BAD GRAMMAR MAKES ME [SIC]

I like this and had to share it

It was an early start for me today. I caught the first bus to come up North. I read the NZ Herald cover to cover on the way up which is rare for me. It's still OK for a newspaper in a time where newspapers are failing and being dumbed down. The competition is from trivial social media and 'news' websites that are being written by illiterates.

Last night The Old Girl and I ate out with old friend Geoff and we were discussing how the standards of news, whether written or broadcast, have slipped over the years. I recounted how yesterday a Yahoo news item caught my attention. It had a headline about a man (a butcher) who butchered his wife on the West Coast and had been sentenced to 17 years in prison. I hadn't heard about this so I followed the link. It was the guy who had bought the Blackball salami operation. He and his wife (now ex wife) had come to New Zealand from Scotland 5 years ago and bought the business that subsequently went sour. The newspaper report that I was directed to was by The Sun in the U.K. Now I know that the Sun is not the greatest newspaper but the standard of the writing in this report was atrocious. The grammar was bad. It was full of inaccuracies and the little twit who wrote it didn't properly use spell-check so that words were in the wrong context. I would have thought that in the U.K. even newspapers like The Sun would attract journalists with some education.

We got talking about how New Zealand television, which used to have high standards and produced and broadcast quality offerings, has followed the dumbing down path. TVOne seems to have taken the greatest dive. Quality and informative news programmes have had a gradual decline (started with Paul Holmes) to reach its current nadir. Seven Sharp is pathetic and downright embarrassing and Breakfast has long been a joke more akin to drive-time radio idiocy than a news programme.

We watch TV3 in the mornings (for about 20 minutes before all the content gets re-cycled) and then switch to Al Jazeera and BBC World News.

Which brings me to the main reason I'm writing a post about this.
My other main source of news let me down this morning. Richard's Bass Bag didn't post this morning. There was no update on what day of the week it is. We don't have any new insights into the reasons why god doesn't or shouldn't exist. Furthermore we don't know how Richard is going on his quest to do 3,000 hours of double bass practical joking practice.

"Rain fade. Transmission interrupted"