A Happy New Year, God Bless Us All

hum yes well I wonder where Aaro might have got the idea of writing a column on the general subject of "weirdo who spend altogether too much time obsessing about the lives of complete strangers on the internet" from?

We will be liveblogging the New Year's celebrations from a WiFi setup in a van parked outside Dave's house (this is a joke in case the police are reading). For what it's worth, it is not exactly difficult to work out who the two bruschettaboys are and only a little more difficult to guess the identity of the Rioja Kid and Vinnie ...

Update [by Backword Dave] I thought about writing on this, but the nonsense to anything-remotely-sensible ratio was just too high. Of the watched here, Dave is the better prose writer -- that is, his sentences sound better, his paragraphs build with more what-you-call-it, but, like Wagner, while the form is excellent, the meaning is bloody rubbish. Gerard Manley Hopkins once had fun with the word "buckle" (which has several meanings, see The Windhover). Big Dave (can we still call him that, didn't the late great (note pun) Ronnie Barker once say, "If you come home, and there's no one there, it's me, standing sideways"?) has some fun pretending (I assume he's not that daft) that all uses of "identity" are the same. I'd like to think he has a point, but Nigel Evans has a better one. (To a point. What I hated about having a credit card was that the whole number was on the monthly bill. What's the point of shredding the delivered bills, when a smart thief can raid the post office -- and yes, one of mine never turned up; so someone potentially had both my address and full card number.) ID as "financial details" should be protected. By you. I don't like that, but I'd like to leave my front door open as well. That's not as unsafe as you'd suppose in central Cardiff, but I have too much to lose (a G5 and monitor in the front room) if the gamble goes wrong. The same applies to ID theft. The risk is low, but what could be stolen is more than you can afford.

In his fourth para Dave moves seamlessly into "identity" as "name and date of birth" which is closer to "identity" as I understand it. Now as I understand his story of the long-long sperm donor, he wasn't asked, much less pressed for money. His biological son contacted him. That may be a surprise, but the son's right as I understand it.

But the good bit is the next para:

Discussing this story with my buddies down at the Giraffe café one morning, my friend Gunther (I have disguised his real name) told me about how he had come to know much more about a man in Dorset than he had any right to.

Anyone know what "any right to" means here?

Who needed Mr Zog’s chequebooks? The man was as available to the world as if he’d parked himself in the central reservation of the M1 with a sign over his head. With this difference — that he probably had no idea just how much information on him was available to anyone wanting to search for it.

Anyone wanting money, Dave?

What you can do for houses you can do for ex-boyfriends (in a phenomenon often known as Googlestalking). You can do it for people you are about to meet so as to amaze them with your comprehensive knowledge of their achievements and complex family arrangements. Feed you own postcode into Google and then follow the lives of those neighbours whom you don’t even know and who simply won’t say hello.

I've just done that (for ex-girlfriends, as I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that). Buggered if I learned anything. They all seem to have university jobs in the US and have had since before I met any of them, which comes as a surprise, let me tell you.

I think Dave's point is that we shouldn't be worried by the government's proposed ID cards, since anyone can Google us, provided we have silly names and were the only survivor of the Boer War, so we should be happy to wear badges wide as a dinner plate telling all and sundry our ethic origin, bank details, and (let's do a comedy Aaro here) penis size.