I was just thinking, as you do, why it is that some things become popular and other things languish by the wayside. Is it really because people like to follow the crowd? This week is Real Nappy Week, not that you’d know about it outside of the sites directly involved in promoting the use of cloth nappies. Even Facebook and Twitter, those outstanding medium for disseminating “information”, have been relatively quiet with just a few posts and tweets here and there. There’s also been a major news story on Proctor and Gamble having to face legal action in the United States over claims that Pampers nappies have caused burns and serious nappy rash which the BBC appears to have failed to pick up even though it’s being touted by Reuters, one of the most respected news agencies in the business.

Update: BBC Watchdog picks up the Pampers story – http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Fwatchdog%2F2010%2F05%2Fpampers_causing_a_stink.html&h=6ae52

So, just what is it that makes people continue to follow the trend of using disposables when they’re hellish expensive, they get used once and are then thrown away, they make your bins stink and they will sit in landfill for at least five hundred years?

Campaigns

There’s a couple of campaigns on the go at the moment which have amused me, although one is deadly serious and could have a huge impact on the British way of life if it continues to gather momentum. Its cause? To elect the Liberal Democrats. Spurred on by a Facebook group which is following on from the successful campaign which saw Rage Against the Machine take the Christmas number one spot in the charts over Simon Cowell’s X-Factor winner, the Why Don’t We All Vote Lib Dem And See What Happens? group currently has 6,822 members, sadly not enough to get Nick Clegg’s party into power but with just under two weeks to go its influence shouldn’t be under estimated.

The mostly Tory-owned national media would have you believe that voting Lib Dem is a wasted vote, don’t believe them but, whatever you do, if you are eligible to vote, use it. People died so that women were enfranchised and to fail to recognise that sacrifice is almost as bad as the attitude of those who believed women were too stupid to understand how to vote. Even if you go and spoil your paper by crossing through all the candidates, if you feel there isn’t one who you could vote for, you should make the effort to go to the Polling Station and register how important your vote is. It’s something which amazes me these days how apathetic people have become about voting. Only slightly more than a century ago the thought of not voting wouldn’t have crossed the minds of those eligible. How times change.

Impact

I was reading the whines about whether or not NATS (which operates UK air space on license from the Civil Aviation Authority through its network of air traffic control towers) should have prevented flights in the wake of the Icelandic volcanic eruption and subsequent volcanic ash cloud and the overwhelming thing which struck me was how insular the complaints were. In all the complaints about not being able to get home from holiday or from a school or business trip, no-one was stopping to ask what the impact has been on the people closest to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano who are facing loss of livestock as well as disruption beyond a delayed flight home.

There were some stunning pictures showing just how much the ash cloud has affected those nearest to the volcano on the Boston Globe’s website. Taken over the course of the initial explosion, they show the struggle farmers living under the slopes of Eyjafjallajokull faced. You can see the pictures here

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html