Forward to the Horse

I have been riding this particular donkey(buddhistpizza - the blog!) for some years now. It was with considerable alarm that I read on my Grauniad website the claims that the poor beast was dying on it's feet. With my girth, you might unkindly comment, that is not surprising!

Cory Doctorow links a report from The Economist on the Death of Blogging.

A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

Have I played Sancho Panza too many times to Hidalgos on their Rocinantes?
Forward to the horse!

Passion

Regular readers who are looking for confessions from your correspondent about being overwhelmed by the hots for some floozy will be disappointed.
We spent a relaxed few days in the garden with the company of family and friends and the blessings of good weather, simple food and some drink. The weekend was rounded off at a concert by Fugata. You can read about them here. The music and the playing were summed up in one word for me, passion.

We pootered home and caught the news that Spain had won the World Cup of Football. No doubt from the pictures of fans in Madrid that they were rather pleased with the result.

Pleasure at 25p a foot!

A village walk, a good lunch, and on a sunny Sunday afternoon the proximity of the beach beckoned. We arrived at the car park and, because it was after 4pm, we were only charged £1.
What else can you get for that? We headed hot foot for the sea. Rolling up trouser legs to a demure height below the knee we immersed the lower appendages in the brine. The tide appeared to go out but it could just have been evaporation.

We stood and reveled in the pleasure of it. Since there were two of us and we were both bipedal our delight worked out at 25p a foot!

Who do the Palistinians Support?

A very nice little article in Open Democracy about the reach of the World Cup of Football.
Who do they support in Ramallah? Read all about it here.

Like the author, Khaled Hroub, I too

... would love to have seen, the ultimate surrealism of watching the games projected live onto the “separation wall” in Bethlehem. Al-Jazeera and other media report the wall’s use as a huge screen draws massive and cheerful crowds from the city and its refugee camps. This is something really exciting: conflated resistance and cynicism are precariously interwoven in one big transcending act that allows the besieged Palestinians to set themselves virtually free and go global.

When is a separation wall not a wall? When it is a window on the world!