As we all know, Twitter is the social media platform of choice for ranters of every persuasion – from Tango’d ex-presidents to assorted nerds, nutters, non-entities and ne’er-do-wells. We now live in a society where public discourse is reduced to 240 characters or less and everyone’s opinion, no matter how stupid, is of equal value. Let the Twitter storm commence.
Twitter is also awash with explicit porn, from cheeky tweets from sex workers flogging their assets on OnlyFans – though maybe not for much longer – to swingers and show-offs looking for hook-ups or titillation. It’s paradise for voyeurs and exhibitionists alike and must have been quite handy during lockdown. I only tweet for business, but hardly a week goes by when I’m not followed by someone from God knows where waving his willy at me like it’s a calling card. Obviously, I try hard not to look.
Last month saw us in London for a very special commemoration. An old friend died suddenly in early 2020 and it would have been his sixtieth birthday on 25th August. We couldn’t let the day go unmarked so we threw him a boozy late lunch in Soho attended by twenty of his nearest and dearest. It was a bittersweet gala of drunken gossip and giggles tinged with huge sadness. Much wine was consumed.
Some in attendance are social media phobics and who can blame them? Social media has a great deal to answer for. But it means I can’t share any images of the party which is a shame so here’s a picture of him and me in happy times less than a year before he died.
On top of the almost daily spam calls and emails supposedly from Amazon Prime, the taxman (or woman), my internet provider, various banks, blah, blah, yawn, yawn, I also get pestered by Faceache friend requests from scantily clad, pouting ladies offering me a really sexy time. Here’s one…
join the Snapchat group that I have founded. in the Snapchat group There are many lonely women who need a date … so if you want to join the group, it’s FREE without spending any money. click here
And here’s another enticement…
Hello. Hello. I started a WhatsApp group for sex. Here’s to many single girls who need good sex. You can participate here without spending money. Can you love a girl like you here, looking for a partner? Are you interested?? Join a group and find your date??…
Barking up the wrong tree springs to mind. Can this old dog learn new tricks? Not a chance. I know the theory but I’m a bit short on the practicals. In any case, the second invitation – badly machine-translated from Russian or whatever – suggests I’m a girl looking for some girl-on-girl action. So not just the wrong tree but the wrong forest too.
There won’t be a lovely lady at the end of the line, just some sweaty mafioso ripping off the sad and the lonely. And what are the ‘names’ of my sexy new friends? Brünhilde Schultze Schierokauer and McCrackeno Khava. You couldn’t make it up, except, of course, it was.
We just can’t wait to get back into the theatre – we’ve a glittering chorus of touring musicals queued up – from the modern: Six, Waitress, The Book of Mormon to the classics: Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Sound of Music. Few trades have suffered from COVID more than the performing arts. The only sure way to get bums back on seats and keep them there is for everyone to get the jab. And yet there are still some twats out there who won’t get vaccinated because they’d rather fall for the total crap swilling around social media than listen to those who really know what’s what.
A case in point is the music video commissioned by the Official London Theatre (the umbrella organisation for London’s West End theatreland) which features a host of names encouraging vaccine take-up. I love it because it’s a spoof of ‘The Rhythm of Life’ number from Sweet Charity, one of my all-time favourites. Like everything else these days, the video’s on YouTube. Depressingly, the barrage of fake ‘outrage’ from the trolls is staggering.
So I have two messages – the first to the refuseniks…
Do us all a favour, stop being a wanker and get the bloody jab because it’s the right thing to do.
And the second to those running the show…
Do us all a favour, share the vaccine with those in the world who can’t afford it because it’s the right thing to do and because until we’re all protected, none of us are.
Hardly a week goes by when we don’t get a call telling us we’re about to get done for tax fraud or threatening to cut off our internet if we don’t pay up. Then there’s the tirade of texts and emails about dodgy activity on accounts we don’t hold or failed transactions on accounts we do – pay here, pay now. If we didn’t know any better, we’d have sleepless nights fretting the bailiffs might come a-knocking.
Then I started receiving abuse from some loony toon in the States about an image I used in a couple of posts here in Pansyland. The woman claimed the picture was of her, posted without her consent. Except, of course, it isn’t of her. It’s a picture of someone I once knew who died in tragic circumstances. My abuser also alleged that posting her picture made me complicit in a campaign of hate and revenge porn by a former squeeze. Except, of course, the image isn’t remotely saucy. It’s just an old picture from happier times.
It’s hard to unpick my very own little troll’s backstory as her written English is so poor. It’s just a rambling, incoherent rant, really. Anyway, apparently she’s reported me to the ‘sheriff’ (what, of Nottingham?) and threatened to have me arrested by the CIA. I’ll do ‘jail time’ as the Americans call it, if I don’t take the image down. She’s used several channels to have a pop – email, here on the blog, Facebook. At first it was quite menacing but after a few days it just became an irritant. She clearly needs help. Listen up Marsha, it ain’t you. Go see a shrink.
I know it’s a remarkable invention and has really helped many of us keep in touch and stay sane during the pandemic. But I’m so over Zooming and by that I mean this video-conferencing malarkey in general. It’s like attending a séance.
Can you see me?
Can you hear me?
Is there anybody there?
You’ve frozen.
No, you’ve gone.
The whole psychic encounter is made all the more spooky by the use of cheap digital backgrounds where participants appear and disappear like ghostly apparitions. First you see ’em, then you don’t. If only we could all hold hands to contact the living.
In 2016, I wrote a little piece about my semi-colonial life as a forces child in Malaysia back in the swinging sixties. The post – Reflections of an Army Brat – featured a blurry old black and white image I found online of Mountbatten Primary School, the school I attended. It started quite a conversation between ex-pupils, a conversation which continues to this day.
The post from way back also took me to a Facebook group called ‘We are Terendakians’ – Terendak being the name of the army camp originally built for the 28th Commonwealth Infantry Brigade which consisted of soldiers from the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The Facebook group is a place to reminisce and interact. And reminisce and interact they do with some wonderfully evocative pictures of a bygone era. Sometimes it even gets up close and personal.
This might be me aged around 7:
And this is almost certainly my mother on the ladies badminton team:
I’ve been plagued with spam comments ever since I started this blogging malarkey – nearly 370,000 so far. Just like Domestos and germs, my spam filter kills off 99.9% of ’em so I don’t have to. I used to get an eclectic mix of spam – the collective weaknesses, desires, vices and foibles of humanity laid bare, blended with endless machine-generated auto-babble. These days the slut and smut stuff is mostly absent, and I generally just get pseudo-clinical gibberish, all targeted at a single post from way back in 2012. Here’s an example:
Decrease of a stage of hemoglobin at males up to 120g/l, at girls up to 110g/l is possible. This can imply dependence on male breadwinners, abandoned opportunities for paid work, and exhaustion that extracts a physical and psychological toll. The former is shown, for example, in exams for cutaneous sensitization, whereas the latter is proven in impairment of the power to resist infection erectile dysfunction for women Correlation of preoperative depression and somatic percepRecommendation #2: tion scales with postoperative incapacity and quality of life afer Collecting data concerning the preoperative characteristics and lumbar discectomy. In the course of therapy, the following duties are solved in every particular affected person: fi reduction of exacerbation; fi selection of adequate primary remedy; fi reduction of the danger of development of complications; fi decreasing the danger of side effects in the course of the course.
The post in question is Goodbye to the Turkish Living Forum. It caused quite a stir at the time, I’m pleased to say. Has the post been deliberately targeted? Who would do such a thing? Who knows. But anyone searching online for the forum will often find my ancient post on the first page of Google – the sweet spot for any website – just below the entry for the forum itself. Perhaps all these spam attacks are keeping it there? Happy days!
I was badly shaken and much stirred to hear of the murder of fellow author, Lindsay de Feliz in December. Among her many qualities, Lindsay was very social media savvy and developed an impressive following. Her evergreen blog chronicled the many ups and considerable downs of her fascinating life in the Dominican Republic with her Dominican husband, Danilo, assorted stepchildren and a menagerie of dogs, cats and chickens. Life at times was really tough but she always embraced it without complaint or regret. Lindsay wrote candidly about her journey in her remarkable memoirs, ‘What About Your Saucepans?’ and ‘Life After My Saucepans’.
I never actually met Lindsay in person but we talked on Skype and gelled immediately, sharing the same ironic sense of humour. When we first became acquainted, I was a rookie author and she was generous with her help. I was trying to make a shilling or two from my first book and her advice was spot on. I shall be ever grateful.
The manner of Lindsay’s grizzly death is plain but the circumstances surrounding it are subject to much idle chitter-chatter. What is known is Danilo and two of his adult children have been arrested, and, some say, charged with her murder. The story broke in the press and hit the headlines. As Lindsay’s publisher, a national newspaper came sniffing around for the dirt, particularly about how much money she’d made. Of course, I kept mum. My discretion was not repeated online with some people, many of whom had never even heard of Lindsay, heckling from the cheap seats and baying for blood. It was an ugly spectacle, reflecting the very worst aspects of social media. Let’s not jump the gun. If Danilo is tried (fairly) and convicted, then so be it but, in the meantime, I’m steering well clear of the bear pit.
My thoughts are with Lindsay’s family and actual friends at this truly awful time. Lindsay, may you rest in peace.
The deluge of GDPR emails has finally dried up, thank the Lord. For the uninitiated, GDPR stands for the General Data Protection Regulation 2018. It’s the latest wheeze from the European Union intended to strengthen the law about the collection, privacy, security and retention of personal data. The new rules are fairly straightforward, if a little OTT – like so much that comes out of Brussels. I’m all for protecting the little person from the exploitation of corporate bigwigs but I can’t help thinking the reputable will comply, the disreputable won’t bother and those squeezed in the middle will be bewildered – think brown owl trying to chivvy up the girl guides or some poor sod juggling the mailing list of a local am-dram society. I doubt it will stop nuisance calls from India or spam emails from God knows where. A case in point was the mailshot that recently dropped into my inbox from a US company. They were trying to flog me such must-have products as a concealed ankle holster perfect for a sneaky armed robbery, a decorative bracelet knife because Saturday night’s alright for fighting and a magnetised holder for the loaded pistol I keep under the sink next to the Fairy Liquid (that’s a joke, obviously). Every trailer should have one. Did I subscribe to this crap? Nope. Did I unsubscribe straightaway? Yep. Will it make the slightest bit of difference? Not a chance.
If you like to see my own half-cocked GDPR kinda-compliant privacy thingy, you can see it here. Happy reading.
Perking the Pansies 