Ask My Granny

Granny O’Gara

ONCE weekly my granny will respond to the issues of today’s web savvy social superheros.

Please email me with your questions on anything from politics to paprika and I will forward them to her. Alternatively ask them in the comment boxes. 

 The questions this week are from me:

1) Why do some white tops go yellow under the armpits ?

2) Does it matter that Obama hasn’t actually done much to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?

3) Mum tells me that in the winter in Galway you used to make egg nog which would mean drinking raw eggs. Did anyone ever get salmonella? If not would you be able to suggest a recipe, I fancy living life on the modern edge.

Trafigura

Read this, it’s a good round up:

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/oct/14/trafigura-fiasco-tears-up-textbook

Power to the people, if you have the internet then.  I’m getting shivers up my spine as the power of web based communication begins to emerge from under the cloaks of confusion. Tweeting outed the miscarriage of justice. Thousands of people hacked towards the same point and the nucleus became stronger than the iron will of an oil company and its plethora of gnashing lawyers.

Tweeting, sounds so insignificant, but rolls off the tongue like a wheel….

Email me with a rant, then go for a run

emermarymartin@hotmail.com

Rant before the Run: Overfriendly

I was had today. At least I think I was had today. What is it about being had, knowing your being had and not saying anything? I just got more aggressive about completing the transaction.

I was paying £35 for 100 business cards on thin card. Is this a good deal? I can’t bring myself to check. I just felt wrong and I saw 500, colour, on thick card for £45 on a poster as I left. I feel had because of the way the woman behind the counter kept using my name. “Now, Emer, what we’ll need from you is…” she nipped out to the back and called through. “Emer, was that 100?” I suddenly understood why playground etiquette allows for the phrase, “you’re not my friend, go away.”

If we bumped into each other in Sainsbury’s later would she have hurled my name once again into the night?

 In Italy, for example, they have an entire vocabulary to provide social distance. Teachers, shop keepers, mature people, everyone who you seriously want to get something out of and who is not your friend is spoken to in the third person.

This is rarely the medium for confessions, except perhaps to a priest; you do not have to go anywhere near the truth. It creates a world of euphemism and white lies. The sun mostly shines, the family is mostly well, the shit rarely hits the fan. If you are declining someone’s invitation, it’s because something unavoidable came up and there is so much space between your private life and the conversation, you are not expected to justify yourself. It’s like sending a text and turning off your phone. One simply cannot be blamed if the battery goes. If you’re speaking in the ’you’ form, lies are less white and people expect, mainly because they are your friends, that you’re genuinely sharing. 

I would have felt I’d somehow let the woman down today if I hadn’t gone through with the transaction. It was as if we were in it together form the word go. I almost hurled the chip and pin machine at her head as she said, “Emer, pin?”  What the hell was she doing prancing round like my BFF? She was wrong. I want to put a slug in her sock.

A rant before the run

A MANIFESTO  has been published by a group of German journalists and bloggers which lays down the relationship between journalism and the internet. The idea is good but the manifesto is terrible; the thing yaps like a mistimed anecdote in the pub.

It stands however, as a great roll call of bad things that can happen when opinion masquerades as fact. But this is dangerous territory as a lot of the comments show. People are excited and influenced by the manifesto’s pseudo-intellectual arguments.  

Read it  www.internet-manifesto.org/

OnlineJourno Santa has clearly taken a whopping bite from the mince pie and we’ve seen the presents under the tree. But  it is not morning and Christmas isn’t here yet.  No one knows what will happen and those who do must be lying.  The manifesto is manipulative.

Quite hilariously, Benji Lanyado, sometime travel writer for The Guardian and New York Times, has re-written the Manifesto, check out his blog: www.benjilanyado.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/why-the-internet-manifesto-is-annoying/

I agree with Lanyado, internet journalism is not to be damned but the Manifesto concoction served up here is. I may just print off so I can scrunch it into a ball for my own satisfaction.

 

 

Hello world!

FOR the first time since GCSEs, when a sense of make or break wafted through the air, I see that some things are actually very hard to undo. Giving the go-ahead to cellulite might be one of them. But I’ve also begun to revel in the irony of having views on Jordon rather then Gordon when the world is at my fingertips.

Hence, recently, a fear has set in that I may end up loitering at the gates of adulthood forever. The whiplash of this fear was a decision to run the marathon. I’ve chosen the one in Paris; quite apt as Paris is the creme del la creme of above board debauchery.

 The idea is that I will run through streets blistering with headonistic opportunity, driven by something I have yet to discover. I have my training plan. I have my bib number. I fear the worst and promise comedy to follow.