Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

The time waster victorious

A few tab closures for the weekend.

The fallout from Belle de Jour’s outing has been fascinating and, occasionally, carcrash awful.

My favourite was this blog from a guy who not only worked out who she was very early, but, brilliantly, created a googlewhack as a tripwire to alert him if anyone else figured it out. When it got tripped, he alerted her. Very cool indeed.

Elsewhere we were treated to the unedifying sight of some people close to her either selling their story or, worse, setting up a blog and bleeding all over it. Her dad turned out to be a habitual user of prostitutes – who was happy to spill his guts to the Daily Mail – which spurred a stream of columnista cries that she was clearly living out some gross father-fixated compulsion.

Meanwhile her ex-boyfriend outed himself online and wrote a heartbreaking but basically unhinged blog about how much he still loved her and threatened to track down her new boyfriend and beat him up, which led Belle to report him to the police. Oh dear. If ever a guy needed his mates to take him out, let him cry on their shoulders, and get him drunk, it’s this bloke.

This analysis of the way in which the journalistic debate was framed echoed the points I made the other day, but slightly more cogently:

”...one might consider the extent to which the media tends to ‘tie’ the framing of prostitution debates to specific voices thought to represent an official consensus on the issue. Can an official consensus, reflecting the ideas underlying prostitution policy, be identified? If so, does this official consensus receive pride of position in media coverage? Are dissenting counter-frames allotted a meaningful role when the issue is up for discussion?”

And my mate Rob turned out to know her. Which, knowing Rob, shouldn’t really surprise me – he knows all the most interesting people :-)

Meanwhile, this chat about social media with Stephen Fry and the creators of LinkedIn and Twitter was interesting and enjoyable, even when viewed live on two computers with dodgy internet connections.

Timelordgirl has outdone herself with a simply stunning CGI mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and, um, Doctor Who And The Wheel In Space. 2001: A Who Odyssey has to be seen to be believed.

On which note, blimey, wasn’t Waters of Mars good!?

And finally, my wonderful wife turned 40 yesterday and we spent the evening celebrating by, um, dealing with screaming kids and taking Kitty to the doctors at 10:30pm to try and find out why she wouldn’t stop coughing (answer: willpower). Oh, so celebratory. Harrumph.