This is week two of quarantine, right? I honestly have no concept of days or times anymore. My time has been spent doing work and playing Animal Crossing, which has honestly been a boon.
However, if you’ve exhausted a lot of your distractions or are struggling to find things to keep you occupied, this edition of Wednesday Links is especially for you.
Please be safe, everyone!
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I wanted to post this collection of COVID-19 myths from the World Health Organization, in case you know someone who needs this info.
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Audible has a ton of free audiobooks available for kids right now! You should just be able to click the book and listen in your browser.
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For those who need more reading material, I made a thread of over 20 FREE romance ebooks. Since I’m the one who puts together the Books on Sale, I browse through a lot of book deals and thought this may help for people who can’t afford to buy books right now and/or those whose library systems are overtaxed with checkouts.
https://twitter.com/_ImAnAdult/status/1242464802758426624
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There are several options to stream episodes of The French Chef. I personally find cooking shows to be rather soothing, or at least great background noise.
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NPR Music is keeping an ongoing, updated list of live virtual concerts you can watch!
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Thanks to EC Spurlock for sending this our way. Sir Patrick Stewart is reading a sonnet a day!
Sonnet 2. This is one of my favorites. #ASonnetADay pic.twitter.com/aQBzrsETKv
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 23, 2020
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
If you need to volunteer, there are a bunch of crowd sourcing projects online that you can participate in (wikipedia has a list, not sure how up to date it is). I’ve been helping the Library of Congress by transcribing suffragette journals – some of the handwriting is very difficult to read, but because there are lots of people looking at them, we can figure it out together! Some crowd-sourcing projects you have to sign in, but some you can just do here and there as you have time/resources.
Amazon has also made all of their kids Prime programming available for free even for non-Prime members. Our personal household favorites that I will watch with our without kids: Just Add Magic (girl power with cooking and magic spells!), TumbleLeaf, Creative Galaxy and Pete the Cat.
And also, there is a public Facebook group started here in Florida called Corona Sunshine that posts artwork done by kids and their families. The original intent was to share some happy pictures with those in assisted living facilities who can’t see their families in person (which is awesome!) It seems to be growing as a wonderful community to just share happiness from our homes. As soon as my workday is done my kids and I will be working on some sidewalk chalk projects to share. 🙂
A play on the word corona is karuna:
https://www.karunavirus.org/
“Karuna is the Sanskrit word for compassion and the site intends to amplify the voice of our collective compassion by featuring stories of everyday people choosing love over fear.”
Since I have to go into the office everyday, there’s so much new and interesting quarantine content popping up all over the place that I’m ironically starting to feel like I’ll never catch up. One thing I’d really like to dig my way into when I have the chance is this archive of the Globe’s Shakespeare productions https://globeplayer.tv/ (most look like they’re available to rent or buy; obviously not an option for everyone, but still a very cool resource.)
Daily Motion has a wide variety of British TV complete episodes. May I recommend Gardner’s World? Monty Don, world’s most soothing man, gives seasonally appropriate encouragements and works in his own garden. His dogs are listed as co-presenters. Watch in order to watch his garden grow through the year.
Or watch Love your Garden and just sob your eyes out.
@Nagarajas- my family has become obsessed with Monty Don after watching all the episodes of Big Dreams Small Spaces on Netflix. I was even going to suggest for relaxing stay-at-home comfort tv, except it left Netflix yesterday. You have made my day if I can find more soothing British gardening elsewhere.
IMHO, British reality shows are so far superior to their American HGTV counterparts. Along with GBBO I really love The Repair Shop and Grand Designs
The New York Metropolitan Opera is streaming a different past production each day for free:
http://www.metopera.org
Each opera drops at 7:30 EDT and stays up for the next 23 hours. This week is a Wagner Week!
@nagarajas & @Emily C: Dailymotion also has Monty Don’s specials: Japanese Gardens, Paradise Gardens, American Gardens & Around the World in 80 Gardens. YouTube has Monty’s special The Secret History of British Gardens.
You can also follow him on IG, as I do, & watch his gardens coming to life in real time (plus photos & videos of the doggos). It’s the first link I click on each morning. so I can at least start the day with a smile.
@Mrs. Obed Marsh: Thank you for the Met Opera link. Two of my daughters are big opera fans and can’t wait to watch the daily offerings.
On facebook, Josh Kilmer-Purcell is posting Golden Girls style scenes relating to the pandemic – one a day. Each one starts –
Sophia: Picture it, Sicily 2020… I was sitting in my house.
Rose: Then what, Sophia?
Sophia: That’s it. We sat in our house. It was a Pandemic.
And goes from there.
I don’t know this person but some scenes were shared on another page I do follow and they were a delight to read.
I don’t know if they’re available in the US, but anyone who enjoys the soothing nature of GBBO should keep an eye out for the similarly formatted: Great British Throwdown (pottery), Great British Sewing Bee, and the Great Interior Design Challenge (there’s actually been about five shows with minor format variations, while they try and figure out how to pull off this one, so if you see something with a similar sort of title, it’s probably a safe bet). We’re very lucky in the UK right now, since Throwdown has just finished, GBBO is doing a celeb run, and Sewing Bee is back in a few weeks – it’s all the comfort programming carefully rationed out! If you want a sentimental home design program, DIY SOS / The Big Build are about doing renovations/builds for people in need, like a families who need to remodel their homes to be more accessible.
Also, history british reality – the “Back in Time” series puts families in various historical scenarios that advance by a year a day, with the focus on revealing how things changed (and reminding people how terrible their nan’s curtains were!). Incredibly cosy. The current one is Back in Time to the Corner Shop, so they’re working through the history of corner shops over the last century and a half with a family that run a modern one. Not a reality show, but David Olusoga’s House Through Time is fascinating as well, looking at the social history of an aea by digging up the records for a specific house and working through everyone who lived there and the uses the building was put to.
Other things I’m following: Dudolf, on facebook, who does the ‘hidden things’ pictures that may have passed across your feed, is doing a picture a day of what the characters from his kids’ book are doing while staying safe at home, taking suggestions from commenters. It’s very soothing and reassuring!
A lot of podcasts have dropped batches of episodes, either relating to the crisis (like This Podcast Will Kill You) or deliberately lighter stuff (like Stuff You Missed in History Class). I actually wish I had more time to listen to them! But I’m one of the lucky ones with a job that I can do from home and increasing demand on it, so I can’t complain too much.
I don’t know who this Singing Dentist dude is, but his “Virus,,,,,, Baby” to the tune of “Ice Ice Baby” made my day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7LCFo9OjeI
(Even though his comma crimes make me gnash my teeth.)
VOX looks at “Quarantined Together” as an emerging romance trope:
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21191148/quarantine-love-stories-reddit-husbands-coronavirus-ao3-fiction
Second the Great Pottery Throwdown on YouTube–it’s wonderful. I’ve also been watching the British panel show Taskmaster (also on YouTube) in which a bunch of comedians are given random tasks to complete. It’s the main thing keeping me sane at the moment. The creator has been posting daily tasks for people to do at home.
Travel+Leisure Magazine is running a number of free video tours, including famous museums, Kennedy Space Center, and many national parks, as well as free online classes, virtual theme park rides, downloadable coloring pages, livestreams from various locations, and many other resources: https://www.travelandleisure.com/
@Emily C: The kids in our neighborhood have been decorating the sidewalks with chalk and I’m enjoying it a great deal on our morning stroll. I’m sure your neighbors will appreciate your family’s effort.
Seconding Mina Kelly’s recommendation for the Great British Sewing Bee and the Great Pottery Throw-Down, which are delightful and comforting. I also love the shows Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the year (not officially available in other regions, I think, but you can find episodes online).
Also, we succumbed and tried making the Dalgona coffee that’s all over Instagram and YouTube. It’s easy to make and very tasty (so if you’re already trying to moderate your caffeine intake, maybe don’t try it).
@Heather M: Thank you for the link to the Globe! When a friend and I visited London two years ago, we really enjoyed the Globe’s production of Hamlet, though I was disappointed that our visit didn’t coincide with the run of The Two Noble Kinsmen. I have a lifetime goal to see live productions of all Shakespeare’s plays, and that one is hardly ever staged. This is the next best thing to seeing it live.