ONE PIC FROM TODAY

ONE THING I DID TODAY

Cabaret-style seating had me in a bentwood chair at the front of a table, touching the stage as watched UK sisters Nichola and Rosie Dempsey, who perform as Flo and Joan.

Explore, find out more about them. I have always loved the wit, but missed the musicianship until I saw them live. Hearing them harmonise, and perform vocal gyrations perfectly in sync, reminded me of the pleasure of listening to Neil and Tim Finn. Sibling voices which blend uncannily beautifully. There is also a pretty mean recorder duet in Lady in the Woods. (Go on, go off and have a listen – laugh yourself silly on the first play through – then listen, really listen, to the harmonies in the second one).

They were the soundtrack to my three years of teaching at UniSA. I added topics on misinformation, disinformation, fake news and ex-information. (Ex-information is what is deliberately excluded and the impact of this is worth further study. [I was going to link to a definition, but Google is not my friend here. I am not divorcing anyone, so what it did retrieve was not helpful]).

Every study period I would work out whether I could still justify including the clip below. I did – and played it deep into the night as I revised topics in the Information Retrieval unit. I told students that they did not have to watch it. Not at all. I just couldn’t bring myself to keep teaching the unit without their company each time I updated that bit of the course.

The song’s refrain “better do your research”, I used as entre to get students to read Barbara Fister’s Lizard People in the Library provocation, written as part of Project Information Literacy. In it she describes how the idea of “do your own research” – the refrain of many librarians (not just Flo and Joan) was horribly subverted by conspiracy theorists in the US of the early 2020s.

Horrible Histories Fake News Song by Flo and Joan.