C'est la guerre

I am an aspiring Twitter junkie.  I am not all that interested in what my friends are doing, but all the other stuff, I love it.  24/7 updates on local wildfires!  Word(s) of the day!  The white house dog!  Seriously, I cannot get enough.

OKay that is a lie, I can get too much.  For example our county's local emergency management tweets used to be my absolute favorite & then they got verbose, so verbose they cannot fit it into a single tweet.  So now instead of  "there's a guy in handcuffs running around 34th street, lock your doors" which actually would have been a good-to-know thing yesterday afternoon, we get links to other websites in their tweets.  Lame.  Also I don't have the kind of phone that can check the sites anyhow.  Soooo, while I do subscribe to those tweets, I do not have them forwarded to my phone anymore.

Alright, the county emergency management site never would have told me about the cuffed guy at the Hilton.  But it would have been nice if the smoke blowing across the highway was reported in 140 characters or less instead of a link to the national weather service with a detailed description of wind patterns.  I'm not suggesting it would prevent crashes, I am saying if I were planning a trip & I got that tweet I would avoid that stretch of 75 (naturally I do not read text messages while I am actually driving).

It is into this addiction (& disappointment) that my brother sent the link for the guy tweeting World War II in real time.  I got so excited earlier this month when Japan announced they would not be taking sides.  Just this morning (in 1940, of course), the Nazis announced that jewish doctors could only care for jewish patients & only jewish doctors could care for jewish patients.

If all of this sounds a bit like a rehash of the very thing I avoided during my Nazi free year (was that really so long ago as 2010, time does fly!), it is a bit.  But it is also what happened in time as it happened, not as it was reported in the media in which ever place you happened to be.  & it is also from a wide variety of sources. newspapers & newsreels yes but also other contemporary accounts such as journals which would never have been available for public scrutiny at the time, even if the public had been interested & lets face it:  we would not have been.

I think that is what I am finding most interesting of all.  Recently (in the war) the Prime Minister of New Zealand died & a German u-boat ran aground off the coast of neutral Norway.  But I am more captivated by the gentile doctor who has started using fake names on his prescriptions.  I really want to know what happens to him.