Newspaper archive OCR corrections

Not interesting, but I have to record these somewhere since there's no way of submitting them to the originators. OCR or OCD?

Adortion row over grisly find Scobie, William. The Observer (1901- 2003) [London (UK)] 20 June 1982: 12.
Abortion not Adortion

Piectgptin acid rain Mosey, Chris. The Observer (1901- 2003) [London (UK)] 20 June 1982: 13.
Pledge on not Piect...

Grim figures could spell new US farm-led stamp Jackson, Harold. The Guardian (1959-2003) [London (UK)] 29 June 1982: 7.
Slump not stamp

Kenneth Williams and The Avengers

KW's diary for January 7th 1966 records:

Went to see Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. Watched some television, 'The Avengers', which was puerile.

Records show that this must have been Room Without A View. What a picture that conjures up, the three of them sitting there at Noel Road under the pink and yellow chessboard squares of the ceiling, watching this chess-themed Avengers ep.

Gerards crossed

I've realised there are two different actors:

• Gerard Murphy (Radio 4 LotR narrator, Silver Nemesis)
• Gerard McDermott (numerous Radio 4 roles including a great George Wilson in The Great Gatsby)

Up to now I've been confusing them as freely as I once did Rebecca Front and Rebecca Stevens.

I mention this because G. McDermott was recently in the wonderful Seance on a Wet Afternoon on R4. I know we're in the twilight of the gods as far as public broadcasting is going in Britain, but full marks to Radio 4 - more specifically Radio Scotland - for still being able to come up with the goods.

Schism of the week: Scouting

No surprise to find that the Scout Association has a splinter group, the 'Baden-Powell Scouts' Association' which fell out with the main movement after the 1967 reforms where some of the Kipling iconography, and all of the explicit Edwardian paternalism, were ditched.

Camelopardalis

Finally managed to see the conventional lines of Camelopardalis tonight - usually I can manage to find alpha and beta, but the fainter stars that make the 'legs' of the giraffe are invisible.

Fortunately tonight I had the lucky combination of excellent seeing and my neighbours being away and consequently not having their conservatory lights on.

The ragged trousered philatelists

Leafing through a compiled volume of Gibbons Stamp Weekly (as was) from 1908, I'm impressed by the prices of packets of stamps relative to contemporary wages.

One packet of 1,000 stamps is advertised as Stanley Gibbons' cheapest ever, at 15s: the best-paid painters and decorators in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (c. 1903) are getting 25s a week if they're lucky.

Their contemporary equivalents are getting, say, £400 pw if they're equally lucky, which makes that 15s packet cost £150 today, or something like 10 times the cost of a modern bargain packet of 1,000.

Lightning Seeds Renault Scenic advert

Regrettably Tim Pope, in his Tim Pope wisdom, has seen fit to remove the video referred to below from his website. I apologise for any disappointment. Let's hope someone, somewhere, kept a copy.

Anyone else who, like me, has wanted to see again the triffic 'back projection' Renault Scenic advert set to Marvellous by the Lightning Seeds, will be fed up trying to find it on Youtube.

But they'll be pleased to know it's on Tim Pope's website. Bit of a surprise to find it's his work, as he hasn't crossed my path since the Boys Don't Cry video.

To reassure people stumbling across this on searches, I'm referring to the cowboy/Indian/James Bond version of the advert. The other versions are on Youtube, including the 'studio backdrop' one and the 'car rolling down the hill' one.