Bunny annoyances

Not 1 but 2 bunny boilings landed in my inbox today.

Flacks take note:

1. Sending a press release with the title "JOURNALISTS! READ THIS FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" is going to annoy me. A lot. Partly because there is no need to use shouty caps or 22 exclamation marks (yes I counted them, saddo that I am). It doesn't scream "OMG you must open me as I contain such massive important news". It screams "delete me". I did, out of curiosity, open it - purely to see if it merited even 1 thousandth of that dumbfuck tells-you-nothing title. It didn't - it was about some spa face mask. That title might just have made the grade if it had been to publicise some bigwig's response to Paul Dacre's speech on press freedom, which has been the talk of the hackosphere today. But it wasn't, so it didn't. And another thing - don't send face mask bumph to journalists that aren't beauty writers. Because we really don't care about face masks.

2. I get a lot of "Top 10 Tips" releases - most are dreadful and fit only for deleting. I had a classic today on money-saving tips when shopping for food. Tip no. 4 - experiment with cheaper substitutes such as oyster mushrooms instead of chicken, pancetta instead of bacon - caused me to spray my coffee over my monitor. Since when has pancetta been cheaper than bacon? No 9. was a goody too - rice is a much cheaper alternative to pasta - hello, are you aware that the price of rice is now so high that many Asians in the far east can no longer afford their staple diet? That there are global rice shortages? That even in the UK, rice is both expensive and hard to source? Yes, the price of pasta has gone up too but it's still cheaper than rice. If you must bombard hacks with tips, let them be factually accurate. Meanwhile I'm left wondering where that bunny did her shopping. Harrods? (Where pancetta possibly is cheaper than bacon, if the bacon is sourced from an organic supplier hand-rearing his weaners halfway up a Peruvian mountain and feeding them on Beluga.)