I don’t want to get involved with the rights and wrongs of the original 1977 Polanski case, nor even with the current extradition issue, but there is something disturbing about this juxtaposition of headlines from Reuters yesterday:
I wonder what the Poles would have done to him if he’d travelled there.
(I find the ‘video’ tab adds another slightly disturbing twist to the headlines, but maybe that’s just me.)
From yesterday’s El Mundo, a clipping with a quotation that annoys me.
Baroness Thyssen has been writing her memoirs and they have been published in the Spanish society magazine ¡Hola!. It seems, though, that she has skipped over some of the facts and incidents that her (unofficial) biographers think relevant.
Her excuse?
Continue reading “putting poetry in your life”
It’s always good to know that people have their priorities right. Sadly, I don’t think they often do.
Today, for example, there has to be something else happening in the news, but the only thing people seem to be interested in is the death of Michael Jackson.
Well, no. There is one thing that rates higher than the Jackson stories on the BBC website shared stories list:
So, what matters to you today?
Last week I received a writers’ newsletter with yet another warning of a new phishing scam. This scam asks for your bank details so tax owed to you can be paid in directly. One of the recipients responded saying that she didn’t see how people could still be fooled; hadn’t we had enough warnings?
Of course people will continue to be fooled by such things because they want to believe that they are going to get a windfall.
But why people fall for a story like this one about swine ‘flu and zombism, is a bit more complex. It’s a brilliantly done hoax, but there are any number of clues that let a careful reader identify it as just that: a hoax.
Continue reading “panics and pandemics”
This paradoxical headline comes from today’s ¡Qué!, one of Madrid’s free newspapers:
Twenty-four-hour gas stations can’t close at night: if they do, they won’t be 24-hour gas stations.
Who checks the headlines before the papers go to press? Don’t they have sub editors anymore?
Continue reading “headline news”
don't confuse the narrator 