Schooled!

Aka the home of random, fun and/or useful stuff that may or may not be related to subbing! Sometimes a sub – in the course of fact checking, naturally – comes across some interesting stuff, shared here… read on and get ‘schooled’.

Popular sub-editing bookmarks on Delicious – a quick roundup (Delicious is my most used social media site).

The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks – wish I had “thought” of this!

Yearbook Yourself – and let the American yearbook envy end.

My Tornado Hell – I can’t quite believe this feature (reprinted on link) went past a subs desk. Everyone’s written purple prose at some point but eyewitness Caroline Phillips is now a legend for this feature on a windy day in Kensal Rise. Vomiting clementines, speared floating shelves, non-demurring loss adjustors called Simon, primal screams and a brilliant trauma specialist therapist, all wrapped up in a windy metaphor triple decker sandwich.

LOLcats and other animals
Only recently discovered LOLcats as, yes, having being living in another universe. But also now moving on to LOLdogs, LOLhorses, LOLcelebs and LOLitics. My only question is, what voice do YOU use in reading out the captions?

spEak You’re bRanes
Currently loving this site which cherry-picks the hooman stoopidity that appears daily on the BBC Have Your Say forums. The ‘about’ section puts it this way:

This blog is dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC “Have Your Say” discussions … perhaps the majority of people in the world really are this awful and stupid.

Ace.

Best ever headlines
My favourites on this five-page forum of suggestions are: ‘How do you solve a problem like Korea?’ (The Sun); ‘It’s Worse Than That, I’m Dead Jim!’ (The Sun on the death of Star Trek’s Dr McCoy) and, is this one real?, ‘Churchill flies back to front’.

‘Let me introduce myself, I am Ghosthunter, for now my name is unimportant…’
This West Midlands ghostbuster, who reveals his name to be Adrian not long after, writes spookily funny stuff on, for example, the investigation of the Blades Hair Salon and Café in Dudley. Virtually every line is a winner. Read it in a Black Country accent for maximum effect. Enjoy also the flaming skulls, the ghostly cowboy, the orb between two bar stools, the ‘how we operate’ section and the terminology of ghost hunting. Addicted!