Category: Opinion

personal opinion on many subjects eg. politics, history, media etc

The Top Five Things That Annoy Me About Social Media

The Three am Rant

  1. Blog posts and articles with names like “The Top 5/10/20 Best/Worst” of anything.
  2. Blog posts and articles that inform you that “You have been doing this wrong for your whole life”
  3. Articles that make you click through endlessly to read a story that could have been told in less than 500 words
  4. Articles that make some claim about a celebrity/royal which turn out to be nothing new and usually tied to some advertising campaign
  5. Poor proofreading eg. “7yo saves chocking mum”. What was she doing, eating too much chocolate?
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Number 1 annoys me because frankly there is far too much of it. It’s even recommended by blogging tutorials as a way to format a post. I was asked to do it when I wrote a guest post for Ruby Lane but it’s really not my style. Once in a while, I write a list but these things are subjective anyway. My 50 most beautiful classic movie stars won’t be yours.

Number 2 annoys me because I don’t like being told that everything I ever did is wrong. I won’t read those because they just make me mad at the twenty-somethings who write them.

Numbers 3&4 are clickbait and I try to avoid them but sometimes I get sucked in by a nice photo or actually wanting to read about the subject but I don’t want to spend fifteen minutes over it, and no, I never click on the accompanying ads.

Number 5 annoys me because I notice spelling errors and it’s becoming more common than ever. Spell check is not enough on its own but sometimes it seems as if nobody cares about correct spelling any more.

Everyone talks about “content” and being “an influencer” it seems that too many people just write any old thing to make money.

Yes, the internet is full of rubbish. Thank goodness for the journalists and bloggers who still provide material worth reading.

30 Days, 30 Songs (29)

Don’t Tear It Down

This song by V Spy V Spy was released in 1986 and I relate to it, even more, today than I did then. It makes me both sad and angry when fine old buildings are knocked down only to be replaced by ugly concrete stacks especially when those stacks are so badly built that people can’t live in them as has happened in two recent cases in Sydney. It makes me mad when people are made homeless because a stupid reality show buys the boarding house where they lived to refurbish but not as public housing; or when the refurbishing is just a token saving of a facade. Our cities are losing their character forever. This song is a musical rant about that.

Encouraging Bad Manners

The cricket World Cup is just beginning and after some debate about whether I could afford it or not I decided to subscribe to a sports streaming channel for a month or so in order to watch some of it as it is not on FTA TV.

A World Cup Trophy

I received an email from the streaming company which included this paragraph.

Out to dinner when a match starts? Just whip out your phone and start streaming LIVE at the table or watch the replay the next day on the bus or train. You can also Use Apple TV, Telstra TV, Android TV or Chromecast to watch it on the big screen.

It really annoyed me that they would suggest getting out your phone to watch live TV when you are out to dinner. How rude is that? We should not be encouraging that sort of behaviour but they speak about it as if it’s perfectly acceptable to ignore your family and friends. This is what replays and recording TV was invented for.

I know. It’s just advertising spiel but it really got my goat. I will be watching the cricket at home on TV. It will be at night so it’s unlikely I’ll miss any but if I had company or was out when it was on bad luck. I’ll watch the replay later.

RDP: Pink

Don’t Pinkize Me!

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the colour pink. I don’t dislike the colour.  I like it, especially in nature. A walk around my garden would easily show that.

pink rose in the back garden.

Ground cover rose grown from a small pot.

No, I dislike the way that pink is used to represent women and girls all the time. It’s as if we can’t be happy in any other colour.

When a woman takes part in a predominantly male sport like motor racing you will often find her team in pink overalls or the car is pink. That wouldn’t be annoying if it wasn’t nearly always the case.
Karolina i Silvette

Pink is used a lot to promote women’s issues. Breast cancer for example. In Australia, everyone knows The McGrath Foundation who raise money for breast care nurses, a very worthy cause let me say. The organisation was founded by Jane and Glenn McGrath in 2005 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Glenn was a well known and popular cricketer so the Sydney Test  Match is always their biggest fundraiser for the year. The players wear pink caps, the commentators were pink ties or even pink suits and the crowd is generally a sea of pink. Again I don’t think this is a bad thing.Jane McGrath Day - Day 3 at the SCG//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

I just sometimes wish someone would come up with a different marketing idea that’s all. Apparently, it wasn’t always this way. I didn’t know this but up until the 1940s pink was generally associated with boys and blue with girls.

While these days pink is seen as a more feminine color, it wasn’t always that way! In an article from Smithsonian.com, it says that in 1908, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” It was around the 1940’s that these colors switched.

Nearly all girls toys incorporate pink. People go on about diversity but the recent 60th Anniversary Barbie was literally pink from head to toe. Pink hair, pink outfit right down to stocking and shoes. She looks like a lipstick! Does anyone remember when Barbie was not associated with pink? No? well, I’m older than she is so I do.

One of the 60th anniversary Barbie’s Photo from Mattel.

So as I said, I don’t dislike pink; I do dislike how commercialised the use of it has become. There is a whole psychology around colours in marketing. I don’t like it because I don’t like being manipulated.

Flowers in my kitchen

References:

Another WordPress Feature Goes Missing

This morning I discovered another WordPress feature had gone missing. I guess it’s not a very important one but I liked it.

On the Stats page there where you can see the list of posts that have been viewed there used to be a little link next to each post which would take you to it. I don’t know if other people do this but I often like to read my old posts to see if they are still relevant or sometimes with a  really old one to remind myself what I said. Sometimes I do it out of curiosity, trying to work out what attracted the reader to it or why an old post keeps bobbing up.

Where did the links go?

When I logged in this morning those little links were gone.  I imagine that as WordPress is so glitchy these days and as they consider something as important as spell check to be not worth fixing they are hardly going to worry about a feature that probably a lot of people don’t even notice.

Of course, there are other ways I can go back over old posts. I know that but it’s just another example of the glitches we seem to be seeing more and more often these days.

Lest We Forget

Normandy Veteran
Veterans at the ANZAC parade 2015
Veterans
Lest we forget
Vietnam Veterans
The Hobart Cenotaph

Today is ANZAC Day. I didn’t get up early to go to the dawn service or catch the bus to see the parade in Hobart but the above are some photos that I took of the 2015 march.

I don’t think of the march as a celebration of war so much as a day that we remember the fallen.

Years ago when I used to go Dawn Service and to see the march in Adelaide regularly I used to enjoy seeing the pleasure the veterans got out of seeing old friends that maybe they didn’t see very often and their determination to go the distance even though they were old and maybe disabled.

It was once felt that the ANZAC tradition would die once the men and women who served in the world wars were gone but instead it seems to have become bigger. Of course,  we’re never going to run out of conflicts to lose soldiers in.

The Waler horse is the type of horse used by the Light Horsemen
Riders forming up before the start.
Two of the horses in the riding demonstration.
A riding demonstration in WWI uniform.

I just hope that young people are commemorating the day for the right reasons. Many young Australians like to visit Turkey and spend ANZAC Day at Gallipoli but it was not meant to be about rock concerts and selfies. It’s a time to be solemn, reflect and do our best to make sure that no more young men have to die in a war.

Dark clouds looming over the Cenotaph in Hobart.

Don’t we have a lot of euphemisms for War?

Moments with Dogs

Most of our Op Shop volunteers make a big fuss when customers bring babies into the shop. I guess I am not very maternal. I prefer dogs.

A few customers bring dogs and tie them up outside the shop while they browse. Sometimes we’re asked for a bowl of water for them which we are happy to supply. If it is not too warm, other customers leave their dogs in their cars with the windows open. I don’t really like this but those people don’t usually stay long. Very occasionally a customer might bring their dog inside and carry it around with them.

This week I met two dogs at the shop. One was a twelve-year-old German Shepherd whose owner had come in to find a couple of old blankets for her. Twelve is a good age for a German Shepherd so when she commented on how much her dog loved soft toys I found one for her to give it. The lady let her dog out of the car to stretch her legs and say hello to me, it was near the end of the day and I was taking things back inside the shop. She seemed to love the toy and carried it around in her mouth. I don’t know if this dog understood that the toy came from me but she came up and gave me a lick. I know a lot of people are frightened of German Shepherds but the ones I have met have all been lovely dogs.

Owczarek cezar
An elderly German Shepherd similar to the one I saw. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Owczarek_cezar.jpg

My second dog moment left me feeling quite angry. Some people had come in and were browsing while their dog, which was tied up outside near the water container, was barking and crying. The people were in the shop for a long time and it sounded to me as if the dog was getting quite distressed. One of the owners went out to check on it once but when he came back inside the dog started crying again.

I guess I am sensitive to this because Cindy gets anxious when I am away from her. I went outside to have a look at the dog and discovered it was a puppy, not a tiny puppy but only a few months old. It was at that clumsy big-footed stage. I let it sniff my hand and talked to it for a bit before thinking I had better get back to work. The owners were still shopping, they did not seem to be in much of a hurry. I went out again, my feet were hurting and I needed a rest so I thought I’d sit on the bench outside and keep the pup company for a few minutes. He cried and tried to come to me but the leash was not long enough to allow that so I went and stood beside him and patted him and told him it would be OK.

I was still out there talking to the pup when the owners came back. I was really annoyed with them by now and I said that the pup was too young to understand them being gone for so long. They said “He’s got to learn.” and “It’s better to ignore him when he cries.” I thought “Yes, but not for that long.” they must have been gone at least half an hour. So I said “I bet you wouldn’t leave a baby crying for that long.” and the woman said that she probably would.

I went back inside because there was no point in saying anything else to them but I was angry about it for the rest of the day.