World’s oldest blogger at 107!

Eric Shackle, a retired journalist whose hobby is searching the Internet and writing about it, emailed me recently. In his mail he said:

“Greetings from Sydney, Australia. Congratulations on your courageous website, which I visited for the first time. You may be interested to learn that Australia’s 107-year-old Olive Riley is the world’s oldest blogger. Her blog is at AllAboutOlive . I wrote about her in The World’s First Multi-National e-Book“.

Eric is not a nobody himself. Apart from being the author of The World’s First Multi-National e-Book,  his work has been published by the New York Times (US), The Observer (UK), Globe and Mail (Canada), Straits Times, Singapore and Sydney Morning Herald (Australia).

He also writes for OhmyNews International (South Korea’s citizen reporters’ journal0, and for senior citizen webzines in UK, Canada, South Africa and Australia. He is copy editor of Anu Garg’s US-based A Word A Day free newsletter, which is e- mailed 5 days a week to more than 600,000 word lovers in 210 countries.

So, you can imagine how excited I was to read about Olive. In her blog she sounds energetic and cheerful. Today, 31 March, is her 10th post. She gets writing assistance from Mike Rubbo. And today, she is planning for a lettuce and Thai meal. Read all about her in her blog. There are some interesting pictures as well.

To all aunties and uncles out there. Don’t give up lah! There is still time, and lots of reasons to start a blog!

Not too far away, my new found friend SK Thew of MageP’s Lab had also blogged about a senior citizen blogging in Singapore. Thew gave me a surprise call one fine day in Bangkok and alerted me to his post –  laozhabor (which in hokkien means ‘old lady’). 

Which makes me think of all the rude comments passed onto bloggers by ministers and their scums over the week and more. These lot know nothing about blogsville, bloggers or even the Internet, judging by the kind of comments that have been spewing out of their crooked mouths.

But then again, I think we have been judging them too eagerly. They are quite a smart lot, but cruel. I read that the Internet usage these days is about 41 percent or 11.3 million users. No wonder they are scared out of their wits! yet, surely not all are bloggers or read blogs. Some read porn, and others are simply un-interested, coz they’ve got interesting and exciting lives, to be bothered about politics or about you, stupid politicians out there.

So, give us a break, will ya. I know, elections are coming, and you don’t want us around. But that’s going to be difficult. You use to have phantom voters, but you can also have phantom bloggers now to sing your tune. I mean, fight us on the same intellectual level, please. Don’t stoop so low as to jump on the same bandwagon and show us what dimwits you are.

By the way, over the week, more dimwits have jumped on the bandwagon, the likes of Ismail Sabri  (BN-Bera) who said bloggers are “sowing the seeds of discord among the races, religions”. He added there should be a limit and proposed lwas to curb bloggers.

Earlier, another dimwit, Nazri Aziz, minister in the prime minister’s department, said: “We already have bloggers doing all sorts of things and only the opposition believes what they write.”

Which brings me to this:

Apart from the growing membership of dimwits in the skim cepat famous (get famous quick scheme), there is now an open war of “Dimwit United” vs “Bloggers United”. Anyone wanna bet?