It’s what PR agencies dream of; hoping against hope that whatever appallingly dull clients they have their roster, they can spin some sensational headline in the hope of catching a time-pressured editor and their underpaid hacks off-guard.

And this is what happened yesterday. Lots of credible tech and consumer outlets, and Bitterwallet, received a press release about GetJar, an online mobile app store. The company had commissioned research into the current sales of mobile applications and hypothesised on future revenues from the sector. Speculation is a great way for a company to attract press release, because it can be based on little more than guess work, but lead to sensational headlines that attract attention. But in this instance, GetJar’s PR company went with:

Read that headline again. What does it mean? What’s the connection between apps and CDs that leads to a direct comparison between sales? Aside from both being consumer products, there’s no relationship whatsoever. A press release about music with a headline comparing tracks downloaded to physical product sold – there would be some logic to that. But apps don’t deliver even a vaguely similar consumer experience to CDs, so what comparison is there to make? It makes as much sense as these headlines I’ve just imagined from previous years:

1995 “Mobile phones will outsell VHS tapes by 1998″

2000 “DVDs will outsell colouring books by 2002″

2001 “iPods will outsell tractors by 2003″

It’s an abstract comparison between two items that you wouldn’t rationally attempt to compare, unless you wanted to create a headline that sounds extraordinary but doesn’t mean anything. It turns out the research conducted by AppJar is reasonably interesting, and the real story -  that mobile apps will be generating $17.5 billion in two years time – is buried in the byline.

Fortunately, most of the tech press spotted this, and ignored the bullshit-baffles-brains headline. Quite right too – you wouldn’t catch a respected news operation simply cutting and pasting such a ridiculous statement into their article, would you?

Oh. Never mind.

What happens when your news isn’t quite interesting enough? You embellish the news you have, that’s what!

Step forward The Daily Mail – eager to make hay following the murder of teenager Ashleigh Hall and conviction of her killer Peter Chapman, the Mail yesterday ran a story entitled:

I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.

The article was written by Mark Williams-Thomas, a former police detective and specialist in child protection. According to blog Global Dashboard, the article opened with:

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.

So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.

Shocking. Except anybody who has ever used Facebook knows this isn’t how Facebook works. To have stumbled upon a sex pervert within seconds of signing up would require the user to actively seek out a very specific person; in fact, it’s pretty much impossible to be suddenly “deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions”. And there’s no video chat in Facebook – there’s no way to perform in front of your audience.

It does sound more like Chat Roulette, however, the site that randomly connects you in-vision to strangers all over the world, and is more-or-less a non-stop onslaught of exhibitionists displaying their genitalia (see Jon Stewart’s take on media reporting of Chat Roulette in the US for more).

Global Dashboard points out that while the story went out in print yesterday, the online version was then edited to read:

I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you.

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl.

All references to Facebook had been removed. Almost. As slick as they thought they might have been, the Mail still hasn’t changed the URL of the story:

And Williams-Thomas is getting quite the arse on Twitter, claiming he never once mentioned Facebook in his original article. Global Dashboard now claims to have been contacted by Facebook, who state that legal action against the Mail is pending.

Taking into account the Mail’s own actions and the retractions of the author, it would appear the somebody at the newspaper decided made a conscious decision to attribute the experience to Facebook. Even after the change was made, the Daily Mail failed to publish a retraction or apology.

With around a third of the country’s adult population having a Facebook account, you’re far more likely to wildly exaggerate the threat (and sell more papers) if you associate grooming and pedophilia with a well-known website, rather than an anonymous one. Hats off to the Daily Mail once more for their middle-England scaremongering horseshit.

UPDATE – avid Bitterwallet reader Simon has been in touch to say he contacted Williams-Thomas before the story broke, concerned about the inaccuracy of the piece. Not only does Williams-Thomas confirm that the Daily Mail seemingly ignored his requests for corrections to the feature, but that he didn’t even write the piece; it was ghost-written by an Daily Mail reporter. Thanks Simon!

News so fresh it may cause nosebleeds – the internet doesn’t work. Not now, not then, not ever! Over the weekend, an opinion piece printed 15 years ago by Newsweek has been circulating. We normally wouldn’t cover a story published so recently, but we wanted to let you know why you’re wasting your time by reading this – and not just because you typed Bitterwallet.com in the address bar.

Yes, it’s easy to look back with hindsight afforded by the online advances of the past decade and a half, but it’s interesting to note quite how wrong one man could be:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

That’s it – show’s over, folks. Nothing to see here. You’ve got to admire the guy – he makes interesting points in the piece about how mentors and teachers can effectively shape the lives of their pupils, but it’s not enough to stop there. Here has to rubbish everything.

And what of the author, Clifford Stoll? Where is he now? Selling stuff on the internet, that’s where! Oh.

Dear Mister Elliot,

Can I call you Mike? No? Now Mike, your role is Head of Credit and Collections at 3, so you may think this letter doesn’t matter to you. It does. Keep reading.

Here’s the deal. If Three is to continue providing customer support via email through the Three website, then at the very least Customer Services should acknowledge any emails they receive and deal with any issues. That’s what customer support is.

Specifically, if Three is going to offer email as a legitimate way of contact for issues such as contract cancellation – as stated in Three’s terms and conditions – then once more, Customer Services need to read the emails and act on them, not ignore them and deny all knowledge of their existence. If an operator asks a customer to re-send the email, then somebody really should reply. Really.

(By the way, in all our collective time of working on Bitterwallet, none of us have ever seen a more impenetrable set of terms and conditions offered by any business – a two page PDF document featuring over two dozen pages from a booklet. Staggering.)

Mike, these issues are not strictly your concern, but given how the failure of Customer Services must provide plenty of business for you, I thought I’d let you know. What is relevant to you, Mike, is this:

If Three is going to attempt to contact a customer during daytime hours, then failure of the customer to respond to a phone message your operator left with an 8 year-old child is not really an excuse to push an account to a collection agency.

And when a customer responds to the letter you signed, by sending a letter recorded delivery, one that contains all the correspondence they sent to Three by email in the past two months, have the decency to have a note put on their account. If you’re going to threaten people with adverse credit ratings, act when they attempt to put things right.

There are probably many reasons why Three has such a poor share of the mobile market. Treating customers like dogshit, even if they don’t want to give your their custom anymore, really can’t be helping matters. You’re putting your name on these letters, Mike. Do something about it.

Cheers,

Paul

PS – for the love of Christ, change the scripts you dish out to your call centre staff. Asking the customer “is there anything else I can help you with?” when the operator called them to threaten them for non-payment – I’ve gotta be honest, Mike, it’s taking the piss.

Despite the best efforts of past governments to clean up food labelling so it doesn’t completely bullshit the customer, there’s still plenty of it about. In October, the Telegraph called out Pret a Manger over its sushi – ‘delivered every day, spankingly fresh’ according to the blurb. In fact the fish was frozen in Chile, shipped 7,000 miles to the UK south coast before being delivered to a wholesaler.

The website Complete and Utter Zebu highlighted Birdseye’s range of Great British Menu products that, of course, weren’t made in Great Britain, and according to avid Bitterwallet reader Russell, Sainsbury’s are attempting exactly the same sleight-of-hand:

‘Sainbury’s ‘British Classic’ range is emblazoned with a Union Jack, the meat in their Shepherds Pie and the liver is New Zealand Lamb.’

What do Sainsbury’s have to say for themselves? According to a Customer Careline Manager:

‘The description on the packaging is very clear. The dish itself is a British classic, and not all of the ingredients used in the pie are British. The country of origin for the mince used is stated on the packaging.’

Sorry Sainsbury’s, but we’re calling bullshit on you. Nobody needs to read the ingredients of what’s in a shepherd’s pie – we already know what to expect – but seeing ‘BRITISH CLASSIC’ plastered across the front, a customer would wrongly assume the ingredients were sourced in Great Britain. And of course you know this, and of course that is why you did it. Buying local or national produce is a strong motivator for many consumers, because they feel they’re buying fresh or they’re supporting local business.

For a dish to be a British classic, it needs British stuff in it – otherwise in no way is it a classic British dish. But then ‘NEW ZEALAND SHEPHERD’S PIE’ wouldn’t sell as well, would it? Neither would ‘SHEPHERD’S PIE – MADE WITH ANIMAL CARCASS SHIPPED FROM 12,000 MILES AWAY.’

There’s lies, damned lies and supermarket marketing – well done Sainsbury’s, you seem to have all those bases covered.

In case you need it, here’s a lesson about why you shouldn’t cut-and-paste entire stories from another website and pass them off as your own.

Anton Vowl is a blogger who devotes his time (some of it, at least) to calling out the Daily Mail and other tabloids for their bullshit-baffles-brains approach to journalism. Anton recently discovered that the excellent posts from his Enemies of Reason blog were appearing on a completely unrelated site, reproduced in their entirety with no links or attribution. In fact the website in question, Legal-Sleaze.com, would occasionally publish the posts under Anton’s name, and sometimes under their own.

So Anton kicked off this morning in a very potty-mouthed outburst about Legal Sleaze, and called the owners out for blatantly stealing his work. Half an hour later, guess what’s the top story on Legal Sleaze?

That the name attributed to Anton’s posts changes suggests the scraping process isn’t always automated and there’s some manual work going on – although in this instance, it’s clear the automation has played a blinder. If you’re Legal Sleaze and you’re reading this, kindly punch yourself in the balls, will you? We’re happy for you to take all the credit for it, too. Cheers.

Ladies and gents, a true tale of people power from India, where corruption amongst local government is rife. Simple, mundane, everyday acts – planning regulations, requests concerning land deeds – that should occur without drama or consequence are exploited by officials who will only perform their civil duties if given an incentive. Bribery is seemingly a way of life for the population, but they have a new weapon in their arsenal and dammit, they’re going to use it.

On a continent where it’s claimed over £3 billion is exchanged in bribes every year, the deterrent that has public officials quaking in their boots is a worthless piece of paper – the zero rupee note:

The concept was conceived by a physics professor who toured India and realised the widespread scale of bribery, then adopted by 5th Pillar, a non-profit, non-governmental organisation aimed at fighting corruption. 5th Pillar began by printing 25,000 of the notes, but demand soared because of the note’s effectiveness, and a million have since been distributed.

According to the President of Fifth Pillar, the zero rupee note is having a profound effect on bribery in India:

Bribery is a crime in India punishable with jail time. Corrupt officials seldom encounter resistance by ordinary people that they become scared when people have the courage to show their zero rupee notes, effectively making a strong statement condemning bribery. Officials are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail.

More importantly, the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up… they are not alone in this fight.

For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalised within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realise that they are not alone, they also realise that this battle is not unbeatable… relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.

[WorldBank]

The headline story is a couple of days old now but it’s worth taking a look; it’s a report by the BBC on how DVLA documentation is being used to sell stolen cars. Three years ago, the DVLA printed thousands of vehicle registration forms but then found an error on them – they were meant to be destroyed but, you know, weren’t. Then they were, you know, stolen:

Our favourite line comes from the DVLA spokesman – “clearly it’s a criminal act – we can’t be held responsible for that criminal act!” Nope, nothing to do with you! Why, you only printed tens of thousands of these official documents, failed to destroy them and then allowed them to be stolen. How could any of this possibly be your fault?

Another line states the DVLA has done “all it can” to make consumers aware of the serial numbers printed on the rogue documents. That’s good to know, so we decided to see what lengths the DVLA were going to.

Stick DVLA in a Google search and what do you find? The first result is a DVLA website selling car registrations – their current promotion is for Valentine’s Day. The second Google return is a result which has never seen SEO before, but that’s the link you need. Odd that the DVLA will spend money optimising websites that help consumers spend money and generate profits, but not one that prevents grand fraud on a nationwide scale.

Let’s assume you guessed which link you need. Is there any information about these stolen documents when you click through? Nope. Given the apparent scale and nature of the crime, a simple panel and link on this homepage would seem appropriate. Instead, you’ve got to hunt well below the fold to find “Buying and Selling a vehicle” under “Consumer Advice”. Let’s assume you guessed that, too. Then you’ve got to click “Advice on buying” and you still don’t see any information until you scroll down again, well beyond the fold to the very foot of the page. That’s it.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the DVLA is doing “all it can” to prevent this crime by hiding the relevant info in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard‘. They’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, assuming they don’t fuck up the paperwork for that, too.

Avid Bitterwallet reader James and his chums went along to their local Harvester in Thanet. Several ordered sundaes from the dessert menu, the cheeky porkers:

“Devonshire toffee sauces.” Mmmm. Sadly, the menu description and reality parted company at that point; there were so many people in James’ party, the waitress bought the ice cream sauces to the table so they could choose their own:

Not quite as ambrosial as the description made them sound, but James was hardly expecting hand maidens to pour the nectar from bowls weaved of gold. He was, however, expecting the sauces had at least been manufactured in the South West:

Toffee sauce from a celery factory in Aylesbury doesn’t sound quite as seductive as Devon. It no doubt sells far better and the average punter paying £2.49 for a dessert wouldn’t have a clue in a blind taste test, so is there any harm in marketing a product to mislead the consumer?

Of course, the ice cream may never have seen Cornwall and the chocolate probably wasn’t made in Belgium – the terms are too generic to receive Protected Geographical Status within the EU to prevent any Tom, Dick and Harry knocking out similar products and slapping an irrelevant title all over them. The real question is – does it matter? If you were in James’ position, would you expect to have paid for a generic bottle of E numbers or a more traditional topping as described?

How do easyJet work out seat prices? And who spends their Summer holidays in Munich? In June?

You may have noticed in the press last week that easyJet attempted to karate-chop Aer Lingus in the windpipe with a new advertising campaign about Aer Lingus talking the talk when offering cheap flights, but not walking the walk. Or even flying it. This is what easyJet had to say:

easyJet, the largest UK airline, today launched a new advertising campaign to illustrate the wide gap in fares between easyJet and Aer Lingus at London Gatwick.

When Aer Lingus entered the London market a year ago they boasted about bringing a low-fares alternative to the London market. Today we are seeing their fares on comparable routes set at around £100 higher than easyJet – each way, and not the low-fares they had triumphantly announced.

easyJet have also had brassy new posters printed to sell their low prices “this Summer”:

The small print at the bottom mentions the stated fares “were correct on 4th January and are based on price per seat averaged over June 2010.” The press release for the ads didn’t appear until the middle of last week,  and we didn’t have a snoop around prices until yesterday, so the advertising campaign was only four days old.

When we checked, the majority of days in June offered lower fares than those quoted. Hurrah! In fact, on all but one day the lowest fare between Gatwick and Munich was £22.99. Of course the small print states the figures are based on average price per seat – easyJet operates several flights a day on each route and many are more expensive, which accounts for the difference between lowest available fare quoted on the website and the average seat price quoted in the advertising.

And there are low fares all round for the examples quoted, except one. On seven days in June, a single flight from Gatwick to Faro could be bought for £28.99, lower than the £31.99 quoted in the advert. Across the whole of the month, however, the average lowest daily fare was closer to £39, with the lowest daily fare climbing as high as £62.99. Again, the price quoted in the ads refers to the average price per seat and there are five flights per day to Faro on some days, so we need to consider the pricing of seats on all the flights available. Of the 130 flights in June, seats on over 70 of them couldn’t be purchased for less than £52.99, with prices on several flights climbing as high as £112.99.

So what’s going on? Either easyJet is laying on jumbo jets to provide extra capacity for cheap seats in order to lower the average seat price – which they’re not – or perhaps they’re taking into account seats sold at a much lower price before 4th January to bring the average. If that’s not the case either, then in the past week Londoners have gone horseshit crazy over the notion of sunshine and started booking up flights to Faro in their thousands, driving the price of the remaining seats well beyond the advertised price. If it is true, however, it’s already rendered a four day old advertising promotion out of date.

Not that shouting about low prices will do easyJet any harm of course. But what about the overall advertising message easyJet is beaming into your brain? Aside from “Aer Lingus is expensive”, you’re exposed to a second message – “easyJet cheap summer flights”; there are only four lines of copy and summer is mentioned twice. Yet with the exception of Faro, none of the other examples provided are typical summer resorts. easyJet flies from Gatwick to the biggest holiday destinations in Europe – Gran Canaria, Majorca, Malaga and plenty more besides – but the examples are for the likes of Munich and Zurich. That, and the fact that easyJet is selling the notion of summer travel based on prices in June; while June is a Summer month, it’s not the time most consumers consider travelling abroad for summer, especially families with children. The seed is planted though – “easyJet offers cheap summer flights.”

We’re actually big fans of easyJet – they prove it’s not that difficult to be upfront about the costs of flights, instead of lumping taxes on top of advertised prices – but using flights to Munich in June to sell the notion of affordable summer flights is pushing it. And we’d be keen to know how they did their maths. We’ve asked the question, and we’ll let you know the answer when we get one.

The difference between consumer satisfaction and the lack of dissatisfaction is too great for some businesses to comprehend. Peel off the sticker it’ll still only do what people expect it to do:

Avid Bitterwallet reader @flashboy via [Twitgoo]

Avid Bitterwallet reader Tom isn’t a happy man, but that’s probably because he went without breakfast this morning:

Don’t know if you spotted this advert blatantly trying to encourage kids to eat an unhealthy cereal after school, despite the fact they probably would have had something similar for breakfast. The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) aren’t concerned and are just hiding behind a wall of figures and statistics provided by Kellogg’s. Despite the fact they claim that the cereal is low in fat, it does not distract from the point they are high in sugar!

It’s great to see the Government’s money spent advertising healthier lifestyles is well spent and once again big corporations can flatten the whole principle behind it!

It’s an old ad, but always worth revisiting, if for no other reason than to comprehend why two primary school children have the inner voices of teenagers. Tom’s certainly right in that Kellogg’s justification of their position to the ASA has the grace of the Mariinsky Ballet, littered with objective statements presented as facts (“Kellogg’s said snacking was a common practice and suitable snacking should be encouraged as part of good dietary practice”).

First it argues that Coco Pops is a more healthy after-school alternative to biscuits, crisps and sweets, but it then goes on to argue it’s healthier than yoghurt and fruit because of the sugar content. Reading through, it’s a wonder a bowl of Coco Pops doesn’t gift children with the power of unaided flight. Bravo, Kellogg’s!

They said the recommended serving size of 30g for Coco Pops was a true volume that they knew people ate. They said the amount of sugar in one serving of Coco Pops was just 10g, which was less than two teaspoons. They pointed out that a banana contained 17g of sugar, a fruit yoghurt 20g and toast with jam 13g.

Of course, such bullshit-baffles-brains conveniently ignores other facts. For example, “just 10g” of a 30g serving means a third of a bowl of Coco Pops is pure sugar. The average unladen weight of a banana is around 100g, meaning the sugar content is less than a fifth of its volume. Oh, and it’s a banana – you know, fruit - the stuff that it’s ok to encourage kids to eat as an alternative to chocolate?

Ultimately the ASA swallowed the lot, seemingly happy that children should be encouraged to eat more cereal. Of course kids snack but that doesn’t mean they should, of course kids would like to eat chocolate-laced cereal instead, but that doesn’t mean it should be encouraged to. And as The Food Commission points out, take all the air out of a bowl of Coco Pops, and the result looks suspiciously like a chocolate cookie.

Still, at least the kids are dictating their own diet with the full backing of a multi-national corporation only concerned with their health and well being. It’s just happy coincidence that two children eating an extra 30g serving five days a week adds up to an extra sale of a 600g box of Coco Pops every fortnight. I’m sure the maths hasn’t crossed anyone’s minds at Kellogg’s.

As expected, a little bad weather and the whole country is utterly, utterly shagged. Our European neighbours continue driving up and down mountains and flying planes in worse conditions without grumbling or their news channels showing continuous loops of snowploughs at dusk. The blizzards and sub-zero temperatures have shut down London’s airports and caused crippling delays in the past few days.

But do they care whether the weather has messed up your Christmas? Travel V3 – the blog of soon-to-launch travel website OfferMeATrip.com – asks why the likes of Heathrow Airport seem more interested in pursuing their own agenda than one that may benefit their customers. For example, this is a screenshot of Heathrow’s website from this morning:

As Travel V3 points out:

What is the communication priority of this website considering the placement and design of the different messages? Shopping, or information for customers?

Does this website reflect a company that is focused on getting people from A to B as effectively as possible, or a company that wants to screw as many pounds as possible out of a captive audience?

Delayed and cancelled flight information does appear on the home page, but below the fold of the screen. At times like this, if consumers are turning to Heathrow’s site to find out how banjangoed their Christmas plans are, you’d think they’d provide more immediate information than meaningless vagaries (“…some disruption is occurring here and at other airports…”) that come a poor second to a shopping promotion (“Heathrow is the perfect place to shop for all your presents”). Is Heathrow an airport or a shopping centre?

[Travel V3]

Last week we told you how a marketing company called The Customer Club was already picking at the carcass of Borders – the book chain is yet to close down, but The Customer Club has acquired Borders’ mailing list and is spamming addresses with requests to join their loyalty scheme. The bait to sign up? A £40 voucher for Virgin Wines.

We suggested the Virgin Wines voucher was confusing at best, because the minimum spend in the small print read more like “£19.99″ than “£79.99″ – although the amount is clarified before the voucher is processed, the point is that some customers wouldn’t proceed that far if the amount was displayed correctly.

As usual, after publishing an article in the best interests of the consumer we were promptly savaged for criticising the company in question. Here’s what avid Bitterwallet reader Steve had to say in the comments:

Please…the font they have written the £79.99 in says 7 not 1. If you look at the rest of the numbers in the text, they are all the same font. Why would a Virgin branded company actually try to dupe customers. “deliberately cut and paste the “79″ from a different font so that the “7″ looks like the “1″ in the font used for the rest of the voucher” – Are you frickin kidding me!

Why don’t you write about what a shame it is these poor people are losing their jobs at Borders just before Xmas, or the sorry state of of our debt ridden country rather than an attack on Virgin Wines who actually sell some lovely wines, at great prices with award winning customer service! I know this because I’m a customer.

A couple of points straight off the bat – at no point did we attack the quality, pricing or service of Virgin Wines, and in fact there were plenty of comments both for and against the company in that respect. In terms of why a Virgin branded company might actually try to dupe customers; we don’t know the answer, only that they’ve tried it in the past – as we pointed out in the previous article, a near-identical promotion was banned by the Advertising Standards Agency a year ago.

However, Steve’s comments did prompt us to revisit the story in case we’d been too hasty in damning Virgin Wines. Was it only us who thought the “£79.99″ price had been doctored to read as “£19.99″? Here again is the voucher in question (you can click here to see it full size):

Look at the “£19.99″ typeface. Just look at it. With your eyes. At first glance it reads “£19.99″. Yes it bloody does. Has it been fiddled with? Well, there’s that gap between the £ and the 1 that isn’t wide enough to be a space. The first 9 is a different shape to the second two. And then there’s that 7. It’s wrong. You simply don’t see Arial-style fonts where the 7 has a vertical stalk while the rest of typeface is curved or angled.

So it was just us who had a problem with the voucher, then? Absolutely not, as we discovered when we decided to double-check the voucher last night (large version here):

Spot the difference?

Obviously somebody else felt the voucher might confuse the customer because somebody in the past couple of days has thoughtfully inserted a 7 from a typeface that actually exists. Not very well, though. So was it a genuine-but-completely-improbable mistake or a deliberate fiddle?

The most popular children’s toy of Christmas 2009 – the Go Go Hamster – can kill your child. It’s official, according to the press. The hamsters contain a mysterious element called antimony which can poison, cause lung cancer and murder a small child to death. The bandwagon is already rolling and has so much momentum it’s impossible to stop. The Mirror declares:

While at The Daily Mail:

And according to The Sun:

“Antimony can be fatal in high doses and make kids sick even in low amounts if inhaled or ingested…”

The result? Danger, panic, upset and a complete lack of professional behaviour from people claiming to be journalists, because not one appears to have researched the topic they’re cutting and pasting from the other – we’re not just talking the red tops, but the broadsheets and the likes of the BBC, too. The result is the perpetuation of a news story that is misinforming the whole of the UK public.

The drama revolves around a study produced by a US website called GoodGuide, which pulls products apart and tests them to see what chemicals they contain. What’s upsetting GoodGuide, at least according to the media, is that Go Go Hamsters contain dangerously high levels of antimony. According to The Telegraph, Dara O’Rourke, from GoodGuide has found antimony at levels of 93 and 106 parts per million, above the “60 parts per million allowed under US regulations”. The BBC quotes Professor O’Rourke from GoodGuide, who said antimony “has potential health hazards related to it which, if ingested in high enough levels can lead to cancer, reproductive health and other human health hazards”. He’s a professor, so this must be true and should go unquestioned by a single journalist.

Cue a brilliant story for the media – the most popular toy under the tree this year is also the most deadly.  Except there are some facts about antimony you need to know about before swallowing this complete and utter bullshit. (more…)