Social media and social networking are two very web popular 2.0 buzzwords that have been making waves for quite a while now online. Do you Tweet? Personally I don’t have the time to check my emails let alone connect with people I’ve never met but I may be an exception to the buzzword action.
I do however love Facebook as a tool to keep-up with what friends, relations and former colleagues are up to.
Is this a social network too far? It would appear not judging by the frantic postings of members keen to brag about their first dressage show or sell or trade a horse to interested parties. It sure beats the old Exchange and Mart!
HorseTweet.com bills itself as ‘the social network for equine enthusiasts’. As someone keen on the idea of horseriding but none too accomplished I’ll leave more qualified readers to judge that statement.
Oh and here’s media-spokesperson-cum-glovepuppet-horse-reporter, Hoof, to introduce the site. Saddle up partners!
If there’s one thing I miss downunder it’s decent TV shows - sure NZ has the usual crop of American imports including House, Lost and numerous others - but you don’t get so much of Channel 4’s output including the Essex boy chef himself, Jamie Oliver.
So what do I find I’m missing on TV this week? Part two of the foodie’s fabulous American road trip in the Kerouac style but probably featuring far more restaurants.
The Times features a selection of southwestern influenced recipes to make up for it: Flavoursome food from Arizona. Looks like I’ll have to investigate more options for tricking the 4oD system into letting me watch or else wait for the DVD.
Some days you just stumble across those website classics and today I’ve followed a great stream of consciousness style tangle of links covering the lowly varmint.
There’s a gem of dialect out of the Wild West. In hundreds of cowboy movies, the man in the white hat — from William Boyd to John Wayne — scowls at the rustlers and the gunfighters and excoriates them with varmint, the meanest, dirtiest, most lowdown word permitted by the prim self-censorship office then run by Will Hays…
The word had appeared in P. T. Barnum’s 1854 autobiography as an imprecation — “ye young varmint!” … and as the title of a 1910 Western novel by Owen Johnson. It is a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin for “worm,” and encompasses animals of cunning… that cause revulsion or anger in humans.
Why am I so focused on a word that ‘reeks of Western lore filtered through a cowhand haze’? Well today I stumbled across the world of rogue taxidermy and, more precisely, Richard Nadeau’s Custom Squirrels.
Not for me the more exotic oddities of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists - Pygmy Tarsiers and Monkey Faced Piglets. No, I’m into stuffed ‘characters’: military attack squirrels in brightly coloured berets clutching assault rifles with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Read the full St Louis News interview with this Mitchell, Illinois resident and you’ll be amazed at the industry that’s grown up around mounted varmints on eBay. I know I’d be more than happpy to receive a Texas Hold ‘Em playing cowboy squirrel for Fathers Day:
