If you didn’t read this week’s post “Flip your way out of failure” I will read it to you, dramatically and enthusiastically, below. 👇
Reading commences as soon as you hit play. Enjoy!
Notes from the Captain
What a day with binoculars glued to eye sockets. Lots of birds. Lots of flipping. Lots of that gesture that can get certain people riled up.
What tha?! How dare!? Backatcha!
It’s weird how flipping the bird or giving someone the ol’ one-finger salute has so much power to enrage. One quick turn of the wrist, a finger flipping out like a switchblade from your fist, and BOOM, faces flush and voices rise.
It says so much, that one finger. Anger, disgust, and don’t give AF. This. Is. What. I. Think. Of. YOU.
Why is it so powerful? What is power anyway? In my very thin research this week, I learned that its origins lay in pee-pees. Willies. Members. Yes, what a shock—it was originally a phallic gesture developed by the Greeks. Bless. One can see how waving yer metaphorical willy at someone could be construed as an insult. But what is it now? Multiple things? An insult. A gesture of pure defiance as you Stick it to the Man. Tell me: is the man AI yet?
If you don’t know the gesture, isn’t it just pointless gesturing?
People are weird. And by people, I mean humans.
Have you ever looked closely at your fingers? I had a lot of close ups and opportunities to look at mine this week as I made this video and it made me sad. So much excess skin around the knuckles (for the bending and not ripping, I guess).
Am I dehydrated?
Have my knuckles always looked like this?
Why are my hands always so cold?
The middle finger on my right hand is sort of curved weird due to how I’ve held my pencil/pen all my life. Or would it have got that bend naturally? That’s weird too. My nails are terrible—farm girl hands. I have collouses and I guess that’s from bike riding? Oh well.
I pinch the skin on the back of my hand.
Dehydrated.
I flip my bird at that. A water bird. My fist bird for this situation is a Flamingo. 🦩
If you haven’t already, go enjoy this week’s video. And the birds. May and hawks and seagulls and ducks and birds of all feathers flip off your troubles and roadblocks with much enthusiastic vigor this week.
REMEMBER: THE POWER OF THE PLUMAGE IS IN YOUR FIST
Drink water, crew. Keep the H2O flowing.
Flip, flip, flip.
Now, go make something great. It’s time.
Your Captain, Janeen 🫡
Thangs from this episode…
👩✈️ Let’s talk about the middle finger
Confession: I found no fast and easy answer for why the gesture is called the bird—one that satisfied me, anyway—and I lost interest in my research quite quickly. My shameful confession is that I could’ve dug more deeply and didn’t. Geese and big birds and people hooting and honking instead of booing. *sigh* At least the phallus stuff made sense. But again, humans are weird. Of course they honk like geese when they don’t like something.
OBVIOUS. Duh.
Anyway, this is just to say that I gave myself a B- for comprehensive research this week. Whatever. My video was about flipping birds at creativity, not a history lesson (she said making one last ditch attempt at covering her arse.) I learned it wasn’t called “flipping the bird” officially until the 60s in Britain and for some reason I forgot to mention that in the video at all, so there’s another fail.
Ugh. I’m bad at this.
If you’re really curious, there are many videos and articles that do have a red hot go at explaining it all and they do a way better job than I ever could. So here is all the supplementary material you could ever want on flipping the bird.
The first video is the one I watched before I made my video. It has the ‘big bird’ info. The second is the one has a bit extra and some famous finger info. I think they fill in blanks for each other a bit, so that’s good.
Some links:
A page of musicians flipping birds
The middle finger is the most controversial digit. Thank the ancient Greeks for that. - CNN
What are the rules for flipping the bird on network television? (US) - Slate
👩✈️ Autocorrecting Mother Duckers on the iPhone
Meet the inventor of autocorrect for the iPhone. This is how it works.
Apple Knows You Didn’t Mean to Type ‘Ducking’ - NYT. Things are changing with this update announced in 2023.
👩✈️ Types of birds
This bird is the only one I’m gonna mention and I don’t even like basketball. My opinion is 100% based on watching the HBO documentary “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals.” What a character.
Ok, I lied. Two birds. I love hummingbirds. The sound of them in the garden. I’m trying to think (related to post) what situation a flipped hummingbird would be for….
Karens. I think they’re for Karen situations. Fluttering in their faces so fast and buzzy that the Karen has to leave the area because they can’t stand it. Too cute, too manic! That’s the hummingbird.
This is how they fly.
And here’s some sexy slo-mo of a hummingbird drinking and doing hummingbird stuffs.
👩✈️ Janeen, what’s your Thom Yorke easter egg this week?
At the mention of traffic in today’s video, I put in a snippet from the Paul Thomas Anderson short film that was made for the release of ANIMA, Thom Yorke’s last solo project. The song clip is Traffic. There’s your easter egg. Now, of course, Thom has been messing around with a side project, The Smile, a band I will see live very soon. You 100% should listen to the new album Wall of Eyes (title song is great). Bending Hectic blew my mind out sideways and I Quit is gonna be great IRL.
But back to Thom and ANIMA.
You can watch the full short film is on Netflix—I think it’s still on there—but it’s extremely hard to find any clips of it anywhere. At the time of its release there was some behind the scenes stuff on the making of, which I know I shared an eternity ago, but here is Thom being the weirdest fish and I LOVE HIM.
Here it a bootleg of the full film on Vimeo. I assume it will get taken down at some point.
👩✈️ More Premium Bird Content
Here is a Seagull out doing some sandwich shopping.
Thanks for listening/watching and sharing this week. If you want to chat about any of the concepts in this week’s post—or just in general—feel free to leave a comment for the Captain (it me.)
Do. Make. Be.
I’ll see you out there.
🫡
Shameless Podcast Plug
Listen to audio versions of early issues of The Stream on my podcast, Field of Streams, available on 👉 all major podcasting platforms 👈
Here’s Apple
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