In through the outfield

14 January 2011

The stupendous language of sport

As part of our Evolving English exhibition, we are running all kinds of related events.

In November I was lucky to be able to watch a recording Just a Minute, the wonderful radio panel game that has been running since 1967. One of my early memories is listening with my granny to Clement Freud and Kenneth Williams.

More recently we hosted an evening devoted to the Language of Sport, which generated some excellent coverage on the BBC – The art of talking a good game. The event was also reviewed on the In bed with Maradona blog.

Not surprisingly much of the talk is about the clichés that surround football commentating, which is related to the live nature of the coverage.

There is a brilliant example from the BBC, of the commentator who ‘went too early’, resulting in over-excited screaming when the ball finally went in the net – The stupendous language of sport.

Then we have Colmanballs, a term coined by Private Eye magazine to describe verbal gaffes perpetrated by (usually British) sports commentators. It is derived from the surname of the now retired BBC broadcaster David Coleman and the suffix -balls, as in “to balls up”.

The Parryphernalia blog has collected a set of amusing misuses of the term literally, which he calls LiterallyBalls.

Here is a short selection:

“After the first goal went in you could literally see the Derby players shrinking.” Alan Shearer commenting on Derby’s latest capitulation.
“Craig Bellamy has literally been on fire” Ally McCoist.
“The Liverpool defence have literally been caught with their trousers down.” Andy Townsend on an Andy Johnson chance against Liverpool.
“Koller was literally, literally, right up his backside there.” Andy Townsend again, commenting on Jan Koller’s positioning in the Turkish penalty box.
“Terry Venables has literally had his legs cut off from underneath him three times while he’s been manager” Barry Venison.

Last, but by no means least, is the commentating legend that was Alan Partridge. Although a fictional sports reporter on The Day Today, his football commentating contains pearls of English that will stay with us. Here is an example that includes, “he must have a foot like a traction engine”, and “that was liquid football” (a comment I have since heard from real-life commentators).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzSQ3xgoh-w]

Colemanballs is a term coined by Private Eye magazine to describe verbal gaffes perpetrated by (usually British) sports commentators.[1] It is derived from the surname of the now retired BBC broadcaster David Coleman and the suffix -balls, as in “to balls up”,[1][2] and has since spawned derivative terms in unrelated fields such as “Warballs” (spurious references to the September 11, 2001 attacks) and “Dianaballs” (sentimental references to Diana, Princess of Wales). Any other subject can be covered, as long as it is appropriately suffixed by -balls.[1] The all-encompassing term “mediaballs” has since been used by Private Eye as their coverage of gaffes has expanded.[3]

22 September 2010

Read or Die (R.O.D) and the coolest librarian in the world

I’m wondering if my quest for the most exciting librarian in the world (Cool librarians, More cool librarians) has now ended with the discovery of Yomiko Readman, codename The Paper, an agent for the Special Operations Division of The British Library. Yes you read that right, but may have realised that Yomiko is a fictional character set in an alternative future, where the British Empire has managed to maintain its superpower status.

In this fantasy world the British Library is an institution devoted to the promotion of literacy (so far so believable), but is also home to The British Library Special Operations Division who run operations around the world to fight book related crime and terrorism. Their slogan is ‘Peace to the books of the world, an iron hammer to those who would abuse them (I have some colleagues who would support this part), and glory and wisdom to the British Empire’.

Yomiko, the hero of the stories is a half-Japanese, half-English papermaster. This means she has the ability to manipulate paper in a wide variety of ways, including creating paper darts that can carry people, paper-rope stronger than steel, and samurai swords. As a result, she never goes anywhere without her case full of stationery supplies.

Although polite and friendly with very few exceptions, she does have a licence to kill, and does so with her deadliest technique, death by a thousand paper cuts!

Yomiko reports to Joker, a stereotypically stiff upper lip Englishman who needs a proper cup of tea in a china cup to help him in a crisis. He reports to Gentleman, an aged, one eyed man, who is the power behind the throne of the British Empire (no sign of the Royal family here).

Although not generally a fan of Manga comics, I greatly enjoyed watching the Read or Die DVD animated version of the stories last night (many thanks to colleague Matthew Shaw for the loan).

In particular I loved the way that Yomiko always asks so politely for her books to be returned to her. And the almost sexual excitement with flushed cheeks she shows when coming across a special book. Needless to say her apartment is piled high with books, to the extent that she is covered by them as she sleeps on her sofa.

Here are some links about this exciting (for a librarian) new discovery:

Please give back my book! Welcome, fellow readers, the newly revamped ReadorDie.org

Internet Movie Data Base

Wikipedia entry

Read or Die Wiki

1 February 2010

Sex sells – but call it Maturialism for now

Springwise and its sister publication Trendwatching always seem to have their finger on the pulse of emerging business trends. So I was somewhat surprised to see what must be one of the oldest tricks in the book repackaged under the term Maturialism in their report on 10 consumer trends for 2010.

Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavours and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of. In short; audiences in mature consumer societies no longer tolerate being treated like yesteryear’s uninformed, easily shocked, inexperienced, middle-of-the-road consumer. We’ve dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism).

My favourite example of this racy new breed of business are The Icecreamists, who seem to me to have combined anarchist tendencies, punk design, fetish wear and ice cream into one unholy whole.

The Icecreamists are an anonymous troupe of provocateurs and iconoclasts with a background in staging dramatic high-profile events.

Whilst engaged on these clandestine and legally dubious pursuits, they would on occasion be discovered by law enforcement officers, enjoying illicit chills with a tub of freshly-made artisans gelato. One day they read that ice cream could be subversive and was being used to undermine the government of Belarus, a state in the former Soviet Union.

Organised ice cream eating as political protest had begun, and the The Icecreamists were born; sub-zero missionaries destined to convert a cold, cruel unforgiving world to the life-enhancing gospel of freshly-made artisans gelato. Today, the founders are still hopelessly foul-mouthed, anti-establishment and politically incorrect, but they have purged themselves of their old law-breaking ways and dedicated their lives to pioneering a new ideology, what they describe as ‘Icecreamism’.

The Icecreamists sasys it’s a bit like socialism, only funnier, more addictive and tastes better. Now aficionados can enjoy Icreamism anywhere they fancy. Against the bar, against the wall or against the law.

icecreamists

22 December 2009

My favourite Einstein quotes

A colleague has recently been using the following brilliant line quite a bit recently, with regard to people who keep making the same mistakes. It didn’t take much research to find it came from that wonderful scientist and philosopher Albert Einstein.

* Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Einstein also came up with quite a few quotable quotes on the topic of knowledge:

* Information is not knowledge.

* The only source of knowledge is experience.

* Imagination is more important than knowledge.

* The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

The Brainy Quote website has a whole A to Z of Einstein’s one liners.

13 November 2009

Business & IP Centre goes ‘On the Buses’

Although this has to be one of the most culturally embarassing references I have used in this blog, I couldn’t resist – now that we are advertising on London buses (see my YouTube link below if you are in need of a cringefest).

This is part of our promotional activities around Global Entrepreneurship Week, for which we have lots of exciting events, including In conversation with Lord Sugar (the event is now sold out, but you can watch online at www.inspiringentrepreneurswebcast.co.uk).

We have had great success in the past with our posters in and around a selection of London Underground stations, so we are both excited and nervous about our experiment with London buses.

Please let me know if you happen to spot one around town.

BIPC_bus_advert

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9demh_RPQpc]

12 October 2009

Starting a business is like playing at Pooh Sticks

Bryan Mills

During a recent training event I was fortunate to hear Bryan Mills speak. Bryan has had a long and successful career creating and managing IT related businesses (although without an IT background himself). His particular claim to fame is building CMG from a two person business, operating from the founder’s homes in 1965, into a multinational FTSE1oo business.

During his fascinating talk recounting lessons learnt from a lifetime as an entrepreneur he used the analogy of playing Pooh Sticks for business start-up.

As both a fan of the game from early childhood, and having grown up very near to the home of Winnie-the-Pooh the inventor of the game in Hartfield, West Sussex, Bryan caught my attention.

When you are planning to start a business you look down into the swirling river below (the market place for you product or service), you try as hard as you can to see where the current is flowing strongest and is least turbulent (assessing the market opportunity with published and field market research). You drop your stick in as carefully and accurately as you can (detailed business plan preparation). And once it is in, you follow it with Eagle eyes, watching every bob and weave (you track every activity minutely in your newly founded business).

However once the stick goes under the bridge it moves both out of your control and out of sight, and there is nothing you can do to influence its route down the river, across into a bank of reeds, or dropping down to the bottom of the river bed. This is very much the situation once your business is up and running. All kinds of unpredictable events can knock you off course, or sink the business altogether.

22 July 2009

Big toys for big boys

It is often said that men are just boys in adult bodies. This seems to be the approach taken by Männerspielplatz, an amusement park for men that lets them get in touch with their inner construction worker (thanks to SpringWise for the tip-off).

For EUR 219, visitors to Männerspielplatz can shed their office trappings and get seriously dirty while playing with excavators, wheel loaders, Caterpillars, quads, Jeeps and more.

The park, which is situated in an old factory site just outside Kassel, Germany, offers 18 stations for visitors to enjoy to their heart’s content. Challenges include using a Komatsu Hanomag excavator to move huge stones; leveling the ground with a bulldozer; off-road riding on a Quad Unimog; and participating in an archery course.

Participants must be at least 18 years old. A Class B license is required, and admission is limited to minimize waiting times.

19 June 2009

The smell of fiction

Since the dawn of time in the ‘real world’ people have enjoyed creating complicated hoaxes, spoofs and pranks (April 1 in particular being a popular time of year).

However, I don’t understand the thinking behind the multitude of fake products ‘for sale’ on the Internet. The latest to bamboozle the blogosphere (and Internet savvy Librarians) is the Smell of Books.

As you can see from the images and text below, someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create this ‘product’.

However, the Smell of Books is just one of a range of unexpected items produced by DuroSport Electronics. These include the DuroSport, a digital music player that no longer supports MP3 format songs. The DuroSport website links to the Prism DuroSport Insider Blog which contains many long and detailed posts written by Vladimir Concescu, the Chief Product Engineer at the DuroSport Electric Company.

I have included a photo of him below to indicate the nature of this site.

Either ‘Vladimir’ has too much time on his hands, or is working to some kind of agenda I can’t fathom.

New Book Smell

The smell of e-books just got better

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?

Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?

If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.

But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.

Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.

Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

The latest example is the the website devoted to selling

2 April 2009

I was an April fool, but it’s no joke for SlideShare

I have always been a fan of April fool stories. My previous job included producing a daily press cuttings service for my organisation, and I used to look forward to trying to find all the April 1 ‘news stories’ for inclusion. One of my all time favourites was from the Daily Mirror announcing that the Channel tunnel diggers had struck gold half-way to France.

The big ‘story’ from today has been the Guardian newspaper letting its loyal readers know that it would shortly be giving up on old fashioned ink and paper. Instead they would switch to Twitter for all future news coverage. The Twitter switch for Guardian article has some lovely touches about the benefits of reducing all news to 140 characters. Even going back intto their archives to ‘re-write’ history;

Major stories already completed include:

“1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”;

“OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”;

and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

On a less amusing note I received an email today from SlideShare (a free service I blogged about in 2007).

Hi infield,
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right. 😉
Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.
Congratulations, SlideShare Team

I checked my three presentations and sure enough one of them had rocketed to 751 views. This was something of a surprise and perhaps I should have been suspicious. However, it took a blog post from Phil Bradley (Slideshare April Fool joke goes disastrously wrong), before I realised I had been conned.

As Phil points out, SlideShare have made ,”a huge error”;
I don’t appreciate anyone manipulating data on my content. That SlideShare are so relaxed about this, and feel they can do what they like is really sending entirely the wrong message about how they view users and content.

To be fair to the authors of this ‘prank’ have confessed their sins on Phil’s blog, and apologised to their customers;

Phil,
My sincere, personal apologies. Its just an April Fool’s prank. I understand why you are upset, however, we did not mean to offend our users who we love. But I can see your perspective.
Rashmi, CEO & Cofounder, SlideShare

I think I can forgive them this time, but fear many of their customers may move to rival services as a result.

5 March 2009

India moves to patent yoga poses

On first inspection this would be filed under ‘Friday fun’, although it was drawn to my attention by an email from a customer who wanted the official British Library view on the Daily Telegraph story.

Needles to say, we don’t have a view, but I have to say I was amazed to to discover that yoga positions could be protected:

“Copyrights over yoga postures and trademarks on yoga tools have become rampant in the West. Till now, we have traced 130 yoga-related patents in the US. We hope to finish putting on record at least 1500 yoga postures by the end of 2009,” said Dr V.P Gupta, of the CSIR, who created the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.

And even more surprised to hear how the Indian government has reacted:

So far a team of yoga gurus from nine schools have worked with government officials and 200 scientists from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) to scan 35 ancient texts including the Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Bhagwad Gita, and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras to register each native pose.

The topic even has its own Wikipedia page entitled Yoga Piracy.