Making better choices

Apparently whoever has been in charge of the social media for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation is moving on. Judging from this tweet, which has ruled my week, they will be sorely missed.

 

What's good enough for Annie Lennox is good enough for me

So, yesterday, Annie Lennox showed up on my Twitterfeed. (Yes, I'm still following Twitter; what's good enough for Annie Lennox is good enough for me.)

Wowza!! I just saw this incredible interpretation of SWEET DREAMS…
Gentlemen..You’re AMAZING!!!
Thanks for choosing our song!
ps.. Who ARE you???? pic.twitter.com/uQFLUYZ5iI

— Annie Lennox (@AnnieLennox) December 10, 2022

And I had to look, because what's good enough for Annie Lennox is good enough for me - I suggest you play the video, too. The trees and pavement looked very Vancouver Island to me, and sure enough, someone responded in the comments that the dancers were Canadian. I quickly looked them up.

They call themselves Funkanometry, and the shorter one is Jacksun (yes, that's how he spells it) Fryer, and the blond guy is Carlow Rush.  I think they're based in Nanaimo, where they clearly film a lot of their videos. I think Carlow may be from Duncan, which is midway between Victoria and Nanaimo, but it's safe to say they are Cowichan Valley boys.

In the comments in response to Annie Lennox, someone remarked, not quite sardonically, that the guys were finally responding after an hour or so (with a very Canadian graciousness, of course).  I thought, given the time difference, that this was a little harsh.

I soon found out, with local news coverage, that the reason for the delay was that, just as Annie Lennox had never heard of them, neither boy knew who Annie Lennox was.  Carlow was born in 2002, and Jacksun in 2003.  I guess neither of them caught the Eurythmics' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.

Their respective parents had to explain to them why this tweet was so significant. (Sadly, what appears to have really clued the boys in was the fact that Jennifer Aniston "liked" the tweet. They know who she is.)

Their videos are generally clips, for a generation with a short attention span, I guess.  Still very clever and entertaining, with good production values, a lot of skill, and superb synchronization . They remind me a bit of Hall and Oates, not that Funkanometry would recognize them, either. 

I particularly like this one, mainly because, being a dinosaur, I know who Roland Orzabal is.

(Update: Apparently Tears for Fears also responded promptly to this video.)

"Family trees are not trees, but matted webs"

Years ago, I decided to treat myself to a course in the sociology of families and households.

Don't look at me like that; we all have different ideas of a good time.

Our professor asked us, as an exercise, to go home and work out how many fifteenth great-grandparents we had.  Math was never my strong suit, but I soon realised that if you double a number fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times, your calculator will run out of digits, and you will end up with a number greater than the number of people living on the earth five centuries ago.

Wow, I thought.  We may not actually be all brothers and sisters, but we really, really are all cousins.  My fascination with family history just grew.

So, this morning, I was delighted to run across this thread of rants from a genetics professor in response to an article expressing wonder that a (that's as in one, folks) descendant of the Cheddar Man could be living close by to where the remains of the 10,000-year-old man (give or take a few millennia) was found.  I haven't included the whole thread - it's easy enough to find, if you just search "Dr Adam Rutherford" on Twitter - just the bits that amused me.

 Clicking on the individual boxes will enlarge them for easier reading.

My favourite bit is when someone brings up Charlemagne.  

Never mind a genetics prof; if you want to exasperate a seasoned family researcher, just claim to be descended from Charlemagne.  (If we have any Western European blood at all, we're descended from Charlemagne.  If we have any English ancestry at all, we're descended from Edward I.)

As you can see, I'm now following this guy.

Cutting it fine

The Tea Table (1920) - Harold Harvey

I had a pretty lousy night last night, and found myself blearily scrolling through social media early this morning, having tried, unsuccessfully, to get back to sleep.

This was how I stumbled upon this tweet from journalist and art historian Richard Morris, asking for feedback from his followers on the practice of buttering the bread loaf before slicing it.  It seems that he was aware of the practice (it's mentioned in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), but thought it might have been a more local tradition, limited, perhaps, to the West Country, where he had documentation.

Wha-a-a??  I said to myself (silently, so as not to disturb the Resident Fan Boy -- which was damned nice of me, considering that it was his snoring that was partially responsible for my sleep deprivation).

First off, it's not that clear from the painting how this buttering was managed.  Fortunately, Morris got hundreds of replies, which you can read if you follow the link.  The followers writing in were remembering mums and grans from all over Britain, but especially the West Country -- and Wales. Many said that it was for economy; the butter made it easier to slice the bread thinly, and that today's bread, made by the Chorleywood method, would fall to pieces, if buttered or sliced in such a way.

I quizzed Demeter when I went over to set up her lunch.  She didn't remember her Welsh grandmother or her Wolverhampton grandmother buttering a loaf in that fashion, but did say that the Welsh loaves were startling:  large with rounded tops.

I went home and questioned the Resident Fan Boy, because I wondered if the technique made it to Canada, and if his grandmother, a farmwife in Alberta, buttered the bread this way. Not only did he not recall the women in his family doing such a thing, but, damn his eyes, he refused to believe such a thing was done!  Showing him the painting did not convince him, but when I had him read some of the Twitter replies, pulled up the passage from Great Expectations, and googled "buttering loaves before slicing", he came around.  (How very dare he!  He knows me well enough that I would have checked!)

I came to the sad conclusion that the generations of our respective families who would have known the answer have slid beyond our questions.  If yours haven't, ask -- and write it down.

Intimations of mortality

On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver, on the record as not being a fan of the Royal Family, made a quip about Britain being bowled over because "a 96-year-old woman died of natural causes".

I am a fan of John Oliver, so I wasn't particularly bothered by this statement, much like I think arresting Scottish protesters for holding up placards about abolishing the monarchy during the Queen's funeral procession is overkill.  Their protests may not be in particularly good taste, but it's their right, and hauling them off to jail is pretty much against what the Queen stood for, isn't it?

But I recalled the Oliver quip this morning when a "retweeted" "thread" showed up on my Twitterfeed:
 

What can we learn from the death of the #Queen?

The world has watched her live through the process of #OrdinaryDying, and yet dying went unspoken, un-named.

Let's notice what nobody mentioned: we all saw the Queen going through the stages of ordinary dying.

A thread..

1/ pic.twitter.com/5bYoZIXUvq

— Kathryn Mannix (@drkathrynmannix) September 11, 2022

This stopped me in my tracks.

If you follow the link you can read the whole thread, which consists of twelve tweets, from Dr Mannix, who is a retired palliative care doctor and author -- a thanatologist, if you will.

I made the mistake of not "liking" it or bookmarking it on my phone; I was at Demeter's, doing her laundry and waiting for her to wake up.

Twitter is like a rolling, roiling river of comments, smart remarks, photos, "threads", and memes, so when I went to look for the thread half an hour later, it had been swept away by other items.  I only knew that the reason I'd seen it in the first place is that the Resident Fan Boy's second cousin once removed, a doctor herself whose physician husband wrote a bestseller about his own impending death, had retweeted it.

After nearly an hour at my home computer, doing every search I could think of on Twitter, I simply entered a few keywords into Google, and there it was.

Two tweets hit me hard:

The changes began slowly.
Initially, we realised that she was less energetic year by year.
This is the stage of dying when life expectancy is usually still measured in years.

After Prince Philip died she was noticeably more tired, her public appearances less frequent, her energy less reliable. Losing weight, walking with a stick: changing month by month, a stage that usually indicates life expectancy measured in months.

I'm a witness to my mother's final years, maybe months, according to Dr. Mannix - although Demeter has used a stick for years, and her weight fluctuates.  However, I do recognize the signs.

Years ago, I joined Victoria Hospice as a volunteer, for two reasons:  I realized in my late teens, that death was something no one acknowledged, even in a time where all topics were supposedly no longer taboo; and Demeter had brought my grandmother to live in Canada, and I knew I would be facing her death soon.  (It was over a decade later.)

It's been years since my time with the hospice, and I'm out of practice.  I do remember, that when people I knew came to the hospice to die - Victoria being not a particularly large city - that I could tell when the end was near when I entered the room and had trouble recognising them.  Not due to disfigurement, you understand, but when people are nearing death, they stop looking like themselves.  It's hard to explain, if you haven't experienced this, but more than once, I quickly checked the name tag on the door to assure myself I had the right room.

The other thing I remember is that health professionals working with the dying have a reason for not giving estimates of the time left.  We would have patients who were with us for months, despite appearing very weak and ill, and others, alert and ambulatory when I came in for my weekly shift, would be gone by the time I arrived for the next one.

However, this Twitter thread has reeled me in, and I will be paying closer attention to what Demeter says and doesn't say, plus what she does and doesn't do.

Dr Mannix concludes:

Dying in plain sight, camouflaged by briefings about 'mobility issues' and medical advice to 'rest.' Because like anyone else, the Queen was entitled to some privacy about her health, and to die away from the public gaze.

But we all saw the process.

Rest in peace, Ma'am.

So John Oliver was right.  A 96-year-old woman died of natural causes, as we watched.  Because she was a privileged person, she died prepared and supported.

I know not the time, but I'm on alert. 

Not taking debate

There's quite a war going on in social media about whether this is the time for debate about the continued existence of the British monarchy, especially when the debate consists of tweets, some in decidedly questionable taste. 

I'd take the hint to take a break from social media until say, October or so, except I keep running into the occasional gem.

I do think comic relief will become increasingly necessary over the next couple of weeks of lamentation, no matter what you thought of the late Queen, so here is a possible way to joke gently, done by a Canadian, of course. 

The Canadian is "Brittlestar" (real name: Stewart Reynolds), who is based in Stratford, Ontario, and if you're unclear of the situation with Lisa LaFlamme -- well, actually, this video explains it pretty well.

Furthermore, men of Harlech smell like garlic

I rather treasure the times that I can make Demeter laugh these days.

Twitter had a heigh-day a few days ago with the #dontvisitWaleschallenge, in which "tweeters" messed with travel posters to spread the message about the important of staying home.

Some of them are rather rude; I've actually picked some of the milder ones.

And some of them require some knowledge of Welsh pronunciation.

. . . or a recognition of a particularly funny and sly aspect of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas.

I had to explain the last one to Demeter, which is ironic, because she originally explained "Llareggub Hill" to me when I was thirteen.

I like to be in Llandudno, okay by me in Llandudno...

So, after a run of peaceful nights, I woke up at 3 am, and still found myself awake at 4 am. Grrrrr. I got up, felt my way into the living room, carefully closing the bedroom door so that the Resident Fan Boy, who rises shortly after 5 to prepare himself to work online with his Ottawan colleagues on their time, could sleep undisturbed.

Good thing I shut the door. I went down the Twitter rabbit-hole, and encountered this inspired tweet:

The Llandudno goats are so much better with a West Side Story soundtrack.

(thanks to @AndrewStuart and the Bergamo boars) pic.twitter.com/A71FumsGNa

— David Schneider (@davidschneider) March 31, 2020

I bellowed with laughter, and hastily shushed myself. I'd been following the reports of the Llandudno goats on the BBC News website. They've been known to descend from the Great Orme headway when the winds are high, but they apparently have never come so far into the town of Llandudno before. The people-free streets have emboldened them.

Similar encouraged wildlife have been reported in other parts of the world, including boars in Bergamo in Lombardy, an area of Italy particularly hard-hit by COVID-19.

The perils of thinking aloud on social media

I'm not all that familiar with the work of Joyce Carol Oates. I read one of her YA books when elder daughter was moving from middle school to high school - I think she had ordered it through Scholastic Books when her homeroom teacher passed around the forms. The book was distressing but intentionally so; the plot involved date rape. It was well-written enough that I had another of Oates' books - aimed at an adult audience - on my to-read list, but I never got around to it.

A week or so ago, Oates came up on my radar again, in that strange domino effect that Twitter has. I follow Marie Phillips, a writer whose work I enjoy, and she re-Tweeted a rather scornful comment by a colleague to a tweet that Joyce Carol Oates had made about ISIS:

Puzzled, I went to Oates' Twitter page to have a look.  Here's what I found.  (The most recent tweets appear at the top of a feed, so these should be read in reverse order):

The tweet on its own was bewildering, but I thought, innocuous.  Read in the context of her three following tweets, it came across to me as an awkwardly phrased, but genuine inquiry.

However, by the time I'd noticed this, thousands of replies and references had been already been posted, all of them to the opening tweet, much as the comment by Marie Phillips' chum had been.  Here's one of the kinder responses.

Most were vitriolic and self-righteous.  More than one man - I came across no woman who did this - felt words did not suffice and posted horrific pictures of ISIS atrocities, presumably in the belief that Joyce Carol Oates had no idea what was going on in occupied territories.  It was "mansplaining" at its nastiest. I had some difficulty sleeping that night.

There were lots of sarcastic retorts, bursts of out-and-out invective, and many retweetings of something cutting the late Gore Vidal apparently said of Joyce Carol Oates years earlier.  Molly Ringwold was also retweeted when she quipped:  "Okay, who got Grandma stoned?"

There were a few who treated the tweet as the question that JCO must have intended.

Others made a stab at defending her:

But there were only a handful.  It was clear that the vast majority had read the first tweet only, and rushed to judgement.  I was saddened to see that Guy Gavriel Kay, an author whose work I've appreciated, had not bothered to read further.

The trouble with Twitter is that you can only "tweet" in bursts of 140 characters.  While it can be an interesting exercise in economical writing,  for the most part it degenerates into, at best, a contest for the funniest, pithiest jibe, or at worst,the shortest, most vicious jab.

It really isn't the best medium for thinking out loud, and this is where Joyce Carol Oates falls down.

Let's put her four tweets into a brief paragraph:
All we hear of ISIS is puritanical and punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous?  Or is query naive? Cultures seem to swing between extremes of Puritanism and permissiveness; rigid order & disorder; control & "freedom". What is clear is that human beings can't live for long -- do not care to reproduce -- without meaning in their lives. Tragic that "meaning" can be virtually anything -- someone will believe it & die for it.

It's still pretty damn clunky - gosh, she loves alliteration - but I think there would have been less kerfuffle if she had written the whole paragraph somewhere other than Twitter -- although, no doubt, plenty of people might still have been offended by the opening sentence.  Better still, she could have thought her thoughts through and simply tweeted the last sentence.

However, it wouldn't have got nearly the same amount of attention.

Was that the point?  She hasn't removed the tweets.  I would have were I in her place, but JCO evidently has thicker skin than I do.  She almost immediately plunged into a series of short diatribes about Woodrow Wilson, then went on to make observations about North Korea -- which pissed off a whole bunch of other people -- or perhaps the same bunch of people, all eager to demonstrate how naive/pointless/crazy/old/choose-your-own-derogatory-adjective they think Oates is.

For the record, I have a sort of answer to her question -- even though I think she answered it herself in the remaining three tweets.  Not long ago, I stumbled across a CBC item by Brent Bambury which addresses the subject of music and celebration in the ISIS.  Should you choose to follow this link, I think I should warn you that, while not as graphic as the photos some men in the Twitterverse posted to "educate" Joyce Carol Oates, I had the same sick feeling of horror by what was suggested.

I have no intention of tweeting the link to Joyce Carol Oates. The last time I checked, she was worlds away, thinking out loud about other controversial topics.

Does the name Custer mean anything to you?

When Robin Williams died a couple of weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter and all those other social-media-type-things were abuzz, mostly with clichés.  Hey, people in grief aren't that original and besides, everyone was in a hurry to post something.  You could tell how old the posters were from the nature of their tweets.  Since most people on Twitter are under 40, the most repeated sentiment was: "Part of my childhood has gone!"

Anyone who reads this blog - I know there are at least half a dozen of you - will have guessed by now that I'm not under 40.  When I think of Robin Williams, I think of his stand-up, and my favourite memory is a crack he made, several times, in 1986.  Well, I don't blame him, it was a classic. I first heard it when he was performing in London, some sort of Royal Variety thing, with the Prince and Princess of Wales in the Royal Box.  During his routine, he kept ducking under the balcony to hiss conspiratorially to the audience:  "Are they laughing?"

In a routine mostly about current events, he imagined Lester Maddox, the ex-governor of Georgia, being asked to intervene with then-South-African Prime Minister PW Botha:  "Mr Botha, there are three million whites and fourteen million blacks in your country.  Does the name Custer mean anything to you?"

For the full impact, you really have to hear it in a Georgian drawl.  I've search all over and can't find this clip, but I found Robin performing before Prince Charles and his current wife in 2008:  

After a long wait for a non-clichéd tribute to Robin Williams, Billy Crystal finally broke his silence and delivered this eloquent elegy at the close of the annual In Memoriam for the Emmy Awards last week.

I have nothing to add.  Clearly, unlike the rest of us, Billy Crystal actually knew Robin Williams.

I'm always the last to know...

I've just discovered that there's been a blog following the filming of David Tennant's Hamlet which is now in its final week! Among the tidbits of info: Jenny Fava, one of the assistant directors on Doctor Who is also assistant-directing here; it is apparently very well-catered...

You can also follow these "Illumination" guys as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company itself on Twitter, if you like that sort of thing. (I'm still bemused.)