… that is the blogging question. With apologies to Shakespeare, I’m referring to comments left on your blog. Do you make a point of answering all of them?
You can’t stop the ducks from making lots of comments!
Unless it’s spam, disrespectful or rude, I always answer comments, and if I should happen to miss one, I feel a bit upset when I spot it later on – I hope I haven’t missed any, but since I started this blog in 2012, I unfortunately probably have. It certainly hasn’t been intentional, however. Nevertheless, I make efforts to ensure that I answer anyone who takes the time to comment, even if the commenter has only left a generic “nice post” comment.
Comments about the Rocky Mountains? Definitely!
I sometimes find it mildly annoying when I leave a comment and there’s no response, especially if I’ve taken an inordinate amount of time to think carefully about what I want to say or if there have been responses to other comments but not mine. I give the benefit of the doubt – maybe my comment was simply missed – so this has never lead me to drop a follow.
Autumn colours are often comment-worthy.
How do you feel about unanswered comments? Do you have firm rules or are you rather laissez-faire? Do you feel it’s not necessary to answer all comments?
Having spent six winters in the subarctic Northwest Territories, I am accustomed to cold weather. I used to walk to work in -40C (-40F) and colder, in fact. The very atmosphere was frozen and crackly and my eyelashes and parka froze too, but dressed properly, I was perfectly comfortable and warm.
I am also accustomed to cold conveyances. Cold trucks, cold aircraft, cold snowmobiles, cold machinery, period.
Fresh snowflakes; photo taken outside my door in February 2023 while on my way to work.Dash 7 Combi – a northern workhorse that is capable of an amazingly incredible amount – ferrying passengers and cargo and getting into and out of demanding landing and takeoff circumstances. Underneath the snow is my reliable truck, also capable of a lot.
Any engine of any type has to be treated with respect, especially if it has been left outside to cool to the surrounding temperature. The north forces patience. Everything takes more time and more preparation and precaution, and trips, even “quick trips to get a litre of milk” are weighed more carefully. Do I really need to go outside in -42C for milk? Or can I go without it until tomorrow when I have five other errands to do?
Yellowknife street clearing.
It’s funny how everything is relative. Now that I’m in the south, I see our weather from a different perspective. A couple of days ago, M and I walked to our neighbourhood brewery for a beer and a sandwich. It was windy and snowing a little. Before we left, the waitress wished us a safe walk home “in this terrible weather.” M and I laughed a bit but we also are falling into that mindset, too. I recently complained to a northern friend about an expected cold snap; she laughed and told me that I’m getting soft. Simultaneously it also occurred to me that I’m no longer a northerner, a northern-domiciled nomad who travels to the south for breaks and lives “real life” in the (mostly) cold.
There’s a saying that “we are what we eat.” But after many years of wayfaring, I’m beginning to think that we also “are where we eat,” too. We take on the characteristics of the places where we root ourselves, even if we wish our roots were somewhere else. It’s part of the human experience, I think.
I find myself thinking of our upcoming cold snap with “my! That’s cold!” But really, I’ve experienced much colder, much more demanding weather with a lot more riding on the decisions regarding it. But that’s also not my reality any more and my perception has been affected.
At least, that’s one of my little theories of relativity.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed that sometimes, my “likes” on some posts are disappearing. If I go back to “like” a second or even a third time, it will drop again a few minutes later. It then appears as if I haven’t clicked “like” at all.
This is extremely irritating as you can imagine, especially when you’re trying to let people know you appreciate what they have posted.
Autumn apples – better than WP issues.
In the time it has taken for me to write this short bit, the likes I have left on others’ posts have dropped or disappeared, specifically from Renard, Mr. Muse and Travels Through My Lens. So if you haven’t seen my likes show up, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s because there’s some sort of WP glitch going on.
I didn’t think I would write about Harry again, but here I am. It’s like I have indigestion and have to, um, bring him up once more.
I haven’t read his book and won’t. I haven’t watched his and Meghan’s apparently exhaustive documentary and won’t. I haven’t listened to her podcasts and won’t. When, I wonder, will they decide to “won’t?”
The fact that I haven’t watched, read or listened to any of their “truth” should have kept me safe, but nope. I can’t read a paper, look at the tv or log in to Netflix without feeling inundated by them. Everywhere you look, Harry is flogging his book. I already feel like I’ve I read it because it has been so hard to avoid.
Image courtesy of BBC
It seems that Spare can be boiled down to a number of crucial events: Harry and William had a physical fight. All of his relatives dish dirt on him and Meghan to the media. Camilla is a dangerous villain. Kate made Meghan cry (apparently sobbing on the floor). Charles doesn’t love him. He froze his pecker. He did drugs and drank a lot. He killed a lot of people in Afghanistan. William is going bald.
On and on it goes, this somewhat bizarre collection of grievances that for the most part cannot be proven, but here’s my interpretation of all these breathless excerpts: Harry is a very angry, self-righteous, uber-privileged boy-man who is using his supposedly most hated institution, the media, to lob reprisals against and make money off telling stories about his family. His philosophy seems to boil down to this: trash the old life (including all the people in it) in order to finance the new life. And not just any new life; it has to be a moneyed, rarefied life.
Image courtesy of BBC
He says he’s had a lot of therapy, but it apparently hasn’t translated into any sort of empathy for anyone other than, one presumes, Meghan and his children. And his statement that Meghan deserves an apology? For what, exactly? And from whom? From the tabloids? Charles and William? Kate?
To be fair, I agree that Meghan was treated brutally by a UK tabloid press that criticised her no matter what she did or didn’t do, and that at least some of it was rabidly racial. Given that situation, Harry and Meghan made a reasonable decision to walk away and lead a more regular, private life. The problem, though, is that they didn’t. They smear – and keep smearing – themselves everywhere to try to make stacks of money.
I also agree that, while Harry – in common with many, many others – lost a parent under tragic circumstances when he was a child, few others have had to march behind their mother’s coffin in front of millions; a heartbroken child on display in front of the world. Wherever that decision came from, it was callous and cruel, for both Harry and William.
On the other side of what’s leaking out of Harry’s book, I don’t know of any brothers who haven’t had some sort of fight, either physical or verbal or both. However, that his family, and particularly Camilla, is in collusion with the tabloids to dish dirt on him and Meghan just sounds peculiar. I don’t believe that Charles doesn’t love him. According to Harry’s own words, Charles used to leave little notes on Harry’s pillow, encouraging him and expressing his affection. Is that what an uncaring father does? And his pecker? Oy. Frozen or not, do the rest of us need to know that or about his extensive use of drugs and alcohol? And the Oedipal references to putting one of his mother’s favourite creams on his penis? I’m lost for words.
Photo by Andrew Milligan
Additionally, as a combat veteran, I take serious exception to his nonchalant and boastfully airy description of his “kills” as “chess pieces.” Not only is that a safety risk, but it’s just breathtakingly inappropriate. Appalling, really. Harry is a very privileged person who is trying to be some sort of war victim. He’s not. During my time in a combat zone, I saw many victims. Victims of violence, of sexual assault, of murder, and of dispossession of all kinds. Those people are victims, and Harry should know that. In common with other veterans, my advice to him is to shut up. Now.
And that nasty balding that William keeps doing? Well, no words can describe the depths to which Harry will go, apparently, to criticise his brother. Doesn’t Harry’s negative commentary about William’s hair loss sound an awful lot like what happened to Meghan? Her skin colour, her ethnicity, her person, being criticised?
Although Harry claims that he wants to get on with his family, I doubt that anyone in that family will trust him ever again. I certainly wouldn’t. I would be very concerned about having any kind of conversation or connection with him for fear that it might wind up in a book. The irony is that despite Harry’s obsession around invasion of privacy, he has seemingly divulged deeply personal information about his family and himself. He violates his own privacy as well as the privacy of others; he certainly didn’t get their permission and lot of what he has apparently divulged comes across as libellous. Is he any better than the tabloid press that he hates so much?
All families have issues. The British Royal family (which is also the royal family of Canada; I’m not happy with having to have a King Charles, ugh) has the garden-variety issues on top of a whole host of other issues generated by their weird but privileged position. But the idea of flogging those issues in order to finance a rarefied life just sounds greedy and vindictive. Is this Harry’s truth? Maybe. The words “truth,” and “fact” have taken an awful beating lately. The best that can be said is that these are Harry’s interpretations and opinions; the worst is that he and Meghan are running a sort of slow motion faked-reality tv show: trash for cash.
Image courtesy of CNN
I also find it odd that despite all the Royal family bashing, Meghan and Harry run around calling themselves “duke” and “duchess,” and are apparently moaning about not having titles for their children. Huh? Don’t you live in the U.S.? Didn’t the Americans throw all that crap out a long time ago? And anyway, why would they want to keep this silly title stuff bestowed by an organisation that they seemingly don’t like and crossed an ocean to escape? How can they continue to trade on these titles while attempting to belittle the institution that provided them in the first place? Yikes.
Still, I feel kind of sorry for Harry. I think that his “truth” is the only thing he has to sell, and people are getting tried of hearing it. What’s left for this pair then? Images of his great-uncle, a former king who also married an American, left in a decades-long useless limbo, spring to mind. Because once their story, Harry’s story, is told, nothing is left. They both lack the heft of a substantial set of achievements to underpin themselves, and those deals they’ve made with Spotify and Netflix will eventually run out.
If Harry and Meghan had dropped their titles and left the UK to live quietly and privately somewhere else, there would be a lot of support and respect for them, I think. But they really have squandered the goodwill that many people offered them, unfortunately. And on that note, I wish them good luck, because I think they’re going to need it, especially Harry.
A recent communique from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction states that “no amount of alcohol” consumption is healthy and rather is linked to cancer. However, having taken the time to find and read their report, I have to say that their research is limited and the results conflicting, so my opinion is that this warning is a bit over the top.
An Okanagan vineyard.
There is no doubt that alcohol can and does cause many, many problems, but I find this announcement, based as it is on small sample sizes, is sort of temperance-sounding and reminds me of the announcements years ago about barbecued food (among lots of other things) causing cancer.
Almost anything, if taken too far, can be a health risk. I like a good glass of wine, pairing it with meals and adding it to my cooking. Rightly or wrongly, my very French father (my parents had wine with dinner almost every evening) insisted that we children have a tiny glass (shot glass size) of wine with dinner; I was raised with wine (especially red) as a natural and delicious accompaniment to food.
As a result, I was never much interested in the teenage drunks that many of my friends indulged in; I found that whole idea silly and boring. So I think my father had the right idea. Alcohol wasn’t a mystery and it never became a problem.
A good bottle of Okanagan red.
I’m not going to change my consumption. I live in wine country and love finding great bottles for our cellar. Planning good food and picking the right complimentary wine to go with it is fun and adds to my enjoyment of the meal.
There were lots of bits of leaves and other detritus caught in it, but I didn’t see anything a spider would want to eat.
It’s possible that’s this is the work of spider mites (they actually eat the plants they live on) but I don’t think so. The bush seems to be healthy and growing and the web strands seem much too large to be the work of tiny mites.
In the Net! - Pictures and Stories of Life 