Petitions, petitions.

My email inbox overruneth with petitions. Well, 2, and I don't think I'm eligible for the UK one. Anyway:

Over at SF Crowsnest, Stephen Hunt dives into the contemporary (a.k.a. literary) v genre fiction wars.

http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/news/2011/One-Genre-to-bring-them-all-and-in-the-darkness-bind-them-15938.php

The recent World Book Night on the BBC, apparently, was a farce of one-sidedness:

The highlight of this was presenter Susan Perkins in the ironically entitled 'The Books We Really Read': a 'Culture Show Special' making it sneeringly clear that she never normally reads any of our lowbrow genre tripe (although she might, you know, give it a whirl now, just for the sake of 'World Book Night'). Fiction has to be painful, a little like school, she explained, before gushing all over some bemused beauty salon clients that her favourite must-read was Dostoevsky, who is all, like, really dark and stuff.

He also wittily writes:

Of course, in retrospect, asking the 'Culture Show, to make a TV program called 'The Books We Really Read' was a little like asking Jeremy Clarkson to make a show called 'The Electric Green Cars we Really Need', with much the same facetious, ham-fisted and comical results raced at high speed across the screen.

Stephen has now started a petition for a letter of complaint to the BBC. Go Stephen!

The other petition is one in favour of alpine grazing - cattle stomping around national parks in an heroic, bovine effort to save us humans from bushfires. How selfless of them.

The sender of that email obviously doesn't know me very well.