I NEVER got to watch Gremlins, a 1984 horror comedy about a young man who receives a strange creature called a mogwai as a pet.
During the Second World War, gremlins were supposedly responsible for sabotaging aircraft.
But I reckoned this was all superstitious and folkloric nonsense.
Then a mogwai visited us last week.
The gremlins are real!
And the evil monster successfully ensured you, our valued readers, could not access the Sunday Express website.
No doubt Sebatalali, Wendi, Lefefooane and the rest of the crew were disappointed big time.
I would like to apologise to our readers for the technical faults that grounded our online edition for days.
We will strive to ensure the website is always up and running and constantly updated.
It’s important that you have access to news from Lesotho all the time.
The advent of the internet has changed the face of the newspaper industry.
Readers have a greater opportunity to make their agenda known to journalists through online forums.
While print editions suffer space restrictions on opinion pages, online editions allow readers to comment directly on articles.
It’s on such forums that they can voice their opinions with greater ease and often alerting journalists to alternative angles or news items.
Yet such forums can be a cause for concern.
Especially when you have readers who take every opportunity to demonstrate reckless emotion, anger and irrationality whose genesis no one will ever comprehend.
Some encourage wicked ideas and murder!
This in the end defeats the noble purpose of the readers’ comments facility that we provide on our website.
Our aim is to promote freedom of expression, which is the freedom to speak or express freely without censorship or limitation.
But that in no way gives anyone the licence to post profanities and launch personal attacks.
The Sunday Express welcomes as much interaction and vibrant discussion between our readers as possible.
We get many tips and critical views from readers who post comments on our website.
But we are worried that some have unfortunately found it fitting to desecrate the readers’ forum by posting defamatory, racist, xenophobic, sexist or homophobic remarks.
I believe one can still make his or her points without resorting to insults that border on primitiveness.
Any reasonable person knows it’s not hard to respect other people’s views and beliefs.
What we encourage are mature and thought-provoking comments.
We also appreciate it when you point out our mistakes be they factual or grammatical.
It’s your paper and I have no doubt you would not want to degrade it to an abuse forum.
By the way, did you know what you utter or write says more about you than the person the words are targeted at?
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