Blog Strike

Today I will cease writing this blog. I will not blog another word until at least 1st January 2012.
My inspiration is a piece of ‘performance art’ (for want of a better term) called the Art Strike, which a similarly named, similarly aged prankster called Stewart Home carried out from 1990 to 1993. Google it if you’ve never heard of it.
Like my sometime associate Home I regard anything I do for fun, rather than to pay the mortgage or for my family, as an experiment, and almost everything else as an utter bore and a complete waste of time. I started the print column because I was invited to and so will continue that until I’m disinvited, but I started the blog as an experiment, so when it is not interesting to blog, not interesting to observe the reaction, then there is no reason to continue. Or maybe I’ll just observe what happens when I don’t blog, because that may also be interesting.
One reason for the Manx content has been that I never understood why nobody else was doing it when so much nonsense goes on here and, for strictly economic reasons, the local press will not talk about it. But I also never understood why, once I’d proved it could be done, nobody else joined in.
And I never understood why the level of analysis or research by commentators on local websites…......well, frankly, why there isn’t any! If I’m terribly honest, I also despair of many 'atheist' websites and organisations too, for the same reasons.
Does nobody ask the most basic questions of news stories?
Where this or that assertion, statistic or ‘fact’ comes from?
Or who?
It ought to be patently obvious to anyone who has even briefly encountered ‘media studies’ that at least 80% of the local, UK or international press is written by PR companies, government spin-meisters and pressure groups, so why do they not ask where the story came from?
Or why they planted the story?
Or why the Manx government spends millions on PR projects which they tell us are meant to improve the international image of the island, but which even the thickest, most academically illiterate marketing assistant in the naffest local company or government department should know from their sub-GCSE marketing course notes is actually a piss-poor attempt to make locals ‘think positive’?
Oh, so many questions, so little time. So, I’m off, to read books, study and try other projects I’ve had tucked away if I find the time, or just (as every disgraced Tory politician says) to spend more time with my family.
No, I’m not bored, or angry, or disheartened. No, I’m not available for anyone else’s projects which they can’t be bothered to see through themselves.
I’m just not here for the next 365 days.
If that’s a bother, it took me about 20 minutes to set this blog up from scratch with no IT experience. I did it for the same reason I churned out punk fanzines when I was 18 and have contributed to all manner of odd, obscure publications ever since.
Nobody talked about anything that related to the world I live in. So if that’s true for you, stop whining and do it yourself.
Go on punk, make my day.
See you in 2012.