THE VIEW FROM OVER HERE

Earlier today I was watching Brian in the uk Big Brother diary room.

He said that "everyone's point of view is valid."

And I subsequently find myself asking "is that actually true?"

Is everyone's point of view valid?

Or is that some wishy washy hippy liberal bollocks?

I genuinely don't know.

I'd prefer to believe that everyone's point of view is valid.

But unfortunately I tend to believe that there are some points of view that seem to resemble a script. Lines that have been learnt. Empty mass produced words that are automatically regurgitated whenever certain topics or situations arise. Vacuous statements that people catch like a cold.

Are zombie knee jerk points of view valid?

plus....

The (sponsored) word on the street

"Word-Of-Mouth (WOM) marketing, the latest advertising boom already established in the US and Canada, is coming to the UK" according to a report by the bbc dated 26 March 2007.

"It means the banter we enjoy with our mates down the pub on a Friday night could soon shift into sales patter."

"WOM is when unpaid volunteers are sent new products and, as they go about their everyday lives, are encouraged to tell their family and friends - even strangers - what they think of them. The products can be anything from mobile phones to sausages."

COOL

"Six months ago, David Cameron's Tories were 10 points ahead in the opinion polls and all the rage in liberal metropolitan Britain. After years when even to admit you were a Tory among those Norman Tebbit once dismissed as the chattering classes was tantamount to owning up to an embarrassing disease, it was suddenly cool to be a Conservative."
( .....wrote Seumas Milne in this morning's Guardian.)

This statement tells us much about a prime meaning of the word "cool", because it was certainly never ever "hip" to be a Conservative.

No. The concept of being "cool" tends to imply people who are heavily infected by the most contagious memes of the time. Cool people are people who are susceptible to information which has enough financial backing to make itself repeatedly noticeable.

To be cool means "to fit in". It is something akin to being a Pod Person from that darned Body Snatcher invasion.

And the antidote to being cool is to stay awake.

Katrina, New Orleans 2nd anniversary

US President George W Bush observed a moment of silence at the Dr Martin Luther King Charter School for Math and Science, the first school to reopen in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward, one of the areas most affected by the flooding.

Lets see now, we've got George W Bush

in a school named after Dr Martin Luther King

marking the New Orleans tragedy of Hurricane Katrina

.....sometimes the absurdities and sick twisted ironies hit me like a piano being dropped on my head from a great height.

I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-fact

"Million more UK homes go online"

The headline from one of those classic news articles where the TOP half of the article is dominated by Fact-Like-Statements.

"some 15.2m UK households - 61% of homes - now have an internet connection, compared with 54% in 2006." etc etc

But way down at the BOTTOM of the article we discover that these "millions" are in reality based upon just 1,200 adults aged over 16 in Great Britain, and 400 adults in Northern Ireland in May 2007.

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