Earning off Popular Media

Nobody is surprised that those whom we call "influencers" earn money from the various Meta websites, e.g. Facebook and Instagram.  (The owners—Meta—probably makes more.)

I get a lot of posts from a 'Sophie Cunningham' site.  I love Sophie C to bits, but the content on the site has somewhat questionable grammar, so I'm fairly sure that Sophie does not really own the site; if she does, she has outsourced the maintaining of it to someone else.  Probably someone she has only met on the Internet.  They may give Sophie some of the money they make off the Fb posts; they actually may not; maybe Sophie has a media manager who handles all that. 

Some celebrity accounts sound suspiciously like they're from abroad.  You 'like' one of their posts about some athlete you admire, and they immediately shoot back: "Send me a direct mail, dear. <3  I will answer, for sure."

Regardless of the provenance (the genuine-ness) of the Fb accounts of star athletes, I really find it difficult to deal with sports fans.  Some of them are OK; they make reasonable comments about the players, about specific games, about the statistics.  But the vast majority of fans commenting on posts about celebrity players are, well, really hard to stomach.  Abusive.  Illogical.  Racist.  Ignorant.  Uncalled for.

Maybe, in about 10 years from now, once I get to understand the game—maybe with the help of my little basketball-playing cousin!—I might be able to tolerate these ignorant comments.  But, my goodness; they're on a par with the off-the-wall comments from MAGA types.  Incidentally, there are highly racist comments made against Caitlin Clark, denigrating all aspects of her game, many of which I cannot understand, being as much of a basketball atheist as I am.  But there are numerous comments insulting black athletes!  Of course, they could be posted by foreign trouble makers inciting racist feelings.  

A Pic from Fb

 

Complexity, and The GOP

There are two things that people dislike: Complication, and Complexity.

Make it simple!

This is the plea of those of my students who don't like to think too hard!  I understand; these are the kuds who think of Literature as just stories!  Of course they are.  And a movie is just a videoclip.

Complication:  These are the things that students—and people, generally—believe that have been needlessly thrown in, just to make life difficult for them. 

Like: divorce.   OK, it's not working out; it's splitsville.

Does the couple share a bank account?  <Ohh, why did you have to bring that up?>

Are there children?  <So what; cut them in half!>

Does the woman have the ability to support herself?  < Oh.> Is there a house?  A car?  How to divide those up?

Complexity.  This is when all the processes that make something work are themselves complex.  In the end, there really isn't a huge difference—from the point of view of a student who hates complication.  From my pount of view, complexity is when there are wheels within wheels.  A complication is just an extra wheel!

Simplifying Government

Maga—and the Tea Party—have historically (that is, for a long time) held the view that government is needlessly complicated.  They have never liked all the complications of * Federal Income Tax returns; * Food and Drug regulations; * The Legal System; * Elections, including the much-hated Electoral College; * Higher Education; and so on.  So the GOP has promised to simplify government. 

Half of them don't care how it works.   The other half doesn't know,  and doesn't want to know.  This means that, if they take a chainsaw to, say, Welfare, they don't know what is going to result.

The same with Tariffs.  These are expensive customs rates tagged on to anything that's imported.  Most of what we buy— at Walmart, or on Amazon—are imported.  This is obviously going to make life more expensive for everybody who shops at those places.  So why did Trump do it?

His theory was that once imported things got too expensive, people will buy US-made goods.  Unfortunately, US-made goods are expensive.  Our workers make $7.50 an hour, while Chinese and Indian workers make much less. 

By now, most of my readers have probably gotten bored to tears!  This boring subject describes some of the most complex processes in trade and government: it's called Economics.  I don't know much about it; but Trump has got someone to give him a summrary of what he needed to know.  

But Trump is easily bored, so I bet it was a super, super, soooper simplifued course in Economics.

To cut a long story short, it didn't go as expected.  The US made a lot of enemies; we wriggled out of a lot of obligations; and we've arranged (supposedly) to depend on Coal and Gasoline for our energy needs.

Trump is a Big Picture kind of guy.  Other felliws must now step in, and make these dreams happen.  (If trump decides to do it himself, it could be very messy.)  But guys who know the finer points of energy production, etc, are unlikely to want to work for trump. 

Kay

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A New Karen

Guess what?  I discovered an actress that lots of younger citizens are familiar with: Karen Gillan!  I was watching a couple of YouTube videos that served essentially to familiarize viewers with this actress—who's about my age, it so happens—and I was really taken with her!  She's Scottish, but she says she can talk American pretty well.

She comes across as painfully unspoilt, and all through the shows I watched, she kept giggling!  Oh gosh, she is cute.  And she has dimples!  And she's tall.  And she talks fast; too fast for me to follow sometimes.  She reminds me so much of Brit girls I used to know, and I miss them horribly.

She's was recently in one of those Guardians of the Galaxy movies, as a sort of junior villain.  Her first breakthrough role was as Amy Pond, in Doctor Who.  I wish I had more patience with those shows, and their low-budget effects; they were intended to be campy, but I had been too young to 'get' fhem.  BTW, a video with Rowan Atkinson ('Mr. Bean') as Doctor Who was very, very funny!  Also, Blackadder.

I don't want to include Karen G in my list of beautiful women just because it isn't her looks that grab me, but her humor, and her seamless craziness, and unassuming manner.  In her earlier interviews, she really seemed to almost squirm, but now she breezes through them like a pro, spewing those rapid-fire offhand remarks that are so funny.

Some of her photographs show her looking weird.  Inclung the one I've put up; they look as though she's under a curse,  or something; as if she's waiting for the haggis to hit the fan!  (Karen, if you're reading this, it wasn't intended in a bad way.)

Kay

Mystery Actress

I've often seen a certain actress in older movies, thought to myself: I must find out who that is, and forgotten to follow up!  Today I found out her name; it was Elisabeth Shue.

This was taken when she was very young, but her basic features have stayed the same.  Love her; a beautifully understated actress. 

Kay

Romeo, Romeo ...

Well, I had thus far regarded the little dog that belongs to my friend as just a noisy nuisance.  But recently, when I was visiting, I noticed—several compounds away—an interesting-looking dog.  Our dog—you know who I mean; he of my friend, who owns the cat—I had seen on a previous occasion, when we were ready to head out, barking at a dog at some distance away.  I never paid much attention to this behavior; all we wanted was to get him indoors and head out.  But I did notice that the dog was a Dalmatian.  This most recent dog I had seen was definitely a Dalmatian; not that I could see the individual spots, but I could see a general spottiness.

Now that I had been alerted to a one time general doggie presence out õver there, now, every time I looked in that direction, I've been seeing a Dalmatian pacing up and, down in their yard.  A couple of days later, I had concluded that it was a female, and a young one, too.  And I had never heard her bark, not even once. 

Our man, in contrast, barks his head off at the least opportunity: people walking along the alley, cars, bicycles; squirrels of course, our neighbors, and certainly Dalmatians.

The Dalmatians, a very distinctive breed, because of the spots, were used to guard carriages, in the 1600's and 1700's, and especially the carriages of fire companies (with hoses and pumps on board).  I read somewhere that they were troublesome to train, because they were exceedingly food oriented.  Well, I thought to myself, show me a dog that isn't.  OK, I'm going to check out that prejudice right now ...

Well.  There isn't any mention of food!  However, apparently they're more intelligent than average, and so training them has challenges.  They also need a lot of exercise (not apartment dogs) and supervision.  Honestly, all dogs are food oriented; Dalmatians being clever, probably find many ways of getting food (from the kitchen) which results in the reputation for stealing food, and being food oriented.

Well, I was back again, visiting with my friend, and went out in the yard, and there was the Dalmatian, about 100 yards away!  I started at it, and it stared back, and proceeded to sit and regard me closely, to see what I would do. 

I grinned at it, and waved.  It considered that as unwarranted familiarity, and warned me with a bark.  Then 'our' dog ran up and barked back, eliciting no response from the Dalmatian.  I got bored, and went inside. 

I so want a Dalmatian to play with!  They're moderately large dogs (they were bred by crossing Pointers with Great Danes), and have a lifespan of around 13 years, in case my readers are interested.  In any case, getting a dog is a lifetime commitment.  If you get one, and later give up (it's not Good Fit, etc,) the dog will be miserable.  Any dog is a lifetime commitment.  If you don't have time, don't get a dog. 

Kay

Margaret Alton: A Wonderful Heroine

I wrote the series about Helen over many years, from when I was a teenager, to when I was in my thirties.

That's a long time!  Obviously, I was a very different person when I first invented Helen, from when I wrote about Helen becoming a mother.

I was a senior in college when I was writing On the Run, which is where her little boy is born.  But Helen was a mother starting earlier, when the two little girls, Gena and Alison join her, and I was still improvising a personality for Helen, based on myself, really.  Shortly afterward, when I might have been getting ready to write the books that continue the Helen story past On the Run, I was busy teaching, writing lots of stories unrelated to Helen, and reading, especially the Darkover books.

The Darkover series is complicated.  The author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, who also wrote The Mists of Avalon, and several other books—one of which, Firebrand, is a favorite of mine—wrote the Darkover books over more than a decade, and I'm willing to bet that not only did her concept of Darkover morph over the years, but she also probably forgot some of the facets of her early concepts of the planet.  But then, she wrote several books—mainly three—centered around Margaret Alton.

Margaret ('Marguerida') Alton is an interesting character.  We first meet her as a little kid who is put in an orphanage, while her parents are engaged in an epic, superhuman battle.  That, right there, would have been enough to guarantee that the kid would be psychologically damaged.  In addition, her (Marguerida's) mother had huge problems, and was extremely neurotic, to put it mildly.  Her father rescues her, and leaves the planet—Darkover—with the child and his new wife (much more sane than little Margaret's birth mother),  and they try to make a life (on Earth, incidentally).  Some 20 years later, Margaret is a scholar of ethno-musicology, and is sent to Darkover with an elderly colleague, to study the folk music of Darkover.  (That's what ethno-musicologists do: they study folk music.)

In case you didn't know—and you probably don't—what makes Darkover interesting is that a large number of people of Darkover are gifted psychics.  They can read minds, they can send mental messages, they can cause pain, and so on.  It turns out that Margaret is, in fact, a generational psychic talent.

Now, obviously, apart from the fact that Margaret (or Marja, as her father calls her) can sing, and she is an able musician, there's not a lot that I could have borrowed from her character for the character of Helen.  But in fact, I appear to have borrowed quite a great deal!  Marja marries, and has children, and for some of the character of Helen as a mother, I modeled her on Margaret Alton.

At least some of what I have written above I've written before, I'm sure.  Well, that's only to be expected; this is an instance where one author simply acknowledges her debt to another author.

Kay