Mercury Nominations Come and Go Yawn!

Am I the only one not to have noticed the Mercury nominations recently. They came and went with a kind of damp squib effect that, for me at least, sounds the death knell of the ailing music awards and the final hiccup of the old music order. It seems the public in general and the music buying public in particular couldn't care less about the waning music industry's masturbatory propensities. The annual strokefest has become so soporific, self-congratulatory and dull that the only people remotely interested in these festivals of ennui are the industry faces and the over-excitable radio execs with the arrested development who're terrified of missing the 'next big thing'. The rest of us couldn't care less and the whole affair seems to matter only to a very limited audience and the 'next big thing' has already reached a worldwide public through a YouTube stunt video that's captured the imagination of the goldfish generation, the one with the 'short little span of attention' as Mr Simon put it so succinctly all those years ago. Perhaps 2010 will be the year that Big Brother, the Brits, the Mercurys et al. all disappear up their own fundamental orifices leaving just the faint whiff of their former glory behind. Fingers crossed.

Decluttering

I find myself increasingly selective about what I read on my newsfeeds. Using NetNewsWire makes subscribing to multiple feeds just so damn easy that I recently found I was trying to keep up with hundreds of feeds every day and was spending most of my time doing it. Apart from the fact that many articles are duplicated on multiple feeds some of the stuff is such unutterable crap that I suddenly wondered why I was letting it clog up my brain and take up my time. So I've been pruning it radically recently. Pairing the feeds to some essentials (news & current affairs), some technology & science and some whimsy. First to go, I have to say, was Digital Spy which seems so preoccupied with the vacuous garbage that is Big Brother that over 50% of its posts seem to have been devoted to regurgitating the minuitiae of a dozen brain dead publicity seekers competing for their fame filled 15 minutes. Why I even subscribed is anybody's guess. I suppose some brief flare of interest was aroused by the Winehouse train wreck that seems to have weekly epsiodes in their posts. I suddenly realised, as I tutt-tutted over her latest skeletal photo that I and others like me were part of her problem and that my absence was required and now.

Since then I've been slowly paring down my intake of 'news' and so, I hope, prolonging my dementia-free years by a few months since my brain is not filling up with useless trivia at nearly the same rate as it was.

I was struck some years ago by the Alexi Sayle theory of finite memory capacity which states that once that capacity is reached, one is in danger of forgetting some thing really important like how to breath or walk since this knowledge will be pushed out of memory by the latest FTSE index drop or the knowledge of a traffic jam on the M6. Since I'm approaching my sixth decade that overflow point must be close. I have no wish to rush to a dribbling dotage and the purge continues.