Who Won the Week (18 April 2021)

In response to Fandango’s Who Won the Week post, I have been looking at my own newsfeeds.

I wanted to talk briefly this week about how social media companies finally seem to be taking some responsibility for the content that appears on their platforms. Just focussing on Facebook, they now have some robust policies, and employ 15,000 human moderators, not to mention all the tech they have at their disposal.

I mean, this is not just illegal content, but can often include items merely offensive or defamatory.

All great news for us consumers.

Unless you happen to be the town council of Bitche, on the French/German border. Yes, in March, Facebook decided to take down the official page of this medieval, walled town, population 5,000. Fortunately, they reinstated it a few days ago.

Okay, on the face of it, a chuckle story. But it does highlight the stereotype of how a huge monolithic English-language-dominated company seems to think that English is the world’s only language.

And it also highlights their absolute inability to police content. Good pages are taken down while harmful posts or videos can remain visible for days. I’m sure none of us truly appreciate the volume of content that these guys have to deal with, but that is their problem, not ours.

You can kinda see, can’t you, why this village, a while back, decided just to change its name to avoid confusion? I did think this place might be located in Hell, but the article assures me that it is in Austria.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56731027

Life through the Lens (18 April 2021)

When my eyesight was still good, I was a bit of an amateur photographer. This is one of mine.

image showing a silhouette of a camera

I once took my daughter to race day, specifically to practise this type of photography.

I took probably a thousand photos, most were binned, but there were a few good ones. Do you see how the car is pretty crisp in the frame, but the background and the wheels are blurred? To suggest motion?

You do this by opening the shutter just a little while longer, but you have to move the camera while you’re shooting, to track the moving car. Most of my images ended up just blurry all round, but that’s the beauty of digital photograpdy – being able to take a pretty-much unlimited number of duff photos just for that one good pic.

Reblog: Songshine Sunday #1

To date, KK is a lot more into new music that I am. I’m mostly stuck in the Seventies or Eighties, but I do tend to like the tracks she shares with me. Here is one she just shared on our new site, what do you think?

Incidentally, having set up our site pretty hastily, we’ve now “rebranded”, and got a proper domain name, for it. The image I wanted to conjure up was “summer sunshine” and I think we did that well. Thank you, KK, for your efforts. You can tell us what you think about that, too!

Songshine Sounds

Whether or not there’s sunshine where you are in the world this Sunday, we hope you’ll enjoy a sunny track, and that it uplifts your spirit.

In June 2020, John Batiste took part in theJuneteenthcelebration in Brooklyn, New York which coincided with the death of George Floyd. It was a day of protests, marches, and vigils to celebrate, show solidarity, and fight for equal rights and treatment of Black people.

Batiste told the audience, “…music has always been something that has had all of the different purposes of our life and our community and our healing and our unspoken pain — Now, it’s more important than ever for us to be reintroduced to what our ancestors used music for, because it’s been forgotten. The world at large sees music as entertainment. It’s never been that, at its root. It is that in one element of it, but the entire spectrum…

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Full Attention

inspired by Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC) of 18 April 2021, focus.

A gymnast of Russian extraction,
Got a job as a high-wire attraction,
But an airplane distracted,
The gymnast impacted,
And he spent the next six months in traction.

Independence Day

Every man’s got a right to decide his own destiny

Bob Marley

To all my friends in Zimbabwe, which finally gained independence on 18th April 1980, I hope you have a good celebration.