Crazy chick
Sunday, July 17, 2016 at 9:31 On Monday I reported that Annie Dressner, a little known American singer-songwriter based in Cambridge, had launched a petition calling for a ban on smoking near children's playgrounds.
We'd both been quoted in last week's Sunday Times and later went head-to-head on BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Tees.
I noticed a slight hardening of attitude between the first and second interviews which was confirmed when she blocked me, Forest and Forest Ireland from following her on Twitter or viewing her tweets.
Not sure why but I may have annoyed her by mentioning – on air – that we had seen her tweets and found it strange she'd been tweeting the minister of health in France about her campaign.
Anyway, what Dressner doesn't know is that Forest has multiple Twitter accounts, some linked to old campaigns, so her blocking manoeuvre hasn't stopped us viewing her efforts to drum up support.
And some of those efforts are impressive, if optimistic. To echo David Cameron in relation to Jeremy Corbyn, "I'm beginning to admire her tenacity."
Here, for example, is a list of some of the people Annie Dressner tweeted last week. They include:
Little Mix
Claudia Winkleman
Kerry Katona
Katie Price
Colleen Rooney
Emily Blunt
Dr Alice Roberts
Victoria Beckham and
... Adele
Naturally, with the Rio Olympics a few weeks away, she's targeted not only individual Olympians (Jessica Innis and Louis Smith among them) but also Team GB (the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team).
More bizarre still, she's tweeted Liv Tyler, the American actress who lives in New York, and – wait for it – Taylor Swift!!!! (Whoever next – Tom Hiddleston?!)
The list goes on and on and on. She's even tweeted Tour de France winner Chris Froome who I suspect may have other things on his mind at present.
You couldn't make it up.
Amusingly Dressner has also tweeted some leading vaping advocates, among them Clive Bates who, to date, hasn't replied.
As far as I can tell only one of the above names has responded positively (or at all) to Dressner's frantic messaging and that was TV presenter Dr Alice Roberts.
And, boy, wasn't Annie grateful:
@DrAliceRoberts I am so grateful that you, and educated and respected person, has agreed with this! I have a lot of people telling me off.
— Annie Dressner (@AnnieDressner) July 14, 2016
Update: Despite the support of Roberts, Julie Barrett (director of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health Wales) and the British Lung Foundation, Dressner's petition seems to be losing momentum.
Launched on July 1, it currently has 2,630 signatures, with just 16 added in the last 24 hours.
Given the publicity she enjoyed earlier in the week that's pretty feeble. Then again the majority of callers to Radio Ulster and Radio Tees made it clear what they thought of her idea so it's not that surprising. (You can listen to a podcast of the Radio Ulster debate here.)
My message to Annie Dressner? Good luck with your new album. Let's hope you have better luck flogging that!
Reader Comments (4)
I have just listened to the broadcast. What amazed me was the ignorance of both the presenter and Dressner. It just goes to show how powerful propaganda is. Doll's doctors study showed that the amount of smoking and the length of time of smoking are very important. Put another way, both of those factors show that there needs to be an amount of concentration of the smoke. If you look at the statistics from the Doctors Study, it is very clear that you would need to inhales SHS for a very long time indeed, say, hundreds of years, before it would affect one's health. Doll himself said that being in a room where someone was smoking would not bother him.
Harm from SHS is a myth because our lungs are very sturdy organs. The human race would not have survived were they not so sturdy. They deal with all sorts of junk in the air without problems for decades and decades. That being the case, all the arguments about giving a good example and such are straw men.
You mean you totally missd her song "Cigarette" released 3 days before her twitter campaign?
It's just self publicity
https://youtu.be/JkfA9Pu68go
And an awful song
Er, I wrote about it - and posted the video here - seven days ago (Warning: explicit content).
I believe 'Cigarette' was recorded in 2011. As I explained in another post (July 11), it was her new album that was completed a few days before the launch of her petition.
Keep up!
I think the old no 10 e petition to amend the indoor smoking ban without all the publicity got more than 5000 signatures.