Currybetdotnet recent comments round-up 2008-08-29

Back in February and March of this year I did a series of articles about blog comments, and one of my suggestions was that doing an occasional round-up of interesting comments was a way of making sure they got attention, particularly if they had been left on older articles.

One way or another I've been in a bit of an Internet connection black hole for the last five weeks or so, and it means that the moderating of comments on the site has been pretty irregular. As I haven't been doing a terribly good job of handling them at the minute, I thought I'd take up my own suggestion, and point out some of the best ones from the last few weeks.

Cats and cricket - more dissent for London 2012

Simon hb from the always excellent No Rock And Roll Fun blog popped up on the last of my Olympic dissent series, to point out one controversy that I'd missed - the murder of cute kittens by the Olympic Delivery Authority.

OK, the ODA weren't pro-actively murdering them, but the Celia Hammond Trust has been fighting to ensure that feral cats living where the Olympic Stadium is being built were rescued. The battle was featured on BBC London, and by July 11th they had rescued 187 cats, including Blackjack [pictured] who proved to be rather troublesome and elusive.

Another comment on the same post drew my attention to the Cricket 2012 Games campaign. This is a bid to get cricket included in the Olympics for the first time since 1900 - since England is one of the few recent host nations that has the infrastructure already in place to put it on.

Given that Scotland play as the Scottish Saltires in English domestic cricket, Northern Ireland and Eire field a unified team, and that the English game is run by the England and Wales Cricket Board, just think of the fun trying to get a Team GB cricket team together if the example of football is anything to go by!

If you are interested, you can now download a PDF version of the entire Olympic dissent series, which covers Olympic-inspired politics, protest and terrorism from 1859 to 2012.

Haunted Malta

My post from 2005 about Haunted Malta has always attracted comments, often telling of ghost stories or spooky occurrences from the island. This has also included comments from Malcolm Hanson, author of "The Do It Yourself Valletta Ghost Walk", which would have been handy to have when I was there.

He posted an appeal for more information about Maltese hauntings, as he will be returning to Malta for 4 weeks from November 25th to co-author another book about the island's ghostly heritage. You can contact him on info@malcolmhanson.orangehome.co.uk, but maybe with something better than a fart joke.

The BBC's 60s golden era

I've also had a fascinating comment, well, essay really, on one of my posts about the Biased BBC blog. It is 1,700+ words long.

Brian uses that as the starting point for an interesting discussion of how the BBC's production values and choice of content on radio have plummeted since the 1960s.

He blames Birt, Dyke, a whole procession of younger managers and producers, and does a compare and contrast with what was being broadcast in November 1962.

"Now I had a look at the Radio Times for that period - I chose November 1962 -because that was the month when we celebrated 40 years of the BBC - the first broadcast was in November 1922. And Mr Damazer will be thrilled to know that congratulations were received from Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles and wait for it, the king himself, Elvis Presley. And they had Sci-fi plays - one by someone you may have heard of - John Wyndham. And there was the serialisation of that great futurist epic Aniara by the Swedish writer, Harry Martinson. For comedy there was The Men from the Ministry with Wilfred Hyde White and Richard Murdoch written and produced by Edward Taylor. Comedy Playhouse - Peter Sellers, Richard Burton, Ian Carmichael, Beryl Reid."

"You sad litle man..."

I'll give the last word in this round-up to JJ, who added this comment to a post from January 2007 about the Today programme's annual vote.

"you sad litle man..."