What We Read

The age of The Gadget, that in which we exist today, has the potential to inform our perspective of the world in new and interesting ways.

My gadget of choice, an iPod Touch, is many things:

• My music collection in its entirety
• My Bible and at least thirty commentaries
• My daily newspaper
• At least 20-odd board games
• My diary and personal organiser
• My alarm clock
• My breviary (a prayer book)
• A collection of books that I am reading
• The internet
• My emailer
• A photo album
• A radio
• A notepad
• A one-stop entertainment centre for my children
• ... and assorted other things. 

The thing is small enough to fit into my shirt pocket, is by no means the most up-to-date of such gadgets, but is my pride and joy. Bliss. 

It is only recently that is discovered that I could download the Independent newspaper to this thing, before I leave the house, and have it in my pocket to read later, and away from a signal. Bliss. It is about the Independent, and more particularly what it seems they regard as important material for us to read, that is my focus here.

It caught my attention yesterday, the ratios of articles on different subjects. It tells me something about what we Brits (and others) consider as important. I will list the numbers of articles according to the headings given, and will leave you to reflect on them as I still am:

• UK News - 53 articles
• World News - 58 articles
• Sport News - 59 articles (of which Football - 24 articles)
• Business - 50 articles
• Opinion - 30 articles
• Environment - 14 articles
• Travel - 12 articles
• Arts - 53 articles
• People - 1 article
• Politics - 26 articles
• Technology News - 13 articles

So, more column inches for technology than the environment; more for Sport than for most of the other sections combined; more for arts than business ... and so on. With paper news, it is impossible to make these head counts, but with Gadgetry, we can audit our reading wants, our interests, and the interests of our neighbours. Perhaps this is just 'interesting' rather than telling, and maybe not even interesting. Though it was worth observing, though!


Incidentally, so far as I have observed, issues and stories surrounding faith and spirituality (save for when they themselves are the headlines) are to be found in 'Opinion' section!

Time to go to our newsdesk ....

Curate's Desk Roundup

1. Sarah Ferguson: why why why why why why why why why, why oh why? Jeremy Vine is on the Radio at the moment and has posed the question about whether we should feel sorry for the Duchess of York?

Should we feel sorry for a woman who sold her family for a hand-full of shekels? Should we feel sorry for a woman who wasn't savvy enough to know that this was probably too good to be true?

No mate - she has acted like a Right Royal Pillock and the got caught. Sympathy to her beautiful daughters and sympathy to her ex-husband who in the spotlight under which he exists may well have thought that the mother of his children might not have been the place of his vulnerability!

2. Spending Cuts: So, we have our coalition. (By the way, didn't the LibDem negotiators do well in the Cabinet?!)  The LibDems have gone back on their election promise not to make cuts this year. Gideon Osborne has cut Child Trust Funds, so I think we have a flavour of how life will be. When all those whose jobs have been costed into obvlion this morning stop spending cash in the shops, how will our economy take to that? Yes, cut waste, but jobs will have been lost this day. Finance bods and Unionists are this day worried about it all.

3. Nose Despite Face? The good folks of British Airways are striking because of pay and conditions, perks and the like. They strike, BA loses hundreds of millions of pounds. I have discovered that one of the perks at the heart of this is an up-to-90% discount on the face value of tickets - but the greater issue is this:

...BA haemmorrhages millions of quid while the folks strike. Perhaps BA collapses, and all the folks are made redundant - and then they all have to pay full price for flights with the pennies that they have left after becoming jobless. Yes, fairness in the workplace - and honest day's pay for an honest day's work - but let us not forget that BA staff are paid appreciably more than any other in the industry, apparently. 

So, Farv, why bother with all this when you could be sat outside with a Pimms? 

It feels that the world is going bonkers at the moment. Maybe it's me, and maybe it is sun spots, but there seems to be an evapourating of sense. I can't shake the feeling either that the news is filled with ways that the Gospel imperatives are being fractured. I get days when I get world-weary, and today is one such day!

....though the bigots who ring in to comment on Radio 2 are a source of some rather macabre entertainment