The Daily Bluster

It’s so strange to see someone watching herself dance 75 years ago. The image of a 102-year-old woman juxtaposed with her youthful, beautiful, and vital self is unsettling, and makes you think thoughts that you often ignore.     You could see through her eyes that she’s reliving it—she can hear the music and feel its rhythm, feel her feet as they strike the floor, feel the adrenaline rush of doing what she likes best and doing it good. Someone once said not to fear growing old, because it is a privilege denied to many. That’s true, of course, but there are moments when one feels that growing old is the saddest thing that happens to us. She’s remembering it all. It’s all in her head still. She was beautiful, she was lithe, and she was a really great dancer. I guess that’s what our most precious possessions are—our memories. We are still 12 or 16 or 21 inside. We’ll all grow old and die someday, but we pretend that we are immortal. We’ll see our lov...

“How do you say, in polite English, ‘ Punta muna ako sa kubeta; taeng-tae na ako! ’  (I have to go the toilet; I’m about to shit myself!)?” In a (Philippine) website that deals mostly in computer parts and peripherals, there was this thread about English grammar. Presumably, the thread starter (commonly referred to in internet forums as the TS ), who was one of the regulars of the aforementioned site, has trouble expressing himself in grammatically correct English. As the site is quite popular, and the site members come from diverse backgrounds, many contributed to that thread, and competently answered the TS’ and other posters’ questions regarding English grammar. The “English” thread, suffice it to say, was one of the site’s most active threads. Anyway, the question quoted above was just one of many. I stumbled across it one afternoon a few months ago. It appeared that the poster works for a firm run by Americans. During one particularly unforgettable meeting with his Ameri...

Misis Djyli is the username of a young housewife who, for the past few months, had been uploading her cross-stitching projects on YouTube. It’s her hobby, and clearly she loves it—you can hear the happiness in her voice as she presents her cross-stitches. I am not an expert on cross-stitching, but hers look beautiful, at least according to the few comments on her YouTube channel.   Here's one of her earliest uploads: Almost nobody watches her cross-stitching videos, but it didn’t seem to bother her—she just kept making and uploading them.   Her latest video, however, has currently over a million views, and it does not show her cross-stitching. It shows her town being bombed, and her normally happy voice is gone.  She is crying and sounds very afraid on the video, and you can hear a baby crying in the background. The woman, you see, lives in Ukraine. She lives in a town called Kramatorsk, and the town was recently attacked by Russians (or perhaps ethnic Rus...