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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living in beautiful surroundings

 

On You Tube, I watched / listened to, a biography of American actress Rue McClanahan.

        She played Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls, in the '80s.  

        I first saw her in an episode of All In The Family, in the '70s.

        She also appeared in plays onstage in New York City, both on- and off-Broadway.

She was married six times.

She was born and grew up in Oklahoma.

She went to college at the University of Tulsa, and earned a B.A. with a double major in German, and Theater.

        In the biography, it got to where she had achieved some success with her acting career, and she said for the first time, she had financial security, and "I was living in beautiful surroundings."

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Micronesia

 

A woman at my work told me that in Micronesia, where she's from, when a woman has a new baby relatives and friends come over and help.

        I thought that was interesting.  And since the Lindsay Clancy case and trial have been in the news lately, I have recalled that conversation a couple of times.

Underneath a video on You Tube, the following Comment was kind of similar:

------------------------ "This is so tragic.  I have Indian roots and in our culture a woman who has given birth is taken care of by the women of the house, mother, sisters, aunts etc. so she gets the rest she needs.  

This is what is lacking in our western society.  She was struggling and yet after 4 days in hospital she was thrown back into the lions den.  

        We as a society need to do better.  Giving birth is so overwhelming and we all need to do better.  Medication is not enough." ------------------------------

Two more from the same Comment Section.

||    Thank you for highlighting this important issue, as someone who suffered severe postpartum depression, it's so clear to me that Lindsay suffered from psychosis.  

Many mothers don't realize they have the depression until it's so bad that they either can't cope or we can't hide it anymore.  

        Here in Denmark postpartum depression can be diagnosed within the first year of the birth.  We also have a lot more time off and check ups from professionals every month after the birth, in our own house, which makes a difference, imo.

        [Isn't that something?!  "House calls."]

||    I'm American but many years ago I lived in Denmark for a time.  My second child was born there.  My prenatal care, my labor, and delivery and my postnatal care were far superior to what I received with my first child in the United States.  

        There was true concern for every person in the family, especially Mom and newborn.  

        At that time, all moms were kept in the hospital for a minimum of one week....The US healthcare system could take a page out of many other countries' healthcare book, and learn a few things.  

It breaks my heart that this family and many others like it have had to suffer such tragedy in large part due to the inadequacies of our healthcare system.  As a retired nurse with a 40+ year career, I saw this every day.

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

A lobbyist told me once, the three most powerful lobbying groups in Washington D.C. are drugs, guns, and insurance.

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a civilized society

 They have a "hung jury" and mistrial, in the Lindsay Clancy trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Horrible tragedy - hard to get your mind around it.

        But apparently this can happen, sometimes.  Remember the Andrea Yates story, about 20 years ago?

I found a couple of videos on You Tube that give some information to try to enlighten us about these situations.

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

Lindsay Clancy Update:  Boston Globe Health & Sciences Reporter Sarah Rahal Breaks Down All The Meds

uploader / channel:  Hot Mics with Billy Bush

Postpartum Psychosis:  What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Gets Wrong

uploader / channel:  Savvy Psychologist and Dr. Judy Ho

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

         Los Angeles trial lawyer Alan Jackson said, of postpartum psychosis, "As a civilized society, we do not criminalize illness."

We "civilians" - lay people, non-experts - assume, in the midst of shock, "a person would have to be crazy to kill their own children."

        The various videos talking about this case show photographs of the Clancy family - the dad and mom, and three children.  In the photos, everyone looks so happy.  

        I saw some of the trial, on You Tube.  I felt so sorry for the families involved.  At one point, a prosecutor was directing questions to, I think it was Patrick Clancy's mom, and the prosecutor asked if the lady is a Catholic, and then insinuatingly crooned, "Isn't murder a mortal sin?"

I was like - What The Actual f-- ...???!!

The lawyers and judge had a little thing about that in the sidebar. ...

Or, as defense lawyer Kevin Reddington would pronounce it, "side - bah"...

        He pronounces "post-partum" as "post - pah-tem."

"Kevin."

All those Boston-Irish are named Kevin....

    

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