Aaaand I’m back.
Phew. Bit of a gap in blog posting here – the past five days have been magazine deadline. Every month, the week before print date is a final rush of 12 hour days to get editorials designed, adverts in, and pages in place. Thus does the glamorous world of publishing concertina down into the reality of sitting in front of a computer until your eyeballs collapse, roll down your cheeks and land damply on the desk so they can stare up accusingly at you for inflicting such abuses upon them.
We usually try to organise deadlines so they fall on a Friday; it allows a weekend to recover. Printers work practically 24-7 to keep the presses active so the mag will typically be turned from electronic files to coloured sheets of dead wood on the Sunday. Then it’s off to the shops, and the airport lounges, and around the world in the expensive-class cabins of various airlines.
So what’s been happening out of work in the meantime? Well, for a start the spambots have found the blog, rather faster than I expected. I’m getting about five spam comments a day at present, offering me enough genital enlargement tonics that I’d need a wheelbarrow to get around. WordPress is doing a pretty good job of filtering them out though.
More importantly, the MacBook Air has arrived to satisfy my geeky cravings, and it’s pretty darn perfect for my needs. This very entry is being typed from the downy embrace of my bed as iTunes wirelessly streams post-deadline stress-deadening music across the network – a bit of Alabama 3 hits the spot just nicely.
It amused me to see how, shortly after Apple announced the launch of this svelte little slice of technology, the internet became filled with the usual barely coherent keyboard-pounding monkeys announcing how “it sucks, lol” or variations on the theme.
Have you noticed how so many of our fellow travellers in the interworldweb seem to default into only two possible reactions in situations like this? Either they profess to hate something so much it makes them physically retch up their stomach lining like a sea cucumber, or they love it with a passion that compels them to defend its honour in the manner of a sex-smitten illiterate baboon. You see it in YouTube comments, discussion forums, blogs, everywhere.
For these people there is no middle ground, no compromise. Each knows he or she is right, and will fight to the bitter death with broken English and unintelligible invective. Were I still officially studying English Language, I might be tempted to write a paper on the subject – it’s practically the opposite of Grice’s cooperative principles.
Or perhaps these aren’t real people at all. Perhaps this is just what the spambots do for fun when they’re not plaguing other people’s blogs – expressions of their essential binary, computery nature where you’re either a 1 or a 0, for it or against.
Let us fight for the middle ground, I say. Let us weigh the pros and cons of every situation. Let us champion the cause of reasoned argument, flexible viewpoints and different strokes for different folks.
And if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong and you suck.