Sweary News Podcast

The Sweary News is the news, but sweary. It’s funnier than you may think, a 1-2 minute radio news bulletin with Wes Mundell (as played by Adam) the pottiest-mouthed newsreader around.

Me and Adam had the idea some years ago, and the original idea was a daily show on youTube each evening. That might never happen, but radio seems to suit the concept well. Ad writes and records the section just in time for me to get my magic beeper out. Here’s just two of the comments from this week:

“thank god for sweary news i have stopped gettin the sunday times cause all my news requirments are covered for the week”  Matt

“Yay! Sweary news. Almost worth getting up early for. ” Andy

It’s available as a podcast too (iTunes link). Bonus for the podcast is that a selection of the swears are unbleeped…

Probably a much better example of what I was taling about here.

“Commandment Nine: Thou shalt not retweet compliments This phenomenon I really don’t understand, especially not when it’s my British friends doing it (Americans get their usual shamelessness pass). So someone complimented you or your business on Twitter? Great! I’m pleased for you, I really am. But RT’ing the compliment? You might as well stand in my garden and masturbate onto a photo of yourself. I’m sure it gets you off, but I don’t need to see it.”

Not safe for work: I’m like Moses, but for Twitter - Paul Carr lays down his 10 Commandments | Technology | guardian.co.uk

“a new sketch/stand up show that I am going to be doing on Monday nights in the autumn at the Leicester Sq theatre and which will be released on iTunes. It’s called, “As It Occurs To me” and it’s going to made up of things I have thought about that week and reconstructions of stuff that has happened to me. I’ve been trying to get a show like this on the radio for ages, but it’s so difficult to get through the commissioning process and it’s so annoying to have to deal with compliance censoring anything that is remotely amusing, so I thought I’d just make it myself and stick it out as a podcast. Costs will be covered (and with luck a little money might be made) by people buying tickets to come and see it live. I don’t know if tickets are on sale yet, but stick it in your diary. It’s every Monday night from 12th October to 14th December (not sure of the time of performance). I am delighted to say that TV’s Emma Kennedy and Dan Tetsell will be performing alongside me. So it should be a lot of fun. And improvised and uncensored. It will be available, for free on iTunes soon after recording.”

Warming Up | Richard Herring.com

The Birmingham Mail covered this exchange on Pete Ashton’s blog, which is good — it’s a story. To sum up, an advertising company working on behalf of the Rep Theatre were using reverse graffiti, they — mistakenly one would assume — used it on a monument (that it’s a monument isn’t immediately obvious, if you don’t know Brum), Pete pointed it out, they apologised.

What annoyed me was the way that the Mail’s report worked — it is so dumbed down as to be wildly wrong in a couple of places:

“A BIRMINGHAM theatre’s unique way of advertising with jet aqua sprays to create ‘reverse graffiti’ has left them in trouble.”

Unique? Let’s see what ‘unique’ means :”existing as the only one or as the sole example” — while reverse graffiti might be still thought of as fairly new, it’s not unique, not even for Brum - here’s an example from 2007 of BRMB using it:

Later on in the article they tell us that Pete “writes a blog on Birmingham” — he doesn’t, he writes a blog on whatever stuff he wants to, including publishing pictures of himself dressed as a cloud. Maybe that’s why they don’t link to the blog, give the URL, or mention that the whole incident played out on the blog (instead they imply he’s talked to them - he hasn’t).

All media outlets have a style, but lowering the standard of discourse so far that it becomes factually inaccurate? Yes it happens all the time. Everything has to be “new” and “difficult to understand”, and “frightening” — so people never think that they should go off and find something out about things, never think that maybe there’s stuff they’ve missed, never think that they can go off an have their own thoughts.

Is it because they still blindly assume they’re the only place people get information from? Or do they really want to keep people stupid?

[EDIT: I'd just like to point out that this post isn't about not linking or crediting internet sources (gwad knows we've all been over that one), but about the terrible tendency to simplifly things to the point of incorrect. Whatever the process, reverse graffiti isn't unique, Pete doesn't write a blog about Birmingham — leave these two bits out the story is better.]

[EDIT the 2th: My point is that I know what's correct here, because I know of Pete's blog, and have seen the development of the reverse graffitti thing and —  while neither are important in themselves — it begs the question, what else do the media get wrong that I don't know about? Maybe some really important big things. I worry.]

Veggie not shrinking, of course. And just so you can see how much the meat ones do shrink:

YooouuuTuuube sort of cascades You Tube vids frame-by-frame across your browser. Hypnotic.