Love it
Had I known Jeremy's Newsnight email contained such repartee I would have definitely signed up. Now it's too late for me. I love how the use of the word fatuous just takes the edge off outright calling the boss stupid.
Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman was in trouble for adding a consonant to "cuts" during Monday's show, now he's used another c-word to describe the programme's daily email. With the subject line "This is an ex-email", Paxman said he was writing "positively the last Newsnight daily email. The time has come to put this exercise …
Perhaps I'm getting cynical but I suspect the problem is more that some junior sub-editor has been desperately trying to get program details, and/or a sign off, from her "superiors" so she can send out the emails promptly.
Just in case anyone else hasn't mentioned it yet:
Gizmo? Sounds like they've got gremlins.
Paxman has always been pretty dismissive of all the web/email/twitter/etc things that have been added around Newsnight and which he has to "plug" at the end of the program ... clearly it shows what an effective communicator he is as whenever he mentions them its always comes across in a sort of Jedi mind-trick sort of way like "here's how to get the daily email ... you don't want to sign up for this"
I tend to agree, Paxo is pretty poor at anything science and technology and seems to feel quite threatened by it. You just have to watch him on University Challange, someone gets an obscure question about arts or history wrong and he's impatient and often quite rude, someone get a piss easy question about science or IT right and it's all "very well done..."
There was a recording of UC a few years back where the answer to one of the questions was "A Radical", the team from Oxford (I forget which one) answered "A Free Radical", "Wrong!" says Paxo, as if they were morons, followed by the team captain pointing out that "they're the same thing." That bit was edited out of the transmission...
Whilst appearing not to suffer fools gladly he's also a nice chap. A few years ago Newsnight dropped the brief today-in-the-market-summary and introduced a similarly brief weather forecast. JP did this in an expectedly terse fashion (e.g. it'll rain tomorrow - take an umbrella, etc.).
A friend of mine on a round the world trip at the time didn't believe this. I emailed JP and he emailed my friend to back me up.
Anyone have one of these emails - care to share the full headers - did the email get routed through a TP MSP or was it direct from a bbc controlled IP space?
If the prior, then I can assume heavy greylisting etc would be in place and delivery rates would be as described. If direct from the BBC then delivery would depend upon just how much the BBC have pissed off the MSP.