PARCA/Nosey
NoseyPARCA is an online newsfeed about Plantation, Fort William
Nosey press releases are typically issued by Jennifer Seitz and published on EMD's (=Mark Drayton's) eponymous 'Download' on SubStack - see link (in subheading) below. Most releases are drafted by Mark and edited by Jennifer. Nosey house style is basically Mark's, and other contributors are encouraged to adapt theirs to his, within reason.
Archive (NB: This is usually updated first)
April 2022
<#1> (11th April), <#2> (13th April), <#3> (17th April), <#4> (18th April).
END of archive
NB: Occasionally, entries are added to the above list a day or so in advance of the scheduled publication of a release.
Style and process
Nosey house style for press releases is, first, to refer to them as 'press releases' rather than 'news releases' because that's the vernacular. However, 'NEWS RELEASE' is used in the heading of the release itself because it is more accurate and editors are familiar with both terms.
Each draft release begins with:
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ DRAFT ONLY - NEWS RELEASE - DRAFT ONLY /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
Each issued release begins with:
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ NEWS RELEASE - NEWS RELEASE - NEWS RELEASE /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
A typical release generally continues with something along the lines of:
NEWS RELEASE Community councillor announces new initiative to [...] DD MONTH YYYY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
As yet, Nosey have never needed to embargo a press release (but you never know, right?).
A typical release generally concludes with with something along the lines of:
Entirely predictably, Mr Drayton couldn't resist further adding that, ideally, residents should join the <https://NextDoor.co.uk> social-networking platform/app rather than relying on Facebook, say. "I don't trust that censorship-loving [Mark] Zuckerberg bastard any further than I could comfortably excrete him," Mr Drayton has previously explained. "Fuck that cunt." As we reported six days ago, Mr Drayton's views regarding Mr Zuckerberg are all-too-well known to readers of his 'Wednesday Headway' SubStack columns, part of his so-called 'Drayton Download': on 8th & 15th September 2021 Mr Drayton re-posted a long article by British-born science journalist Nicholas Wade defending the 'lab-leak' hypothesis of Covid-19's origin; Mr Drayton's brief introduction (at <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxv-pt1>) forthrightly condemned Facebook for censoring discussion of the theory. Mr Zuckerberg remains unavailable for comment. END NOTE FOR EDITORS Further information about this release can be obtained from the following: (for NoseyPARCA DOT WordPress DOT com) Jennifer Seitz (Secretary) that.tiresome.rationalist AT gmail DOT com (as a member of Fort William, Inverlochy, and Torlundy Community Council) Mark Drayton EddieMDrayton AT gmail DOT com /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
The "Fuck that cunt" quotation is sometimes included, sometimes omitted. Kind of depends on whether it's my time of the month. -Jx
--
For office use only:-
Drafting Area
Making Monday
Marking Monday's ANZAC Day.
Pop quiz, assholes: which Union Jack T-shirt clad public school educated punk rocker's far-more-successful** post-punk band's second album closed with an Eric Bogle cover that's been played on cheap guitars by newly-discharged angloglot veterans after every conflict since Vietnam (during which it was written)?
**than the punk-era 'Nipple Erectors' aka 'The Nips', which he fronted from 1978.
I used to strum a bit of guitar, and the only song I never failed to screw up the vocal to in performance - by crying, basically - was Peebles-born Bogle's "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda." Sometimes I broke earlier, but the line that always got was the one about faces turning away. Sung from the inside, it's wrenching. So, this being ANZAC day and with yet another war for control of the Black Sea raging even as you read this, please spare six minutes plus change to listen to, say, <https://www.youtube.com/embed/_IcomIB-F-I>, performed live in 2013. Alternatively, if you literally only have five minutes, try 1985's <https://www.youtube.com/embed/gsXEGvX_ksI> where, interestingly, he omits the cruellest** verses - possibly for the same reason - and when, like me, he had real teeth. In both senses, probably. (And that's your final clue, kids.)
[[ **April being the cruellest month haha. YouTube's million-view (ie million-ear) studio version is online too, at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKURhqmSLmM>, with links to several versions of Bogle performing the song himself. ]]
Musically, Bogle's competition third-placer (source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_Waltzing_Matilda#Background>) sounds like a downbeat parade march but, actually, only the last verse is about a parade: the others are about fighting. Or not fighting. Bogle wrote it in 1971 during the Vietnam War but being Australian he set it in 1915 and Wikipedia says wrongly that it's about the Battle of Gallipoli but the lyrics refute that. The Allies made two attempts to win control of the Dardenelles Strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, at Gallipoli in April and Suvla Bay in August and, although the protagonist mentions the Gallipoli Peninsular early on, he later makes clear that he was wounded at Suvla.
All this was Churchill's idea: he was high-up in the admiralty at the time and, war having only broken out the previous year, Russia was already critically short of shell. Then, as now (hilariously enough) Russia's only warm-water port was at Sevastepol on the Black Sea's Crimean Peninsular.
Famously, Germany lost the first world war for exactly the same reason it lost the second: because it fought on two fronts, east and west, at the same time. But, to fight, Russia needed not just personnel, sixteen million of whom were killed in the second, by the way, but artillary shell, too. And Churchill knew it was hell's own job to ship shell through the northern passage to St Petersburg so he figured to de-mine the Dardenelles Straight and ship it past Constantinople (now Istanbul) into the Black Sea, the problem being that to de-mine a fairly narrow waterway you have to clear the banks of enemy artillery, thus the two British-led but largely ANZAC-manned Bosphorus campaigns.
Suvla was never likely to succeed but the April attempt failed for the most ridiculous reason: having landed unopposed the British commanders merely ordered camp to be made on the beach instead of capturing the overlooking high ground, on which the Turks wisely placed their artillary the very next day. Other spectacular examples of British command expertise in that same year include the Battle of Loos in northern France when, on 26 September, nearly 10,000 Brits spent three-and-a-half hours attacking German positions, achieving absolutely nothing but suffering 8,246 casualties, during which the Germans suffered no casualties whatsoever. Brilliant.
News Release #5
<https://NoseyPARCA.WordPress.com> news release #5 - 26th April 2022
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
DRAFT ONLY - NEWS RELEASE - DRAFT ONLY
/*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/ /*\ \*/
NEWS RELEASE
Community councillor accuses FITCC chair of "sartorial treachery"
26 APRIL 2022 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fort William, Inverlochy, and Torlundy Community Council chairman Mr Mark Linfield is "in serious danger of becoming a traitor to his own T-shirt collection," jokes community councillor Mark Drayton as he relaxes after another long day in front of a laptop writing emails and drafting articles for his 'Drayton Download' SubStack. Drayton, presently the only community councillor presently to live in Fort William's only high-SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) estate, Plantation, has had rather more time to write since last Tuesday evening because he now has much less to read. "As well as barring me from future meetings, FITCC have apparently decided to remove me from the email list because I haven't heard a peep out of [FITCC secretary] Tricia [Jordan] since. I consider that to be pretty foolish, because both she and Mark [Linfield] have readily acknowledged the quality of the analysis I've done on several documents this year alone, with comments like 'good spot' and 'I totally agree.' I'm giving them a few more days - maybe a little longer - to cool-off before I go through the archive and marshall the evidence. After all, as [hard-left US activist Saul] Alinsky's fifth rule rightly states, 'ridicule is man's most potent weapon.'"
(TBC)
[..] He confirmed that his SubStack (at <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com>) would be the "centre of operations" for this, but also that other social network platforms would be "drawn into the circle," enabling questions to be posed publically (as comments below the master copy of this very news release at <https://DraytonMark.SubStack.com/p/news-release-4>, or privately by email, NextDoor message, or even SMS (to 07933 760031).
Entirely predictably, Mr Drayton couldn't resist further adding that, ideally, residents should join the <https://NextDoor.co.uk> social-networking platform/app rather than relying on Facebook, say. "I don't trust that censorship-loving [Mark] Zuckerberg bastard any further than I could comfortably excrete him," Mr Drayton has previously explained. "Fuck that cunt."
As we reported exactly a week ago, Mr Drayton's views regarding Mr Zuckerberg are all-too-well known to readers of his 'Wednesday Headway' SubStack columns, part of his so-called 'Drayton Download': on 8th & 15th September 2021 Mr Drayton re-posted a long article by British-born science journalist Nicholas Wade defending the 'lab-leak' hypothesis of Covid-19's origin; Mr Drayton's brief introduction (at <https://draytonmark.substack.com/p/wed-head-xxv-pt1>) forthrightly condemned Facebook for censoring discussion of the theory.
Mr Zuckerberg remains unavailable for comment.
END
NOTE FOR EDITORS Further information about this release can be obtained from the following: (for NoseyPARCA DOT WordPress DOT com)
Jennifer Seitz (Secretary) that.tiresome.rationalist AT gmail DOT com
(as a member of Fort William, Inverlochy, and Torlundy Community Council)
Mark Drayton EddieMDrayton AT gmail DOT com
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