Friday 1 April 2011

Pinch and a Punch, an April Fools Blogger


Having children on April Fools Day means that one has already been destruction tested before most people have woken up.

Looking at the blogs and other news sources covering Thanet it is a bit difficult to tell if any of the posts and stories are April Fools.

This one From Thanet Newswire has some potential http://thanetnewswire.blogspot.com/2011/04/seaside-town-spends-39000-on-council.html but seems to be backed by a story in the Daily Mail http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371843/Seaside-town-spends-39-000-council-job--running-beach-trips-locals.html is the council really spending £39.000 on taking local people to the seaside?

There is a rather strange article about council employees sick leave in the Gazette, see http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/where/thanet/Council-sick-leave-rate-scandalous/article-3396142-detail/article.html the article says that TDC workers took an average of 12.9 days off in 2011. The bizarre is this:

“Thanet council's business services manager Sarah Carroll said there had been a "turnaround".

She added: "We've set challenging targets to cut sickness levels at the council and have worked hard over the past few years to reduce staff sickness, bringing it down from an average of 11 days for each member of staff in 2006/07 to just over 8 days now.” As the article says it has increase to 12.9 days and the council officer says it has reduced to 8 days, but then as anyone who has tried to communicate with the council will know, 10 council day are equal to a fortnight. 
 
April fools day the councils website is always good for a laugh, here’s their list of forthcoming events:

“St. Laurence Churchyard Tour (April)
Day of Special Interest: The Mediaeval Art of Love and Life.
Margate Bazaar
The Other Whistler
Art Exhibition & Sale
St. Laurence Churchyard Tour (May)
History of Blue and White China Over Five Centuries.
St. Laurence Churchyard Tour (June)
The Spencers of Spencer House and Althorpe.
St. Laurence Churchyard Tour (July)”

And there was me thinking that a certain art gallery was opening soon.

Here are the web referral statistics for this blog http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/411/ and here are the ones for the press release blog http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/411/id2.htm you can take them as popularity score for the local blogs, if you like.

4 comments:

  1. Michael, congratulations for carrying on the principle of April Fool all year

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael I just did an article on TDC and Visit Thanets website. I think we should be ashamed of the way TDC uses the web.

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  3. Anon 14.34, you are obviously a regular reader!

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  4. Michael I am amazed at the amount of comments about this issue on the various Thanet Websites.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.