Some despondent evening

So I decided to watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tonight, because it's a current affairs show, and thus rather time-sensitive.

I knew I was in trouble when a notice in red appeared just before the opening credits:  "This show filmed the evening of June 21st, 2025".

Oh gawd.  This meant, of course, it was filmed before the news about the Creature joining in the bombing of Iran came out.  

The show was pretty damn depressing anyway.  John Oliver devotes about the first ten minutes of his rapid-fire satirical/cynical/ironic commentary to recent events, followed by roughly twenty minutes of a chosen topic.

Tonight the topic was "AI slop", a term I hadn't heard before, although, naturally, it's been around for more than a year.  

I never claimed to be swift.

Nevertheless,  I've noticed, particularly in the past few months, that my social media feeds are less about the people and institutions I have voluntarily followed, and more about accounts that I have not invited.  So far, a lot of them seem to be associated with arts groups, but tonight, after John Oliver's show - which I really shouldn't watch alone, but the RFB is winging his way to Ontario as we speak - and spurred on by the CNN article in the above link, I went through my Facebook feed for a bit and systematically blocked a lot of accounts, as innocuous as most of them seemed to be.

Then I'll wash the dishes and go to bed.

Reading an actual book seems to be a good idea.

Zoned out

In a timely follow-up to my post about AI, this showed up, courtesy of Janel Comeau, who is based in Halifax, and writes for satirical news site The Beaverton, among other things.

Google and Meta search both report that Cape Breton Island has its own time zone 12 minutes ahead of mainland Nova Scotia time because they are both drawing that information from a Beaverton article I wrote in 2024

[image or embed]

— Janel Comeau 🍁 (@verybadllama.bsky.social) 9 June 2025 at 17:50

A more detailed article about what happened, the fall-out, and some good advice on dealing with AI-generated answers - I think ignoring them would be a good start, but what would I know? -  from As It Happens on the CBC Radio web site is pretty good. 

I quit Twitter in favour of BlueSky several weeks ago, but seldom check in. It doesn't seem to have quite a big enough following - at least not yet - to not be a bit of an echo chamber. (But, I repeat, what would I know?)

Watered in fears

A little over a week after my fall, I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude that I sent off the Christmas cards early, as hastily written as they were. One in particular was scribbled and tossed into the mailbox, to prevent myself overthinking, because I did way too much thinking in February, while someone else did way too little thinking.

I'm not going into much detail about the so-called "Freedom Convoy" which occupied Ottawa between January 30th and February 20th of this year.  There's a pretty good timeline and break-down at Wikepedia.  Suffice it to say that I was once again relieved to no longer be living in Hades, because the situation there was hellish for my former neighbours, to say nothing of elder daughters' friends and colleagues, most of whom live in Centretown.

I followed events from a distance, getting social media updates from people I knew.

When the whole trucker mess started, there were reports of people blocking long-term contacts on social media, as they learned that relatives and friends supported the truckers.

I thought that was an unlikely thing to happen to me - me with my intelligent reasonable friends.  Of course, within a distressingly short time, I found myself spending days, weeks, trying to pull together a compassionate, polite, calm response to my best friend from high school.  This kind and gentle lady had posted a link to a blog-post, which, among other things, declared that the truckers were honking out of love for Canada, to save it. 

This blow came in the midst of reports from people I actually knew: reports of sleeplessness, of watching helplessly from their windows as people defecated against their buildings, of being unable to get their children to daycare or school, because truckers and police had blocked off access. Two of elder daughter's friends watched from their living room as two men put starter logs in the lobby of the apartment building facing theirs, lit them, then tied the entrance doors shut. (Elder daughter's friends, who are of many colours and sexual orientations, lived in terror, because they were visible targets. Most of them eventually fled to friends and family living outside of the downtown core.)

After a couple of weeks of despairing and steaming, I felt I was in a better place.  I quoted William Blake to myself:

I was angry with my friend/I told my wrath; my wrath did end.

I should tell her.  Then I could stop being so damn angry.

To better illustrate my diplomatic and calm arguments, I re-checked the blog post she had shared, in order to ascertain who was writing.  (I was pretty damned sure she wouldn't know.)  It was some guy named only "Dave", who described himself as a "leading data scientist".  In the post just before the one declaring that the truckers were honking night and day in downtown Ottawa to save Canada, he compared the "unvaccinated" with - so help me - Jews in Europe over the centuries.  A "culture of cruelty", he called it.

Nope, I wasn't going there.  (I'm pretty sure she hadn't read this post; I'm pretty sure she hadn't read the blog entry she did post very closely.)

I felt the exasperation and rage well up all over again.  I envisioned my friend, in her house on a suburban hill in the Okanagan, picturing her reaction if she were surrounded by people using her driveway for a toilet while honking for days until, in a blur of sleeplessness, she stumbled out to walk her pedigree bull-dog.  Not likely.  Which is the point, isn't it?  Too angry to contact her; I distanced myself.

Her birthday is in early November, and I had the pile of Christmas cards out.  I scrawled out a quick greeting, then hurried to the mailbox, before I could change my mind.  She's my friend, after all.

Just not my Facebook friend.

I think I see a pattern forming.

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.

Another amber moment

On my Twitterfeed this morning

I awoke early this morning; the Resident Fan Boy was celebrating his birthday by going into the hospital for minor surgery. 

In between pulling on my clothes and brushing my teeth, I quickly checked my social media feeds and was arrested by a tweet from Elizabeth Renzetti, a former Globe and Mail columnist whom I follow on Twitter.

Apparently the newsreaders at BBC News had quietly changed into black suits.

Things still needed to get done:  seeing the RFB off in the taxi, then crossing the street to go set up Demeter's breakfast.  I continued to check whatever media was available.  The commentary was vague, but pretty ominous.

I was washing up Demeter's breakfast plates, when elder daughter texted me from London at 10:36 our time.

She simply sent the words of the message that was fastened to the gates at Buckingham Palace:  The King and Queen Consort will return to London tomorrow.  "So odd."

"We'll get used to it soon," I assured her.

I didn't ask her if she could see the rainbow from South Wimbledon.

The privileges of irritation

The Resident Fan Boy is beginning his third week of working from home, which entails his work laptop on the dining room table, phone conferences, and video meetings.

That's not so bad. I can work around him. I can visit Demeter.

The tough thing is, RFB's volunteer work has also followed him home.

At various times of the day, and also on weekends - especially Sundays - our computer screen fills up with the faces of church volunteers, people who are mostly retired, and for whom such meetings are a welcome distraction.

For me, it's a bit like the 1990 movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which the heroine finds her home filled with her deceased lover's music-playing, video-watching dead friends. It spurs her to move beyond her lover's death and find a new love.

Not exactly an option for me; I'm still reasonably fond of the Resident Fan Boy.

Besides, if I needed perspective, it arrived in the form of a tweet this morning. Of course, I can't find it now - the volume of tweets on Twitter these days is considerable - but I believe it came from India, and the gist of it was this: Social distance is a privilege. Self-isolation is a privilege. Even a lock-down is a privilege. Many people don't have the personal space to "social distance" themselves. Many do not have comfortable homes in which to self-isolate - or a home at all, which means hand-washing is a hell of a challenge - to say nothing of WiFi. Let's not even get into the financial hardships being created/exacerbated by this thing.

A few tweets later, in an unfortunate juxtaposition, came this viral video. It's very popular. With people with large kitchens backing on a garden with parents who miss dining out.


Our kitchen is a tiny little galley kitchen, and our dining room is a corner near the window that would look over the parking lot, if not for the translucent reeded glass window. However, we have a large window overlooking the landscaping and the road beyond. The Resident Fan Boy has work. We have a home. We're together and, so far, everyone is healthy.

We'll skip the sommelier.

Facebook follies by fellas

I've had the odd inadvertent adventure in social media.  Some very odd.

Recently, I posted a quick comment on the "Old Victoria" page, a Facebook group I've seriously contemplated leaving more than once, as it's often a hotbed for political grumblings - largely directed at our current mayor - and the usual wearying men (it's always men, somehow) who troll the comments of others.

Some guy had begun the morning with a memory question, which he jokingly called a way to unmask "imposters".  (There had been a recent reminder from the group administrators that only those with some actual connection to Victoria could be members.)

Well, you can imagine.  Someone ignited at the word "imposters" and let fly.  Others flew to the bewildered poster's defense, and he was posting parting shots.

I decided to post my own, remembering a distant brief period when there were local bumper stickers, emblazoned with such devices as:  Pave the Gorge and Ski Mount Tolmie - unremarkable unless you live in Victoria, and know that the Gorge is a waterway, and Mount Tolmie is more like a very steep hill in the centre of the suburbs.

I added that this was a "playful" test for imposters, and that I knew that the original poster of the "imposter" had meant to tease, not torment.  Having grown up in British Columbia, I know when BC guys are leg-pulling.

Eventually, I had something like 75 likes and 85 comments - more than I've received on anything I've put online, even though this was mostly people chatting to one another and not to me.  I didn't mind.

It was a cross-section of everything that is right, and, as it turned out, almost everything that is wrong with the group -- and perhaps with social media in general.

One youngish fella - meaning to be funny, I suspect - said that only people over the age of 100 would get the jokes.  While I was replying mildly that I was in my twenties in the era of the bumper stickers and still managed to "get" them, a guy I'd known in junior high leapt to my defense (I think), saying, "Whoaa...hold on there!"

Some other guy remarked that you needed to be over 100 to be considered a "true" Victorian, and for some reason, Youngish Fella flew off the handle, telling him that he didn't know what he was talking about, being from Nanaimo, and to *&%$ off.

I stayed out of this particular fray, but an administrator deleted the comment.  Youngish Fella reappeared and accused Nanaimo Guy of being a dip@#&%.

The administrators reminded the group about "coarse language", and here's where things got truly silly.  Several men (they're always men, aren't they?) started going on about Freedom Of Expression, and one even posted a gif of Rodney King.

Rodney King, so far as I can recall, was beaten to a pulp by the L.A. police for being black, right?  Not for dropping f-bombs in a private Facebook group.

*Sigh*  For the most part, I have found the historical aspects of "Old Victoria" a gentle pleasure.  I'd hate to be driven away by the foolishness of fatuous fellas.

Welcome to the glass house

Elder daughter, who is on her way back to Hades, is a fan of Tim Minchin, who has released this bitingly funny - and I do mean "ouch" - video, as a harbinger of a new album and the new year.

The album looks promising. The year?

Let's be careful and kind out there.


By now, we thought that there would be jetpacks and flying cars,
Robots to do the cleaning-up for us,
And help with the shopping.

We'd all be famous for a bit,
That's what Andy Warhol said,
Thought we'd all get our coloured heads,
Well the truth would rock him.

He would be surprised to wake up and find that we have weaponized humiliation:

In the future, everyone
Everyone will have fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes of shame
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable.

Pick up your pitchforks and your torch;
We'll go hunt the monster down,
But keep an eye out for uneven ground;
We'll turn on you if you stumble.

Don't need perspective or a heart;
Leave humility at home.
Welcome to the glass house; hope you brought your stones!
Are you ready to rumble?

I'm scared to write anything that might upset my tribe.
Never mind, 'cause in the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes of shame,
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable
Irredeemable
Inexcusable
Scum
Fit only to be strung up in the village square.
I will see you there!

I am scared to say anything that may be taken the wrong way.
But, *$#% it, baby!
In the future, everyone
Everyone will have fifteen minutes,
Fifteen minutes of shame,
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable,
Irredeemable,
Inexcusable...

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.

Crossing the Emoticon

Yesterday, elder daughter posted a Facebook status regarding a week that has been rife with shootings, especially the mass ones at a block party in Toronto and a Batman premiere in Colorado:

"I wish all the guns would disappear."

Words seemed insufficient, so I posted an emoticon hug under her status. I checked it first and this is the one I chose:

({ })

According to several sites including chatslang.com, this is a variation of the common {} emoticon that represents a big hug; also the standard way to represent a hug on BlackBerry devices.


Early this morning, I found a text message waiting from elder daughter. It was gently put, although I could hear her eyes rolling from three times zones away: Hey Mum... Not sure what your comment on my recent status meant, but it's widely regarded as a vagina emoticon.

'Scuse me. A vagina emoticon??? Since when is a vagina an emotion? I did a quick check, feeling rather hesitant to type "vagina emoticon" into a search engine (though it might make a rather arresting name for an emo band...) and up came this, another one of those patronizing sites which suggests that anyone who has parented teenagers is, by definition, too stupid to use social media, or even computers, period.

It appears I'm not the first to make this gaffe. If you type the emoticon I posted at my elder daughter's Facebook wall into a Blackberry device, you will get something like this:

Shall we presume that someone at Blackberry has a sick sense of humour?

I went to my daughter's page at Facebook, deleted my comment (which I'm sure she had already hidden from her friends) and sent explanations by email and text.

Haha Love you, came the immediate reply.

I'll follow her example and just spell things out, shall I?