Your abusing are language

Today I want to vent my frustration at some of the careless grammatical mistakes that seem to be becoming increasingly prevalent in written communication and are gradually mangling the beautiful English language into something incomprehensible, yet when the offenders are challenged they fail to even understand what they've done wrong. While I have no formal language qualifications beyond a GCSE in English and I'm not immune from getting things wrong, I do feel I have an above average grasp of my native tongue (which I hope is apparent in my writings on this blog) so what to me are such basic mistakes really do annoy me as it should be very easy to get these right. Don't get me wrong, I would never have a go at anyone who has a genuine communication difficulty such as dyslexia or similar, and I'm talking about what should be basic fundamentals of grammar learned at primary school.

Consider the following sentence: "Your write, we except Paypal has payment for are products". There are so many things wrong with that, yet it is made up entirely of valid English words and to a growing number of people appears to be a perfectly coherent sentence as they don't know any better.

A burning issue

Please don't set fire to your models!

Something I've noticed recently that is spreading among the younger members of the model bus community is a trend towards depicting a burnt out vehicle by setting fire to it. For many reasons this really isn't a good idea at all so I cannot condone such behaviour and I feel I must write something to warn of the dangers and hopefully put an end to this idiotic practice before someone gets hurt.

This makes me cringe. So dangerous and not even realistic.

Clearing up a Facebook misconception

Facebook seems to be one of those Marmite things that you either love or hate. For all its faults (and there are many) it serves a useful purpose, but there is still strong resistance to it in some quarters, especially among the older generation who may not fully understand the world of social media. One particular misconception is especially prevalent among those who don't use it: there is a widespread belief that Facebook is one of those platforms that is completely invisible and unusable unless you have an account, which is not the case at all and there is a great deal of content that can be viewed without a Facebook account being necessary. Read on to find out how so much of the world of Facebook is available to you even if you don't have an account.

The worst F1 car ever? That's Life

Formula 1. Supposedly the jewel in the crown and the pinnacle of international motorsport, but quite honestly something that no longer interests me at all. With entry fees alone costing many millions and an extremely complicated and restrictive rule book, only the largest and wealthiest teams can afford to compete and the racing has become very clinical and boring as a result. It wasn't always like that though: in the late eighties and early nineties, the fees were much lower and the rules more favourable to smaller independent teams, resulting in entry lists so large that many races had to feature a pre-qualifying session to weed out a few of the weaker cars before the qualifying proper. All sorts of small and now forgotten outfits came and went during this period, usually trundling around at the tail end of the field and rarely even managing to start a race, yet alone finish. The strange stories behind them provide far more interest than the mundanity of today's top teams, none more so than the ill-equipped and ill-fated Life Racing Engines. The very reason for this team even existing is hard to fathom...