The Lion Sleeps Tonight (luckily)

Africa’s Serengeti (according to those who have visited) is an amazing and magical place. Animals of all kinds roam the savanna, the incredible scenery tantalizes the senses and the history and culture of the human inhabitants of this great land amaze and humble all who go there.

Well most …… when they are not busy having a little Serengeti Domestic, that is.

And who, pray tell, were the Screaming Banshees of the Serengeti? None other than some dear relatives of mine who, to protect their identities, I shall call Jemima and Edwina.

In the company of Jemima’s spouse (whom I shall call Big Ted) this mother and daughter team had been enjoying a fabulous African safari. They had traversed the sweeping plains, been up close and personal with the wildlife and had generally been having a great — and good-humoured — trip.

That was until they arrived, hot and dusty, in a tribal village and were invited to participate in the traditional welcome. This involved a visitor of each gender taking part in a special ‘jumping’ dance.

All was going well at the start. Big Ted, a gregarious and relaxed fellow happily joined the jumping fray and things were going swimmingly. But then Jemima, a middle aged lady with high blood pressure, poked Edwina urgently and whispered “YOU’LL have to do the jumping!”

Edwina was not impressed; “I’m NOT jumping!” she hissed back through smiling (yet gritted) teeth.

“You damn-well WILL!” commanded Jemima, attempting to pull the ‘I’m Your Mother and I Tell You What to Do’ stunt which — if she’d been thinking clearly — she would have remembered had never been terribly effective on Edwina even when she was eight, let alone when she was twenty-eight. However Jemima wasn’t thinking clearly. All she could think of was that she definitely didn’t want to be doing a heart-thumping jumping dance in the middle of a dusty plain with no doctor in the house. Aside from maybe a Witch Doctor who, it would be probably fair to assume, may not have been carrying any heart medication in his little wildebeest-leather-kit-bag. The odd herbal remedy or magic spell, maybe: Beta Blockers, doubtful.

Anyhow, as befitting a young woman who has been brought up to respect others (in this case, the tribes folk) Edwina did, indeed, “jump”. And she jumped well. Her mother was proud … but that was not the end of the story….

As they made their way to their campsite Edwina let rip. “How DARE you put me on the spot like that! Don’t you EVER speak to me like that again!” she screeched.

“How dare YOU be so rude to your mother! Not to mention SELFISH!” shouted Jemima.

This went on long into the night until Big Ted (who had sensibly removed himself to a separate tent some distance away) eventually had had enough.

“Girls! Girls! Girls!” he yelled, “I — together with the entire population of the Serengeti — have been listening to this argument for hours, and you know what? You’re both right. You both have reason to be annoyed, so I think the best thing to do is stop talking to each other — RIGHT NOW! Can you do that? If not, there is a fairly good chance that you will single-handedly bring about the extinction of a multitude of local species. They’ll commit suicide just to get away from you!”

Jemima and Edwina laughed. He was right. How ridiculous to be having a mother-daughter spat when one was surrounded by such grandeur and beauty. They shut up and went to sleep.

(Post Script): Unbeknown to the squabbling travelers, the local lions — far from being suicidal —were actually just happy that the noise had abated and they weren’t forced to attack the tent and eat the girls (as originally planned).

A Twit’s Eye View of the Internet

Today I had a very strange cyber experience. I logged onto my hotmail account and found an email from ‘me’. Well, from someone with my name. It was actually an invitation to join this person’s Facebook account as a ‘friend’.

Intrigued, I clicked ‘accept’. I assumed this other person was probably just someone who shared my name and had decided to make contact.

But I was wrong. This invitation wasn’t from another ‘me’ somewhere else in the world. It was actually from ME me!

How did I get this account? I wondered, as I opened the Other Me’s Facebook and realised it had all my own personal information plus some links to my own blog etc.

Then it dawned on me. My son has been helping me set up my blog. Being quite techno savvy he has been waxing lyrical about the possible benefits of linking my blog – which features articles previously published in my Kitchen Philosopher column together with info on my book – to other social networking sites.

His idea is that if we link the blog to Facebook and Twitter, we can increase the number of ‘hits’ on the blog and thus (hopefully!) the number of book sales. Well, that is the theory, anyway.

He’s even linked me to the blog analysis website so I can view my blog activity. This includes seeing how many visits I’ve had, where they are coming from and how long they stayed. It’s all very high tech.

This got me thinking about the way the retail world is changing. Where once upon a time businesses relied heavily on snail mail, word of mouth, newspaper ads and the bush telegraph to advertise their products, today its all about tweeting, blogging and posting. Even our former Prime Minister ‘twitters’ (although I’m not sure what he’s selling -- or if anyone’s buying, for that matter!)

But recently some downsides of these instantaneous communications have been exposed. First there was the newspaper columnist who twittered some highly inappropriate comments while watching the Logies and another whose very public online argument with a uni student culminated in unkind remarks about her foe and his (alleged) fondness for ‘gerbils’ (I’ll let you fill in the gaps here).

All this makes me nervous about the technology that allows us to publically blurt out every inane thought. At least with snail mail, we had some time between the envelope and the Post Office to consider the possible ramifications of our ‘rant’.

But even when you try to be careful about what you say on the internet, you never quite know where your musings might end up or what they might lose in the translation along the way!

I recently discovered this when an article I had written was published online. From it’s original website it apparently attracted quite a bit of attention, both nationally and internationally – judging by the site I later found it on which was clearly of Asian origin. I’m not sure, but I assume my article had been translated into an Asian language, then translated back into English. Consequently, it made for hilarious reading with some very funny misinterpretations of my phrasing, including one reference to ‘haemorrhoids’ which was certainly not in the original script!

While at first I was highly amused, I realised later that the article still bore my name which I found less amusing. But the really disconcerting thing is that I have absolutely no control over what anyone does with my words once they hit the web.

In fact, I feel like a bit of a Twit (erer)!

On the upside, at least I didn’t mention ‘gerbils’.