My Great Leap Backwards at 2 a.m.

Getting an early night is never a good idea. I woke at 1:30 a.m. feeling hot and feverish. There were a lot of thoughts that passed  quickly through my fevered brain like the ads on a commuter train which you never read properly. My life tends to be like that now; little time to fashion and dwell on one thought and I am onto the next. We are all collectors of partial information. We sprinkle a few grains of the plot before we have lost it.

Oh yes. This blog. Why do it? Because it's there and after a week away the daily visits are down from 300 plus to 200 plus and we can't deal with falling numbers now can we, because we would be slipping back and not moving forward like Mao's Great Leap Forward but now I'm confused because 大跃进 (that got you didn't it) entailed agricultural collectivization, which was more a step back to the Dark Ages.

Mao's official portrait

The death toll from starvation as a result of this policy implemented in China from 1958 to 1961 was up to 45 million which is staggering when you think about it, eclipsing the death toll of the Holocaust. But ask yourself how many people know about this? When was the Great Leap Forward last taught at your son or daughter's school. Could it be that we don't care so much about Chinese people as folks in the dust bowl or Germany?

How did that happen? I was talking about the blog. Feels better to walk away sometimes. Or just post dog pictures.

Maybe China could have benefitted from Twitter in the same way as Tunisia. Or at least I presume it did because nobody has bothered to go back and find out, having moved eagerly on to Egypt, Syria etc.

It's easy to lose the plot and to go off on a tangent. Did I really just send a Facebook friend request to one of the most tyrannical bossesI have ever worked for, a man whose personal hygiene defied description? Just bacause Facebook suggested it. I suppose it's OK. Facebook hasn't brought in a smell ap. yet, I guess it's only a matter of time. Sorry I just got distracted by someone's blog post about ornate tea pots. One of the problems with society these days is we don't spend enough time eying up fancy tea pots at 2 a.m.

So I hoped to get some agent tips at writers' group tonight but people drank too much and disagreement between women on whether killing techniques are taught during Army basic training threatened to spill over into bloodshed.

At least I managed to hand out some of those bottle openers I have been working on which don't seem to open bottles so well, and, believe me there are nights when bottles need to be opened.

Back to the mobile device. A middle aged man is stalking me but I am dodging the calls. And David Bowie has posted his latest video shoot on my feed. Doubt if I'll watch it as he's too old for the small screen - by which I mean iPhone as opposed to TV. The marketing guru whose talk I braved a room full of granite faced women business owners to listen to this week said by 2015 about 75 percent of us will be viewing info on a mobile device instead of a laptop or PC. I made up the figure as I have forgotten but it was something like that.

The feed from the Dallas Morning News reads "does the concept of meeting-less relationships confuse you or do you think online-only connections aren't as weird as they sound?" It's related to a football player with an imaginary girlfriend who seems to have died in an imaginary way and the mainstream media failed to pick up on it. I'm moving in favor of meeting because it might solidify my distracted brain but I'm already wondering why so many sharks are moving south to Palm Beach.

So what happened to Chairman Mao as a consequence of up to 45 million deaths? You'd think the sharks would be circling.

"Mao stepped down as State Chairman of the PRC in 1959, though he did retain his position as Chairman of the CPC," states Wikipedia.

Bloody hell. Worse things than that have happened to me for spelling someone's name incorrectly in a story.