Wednesday 30 December 2009

In another world...

Yesterday I ventured to the shops and as a special winter treat bought myself a Guardian. This is a treat we don't allow ourselves very often and I think it is over a year since I sat and read this rag. We get the Sunday Herald - it has a mildly intelligent and leftist leaning opinion section - and a TV section that is usually correct.*

Anyway - reading the Guardian was such a joy.**

So here are some random facts I gleaned from yesterday's paper:

On December 14th, worldwide, the on-line store Amazon sold 110 items per second.

And British internet start-up company onenewspage is supposed to taking on Google in the arena of free on-line news services. Maybe. But ha! - you try finding onenewspage by googling it - you wont get very far cos google have stopped tracking it.

And the networking site Facebook now has over 350 million users and expects this to be over 500 million by the end of 2010.

And there I was going to launch into a tirade about the power these seemingly innocent companies are being handed as we lemmings throw ourselves at their mercy. Myself included. But tirade is off cos Jussi wants to talk doors. Is this a metaphor?



*One really irritating aspect of life in Scotland is how BBC Scotland screw up the TV schedules, randomly and thoroughly illogically and .... rant rant rant

**I mean don't get me wrong - I love Scotland and a' - I've been here nigh on 25 years - but Scotland is too small a market to be able to produce anything of the standard of the English broadsheets

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Armando Innucci has a very amusing rant about his childhood in Glasgow being blighted by the words "Except for viewers in Scotland, who have their own programmes."

I would have hoped that in this day and age of multi-channel tv it would be easier for those of us not wishing to watch 'Teuchter Grouting from Oban' or 'A history of toenail clipping in Fife' or even worse the bloody Rangers/Celtic football and actually watch to watch the natural history programme that the rest of the country gets! But no, BBC Weegie is getting more parochial all the time, and unless we fork out a subscription to either Rupert Murdoch or Richard Branson there's bugger all we can do about it.

Having said that the Grauniad can also be dreadfully parochial, with anything north of Camden being treated as a strange land of alien beings, in articles which suggest that "Gosh! The natives here are actually quite civilised, and not the knuckle-dragging cloth-cap/tartan bonnet (delete as appropriate) wearing clodhopppers I thought they were. And it really doesn't take five days in a hollowed out canoe steered by a witchdoctor with a kipper through his nose to get here."

C

The Speaking Goat said...

Rant on brother!

The original post was more damning - 'anything requiring more than three brain cells, whisky sodden at that, gets bumped to around midnight' but decided it was offensive. Sheeet.

All English papers are parochial when it comes to uk - but I've always enjoyed Guardian foreign and financial news.

Spoke to Malc a while back and got confused about your employment status.

Cheers

S

townmouse said...

I never noticed until I moved up here that all maps of the British isles in the Guardian are usually truncated round about Midlothian...

The English versions of BBC can be found on freeview (channel 800 on our box) but every time we switch our digibox on we have to retune it to get them. One day we'll take the hint. Quite looking forward to the toenail clipping one - when's that on?

Anonymous said...

I think I must have read too much Charlie Brooker, so despite by my complaints I'm still a regular Gruaniad reader - I even forked out for the mobile app.

Malc did message me with a potential offer of work a couple of weeks back, which I had to turn down. But still it was nice of him to offer, and if was your good self who pointed him in my direction, ta as well.

For the record, although I am happily home-based, I'm still for the moment working for the Man.

Happy New and all that sort of thing!
C