...when the conditions are right...

 One time at work a few years ago, I was telling a guy about a book that I thought he might find interesting.

        He said, Yeah, that sounds good - it would have to be raining out, for me to read it.

I hadn't thought about activities as being able to be participated in only if the weather conditions are right.  Although, yes - it can be that way.  We cannot ski if there isn't any snow... what other examples are there?  ...

        I was reminded of that convo recently when re-reading a passage from Chronicles, by Bob Dylan:

------------------------ [excerpt] ---------- I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment, to turn on the black-and-white TV.  Wagon Train was on.  It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country.  

I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door - a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library.  

I switched on the lamps.  

The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness.  Up until this time I'd been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.  

Brando.  James Dean.  Milton Berle.  Marilyn Monroe.  Lucy.  Earl Warren and Khrushchev, Castro.  Little Rock and Peyton Place.  Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio.  J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse.  

        The Nelsons.  Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys.  Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy.  Levittown.

        Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke.  There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies....Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus.  Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General - a narrative which would give you chills. ...

Endless rows of books - Sophocles' book on the nature and function of the gods.... Alexander the Great's March into Persia.... There was Simon Bolivar's biography, too.  I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that. ----------------------- [end / Chronicles excerpt] ----------------------

Bob would have to be in a rest home ... my former co-worker would need some rain....

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a thin, translucent coating

 That gossip columnist we wrote about here in the last post, Nigel Dempster (that's  his photo at the top), was quoted saying, "There is a holiday in my heart when I discover another marriage breakup."

        Nice guy.

----------------- ...the sentences and phrases that Tina Brown writes tend to fascinate me:

the two tabloids that have "a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability"

"sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced"

"screaming populist tabloids"

"daily blizzard of headlines"

"from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity..."

"a swashbuckling editor"

"fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal"

..."scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes" - and here, of course, she isn't even talking about actual weather, she has made a series of metaphors to describe escalating media intrusion on people whose images grab attention....

        Such prose could knock you flat.   It's a plush, dynamic writing style.

        Tina Brown sort of does with words and language what Julia Child did with food.

One thing to bear in mind - Ms. Brown's description of print media in Great Britain, which is quoted and excerpted here in this blog, was from a book that was published in the year 2007.

        We had the Internet back then, but social media had not yet "taken over" to the extent it has now, so all that information about Britain's "voracious" readers buying newspapers might need updating here, nearly 20 years later.

Fleet Street - the heart of the British newspaper and printing industry for nearly 500 years

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total recall

 

[excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown] --------------- Lady Diana Spencer took her bow at the nexus of a national malaise.... The plebeian tabloids - The Sun, the Mirror, and the Star - no longer had the field to themselves.  

Under a swashbuckling editor, David English, the Daily Mail converted itself to a tabloid format in 1971 and quickly eclipsed a wilting Daily Express as the enduring bible of middle England; English's successor, Paul Dacre, has only increased its power.  

(By 2006, the Daily Mail was selling more than two million copies a day.)  

        The magic formula of the Mail was a combination of curtain-twitching class envy and strident rightist politics, with the added spice of the most waspish gossip columnist in London, Nigel Dempster, whose scoops from the highest circles of the Establishment were read at every upper-class breakfast table like a ransom note.  

Dempster had a thirty-year reign of terror until he was felled by ill health.  He was a miniaturist in tabloid takedowns.  His demonic social energy seemed to take him everywhere at once; in a car he always drove at a hundred miles an hour with the horn blaring.... He was dapper, fiendishly well-connected, dazzlingly anecdotal, and blessed with total recall.

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so much good writing

 ------------------ [excerpt from The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown.  Copyright 2007, Broadway Books / Random House - paperback.  Hardcover - Doubleday.] -------------------------- In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world.  

Their relative positions along the spectrum of sensation have remained consistent, but the entire spectrum has shifted sharply toward the garish, a trend accelerated by the resort to checkbook journalism - a practice of buying sources routinely denounced and routinely embraced.  

Three of the nationals - the "red tops" of The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star - are screaming populist tabloids, on most days almost entirely devoid of anything resembling serious news.  Two more tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, compete in the same mass market but with a thin, translucent coating of middle-class respectability.  

        The Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Guardian, and now the Independent, are supposed to occupy the high ground.  Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  

That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television.  

When all the papers are on a rampage against some public figure, which nowadays is always, they invade your life.  They are billboarded at every newsstand.  They leap across your screen.  

They buzz around in your head all day like a low-grade fever.  

Paradoxically, it is the flair of the British tabloid press, its superb professional elan [the "e" in the word elan should have an accent mark over it, I don't know how to do that on my Chromebook, begging your pardon...], that makes it so feared by its subjects and targets.  

        So much good writing and theatrical presentation goes into mounting the daily crucifixions.  So much competitive professional pride goes into finding just the right killer adjective.

        The Royal Family used to be exempt from routine abuse.  But in thirty years the tabloid view of royalty moved from the benign to the malign without a pause for magnanimity in between. ----------------- [end / excerpt]

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much ado about nothing?

 Harry and Meghan moved back to England several weeks ago, and the ongoing, relentless talk-and-commentary about the move is unbelievable.

        But then, I think, well of course it's believable - this is what British newspapers and chat-videos always do constantly.

I guess the word "unbelievable" is a word that comes to my mind when I see some phenomenon as being kind of "a bit much."  Or - as The Bard would call it, "much ado about nothing."

So - not literally "unbelievable."  Rather - a lot.

 

        Royal commentators and experts talk and talk, and then the listener finds herself or himself wondering, OK, what did they say??  What is the substance of all this?

Some critics say the various forms of media just take famous names and images, splatter them on paper or video or whatever, and build stories around them.

The stories come in several forms:

--  true, but exaggerated

--  there's a grain of truth, but the rest is made up

--  completely made up.

        It would be like if I made up a story, right this minute, about someone famous:  U.S. President Donald Trump is buying a library in China, and its shelves are going to be filled with books about him.  (All complimentary, of course.)

        Grains of truth:  1) The president of the U.S. is currently Donald Trump; 2) China is a country that exists.  

        The rest of that - I just made up.

        This is an example of what they do. ...

And that is what a lot of what is published and recorded in England is: made up and put out there because people watch it or buy it.  It's catering (pandering?) to an audience, for profit.

-----------------------------------------------

Listening to a video on You Tube titled "Why have the Sussexes suddenly decided to move back to the UK?" - one person on the panel spoke about the nature of the British press, saying -

"I think, if anything, the reaction from certain sections of the press who may have been sued in the past, some successfully, some unsuccessfully - it's going to be even worse.  

        You know, and that is an issue I'm not sure that they've completely taken on.  Because, trust me, the U.S. media is extremely tame, compared to the U.K. press.  So I don't know how that's going to be managed...."

-----------------------------------------------------

        In order for us to contemplate the media in England, I want to have an excerpt, here, from The Diana Chronicles, written by Tina Brown.

----------------------- [excerpt] ------------- Just before Diana Spencer began to emerge so vividly into public life, a kind of journalistic global warming was altering the eco-balance between the British press and the British Royal Family.  

The sunshine of publicity in which Diana would at first be happy to bask, posing and smiling for the cameras, grew steadily hotter and harsher.  

As the superheated imperatives of an invasive press bumped up increasingly against the milder human necessity of privacy, scattered rains gave way to drenching gales and then to spectacular and finally lethal hurricanes.  

        The ultimate tragedy of the disaster in the Paris tunnel in 1997 was that Diana herself had accelerated the climate change that ended up making her life literally impossible.

        For Americans used to local newspapers homogenized by the stingy monopolies of big chains and no national newspapers except the inoffensive USA Today, the staid national edition of the New York Times, and the staider Wall Street Journal, the volume and variety of the British print press feels bewilderingly promiscuous.  

In 1980, there were ten national daily newspapers selling 20 million copies, more per capita than in any other country in the world....

Despite the advent of the Web, the Brits remain voracious newspaper readers, often buying more than one paper.  That fact plus the country's compactness and newsstand culture make it impossible to ignore the daily blizzard of headlines, picked up immediately by television. ---------------- [end / excerpt]

        

Tina Brown

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a side-table for your garage

 

The You Betcha channel on You Tube has a couple of videos about tools:

"I Bought Tools Reddit Told Me Never To Buy"

"I Bought TEMU Tools, So You Don't Have To"

        He had a video about "Man Caves."

He discussed drill bits purchased from Amazon.

He uses some of the tools on-camera.  Testing them.

He discussed a portable project center that sounds cheap if you clank the pieces together.

        I started thinking, people who are mechanics could watch these videos and they would understand more of this person's video "content" than I do....  -  then realized actual mechanics probably already know all this stuff, and hence don't need the videos....

Maybe the videos are appropriate for people who have an office job or something, but in their free time they want to fix some things, or build some things, at home.  In their man-cave, maybe....

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"I continue to be stunned"

 

You Tube viewer comments:

||    The "whelp" with the double knee slap when it's time to go.

||    "How were the roads"?  Classic when they arrive

||    "Ope.  Sorry, just gonna sneak right past ya."  Gotta have that "sorry" in there.  It's important for the "not being an inconvenience" complex.

||    Canadians have sorry locked down.

||    The Midwest goodbye, "well I better get going" proceeds to talk for another 3 hours.

||    "Twenty-below isn't so bad if the wind would stop blowing"

||    "I dunno about all that" = "That's dumb"

||    "Well, that's different." = I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns

||    "It is what it is" could be the slogan of any small town in the Midwest

        ----------------------------- No joke my (central Minnesota) High School senior class wanted to make this our class motto last year.  Principal vetoed it.

||    As a Midwesterner engaged to a Canadian:  No, yeah

||    My Minnesota family's favorite form of small talk is asking which route you took to get to the place where you met them.  

        Did ya take 94 the whole way, or did ya take the back roads?"

        Nothing excites them quite like navigation.

||    100% my dad any time we visit and no matter which way you go he always knows a better route lol

||    If you could just run to the store for us real quick, but if not, it's no biggie

||    Felt the, "rather suffer alone than ask someone to do something they don't want to do" in my f-cking soul

||    Also because frankly aggressive volumes of community service as default is both a religious / cultural value and expected, and will eat every last moment of your waking hours if someone doesn't give you an out on something.

||    "If not that's totally fine" is an everyday one for me lol

||    Suffering alone instead of bothering somebody for help, is the cornerstone of Japanese society, surprised to see it in the Midwest

||    "You guys" is the Midwest version of "y'all".

||    Way back when, Wisconsin had a brand of cash machine called "Tyme".  When I moved to Chicago one day I was frantically looking (and asking people) if they had seen a "Tyme" machine.... got very funny looks!

||    I'm from Minnesota and I went to Colorado a few years back.  We got an Uber back to the hotel and the driver guessed where we were from by the "yea no's" alone

||    I just used "ope, let me sneak past ya" the other day.  They just looked at me and said "sawrry".

I love the Midwest.

||    I can totally relate, with pushing my emotions and feelings deep down and never reveal them, just let it out slowly over time victim by victim!!!

||    My old man is a born and raised Finnish Minnesotan.  He complimented me for the first time when I was 38 years old.  It was beautiful but brief...and never happened again.  Midwest emotions, ha!

||    I continue to be stunned at how similar Midwestern and Norwegian culture is

||    I was in Germany for work and the "Yeah, No, Yeahs" definitely caused some confusion a few times.  They spoke perfect English too.

        --------------------- Europeans often learn British English or Hollywood English, any other localism will throw them off.

||    When you think about it, the Yeah no Yeahs are a derivative of the don't wanna inconvenience you lol

||    I was born and raised on Long Island.  I've lived my entire life in the Northeast.  I absolutely LOVE saying "ope".  I've yet to pair it with "lemme sneak right past ya" but my goal is to get there one day.

*[the name of the channel is You Betcha.]

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