There is too much internet 2: Swineshead revisited

Swineshead’s misdirected attack on the post below illustrates a problem with blogging: although a blog mostly operates as a local pub with regular readers and commenters, literally anyone can drop in to insult you if they happen to find the door.

I’m not intending just to bash Swineshead particularly here – his admission of standing ‘corrected’ is a vanishingly rare thing in blogland and shows he’s basically a decent cove. But he was googling for the Panorama programme with an over-sensitive racism-detector and jumped to conclusions when he found my post (and probably the title of the blog and the name Brit).

That’s the trouble with the internet – nobody’s got an attention span anymore. Twitter worsens the problem tenfold. A whole bunch of Swineshead’s Twits have come to this blog by following a link which says: I'm still reeling from last night's Panorama - then I see this: http://bit.ly/32EUlC . What a turd.

That, of course, was before he realised that, while I might be a turd for many reasons, racism isn’t one of them.

Swineshead’s argument might be that I should have spelled out, as if for a child, that racism is a Bad Thing in the post, and then the gist of the thing would have been clearer to the ‘casual reader’ (ie. the googler who stumbles upon you).

But of course you can’t write every post as if for the casual stumbler or Twit. My regular readers know I know racism is a Bad Thing, it’s taken as read. Life would get very tedious if I had to run through an obvious list of Bad Things every post. Unfortunately this does leave one open to over-sensitive stumblers with no attention span who feel they can call you “a turd” with impunity, but what can you do?

More evidence, then, that there is just too much internet.

175 cupcake recipes is not enough cupcake recipes

Mrs Brit, having her reasons no doubt, has been scouring Amazon for cupcake recipe books.

Martha Stewart's Cupcakes: 175 Inspired Ideas for Everyone's Favorite Treat looks like a winner, earning five star reviews from J “Cupcake Crazy” Wilden of London, and also from Ms Sonia Dioniso of Geneva, Switzerland, who writes:

This is by far the best cupcake book I own (and I own plenty!).

Which demands the question: how many cupcake recipes does Ms Dioniso need? 175 is clearly not enough cupcake recipes. Would one million cupcake recipes suffice, or is there literally no limit to the number of cupcake recipes it is feasible to amass?