The man slinking on the floor? Hmmm…now let me see. Oops… I just realised it could actually be a couple of people! Now there’s a freudian slip if ever there was one. I’ll leave it up to you guys to decide. Both fit rather nicely. (((huge chuckles)))

And now I exit to catch up on whatever it is that I’ve missed.

Your Dad sounds like a very interesting man John. What a great job! You’ve got to wonder whatever happened in that third tier critic’s own life experience to make him feel entitled to call another man’s life’s work “famously awful”. Surely only one opinion… (and best kept to himself?) You must miss him very much.

Re the cartoon. Thanks again. It’s just a bit of fun. I can not know the half of it from where I sit way over here on the other side of the pond… but I am nonetheless watching with hope in my heart that good sense will prevail and that the right person for the job finds their way to the top job. Fingers crossed.

Yes, blogging comes with its own set of challenges regarding the relationship of blogger to “audience,” but it’s a slippery slope. The very act of blogging is a public one, and yet it’s hard to let go of our feeling that what we’re doing is sharing our private thoughts, and that the spirit of that should be respected. But just as blogging is easy, so is responding, perhaps too easy for those who are inclined to abuse it. By granting to others the possiblity of a dialogue, what we might perceive as a privelege they see as a right. It is good and valuable for you to clarify what you expect of your audience.

I think I tend more toward the public-ness of it, and am willing to sacrifice the private aspect, though I totally understand and respect your views. (I’m not disagreeing with you at all — on the contrary — just meditating out loud on my own personal sense of it.) I have a slightly different persepective, perhaps because my father was for three decades the film critic of the New York Times, and as such his reviews were like daily blog entries, out there to draw fire, sometimes mean and vituperative. I developed a very hard skin about that, as he had to. Just the other day on the radio, 28 years after he died, I heard a second or third tier critic reduce my dad’s entire life’s work to “famously awful.”