The perils of sextortion

IN the interests of clarity, I pointed out recently that Boko Haram did not record A Whiter Shade of Pale. A reader makes the equally valid point that the Steve Miller Band is in no way related to Ed Miliband.

PACKING for a week's holiday in England, in May: shorts, T-shirts, suncream, panama, sandals, wellies, waders, thermal vest, anorak, umbrella, survival blanket, distress flares, snow shovel. Just keep telling yourself it's character building.

A FEW days ago I wrote that a 1970 episode of Dad's Army, The Two and a Half Fathers, was badly written. It was, of course, The Two and a Half Feathers. Moving swiftly on . . .

FOR the past 40-odd years Clive James has been writing some of the finest TV reviews ever printed. He has that rare skill of watching the same show as everyone else and then constructing a brilliant, funny phrase that leaves the rest of us hacks wondering why we didn't write it. James beheld the drag-act Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, resplendent in a gold-embellished fishtail gown, and declared the singer was: "Like an upright carp with a bad shave." Clive James is dying of cancer and his own days of being upright are numbered. He ended his review simply: "This will be my last column." An era ends. A light grows dim. When the world loses a wit we are all diminished.

WON'T you be glad when these Euro-elections are over and the junk mail stops? I am fed up of leaflets about grinning strangers who are allegedly working really hard on my behalf in the European Parliament. If they are that effective and that important, why have I never heard of them? If the entire European Parliament vanished tomorrow, would anyone notice the difference?

AS you may have read elsewhere, I have been been voted Blogger of the Year in the Regional Press Awards. I dare say you have a mental image of a blogger as someone looking about 14 with a tablet in one hand, an iPhone in the other, a back-to-front baseball cap and wires coming out of his ears. The reality is that I am not an iPerson or even an Applehack. I am barely wired at all. I don't do Facebook or Twitter. I have sent no more than six text messages in my entire life and although I technically possess a mobile phone, I'm not exactly sure where it is at the moment. As I accept one of the hippest, happening awards in techno-journalism, I feel more of a blagger than a blogger.

THE one thing I do know about this digital thingy, and which so many people fail to grasp, is that when you go online you are, in effect, speaking to the whole world, in words and images that may last for ever. So if you're not prepared to shout something from the rooftops with a megaphone, don't whisper it in cyberspace. The same applies to waggling parts of your anatomy. According to West Midlands police, several men have been "lured" into flashing their tackle at webcams and are then blackmailed for thousands of pounds by "sextortionists," crooks threatening to post the images on YouTube. Seriously, how much sympathy do they deserve?

YESTERDAY'S Tweet of the Day (Radio 4) featured the BBC's famous first-ever wildlife outside broadcast, the cellist Beatrice Harrison accompanying the nightingale in her garden in 1924. Or was it a nightingale? David Attenborough says there is some suspicion that the birdsong was provided by a professional whistler. Auntie Beeb faking a wildlife documentary? Surely not.