How-to Decide What NOT to Post On Facebook Part II

Over-sharing on Facebook: if you didn’t see the critical list of things NOT to share, check back on Part I. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

Timing
If you are supposed to be at work, posting five status updates and four photos before coffee break is going to show up in your timeline with the date and time stamp. And prove that you’re not working. Expect a misconduct letter.

Assuming there isn’t a policy against Facebook during working time, contain your updates to your official lunch and break times, before or after your clocking-in times.

Review: Crossing England in a Punt: River of Dreams

From the Staffordshire hills to the Humber estuary, spirited explorer Tom Fort embarks on a 170-mile journey down Britain’s third longest river, the Trent. Beginning on foot, he soon transfers to his own custom-built punt, the Trent Otter, and rows many miles downstream. Along the way he encounters the power stations that generate much of the nation’s electricity, veterans of the catastrophic floods of 1947, the 19th-century brewers of Burton and a Bronze Age boatman who once made a life along the river.

In typically British fashion, a restrained middle-aged white bloke in shorts and sand shoes paddles off along a non-descript English river doing that low-key, under-stated and quite reserved presenting of documentary that only restrained middle-aged white blokes in shorts and sand shoes can pull off.

How-to: Text-speak

The pollution of the English language continues apace (‘OMG, I sound like a member of the Academie Francais!’).

Text-speak and the Internet are driving the latest short-hand in verbal and written communication. Literal short-hand, I mean thumb-typing. You don’t get shorter hands than that.

You may think this is the End of th World as We Know It. Or you may marvel at the ingenuity with which we pack meaningful information, courtesy and etiquette into our messages.

Here follows a few examples. Feel free to use them in front of your kids for maximum embarassment. AJS

Review: The Thick of It – The Inquiry

Madness in their method acting made this bravura episode of BBC2’s political satire one of the finest episodes of TV ever made.

The hour-long special (season4, episode 6) mounted a Leveson or Chilcot-style inquiry into the sucide of NHS campaigner Mr Tickell after his flat was sold off.

What ensued was one of the funniest, most painfully accurately observed assassinations of politics ever made.

Armand Ianucci’s too-clever-by-half comedy saw politicians Nicola Murray and Peter Mannion, with their spin-doctors Malcolm Tucker and Stuart Pearson, quizzed under oath at the Goolding inquiry.

Humour: Man Flu Scourge of the Y Chromosome

Leave me, go on without me… just let me die.
@SamDagnall
#manflu

Women do not contract Man-Flu. At worst they suffer from what is
medically recognised as a ‘Mild Girly Sniffle’ – which, if a man caught,
he would still be able to run, throw a ball, tear the phone book in half
and compete in all other kinds of manly activities.

It’s what you get if you stand outside at an old defence contractor’s factory beside Heathrow at 5.30am in -5 temperatures. No more or less than one deserves, particularly if one is not used to it. I should have expected trouble when I tried to get a cup of tea and the milk didn’t pour but rolled over it like a packed ice avalanche.

Review: The History of the Future BBC Radio4

Juliet Gardiner looks at how cultures of the past viewed the possibilities of the future, and what these visions say about the pre-occupations of the time.

Or as I like to call it – Where’s My Jetpack?

Here’s a curious thing; a BBC Radio 4 documentary series that doesn’t appear to exist on iPlayer, Listen Again or as a podcast. I caught the tail end of this series which finished in September, just the last couple of episodes. I’d like to hear the rest, but I can’t find them. Even though the show’s homepage is still up on the BBC website.