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Morning by Patrick William Adam. WikiCommons

A Sunday morning; the cold winter sun footprinting the carpet; wearing warm wool; the tea green and the fruit peeled; John Updike’s latest exceeding expectations; playlist pumps Tal Wilkenfeld, tactile and mellow on her Sadowsky strings; my five senses dovetail. Brain sends a wave when a particular soundbite agrees with the flash of sunlight on a crystal vase – synchronicity or synchrony? Whateva. It’s a sunny Sunday in winter and I’ll take what I have.

Widescreen Radio

My TV channel count is gone up to a much-duplicated 55 but 8 are actually radio channels. “WTF is SBS Radio doing thinking it’s a TV station?” asks Melbourne comedian Dave Hughes in his raucous new live stand-up act. And he’s right! Slyly infiltrating my Electronic Program Guide (EPG) using an alias like ABC Dig exceeds the duplicity of the pirate radio station I was once part of way back in the North Sea radio heydays when I fancied myself as their landlubbing prosopopoeia. But this is legal – though it seems somewhat incestuous. Or at the very least a bit bi.

Imagine all those poor, what…viewers? listeners? – the ‘populi bewilderus’ who just sit there listening to watching the music and waiting for a phantom TV show to start with the patience of Ratzinger’s gay admirer.

The (Scheduled) Fall of the Facebook Empire

Social networks bring people together but like any gathering, the time comes to split. People move on, just like they did from Bulletin Boards, from Chat Rooms and from My Space. QED, historical analysis proves Facebook’s imminent and scheduled demise. The argument is put that users will always need Facebook to contact their friends but that’s what they said about the phonebook. The pendulum on Facebook’s fifteen fleeting minutes of fame has been winding down since it reached its zenith in May 2012 when its ownership went public.

Mark Zuckerberg is a talented man but he is not a businessman. His forte rises above mere commerce. Yet he presided over the halving of Facebook’s share price following the most overhyped IPO since Noah floated the Ark. I won’t delve into the apocryphal IPO debacle here but given the result that the original stakeholder(s) raked in bazillions of dollars in cash that day, I believe that the IPO marked the Facebook mission as ‘Accomplished’. The owners cashed out, regardless of what was to happen afterwards. Any shares they kept could be used as confetti because the overpriced issue on that May day got them twice what it should have.

Vacant vacation

As she settled into the Autobús Argentinias coach at Mendoza’s prosaically named Terminal del Sol for the 7 hour journey across the Andes to Chile, Britney mentally reviewed how she would pass the time. First she had oodles of photos to upload to Facebook, then her tweets and finally an update to Britney’s Backpacking Blog.

Having enjoyed the climb into the foothills, she switched on her iPhone, congratulating her forethought on fully charging its battery. The signal metre was at…what!  Minimum and fading? Britney stared incredulously. How could this be happening on a high-altitude public highway? Then the signal died. Fuck!