Private Parts

My Mum had a rather posh friend, who had been a Wren during the war. they used to giggle a lot about someone called Private Parts.
This was all very risqué !

 When something is private it seems to cause a lot of interest. Maybe if Eve had been told to eat as many apples as she liked then she would have preferred a pear. We can all be awkward like that. Italians use the English word "privacy", they don't seem to have one of their own, the nearest is "riservato". A private room, a private car park, private property can all make you feel a bit sort of excluded. This is probably because our freedom is so fundamental to our well-being. However lovely a place is, you wouldn't want to be stuck there. The minute something is private you feel you want to know about it.

Well anyway the whole point of this rambling on, is that I was thinking about the internet, and what a wonderful gift to the world it is, and now it seems some countries want to sort of privatise it.
The Internet did have many inventors, but only one man can lay claim to formulating the codes and protocols that set the foundation of  the World Wide Web.
In 1984, Tim Berners Lee, a British  freelance computer programmer, saw a way of combining the internet with a programme of hyper-text, which allowed information to be linked.
He then created a whole architecture to organize this protocol. which he called the World Wide Web.
the new hypertext transfer protocol (http) allowed easier use and navigation.

Then, Tim Berners Lee gave his invention away !!
He refused to patent it, thus allowing anyone who wished, to have access to the internet. that sound wonderful. a gift to the whole world !.
In an interview Berners Lee once said " Even the clearest, cleverest and most comprehensive website cannot hope to equal the wealth of information contained in a good reference book. The internet is definitely not a substitute for a well-stocked public library".
There's a lot of talk in the local paper here, about the importance of books, and that Book shops do continue to flourish, in spite of competition from Kindles and ipads.

What is ceaselessly amazing to me is that you can google any weird and wonderful question you like and it really tries to answer it !
How to you cope with extreme homesickness ?- up comes a load of answers.
How do you cure a white furry tongue.? same again !
How do you cure a broken-heart? ditto
What is the quickest way to the top of Kilimanjaro ?

I wonder if there is a list of the strangest questions ever asked on the internet ?
the whole wonderful point of it seemed to be that it was free for everyone. From the Beduins in the desert to the tip of Patagonia. We can all join in. Perhaps there just need to be some rules, like in the Football,fair play, team spirit and discipline.