What3words 5. ///online.react.stale

We do our best with our noticeboard.

We are not convinced that many people read it but it kept going through the lockdowns.

More importantly we work with online content - it is certainly something we try to direct people toward from the noticeboard. 

So it is a little regrettable that the W3w location of our noticeboard is

 ///online.react.stale !

Christmas Card Mysteries: No 1

The Christmas cards have started to arrive!  I love Christmas cards, despite spending most Decembers blogging about the weirdness that many contain.

One thing that everyone once concerned themselves about was sending their Christmas cards in time.  The Royal Mail have helpfully always supplied deadline dates.  But now we live in a social media world and people can send their Christmas Cards for free.

I've had two already.

But why?

How long does it take to send an email or a Facebook message?  Surely the right time to send such cards is on the day they celebrate - Christmas Day?  But no - they seem in general to arrive BEFORE the deadline for posting to Pitcairn Island.  It's a mystery.

Truth be told I don't much care for electronic cards.  I'm struggling to articulate why.  This card is an example of why I'm struggling to articulate why.

I can't help thinking that with a design like this it might as well be tweeted as posted!

24/7

As we disappear into a frozen, snowy freezer of a weekend it is possible to think that Christmas came early and should have waited for the snow.  Not the Christmas of the Bible of course (because we don't know when that came) but folk-festival Christmas with its See amid the winter's snow and snow had fallen snow on snow.

The Internet has done many things to change our lives.  One of them is that Christmas never needs to stop, rather like those Christmasophiles who never take their Christmas decorations down.  Now that a guy with an Internet connection and time on his hands can start an Internet 'radio' station there are plenty of places where you can have Christmas all day long, all year long.(link).

If the thought of Christmas all year is not quite focused enough there are alternatives.  A favourite (sorry, favorite) of mine (in the sense of bizarre interest) is Amazing Grace 247. This, one might say, does what it says on the tin.  Every minute of day and night it plays a version of the hymn Amazing Grace.  So, unless there is a commercial playing right now go ahead to the link and listen and you'll hear John Newton's hymn until you never want to hear it again.  With a small leap of the imagination you can almost hear Newton banging his head on a wall in despair.

Teenager

So Google is thirteen today!

And yet it is so hard to remember life without Google.  Was there a time when a whole day passed and nobody, nobody in the wide world said, "Just google it"?  How did you find the Stagecoach timetable?  How did people find Luther's 95 theses?  Is it possible that Alexander the Great conquered the world and it wasn't mentioned on Google?  Could Methuselah have lived 969 years and not used Google even once?

The preposterous thought that Google has become what it is in such short order is a solemn sign I think.  Could one entity rise to prominence in a world of billions of people as the Biblical prophecies suggest?  Can the whole world really be part of anything when there are billions of us that will never meet each other?

Google is, methinks, not the Beast!  But perhaps it reminds me how plausible the previously implausible has become.  In no time we could be at the end of time.