Not so much a blog as a dump
And an unfiltered one at that.
This is just a place to squirrel away various brain farts as they occur to me, largely for my own amusement. Most of the entries are piddling reflections on news or common cultural items. If you find it amusing, that's cool; if you find it offensive, it's unintentional; and if you find it enlightening, check your facts.
I don't do Facebook or Instagram, and Twitter's a cesspit of anger management issues, for narcissists and sociopaths to exhibit their mental health problems in public. So this site is a proud member of the antisocial network, if that's not an oxymoron.
Commenting is off, until I figure a usable spam protection; probably never. But I figure that most of the crap that I post here is below any reasonably sane commentary anyway; which just leaves those bloody inane linkbacks. And the interwebz are better off without those, eh kids?
I despise the BBC
There, I said it.
I despise the fact that British citizens are held hostage to an extortion racket: forced to purchase a TV licence in order to watch any broadcast television, even if not the BBC's. It's always been so, but this situation gives the BBC no incentive to up its game, rather to follow its own path which would be editorially laudable if it weren't for the perception that the bloody organisation's being led—if not from the top, then from within where it matters most—by activists. It's grown worse over the years.
I despise the fact that it claims lofty standards, riding on past glory, but so often failing to meet them. The BBC is politically biased, woke—I've come to hate that word, but they made me use it—and sloppy in its reporting and editorial.
On 12 February 2021, in a story entitled China bans BBC World News from broadcasting—a rare example of common sense shown by the CCP—someone at the People's Republic of Portland Place claimed: The BBC is the world's most trusted international news broadcaster and reports on stories from around the world fairly, impartially and without fear or favour.
I don't know whether to bless their little cotton socks for their charming simple-mindedness, or rage at their bare-faced cheek.
Recognising the difference between trusted
and trustworthy
, I have commented on its [cough] trusted reporting
, conducted [cough] without fear or favour
, to [cough] high editorial standards
. I lay no claim to this being an exhaustive analysis, just the items that have crossed my path and struck a chord with my pedantry over time.
Beware! Predators abound in these parts!
There are many posts here—262, actually, with 794 updates—on the subject of skeevy predators despoiling the academic record for profit. They're added not for entertainment purposes—as much as anything here could be considered entertainment—but simply for record-keeping and taking the piss. They're presented neither on the front page to this blog, nor in the next/previous links at the top of other posts, nor by the randomiser.
They can be found in the archive, by using the search facility, or the specific tag: predatory publishing & conferences.
Updated 02.08.2025: added subsection about the BBC.