From time to time I look at the 18th century cooking videos that James Townsend and Son put on Youtube, I've even tried a few of the simpler recipes. I liked watching the ones about making a clay oven.
I watched the one posted on July 3rd from Mt. Vernon, one of the resident staff cook-historians made one of Martha Washington's favorite deserts, orange fool, a kind of orange custard.
Apparently some people took umbrage at the name, associating it with a certain fool with orange hair. Shades of NPR's tweeting the Declaration of Independence.
I feel some sympathy for James Townsend who doesn't want to run a political Youtube channel but I have to say I find this funny, too. I would suggest to him that he drop the comments but he interacts with the commentators who have given him a lot of ideas for more things to post.
I hope he finds some way to avoid it if he wants to.
Dealing with people who have the vocabulary of Trump.
ReplyDeleteThe internet is dumbing us down as the voices of ignorance drown out the voices of insight and knowledge.
Over night, thinking about this, I wonder if it might have something to do with paid trolls for whom English isn't their first language. Over at Media Matters a lot of their trolls use syntax that's definitely not standard English.
DeleteI've noticed when I get a lot of hits on my Google-provided site counter, the largest number seem to come from Russia. This will last several days, then fade.
ReplyDeleteIt's hardly huge; I don't attract that much attention, but it's multiples higher than I normally get, so it's large relative to expectations. I can't imagine what I write is regularly so interesting to the average Russian, frankly. For that matter, what's important to Russian hackers; but maybe they are gathering information from around the web.
And it is well known (but seldom acknowledged) that Russian hackers (government employees, too) regularly invent information to insert into e-mail caches that are released through Wikileaks and others, as well as invent "fake news" that gets disseminated as true.
So your speculation wouldn't surprise me in the least. You're probably right, IOW.