science and technology – Page 8 – don't confuse the narrator

get off my lawn*

I’ve just signed up for FaceBook as so many people seem to think it’s the best way to keep in touch. In particular, there are poets I want to be in contact with and it seems to be where they hang out.

(It’s true that I also have friends, including some poets, who loathe and detest the system and think I must be mad, but I hope they won’t ‘unfriend me’ in Real Life because of it.)

When you sign up, the system asks for your date of birth, the theory being that you will then be shown age-appropriate content and adverts. Presumably like the one shown here, which seems to be telling me I am too old for FaceBook.
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self-fulfilling prophesies

I always check the stats page to see what people are searching for that leads them to the blog.

I already commented in pictures of pigs that I get a lot of visitors looking for “pig slaughter” – some of whom I hope go away satisfied that they’ve seen butchered swine on several pages, although, as yet, I’ve not actually been present at a matanza. (I do love the fact that Spanish doesn’t seem to distinguish between the idea of “slaughter” when it applies to approved animal killing for food, and “massacre” when applied to B-movie horror, e.g. La Matanza de Texas.)

Note that I’ve not been an eye-witness, but I have heard: there has to be a pun about “pigs’ laughter” and “squealing”, but I’m leaving that for another day.

Recently, though, there have been more searches for “science and technology poems”, and I think I am failing those potential readers. So I’d better do something about it (hence the post title).
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health check

I received a very worrying newspaper cutting through the post this weekend. (Yes, I know people who still communicate by ‘real’ mail and take the trouble to clip and send on articles of interest.) It came from the UK Metro, and the headline read Take the Pill ‘for a long life’. What was particularly disturbing was the following phrase that also appears on the web version of the story:

Women who take the contraceptive are 12 per cent less likely to die compared with those who never have.

The same story on the IBTHealth site says:
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back to the narrator

It’s been a while since I mentioned poets and narrators on the blog, but Google has prompted me to return to this hobby horse of mine as it seems that the ad selector is just as likely as the novice reader to confuse the writer with the narrator of a poem.

I’ve been looking through some old emails and found one a friend sent me a while back with a poem in it for me to comment on. The poem contained the phrase “slipped disc”.
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size matters

When I got to the writers’ group last night I put my mobile on the table. (The bar where we meet is usually noisy and no way would I hear it ringing from inside my bag.) The phone is a chunky old flip-open model, reminiscent of the communicaters in Star Trek, and wouldn’t impress anyone. It joined a couple of other phones on the table, of varying ages, but all fairly standard.

Then José arrived. His phone is much slimmer, with a complete querty keyboard, and I swear I felt a tremor of envy run through the group. Looking around the table at all these phones of differing shapes and sizes, I was reminded of the business card scene from American Psycho.
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