Friday 25 January 2013

Jazz Police

This:

plus this:

Bee image from Wikipedia, copyright under Creative Commons licence.

A new emergency service.

In today's world, many new threats to our safety and security have emerged, and new services have been established to fill these needs.  Only a handful of years ago we would not have anticipated the need for the Testicular Extortion Squad, the Interdimensional Transit Authority or the National Deflation Service.  I'm here today to introduce you to a newly-established such undertaking:  the Emergency Punctuation Force.

This was established in response to two separate needs.  The first was the absence of closing paired punctuation marks in some situations.  Unclosed parentheses were responsible for 6912 accidents last year, caused by the distracting discomfort of finishing a passage of text without the satisfaction of a closed parenthesis, and failure to close inverted commas is an even more serious problem.  Victims of unclosed air quotes have been known to cease taking their entire lives literally on a permanent basis, and so far £5 million have been spent on the construction of special homes for these unfortunates.

If you have experienced difficulties of this nature, do not hesitate to contact our operatives.  We will ensure a representative will arrive at your door within ten minutes and do this:  """, this:  """, this:  "(" or this:  ")" at you so you can continue your day in safety.

Far worse than either of these, however, is that scourge of contemporary life, the inappropriate apostrophe.  If you see one of these, please resist the temptation to take the law into your own hands.  Contact us instead.  Within five minutes, highly-trained professionals will attend the site and deploy our latest weapon:  the de-apostrophising ray.

Remember, we are here for you.  Do not hesitate to contact us.  Together, we can cleanse the world of dysfunctional punctuation.

And don't forget our sister service, the Nashunal Speling Ajensee.


is today's offering, largely inspired by Hypergraffiti but with some influence from Leonard Cohen, Scott Pilgrim and Cheap Trick, and maybe a bit of Viz.  It's not terribly good of course, but i hope that doesn't interfere with the humour.  I seem to have some kind of problem with my general demeanour when i try this kind of thing which doesn't happen in real life.  I still had a problem with synching audio and video, which i've tried to fix by inserting stills.  There must be a way to do this more straightforwardly.

The thumbnail also took a needlessly large amount of work:

(Hope it fits).


Another good thing today:  one LordAzanko has said it's a shame i don't have more views because my "History Of English Backwards" video is very interesting.  I think it's partly just a very gradual plod.  I had a dream the other night that i'm climbing a very steep hill with Charlie McDonnell.  Incidentally, try this.  Go to his channel and remember the views and numbers of subscribers, then hit refresh.  You will almost certainly find that the number of subs has gone up by one or two, but the number of views takes longer to change.  I just did it and the former went up by three and the latter stayed the same.  The same thing seems to happen on all the user channels - subs update quicker than views (yes i know, grammar).

Another observation:  compare the illumination on these two frames.  Yesterday's is on the left and today's on the right.  The difference in lighting is due to today's being lit by a disappointingly feeble 20W compact fluorescent tube, which however, has a higher colour temperature than a normal one.  I'm inching my way towards three-point lighting here.

Right:  That's it for today.  Tomorrow will probably be on the theme of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".

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