The Bluestocking, vol 132: The Hapsburg Line Has Ended
Happy Friday!
Standards have slipped in week ?? of lockdown, and my early ambition - "read a play every day!" - has been replaced by "go on, then, just one more episode 30 Rock". I regret nothing, though, because that episode about the last Hapsburg could not have been more relevant to my interests.
YOU ARE EXQUISITE. (For anyone genuinely interested in the fate of the Hapsburgs, Adam Rutherford's book has the gory details of why you really shouldn't marry your cousin.)
I have also, obviously, been watching Tiger King. My Atlantic colleague Sophie has done a great job of explaining what a manipulative piece of documentary making it is and reluctantly, I agree with her. For every enjoyable bit of nuttiness there's something much darker (Where did her arm go? Oh. Where did his teeth go? Oh.) It's barking to try to equate Carole's failings (being a kooky middle-aged woman in a flower crown, running a ropy intern programme) with those of Doc Antle (runs something close to a cult where he controls the lives of teenage girls who must sleep with him to stay employed) and Joe Exotic (runs intensive puppy farm, but for tigers, and recruits drifters who are so poor they have to eat date-expired meat leftovers from the back of a truck).
There is, nonetheless, something incredibly revealing about American culture that comes through the crazy. Namely: why shouldn't I keep a tiger if I want to? On Twitter, Dan Knowles once summed up Trump's appeal as something like: you can have gas guzzlers and smoke Marlboro Reds and not feel guilty about it! It is no surprise, therefore, that Trump is reportedly considering pardoning Joe Exotic.
Helen
PS. Thank you to everyone who sent nice feedback about Have I Got News For You. I wrote a bit about doing jokes into the Zoom void here.
Funnily enough, this is exactly what I said when one of the New Statesman staff got their arm ripped off at work by John Gray that time.
The Last Guests in Paradise (NYT)
The resort’s full staff are at hand, because of the presence of the two guests. Government regulations won’t allow any Maldivians to leave resorts until after they undergo a quarantine that follows their last guests’ departure. Accustomed to the flow of a bustling workday, and the engagement with a full house of guests, most of the staff, having grown listless and lonely, dote on the couple ceaselessly. Their “room boy” checks on them five times a day. The dining crew made them an elaborate candlelit dinner on the beach. Every night performers still put on a show for them in the resort’s restaurant: Two lone audience members in a grand dining hall.
This is a British person's nightmare. All that attention. All those people watching to see if you are having fun.
Have Google Searches Revealed Another Covid Symptom? (NYT)
The three searches most related to Covid-19 disease rates were not a surprise: loss of smell, fever and chills. The fifth and sixth searches weren’t much of a surprise either: nasal congestion and diarrhea, which have also received a lot of attention as Covid-19 symptoms.
However, the fourth-place search was a surprise: eye pain, which has not garnered much attention as a possible symptom of the disease. Searches for “my eyes hurt” over the previous week were highest in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Louisiana and Michigan. Such searches seem to have risen in the past two weeks almost exclusively in parts of the country that have reached very high Covid-19 rates (although the data is fairly noisy and the rise isn’t as large as it is for some other symptoms).
Intrigued by this as I had eye pain the first week of lockdown, but no other symptoms. Maybe it's corona, or maybe there's some other winter bug where one of the symptoms is eye pain.
Me posting an edgy tweet.
Quick Links:
"Innocent as they were, Lovatt’s sexual encounters with Peter would ultimately overshadow the whole experiment when a story about them appeared in Hustler magazine in the late 1970s." Peter was a dolphin, so this figures.
Great parenting hack.
I enjoyed this description of borderline personality disorder.
On Monday, the Schaubuhne will be broadcasting Simon McBurney's version of Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, with English subtitles, and I will be watching it, because I am a Theatre Wanker. Join me.
Me re: my enemies.
How are you getting through lockdown? Let me know. Self-deprecating answers only.