editorialgirl

Apart from a brief flirtation with Glasgow, I’ve lived in Birmingham all my life. Not all over Birmingham, you understand – just south Birmingham. In fact, for 31 of my 33 years I’ve lived within four miles of my birth. Meh – call me a homebody.

Despite this, I don’t have much of an accent (or so I’m told – although this is mainly by southerners who are probably expecting a “yam yam” black country drawl). I do apparently have a “hard G” (in other words, I pronounce the Gs in words like banging and singing), and the more I drink, the more I go down-then-up at the end of sentences… but I don’t strangulate my vowels, and I certainly don’t say “ar” instead of yes.

So, having been told on many occasions that I “must be a posh Brummie”, I’m regularly surprised to find that words I use all the time are actually West Midlands vernacular.

For example, when giving directions, I’ve always told people to, say, turn left, “at the next island”. Apparently most people only ever call them roundabouts. Who knew?

Likewise, I’ll stop at the garage (pronounced garridge, of course) rather than the petrol station on the way home from the pub. Why has it taken me 30-odd years to find out that “garage” in this context is unique to Midlanders? I’m still not convinced it is!

Some words and phrases are historical and I wonder if Brummies are just being old fashioned by continuing to use them. For example, when I was younger, the off licence at the bottom of the road was “the outdoor”. This dates back to the time when pubs had a separate entrance for off-site sales. But wasn’t that the same all over the country? Why do people in the Midlands still use the word?

Others are just unfathomable. “Wash your donnies”, my mom used to say before lunch. In an effort to make up for using such unbecoming slang, she would hurriedly follow this with “from the French, donner – to give…” She’s right, of course. But how on earth did that little channel-crossing gem happen?

Obviously I don’t want to turn this into a list of local dialect and slang – there are plenty of those around. I just enjoy being genuinely surprised, and wanted to share that. So I could go on (how do you pronounce “tooth”? Have you ever been deffed out, or dismissed as yampy? Does your chip shop sell potato scallops?)… but I won’t. And besides, as my dear departed Nanna used to say: I’m off to the larpom.

So flickr have announced today that Pro members can now post short videos.

My initial reaction was that it’s wrong, all wrong. YouTube is for videos; Flickr is for photos.

Flickr are trying to differentiate their offering (I guess) by limiting video uploads to 90 seconds. They said: “Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of ‘long photos,’ of capturing slices of life to share.”

I posted this on Helluva Forum with a bit of a “pfft” type comment, but then something Maffu said made me think about it differently.

“I think they’re onto something but I think they’ve dug past the gold,” he said. “I really, really like the idea of ‘long photos’, but I think 90 seconds is way, way too long. I’d love to see what people could do with a maximum of two or three seconds of movement. Imagine how much more of the ‘ness’ of an image you could have in these imeos/vidages/vidtures. Think of the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard picks up the picture of (supposedly) Rachel as a child, and for a couple of seconds your can see the shadows of the trees playing across their faces and hear the laughter and the birds singing around them.”

Okay, he lost me with the last bit (not too hot on film references, as you know), but I do see his point and I’m going to strive to make some of these vidages, as well as taking snaps, next time I go out on a shoot.

And I think this is what will make it all right. Only Pro members of Flickr can upload video. These are the people who (should) understand where flickr is coming from. How many of them already take video as well as still photography? This will give them somewhere to put the results, instead of just uploading the photos and leaving the video on the computer. Or, indeed, uploading photos to flickr for peer feedback, and then uploading the video to YouTube to get lost in a sea of mobile phone footage and kittens.

I finally signed up to Twitter this evening. Er … what do I do now? I’m “following” a couple of people (which just makes me feel like a stalker) but, as I mentioned before, I’m a bit frightened that this might just be another way of pointlessly fuelling my internet addiction.

This blog has gone crazy with the hits over the last couple of days. Here’s why:

You sick puppies :o)

Well, no. So why, when someone asked that question in the office this morning, did at least two people nod vigorously and begin to earnestly discuss the poor man’s demise?

I was bemused. Normally, the punchline to the question “did you know Neil Buchanan’s died?” is “yes, he had an Art Attack”. Boom, boom. Had someone misunderstood the joke? “No,” said my colleague, who’d heard the news from her sister. She shook her head gravely. “It was colon cancer. No-one even knew he was ill.”

I checked Google news. I checked the BBC. Nothing, anywhere. I checked Wikipedia, where I found a paragraph dedicated to the “death rumour”. Wikipedia’s source for the rumour pointed me to facebook.

Yes, it seems this current urban myth is down to a facebook group called RIP Neil Buchanan (the art attack guy), which has 9,218 members. The group’s homepage says that he died on 21st March 2008 after “a long struggle against cancer of the colon”. Eh?

But wait. A comment underneath, presumably by the groups’s admin Nick Hernshaw says: “It has been recently suggested that Neil is still with us, contrary to announcements on several radio broadcasts and on blue peter (bbc!). If you are in anyway offended or consider being disrespectful to this group, please bear in mind, that even if you do not necessarily believe, the sole purpose of this group is to show RESPECT for Neil, and this should be done whether he is alive or dead. It would be a shame for the small minority to ruin this opportunity for the majority.”

A bit of backtracking going on there. Sounds like he doesn’t really believe it himself. So was it a genuine misunderstanding? Or was it just set up to see how quickly and how widely a rumour can spread? Pretty damn quickly and widely, it would seem, when it’s on facebook.

Out of interest, I’ve just counted twelve facebook groups set up to debunk the myth, from the jolly sounding “Neil Buchanan is alive and well actually! lets get him back on tv!” (14 members), to the rather more angry “Nick Hernsahw [sic] is a sick cunt…..Neil Buchanan isnt dead” (32 members). However, even adding the membership of all twelve “it’s not true!” groups together, the naysayers have still only got around 300 people on board. The mysterious Nick Hernshaw has nearly 9,000 more. It looks like the rumour will be doing the rounds for a good few weeks yet.