Stripes

While living in the UK for a stint a few years back, I came to enjoy the BBC. As part of my course requirements in discourse analysis, my professor asked us to absorb UK media - popular, new and conventional. I took to reading The Guardian and watching the dinner time news on the BBC. I poured over the glossy pages of British Cosmo. I paid attention to posters and advertisements in the tube stations all around London.

Being accustomed to North American news media where hard questions are rarely raised, and partisan leanings are often too visible to suggest any neutrality in the reporting, I was impressed and intrigued by the hard hitting BBC journalists. It was abundantly clear that it wasn't their mission to make politicians feel comfortable in studio and allow them to tick off public relations goals through positive press. I felt more informed. I was impressed by the quality of reporting.

I heart the BBC. This isn't to say I dislike the CBC, in fact, I am a huge fan of Wild Roses, but I do appreciate the guts and integrity of British media. I think studying journalism in the United Kingdom would be a great education.

I support the BBC, and it seems they support some of my notions too. The namesake of this blog - Horizontal Stripes - has long been touted as unflattering. However, The University of York, as reported by the BBC, has found that horizontal stripes are more slimming then vertical stripes. The study involved asking people to decide which women wearing striped dresses looked slimmer in 200 pairs of pictures. This study was based on Hermann von Helmholtz optical illusion which shows two identically sized squares next to each other - one with vertical stripes and one with horizontal. The horizontal striped box looked taller and thinner, and so did the women.

Long live horizontal stripes!