Even in America...

A while ago I noticed I didn't have access to my friend's blog. I didn't think much of it at first, that it must be some kind of mistake, and since I considered her one of my good friends, it should shortly be remedied. I was gonna say something, but then I got busy and then I noticed it had been awhile and I still didn't have access. It was at this point I started to get paranoid, I have a bad habit of putting my foot in my mouth without even realizing it from time to time. Maybe I said something that totally offended her and I didn't even know it.

I wasn't sure how to approach the whole situation at this point, I wasn't a fan of confronting the situation head on without any idea of what I had done, I knew I had to make it better, whatever it was, and so I did a little digging to see if anyone had heard that she was mad at me, but what I found out was that other people who formerly had access also were cut off at this point. So I felt pretty relieved that our friendship was still intact, and so with the knowledge that whatever it was, it "wasn't personal" I finally asked her about it today- this was the story she told me-

Sometime around the end of the Olympics she wrote a blog post and mentioned the name of the host country several times. Nothing rude or offensive, the whole thing was very light and cute and funny in her opinion (I can't comment on that, but as most of her other blog posts are...I have no reason not to believe her) but the fact that she did name the country a grand total of five times was apparently enough to cause enough red flags to go up. She got some notice saying that there was "offensive material" on her blog. Her whole blog went haywire, and she doesn't even have access to her own blog. She has to start another one from scratch and had lost everything she had written up until this point. I totally feel for her, this is the friend that encouraged me to start blogging in the first place and I have derived much more enjoyment from the whole thing than I would have thought possible.

So what to learn from this whole situation-

If I learn nothing else, I learned that I should have just picked up the phone or shot her an e-mail in the first place and I would have saved myself a couple of weeks of worrying that I had lost or upset a good friend.

Other things-

From now on when referring to that country in general they shall henceforth be referred to on this blog as "You-Know-Who" or "They who shall not be named." (I'm really glad that when I did a post on the same subject I only mentioned You-Know-Who twice. )

If it's important, back it up. I was looking into publishing this whole blog into a hardbound book about once a year, but now I'm wondering if that's enough.

And lastly, apparently when you are working in a worldwide media forum who is in the back pocket of You-Know-Who, the first amendment doesn't hold as much weight as we think it does. I can't really remember, but I'm sure I clicked some box when starting this up that said that I agree to their terms and conditions and I agreed without really thinking about it because I generally have no trouble with all of that, and so I am subject to those things, and that's okay because generally those things are reasonable. But it's an odd thing to ponder that someone I know was affected in such a way. That some powers-that-be reached out half way across the world and were able to put a limit on one of her freedoms.