Month: May 2017

Type on the street: Westminster/Data 70

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Westminster was a typeface designed by Leo Maggs in the 1960s, based on the typeface created for the Westminster Bank for cheque scanning in the early days of optical character recognition. See this article for more about its design. That’s why every single letterform is so different from the rest.
In 1970, Letraset released its own typeface called Data 70 which was ‘closely related’ to Westminster. (That’s the way things worked back then.) Westminster was released by Microsoft in various versions of Windows, such as Windows 98.

Photographed in Anstruther, Fife, on 1 May 2017. The shop was closed.

See Fonts in Use for more examples of Westminster and/or Data 70.

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Staring at disaster

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The three Labour leaders who have won general elections since 1945

There is no better guide to the completely bonkers attitude of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, who are on course to lead the British Labour Party to disaster in five weeks time, than this article written on Friday in the Independent.
It was written by a Momentum supporter called Rachel Godfrey-Wood, who obviously remains convinced by the Dear Leader.

As a Momentum member, I’m not disheartened by Labour’s losses in the local elections.The local election results are coming in, and the pundits are predicting doom for Labour in next month’s general election. I could have written that line before we even knew the results – in fact I did – because it relies on two hard facts that were never going to change. Firstly, that these local elections are not nationwide and exclude pretty much everywhere that Labour’s vote share has been improving (for instance, there were no elections in London). Secondly, that large sections of the media are committed to building a narrative against Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour’s army of campaigners were never drawn to the idea of giving up their evenings and weekends by good polling numbers, and they won’t be put off by the odd setback in county council elections.
They have been inspired by a vision for a radically different kind of society – an alternative to the rigged political and economic system in which nurses are using foodbanks and four million children are living in poverty.
It’s the people versus the establishment, and for the first time in my lifetime we have, in Jeremy Corbyn, a potential prime minister who is really on our side.

This guff is symptomatic of the failure to face up to the reality that in seizing control of the party these Momentumites have elected a leader who is so mistrusted by the ordinary Labour voter that they are pushing a once-great party with a proud history to certain doom.

Here is what the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley thinks:

There are only two people in the country still trying to sustain the fiction that the general election is competitive. One is Theresa May. “I don’t take anything for granted,” she says, with the most implausible humble-bragging. The other one playing pretendy politics is Jeremy Corbyn, who has to maintain the line that four weeks of further exposure to him, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell will miraculously change the country’s estimation of their suitability to form the next government.
After Labour had been hammered in areas of Britain that the party had controlled for decades past, he blustered that he was “closing the gap” with the Tories, before going on to claim that he was “loving every bit” of this hopelessly unbalanced fight. I dare him to say that to the faces of the hundreds of decent, loyal, hard-working Labour councillors who have just been fed into the jaws of the Tory munching machine.

Rawnsley concludes:

As Labour stares into the jaws of disaster, it is essential to grasp that there was nothing pre-ordained about this rout. The electoral evisceration of Labour wasn’t written in the stars. Defeat is not to be blamed on the whims of the gods or the tides of the moon. This calamity can’t be put down to the caprice of fate. The Tories were handed this opportunity to smash their way to a big majority because Labour made terrible choices and is under abysmal leadership.

Unfortunately it looks as though Labour will pay the price, and this cost will be expressed not just by the many good Labour MPs who, unfortunately, will lose their seats on 8 June. The greater burden will fall on the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. For this could well be the last time when an election will be held when all its constituent parts will vote for the same Parliament. And it could condemn the Labour Party itself to electoral oblivion.

Looking on this from abroad, I can only despair.

Déjà vu all over again in Sunday Express as columnist writes same story three times

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Reposted from my Dambusters Blog

A colleague sent me a link to this week’s Sunday Express, thinking I would like the fact that it had given me a namecheck and also quoted a commenter on this blog. Fine, I thought at first, but when I looked at it more carefully it did seem to be rather an old story. And so it was.

The article appeared in a column written by Adam Helliker (‘Whispers from the Top: The best informed, most entertaining diary you need to read’) published last Sunday, 30 April 2017. The piece started:

UNLIKE the brave men of Bomber Command who hit those dams so accurately in Germany in the Second World War, the producer who wants to remake the famous film about the raid keeps on missing his target.
It is now more than a decade since Sir Peter Jackson, producer and director of The Lord Of The Rings, declared he was going to remake The Dam Busters.

Sounds familiar? Yes indeed. Here is the ‘best informed’ Mr Helliker, with another of his ‘whispers’, written on 9 August 2015:

UNLIKE the brave men of Bomber Command who hit those dams so accurately in Germany in the Second World War, the producer who wants to remake the famous film about the raid keeps on missing his target.
And with the death of pilot Les Munro, who was to have been the film’s technical adviser, the likelihood of it being made is dropping faster than a bouncing bomb.
Sir Peter Jackson refuses to say when his new version of The Dam Busters will be made.

And if this is not enough for you, here’s where the sequence starts. In what was doubtless named as an exclusive on the day, the ‘most entertaining’ Mr Helliker wrote this on 7 December 2014:

UNLIKE the brave men of Bomber Command who hit those dams so accurately over 70 years ago in Germany, the producer who wants to remake the famous film about the raid keeps on missing his target.
Sir Peter Jackson refuses to say when his new version of The Dam Busters, with a script written by Stephen Fry, will be made. Indeed he professes to becoming increasingly “irritated” when people ask him about it now, even though he has held the rights for five years.

It’s not just the text which is interchangeable in all three versions. Mr Helliker has recycled the same 2014 quote from Sir Peter Jackson: ‘There’s only a limited span I can abide of people driving me nuts asking me when I’m going to do it.’ To add interest, Sir Peter is variously described as ‘being dismissive’, ‘declaring tetchily’, and becoming ‘increasingly irritated’. As indeed he might when he reads this comment for the third time.

The recycling doesn’t stop there. Each article has a quote from a Mr Jim Dooley of the Bomber Command Association. In both 2016 and 2017 he is quoted as saying: ‘It’s a film everyone wants; the original one is always being shown and they wouldn’t do that if there wasn’t an interest in it.’ In 2014, he said: ‘The time to make this film is right now; we are waiting with baited breath. These chaps might not be with us for much longer, and we were hoping for a big opening night to boost funds needed to maintain the new Bomber Command memorial in London.’ So Mr Helliker must have troubled himself to pick up the phone to Mr Dooley on two separate occasions.

Each of the three articles also mentions what Mr Helliker calls ‘chatter’, but seems largely to be generated by him, that the cast of the film will include Colin Firth as Barnes Wallis and Tom Hollander as Guy Gibson. The fact that Tom Hollander (a fine actor, of course) is now in fact 49 and therefore unlikely to be cast as a 24 year old war hero is not mentioned. But original research (such as checking out his Wikipedia entry) doesn’t seem to be Mr Helliker’s forté.

Instead, he just pulls up an old piece he wrote a few months ago, swaps around a few paragraphs and hopes that no one notices. Maybe the line at the top of the page should be changed to ‘Whispers from the Bottom. Recycling old tat every week.’ 

[Thanks to Dom Howard! Full disclosure: the quote in the headline ‘Déjà vu all over again’ is attributed to baseball coach Yogi Berra. Or so it says on his Wikipedia page. ]