More contextual advertising

Well Backing Fracking finally held their promised vigil – not in Preston as advertised, but hastily moved to Blackpool. They say because of the problems in Preston (which don’t seem to have phased the TUC). We think it’s more likely that they just panicked when they realised what an embarrassingly tiny crowd their “star” guest had attracted and didn’t want press photos of the turnout that they couldn’t control.

Stephen Tindale, ex-director of Greenpeace and advisor to the Task Force on Shale Gas had to suffer the ignominy of addressing a massed crowd of , er, 30 people (and that’s if we take his own assessment rather than the evidence of the photos which so far suggest no more than 20, including the contingent dragged up from Yorkshire, were there)

After a couple of days the Blackpool Gazette published an article which looks as though they just took the press release and re-printed it, but those of us without ad-blockers were treated to another outing for Pinocchio under a quote from Stephen.

Too delicious for words really, but it does bring to mind the opening words of Michael Morpurgo’s version of the tale:

“Now – there’s no point in pretending here – I was, and still am deep down, a puppet. Everyone knows Pinocchio is a puppet.”