Sarah Marshall linked to this on Facebook and now I’m really into it:
Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) was a village sign language once widely used on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, U.S., from the early 18th century to 1952. It was used by both deaf and hearingpeople in the community; consequently, deafness did not become a barrier to participation in public life. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language played a role in the development of American Sign Language.
The language was able to thrive on Martha’s Vineyard because of the unusually high percentage of deaf islanders and because deafness was a recessive hereditary trait, which meant that almost anyone might have both deaf and hearing siblings. In 1854,when the island’s deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha’s Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf.
Hearing people sometimes signed even when there were no deaf people present: children signed behind a schoolteacher’s back; adults signed to one another during church sermons; and farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry.
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Related to the Chipewyan naming issue we talked about on Tuesday, how Facebook (in league with trolls) messes with Native names:
Iron Eyes says that in late summer 2014 Facebook disabled his personal account and asked him for ID to restore it. That account suspension meant that Iron Eyes—who also co-founded Last Real Indians—also lost access as an administrator to the site’s Facebook page.
“I turned in my Standing Rock Nation ID twice, but Facebook kept my account disabled anyway,” Iron Eyes says. His tribal identification allows him to vote in North Dakota, but Facebook required a state ID.
Iron Eyes, who was highly visible during the protests in Leith, suspects that PLE targeted him, but he hasn’t been able to prove it. Ultimately he holds Facebook responsible for what he calls discrimination. “So many of us Lakota people have these two-word last names that were sometimes handed down [in] ceremonious and meaningful ways. Facebook has belittled and singled us out because of it,” says Iron Eyes, who adds that the social network didn’t offer him an explanation about why his account was flagged in the first place.
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mad men oral history yes please also megan is the prettiest woman in the world and a great canadian and bc cobie smulders is also the prettiest woman in the world I THINK I HAVE A TYPE:
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this was yesterday BUT STILL:
GUYS TODAY IS THE 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE DAY THAT CAT HELD ITS FAMILY HOSTAGE IN A BATHROOM pic.twitter.com/EvRUWczYVs
— Tracy Clayton (@brokeymcpoverty) March 11, 2015
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mouthy bitches on Twitter talk about being mouthy bitches on Twitter:
I hate the idea that social-media accounts — or people, for that matter, and especially women — have to fit into this sort of mold or type to be taken seriously. Like many of those on Twitter, I am a human being, so it’s not weird to me to tweet about systemic racism and tacos in the same day — those are two things that coexist in my world, and there’s nothing weird about that juxtaposition. My feelings on Ferguson absolutely should not be discounted because I also take toilet selfies, and anyone who thinks so is a goddamned ninny.
That was noted troll Jazmine Hughes, a repeat offender in our link roundup.
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The world’s saddest story:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Can you update the link to the MVSL article? Right now it just links to the “Martha” article on Wikipedia (lol)
Here it is, in case it doesn’t get fixed for a wee bit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_…
Ooh, it’s always nice to see my home-island in the link roundup! We learned about the deaf community in school, but I don’t think I knew it had a genetic family component.
(I’m From Martha’s Vineyard: AMA)
Oo! Summers in MV as a local: great because summer w/ beautiful island beaches, or awful because tourists?
Awful because of traffic, mostly. Well, tourists are pretty terrible too, but there were only 120 kids in my HS class, so it was great to get the influx of summer kids. After dealing with the same people every day for 9 months, it’s like, “Oh, thank god you’re here. Please, tell me of the outside world.”
I didn’t get to the beaches much because I worked 2 jobs from the ages of 14-20. (This is not typical. I don’t recommend it.)
Haha, yeah, that answers a little bit of my second question too, which is “What’s the view of the ‘mainland’ when you’re a teenager?” It sounds like a strange place to grow up.
My family has visited for a few days during August for the past few years. I think I might kill someone if I had to deal with the traffic in Edgartown / Oak Bluffs/ Vineyard Haven every day.
Thanks! 🙂
Yeah, I’m always curious about that, as someone who went to Cape Cod (Eastham, not MV) a lot as a kid. My supervisor is from Texel, one of the Dutch islands, and whenever he talks about it it sounds so weird and interesting to me.
We had “on-island” and “off-island.” Off-island was literally the entire rest of the world. So a little isolated, yeah. But I grew up just as the internet was beginning to be a thing. I wonder a lot if it’s different now.
Learning to drive during the summer was actually how I discovered I have a panic disorder. That was fun! And my husband has also said he would murder someone if he had to drive on MV every day, so you’re not alone there.
Thanks a lot for answering questions! This was cool! (Though much sympathy on the panic disorder!!)
I regularly hear of new and exciting ways in which Facebook is terrible. They refuse to ever get rid of pages full of hate speech, but how dare people have names that don’t “sound normal” to white people.
I once reported a cartoon of a rat that was clearly meant to represent Jews (big hook nose, wearing a star of David, carrying bags of gold, etc.) where the person who posted it was ranting (in Persian) about how they should kill all the “filthy Jew rats,” and facebook declined to remove it. I wonder whether they even bothered to translate it.
I’ve reported all sorts of very overt shit. It stayed.
I admit I never tried to report a woman with a breastfeeding pic or a person who had a name that didn’t correspond to whatever norms I have in my head, I bet those would have been gone.
I reported a group called ‘self-harm encouragement’ and even though in the ‘what we will remove’ page it says ‘we will remove anything that encourages self-harm’, they said it was fine.
And ‘muslims need to be burned off the earth like a cancer’ was also fine to stay up.
Delightful.
And if you changed your name to “Ragnar Punchyouintheface Hairy-Breeches” before some arbitrary date, you’re totally fine and it’s a cute way of not being searchable, but if your actual name is “Chase Iron Eyes,” that gets flagged as “fake” and “deceptive.” Oh, and also if you’re trans. Because we have to have standards, clearly.
God, isolated island communities are the coolest, especially if they date back a long ways. I am wholly and forever enamored with the pseudo-country-English-hillbilly-colonial-Boston-what accent of Tangier Island, VA.
YES. I went to school in that area and oh boy, the accents I have heard. A close friend of mine is from there (friend with benefits, just imagine that accent in bed/he’s kind of from a mix of places on the eastern shore but oh yes, the accent is there) One of the most entertaining things we used to do was call a buddy of his (who was born, bred, and never left Tangier) whenever they were on shore leave, and just let him rant in his amazing accent. My favorite moment in conversation with him was probably (when he was just home from a 6 week shift on the boat he worked on, and about 14 beers in) hearing him, loudly and hilariously, complain about how much his son’s braces were going to cost him. We had no idea what he was saying but it was amazing to listen to. God, I miss it there sometimes.
Appalachian Creole. AMAZING.
TELL ME MORE
http://www.npr.org/2014/09/23/349853440/saving-a-…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oy9WZNShBU
That is one hell of an accent. Their inflection pattern is fascinating!
I understood less than 30% of what they were saying, but I was charmed by 100%
The CDC needs to quarantine all children under 12 because they are disease vectors; mini Typhoid Marys of infection..
My children have given me:
Ringworm
Pinkeye (THREE TIMES!)
Countless colds
Noro Virus
HEAD LICE
of which head lice was the most annoying thing to eradicate, involving expensive shampoos, washing of everything a head might have touched etc.
If we taught teenagers all of the disgusting diseases small children would give them, they would be extra diligent about using birth control
I guess every time my boyfriend gives me a cold passed on from his hoards of elementary school students I should be glad it is not worse
I had norovirus two years ago, caught from my younger sister who got it at college. That was the worst.
My friend works at a public library and among her duties are doing storytime and driving the bookmobile to schools and daycare centres. She is sick pretty much all the time.
I used to work in elementary schools and was sick all the time, but now that I don’t, I barely ever get sick. My immune system is great after having battled countless colds and flus from children.
Weird true story: I contracted head lice as a pre-teen but was too embarrassed to tell my mom. Then I dressed as a witch for Halloween and my costume included dying my blonde hair a witchy black with some cheap spray dye. Apparently lice don’t like that stuff, because that took care of it! My head has not seen a louse since. (Until the day I have my very own disease-ridden children, I suppose.)
I used to work in museum education and the sickest I have ever been in my entire life was the day after I worked a booth at a “children’s symposium” which had an estimated 10,000 children in attendance throughout the day. The next day I felt like death and it took me almost a whole week to recover. It still makes me shudder.
The best remedy for head lice is the face cleanser, Cetaphil. I had it last year around this time. Because I went to Texas and every one of my little cousins had it. And regular lice killers weren’t doing the job because it was some damned Brazilian variety. So I was digging around on the google and that popped up, and it worked! IT WORKED!
How, please? Did you dump big bottles of Cetaphil on your head? Did you have to work it into your scalp? How long did you leave it on your head? This is fascinating!
This is where I got the instructions. http://nuvoforheadlice.com/test/?page_id=9#accept…
You have to follow them exactly. It’s a bother, but a big bottle of Cetaphil is cheaper than those ridiculously small bottles of Nix or Rid.
Thank you! I use Cetaphil as a cleanser and think of it as oh-so-gentle for my sensitive skin. The notion that it could kill anything was astonishing. But now that I know it kills lice as a suffocating coating, I feel better.
I got Fifth Disease, which is like very mild measles (no vaccine for it) from my daughter and it suuuuucked. Two weeks of low-grade fever, which because of my MS, meant exacerbated neurological symptoms. And that whole time you think, “Is it warm in here? I need to lie down,” but you don’t think, “I have a serious virus.” It was weird. The visible symptom – a rash that’s particular to the virus – doesn’t appear until after you’re no longer contagious and after the fever breaks. So it was a few weeks of “What’s happening!?!” I had to force my daughter (who, bless her, has the worst immune system) to go to school, because again, just a low grade fever for two weeks.
Also, I don’t pray a lot, I guess, but when I do it is for God to spare us from lice.
20 years in childcare gave me pinkeye 13 times. Will I never learn not to touch my eyes? Apparently not. So, for that and other reasons, I quit childcare.
I used to think people who kept their children totally isolated for fear of germs were crazy. Now I realize they just wanted to be able to make it through a few days without coughing or throwing up.
Last August, I got some candy to take to the nurses from my baby’s hospital stay. It’s still sitting on my counter, because there has not been a single weekend where we have all been healthy and so could take it to them.
In college I taught dance at a YMCA and encountered disease populations from half a dozen different districts plus preschools. I spent the entire first semester ridiculously sick. I’m convinced that my A minus in Spanish that semester was bumped to an A after Dr Velez asked why I was always sick and the only thing my DayQuil addled brain could string together was “Los ninos son fuentes de pestilencia”.
So, I’m living the millennial dream and have moved in with my parents. My dad teaches kindergarten. The cats have the most persistent fleas in the world. Everyone is sick all the time and the carpets are full of fleas and this morning I tried to make coffee without any coffee. Help.
Lysol the f*ck out of everything the fleas might come near. Vacuum it all, empty the vacuum and then Lysol that. A strict regimen of that should get you flea-free in a few weeks. Also you will have to treat the cats for fleas (the vet will have pills, or there are some sprays at the pet store (CAT PRODUCTS ONLY!)). Also you have to not let the cats go outside and cavort with those filthy squirrels and such.
I cannot help with the sick all the time part, or the forgetting the coffee part. But there may be hope for the fleas.
I love clear problem-solving instructions more than most things in this world. THANK YOU.
Capstar is also a great product. That and Frontline and various carpet sprays + vacuuming is how we got through the last outbreak. If it happens again I’m bug-bombing the place.
Frontline does nothing for my cats, for some reason. Advantage used to work great, until it suddenly didn’t anymore. I’ve heard it can be a geographic thing, but I’m also starting to suspect that the world of internet flea advice is similar to the world of internet nutrition/childcare/health advice and I’ve decided to only trust things I’m told on The Toast.
i look forward to the day when all human offspring are fertilized, incubated and birthed in sterile labs, 100% vaccinated, and then raised under quarantine until such time they are suitable for release amongst the adult population.
yeah, kids are gross, for just so many reasons. last year in my first year of teaching elementary school, i got bizarre illnesses every couple of months, and it sucked. SO this year, i wash or sanitize my hands a million times a day (like, if i hold a kid’s hand i will discreetly sanitize my hands soon after) and i never touch my mouth/eyes, and so far i haven’t caught any of the MANY illnesses constantly going around our class (knock on wood).
i feel bad about all the hand sanitizer i use, but not bad enough to risk getting [insert disgusting contagious illness here].
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Part 2 of My Saga: A roadtrip to Minnesota to see the Kensington runestone. He got to Duluth/Superior and finally had fun. The first Norwegian he meets is Black.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/karl-o…
I can’t even with him.
Uff dah!
He sounds even more like a time traveler in this one.
Aw man, now I have to read it, I love the stupid Runestone Museum.
UPDATE: I have read it, he scorned Big Ole, he’s dead to me.
Since I grew up in a veritable Scandinavian ghetto in Minnesota, my perspective on some of the things in Knausgaard’s saga:
(1) Mark Hatloy says: “This house belonged to grandfather and grandmother. I tore it down and built a new one in the same place. But I left the barn standing”
and
Mark Hatloy continues: “He told me that they built the first house the way they built them in Norway. It had been so plain that Martha protested. It didn’t help that the barn was both bigger and more elaborate.”
It’s a standing joke in old Scandinavian farming communities that the barn was better build, bigger and more luxurious than the houses. The animals were better kept than the family. It’s also a standing joke that old Scandinavian men spent all day in the barn, puttering around, doing made-up tasks, keeping busy. If a wife and husband went visiting, the men would disappear into the barn to drink beer and look at all the projects, while the women stayed in the house, in the kitchen. The barn would have a heat source of some kind, and a fridge or cooler for beer.
The part about tearing down the old house, though, tore at my gut.
In my experience as well, Scandinavians don’t throw anything away, or tear anything down.
(2) If Mark Hatloy’s wife would have been there, or if a Norwegian-American woman would have accompanied Karl Ove, I *think* a couple of things would have been different. One, the wife would have dug out all the old Norwegian things that Mark had packed away to show the guests. Two, the Norwegian-American woman would have asked to see the packed away things. Also, the wife would have probably “whipped up a hotdish” for Karl Ove, and otherwise plied him with food. In my family, if we knew Karl Ove was coming, we’d have asked him what kind of alcohol he wanted and gotten it for him. “Make yourself at home” and being a good host is very very important, and I was a little taken aback by Mark Hatloy’s hosting skills. We also would have asked Karl Ove to stay, and probably, contacted any relatives we could to bring them over: in other words, we would have thrown together a small party to welcome Karl Ove to our home and invited him back “any time.”
Another custom when you visit a Swede or Norwegian? You give a tour of your house and barn. I’m actually not sure why this is … when I came back to Minnesota, and I visited an old high school friend, the first thing he did was show me every room in his house and garage and he told me the history of everything. I know when I was a kid, and maybe still today, people talked about how they went to a garage sale or an estate sale, and got an old dining room table or something, “for nothing”, and how they restored it … . So when you were in their house and saw their spectacular dining room, they assured you that they weren’t showy rich people, but had lovingly “brought back” something old that someone else had gotten rid of.
Part II of my observations:
(3) But I think it shows the isolation of Mark Hatloy in that wide, flat expanse in Northwestern Minnesota/Northeastern North Dakota; and it made me think of how isolated his grandparents were out there so long ago. It made me wonder how his grandmother kept busy all day, and whether she had any help during her childbirths.
I mean, Karl Ove kept going on about all the TV sets everywhere, and he makes an immediate connection to one of the first things that the grandparents bought:
“They lived in two rooms with no furniture of their own, but they had bought a radio, Martha wrote, and it lightened up the place.”
Can you imagine in that isolated place, just wanting the company of the radio, a human voice other than your own in that vast expanse?
(4) To me, I think, growing up with mostly Swedes and Norwegians around, I used to think that time had stopped for the culture when immigrants came over. If the immigrants came over in 1910, they brought their culture and language with them from 1910 Sweden or Norway, and they preserved that in Minnesota. When, then, did these immigrants become American, especially if they were around other Swedes and Norwegians?
To me, I thought maybe Karl Ove didn’t realize he was seeing old Norwegian culture in rural Minnesota/North Dakota, something that might not exist in present day Norway and that Karl Ove wouldn’t be able to identify if or when he saw it. I know that I didn’t realize the extent to which the Old Ways were preserved where I grew up until I went to Minneapolis to go to college. It was like going to another country. I know when I lived in the dorms, the city kids befriended other city kids, and the country kids hung around with other country kids: not exclusively, but mostly it was this way. City kids were always bored, and went out to clubs and to the movies or to the mall; the country kids sat and visited, talked, drank beer, or went exploring what interesting things they could in Minneapolis, maybe go to the river, stuff like that: free stuff. I also didn’t realize how relatively poor I grew up until I went to the city, and city kids told me that their parents actually bought things for them at actual stores and paid full price. I grew up with sewing, things from garage sales (of course), vintage things from my aunt’s attics and hand-me-downs … stuff that came with a built-in history. You’d say: this was something my aunt wore when … or I found this at a garage sale, took it in, took the collar off and it’s “good as new.” (Not that I knew what new was!) Buying new things, today, for me is still kind of empty; although I look forward to giving my daughter stuff from when I was in college in the 1980s.
(5) Karl Ove started talking and relating to people — that’s what happens in small towns where there’s not much to do. He seemed embarrassed about it, but that’s what happens. It was a geniune experience, and maybe the NYT’s readers didn’t realize it?
Anyway. I think Karl Ove observed more stuff than the people in the New York Time’s comment section realized. I think they took his word for it when he said he really didn’t discover anything. I think he did.
I also wondered why there was no desire to show/see the grandparents’ leftover belongings.
I agree so hard with your last point. This part really endeared me to Knausgaard, and it was nice to see him actually experience something:
“When I woke up the next morning, I had an anxiety attack. I lay there for a long time, staring out at the empty room. The last thing I could remember was that I had gotten into an elevator. I had no recollection of seeing the room before. Everything was terrible, everything was diseased and I was a ridiculous, laughable character. Oh, God, what an idiot I was.
I had talked.
To total strangers, I had babbled away. With no dignity whatsoever, happy and enthusiastic over every little thing. I had given compliments! My eyes had filled up with tears at my own human warmth and goodness.
Oh, Jesus, was I an idiot.”
Is this why the people I’ve met from North Dakota have been lovely? It’s a cultural expectation of hospitality and politeness? I would definitely be interested in Norwegian artifacts! Or a hot dish (is that a casserole?).
Yes, a hotdish is made IN a casserole dish, and it differs from a casserole in that it usually has all the food groups in it. So, lasagna, which is a casserole, could be a hotdish if it had more meat and had some vegetables in it.
Farm wives made hotdishes to feed the farm workers, amongst other food. A busdriver told me that his mother made 10 sheets of homemade cinnamon rolls at a time for dessert during harvest times. He worked with 8 other guys, and after lunch, maybe a couple of cinnamon rolls were left. These guys could EAT. (So, hotdishes went a long way, economically, to feed the guys.)
DEAD LANGUAGES THO. I’m going to be lost in the Wikipedia links to dead languages all day and I don’t even regret it a little bit. It makes me want to change careers and go out and help keep records of dying languages for posterity because SO FASCINATING.
How about non-dead jargon languages? Go google Boontling and Chinook Wawa. There are YouTube videos of people speaking Boontling, and Chinook Wawa is taught in some schools.
That Martha’s Vineyard link reminds me of that Oliver Sacks book where he goes to an island where a really significant percentage of the population is completely colorblind, and how the culture accommodates them in a way that other cultures don’t/can’t (being completely as opposed to partially colorblind also means having reduced visual acuity and problems seeing in daylight). It was a neat book and I should probably read the other half of it at some point.
This sounds great! Do you remember the title?
It is called The Island of the Colorblind!
Yes! I’ve forced this book upon at least three people now. I’m glad.
I love all of Sacks’ books, was very, very sad to see that he is terminal now.
Interesting. Being (mildly) colorblind myself, I should probably read this :).
He’s written a book about Martha’s Vineyard too! It’s called “Seeing Voices” and it’s about sign languages and what happens when people grow up without a language (feral children, Deaf people who lived in places with no other Deaf people) and the history of Deaf education and and and I love Oliver Sacks so much
http://www.oliversacks.com/seeing-voices/
That sounds so cool! Oliver Sacks is wonderful.
I am a historian person who has done oral histories for academic projects and databases, and also oral histories for museums, and I’m unused to seeing the phrase “oral history” used among people who are not trained historians. What does it mean to do an oral history of a TV show? Do you just mean … like … interviews? I’m asking because oral histories are usually done with great respect for the experiences being shared, and to interview someone about their time spent working on a TV show is quite a different thing than asking someone about their lived experiences based around [event] or [geographical area] or [facet of identity]. I’m surprised how much it gets my back up to see it used so casually. I’m just wondering how those who are not historian people use the phrase! I can stand to chill and it would help me understand. (clears throat) an oral history of the phrase ‘oral history’ if you will (twirls away)
“Do you just mean … like … interviews?” Pretty much, yeah. But they tend to follow a similar formula: excerpts of interviews with multiple sources, interspersed with paragraphs of explanation from the interviewer that move the story along (either chronologically or from one topic to another). Here is a link to a ton of examples: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-inst…
WELP there goes the rest of my day
Then to me it’s storytelling! Because as an oral history interviewer you never ever try to influence the story your interviewee is trying to tell and ask only extremely general questions so they can tell the story their way. You can interview and storytell and it can still be really cool and not be an oral history [casually drinks a large glass of ice water] but I am being oversensitive perhapssss
Thank you for the link. I love television as much as I love history and expect to spend many hours here today!
I feel the same way when people use “archives” as a generic term for something they have that is… not recent? [The volume of photos on Instagram, for instance, which use ‘#archives’ is ridiculous. I’d like to click on that tag and see highlights from library and other institutional collections, not the series of duckface selfies someone took last weekend.] Also “archiving” as a verb sends chills down my spine. [You mean… “saving”?]
How do you feel about me tagging all my childhood photos as #prehistoric? There ARE a lot of dinosaurs in my childhood pics bc of my Jurassic Park obsession.
ha! Perfectly acceptable.
Oh man, that bothers me less (‘to archive’ is a verb — but should it be?). Particular profession things! I was trying to come up with an equivalent and wondered if accountants were bothered when people said they ‘accounted’ for all the possibilities. (I don’t think you did it according to REGISTERED ACCOUNTANT STANDARDS though, scowl accountants everywhere.)
“To architect” is a verb in software/ computer type fields, and it makes me want to set things on fire. We have perfectly good words like “design” for that nonsense. It’s bad enough they mess up my online job search results.
English is as English does, y’all. We English speakers invent words all the time. This flexibility is one of the reasons it’s become something of an international language, at least in science. So many of today’s universally accepted English verbs were once nouns-only. We questioned each other’s language propriety when turning them into verbs. But so long ago that none of today’s speakers knows how “alternative” or daring their current usage once was.
Then you’ll LOVE my “curated” playlist.
It must mostly be a self-preservation [ha] thing, because there are so many people out there who don’t know what professionals in the information sciences field do [many librarian friends have family members who think that they *sit and read* all day] , so hearing the terms appropriated for other usage kind of perpetuates confusion.
As historianon said, “particular profession things!” Amirite?
Ha, my boss has been INTENT upon getting an “archivist” to “archive” our “historical” office stuff, when what he really means is he wants someone to organize all the real and digital crap left over from projects five years ago. We asked an actual archivist to take a look, and she was basically like “yeah, this is not archiving, you just need someone who’s not a disorganized artist-type and has time on their hands.” But my boss refuses to revise his terminology so we all just roll our eyes.
Hello. This is all I can see right now.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/20…
When I look at it, in the middle of all the mind-blowing owls is an animated ad in the form of a zooming in onto a map, and all I can think is “the owls are coming! They’re coming for us all!”
Can we talk about the world’s largest freshwater fish (that we know of)? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150311…
I really want to sit on it and let it carry me around!
It’d be a living magic carpet!
Pete is truly the best.* Every time he appears I just get a super happy moment of "what horrible thing is he gonna do/say/wear NOW?"
*Sally is the real best though, in that I don't also hate her.
I love all of Sacks' books, was very, very sad to see that he is terminal now.
NO! Noo! NOOOOO! Terry Pratchett died!
When I read his Discworld books II am in tremendous awe at how he skillfully created an entire world whilst being wickedly funny too.
Goodbye Terry and thank you for Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Sam Vines, Vetinarii, Carrot & Angua, Cheery Littlebottom, DEATH and the million laughs you gave me.
oh no no no no no
🙁
oh no oh oh oh no.
edit: announcement here – http://www.pjsmprints.com/
Everything is terrible.
He was such a great dude.
March is really determined to take away all our most beloved public figures, huh?
I just saw this, emailed a colleague with similar taste and then went here just to share what can only be called grief and sadness and emptiness and I generally don’t cry over people I don’t know, but ahrg, welling up at my desk.
I feel the same! And no I did not know him personally but his books were so brilliantly written and he managed to be poingnant and have such an interesting perspective on life and really had a lot to say about how people treat people whilst being hilarious at the same time that yes I was so impressed by him that I genuinely am mourning his loss.
He was so brilliant at writing about death (and DEATH, but that is another thing). He was so good at seeing life in the whole perspective and he was so good at showing us how it really worked, without any religious comforts, really (religion really wasn’t a comfort in his books – most people would not like to spend eternity on either the left nor the right side of any of those gods (except maybe Anoia)). He made the calm darkness of the desert sound… rather appealing? I expect nothing of death, and darkness and cool sand is a good way of making that nothingness into something tangible.
Soul music was the first English book I bought. I didn’t get all the puns. I think I’ll sleep with that particular copy under my pillow tonight.
I love that Soul Music was your introduction to literature in English.
Related: Downton Abbey notwithstanding, Michelle Dockery will always be Susan Death to me.
Susan Death is genuinely how I refer to Michelle Dockery, so…
I read a lot of fantasy, especially steampunk, and I’ve been getting so overwhelmed by dystopia recently. What I value so much about Pratchett is that he never downplayed the awfulness of life, but at the same time, he never downplayed the hopefulness and the beauty, either. Who else could make you love Death? Who else could make you realize that, appalling as Vetinari might be, you sure as hell don’t want any of the other options running your city? Who else has created an entire universe, not to tell one kind of story, but to explore such a diversity of stories over such a long time? Who else, for crying out loud, could continue to turn out such brilliant books while suffering from Alzheimers, FFS?
I did the same :’-(
fuck
His twitter has a really sweet sendoff with DEATH.
Edit: https://twitter.com/terryandrob
All my reactions have involved swearing. Knowing that he was planning to leave has not softened the blow.
[ETA: Jo Walton tells some good stories. One of the comforts today is how the internet has blown up with people sharing stories and admitting what he meant to us. At least we’re not grieving alone.]
My friend Phillip drew this today and between the news, the tweets and this, I’m just done in completely.
This is lovely. Thanks for sharing
🙁 🙁
I’ve been crying about this for the last hour. I was not prepared at all.
Yeah I’m not ok. I can’t overstate how important his books were to me at various times in my life. Today is very fucked up for me.
The Tiffany books — of all the things — have turned out to be some of the most important novels I’ve read about how to live my life. I just sobbed in my office loudly enough to disturb classes on the hall, and I have no shame. That man deserves to be grieved.
There’s supposed to be one more Discworld book that was finished before his death, and I think it might be a Tiffany book. When I read the Tiffany books for the first time, I was a little upset that they had come out in my late teens, and not my pre-teens: I wanted to give them to my younger self so she could have had Tiffany as a friend.
My sister, damn her, put this quote on facebook: “They do not want to shout. Their hearts are too full for worrrrds. … But for now, each Feegle remembers her in silence. We dinna mourn like ye do, ye ken. We mourn for them that has tae stay behind.”
-William the Gonnagle, The Wee Free Men
The Tiffany books are the best.
Oh.
Damn.
Ooooooh nooooooooo. 🙁
I had to leave a meeting and go have a quiet moment when I read about Sir Terry’s passing. I loved him, and I love his books. I have re-read them more than anything else in my library. I am going to re-read all of his works starting tonight.
I am also embarking upon a re-read tonight. While being sad in my office this morning, I learned that none of my coworkers (who are otherwise excellent) have read any of his books, so I will also bring them each the book I think they should start with.
I may have to stop on the way home today and buy a second copy of Reaper Man, so Zack and I don’t have to take turns re-reading it and crying.
So sorry to hear this, yet glad I heard it here. His books were a gift to me from customers at the Mendocino Book company, who didn’t just nudge but insisted I check him out for his humor, intelligence, ability to set up a tiny joke so intricately it landed like a harpoon, and for crafting such perfect resolutions to his complex plots. I’m fortunate to still have several more to look forward to, so this isn’t goodbye, really, just very sad.
Great shirt by Ryan North: http://teespring.com/too-late-for-tall-ships#pid=… (I already posted this on the Dad Magazine thread because it just seems to me to be the most Dad shirt I’ve come across in a while but really it is just a cool shirt).
OK, so if the Matha’s Vineyard Sign Language piqued your interest, please, please do yourselves a favor and take a gander at some various articles on home-sign, particularly Nicaraguan home-sign. It’s essentially a spontaneously created language that (some!) researchers believe grew out of a basic gesture system, evolved into a kind of creole, and finally has been recognized (by some!) as a full-blown language. It’s the birth of a totally new language that happened in the last 50 years and there is so much we can learn from it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/birth-of-a-language/
http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/L02-sign-language…
For the more academically inclined: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC30315…
Nicaraguan Sign Language is really interesting!
It always annoys me though that authors tend to state that NSL ‘speakers’ pre-NSL had not previously been exposed to, nor acquired, a spoken, written, or signed language . Actually, I’m sure they had been exposed to parts of language – I’m sure in communicating with their children adults relied on their language’s grammar, sentence structure, modelled conversational patterns, etc. That’s not to say that it isn’t completely fascinating that NSL was developed by these children, but I think it’s disingenuous to say they started from zero. They didn’t have much, but it wasn’t nothing.
Yeah, I hear you. I think mostly what people mean is that the communication that these children had tended to lack the syntactical structure of established languages. It’s difficult to encapsulate grammar into gesture systems, although what I find so fascinating is that there is a kind of proto-grammar present even in very early instances of NSL. Usage of hand symbols in space to signify prepositional relationships, for instance. Whether you think that indicates some degree of teaching from parents or is an example of universal grammar, though, probably says a lot about whether you have empiricist or nativist leanings 😉
Why yes, it probably does 🙂
I can’t even picture January Jones as Peggy. It just does not compute.
I know this subject is dear to the heart of many Toasties: this week, I joined Kale Kulzick and Simon Howell on The Televerse to discuss… Columbo.
A good thing is seeing how many people loved and were moved by Terry Pratchett. I expect that, in any event, that’s the best that anyone can hope to leave this world with.
I’m a little late, but I saw the link about the Martha’s Vineyard sign language—-I just now remembered that when my dad was working for a local theater company in the early 90s, they put on a musical about 1800s Martha’s Vineyard. It talked about the deaf community extensively, and included Native and free black characters too. I wish I still had the tape, because it was a pretty cool treatment of the subject. Sadly, googling “Tidebook” doesn’t seem to bring anything up.
I re-googled that just now, and did find something! Apparently the author’s stuff has been out of print for ages, but he (Dillon Bustin) does have a web presence! I’m about to get sucked down into an internet wormhole of New England folklore now, bye.
“megan is the prettiest woman in the world and a great canadian”
PRETENDING ALL OF THIS IS ABOUT ME YOU CAN’T STOP ME
Also confession: when I was a kid I thought Martha’s Vineyard was where Martha Stewart lived.
ALSO: Facebook’s ‘real name” bullshit is totally racist and transphobic, as I have had a fake account with the name “Mona Boehner” for SEVERAL YEARS and they have not tried to shut it down. Even though I don’t use it!
Mad Men! And yes, Megan is the prettiest woman in the world. In real life (does real life beyond mad men matter tho) Jessica Pare’s mum is a conference interpreter, and as someone who studied conference interpreting I pretend to myself that this makes me closer to her.
I could watch him angrily falling down the stairs forever.
I understood less than 30% of what they were saying, but I was charmed by 100%