K and I really enjoyed the recent Channel 4 documentary "
The Sex Blog Girls", starring our very own
Zoe One Track.
Needless to say, this was my favourite part of the documentary. Two whole seconds of immortality (rounded up to the nearest whole number)! Why, I nearly wore out the pause button...
And then, just a few minutes later, this popped up:
"
Darling!", I squealed at my best beloved. "
How could they have got you so wrong?"
Labels: blogs, journal, onetrack, television
Oh dear. (Paragraph 6)
But there again... (Paragraph 2)
Although I did once say... (Paragraph 4)
The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between.
(No,
not between the left one and the right one. Are you fixated or something?)
Update: I've left some extended spin-off thoughts in the comments. In many ways, they merit re-working into a proper post - but in other ways, I'm actually happier to leave them slightly buried. Yup, it's a return to "confessional" blogging...Labels: confessional, genderpolitics, linkage, onetrack
1. Once again, K and I have become
Big Brother's bitches. Once again,
Grace Dent provides the sharpest commentary. Also on the telly tip, I was able to identify the
precise moment when the hitherto flawless
Shameless jumped the shark: namely, when an unconscious Frank Gallagher was dragged from his burning kitchen by his pet dog. I mean,
really.
2. As the Hellen Affair rumbles on, Zinnia Cyclamen provides
a neat rebuttal of his rebuttal.
3. Much to my surprise, since I'm not exactly Mister Gadget Man, I have been completely sucked into the Apple iPhone hype, and now find myself pining for ownership.
Engadget has the most thorough explanation. Unfortunately, K's plans to surprise me with a Blackberry on my birthday now lie exposed and in tatters. If only he was going to Florida in June...
4. ...rather than today, six months short of the device hitting the shops. In preparation for this, my valeting services have been in great demand this week. We had a lovely time picking out fresh shirt-and-tie combinations for him a couple of evenings ago (does pink scream "Spring 2006", or can we get away with it for a while longer?), and I have never been far from an ironing board. Oh, I do have my practical uses.
5. Alarmingly, K will still be out of the country when the kitchen fitters arrive next week, thus leaving me as
de facto Site Manager. But what if they ask me technical questions about, I don't know, angle brackets or something? I shall be all at sea. Thankfully, K's business partner's wife E - who is something of an expert in this field - has volunteered her services as Relief Manager. She knows her way round kitchens, does E. I don't usually stretch much further than the fridge, the kettle and the microwave.
6. Facing the prospect of being home alone with no working kitchen for a few nights, I intend to be Out and About as much as possible next week. Owt good at t'flicks?
7. My intensive pre-interview research into the Life and Times of Will Oldham/Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is yielding rich dividends. In particular, his most recent album
The Letting Go is a quiet revelation. I don't have many alt-country moments these days, but this is one of them.
8. With the Amsterdam weekend imminent, blogging might be light, but Twittering will hopefully be moderate-to-heavy - so keep your eye on the newly expanded "we twitter" box on the sidebar. (I am SO PROUD at having hacked the code around for this, although it has rather buggered up my archived unordered lists.) In the meantime, why not refresh your memories with details of my previous visits in
1991 (in which I found myself the unwitting star of a Benny Hill sketch at a *cough* "men-only event") and
2002 (in which cracks appear in my carefully constructed professional facade)? Ah, for those heady devil-may-care early days, when Troubled Diva was still a byword for Too Much Information...
9. Preparations for
Which Decade Is Tops For Pops and
Post of the Week have taken up most of the rest of my spare time - and at the time of writing, there is still
one more vacancy for another member of the Post of the Week editorial team. More details below.
10. If spin the list out to a nice round ten, I'll make myself late and miss my plane. Have a good weekend!
Labels: bigbrother, confessional, gadgets, journal, linkage, lists, media, onetrack, television, twitter
"
My place, posh frock, or else the Mother gets it."
And so, just three days after Girl With A One Track Mind first published it on her blog, and following a steady ground-swell of linkage from duly appalled fellow bloggers, an odious piece of e-blackmail from the
Sunday Times finds itself at Number One on Google for
a search on its author's name. Coming hot on the heels of
last month's similarly successful blog-link campaign against a spam-commenting online florist, this is further proof of the power of the collective link.
Of course, some might maintain that Abby "One Track" Lee was "naive" for thinking that she could hang on to her anonymity, and that Hellen was only hastening the inevitable, and that the rest of us are being "naive" for throwing up our hands in maiden-auntish horror. Happens all the time, journalism's a rough old game, only doing his job, yadda yadda.
To which I say: isn't that the moral equivalent of justifying the theft of an unattended handbag on the grounds that someone was probably going to steal it anyway, and so you might as well get in there first?
Actually, no. It's worse than that. Handbags and their contents can be replaced; personal privacy can't be.
If Abby Lee and her supporters are to be branded as "naive", then that's only because, like most reasonable people, they operate from the assumption that most of us are still minded to treat each other with fairness, decency and respect. In which case, I'm
glad that, in these hard-nosed, cynical times, Nicholas Hellen's e-mail still has the power to shock.
In any case, the balance of shaky assumptions lies firmly on Hellen's side. Assumptions that Abby Lee would comply with his demands through fear, or that her vanity and/or desire for "success" at any price (to use a somewhat dubious definition of the concept of "success") would send her rushing into the arms of her captors, posh frock in hand, ready for her Glamorous Makeover. Not to mention the assumption that the unmasking of the author of a newly published and still relatively unknown book constituted a legitimate, public-interest news story, fit for Page 3 of a "quality" Sunday broadsheet.
But perhaps Hellen's most "naive" assumption of all was in thinking that he could f**k with an extended community of nice, friendly, supportive people with Google Page Ranks of 5 and 6, and an aggregated readership of thousands, and get away with it. Hopefully, this little campaign will send out a signal to Old Media's most reptilian foot-soldiers, in possibly the only language they respect or understand, that we are NOT to be f**ked with in the future.
Labels: blogs, community, genderpolitics, linkage, onetrack, opinion
