Trump news is bad news

Why oh why would anyone not like little Donny?

Apparently, chief Oompa-Loompa of the USA, Donald Trump, has no limit to his paranoia.

This week, he’s declared that Google are “left-wing” when it comes to search results for “Trump News”. By this, he means that they are being rigged so that the vast majority are negative.

Wow. Google have understandably denied this (not the negative bit, but that any political viewpoint is used in the complex algorithm that decides what to bung in front of you when you type something in that little box in your browser).

Analysts have pointed out that extra weight is probably given to pages that a lot of other people linked to. There’s no point in asking Google that, though. If they explained that appearing higher in search results could be achieved by putting ice cubes down your pants, there would be a simultaneous water, electricity and freezer shortage as everyone in charge of a website attempted to cram extra frozen water into their underwear.

The search giant admits there are more than 200 factors involved in the lightning-fast decision making process, so it’s obviously upsetting for Donny to discover that 96% (according to him) of the news articles were from left-wing news outlets and, therefore, not exactly singing his orange praises.

I’d have tried some other search engines myself, but Google are now so dominant (more than three-quarters of all searches worldwide go through them) I can’t remember what the others are any more.

Is The Donald right, though? I mean he is Right, in a political sense, but is he correct? As far as I can tell, here in the UK he isn’t exactly number one in the population’s hearts.

So I’ve conducted a bit of in-depth research myself, taking an unprecedented almost four minutes of my time to run some other searches and see if the results were broadly negative or positive:

Crocodile news: They bite stuff and have killed some people. On balance, I’d say that’s probably negative.

Spider news: Well, let’s put it like this – if I do ever sleep again, it’ll be with the lights on. Not just negative, but unremittingly terrifying too.

Kitten news: Nawww! One had to be rescued from a toilet! OK, one story about a six-legged cat, but it was still cute.

There you go then. Generally, if something is frightening, scaly or dangerous, the results are negative. If it’s friendly and cute, they’re positive.

Jury’s still out on having more than four legs, though.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 31st of August 2018. Yes, column title back to normal after a quick email exchange with the editor.

The column seems to be appearing on their website again, too... or maybe it's just because the last two have been vaguely real-world related. Check it out, if only to see the horrifying over-tweaked photo of me. Not sure how they did it, but I presume that moving all the sliders in image-editing software to one end on the scale might well achieve a similar result.

(CD A-Z: A new one for me - although I think I had it on cassette once - Altered Images' "Happy Birthday" album.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Unstable Stables: Throw away the key

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple...

Is it foggy? No.

When I get put in charge (which is bound to happen soon), I'm going to introduce a whole raft of new laws, for I shall be a just and fair ruler. I'm quite liking the title of 'Most Marvellous Emperor Of Sensible Regulations And Bountiful Lovingness Not To Mention Exceedingly Handsome', but it might be a bit long. On that basis, I'll settle for the more informal 'He Who Is Smashing' from my loyal subjects. Anyway, I digress. I do that sometimes - had you noticed? Here, then, is the first law that will introduced: grumpyf1 law No.1 - Turn your fog lights off, you complete git. Don't get me wrong; If it genuinely is foggy, fog lights are quite handy. The reason for introduction of this law is because 96% of the time (based on my own in-depth research) it isn't foggy when some utter cockwomble blinds you. This has always been a bit of a problem but in the last couple of years it seems to have escalated out of control, possibly because of the...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog