Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength

Posted by North Wales Weekly News team on November 20, 2008 9:27 AM

By Richard Evans, Reporter

"Now you're being rude, and I hate rude people."
"Rudeness is an epidemic."
Hannibal Lecter M.D
WHEN psychiatric cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter stumbles across a person he considers rude, vulgar or discourteous he chooses to eat their liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
Being a journalist on a weekly newspaper and not a cold-blooded sadistic evil genius, when someone is rude I instead either turn the other cheek, or at the very worst mutter something mildly offensive or sarcastic under my breath. Hardly a deterrent for them in the future to discontinue slamming doors in my face and treating me as if I'm their own personal door mat.
This week I really have had enough. Nothing annoys me more than when an individual assumes I may have been put on this earth to hold open doors while they shoot past without a word, or even a nod or polite half smile, which would be perfectly sufficient. Is brief eye contact too much to ask?
The other thing that winds me up is people who can't even be bothered to look at me when I speak to them or just treat me as if I am an invisible breeze.
Of course nobody is perfect, everyone has a bad day. I swore out loud just the other day when shocked by the price of the product I was buying. I was pretty miserable with the said member of staff. Realising it was not their fault (although they had been slightly abrupt and blunt when I questioned the price) I returned minutes later and apologised.
But these rude people are like this all the time and they don't even realise it. And do you know what? For the first time in my relatively short 31 years of life I have a little empathy with a serial killer - albeit a fictional one!

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Urban explorers - why so coy?

Posted by North Wales Weekly News team on November 5, 2008 3:51 PM

By David Simister, reporter

SOMETIMES being tarred with the "in the media" brush sucks. I came to the North Wales Weekly News with noble ambitions to do the best I can in covering people's stories, and I think everyone here does their upmost to make sure our reporting's fair, honest and reflective of the community.
Yet we still get groups of people who think that - being from the nasty, evil world of newspaper reporting - we're involved in some huge conspiracy to make them look as stupid as possible.
This is one of the lessons I've learned delving into the dark and murky world of urban exploration, an historically-minded hobby that borders on the barely legal. Essentially it involves daring photographers breaking into decaying buildings, taking snapshots of what remains, and then posting them online for preservation's sake.
Is it anti-social and illegal, or a necessary way of recording the neglected history across North Wales? That's what I was hoping to find out for a future edition of our feature series The Issue, but that's before I came across some of the hobby's more paranoid purveyors.
"There aren't any myths surrounding it, only what the press makes up," came the flatfooted refusal from 28 Days Later, one of the UK's biggest urban exploration forums after I made a polite enquiry. "So sorry, but the answer is NO."
Really? I thought if anything it'd be a lack of communication that helps perpetuate so many of the myths surrounding urban exploration in the first place. Obviously, by the very nature of it I can understand why so many urban explorers don't want to be identified, but that doesn't mean that the work they do can't be shared with the community and explained in greater detail.
The region's urban explorers remain shrouded in mystery for now, but they shouldn't be.

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