About dead people

Nobody reads this blog any more, so there’s little point in writing this. That said, there would seem to be little point in Blogger telling me that several of my posts have been put behind a warning (akin to those apocryphal ruffles that Victorians supposedly used to cover the shame of piano legs) but this is indeed what they’ve done. 

The problem is, beyond a bland ticking-off that they “contain sensitive content” and may not “adhere to Blogger’s community guidelines” there’s no indication as to what may have given the Blog Gods a fit of the moral vapours. Unless, of course, I realise that a post asking why Lisa Jardine privileges the reading tastes of women over men, and one pondering the extent to which Jade Goody’s stupidity is real are linked by one crucial element: since the posts were written, both Professor Jardine and Ms Goody have died. All that I can infer is that we are no longer permitted to speak ill of the dead* and I’m just waiting for Blogger’s AI to stumble over my Jimmy Savile post.

Incidentally, they also found fault in a third post, in which the only potential offence I can deduce is the contention that Haruki Murakami’s first book isn’t terribly good. And since pretty much the only person who gets offended by that sort of thing any more is, uh, me, I’m not sure what the problem is.

*Of course, I have to bring up Bette Davis’s line: “You should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead? Good.”