The speed of light

Remember, life is strange/Life keeps getting stranger every day -- New Order, Procession

We certainly did not see this coming.

Just a few days ago, I was working on a music video. (My cover of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here from the album of the same name. I recorded this using a basic backing track (tinyurl.com/kqbzw8y) and then recorded the video of me playing and then edited it all together using Powerdirector. I play all the guitars and sing along with David Gilmour.)



Wish You Were Here (for mom) from Jason Ballantyne on Vimeo.

Then I awoke a couple of days ago to a Facebook posting by my father, saying he had dined out the previous evening for the first time since mom died, which also made it the first time he'd dined out without mom in 43 years.

While eating and thinking about mom, he spotted a young couple. They reminded him of him and mom in their younger days so he decided to pay for their meal and leave an anonymous note.

If there's one thing I've learned in my years as a reporter and communications professional, anonymity is a fragile thing.

The owner of the restaurant took a picture of the note dad wrote on the napkin (in his distinctive upper/lower case hybrid printing) and posted it to reddit.

And just like that the story spun off, going viral within hours.

It was soon on the front page of the subreddit pics page and the front page of imagur. At first it was merely a picture of the napkin.

The comments at imagur were, for the most part, supportive -- most people said they enjoyed reading a bit of good news and that my father was a kind man to think of others in the midst of his grief.

The comments at reddit, not so much. Many commenters questioned the photo's authenticity in one of two ways; they said either the napkin was a fake or the story was merely a repost, something many redditers take very seriously (as if people posting items have at their disposal a complete repository of everything that has been posted in the history of the internet.)

As someone who's worked for 15 years in communications, I've always advocated meeting negative comments head on. Not to get in a prolonged debate -- you can't win those on the internet -- but to post a balanced viewpoint and then move on. So that's what I did. I posted a few times with some basic information that clearly showed the story was real and then I disengaged.

Little did I know how far the story would spread. Soon it was on the Huffington Post, several Australian news sites and now the Daily Mail.

(The first thing I thought of when I saw the posting on the Daily Mail was one of my favourite Smiths songs, The Queen Is Dead and Morrissey's cheeky lyrics about Prince Charles: "I said Charles, don't you ever crave / To appear on the front of the Daily Mail / Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?")

I must say the messages I've received, either through the comments section of the various news sites or here on my blog, have been uplifting.

I'll be responding to the ones here in my next blog entry.

For now -- thanks for all the kind words. Some of you have spoken about my strength in writing about mom. Let me tell you -- you've also shown strength in writing to me.

Don't forget that.