I’m a bit cross

 Now that you’ve opened this post, I can expand on that – I’m fucking fuming!  How much lower can that bunch of filth-brained scumbags lower themselves?  (Just in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the Daily Mail.)  How dare they slander a good man (read his biography) in that scurrilous way, purely in the hope that some of their lies and innuendoes will rub off on his son, twenty years after the father’s death?

Congratulations, Dacre, you have shown your true colours.  Cameron can wriggle and squirm all he likes, but this may just have lost him the election.  You have to wonder at the stupidity, don’t you?

The Mail claims, by some kind of weird osmotic process, to speak for something it sees as ‘Britain’.  If this is the case, then I have to say that I, too, hate ‘Britain’.

Just join the Club, silly!

“You can’t have one law for members of a club and another for non-members,” a senior executive of a newspaper group is quoted as saying, in connection with the proposed new press regulatory regime, whereby publications that decline to be regulated will be subject, in some instances, to harsher conditions than those who join.  (I simplify, of course.)

Funny, I thought the whole point of joining a club was to gain some benefit.  What else is a Tesco Clubcard for?  (From the holder’s point of view, of course – I’m sure Tesco’s get something out of it too.)  And I wouldn’t expect to be able to just swan into Boodles and help myself to the port without having joined.  But then journalists do tend, like Humpty Dumpty, to use words to suit their own purposes, don’t they?

It rather reminds me of an elderly relative of mine who regularly complains about being referred to some website, because “I’m not on the bloody internet!”  The suggestion that this could easily be remedied simply by joining up is met with no more than a shake of the head.

In other news …

A scattergun post today, in line with my currently scattered brain, from the world of media fringes.

1. Where did Emsley get his inspiration from?

 

Find your nearest Katie Kambridge, compare and contrast.   

2.      The S-word doesn’t appear until page 13 of today’s Observer, and then only in passing.  Even more encouraging, no pictures at all of the slug-faced junk-garnished slob-draped swamp cockroach.  Other ‘news’ purveyors take note.

3.      Bowie’s new single is brilliant.  But is this the greatest marketing campaign EVER?

4.      For crossword aficionados mainly, but all fans of the human spirit may join in:  Araucaria, the greatest compiler ever, who is a retired clergyman aged 91, announced on Friday that he has terminal cancer, and provided details - by means of the solutions in a characteristically devious crossword.  “It seemed the natural thing to do,” he said.

 

And finally: Blogger has bloggered up yet again by apparently withdrawing the 'browse' option from the 'insert image' function, which used to allow me to select a picture from my own hard disk. I now have to upload it to Picasa Web Albums and select it from there.
Tell me I'm wrong, please, someone.  I'm going to be investigating Wordpress ...

Communities

This started from my reviewing my Christmas card list.

It’s that time of the year, isn’t it?  I like to think that I belong to quite a few communities.  But if I’m honest, I’m not sure whether I do.  So I need to analyse this.  Bear with me.  (Or don’t, click off now – but see my last paragraph.)

Years ago, I formed a concept that a community might consist of a number of people who might be thinking of each other at any one time.  The closeness of the community could be measured by the probability of that happening, and actual face-to-face meetings were an outcome of that probability.  Originally, and for many centuries, people had to be within walking or riding distance, so you’d be constantly aware of all that, and of the subtle shifts within it.  If you wanted to move in or out, you had to physically duck and weave.  I’m not just talking Jane Austen: even in my teens, in the fifties, you had to keep a bright eye open for who might walk up the high street or through the youth club door, and who they were with in relation to who you were with.  So communities shifted and mutated.

The theory held, with extension, after the telephone became cheap enough for parents to permit its use.  Although the interaction was long-distance, it still depended on the precept that you would be thinking of the person you phoned.  The nature of the community didn’t really change, it just stretched.  The relationships within it remained the same.  And of course you could always pretend not to be there, or ring off.

And then along came the internet, 2.0.  I started blogging, and that was fine.  Although I didn’t actually know any of the people, I could feel that there was a community out there, to which I could belong, within a rather reconstructed set of rules.  It was a bit like being at a conference in Dusseldorf  or somewhere, where you don’t know anyone but can easily relate, because you have at least a bit of common ground – and of course you can always walk away.

This is where we came in.  I’ve joined a few social sites, and I get invites to befriend hundreds of people whom I don’t know, will never know, and who only know of me as a friend of a friend of a friend.  That’s exactly like my Christmas card list.  I’ve got it down from eighty-something to thirty-six, just by eliminating all those with whom I feel absolutely no sense of community.

Am I being churlish?  Probably.  So I promise to do nothing but frivolous posts from now until 2012, starting tomorrow.

Virtual Role Models

You may have noticed, from the TV or the newspapers or passing loudspeaker vans or sky-writing aeroplanes, that a certain football player has recently been revealed to be a bad role model for the nation's youth, due to the uncovering of certain behavioural shenanigans which have no place in a respectable blog such as this.  The sin is deemed especially heinous by virtue of the fact that the person in question had hitherto been universally regarded as a good role model: sober, balanced, faithful loving husband, perfect father, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  So youngsters who were previously motivated to emulate this laudable lifestyle will, we are told, be instantly converted to the belief that it is after all perfectly acceptable to play away from home/beat your wife/snort yard-long lines of cocaine or whatever the latest scandal might be.

And I think: hang on.  A couple of things.  Firstly, whilst all this was allegedly going on, who was holding this man up to be that paragon of virtue?  Why, the very media who now vilify him as the spawn of Satan.  So that wasn't very good journalism, was it?  They are normally so good at unearthing wrongdoing where none exists, you'd think the real thing would be a doddle, wouldn't you?  But it took them years.  Secondly, have they ever met, spoken to or observed an actual teenager?  And finally (all right, that's three), if they are so dismayed by these revelations and their perceived corrupting influence, er, why did they publish them?

Myself, I think this whole role model thing isn't what it's cracked up to be.  I can't think of a single one I ever had.  Heroes to be worshipped, certainly.  Achievements to be aspired to.  But people of whom I thought: 'I want to conduct my life like him'?  Nah.  But maybe that's just me.