I’m of course talking about their magazine blog: ‘How to Say’ (link opens in new window/tab).

it’s great, but, kind of a giveaway about exactly how many people will give up trying to read it if you have to publish an instruction/translation guide to go with it :X

“BBC TEXT SPELLING

Written pronunciations are given in a text spelling system based on English spelling conventions.

It is based on English sounds with the addition of some other sounds such as Welsh ll and the front rounded vowels found in French and German.

Syllables are separated by hyphens. Stressed syllables are given in CAPITALS.

Example: the word pronunciation would be respelt pruh-nun-si-AY-shuhn.

Vowels

a as in hat

aa as in father

arr as in marry

ar as in bar

air as in hair

aw as in law

ay as in day

e as in get

err as in merry

ee as in meet

eer as in deer

i as in sit

irr as in mirror

o as in top

orr as in sorry

oh as in no

oo as in boot

oor as in poor

or as in corn

ow as in now

oy as in boy

u as in cup

uh as in ago / the

ur as in fur

urr as in hurry

uu as in book

y as in cry (also igh as in high)

oe as in French peu or coeur

oey as in French fauteuil

ue as in French vu or German fünf

Consonants

b as in bat

ch or tch as in church

d as in day

f as in fat

g as in get

h as in hat

hl as in Welsh llan

j as in Jack

k as in king

kh as in Scottish loch

or German ich

l as in leg

m as in man

n as in not

ng as in sing

ng-g as in finger

nk as in thank

p as in pen

r as in red

s as in sit

sh as in shop

t as in top

th as in thin

dh as in there

v as in van

w as in will

y as in yes

z as in zebra

zh as in measure

(ng) after a vowel indicates nasalization; as in French un bon vin blanc: oe(ng) bo(ng) va(ng) blaa(ng).

y between a consonant and a vowel is a glide: e.g. mute: myoot; manual: MAN-yoo-uhl.

Our respellings acknowledge word-final or pre-consonantal R, as in words like party and hair, which is pronounced in some accents of English (rhotic) and not in others (non-rhotic). Therefore Parker is transcribed as PAR-kuhr, not PAA-kuh, and the rs will be pronounced or not according to the speaker’s accent.
The way the words are broken into syllables in the respelling is not an attempt to reflect actual syllabification in a given language. Instead, it is a tool to reinforce vowel pronunciations and to ensure the most intuitive transcription. When a vowel is long, the following consonant will be placed after the hyphen, as in PEE-tuhr for Peter. When a vowel is short, the consonant goes immediately after the vowel, before the hyphen, as in JEN-i for Jenny. – source BBC How to Say.

funny.

As an aside, if YOU are opposed to service cuts in the BBC, or think the wrong services are going, this is your opportunity to VOICE YOUR OPINION AND HAVE IT HEARD (opens in new window/tab). Tell them how YOU want YOUR licence fee to be spent. And do it eloquently, PLEASE!

Charlie

Now, I purchased The Hell of It All, because I have an insane erotic desire for this man. But this is beside point, as I was thumbing through it, I happened upon the following exerpt, from a 2007 ‘Comment is Free’. I don’t know why but now more than ever it makes me laugh, and I can agree with it wholeheartedly, despite only being a legal ‘clubber’ and drinker for the past 2-and-a-half years. I think perhaps my dissertation has sapped the will to live like a normal student out of me. Perhaps this is why I’ve turned into a hermit in everything but nomenclature. One thing’s certain, I don’t think I’ve taken a camera out with me on a night out for over a year. Now that’s some serious documentation failure, what kind of 20-year-old female am I? Anyway, I’ll get to posting the funnies though, because that’s what this post was for:

I went to a fashionable London nightclub on Saturday. Not the sort of sentence I get to write very often, because I enjoy nightclubs less than I enjoy eating wool. But a glamorous friend of mine was there to “do a PA”, and she’d invited me and some curious friends along because we wanted to see precisely what “doing a PA” consists of. Turns out doing a public appearance largely entails sitting around drinking free champagne and generally just “being there”.Obviously, at 36, I was more than a decade older than almost everyone else, and subsequently may as well have been smeared head to toe with pus. People regarded me with a combination of pity and disgust. To complete the circuit, I spent the night wearing the expression of a man waking up to Christmas in a prison cell.

“I’m too old to enjoy this,” I thought. And then remembered I’ve always felt this way about clubs. And I mean all clubs – from the cheesiest downmarket sickbucket to the coolest cutting-edge hark-at-us poncehole. I hated them when I was 19 and I hate them today. I just don’t have to pretend any more.

I’m convinced no one actually likes clubs. It’s a conspiracy. We’ve been told they’re cool and fun; that only “saddoes” dislike them. And no one in our pathetic little pre-apocalyptic timebubble wants to be labelled “sad” – it’s like being officially declared worthless by the state. So we muster a grin and go out on the town in our millions.

Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one’s going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs?

“Because you might get a shag,” is the usual response. Really? If that’s the only way you can find a partner – preening and jigging about like a desperate animal – you shouldn’t be attempting to breed in the first place. What’s your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You’re a moron, and so is that haircut you’re trying to impress. Any offspring you eventually blast out should be drowned in a pan before they can do any harm. Or open any more nightclubs.

Even if you somehow avoid reproducing, isn’t it a lot of hard work for very little reward? Seven hours hopping about in a hellish, reverberating bunker in exchange for sharing 64 febrile, panting pelvic thrusts with someone who’ll snore and dribble into your pillow till 11 o’clock in the morning, before waking up beside you with their hair in a mess, blinking like a dizzy cat and smelling vaguely like a ham baguette? Really, why bother? Why not just stay at home punching yourself in the face? Invite a few friends round and make a night of it. It’ll be more fun than a club.

Anyway, back to Saturday night, and apart from the age gap, two other things stuck me. Firstly, everyone had clearly spent far too long perfecting their appearance. I used to feel intimidated by people like this; now I see them as walking insecurity beacons, slaves to the perceived judgment of others, trapped within a self- perpetuating circle of crushing status anxiety. I’d still secretly like to be them, of course, but at least these days I can temporarily erect a veneer of defensive, sneering superiority. I’ve progressed that far.

The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah – but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more – you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

Mind you, since in about 20 years’ time these same people will be standing waist-deep in skeletons, in an arid post-nuclear wasteland, clubbing each other to death in a fight for the last remaining glass of water, perhaps they’re wise to enjoy these carefree moments while they last. Even if they’re only pretending.

“Charlie Brooker is a Guardian columnist. He currently writes Screen burn, a G2 comment piece every Monday and he produces, writes and presents Screenwipe, Newswipe and Gameswipe for the BBC”

The Great Betrayal

Yes, a girl was in our midst! This normally wouldn’t be an issue, not for normal people with working moral compasses, anyway. This led to a great betrayal involving two boys and one girl, now there is one boy, one girl, and a bunch of very confused ‘ex-friends’ or ‘university friends’ as we’re called. The disposable ones, apparently.  The rest of the group have disbanded from these two people, in a bid to stop associating with those who have upset them. This caused a great deal of sadness on my part as the boy was a very close friend of mine and he has forsaken the mantra ‘Bros before Hos’. Very sad. See?

My Foot

I refused to call an ambulance until I'd got a good picture.

Shortly after that debacle I fell down some stairs. HA! Not that funny actually, quite painful and resulted in five hours in Selly Oak Hospital Accident and Emergency and I also am still feeling the pain now. Luckily for me I was given the great privelege of hobbling around Selly Oak on two crutches with my foot cemented into a roboboot for the coming months. LOVERLYYYY! Anyway, what supposedly happened was that I tore all the ligaments, and got a hairline fracture on the bone. Another lovely. They treat torn ligaments in the same way as they do broken bones, which is to hold it in place until it’s healed (mine probably hasn’t, there’s been a dull ache there ever since and if I stand in the shower I notice it most), anyway this meant I had the roboboot, had to ‘keep my feet up’ etc etc. It was a most humiliating furore. Mostly.

Snow, Snow, More Snow, and an Almost Aborted Trip to Worcester

Yes, when out of my window I did spyeth the most lovelieth white carpet of pure white, fresh driven snow it did exciteth me. But, as with the rest of England and Great Britain, I soon grew weary of it. London ground to a standstill again. And London being the centre of the universe received the majority of news coverage, despite other areas of the country just ‘getting on with it’ and ‘manning up’, to use a few kinder phrases. There were deaths, accidents, lock-ins, lock-ups, slip-ups, slip-overs, A&Es were full to bursting with ice and snow related injuries and you could see that news anchors’ eyes

The view from my window

had glazed over through sheer boredom when having to express joy at how ‘wonderful’ the viewers’ pictures of snow in their area looked. I only took a few pictures of this. Only a few. This one being the most easily to hand of the few that I took. I digress. This snow nearly put a stopper on a trip which we had had planned since the summer. It was my cousin Daniel’s 30th Birthday party at a big manor house in Worcestershire. I was apprehensive enough about the whole affair… My dad’s car got stuck in the snow trying to climb a hill to pick me up, nearly got crushed by a jack-knifing lorry, nearly called the whole trip off until some kind strangers helped dig them out. The trip was once again ‘on’ and we went and had a lovely time at a very pretty house and I met people who I hadn’t seen since I was “YE HIGH!” or “knee-high to a grasshopper”… ah Northerners and their silly turns of phrase…

Park Hall House, Worcestershire, Nr. Kidderminster.

Christmas & New Year & Beyond

Christmas was a rather boring affair all-in-all, the usual stuff happened, and on New Year we got drunk in a pub until the sun came up, which is also a pretty normal activity I suppose. The whole season was somewhat blighted by the fact that I was questioning whether or not to come back to university, as I’d been ill with viruses such as swine flu, and bronchitis and the common cold and an intestinal virus over the semester which whilst unremarkable in themselves had contributed to me being incredibly behind in my work. In fact, I’m still incredibly behind now. Except that now, I’m incredibly behind, owe my landlord money, and am probably definitely at least taking a leave of absence. There is no way I am going to get a 12,000 word dissertation started finished and perfected before April now. So yes. That’s the long and short of it, I am a lousy blogger, a lousy student and a lousy… non-tearer-of-ligaments. What’s been going on with you?

this is me in a past, present or future life. probably.

So. I’m currently sniffing a bag of ‘Indian Elephant Farm’ Coffee, and typing on a far-too-expensive-laptop, not belonging to me. Whilst I wait for the coffee to filter, I figure I’ll fill out my first blog post.

Mmmk, so I do the twitter thing, obviously, you can see that there ->

I guess I just like to tell people about awesome things I see, hear, learn or ingest, and that’s what this little space is for. I also wanted to make some time to start writing again because it’s something I always liked to torture other people with in a passive aggressive way.

I can see this blog going in one direction only, and that is, that where it ends up, people will only stumble across it through a chance google of terms that may or may not come up here. That’s fine, I don’t mind that I may be the one and only person reading it ever. There’s reasons why I think this also.

1) I say things that a lot of people don’t like or agree with.
2) I don’t tolerate people preaching at me for the above.
3) I’m not a full-blown narcissist and may let the blog fall into disrepair on a regular basis.
4) People find it hard to tell when I’m joking.

For the 4th and final point, I will introduce a system whereby I denote using asterisks when I’m joking. i.e. *SARCASM, DUMMY* etc. this way, I will probably offend 90% less people than I would if I neglected this aspect of my personality online.

I was able to type slightly more in this blog than I anticipated thanks to the fact that some idiot put my coffee at the back of the fridge, it froze, and I had to defrost it. HURRAH FOR OBSTACLES!

Anyway, this is me, and my ‘MLIA’ channelling page, and my next blog post will be after this one at some point in time, and about some sort of subject matter that interests me like… scrabble, or derren brown, or acid. TOODLES