I titled this communication Rage. Using that word is wrong, this should really be titled “makes me slightly annoyed with modern life until I forget I saw it”, but that isn’t snappy and so I thought I’d follow the Dail Fail headline writers’ rules.
The following picture gives the options I found on a questionnaire for a company that rates childcare nurseries.
I am happy with the questions. I am very disappointed with the options for answers. This grading system is a bit like Ofsted criteria where satisfactory is bad and good is bad and excellent is the only thing that’s good. My issues are:
- Only three answer options – never give an odd number of possible answers people choose the middle value.
- Poor options – what if I want to say something is poor or bad?
- Poor criteria – what is the difference between good and excellent? This is all very subjective.
These sorts of thoughtless things make my head hurt when trying to figure out what they mean. I dislike things like this and would, if I cared enough, write to them and suggest how to improve their options. It is now time to forget about this questionnaire and to move on to things that are really annoying.
I ought to explain my hatred of the Daily Fail. If I ignore that fact that the company behind the Daily Fail probably doesn’t pay its share of tax (which might not be illegal but is definitely immoral) and ignoring the fact that the newspaper supported the fascists in the 1930s it is still a shockingly bad news website. The newspaper purports to be the moral and ethical backbone of the UK and yet it portrays all manner of poor behaviour and encourages readers to click on the right hand column.
I have big issues with headline writing in the online version of the Daily Fail which is one of the MOST visited websites in the WORLD [sad face]. I rarely read the print version because I get so annoyed by it I want to cause serious damage to the fabric of society that actually buys this shitpaper.
Here’s an example and a link to the original page if you want to:
Loom bands are small coloured rubber bands that people are weaving together to make bracelets and more. They are a productive, creative thing for people to do and I hope the manufacturers are making lots of money from them.
The headline states that a boy was blinded by a loom band.
When you then read the bullet points it turns out that he might be ok after surgery which is still pretty bad but not utter blindness. It also turns out that the boy was struck in his eye after his brother “accidentally” pinged a band at him. So it was the brother’s fault, and therefore, because the brother was young, this was the fault of the supervision of the child not the loom band itself. This is headline writing at its worst. It’s also making a “news” story out of nothing.
This article was written by Mr or Mrs Daily Mail Reporter. Even the staff know this is such a non-story and misleading that they don’t want their name attached to the story.
As for the boy who fell asleep with the bands on his fingers, he’s ok now. His mum took them off and his fingers are fine.
If you read this article [click on the picture] you will notice that the father took PHOTOS before taking off the loom bands. He can’t have been too worried then. If this had happened with boring office rubber bands do you think this would be in the news? No, it’s there because it’s a new children’s fad that Daily Fail writers don’t understand and so they fear the *new*.
Rage and anger and outrage at how such a rubbish website can be one of the most visited. Perhaps I judge by standards that are too high but I would like to think that there is a market for raising the intellectual game and making people *think*.
