Social Pantomime

This afternoon I 'took part' in a social network pantomime. No, I don't mean a client presentation which went badly, but a 'performance' of Cinderella (mostly) which took place on twitter . Using the hashtag of #twitpanto there were over 600 messages of 140 characters or fewer, some from the 'cast' (mostly well-known UK bloggers or social network pundits) but the majority from the other users of Twitter. Lots of audience participation of the "Behind you!" and "Oh no he's not!" category made for an escapist hour and a half. For myself, I've always believed that pantomime requires rhyming couplets, so most of my tweets were in that form. Of course, the end of any panto needs a song where the audience join in, and so a link was posted. And everyone was rickrolled, so maintaining another web phenomenon. So with that, I'll wish all my readers, wherever you may be, a happy Solstice / Yule / Xmas / Winterval / New Year / Hannukah / over-indulgence in wine, women and song.

Skyline

This morning was one of those mornings where the view goes into monochrome in the distance. The far distance — around twenty miles for me — drops out almost entirely to a very light grey, and the mid-distance towers of Docklands and the City — about five to eight miles away - show up in a dark grey silhouette. This had the effect of drawing to my attention this particular morning that at least two buildings under construction have recently broken above the horizon and, going by the height of the tower cranes alongside them, have quite a way to go still. Just as I lost my view of Blackheath when Canary Wharf started reaching for the skies it seems more of my views will be disappearing soon.

Then the phone rang

I've had three major posts on my mind for the last few weeks, which I'll tell you about later, but just as I was about to finally make a posting here my landline phone rang. Before I could say anything a recorded voice told me it was an SMS-to-voice service with a message for me. "We must speak to you today. Ring 0113-etc and quote this long reference number." Needless to say, that whomever the company is won't be called by me (I deleted the message anyway) as if they couldn't be bothered to actually *phone* the number, or even my mobile number, then clearly they are spamming or scamming.