So how was Climate Camp for you?

Don’t know about you lot but this blog had a whole pile of fun….

….but  it was that veteran hogger of the limelight and burster of pompisity’s bubble, Old Holborn, who ran away with the laurels….

….and managed to get almost an entire piece in The Groan to himself.

Honourable mention for services to sanity to @wearethebritish, who started the whole thing with this….

When’s the next one? Tell me there’s another one soon!

Stephen Fry saves the internet again

A disaster of epoch-making proportions was narrowly avoided yesterday when, for twelve agonising, nail biting hours, the world waited, digits crossed, gaze fixed intently on its computer screens, to see whether or not @stephenfry, the man widely acknowledged to be in charge of the internet, would make good his admonition that he would be leaving social networking site, Twitter, never to return.

This near tragedy came about in the early hours of yesterday morning when hitherto Twitter also-ran and complete unknown, @brumplum, had the downright gall to refer to Fry’s tweets as “boring”. Naturally Fry wasn’t about to take this lying down and returned serve with interest….

To which, sense of fun and japery going into overdrive, our friend The Plum responded….

Only to discover that Fry wasn’t in on the joke….

As is only right and proper when the honour of a National Treasure™ is impugned, the world wide web went into a ferment, and the sense of outrage and moral panic had reached fever pitch by the time Fry’s QI sidekick, the part time actor and full time Dagenham enforcer, @alandavies1, arrived on the scene and waded in with this flailing combination of haymakers….

Followed by….

And finally, the following call for all good Essex men and true to take up arms in defence of our hero….

And so it continued, for hour after hour, with enraged Twits landing body blow after body blow on The Plum, while the object of all this opprobrium and his small but loyal band of followers manned the barricades to prevent his Twitter account from being overrun and laid waste utterly.

But no word from Fry. Would the internet ever be the same again? Would he return, right hand raised, doe eyed, beatific smile illuminating his features, to pronounce benediction on a rapturous, welcoming throng, or would he be lost forever, a memory, a rumour, a smudge on a forgotten page of history?

Finally, early this morning, as dawn’s fingertips began slowly to draw back the black velvet curtain of night, our long, uncertain vigil was at an end….

And suddenly as if the yesterday’s brouhaha had never happened, love was all around….

Now I think I speak for the vast majority of right thinking people when I say that this kind of thing cannot, under any circumstances, be permitted to happen again. We simply cannot afford to run the risk of Stephen Fry deleting his Twitter account and the internet collapsing into chaos and anarchy. Therefore, with this in mind, I have devised a plan, a series of options that should allow us to sleep easy in our beds….

1. All personal insults, jibes and brickbats must henceforth be presented to a Mockery Panel, made up of admired and respected Twits, such as @rustyrockets, @CHRISDJMOYLES, @MayorOfLondon or @jenxstudios, and scrutinised for quality, grammar, and diversity consciousness. Any that don’t pass muster must be deleted and the user’s account suspended until he, or she, can prove to the panel’s satisfaction that he, or she, has mastered the subjunctive as prescribed in Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
2. All prospective Twitter account holders must be subjected to psychological profiling, involving online Rorschach Tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and Neuro Linguistic Programming, and graded on a score of one to ten. Any user scoring below one will be banished from the internet until the Apocalypse.
3. The word, “boring”, must be substituted by the following sequence of characters from the Greek alphabet: βορίνγ
4. There must be full implementation of the harshest, most unforgiving Darwinian principles, with unregulated, all in, free-for-all mockery, lampooning, ridicule and sending up, and may the best man, or woman, win.

Call me callous and obdurate but I’m inclined to go with option 4.

Alan Davies has been unavailable for comment, on Twitter at least, for the last 16 hours.

Subcontinental email pest dept. Oh do leave me alone, will you please?

Karahi’s been clogging up my inbox again.

Two months ago he dispatched one of periodical email circulars about nothing of consequence, saying….

One day, people, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will just disappear without a trace. You heard it here first.

Well, no I didn’t, actually.

Excellent. I’m waiting expectantly for the dawn of that day.

In deciding whether to use Facebook, Twitter, Shitter or Mysolitarybedroomexistence, I only have to ask myself whether The Hoff would use it. Answer, yes, so it’s not for me.

And let’s face it, The Hoff has a more interesting life than most about which to broadcast snippets of ephemera to “friends” he’s never met, and probably never will.

“Fine. Chacun à son goût,” thought I. Personally I don’t use Twitter to divulge information about my personal life, but more as a tool for enticing visitors to this blog, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

Imagine my surprise, then, when this morning, the following paranoid screed arrives….

I noticed this morning that a suggested friend on Facebook….

Sorry?

….a suggested friend on Facebook….

That would be the Facebook that, two months ago, a team of Clydesdales on steroids wouldn’t have dragged you into signing up for, or another Facebook I don’t know about?

….was my landlady.

Now, normally when I have a look at suggested friends I’ve never heard of, we always have one or more friends in common; fair enough.

So I was wondering which friends the landlady shared. Answer: fuck all.

Now that’s just weird. Why would she appear as a suggested friend? I barely know her, don’t know anyone else who knows her, have no personal info on Facebook that would connect me to her, and when I checked her small list of friends I’d never heard of any of them.

Blimey, K. That’s a cosmic mystery and half, right there. Sounds like the CIA’s been reading your thoughts. I’d seriously consider a tin-foil helmet if I were you.

If only there was some way he didn’t absolutely, positively have to use Facebook.