Error Of The Week (6)
Technology is all very well but it needs to be used with discretion and sensitively.
One addition to the box of tricks that cameras and smart phones come with that I can never imagine I would ever want to use is the cat filter. Apparently, it superimposes a cat’s ears and whiskers on to the visage of the subject of your photo. I suppose it could be amusing but it seems to me to smack very much of a solution looking for a problem.
I’m on the way to British Columbia Alaska as you read this and so this story piqued my interest. A couple of people had been murdered on the Alaskan highway and Sergeant Janelle Shoihet of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police held a televised news conference to explain how the investigations were going.
Unfortunately, some wag had switched on the cat filter on the camera. It took a while, and a few astonished tweets, for the error to be noticed. Hardly the image of professionalism and diligence that the force was trying to present. Indeed, you could say that someone had made a pig’s ear of it all.
