Social media / anti-social media / oddness!

I have been known to express my rather negative  feelings about the excessive number of pictures of dogs and cats that appear on social media. So I was not greatly impressed to see the face of a cat on so many front pages of national newspapers.

This was Grumpy Cat, apparently the most famous cat on the internet. She has been described as a “petfluencer”, which I suppose is the pet-related version of “influencer”. An “influencer” is defined as “a person who has the power to influence many people, as through social media or traditional media: Companies look for Facebook influencers who can promote their brand.” And this one was a cat with a cross face.

She has been in the news because she has just died. As a result of her success as a “petfluencer”, she has been in a film (really? Have adults been to see it?), there have been numerous soft toys made in her image (understandable), and she is even supposed to have written a book (yes! I too am amazed!) and presumably she made money for her owner.

And now lots of people are seemingly very sad.

It is not known whether there are plans for a public memorial.

Oh, boy!

People have been posting and reposting pictures of Tommy Robinson having strawberry milkshake thrown at him during his campaign for election to the European Parliament. Nigel Farage has been in Edinburgh, where police asked a MacDonald’s restaurant near the venue where he was speaking not to sell milkshakes as they feared copycat milkshake throwing.

I have heard, however, that Burger King have been specifically advertising their milkshakes. Of course, that might just be fake news.

Another bit of possibly fake news is this headline:

Donald Trump convinced Roe vs Wade was legendary 1970’s Wimbledon final

And yes, it was fake news, put out by the spoof news people, Newsthump, in response to Alabama’s extreme rulings about abortion. Since then President Trump has had his say on the matter, urging Republicans to stay "UNITED" on abortion in a series of tweets late Saturday night where he wrote that he is "strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions - Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother."

I could go on at length about this but in fact I am left quite speechless by it all.

Instead I will return to a lighter vein and give you this link to a series of photos of amazing facial hair.

Who even knew that there was such a thing as The World Beard and Moustache Championship?

On national pride and prejudice. The importance of names and symbols.

Here’s a little story about numbers:

 “More than half of Americans believe “Arabic numerals” – the standard symbols used across much of the world to denote numbers – should not be taught in school, according to a survey. Fifty-six per cent of people say the numerals should not part of the curriculum for US pupils, according to research designed to explore the bias and prejudice of poll respondents.

The digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 are referred to as Arabic numerals. The system was first developed by Indian mathematicians before spreading through the Arab world to Europe and becoming popularised around the globe.

A survey by Civic Science, an American market research company, asked 3,624 respondents: “Should schools in America teach Arabic numerals as part of their curriculum?” The poll did not explain what the term “Arabic numerals” meant.

Some 2,020 people answered “no”. Twenty-nine per cent of respondents said the numerals should be taught in US schools, and 15 per cent had no opinion.”

I am resisting the temptation to mock American ignorance. If we did the same survey in the UK, I wonder what kind of result we would get.

Hadley Freeman,  a very anglicised American, under the guise of giving advice to Meghan Markle, has been writing about being an American mother bringing up a child in the UK. She gets particularly agitated about what the child should call the mother: mummy or mommy?

She writes: “Yes, the tweeness of “mummy” sets American dentistry on edge, but I can guide the duchess through this transatlantic minefield.”

Well, tweeness is as tweeness does. “Mom” simply grates on my ear! But I have to agree that when grownups refer to their parents as “mummy” and “daddy” it does sound a bit precious.

A French friend of mine used to speak of her mother, then well into her nineties, as “mummy” but we forgave her as it was just a direct translation of the French “maman”. Despite my many years of speaking French, I have no idea how the French abbreviate “maman”. Perhaps they don’t. Watching Italian series on television I have, however, learnt that “mammá” and “papá” get shortened to “ma” and “pa”, both with the short “a” as it “cat”, not the longer “a” you hear in upper class English “ma” and “pa”.

Poshness and Americanness combined: the press have had access to the birth certificate of little Archie Windsor. In case people were really worried about it, we can now be reassured the little one was born in hospital and his parents did not opt for a home birth. Well, I can stop being concerned about that now.

And the child’s mother’s occupation was listed as “Princess of the United Kingdom”. Is being a princess really an occupation? Who knew? That scotches any notion that she might go back to making films.

Now, how about maternity leave? I seem to remember reading about Kate Windsor, another “Princess of the United Kingdom”, coming to the end of her maternity leave for one of the offspring and resuming her duties. Do Princesses of the United Kingdom have contracts, stipulating duties and appearances? Presumably both these ladies had it all explained to them before they joined.

We can all be relieved to hear that there are raven chicks in the Tower of London for the first time in thirty years. I was amused by the headline for this little article: “Raven chicks born at Tower of London for first time in 30 years”. I thought that birds hatched rather than being “born”. Or is that just a linguistic technicality?

I am pretty sure there are superstitions relating to the ravens and the tower. Here we go - legend has it that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, both the Tower and the Kingdom will suffer.

Maybe the arrival of new chicks, which tellingly began to hatch on St George’s Day, bodes well for the end of the Brexit crisis.

Oh dear! Oh, deer! The oddness of the modern world!

Cities in Spain have problems with wild boar wandering into the outskirts - and maybe even the centre. Some places have problems with wolves. A friend of ours in Canada had told us about bears coming into town looking for food and even had one in his own garden.

So what do we get in Manchester? Deer!

A female deer was seen swimming in the canal at the Castlefield end of town yesterday. Goodness knows how she got there, Maybe she fell in in one of the outer districts of Manchester and just kept on swimming. But how far out do you need to go to find deer falling in the canal.

The RSPCA told the BBC: “We received a report from the police that a medium-sized female deer was in the canal in Manchester city centre this afternoon but it managed to get out. We were then told the deer was stranded on some land near the canal but it again managed to get free and ran away before our officers could attend.”

Once out of the canal she ran onto Oxford Road, a busy road full of scary (for a deer) people and even more scary, not to mention dangerous, cars. And then they lost it. No reports of a car-deer crash so we can hope she managed to get away!

We never even used to see deer around here at our end of Greater Manchester, and we are literally minutes away from open country. Now I am told that there are lots of them in the valley between Delph and Denshaw but they must have hidden well when I have walked there. We did see a couple in a field on the edge of the village and one ran across the Donkey Line bridle path in front of me. But we are hardly city centre Manchester.

All part of the oddness of the world!

Here’s some more:-

About twenty years ago now I took my daughter and granddaughter - the one who is now an independent adult of sorts - on a visit to my sister’s house in southern Spain. Her then eight year old son was very proud of a hat they had bought for him at the market. This, I was informed was a “Gran Hermano” hat, a style worn by one of the participants in the TV show. I had never heard of this show. When it was described to me - a selected bunch of people living in a house, pretty much out of contact with the outside world, their every action and interaction filmed and broadcast to a public who would vote on who should be ejected - I was amazed and declared that you would never see such a thing on English TV. “Oh, Mum,” said my daughter, “they are about to start broadcasting ‘Big Brother’ any time now! Do keep up!”

And so it began! Reality TV, showing a reality that most of us don’t want to live. And now we have had the big scandal of the Jeremy Kyle show (where members if the public seem to have family fights and arguments on screen) and its eventual permanent shutdown after a participant allegedly killed himself through humiliation and despair after being subjected ta a lie-detector test on the show.

There are two things I don’t understand :-

 1. why people watch such stuff

 2. why people want to participate.

As for watching it, I suppose people take a kind of delight in their life not being as horrific as that of the participants. And people have always watched others suffer. Think of bear baiting. Or even boxing matches, for that matter.

But surely if you volunteer to take part you must already have an idea of what to expect. Sowhy do it? Does the fifteen minutes of fame really compensate for being made to look a complete idiot.

It simply beggars belief!

And finally here is a bit of mistranslation. I have a French friend who lives in Vigo - both a real friend and a Facebook friend. She regularly posts pictures of the sunset over the sea on Vigo bay or birds in her garden, with the greeting “Amitiés de Vigo” - friendly greeting from Vigo. The other evening the automatic translation system went into gear and translated it to “friendships of Vigo” - each word correctly translated, if they were in a different context, but the whole coming down to a piece of “translationese” gobbledegook.

Humans are not likely to be replaced by machines at this rate!

My launderette! And a bit of Facebook-related ranting!

Grandma’s cafe has expanded its business and has become grandma’s launderette this week. My daughter’s washing machine has developed a fault. Consequently she arrives here at regular intervals with bags of washing and suddenly my washing machine is busy nonstop. It’s a good job we have had some fine and sunny and warm weather to get stuff dry. That said, she does take some wet stuff hime to put in her tumble dryer.

Back in the day, when I had children around and felt the need to wash clothes every day, if my machine played silly beggars, I had to put the stuff in the car and go off to an actual launderette. Those establishments seem to be thin on the ground these days. In fact I see more of them in Vigo than I do here. Odd!

Facebook friends come in at least two categories. There are those who are your friends in real life, people you have known for ages, some of whom you meet from time to time for lunch and some who just stay in touch through social media. Others are often friends of friends, people you may have met once or twice at the most but who are vaguely in tune with you and so become Facebook friends. Two “real” friends of mine became “Facebook friends” in that way and only discovered months later that one had been the German teacher of the other’s daughter. That’s the kind of small world stuff that happens in my life! If you are really daft, you have another category of friends: people who have somehow seen a post of yours and decide to “friend request” you. If you accept all of those you end up with thousands of nonsense friends.

I was prompted to write all that because I wanted to comment on the recent post of a “Facebook friend”. It was a photo of a dog looking miserable and hiding his face. She commented on the photo: “Someone is feeling sorry for themself”. I winced! Even the spell check picks it up! If you must insist on using “they” and “them” to refer to singular people (or animals), then you must be consistent. “Themself” is a nonsense, neither singular nor plural. Surely it should be “themselves”. But there is only on dog in the picture! Besides it’s HER dog and surely she knows whether it is male or female so that she could say “himself” or “herself”. And this “Facebook friend” is supposed to be a linguist (she was taught German by the “real friend” mentioned earlier - that’s how we became “Facebook friends”) and so she should know better than to mangle the language!

Having got that rant out of the way, here comes another one.

Someone suggested that mothers should be banned from posting numerous pics of their babies. I can sympathise; some people do ho a little over the top and will have some embarrassed teenagers in the future. But personally feel the same, and possibly even more strongly, about people who post cute pics of dogs, especially of people kissing dogs, treating dogs as human beings and generally getting over-sentimental about it all.

Worst of all is when they combine the two: - pictures of new babies snuggled up to dogs!!!

As for me, I mostly post pictures of places I go, trees and flowers and interesting birds I see along the way. According to some columnist I read at the weekend I am very in trend, as they say. The latest thing for Instagram, apparently, is not a selfie of the poster wearing something elegant but a picture of a place, proving how ecologically sound the poster is. There you go.

The columnist then went on to point out that it is only the most privileged of us who can post such pictures as only the wealthy live in those places with greenery and trees and flowers.

Such nonsense. Some of us are quite ordinary people who happen to live a short walk away from a green place!

Living in, or avoiding, an internet world.

Yesterday got busy: running races against a two year old, walking to the park and then not stopping at the playground because the two year old had fallen asleep, going to my Italian conversation class and eventually walking back from the railway station in Greenfield through the bright evening. Out and about we spotted the heron fishing, quite successfully! It was fine day to be out and about and, indeed, fishing!

In the Italian class we talked about internet-related vocabulary, borrowed from English and adapted to Italian. So to log on becomes “loggare”, to click, “cliccare”, to scroll, “scrollare”, and to tag, “taggare”. There is even a ridiculous verb, “backuppare” and another, “whatasappare”. And so, telling someone to send you a whatsapp message turns into something that sounds like old-style comedy Italian-talking-English - “whatsappammí”.

As Whatsapp was reported to be having a bit of a security crisis yesterday, accounts being hacked and so on, we asked our Italian teacher, a Whatsapp user, if she had upgraded her system yet. She told us she had not had chance to do so yer but was not terribly worried as she puts nothing on social media that Russians, or indeed anyone outside her immediate group, would find interesting or, more importantly, consider to be something they could blackmail her with.

She has a healthy nonchalance towards stuff like that. So far she has not registered for settled status. As far as she is concerned, we are still a member of the EU and a small, optimistic bit of her is hoping Article 50 might yet be withdrawn. In the meantime she will not get stressed hunting for documents proving this, that and the other until she absolutely has to.

One of our number was totally confused by all the internet vocabulary. I think he uses email but I suspect his mobile phone is only used to sending and receiving phone calls. He must use the internet tonfind information because thatvus hiw he discovered the Italian class. But not only does he not use other social media but he has absolutely no idea what it does. Mind you, since he revealed that he keeps four pet sheep in his garden, we have all decided he is really on a other planet anyway.

There are, however, more dangerous forms of eccentricity than keeping pet sheep!

The inteligent octopus. Foreign foods. And talking to trees.

Scientists have concluded that octopuses (octupi?) are intelligent. They have been observed to use tools and can remember things. No doubt the scientists have their ways of testing octopus memory. The outcome of this is that they now say it is quite deplorable and cruel to think of farming octopuses (octupi?) because we should not treat intelligent creatures in this way. And besides, there is evidence they get depressed.

There are problems with farming them anyway, as they only eat fresh food - another sign of intelligence? - and providing a suitable diet is very difficult. So attempts at octopus farming have failed.

I quite like octopus, provided it is properly cooked. Overcooked, it is a most unappetising thing, as is the case with squid for that matter. Cooked in just the right way, it is quite delicious. But I would not be miserable if I never ate octopus again in my life. (Scallops are a different matter.)

When I was a child nobody ever suggested eating octopus. It was an undersea creature. Jules Verne territory. But since so many of us have been spending holidays in Mediterranean countries the demand for octopus has grown.

Do the French, Spanish, Italians, Greeks who come to the UK have a great hankering to eat fish and chips after spending a holiday in this country? Do restaurants spring up in deepest France, specialising in fish and chips, sausage and chips, scraps? If my experience of Spain is anything to go by, I think not. The Galicians are pretty much averse to patronising restaurants that offer something different from Galician fare - fish, boiled potatoes and greens!

We British on the other hand love to see a new tapas restaurant or sushi bar or street food from around the world place open up. I wonder why we cannot be satisfied with waiting until we go back to foreign climes to sample their culinary delights once again. Mind you, having said that, one of the delights of eating out in the UK is that you can sample food from around the world. I have never been to Vietnam, for example, but I have eaten Vietnamese food.

This should be counted as one of our strengths. And it should be a reason for our being more tolerant of people from other places and actually wanting to stay in Europe. But that might be just me!

I also like trees and I read today that Forestry England wants us to go into the woods more. Very good. I am all in favour of that. Here is a part of what I read:-

“As part of Mental Health Awareness Week, Forestry England is working with the television presenter and tree fan Kate Humble, who has described how she often finds comfort in sylvan settings. She said: “We all have moments of anxiety or stress or confusion or sadness. Sometimes it can be really hard to articulate that to another person. You can talk to a tree: they feel old and wise and at times you need an old and wise thing that isn’t going to judge you.”
Humble said she had a particular 600-year-old tree she turned to, named Old Man Oak. “He is so stately. There have been many occasions when I have gone and sought the solace of Old Man Oak. We live this very ephemeral life. There is something about the solidity of a tree that can give you a sense of security.”
Humble also said she thought it was fine to sometimes feel a little nervous in woodland. “It’s a lovely feeling to almost be lost, but not quite, and to feel you are being led down mysterious paths.”” 

Splendid! Now, how does the old song go? Ah yes:-

I talk to the trees
But they don’t listen to me.

 I suppose Kate Humble could just talk to herself. But the there is another song that goes like this: 

You’re talking to yourself again.
It’s causing great concern for your health.

Bits of oddness everywhere!

Out and about. And some interesting words.

Yesterday the weather went from fine and sunny to torrentially rainy to fine and sunny again. As a rule I walk to the supermarket and catch the bus back. In one of the rainy spells I caught the bus. By the time I was due to return the sun had returned and so I contacted Phil so that he could meet me along the way and act as my beast of burden. Such are the advantages of mobile phones!

On our way back we admired the bluebells in the woods alongside the bridle path.

We had a fine sunset later, supposedly an indication of good weather to come.

That seems to be right. Today the sun is out with a vengeance. Another brief almost-summer seems to have arrived.

It has brought out the drivers of big boys’ toys. Here is a fine example parked outside our house.

Also out in abundance are poppies - all yellow and orange. We seem to lack red poppies around here. 

And the dandelions are rapidly turning into dandelion clocks.

Consequently the air is full of floating seeds. Dandelions are excellent self-propagators!

Now for some stuff about words. A bit of an obsession of mine, I know!

Many people have been overexcited about the latest, and apparently final, series of Game of Thrones. I know people, slightly deranged people, who stayed up to watch the first episode at 2.00 am. I know another who set her alarm and then decided she really could not be bothered to get up at that time! Sensible person!

Anyway, it seems that in their haste to join in the fun, the translators of the dialogue in the series, very grudgingly handed over by the makers of the series as they wanted to keep it all very hush-hush, into Spanish did not have time properly to work out to work out what was being said. I have not seen the moment when someone looked up at the sky, pointed upwards and apparently said of the dragon-riding princess in a Geordie voice, “she can’t see us”. The hasty translators thought they were pointing to a new danger in the sky.

And so a new word was born: “sicansíos”.

Wonderful! Much fun was had on twitter!

The actor Steve Pemberton was the subject of the Q&A feature in the Guardian Magazine on Saturday. Asked which word he over-used, he had this to say:

“I say ‘segue’ a lot in a professional capacity, but only recently learned that I’ve been mispronouncing it. It’s ‘segway’ not ‘seeg’.”

There are worse mispronunciations and I can forgive a lot in a man who responds to the question “What makes you unhappy?” with “Misplaced apostrophes”.

A man after my own heart.