Courier makes a killing

Lest we forget just how awful Australia's supposedly best newspaper is, we bring your attention to The Courier-Mail's edition of Remembrance Day, November 11.
You'll remember that Prime Minister John Howard was in London for the opening of an Australian War Memorial in Hyde Park, and the Courier's reporter Ben English was on hand to record the emotional event.
Now we all know that our PM is Australia's greatest ever peacetime warrior. Cut the man and he bleeds khaki.
So maybe Ben just got a little bit carried away with the sense of occasion when he wrote about the memories of "hundreds of thousands of fellow Australians who fought and died in both world wars".
Australia's best newspaper confirmed the death toll under a picture of a couple of old diggers on hand to "honour Australia's hundreds of thousands of war dead".
Now we at The Bug have no idea how old Ben English is, or for that matter, how much he knows of Australian history with a surname like that.
Nor are we too critical of a little bit of leeway to give a story extra punch. A pinch of exaggeration makes for a heady news mix, right? A flourish of hyperbole to make us realise just how damned awful the Hun was in both conflicts.
Or to put it another way, never let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Sadly, we at The Bug are of an age and are proud enough Aussies to know instinctively that "hundreds of thousands" of Aussie war dead was gilding the lily a little too much.
Before we went to the net to get the facts - something our poor old sub at the Courier seemed blissfully unaware of - we had an inkling it was around 70,000 for the war to end all wars, and 39,000 for the one that followed.
Well, we were wrong! The first page we brought up was the BBC News Online, which explained that the memorial in London "honours the 102,000 Australians who died in the two world wars".
Well, maybe they're wrong too.
The Australian Government's site covering the national capital tells us that the Australian War memorial "is the nation's tribute to its 102,000 war dead". We suspect that means the dead from all conflicts.
The Bug as you know is always fair, so we'll accept that maybe Ben English is guilty only of a poorly framed sentence. One for the "we know what he meant to say" file.
But no research is needed to tell us that the sub who wrote the blocklines for the diggers' picture doesn't have a bloody clue, mate, about Australian war history!
Or the checksub. Or the page proof reader for that matter.
Australia's best newspaper has doubled our nation's war dead with the tap of a few keys - and no-one in that exhaustive process that earned the Courier its best-in-the-country gong spotted the error.

Look, here we are over there!

The photo above has been appearing in ads in various Brisbane publications to promote the planned high-rise unit block earmarked for the Festival Hall site in the CBD.
All very well, except that in the background of the "indicative only" photo you can see the actual site of the project. That's the roof of the soon-to-be-demolished Festival Hall just under the railing on the left-hand side of the picture.
The "indicative only" photo shows a view over the Brisbane River to South Bank from a site almost one city block away from the new project's actual location.
The photo's disclaimer does note that "surrounding buildings are not included" - possibly because if they were, you would see only other buildings and not the sweeping river vista depicted.

Oh dear, this spells trouble ...

From the Media liftout in last weekend's Australian

New headline needed too

It seems a whole new suburb has recently sprung up within Brisbane's urban renewal precinct - if you can believe the city's inner-city newspaper The Independent.
We are all familiar with terminally trendy suburbs such as New Farm and Newstead where former woolstores, factories, cesspits and public toilets are being converted into upmarket digs for savvy, sassy, babby, faffy, 20 to 40-year-old generation XYZers, or whatever the current marketing-speak is for people willing to pay too much for very little.
But in its October 16 edition, The Independent introduced readers of its property pages to an apparently new locality, New Caption (pictured above).
Readers might want to check prices in New Caption with local real estate agents. There could be some bargains to be had.
Oh, by the way, The Independent is produced by the same company responsible for The Bug, the Brisbane Independent Newspaper Group.
But I'm sure the powers-that-be at BING will see the funny side.
Gerard Kroll

and, finally, our splash of the month....