Anonymity can be attractive or enormously irritating. Positive anonymity might be when you're lost in a crowd or you're in transit between places - just another human being in the flow of life, leaving the niggles and stresses of the everyday world behind you. When nobody even knows your name. And being an anonymous giver or hero is also attractive. I enjoy news stories about kind strangers who help old ladies to escape from house fires or pull somebody from a car wreck or pay thousands to prevent a hostel for the homeless from closing. Then of course, there are all those anonymous war heroes buried or lost - for example, where the plains of northern France meet Belgium - the unknown soldiers - entirely deserving of our endless honour.
Bad anonymity is different - the nameless morons who smashed my car window on five occasions to get at the CD/radio - the graffiti sprayers who leave their ugly scrawl for the rest of us to notice - the bureaucrats who don't give you their names when you're on the telephone - and in the world wide web there are those maddening but unnamed spammers and cowardly stalkers who leave "anonymous" messages in blogs - sometimes of an offensive nature.
However, maybe I'm being a little hypocritical about this because of course my parents didn't christen me "Yorkshire Pudding"! I have another name that people outside this cyberworld use and perhaps it's time to come clean. This whole blog has been an invention. I have never been to Yorkshire. My real name is Earl Radsinsky. I live in Baltimore, Maryland and I have been commisioned by the CIA to hunt down "anonymous" contributors to wholesome blogs. May I assure everyone out there that I know who these "anonymous" computer users are. I am gradually closing in on them and in the course of time they will each be, well, let's just say - eliminated!
Since you're my neighbor, then, would you do me a favor and move your car just a bit further down the curb. I won't need to smash the windows, then, out of frustration, of course... ;-)
ReplyDeleteWell, I really loved your comment on my blog in answer to the twerp who had been commenting anonymously. It's so nice to have a knight in shining armour. ;)
ReplyDeleteMr Pudding,
ReplyDeleteShine on and ignore the pillocks.
Regards
Mr Country
I thought your real name was Cecil or Percy.
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ReplyDeleteare you having some spam trouble there Mr P, I mean Earl? As you're in maryland, can you send me over some of those cookies you make over there please as we can only get the fake co-op ones here
ReplyDeleteGRRRRRRR! If this Old Pa Clewley or Bud the Griller pretending to be anonymous contributors I shall blow my top and what is more they will be forced to eat boxes full of "Spam"! The only concession I will make for the apeman is that his "Spam" will be banana flavoured. GRRRRRRR!
ReplyDeleteI was hit by a couple of those recently. Tosser.
ReplyDeleteI too have a hidden agenda, but the time is not right to reveal all....
YP, you do know about word verification, don't you? It gets rid of spammers!
ReplyDeleteI too have a confession. My name is Gwyneth Fairchild. I am not, in fact, a middle aged slacker, but a twenty-something brain surgeon who looks like Brigette Bardot and dances like Gelsey Kirkland. I am not, in fact, married to a 50-something film critic with a Chopinesque profile, but to a devastatingly witty English expert on Henry James who graduated with top honors from Cambridge, knew both Leonard Woolf and CP Snow personally, and who looks very much like Hugh Grant.
ReplyDeleteThere. I feel better now.
Hugh Grant? Oh Yuk! Poor The Moy!
ReplyDeleteDamn. I thought you were a Sedaka.
ReplyDeletesay, moy, read your description, what are you doing saturday?
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