The Six Stages of E-Mail

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I love Nora Ephron. Well, to be precise, I love her writing. Someone kindly sent me a link to this from the New York Times. It opens thus:

I just got e-mail! I can’t believe it! It’s so great! Here’s my handle. Write me! Who said letter writing was dead? Were they ever wrong! I’m writing letters like crazy for the first time in years. I come home and ignore all my loved ones and go straight to the computer to make contact with total strangers. And how great is AOL? It’s so easy. It’s so friendly. It’s a community. Wheeeee! I’ve got mail!

You can guess how it goes on. (Hint: it corroborates my view that email has become dysfunctional — at least in large organisations.)

Celebrity culture

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Engagingly hysterical scenes outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange tonight as revellers arrived for my daughter’s Leavers’ Ball. It was interesting to see how many of the girls had managed to transform themselves into replicas of the kind of people normally seen only in Hello! magazine.

Gordon and the prancing fops

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Good God! Janet Daley thinks Gordon Brown is rather good.

In a time of national threat we don’t want cuddly; we want serious and stern. Charm might be nice when politics is becalmed and day-to-day living is secure, but gravitas is a whole lot better when there are unknown numbers of people in your midst ready to commit random mass murder. When a nation is in danger, it judges its leader (or potential leader) by his character, rather than his personality. So if the contest between Mr Brown’s governing style and David Cameron’s opposition is really to be, as my colleague Boris Johnson wrote on this page last week, between humourless Labour Roundheads and jolly Tory Cavaliers, then God pity the Conservatives. The last thing that the electorate will welcome now is the opportunity to be governed by prancing fops.

iFever spreads online

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Ho, ho! The Daily Torygraph reports that…

Apple’s frenzied US launch of the long-awaited iPhone has spread to the internet, where fans are now willing to pay up to four times the retail price.

The iPhone was rolled out across America amidst huge hype on Friday evening, and the devices are now commanding up to $2,000 on eBay.

Americans began queuing for the latest gadget, which combines a mobile phone, music player and web browser in one, up to five days before its launch.

Although Apple has declined to comment on the number of iPhones it sold over the weekend, analysts have estimated that up to 200,000 were sold in the first day…

Hmmm… I just looked on eBay.com and the first iPhone I found was an 8GB model which went for $730 plus $15 for shipping. That doesn’t seem too much of a mark-up for an allegedly ‘frenzied’ market.