I can’t speak, read or write Welsh, so I haven’t got the slightest idea what gyfieithu means. Neither did Swansea council when they put up this bilingual road sign:
From the BBC:
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council […]
Another 9/11 anniversary. Three thousand dead. A terrible tragedy. A horrific crime.
Five and a half years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a million dead, give or take a hundred thousand or so. So much destroyed, so many dead they have to be counted by survey like voters in an opinion poll. No […]
On August 13, ITN’s John Ray was arrested while covering a protest in Beijing:
Police in Beijing roughed up and detained a British journalist after he covered a Free Tibet protest close to the city’s main Olympic zone earlier today.
The incident appeared to be the clearest breach yet of the host nation’s promise of free media […]
This blog is a disgrace. I haven’t posted a single thing since May. I was tired. Sorry! There may or may not be some sporadic posting this month, but I’m now on holiday so I might not do anything much at all. Normal (i.e. equally irregular) posting should resume in August.
But for today, a look […]
With all the Tibet furore, I missed the release of the BBC World Service poll (PDF) measuring views on the positive and negative influence of various countries around the world. The BBC leads with the United States. Not surprisingly, I’m more interested in China. But Americans might be disturbed to know that the world thinks […]
There is some anger being expressed by Chinese citizens about foreign media reporting on the Tibet protests and violence. To a certain extent it is justified. Showing pictures of Nepali security forces beating Tibetan protesters and labeling those pictures as Chinese violence is at best sloppy, at worst a lie. And I keep wondering why […]
An unusual way to learn English:
Could this have been made anywhere but Japan?
There’s a very impressive collection of flags that has been circulating for some time, showing various interesting and disturbing facts about each of the countries involved. I saw it for the first time last night at ProState in Flames. A quick Google search identifies Icaro Doria, a young Brazilian designer, as one of the creators […]
I don’t watch much TV news. You can Fox it up as much as you like with waving flags, crashing sound effects and wizbang graphics splattering the screen. Or you can dress it up as something very, very serious. It’s still just TV news - about as nutritious as a microwaved dinner. It’s not always […]
If ESWN had not linked to Riverbend’s latest post at Baghdad Burning, I might not have known for another week or so that she had finally left Iraq. She hadn’t written since April. It took me about half an hour to read this last sad letter from a country in ruins. Ten minutes to get […]