As a writer myself, I understand the temptation in having a point you want to get across, interviewing a bunch of people and then cherry-picking the responses to support your agenda. However, good journalism shouldn’t have to resort to such tactics (and, to the best of my knowledge, it’s not something I’ve done myself in any articles that have seen print), and certainly not when the resulting article not only takes comments entirely out of context but also ends up borderline libelling those interviewed.

The new offenders of standup comedy by Brian Logan in the Guardian escaped me on publication, but came to my attention today via Twitter. Logan essentially paints Richard Herring and his latest show as utterly racist when it is in fact the opposite. Those people who’ve not seen this material but who’ve no inclination to research further—And why should they? After all, this is an article from a supposedly reputable publication!—will no doubt avoid a show that, ironically, would ideally suit them.

This isn’t nearly the first time the Guardian’s resolved to such hackery, but this is nonetheless a dangerous example, and with a suitably ironic strap: How did things get so nasty? One might ask the same question of Guardian ‘journalism’.

The paper should either apologise or give Herring the right to reply. If it doesn’t, it pretty much proves the point that it’d rather pander to the bullshit brigade than entertain the possibility of good journalism and proper representation, and while one might expect that from current and former red-tops, or the likes of the Mail, that really shouldn’t be the case regarding the Guardian—or perhaps my rose-tinted spectacles need painting a clearer and less nostalgic shade.

Herring himself responds on his blog as does Dave Gorman.

You know what? You can keep your Spotlight, your Cut, Copy & Paste, your MMS and your landscape keyboards, your improved calendar and your Voice Memos* app. With Apple’s latest iPhone OS update, it was a much smaller new feature that made me happy.

Buried in Settings > Phone is a shiny new field: ‘My Number’. For many iPhone owners, this won’t make any odds, but I bought a Pay and Go model, and transferred a number from my old T-Mobile account. Although the transfer was eventually fine, my iPhone resolutely decided that my number (accessible via the Phone app) was the one on the iPhone SIM card, not the one that had been transferred.

As someone notoriously bad at remembering my phone number, this wasn’t great. However, the aforementioned new feature means my Swiss-Cheese memory won’t have the problem again. (And, yeah, I know many other phones have been able to do this for ages—yada yada—but my phone couldn’t.)

* In fact, you really can keep that one, Apple, because I don’t use it, and it’s getting really annoying that you can’t get rid of the default apps. Do we really need Stocks ‘forced’ on us? Gnh.

So I get a call late last night. It’s automated, from my bank, and from an 0845 number I’ve never heard of. It’s about possible fraud and I’m a little suspicious.

I go online to check the number. All I find are blazing arguments in threads stating that either this number is my bank’s genuine fraud department, or it’s a massive scam. People claim they’ve called the bank and been treated well; others argue that these people answering are scammers themselves. The end result is a thread where it appears that the number is a fake.

Despite being sceptical, I’m not stupid, and so I phoned my bank this morning (via its standard call centre number), only to discover from their automated read-out of my statement that a British web hosting company that I’ve never dealt with (www.webfusion.co.uk) tried to take a payment for over £2500 yesterday. Clearly, my card is compromised, and although I do often shop online, I’m absurdly careful about doing so. (In fact, of those people I know who’ve ended up in similar situations, almost all of them have been victims of card cloning, not online fraud.)

This all just goes to show that although the internet is great for many things, it’s not particularly wonderful when it comes to accuracy—nor people actually being helpful when it comes to important things like bank fraud, instead choosing to mislead through ignorance or wilful malice.

While watching the latest Chuck last night (‘Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer’, which, knowing UK TV, aired sometime last year in the USA), Missile Command became a major plot point. Chuck (the show) is harmless fun, but it did highlight a problem in taking history and messing with the truth with merry abandon.

The episode was mostly quite well-written and the revisions not nearly as irksome as, say, Titanic taking First Officer William Murdoch and turning a guy who saved lives into a murderer, but I was nonetheless decidedly uncomfortable at times. The reason? Missile Command is essentially a pacifist game. As ex-Atari guy Greg Rivera mentioned to me in a recent interview: “One of the goals [of the Missile Command team] was to teach the futility of war. No-one ever won Missile Command,” adding that there’s no ‘game over’ in the production, just an ominous ‘THE END’ when all your cities are destroyed. In Chuck, however, Dave Theurer is turned into Atari’s Japanese chief engineer, with terrorist ties.

All shows take liberties with history, and I’m sure no malice was intended by the scriptwriters. But in an increasingly hostile age, it’s a shame to see a fantastic satirical, pacifist statement by a true giant of classic videogames misrepresented in such major fashion. Then again, the concept of a living, breathing, vibrant and bustling Atari HQ in the USA almost makes up for it.

OK, geek alert (and for the return of this blog—for shame!), but I just saw Transformers 2 and an odd thought struck me*: it has an evil Volkswagen. And this made me think: what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals.

If you’re thinking “er, what?”, Volkswagen somewhat recently nixed a major redesign of the Transformer Bumblebee, who was due to join an absurdly detailed toy line (the decidedly ‘not for kids’ Alternators) as a new Volkswagen Beetle. Volkswagen said no, reasoning that the company didn’t want to associate its vehicles with war-themed media. Fair enough—after all, a quick peek into VW’s history shows a somewhat… murky past.

Fast-forward four short years and evil Decepticon Sideways is on Earth in Transformers 2, presumably having fun killing various things. He changes into a silver Audi R8. Audi, of course, is owned by Volkswagen.

Like I said, what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals. Sadly, this isn’t in the slightest a shock.

* And, no, not “why on Earth did I go and see this?”—it’s actually quite fun, if not as fun nor nearly as coherent as the first film. And Bay and co. should really cut down on the racist Autobots, which even give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money.