peter young’s listopia

First, annual birthday co-habitee salutations to Messrs. commonpeople and purplecthulhu. I am not 100 today, I just feel it. Where's my cake?

Second, I hope more frequent updating will be resuming here as soon as possible. I know I've been crap around here lately... I'm just re-organising my Live Journal a bit, doing some retro-fitting and re-evaluating of what I use LJ for. I've probably been more active on Facebook the last six months because so many of my social circles seem to intersect there, even though I still don't actually like Facebook nearly as much as I like what LJ does. But I do still read my LJ Friends page regularly, even though I may not be commenting nearly as much.

LJ is up again, until the next time it's gone. And the Russian President blog_d_medvedev is not happy.

Thanks very much to those who sent me invite codes to Dreamwidth, where I am now peteyoung. I'll gradually duplicate my LJ and contacts as far as possible, so if you're already over there add me and I'll repay the compliment, or I'll come searching for ya at a later date. But for the moment I'm sticking with LJ as Blog Numero Uno until it completely disappears in a puff of smoke.

As much as it pains me to do it, I'm switching off anonymous commenting on this journal. I've just returned from a week away and I see you've all taken it upon yourselves to offer me Thai kick-boxing equipment, weight control mints, permanent laser hair removal (but I'll have that laser off you if possible, thanks) and escorts for my next visit to London. As much as I appreciate it I don't really need any of these, and I honestly can't think which of you good people might be spamming me so thoughtfully and conscientiously with services you believe I just might need.

Apart from that, a short while ago this journal also received a couple of vicious anonymous comments definitely from winterfox, a certifiably pathetic troll who presents herself as an attention-seeking and toxic science fiction fan from Thailand, the only person who has ever directed personal abuse at me on Live Journal, whose faux outrage is transparent enough to be laughable, and who consistently thinks book discussion communities are appropriate places to employ the tactics of a playground bully. Nothing will ever be called a meaningful critique if it's been typed by her.

Hence I'm now regrettably switching on the logging of IP addresses as well. Who needs this shit, honestly.

Well, I've had a shower, and I've decided to put social networking on hiatus for an indefinite period. I'm reverting to private e-mail, the telephone and good ol’ face-to-face.

Things said in conversation on two occasions to two friends in the last couple of weeks have not gone down at all well when translated almost verbatim to a social networking context. Time to step back and take stock, and apologies are offered to the offended parties.

I will still be uploading to Flickr as and when.

Bye for now.

Icon love to bohemiancoast, as always.

Via athenais, a neat idea created by interim32: if like me you post reviews of books, music or films and want more people to read what you write, you can index them at LJ Book Badge. For instance, here's my last-but-one read:

	lj book reviews
	Budapest: A Novel Chico Buarque what are you reading?.
	make your own book badge | read lj reviews of this book

Images are sourced from Amazon.com, so there will be a selection of covers you can choose from. Creating the badge is simple to follow, and if like me you want to index your review but find meme panels a bit cumbersome you can still do so without having to add the badge to your post, and instead maybe creating your own simple link to the site as I've done here. Now to index all those other reviews...

[Poll #346513]

Probably not what the average American family want to see falling out of their candy bars or boxes of Corn Flakes, but as a cultural artefact this is almost worthy of Jeff Koons. Full story here.

I consider myself fortunate enough to have a few heavyweight British politicians on my LJ Friends list – stand up blairstripone, stand up michaelhoward, stand up cardboard_tobes – and while I accept that they're probably too busy to add me to their own Friends list (British politics being the rat race it is, eh? though perhaps a donation to party funds might help?) I find their very occasional erudite missives to the British electorate via LJ to be of paramount importance to my continued marginal involvement in British political life. At least they have posted more recently than some of their American counterparts I will name here.

If I was a Merkin, I reckon most people would figure me as a Democrat. And they'd be right. Therefore I make no apology for wanting to see a Democrat in the White House, and as blairstripone likes to say, "Make no mistake, once this tyrant has gone and we have rid him of his Weapons of Mass Deception (which a bunch of crap British spies tell me can be deployed in less than 45 minutes), the world will indeed be a safer place." Some déjà vu here, surely.

But to continue. Those who know me will also be aware that I like to keep things balanced, see both sides of the coin, yin and yang, walk a mile in your enemy's shoes yadda yadda, and now that the race for the White House has properly begun if I truly want to get the Big Political Picture via LJ in the months to come I see no real alternative other than to add a few more high-profile Live Journalists to my Friends list, in an effort to figure out the difficult task of learning how Republican politicians actually think, as they surely must.

Of course there is an easier way: watch Fox News, but even I can't sink that low.

So anyway, a big High-Five to:

georgewbush...
The last few years really have been George's Big Adventure, haven't they? But heck, if I choked on a pretzel while watching Wacky Races I'd sure say something about it on LJ, wouldn't you? Not George... I see he hasn't posted since July 2003! You'd think that in between inspiring many best-selling books of quotations, filling his cabinet with the dirty end of the oil industry, giving the finger to the environment, sending himself men to Mars, falling off his bike, invading Afghanistan, giving the finger to the US constitution, invading Iraq, getting a bollocking from the Pope and then giving the finger to the electorate, that he'd probably have something he'd like to pass on to the likes of us? Apparently not. He is obviously a man of few [coherent] words, and I reckon if he keeps a diary it sure ain't an online one, and Bob Woodward had better look elsewhere.

dick_cheney...
I really should cut Dick a little more slack than his boss as he's not been well these last few years (though certainly well enough to tell the opposition to "go fuck yourself!" when the opportunity arises), but I see that Dick hasn't posted anything since... wow, August 2001! Where has he been?! Dick, come back to us... just because you're now a fully-fledged Borg with all those artifical add-on bits to keep you alive doesn't mean you can't plug your cerebral cortex into LJ once in a while... even my old shagging buddy ron_jeremy is more up-to-date than you! (BTW, I really liked Ron's post "i really wish the spice girls were still together. mel b is a piece of ass." Deep.)

jesus_christ (Peace Be Upon Him) ...
Wow, this man has an impressive Friends list! And now I'm proud to count Jesus as one of my Friends too I'm sure I'll be seeing him post stuff like "Paging georgewbush: Need to talk, G... get in touch by AIM or Prayer. Ta." jesus_christ (Who's Your Buddy, George?) is gonna have a big impact on the Merkin election this year, make no mistake, and he can't have been dead two thousand years because he actually posted as recently as December 2002: "Beware of North Koreans!" So I think we can safely bet that if georgewbush gets reinstated in November, that's where the action will be in 2006.

In fact I might drop jesus_christ a line and ask if he can persuade Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld to get free LJ accounts too. Then we can Collect the Set: 'The Four Live Journalists of the Apocalypse'. Doom...