Yikes!

I’ve just been seeing what search terms led people to this blog (“Spinach Poisoning” is always popular, I should make that post more interesting).

Two close together, one from the Netherlands and one from the UK, showed a new and disturbing trend (of two). The second was comparatively reasonable: “Stephanie Flanders married children”. The first, however, was “Stephanie Flanders nude” for which, following research, I see I am the second Google listing.

Sorry to disappoint, guys, but they don’t really do that sort of thing on Newsnight…

Samantha Smith & Rachel Corrie

An interesting and poignant post on Metafilter concerns Samantha Smith, a 10-year-old girl who wrote to Yuri Andropov asking him whether the USSR was going to declare war on the US. She died young, in a plane crash.

Matteo makes an interesting comment comparing the treatment of her death in pre-Internet days and the treatment of Rachel Corrie on right-wing blogs.

Thus – the company with no clue

Just to mention the pain I’m going through trying to cancel my old Demon broadband service. Outsourced call centres, clueless stubborn staff, pointless bureaucracy AND a complaints email address that bounces back with ‘user unknown’. I’m betting their customer complaints are WAY down this quarter.