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a big B:iNS ’shout out’ (ahem) again to Created in Birmingham - the blog that keeps you up to date with anything ‘creative’ in Brum.
this might be a feature they’ve had for a while, but i’ve only just stumbled upon it - for those of you that use Google Calendar to rule your lives, just go here, click a button and all the exhibitons events and that are added to your calendar.
best of all, the CIB goblins do all the updating, so you don’t have to! you may end up never in the house again of course, but that’s at your own risk
now booking: walking tours of John Baskerville’s Brum.
a walking tour of Birmingham City Centre, taking in locations, buildings, artefacts & monuments associated with the celebrated Mr. John Baskerville - printer, type founder, japanner, gravestone carver & atheist. Find out about his contribution to printing and discover an often overlooked slice of Birmingham’s history.
I’m not saying why, or where they are - you can guess if you like. They are all in Brum tho’, I had to make a cut off somewhere and it might leave room for a follow-up that isn’t just Brum. It was actually quite an emotional experience in a couple of places (not to mention dangerous when standing in the midlle of the Pershore Rd to get ‘just the right angle’).
Radio WM’s breakfast show are trying to find Brum’s best cafe. Phil Upton is sending a reporter out all week and then there’s yet another ‘pop idol’ type vote.
Round here, leaving out Mr EGG (which surely qualifies for it’s own national yolk-based award), our favourite is “The Knife & Fork” on the Bristol Road. Also know as the Titanic Cafe:
Western Union Money Trasnfer have been trying to engage the local Sikhs with this poster i think - unfortunate coin-pile-character-turban interface tho.
having filmed our very own bounder romp home in a spectacular booby-prize-winning last place on horsey brummieoftheyear in 2005’s Pantomime Horse Grand National; we only went and forgot (doh) to film B:iNS rep for the 2006 race, Mick riding Airbiscuit, who left the competition standing and actually won the race (yay!).
our 2005 vid:
luckily, today we discovered that chrishamsandwich was up to job and has a couple of vids on youtube.
if you popped along to digital birmingham’s marquee in Victoria Square (to celebrate their first birthday)- as did my other half’s parents - you may well have been impressed with ‘our new digital age’ and all it can do. Visitors got to play with their Wii (hem hem) and find out a little more about podcasting, amongst other techno-marvels.
No doubt you’d have come home drenched in leaflets, for all sorts of services and about a wide variety of subjects.
Good. I’m glad someone’s trying to open up a few minds.
Not good, however, is one particular leaflet “The Guide to Broadband at Home” (published by digital birmingham themselves). It’s littered with advice that is at best dumbed down (its definition of downloading is almost a perfect definition of streaming, for example) and at worst woefully out of date and inaccurate.
If you had no idea to start with, you’d be even more confused.
Some examples:
(from the glossary)
“Netscape Navigator. Software. One of the most popular browsers for accessing the world wide web”. not since about 1990 it hasn’t been. There’s no mention of IE, let alone Firefox, if you were trying to access the web you’d be hunting for out-of date software with huge security holes.
It tells you to “double-click” on a link in web-pages to “get to a second page”. To my knowledge this has never been true.
It refers to “Microsoft Media Player”. Try finding that on your Windows PC - never mind on your Mac ;).
“Window…is the name of a popular program for home PCs”.
i could go on, at the risk of making a few mistakes myself and sounding stupid, it’s woefully edited (spelling and grammatical errors abound - not that we’re ones to talk probably) wrong and confusing.
I deduce that it’s been cut-and-pasted from a website, a crap website, from 1990. It’s not been proofread, edited, or even read by the looks of it. It’s quite simply the worst informational leaflet I’ve ever seen. An absolute disgrace.
They do not know what they’re doing.
“all the words bolded in this Guide are hypertexts, as they take you to an explanation of that word or phrase.” - I’m off to poke the leaflet in the hope of getting something out of it. Then I might edit it and send it back to them for the next print run.
Again to reference Pete Ashton, who has put together something very well thought out about the recent national media coverage of Birmingham. For those who just want to read this post then quickly forget about the whole thing, let me recap;
when directly questioned 48% of surveyed people think manchester is britain’s second city (40% brum, 12% obviously couldn’t give a fig)
we’re the rudest city in the country - according to a survey run to in some was promote a very low ranking supermarket (lower even than Safebury’s in my estimation anyway)
the interior designer fella that people assume is gay, but actually isn’t did a Holiday report on us and recommended us as a weekend break
Pete is very dismissive of all the journalistic work that has gone into the coverage all this, very rightly in the case of the rudeness survey, and seems to pretty much be saying “what’s the point?”. I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong.
I was asked by News 24 and Kerrang! Radio to comment on the second city and rudeness debates respectively - judge for yourself whether asking me constitutes lazy journalism - and in a way i feel a bit guilty in playing their games. I tried to be dismissive about both, after all what does this sort of thing actually prove - and if people think we’re rude then they can just sod off
BUT - while most of Birmingham: It’s Not Shit is really aimed at Brummies, and I’m sure if i was marketing Birmingham to the rest of the country I’d do a little bit less on Carl Chinn and The 11 route and a little more on the Ikon gallery too - through lazy journalism, the national media do display a prejudice against us. And worse, the people that are paid to promote us - to get our retaliation in early - (supposedly - unless these people here are not real) don’t even think they do a good job.
Do we have to be ‘Malmaison’ perfect for Mr Llewelyn-Bowen , or something for Terry Christian to slag off on a slow news week? Can’t we be represented as a fairly huge diverse mass of contradictions?
apparently Birmingham is the new hot destination for city breaks (that’s ‘hot’ as in ‘cool’ not ‘hot’ as in ’scorchio’). Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen investigates as part of this evening’s Holiday 2007 - 7pm, BBC1
