Well now, something strange is occurring. One of my e-mail addresses receives other people's e-mails from time to time. If it is obvious that it's a real person, then I e-mail back and let them know that they've wrongly addressed the post, and generally, I'll get a short note saying thanks.On Saturday or Sunday, I received an e-mail from my sister Rowena. Only I don't have a sister Rowena. So I e-mailed her and told her. Now she has replied, assuming that I'm joshing with her. We've entered the surreal zone, trouble is, I quite like the mildly surreal. I will have to see how long it takes before she realises she really isn't communicating with her sister. Ah, such sport.
So, what is this? Blue Peter having to apologise? Blue Peter is a children's magazine programme on the BBC that has been around since I was a kid. It prides itself on the quality of the content and presentation. The thing is, in my opinion, they are the victims of some pathetic uptight member of the public's righteous indignation.
They had a phone-in to raise money for some good cause - this is something Blue Peter is renowned for. But the telephone system had technical difficulties and so a child who was visiting the studio was told to phone and and she won the prize. How the hell a member of the public even found this out is beyond me, but to ring in and whine is unbelievable. Honestly, it seems like a decision that most of us would have made in the circumstances, and no-one gained any money from the whole thing except the charity, so what's the beef?
Apparently, blogging has peaked. Maclean's, a Canadian Magazine, reports that 200 million bloggers have given up and that the rate at which new bloggers are coming in is slowing. I'm not sure whether this is good, bad or indifferent.
The Guardian's own blog site 'Comment is Free' is one year old today. Again, I'm not sure whether it has been good, bad or indifferent. I have sometimes read articles on there by journos who can do a lot better, but who seem to turn out something fairly shoddy because it's a blog. And the comments are no better. Things turn nasty quite quickly, with commentators flaming each other or the article writer without much thought.
I like blogs, I like blogging, but I also like to follow the lives and thoughts of other people, those I know, those I know through blogging and those I don't know at all, they might just as well be characters in a soap, but whose styles or lives interest me.
2 comments:
Ironically, it was the mother who complained. She said that she couldn’t let it go because it was wrong to lie to the children. This was, of course, after her child had received the prize.
How bloody pathetic is that? All the good work Blue Peter does and she gets all uppity about something they couldn't really do much about. But of course, now she's had her 15 minutes of fame. Hope at least someone she knows told her what a plonker she is.
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