasionally visiting the pub with your friends and reading books. You also like blogging, and you are keeping in mind that readers may desert a dormant blog. So, which of these spare-time activities will get dropped? Sadly, it is natural that other mind-expanding and important activities get squeezed because you are prioritising your blog.

3. It only shows how I operate on my own terms

   Okay, so I can meet my own deadlines. But what about a deadline that someone else sets me? I can write about my own opinions. But would this necessarily make me good at, say, copy writing or journalism?

   In essence, being a good blogger demonstrates that I am a good blogger. But does it necessarily demonstrate that I would be good at doing similar work for other people? Possibly not.

So, what do you think about all of this? Is some of it a bit pie-in-the-sky? Are there any other pros and cons of putting blogging on your CV?

I should point out that several suggestions have already been posted on my previous post on this issue.

Nationalists are dead chuffed. According to them, it is monumental. Not from my perspective. This is just the Executive deciding it wants a fancy new name just as arbitrarily as a ned gets a personalised number plate for his car.

I’m not sure what the point of the name change is (beyond making the SNP feel more important than they actually are). For a start, officially changing the name would require a change in the law in a reserved area. The change is cosmetic. Mind you, that is probably enough for nationalists. But beyond that, Alex Salmond’s justifications do not quite add up to me.

Normally supporters of independence line up to criticise unionists of claiming that Scots are too stupid and incapable of making an independent Scotland work. But today ask a nationalist and all of a sudden Scots are just too stupid to understand what “Scottish Executive” means. This is despite the fact that the phrase has been a part of everyday language for almost a decade.

Perhaps I am being a bit harsh. Maybe this “Scottish Executive” business is too taxing for those little voters. So what do they do to alleviate the confusion? They change the name. Because that won’t muddy the waters one bit!

It’s a tweak to the political lexicon that is not needed. Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 there has been a need to differentiate between the bodies that govern us.

So the legislature in Holyrood is the Scottish Parliament (or sometimes just Parliament, if there is enough context to allow you to ditch the ‘Scottish’). There the Scottish Executive is formed and is led by the First Minister.

Meanwhile, the legislature in London is called Westminster (to differentiate it from the (Scottish) Parliament). That is where the government, led by the Prime Minister, does its business.

I didn’t think that was too confusing, but there you go. Obviously I, unlike Alex Salmond, am not in the sort of position to say when and when not Scottish voters are too stupid to know what’s what.

I was used to saying “Executive” for things that the Scottish Executive did and “government” for things that, er, the Government did. Now we have a homonym. So what do I say now? I suppose it will all be “Scottish Government” and “UK Government” from now on.

Except, that is, in bills. These will still contain the phrase “Scottish Executive” even though it was the Scottish Government that put forward the bill. The whole situation is crystal clear now. I really am glad that helpful Mr Salmond has cleared things up for us!

Of course, the Scottish Executive hasn’t given itself a new name because the voters are just too, too confused (although that is the SNP spin on it). Bellgrove Belle lets slip the real reason behind the name change:

[O]nce we are called a Government, act like a Government, people will begin to demand the powers of a Government.

So there you have it. Not only is this name change a piece of spin to the n^th degree deliberately designed to make voters more likely to vote in favour of independence. But also the Executive is not a real government with “the powers of a Government”. It wasn’t me who said that; it was Bellgrove Belle.

So just what is the justification for the name change?

I was thinking the other day about how quickly new words enter everyday vocabulary. Before the internet, language evolved slowly and often in geographical pockets. Now? It’s “chav” this and “wag” that and “spam” the other (not to mention omg, wtf, lol, btw). And the fact that I am blogging about this would befuddle the 1990s you.

In fact, spam proves the point quite well. Of course, spam has existed since the year dot as a strange canned meat product. But when you say spam today you think of unsolicited (usually commercial) email. The word spam was first used in this sense in the 1980s, yet it took until at least the late 1990s for it to become a household name.

Today? Some wise guy can invent some half-arsed new term and almost instantly it is all over the internet like a rash. Or a rasher (rashr?). Of bacn.

I first heard of bacn via Gordon McLean. When I saw it at his blog I thought it was pronounced like the word ‘back’ with a rogue ‘n’ at the end. I thought it looked a bit like the name for some dodgy quango. British Autocratic Complete Numpties? (Too honest a name to be a real quango I guess.)

I soon remembered that this is “the age of the stupid removal, for no good reason, of the penultimate letter of a word if the penultimate letter is a vowel and the last letter is a consonant”. This is thanks to those wise guys at Flickr. Wankrs the lot of them. So bacn is like bacon, except now you have to delete the ‘o’ when you accidentally type it out of habit.

I have since learned through Boing Boing that bacn is an overnight internets phenomenon. So what is this mysterious bacn?

Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

On Boing Boing it is described as “e-mail you want, just not now”.

The thing about this bacn thing, though, is that this is not really a phenomenon that I identify with. Spam is ubiquitous. We all know what it is. We all get it. We all hate it. Bacn? Not quite.

I can just about see it when it comes to the newsletter from my favourite company. But usually I just (skim) read them straight away so that they don’t pile up. I have signed up to The Economist‘s newsletters, but I almost never read them. Hardly counts as “email you want”, even though I did ask for them. The exception is the indispensable Boomkat newsletter, which is one of the first things I read on a Friday.

So what about the rest of them — Twitter follower notifications, Facebook wall post notifications and the like? Well, I do want to know about them now. I just don’t want to read them.

Google Talk comes with a handy Gmail notifier which tells me whenever I get a new email. I can just look at the subject of the email and pretty much know what it is. Take three recent notifications that I received from three different websites:

• X sent you a message on Facebook
• X is now following you on Twitter
• Please confirm story about X [from Bebo]

In each case I did not want to read the email. What a waste of time. I just marked them as read the next time I logged into Gmail. But in each case I did visit the relevant website immediately to see what was going on.

Maybe I would understand more if I was an omg wtf busy 24/7 21^st century lifestyle stressed out city dude. But for me, bacn is not so much email that I want to put off reading until later. It’s email that I either want to read immediately (like the Boomkat newsletter), or not at all (Twitter followers).