all right, Tiger, me old c***

Another example of the slightly counter-productive effect of prissily asterisk-ing out relatively innocuous words from news articles - here's a piece in the wake of Tiger Woods' latest car-related mishap. This one features an interview with David Duval, former world number 1 and apparently one of Woods' closer friends on tour during their brief period of serious rivalry between about 1997 and 2002. It's all fairly bland stuff, to be honest, carefully skirting round any speculation about Woods' intake of prescription (and indeed non-prescription) drugs or any future legal action, but does include this snippet:

Join me, if you will, as we mentally step through at least two words that could be in the asterisked place in the sentence, both of then considerably ruder than the "crap" that Duval presumably uttered, and respectively referring to items of female and male genital furniture. 

Duval, incidentally, now plies his golfing trade rattling around mid-leaderboard on the lucrative PGA Champions Tour, where he's making a perfectly decent living thank you very much - $86,000 from five events so far this year despite his best finish being a tie for 14th at the Hoag Classic a couple of weeks ago. Nice work if you can get it. 

aged blogger smells rat, headline meaning

Here's an interesting headline from Rolling Stone which I spotted the other day. Nothing so weird about that one, you'll probably be saying, it's just confirming that Steve Howe really did sue someone (it's not clear who) for some sort of copyright infringement over a song.

The key to smelling a rat and subsequently the real meaning of the headline here is actually knowing who Steve Howe is, something which probably divides sharply along lines of musical preference and, depressingly, age. Anyway, Howe is the guitarist with British progressive rock band Yes, who, rather remarkably, are still a going concern, albeit with only Howe as an "original" member. I say "original" as even Howe wasn't in the very early incarnations of the group, only coming on board for the making of their breakthrough album The Yes Album in 1970. I suppose what I mean is he's the only member from their "classic" period which ran from about 1970 to about 1974.

Anyway, despite what the surface reading of the headline might suggest, it is in fact Howe and the current incarnation of Yes who are being sued for copyright infringement by a guy called Riz Story. To be fair the sub-headline makes that reasonably clear.

Have I heard any of the songs in question? No. Do I, in fact, give a fuck? Not really. The point is the headline, and some odd American conventions regarding headline structure, in particular the use of a comma to splice words together in place of the word "and". This is jarring to the uninitiated and highly satirisable even to the presumably initiated (both the fictional headlines below are from The Onion). 

lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

headline of the day

My views on the monarchy as an institution are fairly well-known, and as much as I am a terrible arsehole in a general sense I do recognise that it might be appropriate to allow a moment before steaming in with some WELL ACTUALLY observations. So in the wake of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh I will restrict myself to noting the unfortunate wording hastily cobbled together by the Guardian website sub-editors.

I mean you can't really complain about people mistrusting the press and other media if you've been peddling the same fake news for 73 years. 

shite entertainment

Generally I like the Headline Of The Day candidates to be freshly-minted and just plucked at the moment of perfect ripeness from whichever website has bunged them up without proof-reading them properly first. This one is a little different as it's from around eighteen months ago, but has some present-day resonance for me in ways which I'll explain shortly. Here it is:

There's quite a bit to unpack here, so let's start with the simple stuff: Blippi is a supremely irritating American children's TV creation who has become a gazillionaire by the seemingly simple method of bouncing around seemingly abandoned trampoline parks, softplay centres, playgrounds and skateboard parks making lots of high-pitched squeaking noises and gurning at the camera in a way that young children (my 3-year-old son among them) find as irresistible as some people find injecting heroin into their own eyeballs on a skanky old mattress under a highway overpass. 

When I first encountered Blippi back in the early days of the coronavirus lockdown (I think it was Alys who happened across him first) I jokingly tweeted that he was a bit like Pee-wee Herman (true) but at least he wasn't a sex criminal (also true, but, well, wait and see). 

he's a little bit Pee Wee Herman only without quite so many convictions for public wanking

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 26, 2020

Blippi does, it turns out, have some back-story of his own, though - in his case (in contrast to Pee-wee Herman) from before his kiddy-centric fame happened rather than after. He is the creation of someone who these days goes by the real-life name of Stevin John, but seems to have been originally called Steven Grossman. The reason for the name change seems to have been his real name's uncomfortably close proximity to Steezy Grossman, the name of his youthful comedy alter ego as whom he made several videos whose content is definitely not for kids, including one notorious one where he takes a gargantuan splattery (and, as far as I can gather, real) shit over a friend in a toilet cubicle. 

Needless to say now that he's a MASSIVE HIT with the under-fives he's not very keen for his MASSIVE SHIT with the number twos to keep popping up in internet searches, so there has been a fair bit of legal effort expended on suppressing the video wherever it pops up. Just to be clear, I haven't seen it, nor am I especially keen on seeking it out, but I expect you could if you really wanted to. I'm not judging you, any more than I'm judging Blippi or suggesting that he is not a fit and proper person to be entertaining small children, as long has he keeps his anus out of it. I think this is a not unreasonable expectation of any children's entertainer, to be honest.

headline of the day

Picture the scene: YOU, a hardworking professional helicopter pilot for hire, get the call to deliver a BOAT to a HOSPITAL, pronto. But WHY does a HOSPITAL need a BOAT, you think to yourself, but, as befits a consummate professional, you don't stop to actually ask piddling inconsequential questions like this - no, you leap into action, fire up the helicopter, attach a boat to it, presumably dangling below via some sort of rope, and set off as fast as you can (while observing all the rules of the air applicable to helicopters with boats dangling beneath them, naturally: you're a professional, albeit ruggedly unconventional and with a fine disregard for the pompous stuffed shirts at Helicopter Central) for the hospital. You're just crossing the car park heading for the rooftop helipad and the crack boat-untethering team that the hospital administrators have assembled there when disaster strikes: the rope frays and the boat plummets two hundred feet to the ground, pancaking some unfortunate bloke just gingerly returning to his car after a minor surgical procedure on some troublesome haemorrhoids. NOOOOOOOOOO, you wail to yourself in the cockpit, WHYYYYYY did I buy that cheap foreign rope instead of some stout reliable English rope? But it's too late, and you skulk morosely off back to base to cultivate a ferocious drinking habit and a vow never to fly again until disaster move cliché demands it. Tomorrow's newspaper headlines read as follows:

I'll let you into a little secret: the story above is a fabrication, devised specifically to lead the unsuspecting reader to the headline above, gleaned from the BBC News website earlier today. Needless to say this is a crash blossom, and it was in fact the man (who had been crushed by a boat) who was flown to hospital, not the boat itself. Also needless to say, or at least I would hope so, is that my intention here is to mock the careless headline-writing of the people who maintain the BBC website, rather than the plight of the man who had the argument with the boat. I wish him all the best for a speedy recovery, and hope that he SAILS through the experience without being, erm, KEELed.

Previous crash blossoms on this blog (the Language Log link above has lots more) can be found here, here, here, here, here, here and my all-time favourite one here. 

headline of the day

Just as with the William Shatner one from a month or so ago, today's headline pretty much picks itself (with the caveat that I haven't scoured the entire internet looking for better ones). Eagle-eyed observers will notice that it shares a theme and certain key words with the Shatner one as well.

It's easy to mock, of course, but who among us can honestly say that they are such a rigidly-self-controlled freakish automaton at their place of work that they have never cranked one out in a semi-public space and then put themselves away in such a hasty and slapdash manner that they have subsequently dripped or oozed fluids onto a colleague, customer or member of the public? That's right, NO-ONE.

headline of the day

Not much competition for this title today: it pretty much has to be this one.

It's unclear from the article whether Shatner just emerged from a lengthy session with his and his ex-wife's respective legal teams proudly bearing a sloppy brimming bucket of warm horse jizz, or whether some other arrangement was put in place. Either way, I'm sure the legal negotiations were tough and gruelling, but Shatner and his lawyers showed some spunk and pulled it off. I expect you can make up your own jokes.

headline of the day

From Twitter, and not a crash blossom for once, this is just a bit....well, see for yourself:

It definitely has a bit of a Day Today/Brass Eye feel to it, in particular the references to paedophilia and the inability to avoid hearing it read out in Chris Morris' faux-concerned Michael Buerk voice.

bombed between groins

I spotted this on Twitter earlier today:

This turns out to be from 2014, but I imagine the principal protagonist (who is from Taipei) still winces about it, and possibly finds himself unable to eat noodles without experiencing some sort of PTSD reaction. A couple of questions immediately spring to mind:

• I mean, just generally, what was going on here? It turns out there is an answer, of sorts, involving, as you would expect, some exceptionally poor life choices;
• Who the hell is "Chris Illuminati"? Does he even exist? Is he some sort of Nazi space lizard, under deep deep cover as a lazy recycler of internet content for "brobible", and secretly using his job as an excuse to laugh at us puny humans and our pathetic warm-blooded non-scaly antics?
• Lastly, what does "cooking up ramen in a Speedo" mean? You'd think it meant he was actually using a pair of Speedos as a cooking pot, something that would surely be problematic from a flammability point of view, not to mention the issue of all the soup falling out through the leg-holes leaving a bulging gusset of half-cooked wet noodles. At least it might put the fire out. It turns out the original web page from which "brobible" shamelessly swiped most of the content phrased it slightly differently, although still not in a way most people would recognise as proper actual English (that would require an "s" on the end of "Speedo"). Maybe the extra "a" was added to foil plagiarism-bots hunting down shameless scrapers of website content or something;
• Finally, note that the byline under this version of the story is equally stupid, though a bit less obviously lizardy.

I think the reason that some of the phrasing here is a bit odd is that this is an English translation of an original article in Japanese. Clearly a bit more care has been taken than just running it through Google Translate, though, since if you do that you end up with this

headlines of the day

Here's one for the file of What Does Any Of This Even Mean headline-parsing challenges:

In order to have any chance of understanding that one you have to realise that it's a sort of ironic callback to this actual headline from a few days earlier:

This one actually refers to a real story whereby the Beresheet lander, operated by the Israeli SpaceIL organisation, crash-landed on the moon after its main engine failed at a crucial point during the descent - the point where it needed to fire to slow the craft down and prevent it crashing, basically. That was back in April but it has only recently emerged that the craft was carrying a scientific payload that included dehydrated tardigrades. These little guys, while known by some endearingly cutesy names such as "water bears" and "moss piglets", are in fact some of the baddest motherfuckers in the animal kingdom, being able to survive extremes of temperature (at either end of the scale), massive doses of radiation and exposure to the vacuum of space. So there's every chance they could survive on the moon's surface, though whether they'd ever be able to emerge from their dormant state and actually do anything (like eat or breed) is a different question. You can imagine that if they could it would be a short evolutionary journey to actual grizzly-sized solar-powered angry space bears, which might make future human trips to the moon dangerous for a whole host of completely new reasons. I should add that my knowledge of tardigrades, and all aspects of the animal kingdom, is greatly enhanced by watching Octonauts, just as my knowledge of world geography and landmarks of significance is greatly enhanced by watching Go Jetters.

Anyway, the reason for the second headline (chronologically speaking, first in its position within this post: do try to keep up) is that there is a school of thought which says: meh, there was probably some bio-contamination already on the moon anyway from long-ago asteroid impacts on Earth. I guess one has to also allow the possibility that some biological matter was attached to the spacecraft and humans that visited the moon during the previous round of manned exploration between 1969 and 1972 and various unmanned missions thereafter.

for those about to rock

I can't quite remember what got me into watching rock-climbing videos on YouTube - I suspect I might have followed a few links after investigating the climbing wall facilities at Cwmbran Leisure Centre. Nia expressed an interest while we were scrambling around on the softplay area there recently and since a) I've never tried it and wouldn't mind having a go and b) she is a creature of River Tam-like grace and agility (though with less killing, hopefully) and I expect she'd be really good at it, I made a mental note to give it a go. Obviously that hasn't resulted in me actually doing anything about it, but all in good time.

Anyway, I ended up watching a few climbing videos, which are fascinating in their own way. One of the ways in which they're interesting is to contrast the activity involved with the sort of stuff I like doing on mountains and to envisage where the dividing line is between one and the other. On the one hand I have absolutely no interest in roped-up sport climbing, still less the sort of free-soloing that people like Alex Honnold do, which seems literally insane to me; on the other hand there is a point where the hands-and-feet scrambling I like, sometimes up quite gnarly semi-vertical rocks, such as those between the Càrn Mòr Dearg arête and the summit of Ben Nevis, or the upper reaches of the Black Cuillin on the Isle of Skye, comes somewhere near to meeting up with the easy end of what you might start to call rock climbing. On the other other hand, at least Alex Honnold's ascent of El Capitan, bonkers as it may have been, was a venture with a specific real-world objective, that is to say the summit of the mountain; the really esoteric sport-climbing stuff that people like Adam Ondra do, as jaw-dropping as it is as a feat of athleticism, has no real-world "point" to it other than as a series of gymnastic moves that have to be strung together without falling off the rock.

Anyway, on a less serious note, there is a whole lexicon of climbing jargon which is largely impenetrable to the uninitiated. Take a look at this headline and see what springs to mind, for instance:

This is not, as you might imagine, some weird postal drug deal involving an Italian Jason Statham-alike, still less some weird sexual thing, but instead an article from a climbing website describing British climber Hazel Findlay's ascent of a tricky climbing route in Italy. The word "send", in particular, in this context is a shortened form of "ascend", and just means a successful climb of a route without falling off at any point. Past participle generally seems to be "sent" rather than "sended".

headline of the day

I know there's much speculation about the composition of the squad for the upcoming Ashes series in Australia, and England have a few headaches to deal with with regard to batsmen, since they only really have two of their top five sorted out, which is not what you really want at this stage. So it's a bit unhelpful for them to be publicly wishing injuries on potential opening batsmen.

A bit of noun/adjective confusion here, of course, which makes this a classic crash blossom in common with many others noted on this blog (my favourite is this one, though strictly that one is noun/verb confusion).

headline of the day

Here's another example (from the Daily Mail) of a phenomenon you might call "subject slippage" or something similar - a bit like this one (and indeed this one) in that as written it appears to imply people doing things after their own deaths, in this case some sort of zombie sexual assault rampage, perhaps as a sort of beyond-the-grave revenge for her own ordeal (which, to be clear, happened while she was alive).

A few commas go a long way in this sort of sentence, just to demarcate where sub-clauses start and finish and give the poor old reader some chance of following what's going on. The first paragraph of the story basically just rehashes the headline, but does contain some mercifully sense-supplying commas:

headline of the day

Attempt, if you will, to parse this gem from the BBC News website today: Corpse sex kill threat man gets 45 years.

So who was making the threat? The corpse? And if so, what was the nature of the threat? To kill people (or maybe just one particular person, this "man") by having sex with them in some sort of horrific zombie rape/murder rampage? More likely (if we exclude the various zombie scenarios) that it was the man making the threat, but if the corpse then becomes the object of the threat, "kill" doesn't hold much power, a corpse being dead already and all. Indeed making pretty much any threats to a corpse ("sex" included) is a fairly futile activity.

So what's going on? The (very) slightly revised version of the headline on the main story page isn't much help, but it turns out that it was the "man" making the threats, which basically involved first turning living people into corpses by murdering them, and then doing the sex bit afterwards, sex with living people apparently being a bit complex and involving a lot of red tape and potential misunderstandings. Better to murder them first and then save the sexy sexy times until afterwards. Plus it presumably saves any awkwardness over who pays the bill after dinner.

This is one of those headlines where any kind of comprehensibility evaporates once the sub-editors have applied the space-saving journalistic convention of just mashing a load of nouns together without any explanatory prepositions, conjunctions or pronouns. Previous examples from this blog can be found here, here and here. Language Log calls it a "noun pile-up", which I think is pretty good. Previous examples can be found here, here and here - almost inevitably it turns out that they've spotted today's as well, and indeed written nearly the same blog post, although in a slightly more sober academic tone without so much freaky zombie sex. Take your pick.

headlines of the day

The day in question being yesterday, actually, but I'm a busy man and I can't always leap into blogging action at the drop of a dangling modifier. Anyway, here's a couple from the Daily Mail.

Firstly, this one illustrating the importance of keeping track of which pronoun refers to whom - in the normal course of sentence construction the "she" and the "her" in the last clause would typically refer to the same person. Not so here, unless there's some sort of My Big Fat Scottish Zombie Wedding thing going on.

Secondly, this mind-bogglingly inconsequential piece about Victoria Beckham taking a selfie: the hack who wrote the original headline evidently gave it the care and attention its importance merited and left in two obvious errors (they seem to have now been corrected). The first one just mangles the (already lame) attempted reference to Bend It Like Beckham; the second just raises the question: what the hell is a "ballot pose"? Is it like a ballot box? i.e. something shiny, angular and sharp-cornered with a generous slot in the middle accessible by right to anyone who's on the electoral register? Well, as they say, good luck with that.

Obviously I do know it's meant to say "ballet", really. It's still not quite as funny as the claim about Stella Artois 4 being "a good pallet cleanser", though. Fascinatingly, although the link in that old 2009 blog post is now dead, the Wayback Machine has a couple of archives of it, one roughly contemporary with the post and one from a couple of years later. Here they are, in chronological order.

The sharp-eyed among you will notice that they've had a go at correcting the original error, but have, amusingly, still managed to cock it up, unless there really has been a refinement of the recipe to reposition the product from being suitable for cleaning heavy-duty wooden stacking platforms to being more suitable for cleaning artists' equipment. I assume not, and that the word they were groping unsuccessfully for each time was "palate". But it's Stella, so you never know.

pulled off at half-time

A bit of unfortunate slapdash photo-captioning in this match summary of France's slightly unexpected 10-9 win over Ireland in the first Six Nations match on Saturday. I didn't see any of it as I was slogging up a mountain in the snow at the time (more on this later) but it sounds like it was a pretty desperate and attritional affair, only livened up - or so I gather from the photo caption below, anyway - by the spectacle of Irish outside-half Jonathan Sexton being furiously "milked" by a bald-headed member of the backroom staff. It's all part of the coaching and motivational routine, and presumably serves to settle the nerves before key place kicks.

Just in case you can't read the caption there, it reads as follows:

Johnny Sexton was frustrated to have to come just before France's match-winning try

In reality I assume there's a missing "off" before the word "just" there, but like I say I didn't see the game so I couldn't say for sure.

headline of the day

Just as with my unseemly (for a fortysomething father-of-two, anyway) chortling over the contents of children's books here, the amusement factor here is mainly around the inherent sniggery amusingness of the word "flaps".

It's actually the headline for this fairly grim story about the current Tongan obesity crisis, and the problem of richer countries unloading their cheap unwanted cuts of meat on poorer countries. Nonetheless you'd think they could have rustled up a female New Zealand lamb exporter to enthuse about how the Tongans love the taste of her flaps, can't get enough of her flaps, despite the unusual smell, etc. etc.

Just in case we need a bit of orientation, the BBC article includes this helpful diagram.

headline of the day

This (although it's from the BBC website) is one of those tabloid-esque pack-as-many-nouns-in-a-row-as-you-can-and-see-if-it-still-makes-sense-type-of-things, which occasionally overlaps with the crash blossom category:

This one isn't really a crash blossom, it's just a bit jarring to the eye, not least by virtue of containing the word "penis", still a fairly unusual word to see in a headline, tabloid or otherwise.

As it happens the item Michael McFeat was queuing up for was a sausage made out of horsemeat, so I must say I'm slightly baffled as to where the major offence arose from. If sausages in Kyrgyzstan contain the same sort of meat as they do in this country I certainly wouldn't want to be putting my hand on my heart and claiming they were 100% penis-free.

Not to be outdone, Kyrgyzstan's much larger neighbour Kazakhstan has as one of its national dishes a thing called qarta, which is fried boiled horse rectum. You'd hope that as well as boiling and frying it they'd give it a bloody good rinse first.

headline of the day

Just a bit of textbook blithering tabloid innumeracy for you - today's Daily Mail contains this headline:

That image is from the front page of the Mail's website; the actual article has had its headline amended to something that at least makes sense.

The interesting thing with these is always not so much to spot the error - that's easy - but more to try to determine what the person who wrote it was actually thinking, given that they'd presumably done a calculation of some sort to get hold of the numbers. The sort of thing you want to be doing as a sanity check here is to say to yourself: if you had a thing at a certain price, and you reduced that price by 100%, it would end up being free. So if my calculation gives any number greater than 100, I've clearly cocked it up somewhere.

In this particular case, a £30 bottle of wine being offered for £7 represents a discount of (23 / 30) * 100 = 77%. I can't actually imagine a way of carving the numbers up to get a figure of 200, but on the face of it a £30 bottle of wine with a 200% discount means Asda paying customers £30 to take each bottle away. If I really thought that was true I'd be down there RIGHT NOW.