The following is the most popular tweet I have ever written. (In fact, the only tweet I’ve ever made which has seriously gone viral in any meaningful way.)
BBC News front page: "Five convicted in paedophile case". One of Enid Blyton's less popular books.
— mumoss (@mumoss) November 2, 2011
Back in 2010 – long before this bugger was released – I created an I’m Alan Partridge soundtrack album. It featured not only songs from the show, but also clips and jingles and a few surprises, hopefully all mixed together in something approaching a fun way. It’s by far the best thing I’ve done on this site, and it’s been a slow inexorable decline ever since.
Originally it was hosted by MediaFire, until it got booted off for copyright infringement. Then it was hosted on my Dropbox, where amazingly it managed to survive until very recently. But with the latest disabling of all Dropbox public folders, it managed to fall offline yet again. So I thought it was about time I uploaded it somewhere legal rather than trying my luck once more.
Enjoy.
Now, I really must get round to making that Maid Marian and Her Merry Men album…
Congratulations, apologising in a red alert situation, a new record time: 220 days, 14 hours, and 33 minutes.
Yes, seven months after this unpleasantness, Nico Hines has finally said sorry. Though to be honest, I don’t really want to dwell on his apology too much. Seven months is far too late, and I really don’t feel anything behind his words.1
But Nico himself always bothered me less than The Daily Beast as a whole in this story. And the worst thing about that article is the “Editor’s Note” attached to it. Here is the most pertinent section:
“We’ve said it before: as a newsroom we succeed together and we fail together. Our belief in this has not changed. After months of internal review and discussion – made more poignant by our current national climate – we as a newsroom are as mindful and committed as ever to the responsibility we have as independent journalists to not only tell the truth but further the public good. We will continue to stand up to bullies and bigots, value an inclusive culture and be a proud and supportive voice for the LGBTQ community.”
Here’s the thing. It’s all very well saying you’ve had a lengthy “internal review”. But without reporting the results of that review, any repeated apologies are pointless. The really important thing about this story isn’t Nico Hines’s behaviour, however pathetic it’s been. The important thing is the complete and utter failure of The Daily Beast’s editorial processes. And after seven months, The Daily Beast STILL doesn’t seem to get this.
I don’t mind them saying they succeed or fail as a newsroom together. I have no problem with that. But they still haven’t managed to explain how the bloody hell they failed.
This is not an impossible thing to do properly. I point everyone yet again to how Grantland dealt with a similar controversy. I’m not going to quote any of that again here – it’s worth reading the whole thing in full. And after reading it, you have a full understanding of exactly what their editorial process were, how they failed, and exactly what they did to improve them – and not in generalities, but how they applied to their specific error in judgement. In excruciating and excoriating detail.
All we’ve had from The Daily Beast are vague apologies, and promises to do better. For some mistakes, that’s enough. Not this. The potential consequences of this one were just too dire to hand-wave away. As it is, they’ve had seven months to tell us what really happened, and they’ve failed. At this point, they clearly have no intention of actually doing what they really need to do.
Nico Hines may well have gone on a leisurely seven month journey to enlightenment, but The Daily Beast as a whole clearly haven’t. I will waste precisely zero further time on them.
Incidentally, isn’t it weird that Nico Hines hasn’t tweeted a link to his apology? And yet he’s updated his bio to remove the reference to Rio. Hmmmmmm. ↩
The Cook Report, 26th November 1996, ITV, 8:30pm:
ROGER COOK: Colin Stagg was the the prime suspect in the Rachel Nickell murder case. He was charged after an undercover policewoman enticed him to talk about his fantasies of sex and violence. A judge threw the case out before a jury was even sworn in, and condemned the murder squad’s tactics. Although innocent in the eyes of the law, many people still see him as guilty.
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
COLIN STAGG: There’s nothing there to tie me in with any crime whatsoever.
ROGER COOK: There’s no forensic evidence.
COLIN STAGG: No forensic, no.
ROGER COOK: Which there wouldn’t be, one would think, after two months. If there had been, it would have gone, wouldn’t it?
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
COLIN STAGG: Nobody can remember what they were watching on TV two months ago, at a certain time, but it was around about that time quiz programmes were coming on.
ROGER COOK: So it fitted what you needed to say, some people might say?
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
ROGER COOK: Question 28 on the lie detector test said “Are you a violent man?” – and you said…
COLIN STAGG: I said no.
ROGER COOK: Right. Did you stab your brother?
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
ROGER COOK: There are two good examples of violence there.
COLIN STAGG: I was reacting like any normal human being would.
ROGER COOK: Well, that’s for others to judge, I guess. Some people though would say that this is another example of your continuing inconsistencies, and that there have been so many untruths, so many lies told, perhaps you don’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
ROGER COOK: In all, Lizzie James was sent dozens of letters, each more revolting and sexually depraved than the last, some disturbingly similar to the attack on Rachel.
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.1
ROGER COOK: But the lie detector was only one of three tests we asked Colin Stagg to take. We also took him to a hypnotist used by many doctors, who told us he’d resisted all attempts to induce hypnosis. And after a psychiatrist explained that the truth drug – though completely safe – was also difficult to defeat, he finally refused to take it.
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
ROGER COOK: Yet all these other questions, Colin Stagg, remain unanswered.
COLIN STAGG: I’ve answered them as best as I could, and I did my best.
ROGER COOK: Then it’s up to the viewers to decide who to believe.
COLIN STAGG: Fair enough.
Stagg was found not guilty. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell in 2008.
* * *
One final thing, in case anyone thinks that all this is very easy to point out with the benefit of hindsight. When Colin Stagg was acquitted in 1994, Justice Ognall said the honeytrap set by the Met police was “not merely an excess of zeal, but a blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind”.
That was 1994. This episode of The Cook Report was 1996. And yet it constantly relies on clip after clip after clip of Stagg’s police interview, along with Cook stating the police’s point of view over and over again.
To call this programme reprehensible doesn’t need hindsight. It’s the fact the programme entirely missed the actual story which was plainly in front of them which is hard to believe.
Thank fuck Roger Cook doesn’t have access to my browser history. He’d have me down as Jack the Ripper within minutes. ↩
Despite howls of protest – at least among the hardcore users – Twitter is obsessed with trying to give us non-chronological timelines. And not just with its show “best” tweets first feature – at least that can be turned off. No, we’re talking about the dreaded ‘In Case You Missed It’, cluttering up our timelines something rotten. Which you can helpfully request to be shown less often… but can’t switch off entirely.
Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much if those tweets you missed were actually worth catching. But in my experience, they so rarely are. Still, as an extremely unscientific test, I asked people to send me examples of my own tweets which Twitter somehow thought they needed to see again. With thanks to Mike Scott, Paul Buckle, Richard Goodwin, and David Swallow, here’s what delights from my feed Twitter thought needed a second chance.
Daring Fireball, 15th March 2017:
Jon Rubinstein Named Co-CEO of World’s Biggest Hedge Fund, Fired 10 Months Later
Mary Childs, reporting for The Financial Times 10 months ago:
Bridgewater has chosen former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein as the new co-chief executive of the world’s biggest hedge fund, replacing Greg Jensen as part of a 10-year handover from founder Ray Dalio.
Mr Rubinstein, who also sits on the boards of Amazon.com and Qualcomm, is expected to join Bridgewater in May and to share the co-CEO role with Eileen Murray.
Now:
Bridgewater Associates co-CEO Jon Rubinstein is stepping down and transitioning to an external advisory role in April after 10 months on the job, the firm told clients in a note Wednesday.
“While over the last ten months Jon has helped build a plan to re-design our core technology platform and has brought in a group of extremely talented executives to build out our technology leadership, we mutually agree that he is not a cultural fit for Bridgewater,” Bridgewater founder, chairman, and co-CIO Ray Dalio wrote in the note.
Except that this isn’t how this piece was written when it was first published. It originally went as follows:
Jon Rubinstein Named Co-CEO of World’s Biggest Hedge Fund
Mary Childs, reporting for The Financial Times:
Bridgewater has chosen former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein as the new co-chief executive of the world’s biggest hedge fund, replacing Greg Jensen as part of a 10-year handover from founder Ray Dalio.
Mr Rubinstein, who also sits on the boards of Amazon.com and Qualcomm, is expected to join Bridgewater in May and to share the co-CEO role with Eileen Murray.
Not where I expected Rubinstein to wind up.
Screengrab here, taken from Google’s cache.1
What’s happened is pretty clear. John Gruber originally saw the FT article about Jon Rubinstein, didn’t clock that it was from ten months ago, and published in haste. Once he saw that the news was out of date, and Rubinstein was actually stepping down, he edited the article to correct the error… but didn’t mention his correction anywhere.
Not exactly fake news of the century, of course. Still, I thought it was worth pointing out, if only because Gruber is one of the good guys. And as the good guys, we should all be as transparent as possible about what we write. If we fuck up, even on a small piece such as this, we need to admit it. Otherwise, who knows what other mysterious edits happen with Daring Fireball after the fact? The issue is one of trust, and it only takes a small breach of that trust to make you doubt an entire site.
I could happily go back through Dirty Feed’s archives and do some nifty editing to ensure I’ve always been right about everything first time. But it’d be a pretty dishonest way to write.
No idea why the spacing is incorrect on the navigation bar there, but I thought editing to make it correct wouldn’t be in the spirit of this article. ↩
Recently, I wrote a little piece over on Ganymede & Titan which was ostensibly about the popular science fiction comedy series Red Dwarf. In fact, it was bugger all to do with Red Dwarf. It was actually about the transient nature of the web – a bit of a recurring theme of mine these days.
To summarise, then: I went back and looked at a random day of G&T’s output from ten years ago – and the result surprised even me. Every single external link used in those news stories from 10 years ago no longer works correctly. I expected some – perhaps even most – to be dead. But every single one to succumb to linkrot? That’s completely ridiculous.
“Our biggest struggle after filming the pilot was cutting it down to time. We were something like six minutes long, which is a lot. We cut and cut and cut some more. We cut things we liked and we cut things we loved. Still, after 6 or 7 passes at the show we were still a minute long. We felt we had cut it to the bare bones. Any more cuts could damage the show so we went to Paramount with our dilemma. Thankfully, they agreed with us and asked NBC to give us some extra time. After viewing what we hoped would be our final cut, NBC agreed to give us that extra minute which was a very big favor. So, how do they come up with that extra minute of programming time for us? Don’t think that all they have to do is cut a commercial or two. Are you crazy? That’s money. No, to give us that extra minute, they asked the three other comedies and one drama on that Thursday night to each cut 15 seconds out of their programs. It’s not something that’s done very often and it’s not something the network likes to do, but for that pilot of Frasier they felt it was worth it.”
— How Frasier Came To Be (Part 3), Peter Casey, December 2006
Six minutes, cut out of one of the best sitcom pilots ever made? Oh, man, wouldn’t it be amazing to see what was cut? But I guess we’ll never find out, unless there happens to be a script of the pilot hanging around online anywhere…
…oh, hello. Marked “REVISED FINAL DRAFT”, and dated April 29th 1993. Let’s dig right in.
Material which is only in the script is indicated like this; material which is only in the episode as broadcast is indicated like this. I won’t detail every single difference in phrasing between the script and the final show, minor trims to dialogue, or every change in staging, but all major differences will be noted.1
If you want to see every little difference, I suggest you watch the final episode and read through the script at the same time. Note how Kelsey Grammer often slightly rewords his lines. ↩
It’s a normal day, and as usual, an innocuous tweet sends me into a spiral of links.
Fine, I forgive Alyssa Milano for that whole Tweetie 2 thing. https://t.co/Qr41iFyTQ0
— Guy English (@gte) February 10, 2017
Alyssa Milano? Tweetie 2? What’s all that about?
One quick Google search later leads us to this Business Insider article, from 2009:
“B-list bombshell Alyssa Milano, a self-professed Twitter addict, is also apparently a cheapskate. And it has the iPhone nerds very amused.
Yesterday, after finding out that Tweetie 2, a major update to the popular iPhone Twitter app, would cost $2.99, she tweeted: “Boooooo!!!”
This triggered a bit of an uproar from the iPhone developer community, half-amused and half-angered that a celebrity would be such a cheapskate to complain about paying $3 for a software app she could end up using for hours a week. (And that an independent programmer just spent months working on.)”
Ah.
“Responding to someone else’s complaint about the upgrade price, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber made two solid points:
- If you don’t think it’s worth $3, don’t buy it.
- Keep in mind we’re talking about $3 for an app that only runs on handheld devices that cost at least $200, most of which come with a $70/month service.
Both valid. And, seriously… it’s just $3!”
Oooh, what’s that, a Daring Fireball link? What else did John Gruber have to say about the subject?1
“Jeff LaMarche has a sharp response to this goofy rant by Patrick Jordan complaining that the upcoming Tweetie 2, which costs just $3, is not a free upgrade for existing users.”
Excellent, a goofy rant to laugh at:
“My thought is that this is a very,very,very Bad Call. I just can ‘t find a way to think of this as anything less than spitting in the face of existing Tweetie users.”
Your article is bad and you should feel bad.
Enough of that nonsense. Let’s read Jeff LaMarche’s rebuttal post:
“Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”
For fuck’s sake.
OK, OK, so you can read Jeff’s post via the Wayback Machine. And seeing as that post is called “A Sense of Entitlement”, I guess I have to be really careful about what I say next.
So I’ll just say this: it’s really, really annoying when a badly-written piece of tosh manages to stay online, and a thorough and well-reasoned argument ends up being deleted. God knows the world needs more well-argued pieces, and less goofy rants. For the crap piece to survive and the good piece to fall offline just feels fundamentally wrong.
Think about what you leave behind. At first glance this looks like a silly story… but it touches on issues of real importance about paying developers for their work. That’s a topic which is well worth looking back on, and very little has changed today. Don’t delete your part of the story.
Otherwise, you risk leaving the public record to just be a series of goofy rants.
Placement of link adjusted for readability. ↩
Over the years, I’ve used many sites as a research tool for writing about comedy. Hey, I’m sure a lot of you know this one, run by a certain Philip Hill. I used to reference his episode guides constantly – in fact, for many years, it was the very first place I looked to for TX dates.
What you may not know about the site: it’s now gone. Disappeared offline. The last version the Wayback Machine has archived is from June 2016. And the WHOIS indicates the domain phill.co.uk has a brand new owner from January this year.
It’s perhaps worth noting that while the site remained online until 2016, it stopped updating long before that. The listing for Citizen Khan only details the show’s first series; before the site fell offline there had been four complete series broadcast. A quick check in the Wayback Machine indicates the site had indeed been dormant since 2012.
As far as I can tell, there is no indication anywhere of what happened to the site. Perhaps Philip got bored with his hobby. Perhaps personal circumstances took precedence. Perhaps he gazed over at Wikipedia, and thought there was little point in carrying on with episode guides. We’ll probably never know.
So I will shed a small tear for a site which was tirelessly updated for years, was an endlessly useful and widely-referenced resource… and has ended up disappearing into the digital ether. Whether it was ever going to be updated again or not, the site deserved better than to just fall offline, with no warning or goodbye.
As ever, let’s try to remember this stuff.
