press – Page 3 – don't confuse the narrator

of love poetry and distractions

I complained, or at least commented, recently, about the temptations and distractions involved in dusting bookshelves. At the moment a similar temptation confronts me every time I clean the log stove and re-lay the fire.

No, I’m not using books for fuel, but I do tend to start each fire off with a fir cone or two and a few sheets of paper; I’ve tried using some of my old drafts of poetry, but I fear my writing will never set the world alight and newspaper is definitely better.
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poems not bombs

I wrote recently about the automatic responses from WordPress when you publish a blog post, and how one of my posts was greeted with:

In the comments to that post, it was suggested that perhaps this was intended as an imperative, but I assure you I am not responsible for the story that prompted this blog post.

The original headline that is referred to comes from hoy.es and reads: Una poesía provoca una alerta por bomba – ‘poem causes bomb alert’ – a news story from Badajoz earlier this week. If your Spanish is up to it, please go and read the post on quadernodenotas, if not, you’ll have to make do with my hurried – and somewhat ‘creative’ – summary.
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from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.
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scheduled water fights

Guardian headline:man charged over water fight

The Guardian have published a story about a guy being charged for arranging a ‘water fight’ using BlackBerry Messenger.

The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.

Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
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it’s not unusual

I suppose it’s difficult for journalists to maintain the momentum of a story that continues for months without very much actually happening. Which presumably accounts for the Evening Standard story headlined:

Assange ‘acts like a moody teenager and is hunted by women’

I thought teenagers were mostly moody due to a lack of attention from the opposite sex, but I guess it’s been a long time since my adolescence.
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