mostly david ephgrave

Today, I stumbled across a post on social media describing me as "unique and not for everyone". NEVER GOOGLE YOUR OWN NAME. "The Internet gave, and the Internet hath taken away"; so said The Bible, with a tiny alteration. While on its own, the adjective ‘unique’ sounds impressive and like a compliment, the kindness is soon stripped away when followed by those other four slap-in-the-face words. ‘And not for everyone’ may as well read ‘and not for many’ or ‘and not for you’. They could have just used the word ‘crap’ four times: one in standard font, one in italics, one bold and one underlined. They could even have increased the size of the font for each word in increments of ten; as Ronnie Corbett said in that iconic Frost Report sketch, “I know my place”. Such is the joy of the World Wide Web; for anyone who likes you, there are a hundred and eleven who’d like to punch you in the stomach. The fictional MP Peter Mannion in Armando...

I woke this morning (blues riff) to an email telling me my blog had been deleted, because I was phishing through it. It wasn’t the best way to start the day, particularly as I was busy sorting things for Mostly Comedy, and didn’t have the time to address the situation properly. You could argue it was ‘a fair cop’, as if I was up to something nefarious with my blog, I should expect a comeuppance...if it weren’t for the fact I had to look up 'phishing' to find out what it meant, learning that I clearly wasn’t doing a thing of the sort in the first place. I’ve never used the blog to steal someone's credit card details, as I have a far more effective way of doing it. It’s not been used to purloin a person’s identity, except for one time in 1995 with Sandra Bullock . It hasn’t gleaned a single password, as it’s hard to do this just through having someone read it. I’ve not perfected the technology, but I’m working on it. In tru...

I sometimes question my past Google searches. Thankfully Gmail trumped stigmata for the top spot. If the latter had been more popular, it would have called my entire internet history into question. I suppose it could be worse. I could have been looking it up on NHS Direct. Which no longer exists, by the way. Bloody Tories. (Which is not a reference to stigmata in Government.) At least I wasn’t looking up something inappropriate. You won’t be arrested for researching stigmata. I don’t think so, anyway. Not unless you’re scanning the internet for ‘stigmata teens’. I’d like to hope this isn’t a real fetish, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Either way, I’d sooner remain in ignorance. In reality, I was just checking my facts for a joke. I search a lot of incongruous subjects for this reason. As a result, I’m a mine of useless information. Still, it keeps me busy.

The plus side of not having a Wikipedia page is I don't have to be confronted by my own, open-ended death date. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve looked someone up to be faced with such morbid information. That said, it can be fascinating to see a person's life and career summed up in just a couple of short sentences. One can imagine the glee that some must feel when updating a person's entry with a bit of breaking news; it's like playing a small administrative part in someone else's life story. I dread to think what mine would say. It would probably bug me.     It like the time I Googled myself to discover that the most popular related search was this :   The question is: how many people entered that for it to become a standard ? I can only hope that MySpace has a sudden surge in interest, so I can subtly redress the balance.