Junk mail

This is not a blog for entering the debate about the dangers of AI becoming too powerful. Oh, no. I leave that debate to the experts.

Let me just share with you that I have a public Facebook page for my research into Scottish music publishers. It’s really there just to highlight small snippets and research discoveries, and to point curious readers towards this blog. This is the link:-

Scottish Music Publishers 1880-1950, with Karen McA

Well, today, I discovered I had a new ‘follower’. I’d like to know how anyone can possibly help to monetize the activities of a bunch of defunct Scottish music publishers. I have visions of Messrs Bayley, Ferguson, Kerr and Allan walking down Sauchiehall Street, enthusiastically discussing the new interest in their latest publications … amazed that anyone would be willing to help promote their work, which ceased more than half a century ago.

It’s okay – I’ve blocked the ‘follower’. I’m just annoyed that I had to waste time doing so!

All the Crazy People

Is there no end to it? Looking for a particular email that I’m expecting but haven’t received, I thought I’d better check my Junk mail. (It wasn’t there, so I’m still waiting.) But there was a firm wanting to charge me several thousand pounds to turn my RMA Research Chronicle article into a professionally-made podcast. (Really? I’m a semi-retired musicologist research fellow – I have time to do this myself, and I’m not paying a scientific organisation to do it for me.) And then – in the same folder – I find another firm offering to turn my PhD thesis into a book. Yes, right. I did that, with Ashgate, over a decade ago.

The world has gone mad. Can we turn it off and on again?

Image by Felix Martinez from Pixabay