We'll see what Blog says it is..Goodie, we're in sync.

Well, I wrote something that has disappeared. That's okay, too. I'll think of something else. i'm very good at tap-dancing. What I really wasn't to write about - WHO I really went to write about, is Mary Beard. Have to do a bit of reading first. Anon, anon.

She's British and a Classical scholar, writes books about the ancient world (Rome, Greece, Pompei), and a regular column (blog) for the Times Literary Supplement. She began to write the blog (A Don's Life) a few years ago. and it's very popular. She is salty feisty, outspoken and feminist (delightful) and she gets a lot of Twitter abuse,often quite vicious, mostly from men. Her most recently published book (late 2017) is a short (115 pages) illustrated (cartoons, sculpture, paintings) Manifesto: Women and Power. With her deep knowledge and training Beard is able to trace the roots of misogyny back to ancient times. When you read it you will probably do a lot of head-shaking and nodding, as I have done.

The Me Too and Time's Up moves seem to be having an effect but there's bound to be some kind of backlash. I don't know how far back we can go in trying to right the wrongs and erase history, as some are trying to do with public monuments and statues, o say nothing of schools and streets and pubs and theatres etc. Hard to erase Woody Allen.

I'm still thinking....

Who needs Facebook when you have all the trivia in the world at your fingertips on Google and the NYT and The Manchester Guardian and my friend Gabi who sends me all the articles she thinks I should read? (I do that, too.)

I've just been browsing (googling) among the new-to-me women comic writers/humourists/essayists - um, what else? Are they satirists? Not sure. Remember George Kaufman (You Can't Take It With You) said satire is what closes on Saturday night. These women all have TV credits and awesome (aka funny?) presence so they are not strangers to a New Yorker audience. They write for Amy Schumer and The Good Place and South Park and then drop casually into Shouts and Murmurs and Daily Shouts in the New Yorker. One of them, Megan Amram, came up through the ranks (is that the right word?) of Twitter with such amazing thoughts that she attracted a following immediately. Wow. I can't attract a following of pigeons in the park, but then, I've never tried.

In my day, a long time ago, women weren't supposed, or even allowed, to be funny. I used to love games, deliberately confusing words for humour's sake, but most of my listeners, if indeed, they listened at all, didn't get it. Never mind. The first funny women who came to prominence on TV and in the entertainment world got their laughs by denigrating themselves. Remember Phyllis Diller? Roseanne? (She's coming back, I hear.) Oh, and before that, Fanny Brice? A woman couldn't be beautiful or even good looking and funny too. You couldn't laugh with her; you had to laugh at her.

I'm going to think some more about that. Long long thoughts.