Wednesday Wraps will be my outlet for commenting on the world around me. A lot catches my eye during the course of a week and I don't often get to comment on it elsewhere. This is going to be my space to do it. Be it happy, sad, insane, serious, frivolous.. the reason why all alien life bypasses Earth.. whatever it may be I hope you enjoy it and if you feel so inclined please leave a comment :-)
Lets just kill off a few trees for the sake of the news:
Saving the environment they said when more and more of our lives became online apps and widgets instead of letters in our postbox and newspapers picked up on street corners on our way to the office. Well one online news vendor decided they would try an experiment this week - print their headlines over the space of 12 hours and affix it to a lamppost. The aim of the project - to show motorist how many potential headlines they were missing by not subscribing to the app.
12 hours - 136 headlines...
Huge fail in my opinion.
Saving the environment they said when more and more of our lives became online apps and widgets instead of letters in our postbox and newspapers picked up on street corners on our way to the office. Well one online news vendor decided they would try an experiment this week - print their headlines over the space of 12 hours and affix it to a lamppost. The aim of the project - to show motorist how many potential headlines they were missing by not subscribing to the app.
12 hours - 136 headlines...
Huge fail in my opinion.
- How many people drive past the same lamp post 136 times over a 12 hour period. That's 11x per hour you have to drive past that same lamp post!
- South African drivers do not need to be distracted by lamppost signs. Please our road stats are nothing to write home about. Eyes on the road people - not on the lamppost or the phone for that matter!
- There are not 136 headline worthy events in a 12 hour period. Our brains will not remember all 136 of those stories, whether we see the headline on a lamppost or read it on our phones, tablets, or watch the 8pm News!
- The poor tree that was sacrificed for this experiment. Wasn't there a point to moving to a digital age -something about SAVING the environment. Looks like that seemed to have bypassed this exercise.
Stolen Instagram photo nets $90 000
It doesn't bother me so much that he stole it. We all know that there are people like this who are always going to be trying to pass others work off as theirs and we know once we put our photos out there on social media we run this risk. In this instance though Richard Price is well known for taking others works, removing the captions and replacing them with his own and then going on to exhibit and sell the work.
What irks me is the galleries that exhibit the work. They are the problem in my opinion. If they are willing to do this what is stopping them from doing it for a far more valuable piece of artwork such as a Van Gogh or Picasso. Clearly their bottom line is money. If they are not going to protect artists integrity at large that is an issue. And yes even Instagram photos are ART!
Where do we draw a line between the acceptable and unacceptable? Only when you stop the source will you start stopping the problem.
Catholics & Gays
So what was probably the Vatican's strongest hold outside of Rome has voted overwhelming in favour of gay marriage. Ireland, where you can't even get divorced without being legally separated for something like 4 years, has now decided to allow gay marriages. Even I'm shocked. And I don't shock easily!
Can somebody please tell me WHY in 2015 we are still even debating this issue and having to have referendums about it? The majority, if not all, of us who are in hetrosexual relationships will not tolerate anybody dictating who we can marry so why do we think we can do the same for same sex couples? There shouldn't even be laws against it for heaven's sake!
The world has far bigger fish to fry then worrying about who is cozying up to who in bed at night. Get a grip people - unlike the Vatican seems to think this is not a defeat for humanity. A defeat for humanity is the thousands of people losing their lives in the Mediterranean Sea trying to escape appalling living conditions and wars. It is the starving, the sick, the abused - that is a defeat for humanity.
Time the world focused on the real issues - get out the bedroom!