Well, hello stranger!

The stranger, in this case, being yours truly.

I am now an old married woman. There's a bit of paper that says so, and I have a ring on my left hand that wasn't there before. I also had a great holiday to Paris, during which my digital camera got nicked.

Yup. My precious cybershot got lifted in the Louvre foodcourt. We reckon that someone spotted us using it, then followed and waited til a milisecond when we were too busy with trays/getting a seat/peeing and yoinked it. So no photos, I'm afraid.

This brought me on to another train of thought, and one which is related to my blogging absense.

Are people really interested in photo-less blogs?

Sure, there are a lot of them out there, and I wouldn't even think about the lack of photos on my LJ, but here it seems different. I think knitters and crafty people are more tactile or visual than most (or at lease aren't shy about letting it be known!) and a crafty blog with no pictures seems......

.....well, I won't go so far as to say pointless, but lets say that knitters like their shiny.

I'm not even talking about posting tomes of photo diaries or anything, just the usual couple of pics a post that most bloggers seem to do. It helps make a connection more easily between the reader and writer. You may tell us that your latest WIP looks like your new puppy just tossed his cute little cookies all over it, but unless we see, we still doubt that it could ever be quite that awful. Bonus points if you post a pic of the puppy looking cute and adorable too.

Now there are always exceptions to every rule. The fantabulous Yarn Harlot could write a completely photoless post about the kind of glue used on the back of postage stamps, for example. She has a way with words that I think fewer and fewer people have, and this is even more apparent with new blogs and social networking sites popping up every other minute. I am convinced, in my especially soapboxy moments, that if the world ever descends into the type of all out chaos and war that the Terminator warned us about, TXT SPK will be one of the causes.

There is an ongoing debate in the UK, for example, about test scores. The results that students have been getting in state exams have been getting worse for a long time. Instead of re-examining the school system, encouraging teacher training, paying for school facilities and proper school dinners, what is being debated as a serious "fix"?

Make the exams easier.

I kid you not.

Apparently the problem is not overcrowding in classes, frazzled teachers spending all their time dealing with wrangling little brats, or the curriculum. Nope. The problem is there be too many of them big wordz in the tests.

What will happen next? Will the collected Jane Austen be released in a special edition that goes something LK DIS?