#9thbutterfly liveblogs the radio

[9thbutterfly]

Waitwaitwaitwhat, did they just say that sign language is soon going to be taught in Austrian schools?

I have been grumpy about the fact that I couldn't learn that in school for so many years.

[9thbutterfly]

Okay, this dude is pissing me off.

"I don't understand why we artists weren't considered essential workers." Not to discount the importance of art, but you aren't literally keeping people alive in the same way as people supplying food or medical care. You just aren't.

Trying to grow a year's supply of food as an art project. Yeah, you can do that. But lots of people do that every year. They could have told you how much you need, you don't need to feel so smart for figuring it out.

Buying land and letting it grow wild to protect insects. Yeah, noble intentions, but this is probably agricultural land. And where do the things that were grown there come from in the future? Some third-world country that's none of our business? Wouldn't it be more useful to use that land for more sustainable agriculture that supports insects *and* people?

[9thbutterfly]

I learned today that there is a fungus named Woswasia atropurpurea.

"Wos was i" is Austrian dialect for "was weiß ich" = "what do I know" because the people who discovered it had problems figuring out what family it belongs to.

[9thbutterfly]

Today, the newsreader on the radio made a mistake that I loved.

Instead of "Kohle, Öl und Gas" (coal, oil and gas) he said "Kohl, Öle und Gas" (cabbage, oils and gas).

I giggled for several minutes, and wondered if he or his colleagues would laugh as much when they noticed.

I also loved the time one of them started to introduce his colleague Beate Tomasovic as "Tomate Beasovic" before quickly correcting himself.

[9thbutterfly]

"Excuse me, could you repeat that answer? We had some problems with the connection. We are speaking over Skype, you are not in the studio with me, and the connection broke up for a bit."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"You aren't Mr Skype, it isn't your fault."

[9thbutterfly]

I... I just heard a caller on the radio argue that planes are more environmentally friendly than cars because they don't need roads to be built, so we should all fly everywhere and all the space currently occupied by roads should be given back to nature.

I mean... what? the? hell????

Also because planes can have hundreds of people in them and cars usually only one or two. Like... dude. DUDE. Have you ever heard of this thing called trains?

And are you proposing I fly to work every morning? And park my plane...where?

I just... WHAT?

[9thbutterfly]

New galaxy brain take from a caller on the radio: "The CIA is using the queer community to destroy communism."

Ooookay.

[9thbutterfly]

I have recently been having feelings about children's songs and ordered CDs of all the Fredrik Vahle songs I grew up with and now I discovered that Ö1 ("my" radio channel) had a series about children's songs, and guess who the first installment was about?

It is very odd to hear Cowboy Jim aus Texas and Die Rübe on Ö1, but also an excellent surprise!

And it turns out that even new songs by him that I haven't heard before still feel very familiar and calming to me, haha! (and no, I definitely haven't heard it before and forgotten it, he said he was still working on it.)

[9thbutterfly]

Was listening to a thing about accessible travelling earlier. The last part was about a blind hiker/mountain climber, and the guy was hilarious!

He went on a hike with the interviewer, and told her to close her eyes for a part of it, then: "Dear listeners, please turn down your volume. You will hear a loud crash any moment now." - Interviewer: "And swearing!"

A bit later: interviewer: "Aaah, now I have fallen!"

Blind hiker: "The good thing is, nobody saw you!"

There was more, but I can't remember it. But I laughed so much!

[9thbutterfly]

"We as humans seem to want to just throw things away and have them be *gone*. Think about nuclear waste - we create this thing that we can't really control and our solution is "we'll bury it really deep, then it is gone". Do we have a problem with object permanence, which your children probably have mastered by now?"

[9thbutterfly]

"I think everyone can confirm that you won't have a nice evening out if you're served by a waiter wearing a mask."

Nope, actually I think we should keep that as the new standard even post-pandemic, because this has made me realise it's actually kind of gross to have strangers breathing (or worse) on my food.

[9thbutterfly]

Discussion on immigration/refugees on the radio.

Some old dude calls in with some sort of xenophobic rant.

Another guy calls in, clearly an immigrant himself by his accent, and says, referencing the earlier caller: “I couldn’t eat as much as I want to puke when I hear such things.”

One of the guests on the radio, clearly wishing she could say such things too: “Please be assured, I only talk this civilly on the radio.”

[9thbutterfly]

It is rather odd to hear a thing titled “my father was a nazi” on the radio today, when over the weekend, I heard a bit of “Carmen”, and since then my thoughts have been circling around a memory from my childhood, when we also heard Carmen on the radio, and my father told me it reminded him of how his father had told him that when he was a soldier, they would turn on opera recordings very loudly before shooting prisoners, so they would not hear the screams so much.

And I have no idea how the hell I’m even supposed to feel about that? It’s awful, and at the same time it’s just a thing I know, with no particular feelings attached to it? And there’s nothing I can do about it, my grandfather is dead, my father is dead, I’m not close enough with my aunts and uncles to talk about this with them... And it does make me wonder how it fucked up my grandfather to do this, and how it fucked up my father to know this about his father... I’ve said it before, I need a necromancer and a psychologist to team up on him.

And I know it is probably just coincidence that I heard these two things so close together, and I probably hear bits of Carmen many other times not followed by “my father was a nazi”, and it’s probably just the thing where humans like to do pattern recognition on things that do not have a pattern, but at the same time, it does feel like dead family members being spooky again, which would not be the first time in the last nine days. If you destroy any more of my property, guys, we are going to have a problem.

[9thbutterfly]

On homeopathy: "if you dilute a substance again and again and again, it doesn't become more effective. You can try that with your coffee."

[9thbutterfly]

"Would you like a glass of water? A listener has written us an email, 'your guest sounds hoarse, could you offer him some water.'"

[9thbutterfly]

Huh. They actually read my email on the radio! (They had a discussion on the discrimination that parents face in the workplace, and I (anonymously) shared my experience that since I publicly mentioned that LG would do the majority of the childcare, since I can't be away from work that long, his employer has put off changing his temp position to a permanent one again and again - for over a year now.