Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme: An Experiment in which You Will Participate, Or Else…

You too can participate in science from the comfort of your own home. Click on the link above to read the details of the experiment, or take the shortcut and just follow the instructions below.

1. Write a post, in which you explain the experiment and link to the original post (http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/11/measuring_the_s.html). (All blogs count, be they TypePad, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, &c.)
2. Ask your readers to do the same. Beg them. Relate sob stories about poor graduate students in desperate circumstances. Imply I’m one of them. (Do whatever you have to. If that fails, try whatever it takes.)
3. Ping Technorati.

On Sunday, Mom and I went over to visit Grandma. Besides looking forward to seeing my 101 year old grandmother, I was armed with a mission. At Orycon, someone (I’m sorry I’ve forgotten who) was talking about epidemics and how one couldn’t really interview people who had lived through the great Influenza epidemic. I realized that I could. When I mentioned that, Richard Lovett said that I should also ask Grandma about the Titanic, which would have been the shuttle disaster of her generation.

We wound up not talking about the flu epidemic, or even the Titanic much. Grandma says that they didn’t have television or radio where she was living when the Titanic went down, so she heard about it through word of mouth over the course of a couple of days. That sparked a memory of the phone that her parents had had when she was growing up.

It was an eight-party line, she says, and they weren’t supposed to listen in on their neighbors conversations but sometimes, when their mama left the house, Grandma would get a chair and climb up to get the receiver. She says that she thinks her mama put the phone up so high to keep them from getting to it.

I also learned that her father was an excellent story teller and would tell them ghost stories that, “made it so you were afraid to sleep at night.” The one that she could remember was about a man who was cutting through a graveyard and fell into an open grave. While he was down there, two people fellows came along and were dividing up walnuts, saying, “One for me, one for you, one for me…” The man in the grave thought that it was the boogie man and death talking about dividing up souls and leapt out of the grave and ran straight off. She said that couldn’t remember it the way my great-grandfather told it, only that the way he told it was scary.

I remember hearing this story when I was little, but don’t know where I heard it. Now I want to find a large print version to give Grandma for Christmas.

About this time, I remembered that I had a video camera on my palm pilot and so by the time she and Mom started talking about the Indian mound on my great-grandaddy’s farm, I’m ready. I’ve edited out the bits where we start talking about family.

It was a good visit. Next time, I’ll make sure I have the camera out the whole time.