Posting, posting. . ?
March 18, 2010
Sex, drugs, scandal, horror. Cheryl Cole, Katie Price, Kate Moss. Football, baseball, basketball, Formula 1. Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Simon Cowell. Steamy sex, legal drugs. Alien abduction/invasion, the Apple iPad, the Loch Ness Monster, dangerous dogs, World of Warcraft, miracle diets, anti-ageing secrets of the stars. Illicit, passionate, torrid sex and extremely hallucinogenic FREE drugs. All topics for which I suspect you’ll look largely in vain on the following pages – but at least it gets the shameless scattershot ploy for Google’s attention up front and out the way.
So, obviously, I’m new to this blogging malarkey – though I have spent 20 years writing for a living, and actually lost my online cherry (e-cherry?) when I wrote an event-based daily blog for three weeks earlier this year. But that was anonymous, a kind of chatty/gossip column-style commentary on said event, and when I’ve got my journalist hat on there’s the protection of professional objectivity (as far as that’s possible) as well as a very particular brief to write to. This all feels very naked. (Which wasn’t another shameless ploy – though it likely can’t hurt.)
As you might be gathering, I’m one of the world’s tardiest adopters of any new-fangled technology. I only recently got my fourth new mobile phone, ever. So it’s going to be as much of a learning curve to find my way around the technicalities of posting, categorising, archiving etc – reassuringly idiot-proof as they look – as it is to figure out what to write. I’m sure it’s all going to be a great adventure – for some reason I’m put in mind of The Phantom Tollbooth (and thus of its splendidly named creator, Norton Juster), especially the Dictionopolis bit. In a good way: it’s one of my all-time favourite books.
Anyway, here goes with the sharing thang, which I gather is part of the point: daffodil season always makes me happy. (I’ve just looked round and seen the bunch on the chest of drawers at my window, in absolutely perfect full bloom.) On sale across town for a quid or so a bunch for maybe another month – by which time the outdoor ones will be happening. Gorgeous, gladsome flowers, so totally redolent of spring. They don’t last long, of course, and once they’re wilting they smell really sickly – but for a quid or so it’s part of the pleasure to buy a bunch more in bud and watch them open up. I weeded and dug over our whole garden last Sunday. Not that it’s exactly big, just a wee lawn with three borders around it, but I did the lot in one stint, worked up a fine muck sweat for a couple of hours, followed around by a thrush and a robin hoping for worms, and it felt fantastic – especially for someone usually desk-bound, living at 56° north, after the coldest winter in 30 years.
Going back to mobile phones, here’s a great wee factoid to round off my maiden post. It comes from a book I read recently, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (Bloomsbury, 2005), which recounts how its author Andrew Smith tracked down and interviewed the then nine remaining astronauts who’d walked on the Moon. It’s a really interesting, thoughtful, thought-provoking and lovingly crafted read all round, but the particular snippet that’s pinged to mind is the fact that NASA Mission Control’s entire computing power for the 1969 landing – and we’re talking vast roomfuls of kit here – was equivalent to about four mobile phones, circa 2005. The lunar module’s entire computer payload amounted to 56k. Even when I began my journalistic career as the proud owner of an Amstrad, I had nearly ten times more than that.
Having just taken delivery of a new, albeit budget-priced laptop this past Monday (that being partly the spur to get blogging: every single smallest task had become a teeth-gritting toil with its geriatric predecessor), only a week or so after the new phone, I’m even more than usually boggled by it all. But enjoying this new dimension so far. . .
