Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
The spring series of The 9pm Edict kicks off in a strange week, especially in British politics and the monarchy. This episode is a disjointed set of personal observations and complaints.
Continue reading “The 9pm Delusion of His Anserine Highness, Princess Timothy of Kew, and Other Observations”
A family in Florida is shocked by some unusual behaviour. Bob Katter talks about his cunning nature. And Scott Morrison continues to be Scott Morrison, telling us he doesn’t trust governments
Continue reading “The 9pm Low-Energy Bob Katter Lovefest with Unexpected Nudity”
The winter series of The 9pm Edict continues with special guest David F Porteous joining us from Edinburgh in the actual Scotland. He’s an author, he’s a social researcher, he’s a podcaster, and he’s a lovely chap to chat with.
Continue reading “The 9pm Extensive Salad-Tossing of the Monarchy with David F Porteous”
I cringe when people talk about the “train station”. “It’s ‘railway station’, you morons,” screams my brain. Well as it turns out, they’re actually not stupid — at least not for that reason. It’s just another relatively modern shift in language.
The chart at the top of the post is a Google Ngram search of their entire English corpus since 1820 — the first public steam railway in the world was the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 — comparing the usage of “railway station” (blue) versus “railroad station” (red) and “train station” (orange).
You can click through to the full-size chart, or run the search yourself.
As you can see, the most common usage has almost always been “railway station”, with “railroad station” distinctly second-place. A “train station” wasn’t even a thing until the 1950s, but it rose in popularity quite quickly. “Train station” has been the most common usage since the mid-1990s, although it has been declining again since around 2000. I wonder why.
My understanding is that many railway terms derived from the military, because until the railways came along nothing else had been organised on that sort of trans-national and even trans-continental scale except armies. Hence trains have “guards” for their safe operation, and “stations” along the line where staff are stationed to maintain the entire railway system — including fuel, water, trackwork and signalling.
Railway stations are therefore part of a railway’s entire operation, not merely “train stations” for trains to stop at. For me, someone talking about “train stations” is showing their ignorance of how railways work: it’s more than just the trains.
Since I had the Google open in front of me, I thought I’d look at the variations in US versus UK English. It seems that “railroad station” isn’t the dominant American usage that I’d imagined.
Continue reading “Why people who say “train station” sound stupid”
I am so many different kinds of expert these days. On Friday I was on SBS TV’s World News talking about the UK’s High Court decision to order the country’s largest internet service provider BT to block access to a website that provides links to pirated movies.
The video of the news story is embedded in the website article.
SBS has also posted the complete 7-minute video of the interview they recorded.
Yes, I’m wearing a hoodie on national television. At least it was a clean hoodie. I’d taken a cab to SBS straight from the airport. It’s actually a small miracle I had any clean clothes with me at all. Besides, the cameraman chose the hoodie over my black shirt because he wanted to “break things up a bit”. The TV news has too many men in suits and business shirts for his liking, it seems.
Earlier this evening I recorded this interview with Iain Dale, who’s keynoting the Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum in Canberra on 1 June. He’s one of the UK’s leading political bloggers, a former Conservative Party politician, publisher of Total Politics magazine and host of the evening show on London’s LBC Radio — amongst other things.
I’d originally intended to use a slab of this in the Patch Monday podcast I do for ZDNet Australia, but it’s not really about technology. Our conversation did touch upon the way political parties use social media such as blogs and Twitter — or, really, why they don’t. But we also covered the attraction of broadcast radio as medium and why it’ll survive, authenticity and much more. So I decided to post the entire recording here as a podcast.
I began by asking Dale about a piece he wrote for The Guardian earlier this month, Is this really the death of political blogging? It turns out the headline is misleading.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:10 — 29.8MB)
For more on Iain Dale, read his Wikipedia entry or follow him on Twitter.
I’ve been thinking of doing a more podcasts of interviews along the lines of this one — not necessarily about politics or technology but whatever strikes my fancy. Indeed, I created the blog post category Conversations for this purpose, although so far I’ve only used it to post random audio I’ve been involved with. What do you think?