Memetic Dining

Further to the post below, I spot a bandwagon to jump on. About a year ago, I did the dinner party list of people, rather than bloggers, and now it’s time for the bloggers one. As I haven’t yet knowingly met any bloggers, that part of the equation isn’t a problem, but I will extend it by saying that I wouldn’t re-invite people that I’d already “met” at other dinners. Variety being the spice of life, and all that.

So, the people that would be invited to mine would be :

• Peter from Naked Blog
• The inevitable ScaryDuck
• bsag from But She’s A Girl
• The (happily now back to blogging) Pogo of Dearie Me

and

• Jane from iCandy

Make of that little lot what you will. And yes, I nearly ended up with eight instead of five – apologies to the nameless ones who got dropped at the last moment. I blame the size of the dining table: that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Social Life Explodo

Over at ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat” (note to self – must remember to add that one to the blogroll), Zoe is talking about which bloggers she’d have to a dinner party, and it seems to have struck a chord with other bloggers. Meme-tastic, as Mike would probably say.

Anyway, it looks like yours truly is getting to be popular (or maybe it’s just to see what table manners an ill- trained monkey possesses), as I’m on Gert’s list of guests, and also on Karen’s list of suspects (although Pete doesn’t appear to have had much say in it, and I’m on instructions to be nice to Americans) so I must be doing something right. Hopefully someone will soon tell me what.

At the same time, there’s been initial discussions on Lori’s site about the potential for a Mancunian blog-meet before the Festering Season™ takes hold – which’ll be interesting. So far, Fab Café is looking like a favoured venue, but time will tell…

Marketing in Action

I’d forgotten I’d taken this photo – it was while I was out in the city over the weekend, and these two girls were running around the Urbis gardens yelling “Got your number!”

A while ago, Meg commented about shirts with 118 on them – I’ve no idea where these two got them from, but they were certainly getting their money’s worth out of them.

Lest ye Be Judged

For sheer light relief, the tale of the pissed Judge attempting to mediate a fight in a Scarborough kebab shop – of all places – is utterly brilliant.

[The judge said] “What proof have you got that you are police officers?” Mr Newbury said: “This rather went to confirm their assessment of him, as both officers were in full police uniform and had a fully marked police car outside the door.”

“Deputy district judge David Messenger called two officers “arseholes”, tried to wheedle favours from a desk sergeant, broke a police station alarm bell and refused to stop banging on his cell door on the grounds that he was “a drummer and enjoyed drumming”.”

I haven’t laughed so much in ages.

Oops

Reading through the current Corporate Communications Plan for the place I’m currently working in, an error has been spotted by myself. It concerns all corporate communications to the outside world, and I quote

All communications should be plain and clear, written using 12pt Anal font.

Obviously they’ve been typed from bad handwiritng – but all the same, I dread to imagine what the O character would look like in that particular font…

Google special

Well, according to Mike’s comprehensive searching of google (and Mike, you really DO need to get out more. *grin*) yours truly comes up seventh in Google. I’m preceded by people like Mr Julia Roberts Lyle Lovett, and – um – Cook with Lyle the Lion, as well as the wonderfully named Lyle H Ungar. Considering Tate and Lyle are at #1, I think they’re a bit out of my league, but it’ll be interesting to see if my ranking goes any higher than 7th.

Gawd, and I said Mike needs to get out more? Ha.

Stable Door – Locked

From today’s news, I find it amazing to hear that Microsoft will be closing all it’s MSN chatrooms in Europe from October 15th. (There’s also an editorial in the Guardian about the same subject) Of course, it’s The Paedophile Threat that’s being named as the excuse, and while I can see some of the reasons behind it, there’s a lot more that just seems to be a knee-jerk “make sure we can’t get sued” reaction.

I’m sure it has happened – people being ‘groomed’ by paedophiles and similar – through MSN chat but mainly it seems that it’s still part of the current demonisation of the internet by the media. According to the Guardian’s story on the same subject,

There have been at least 26 court cases in Britain involving child abuse which have been directly linked to chatrooms.

Now yes, that’s “a lot” of cases – but bear in mind these rooms are used by tens of thousands of people worldwide every day. Suddenly, the figures, the percentages don’t look so high, do they? Ideally, we would have a world where paedophilia didn’t exist, where no-one got abused or abducted – but that’s not reality. Is it fair though that 1% of users should keff the system for the other 99%? And what happens when the first ‘blame everyone but myself‘ paedophile says “well, I used to do all this via Chat, as a fantasy to keep my own urges under control, but when they cancelled chat, I had to go out and do it in reality instead”? The same piece quotes,

Gillian Kent, director of MSN UK, said: “Ninety-nine per cent of chat has been used appropriately by people. It is only a small number of people who abuse the service – but it is really serious abuse.

She said one in five people in chat rooms were spammers and there were a smaller number of paedophiles.

Frankly, that’s bollocks. I’ve used chat for about three years now, and a figure of 20% spammers and even 5 or 10% paedophiles is WAY out of proportion. Maybe MSN’s user-profile is different to the services that I’ve used – but I doubt it’s all that different.

There’s instantly more hysteria when anything involves “the internet” – whether it’s children being abducted, spouses leaving to be with someone on the other side of the world, people re-tracing their first loves through school reunion sites, if it mentions the internet, and can be used in a bad light, then it’s media-worthy.

Every form of communication has it’s bad side, it’s anti-use, if you will. Mobile phones can be abused – for instance bullying by text nessage (for which I still envisage “c u ltr 4 a bting” – but I shouldn’t be flippant) and can be used for terrorist purposes due to anonymity, particularly on pay-as-you-go devices. Telephones can be abused – menacing phone calls, or plunging people into debt through premium rate calls. The post can be abused – death threats, love letters, whatever. Even meeting people face to face can be abused – it’s no less likely that meeting one’s “first love” in a supermarket won’t have exactly the same effect as meeting them via a website.

But it’s the internet that gets the bad press at the moment. It’s made communication more instantaneous, and it’s global in reach – maybe that’s why the media doesn’t like it. Yes, because of it’s global nature it is harder to police – but doesn’t some of that come down to personal responsibility anyway?