Benespection

Friday, August 31. 2007

☯

Lately I realise my life is amazingly out of balance. I'm now forced to play catch-up with everything going on around me, not only at work but in my personal life; Everything's out of kilter, and this is why I haven't had time to return phone calls, answer emails, scratch that bloody mozzie bite on the side of my arm, or write blog entries.

I've started to write about several things, but they've never really gotten anywhere beyond simple statements. As most of these are inspired by something I've seen, I thought that the best way to deal with them was to sporadically compile a little post that was somewhat closer to a photo-blog. In a moment of weakness, I unfortunately invented a little word for this; Apologies in advance.

ben·e·spec·tion

noun

The act of visually discovering an unusual element of daily life that would otherwise be overlooked
The ability to overcome selective vision to find discover out of place elements within one's habitat

A few months ago I caught this on my way shopping. The guy was tight-rope walking (and cycling) in a suit with a depressed look on his face all to the tune of some morbidly slow and equally dark music. His kit was all mounted on the back of a flat-bed truck, and looked like it could be quickly folded up and moved anywhere. It was odd.

Left over from the recent festival, this portable genset provided another sign that proof-reading has become a lots atr. Every sign on this box, of various sizes, had the same mistake. I also saw this mistake on other units around the city. Meh, it's Belgium, and they probably couldn't care less.

Either I've missed something, or spelling is also on the brink of extinction. Kids: it's “i wuz 'ere” followed by at least the last two digits of the year.

For the second year running, the summer bums on my square have returned. Last year they spent the entire summer hanging out there, drinking beer. They're quiet and harmless, but I thought it was bizarre that once it turned summer they were back. Now that summer is essentially over, they've left.

Returning late one night, I caught a metro at Mérode. The station was practically empty, besides myself, a few other passengers, and two of the STIB's “prevention” guys hanging around. They were so bored that they were playing soccer on the platform. At one stage the ball (inevitably) fell onto the tracks, so while one called to stop the on-coming metro the other jumped on the tracks to fetch the ball. Would this be one of those “abuse of power” things?

Posted by Simon Butcher in Belgium, Benespection at 02:00 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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It’s only the first edition ?

#1 AMC on 2007-09-02 23:41 (Reply)

Yes, and regrettably Simon’s Bogus Dictionary of Bollocks, First Edition is currently out of print.

#1.1 Simon Butcher on 2007-09-04 20:49 (Reply)

And Oh My God, I soo wasn’t paying attention the first time I saw that Power Shop photo. Besides the obvious typo in the parentheses (but ok, we can all miss a typo), they’ve decided to use a different font size for each word! groan.
I love the train of thought that goes: "this is important, so is that and that. So lets make it stand out". The problem is this, if you want to highlight each piece of info in a ^layout because it’s ‘important’, doing so will confuse the reader and nothing will stand out at all! (had no access to font, size or colour changes so had to make do.:) )

Worth pointing out also, is the full stop after Tel. Though some will argue this is grammatically correct, the fact that Fax does not have one unbalances the text. (For these kind of uses, it’s always nice to do one of the other.)
(A little tweaking of Tel and Fax would have been nice too, just to align the 2 colons – simple!)

This is indeed a good example of how some people view communication today. Not a great design (I’m being a tad kind i think.) and a few oversights, but ask them and they will tell you the info is there. And if they are thinking that most people wouldn’t notice it, experience has shown – they’d be right!)

#2 AMC on 2007-09-04 20:38 (Reply)

but you can muck with this text ‽

#2.1 Simon Butcher on 2007-09-04 22:31 (Reply)

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