My mornings start the same way lately: I get up, let the dog out, make a cup of tea and slowly wake up in front of the computer reading random stories that make me feel superior about myself. Or make me cry.
My number one site page to start with is SFGate.com. I still use it for my local news – even thought I don’t live in California anymore. SFGate tempers it’s local news with stories of nationwide and international news in a pretty dry form, giving me just enough to feel smart in a conversation but not too much to confuse and depress me when I’m still mostly asleep. After that, I then click over to the web pages for Channel 5 and/or WSMV4 here in Nashville. News there is all car crashes and fires. I exaggerate, they do cover the world and the USA but the top stories are all car crashes and fires. Seriously, there was a period this past spring where every single day brought a story of a lawnmower death. I didn’t realize lawnmower death was a thing – well more than a random thing – but there are actual statistics on lawnmower deaths. I don’t know what they are, it’s too early and I’m too lazy to look them up but there were at least 10 deaths by lawnmower this spring. Anyway, after I peruse the many ways a lawnmower can kill someone or the dozen car wrecks that happened overnight and read about the 8yr old that saved folks from a house fire, I hit up BBC for the news of the world. And get totally depressed. The world is falling apart people. Folks are killing and maiming and bulling and generally being total asses to each other. And total asses to the environment. And total asses to animals. I treat my depression by reading Daily Mail. It is a plethora of ‘news’ and trash that can make me feel very intelligent at the same time as bringing me to tears - usually in the same article. The editing is horrific – there are spelling errors and grammar errors and paragraphs repeated in the same article, sometimes more than twice. But unlike SFGate and BBC, they have pictures of everything – lots and lots of pictures of every possible angle of a shooting or celebrity or animal. And the pictures are often good – even though the topic is often horrible. This past week with the Kenya hostage situation, Daily Mail had photos I found nowhere else online. I spent hours scrolling slowly through each picture looking for relatives. I haven’t been in Kenya in 30 years and wouldn’t recognize a relative if I saw one, but because of the wonder of Daily Mail, I could look. And I did look. Feeling the terror I could see on their faces. The horror and pain as they ran past bodies of folks that had just been gunned down just because. The poor woman and her two children playing dead until they could be rescued and then she was too terrified to actually move and the security guy had to grab her daughter to convince her to move. The two kids standing next to the dead man on the steps, holding Mars bars that the bad guys gave them and crying… phew. When my sobbing becomes audible and the tears running down my face obscures my vision, I can click over to a story that’s so far from the senseless violence, a story about Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2432879/Goldie-Hawn-Kurt-Russell-hands--dating-20-years.html Although there is really nothing in the ‘story’ but the pictures, it’s a welcome salve – albeit one that can make me feel worse about my self because I haven’t accomplished nearly one third of the things she’s accomplished, I don’t look that stunning at my age and I can be totally sure I won’t at her age. So I click off Goldie and onto the link about the National Geographic 125 years of images. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2432914/125-years-iconic-images-National-Geographic-magazine-commemorates-history-anniversary-issue-celebrating-power-photography.html Freaking cool images. The world can be a beautiful place. My uncle has had pictures in NatGeo – not in this article – but in the magazine. How could is that? And I’m back to feeling useless again so off NatGeo and onto the woman suing Coca-Cola after finding a dead RAT in her lemonade. And O.J.Simpson who has been caught stealing COOKIES from prison cafeteria. I love how they capitalize the "important" part of the article. COOKIES! RAT! And that in O.J.'s article, it's not stealing, it's COOKIES! Around and around the Daily Mail site I hop, clicking on one thing that depresses me and the next that makes me giggle until it brings me to this harmless article about a self-ironing contraption: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2433038/Hate-laundry-Worlds-HANDS-FREE-iron-make-thing-past--youre-willing-shell-850.html My favorite part about this article is the sentence: 'Our Tubie is bought by normal people who do not like the idea of ironing. Huh? I do not like to iron, most people don’t, but why specify ‘normal people’? Could this be used as something else, something ‘normal people’ wouldn’t think of? And that is when I decide to get off line. Because I don’t want to start my day coming up with ways not ‘normal’ people could use the Tubie contraption. Because just in writing this down, I’ve come up with three… The good news: I'm no longer depressed. Amused and slightly grossed out, but not depressed. Thank you Daily Mail?
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AuthorMy name is ej. I'm a girl. I say that because with the short hair and the short initials, folks aren't always sure. More brilliant insights to who I am in About me Archives
April 2019
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