Media, social and antisocial, not enormously comforting these days. Well, maybe never was. Memories of my daughter then aged about nine asking why I watched the news. It's always the same. Queried this, as had assumed the essence of the word was in the “new”bit. Oh, you know - inflation is up, the dollar is down, and there is fighting on the other side of the world.
No change except in the details. A little - ok quite a little - less patience with newscasters and analysts who have got it wrong though. Not people who come from a different part of the political spectrum than I do. Most people do. But not a lot of time for people whose job is to present and explain who are seriously underinformed or have bought a world view that benefits only Elon Musk. Or for people who are prepared to write off whole nations as undeserving of human dignity. Hey, we have been to Russia, Palestine, China, Syria, Lebanon. …
And we remember the past. Or a fairly impressive number of decades of it. Not to be confused with remembering what we went upstairs for. So when a reputable reporter seems to have no idea that the group he is praising as liberators are the same lot who cheerfully beheaded an American reporter they had captured not that many years ago….
Time for a nightcap and a podcast to go to sleep with. Know much better than to listen to current events at bedtime. First choice is ancient history. The Greeks and the Persians did bad things to each other but it was a very long time ago and nothing anyone can do about it now. And the annoyances it comes with are minor, sometimes amusing. So I wake up to a pretty good historian referring to Salamis, as in Battle of. Except he pronounces it like pizza sausages. Have I been doing it wrong all these years? Repair to Google. Turns out historian is using the regular (Italian?) American pronunciation. The rest of us do say Sal-a-miss. With the emphasis on Sal.
Actually do have access to quite a number of major newspapers. Which is nice considering the deliberately misleading message FB is pleased to keep posting suggesting that it is entirely the fault of the Canadian government that they have removed anything that was sourced from a newspaper. And not just Canadian papers. If a Turkish Cypriot correspondent posts a short segment from a local news article describing a car accident then FB feels piously obliged to remove it. Not currently living in Canada, story not from a Canadian paper, bloke posting it never been to Canada. Hell, one of our iPads not even bought in Canada. Absolutely maddening.
Rant over. Time to turn off the news and return from the age of print to the Bronze Age. The peaceful days when the village of Lapta moved uphill to escape from Arab raids.
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