Web Log for 8.6.25

So today I found links. More heavy than light ones I'm afraid.

Animals 

Moths in England:

http://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2025/08/some-moths-during-july.html

Censorship 

As long as web sites are privately owned they do have a right to censor content, actually. This web site censors content. I'll post links to your site, and even write a product-supportive post to stick them under, only if we approve of your site. No "but it's legal now" marijuana products. No religious-about-being-atheist literature. So, fine, let F******k censor political content, let Youtube censor videos that tell the truth about vaccines that anyone who'd taken a single course in freshman-level health science should have known would be useless and dangerous for them at the time they were marketed, let X say it doesn't censor while it sneakily extinguishes all human conversation on its site. But where are the uncensored social media sites that offer what those sites used to offer, that should have caused all three sites to wither up and die by now? Well, actually, for people who want to sit through "vlogs" instead of reading blogs, Rumble and Discord are competing to replace Youtube; it'll happen. For people who want to post photos, Pinterest, Instagram, and Reddit aren't really uncensored, they're only smaller than F******k, but they are competing to replace The Filthy Eight-Letter F-Word. But where's the "Tweetie" site that works like the original Twitter? 

One suggestion as to why Tsu and Truth Social didn't compete with the original Twitter, and why Bluesky isn't crumbling X faster: Part of what the original Twitter was, in addition to being a super-efficient way to connect with e-friends everywhere, was short. No long essays or big splashy pictures--only links to them. The middle column of Twitter fitted a good half-dozen tweets on a computer screen. I like long wordy blog posts, but Twitter was for scanning messages from everybody and finding the urgent ones fast. The 128-character limit per tweet, with the option of linking tweets into long threads, was a good thing. 

Another suggestion: The world needs no more echo chambers. A real replacement for Twitter has to be hospitable to the full political spectrum, leaving it entirely up to individuals to decide whether they want to huddle in a personal echo chamber they set up for themselves, or get the benefit of reading both sides. 

Another suggestion: "AI" is a cute name for the ayayai of totalitarian government by spying and censoring. It's also a cute name for the tacky plagiarism-bots that people who don't deserve to be called hacks are using to crank out really bad writing, music, and art, at the moment, but nobody's pouring millions of dollars into those things or suggesting that they need to be fed on ten times the amount of electricity the human population of a city are using. A sustainable replacement for Twitter may not be 100% bot-free, but it should encourage people to flag accounts that don't post recognizably human content, and delete those accounts. 

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/07/01/breaking-scotus-rules-on-texas-florida-censorship-laws-n4930160

Climate 

Coming at the end of a heat wave...I think most people should be able to see through all the hype about the profitability of "energy," ask what that "energy" is needed to do, and remember that local warming is a very clear and present danger to our safety. We don't need more "energy" to fuel more local warming. We might do better to allow the Internet to work only in winter than to expand the Internet into the Orwellian vehicle of totalitarian government that Trump, poor old out-of-touch rich man, is being set up to enable.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/08/03/opinion-trump-proposes-to-end-the-climate-hoax-steve-milloy/

Politics 

Right-wingers vindicated? Tucker Carlson interviews a slow-talking researcher (I mean like annoyingly slow; you'll want to speed up the video until TC sounds like a Chipmunk) who makes the case that Timothy McVeigh was actually a federal agent, paid to stage a violent crime that would make the Right look bad and justify suppressing news coverage of the House investigation into the Waco disaster. It would be hard to prove her case, after thirty years during which almost all the principals in the case have died (many by violence), but her claim does put together the multitude of missing pieces that made me say in the 1990s "We can't do a FacTape on this--not yet--the story is too horrible and too weird--too many questions are still open." There's a possibility that people will believe the story Margaret Robert tells as if it were facts, just because it offers answers to all those nasty unanswered questions and people want closure. It's not facts; it's a case for the prosecution. Nevertheless.

Is it possible that leftists in our government, frustrated by the reality that most "conservatives" are not violent or even racist, are creating the legendary "alt-right" to meet their own needs for a violent enemy they need to suppress? It is indisputable. What's controversial is this claim that they went so far as to blow up a federal employees' day care center. I would urge readers to be very cautious about accusing even the Clinton administration of anything that bad. Though I can picture an undocumented conversation along the lines of "I said a small bomb!"--"They trained me to drop bombs, not build'em."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91PqJmEtFMk

Safety 

Meme from Joe Jackson:

These laws need to be reversed. Video recordings of private citizens should be limited to the private property of the person recording. Video recordings of government employees at work should be legal for their rightful supervisors, the taxpayers. A completed 1040 should authorize anyone to film anything a government employee does on paid time.

Women's Issues, Various 

More than any other of her posts this one seems to explain why Mona Andrei is a popular "mommy blogger," even though her children are grown up and many of her posts can be read while eating or drinking. Not all single mothers are as successful as she was, but who doesn't like a success story?

https://www.moxie-dude.com/2024/07/01/single-mom-speaks-out-and-busts-myths-about-solo-parenting/ 

Meanwhile, a teenage girl not unreasonably refuses to buy underwear in a store where customers are pestered by a pushy salesperson, who in this case is one of those men who identify as women for the purpose of intruding into women's space. Her mother and various local celebrities make her complaint a Cause. 

I understand the girl's feelings. At the same time I wonder whether some men got this idea from incidents that started in the 1970s where businesses that provided rather personal services, from fitting clothes to urological surgery, would be p.c. and hire women and try to shame men who felt that their modesty was being violated if they were served by these women. ("What kind of woman would even want to be a urologist?!") Those men had a valid case, too.

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/08/05/a-young-girls-bra-shopping-trip-went-terribly-wrong-now-the-store-is-apologizing-n4942432

Next link that turns up: a woman plays the part of Jesus in a musical. Unburdened by any sense of historical authenticity, of course. Respect for the audience's knowledge about the time and place she's trying to reenact would dictate that in solo scenes where she might be portraying Jesus in prayer, she'd be wearing a longish tunic with full-length sleeves, a sort of shawl over that, and an elaborate head scarf. as worn in slightly different styles by men and women. Her costume is what only the twentieth century, when fabric became cheap, would ever let anyone call formal costume; throughout most of history such a dress would have been recognized as rags and tatters, and we are specifically told that Jesus' followers made sure He never had to be seen in such disgraceful attire--at least not until He was stripped and scourged. So the costuming is all wrong. And we're not told that Jesus was left alone between the scourging and the pronouncement that He was dead. And if He screamed like that during that time, it would have been only natural, but we're not told about it. Whatever that woman thought she was enacting with that performance, it's no part of the story of Jesus.

"Demonic"? She can't help being skinny, which Jesus may well have been; the body wrapped in the Shroud of Turin was tall and gaunt. She could nowadays have watched video of her performance in rehearsals and seen how much her hunching, reaching, and shrieking resembled traditional portrayals of ghouls, rather than a suffering Savior. For that she's much to blame. She's not, of course, trying to drag anyone into deep water or drink anyone's blood, but surely it's possible for her to strain for high notes without gesturing as if she is.

Credible? No ordinary human ever has played or will played the part of Jesus credibly. The best Passion Play I ever saw recognizes that fact and requires the actors to mime around Him; most theatre groups can't pull it off, but when it's done it's awesome. The best actors can do in ordinary reenactments of the Crucifixion, I think, is to walk through the role of Jesus without really trying to convince the audience that that's who they really are; merely reminding the audience what He said, and how terribly He was hated for it.

Is her lifestyle Christian? How many Christians have asked that question about men who've  played the role of Jesus? Has anyone ever been told "You cheated on land deals, you cheated on your wife, you drink till you fall down in the road, you're fifty years old and still have unpaid student debts, you have such an uncontrolled bad temper you can't even keep a dog, or whatever, so you can't carry the Cross in the Passion Play"? It's a bit late to start sniffing at the crotch of a woman playing that role, isn't it?

In legitimate theater tradition anybody can play anything. Race and sex don't matter. And we're not specifically told that Jesus had fair skin, though we are told that His ancestor David was distinguished by a "blond" or "ruddy" complexion; a prophecy that might or might not have described Him mentions curly hair. If we with our current sense of "race" saw Jesus, we might not agree on whether to call Him Black or White. So yes, I'd say that a Black woman could play the part of Jesus, but I'd expect her to play it in a better informed, more respectful way than that one did. 

https://x.com/Mary_McMuffin/status/1952033414120644824

Book Review: Midnight Prince

Title: Midnight Prince

Author: Aisha Urooj

Date: 2021

Quote: "She was upset with the faerie king. But I became her hapless victim."

Prince Milos has been turned into a frog by the witch Agnes, who wants a special favor from King Eldas. Agnes might change him back. Or Princess Kitty, whom Eldas wants to marry to Milos anyway, might change Milos by kissing him in frog form. She has another idea, about leaving the frog in the swamp.

This retelling of the Frog Prince fairytale is at least funnier than the original, though the e-copy I received could have used some editing on points like verb tenses and the noun form of "invite" being "invitation" and suchlike. 

Lateness

Today's essay will be late. Today's book review and link log will appear on schedule. I am caught up in blog-housekeeping and real-world chores. However, the essay I promised at another blog will be here, probably some time today... 

Web Log for 8.4-5.25

One link...seems pitiful. I spent a lot of 8.5.25 learning my way around Substack.

Music 

Did you know John Scalzi was also a composer? 

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/07/01/new-ep-the-wave-returns-to-the-water/ 

Books I Read in School and Didn't Like

Today's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about books we read at school and didn't like. Long lists!

Textbooks, generally, tend to be written in a tedious committee-type voice. This is such a widespread shortcoming that the individual books seldom even come to mind. Well, one does, actually. I wasn't required to read it but it had been popular enough that homes, libraries, and classrooms used to have copies, and by the time I came along it had been challenged on several cut-and-dried historical facts the author got wrong. The Development of America by Fremont P. Wirth was readable, being mostly the work of one author, but often inaccurate. 

No, older schoolbooks were not consistently better or worse than the new ones. Some books were better than others. Several books my school used were pathetic. One that stands out in memory was apparently dragged out by Mrs. Ratfink for some sort of review. We'd finally plodded through "Jump, Janet, jump" and made it into a real reader, with sentences formatted in paragraphs and arranged in actual stories, and then Mrs. Ratfink threw us back into a tedious tale about how "Dan and Ann can wax the van." Not even "their" van. It might have been someone else's van. 

Mrs. Ratfink also used a set of dreary little paperback stories, whose big asset was that each person was reading one at a time so the school had to buy only two sets for each classroom. They were written by a committee whose initials were S.R.A.; when everyone finally plodded through those at Mrs. Ratfink's glacial pace, a song spontaneously composed by several seven- and eight-year-olds at once had the refrain "Yay, hooray, we're done with SRA!" 

Things were stranger at the schools I visited on a few of my family's last road trips. At one school in California, one of the younger reading teachers thought it was important that we learn to appreciate the fantasy genre most older teachers thought people ought to have outgrown by age six, so she used The Phantom Tollbooth instead of the regular fourth grade reader. I liked her, but not everyone did. 

At another school in California, where the children were less obnoxious but the adults in the neighborhood were much creepier, we used a Seventh-Day Adventist "health science" book that began with a unit on "Vital Force," a phrase that had fallen out of use as more specific information about things like vitamins and calories became available; Adventists still thought it was important for children to understand about Vital Force because Ellen White and Jethro Kloss, like their contemporaries, used that phrase. 

 Then there was Mr. Ed. --, who probably never taught anyone anything else but math (and hating school), but he certainly did drill that math into all thirty-five of us, bright or dull. Mr. Ed. had no problem with spending four hours on the math lesson in the book if that was how long it took people to solve a page of problems, but he liked to make up his own problems and interrupt whatever else was going on with "I'm about to fall asleep! I need to do some math! If you know the answer, shout it out." I don't think anybody liked Mr. Ed. I didn't. I don't think most of us liked math, but after a year of shouting in unison, we all knew rules like "Divide, multiply, subtract, bring down" and "Volume equals length times width times height." 

But presumably everyone already knows that textbooks are a genre so tedious as to be beneath consideration. Which of the books that were sold in ordinary bookstores, circulated in public libraries, generally available to people who were not at my school in that particular year, did I not like? There weren't many--probably because my teachers were wary about assigning specific books, other than textbooks. 

What they did was march each classroom full of students at a different time, each week, into the school library, where each child had to choose one book to read during the next week, and every six weeks or so we were supposed to write a report on one of these books. If we had a free choice from the small selection available, in theory, we wouldn't hate reading books so much. The selection included bestsellers of that time! We could read Matt Christopher or Betty Cavanna! There were, however, books that were recommended that I think shouldn't have been. 

1. The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

The story struck me as too rough for a children's book, though of course that's what some boys like about it. Jack London's life and work are nothing I'd want to recommend to children, though of course that's what some teachers liked about it--JL was a socialist and an atheist, and also an alcoholic, and generally not a person most parents would want their children to know. 

Better: Red Fox by Charles Roberts was about a real wild animal. White Fang is still Jack London and still atrocious writing, but at least the dog, which is not a natural wild animal and does not improve when allowed to live like one, is reclaimed as a domestic dog. 

2. Peter Pan by James M. Barrie 

Disney was promoting the living daylights out of their movie version with tie-ins, and they were dreadful, too. What Barrie wrote was a syrupy confection based on dream-logic; the story might have been intentionally left weak. Disney was promoting some contemporary woman's adaptation, which tried to patch the more obvious holes and excise the worst effusions of sentimentality, and which seemed weaker to me than Barrie's original version. The story wasn't done anything resembling justice--and it needed mercy!--until Dave Barry came along, in the present century, and made a real story out of it. 

Better: Peter and the Star Catchers by Dave Barry 

3. The All of a Kind Family and its endless sequels by Sydney Taylor 

Bleep ever wanted to read about people who lived in New York City, had too many children, and dressed them all alike? 

Better: Amy and Laura by Marilyn Sachs. The family are poor and live in New York City, but at least the two children can be told apart. There was a whole series about them, too, or at least people who went to their school. I don't think Amy and Laura were Jewish, which I suspect was the only attraction of the All of a Kind Family, "representation," but at least one of their friends was. Though it seemed to me that Sachs's point may have been that New Yorkers are more like other New Yorkers than like other believers in whatever faith tradition they do or don't claim. 

4. Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia Axline 

Lamest, most misguided, most sentimental study of a hopeless autistic child ever. Who wanted to read about hopeless autistic children anyway? In any case Dibs is not in search of himself. He is all tangled up in self. What he needs so badly that he doesn't even search for it is a way to communicate with other people.

Better: Anything by Temple Grandin or Donna Williams...at least until worthwhile scientific studies of what autism looks like on a brain scan are available. There may be permanent physical differences between the sort of autism that makes people seem "high-functioning" as kids, that becomes an eccentricity rather than a disability as they grow up--and the kind that disabled "Dibs."

5. Sea Wolf by Jack London 

To be fair, I don't think this was actually recommended at school. I think the boys who didn't mind Call of the Wild had noticed that The Sea Wolf is so called because the character is called Wolf Larsen, and one of them happened to be called Larsen, so they called him Wolf, too, and read the book to find other witty things to say to him. Anyway my brother brought home The Sea Wolf and neither the parents nor I could figure out who the BLEEP would have recommended that book to a fourth grade student. 

6. Are You There God It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume 

Quite possibly the worst book for middle school girls I've ever read, though it spawned a few imitations that might have been considered equally bad, or maybe worse because derivative. At some point in between ages ten and fifteen most teenagers do notice that growing up includes a few extras beyond just growing bigger and stronger. They notice, but most of them do not become obsessed with the process of puberty the way Judy Blume's characters do. 

And some of them do, in fact, develop spirituality while other parts of their brains and bodies are still growing, although I don't think I did. When C.S. Lewis had a wise elder advise a young woman, "You will have no more dreams. Have children instead," Lewis could at least point to evidence that he'd intended readers to understand that this was specific advice to a character who's met half a dozen older women who were capable of doing anything more than having children. Judy Blume basically said in this horrible novel that all teenaged girls are fit to do is stare into mirrors and think about their progress toward becoming breeding stock. 

To be fair, no teacher or textbook specifically recommended this one either. It was new, and a publisher's "book fair" representative did the recommending. But it was in the school library and it was disgusting.) 

7. To Teach to Love by Jesse Stuart 

The ickiest part of this icky, sentimental story is that I've read other novels by Jesse Stuart, and all of them were even worse. As one of Dave Barry's correspondents said about a songwriter, Stuart never figured out that he could have bored a hole in himself and let some of that sap drip out. 

Better: Christy by Catherine Marshall.

8. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 

I don't remember whether I read this one, in grade nine, on the recommendation of a teacher or of a publisher. I know it's not a good novel for grade nine. If adults want to sit around in a book club and discuss the historical reasons why young people like Howard Roark and Dominique had to pretend that what they had was rape, when it was clearly consensual fornication, that's different. Teenagers do not need confusion on this point, however historically accurate it was. 

Better: If students want to read Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Reader condenses her wordy fiction down to Anthem and the "Who Is John Galt?" story. Those are appropriate for teenagers. If they lead teenagers to discover The Fountainhead at the public library, at least it ought to be in the adult collection, so everyone has had fair warning. 

(There are a lot of books that are on even elementary school reading lists, these days, that I don't think need to be in school libraries. They should be in the adult collection in public libraries, where teenagers who are ready to discover them can do so. That list includes The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye, A Confederacy of Dunces, Woman on the Edge of Time, Stranger in a Strange Land, and many more. I think college students and adults absolutely should read these books; I think some teenagers are ready to read them; I don't think they need to be stored in places where they can confuse or disturb other teenagers.)

9. My Darling My Hamburger by Paul Zindel 

Give the poor drip points for trying to write about the way things were: A crowd of teenaged baby-boomers hang out together and discuss, among other things, the inadequacy of a lecture about sex in which a pathetic teacher told the girls to deal with the boys' demands for sex by suggesting that they go out for hamburgers. The thinking really was that teenaged boys generally are interested in hamburgers. When they are trying to crawl inside teenaged girls' clothes this generality may be less applicable. 

Anyway, the plot consists of two of these teenagers postponing the hamburgers until they've started a baby. Then they talk endlessly about why all of the alternatives now available to them are so bad. Then before the pregnancy becomes obvious the pregnant girl has an abortion, after which her remaining line is "I'm bleeding. Oh god, I'm bleeding." This kind of thing did happen, and still does, but it was not a pleasant read. 

Especially not during the years when I knew very well that (1) no normal man wanted to be seen talking to a baby-face like me, and (2) I knew to jump back if anyone--male or female--touched any part of my body, including hands, because we don't touch people in town, that was the part of my ancestral culture that got us through the tuberculosis epidemic, and (3) if in some unimaginably distant future I did get close enough to a man to conceive a baby, we were the kind of family who don't waste babies. I would have been given a bus ticket, directions to the home of relatives a good long way from my home, copies of Thank You Dr Lamaze and Let's Have Healthy Children and the La Leche League guide to breastfeeding, and possibly advice on changing my name. The ideal name for a single mother to be using at the time of birth comes from a family that is not represented in any town near hers, in which a young man died of stupidity during the months before the birth. 

Better: Why not the books about the physical, emotional, and financial costs of being a parent? I don't know of a better book about the reality of abortion for teenagers...I bless a teacher who recommended Jurgen, though. Teenagers need some hint that there are alternatives to makng babies that are equally satisfactory in the moment.

10. The serious male fiction writers of the early twentieth century: Faulkner, Hemingway, Miller, Mailer, and their admirers and imitators

Just...blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. With booze-reeking puddles. Some good writing in English was done by men in the early twentieth century, and not all of them even hung out with C.S. Lewis, but they were the ones who didn't take themselves so seriously. Some short pieces the early twentieth century's version of a literary establishment produced might be compared with some things written by Kerouac or Ogden Nash or Farley Mowat, but turn those guys loose in a full-length novel and they became disgusting. Without spirituality, the human condition is disgusting.

Better: Nash. Mowat. Tolkien. Charles Williams. Dorothy Sayers. Pearl S. Buck. Selma Lagerlof. Rose Wilder Lane. Willa Cather. Harriette Simpson Arnow. Della Thompson Lutes. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. George Bernard Shaw. Even Don Marquis would be preferable to the pompous male literary clique of this period.

Book Review: Love in Ocean Grove

Title: Love in Ocean Grove 

Author: Anna Catherine Field

Quote: "Is this the summer Maya Sweeny gets her first kiss?"

It seems time for that to happen. Maya is seventeen, close to eighteen. But she doesn't like anybody in Ocean Grove. In fact she and her best high school friend are planning to go to Los Angeles in search of new boys.

Then Maya's father, who's become addicted to medication he's supposed not to need any more, goes to rehab and Maya's ordered to stay in a "group home." And take a summer job, arranged by the housemother, scooping ice cream in one of the beach shops. The group home has sent other girls from troubled backgrounds to work there, in other summers, but this is the summer the owners' son notices the summer helper. 

Can Maya believe that this child of privilege likes her, and choose to stay in Ocean Grove? Or will she hitchhike to Los Angeles and be a "runaway" with her friend?

I'd be better pleased if Maya decided to stay close to home to be there for her father when he comes home, rather than just for a high school boy, but: clean, age-appropriate romance where boy influences girl in the more prudent direction.  

Book Review: The Shop Owner and the Billionaire Developer

Title: The Shop Owner and the Billionaire Developer

Author: Josie Frost

Date: 2023

Quote: "I dig in and begin setting plans for all the upgrades I hope to accomplish."

Harper has always wanted to keep the "dry goods and sundries" store that's been passed down to her through an aunt. She also wants a human partner (at the beginning of the story she has a cat). Paul seems like an ideal partner for life, but is he only a tourist? Or worse, is he planning to "develop" property on the edge of town in a way that will suction traffic away from Main Street stores like hers?

Paul is one of those men who have difficulty bringing up sensitive topics until they can bellow "This is the way it's going to be! End of discussion!" so it takes some serious character development on his part to allow him to confess to a mutual acquaintance that he wants to be Harper's friend after others have convinced her that he's her enemy. But this is a romance, and gone are the days when a romance could end with the characters separated by difference of opinion but still too much "in love" to marry other people. You know they'll work everything out. The only question is what the cat will do during the marriage proposal.

Billionaire "developers," and people who guide billionaire companies to invest in "development," don't usually read sweet small-town romances.  Perhaps they should. This book is brain candy for ordinary romance readers but it ought to be required reading for all MBA candidates.

Web Log for 8.3.25

Strictly fluff.

Animals 

Music inspired by the Red-Spotted Purple butterfly, with a photo. Red-Spotted Purples are abundant in the Southeastern States in July and August. They're attracted to humans because they're composters who don't usually lick sweat off our skin, but love to slurp up the juices of our food scraps. They like savory vegetables, tomato sauce, fresh damp corncobs from which we've eaten off the corn, and other juicy savory dishes, as well as sweet fruits. They are in the group of butterflies that get some survival benefit from looking, from a distance, like the Pipevine Swallowtail; nevertheless, in the North, when individuals are exposed to cold enough temperatures, they look so different that they were thought for two hundred years to be a different species and called the American White Admiral.  

https://wufeimusic.substack.com/p/1007-a-lover-from-the-past

Art Appreciation 

For those who enjoyed my reaction to a painting last week, here's a link to John Scalzi's take on a sculpture: 

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/08/01/what-the-hell-indianapolis/ 

Book Review: Deception

Title: Deception

Author: Stacy Claflin

Date: 2012

Quote: "I glanced over at my used, hard-earned Ford. It languished next to the glistening BMW. POP! POP! POP! Three of the six driveway lights exploded." 

You'd think Alexis would be past the moody stage of adolescence by now; even baby sister Natalie, in grade ten, ought to be mellowing. Alexis didn't give their parents time to buy her a car, though they could afford one. She worked and bought her own. And their mother might like to make Alexis as much of a fashion plate as Natalie is, but Alexis never has paid any attention to what she wears. And suddenly, though she's almost done with high school, Alexis feels so envious of Natalie, anyway, that her anger makes nearby light bulbs explode. Alexis just knows she's adopted and their parents love their own natural-born daughter more.

The plot thickens when Alexis checks her DNA and finds that she's not related to her parents. Then some trusted friends tell her what sounds like the classic teen-angst fantasy: Alexis's parents have had their memories magically altered so that they think she's their daughter, but actually she's a European princess in their foster care. But...European royalty are sickly and inbred and not even good-lookng, aren't they? Well, yes. Alexis is a vampire princess. The mood swings of puberty are nothing to the mood swings Alexis is scheduled to suffer this winter. Ordinary vampires are made, not born, by having a crucial amount of blood drained out of them by an existing vampire and biting that vampire back, as in the canon of vampire fiction; but vampire royalty are for all practical purposes human up to about age eighteen, and then their vampire super-powers grow in and their mood swings justify locking them up, just as if they'd been humans who seriously believed they were vampires.

Alexis is an all-American brat. No wariness about her new powers or compunctions about getting them right, for her! Alexis talks back. When locked up she uses her power to walk through walls and gets on with exploring her powers all by herself, though warned that as a princess she's "stronger" than other vampires. Alexis be like, "How many rival vampires can I kill?"

The one check on her amoral hedonism is Cliff, the vampire prince to whom she's betrothed. They're old childhood friends. They're "in love." However, when Alexis craves blood, she's heard of a human boy who willingly gave blood to another vampire girl. One day, after biting him, she kisses him. That's cheating on Cliff. Cliff goes off in a royal sulk, which of course only gives Alexis more time and motivation to build a romantic relationship with her willing victim, Tanner. Even her vampire mentor Clara only sighs at the vagaries of fate, that Alexis should be simultaneously in love with two good men.

Vampire lore started with a real-world horror--people used occasionally to be buried while they were only in comas, after which some of them clawed their way out of their coffins looking ghastly and feeling worse. Vampire lore is popular, however, because vampires are idealized embodiments of the human id. They're not going to Heaven in any case so they don't have to bother about behaving like people who are going to Heaven. They can seduce anyone they fancy, do with their victims as they please, and while they're about it take all the wealth and worldly power they fancy, too. Their behavior can be appalling. Why not? People are appalled by them anyway.

Alexis' parents apologize for not having given her a second car, sooner, by buying Alexis a Lexus. Alexis thinks the pun is cute but she's not going to stay with them or finish the year at school anyway. Vampires don't do loyalty. Alexis has improbably committed young men to betray and people--vampires and humans--to kill. 

Is this plot amusing? Do you want to be a person who finds it amusing? Alexis' tale is well told but I feel the need for an extra shower after having read it. 

Butterfly of the Week: Kirby's Graphium

This week's butterfly is sometimes seen as an example of "disruptive coloration," in which a prey species is so brightly colored that it disrupts its predators' view in a way that shuts down their appetite. Graphium kirbyi has mostly black wings with a stripe across each wing that reflects light and can look white, blue, green, yellow, orange, or even pinkish. It can even gleam with a fluorescent white look reminiscent of Graphium codrus, if photographed in just the right light. This stripe is visible on both sides of each wing, and reddish spots are visible on the underside of the hind wing. It catches the eye, and has been much better documented than last week's well camouflaged butterfly, though kirbyi, too, is most often seen in Tanzania. It lives near the coast and is also found in Kenya. A report of it in Nigeria is now thought to have been an error.) It is described as "uncommon and local," though it doesn't seem terribly hard to find at the right times and places.

Photo from Tanzaniabirds.net. The wingspan is typically between three and four inches.

It likes coastal habitat where the males can get brackish water. It is usually found in forests, or along forest roads--males sipping from puddles, females sipping flower nectar in the morning--between September and November.

In English it is also called the Pale-Banded Swordtail. It was identified as distinct from other specimens, and officially described, by W.C. Hewitson in 1872. Exercising the right of the first scientist who describes a species to name it, Hewitson said he wanted to name this butterfly after "Mr. Kirby, the author of a "Synonymic Catalogue of Diurnal Lepidoptera," in admiration of the great accuracy which is displayed in its production, and in gratitude for the many weary hours of research he has spared to me by the labour he has bestowed upon it."

Graphium kirbyi looks very similar to some other Swordtails, especially Graphium policenes. Specimens of these two species that are photographed for display in field guide books and web sites are easy to recognize; policenes has numerous white spots in addition to a fragmented white band across the wings, while kirbyi's upper wings are black with a clear stripe of white. Apparently in real life they're not always so clearly distinguished. 

Photo by Zarek. Lower-contrast colors--palpating a leaf--is this one female?

Another photo by Zarek, catching the fluorescent-white effect.

In males, the appearance of fluorescence may be enhanced by the white hairs in the scent folds. Many male Swallowtails have these folds at the inside edge of each hind wing. In flight the folds are opened and release a species-specific scent that may or may not be noticeable, or be considered pleasant, by humans. Sources don't mention this butterfly's odor, though it does have scent folds.

Its food plants are in the tropical genera Annona, Uvaria, and Uvariodendron, and include Uvariodendron mbagoi, an endangered small tree species only recently named in honor of Frank Mbago at the University of Dar es Salaam. Photos of Uvariodendron leaves, fruits, and flowers illustrate this article: 

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6aad/70eee23763750685c9c5f0c8ba2eb97f0c06.pdf

Although the butterflies can live on any of several plants, some of their hosts are endangered, and since this seems to be one of the large butterflies that nature intended to be sparsely distributed, loss of one host plant could endanger local populations.

Males gather at puddles, and may join mixed flocks, which may include Graphium policenes.

Photo by Clamsdell. The one in the center is kirbyi. As a guess the one at the center left is policenes but this is a question for experts to answer. When male Swallowtails drink at the same puddles this does not indicate that they belong to the same species. Some Swallowtails want to be the only individual of their sex and species in a neighborhood, and will keep moving on until they are...and, if male, these butterflies often get the safety-in-numbers benefit of sharing a puddle with lots of other butterflies of different species.

Photo by Titi-uu. Plastic waste is on the ground at this puddle...blue-green and green-blue litter. How much of an attraction is the blue-green color for this species?

Photos of larval and pupal stages of this species have been printed, but apparently have yet to be digitized. The species is said to pupate with its head down.

Web Log for 8.1-2.25

Animals 

This Canadian Lynx was brought up like a house cat. She purrs and cuddles, then starts bouncing and pouncing. When a lynx kitten starts bouncing and pouncing it's prudent for humans to leave its pen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAmkt_cYkuA

Malaysian butterflies...not our Diana Fritillaries, Monarchs, or Silver-Spotted Skippers, but some of them look similar and fill similar ecological niches. (If Asians think of butterflies when they hear the word "jay," you knew a butterfly had to be called the Popinjay. It will be featured here if I live another five years or so.)

https://ronnieooist56.blogspot.com/2025/08/butterflies-in-july-2025-popinjay.html

Child Safety, Conservatives Off the Deep End on 

No question about it--sexual abuse of a small child is a violent crime. But most of the alleged child sexual abuse involves teenagers. Hello? Have conservatives forgotten being teenagers? Only the teenager involved can say whether any intimate act involving a teenager, including giving the teenager too much information, was a terrible traumatic violation or a transgressive delight. Adults can't make a simple rule like "The magic eighteenth birthday transforms a teenager into an adult capable of consenting to sexual acts." I was eighteen, nineteen, even twenty years old once and I remember that (1) I was capable of enjoying erotic sensations at fourteen, and (2) I was not in any noticeable way better qualified for marriage and motherhood at twenty than I'd been at fourteen. That was partly because our culture actively works at sheltering teenagers from themselves, not to protect the "innocence" that they do not have, but to reduce the birth rate. It was also because the human body is still growing up to age twenty-five. When life expectancy is short and societies want to maximize the birth rate, young people have always been told they were as ready for marriage at thirteen or fourteen as they'd ever be. When life expectancy is long and societies need to minimize the birth rate, we mysteriously discover that having babies before both parents are twenty-five is harmful to both parents and the babies. Well, it is, but hardly enough to justify the irrationality of treating seventeen-year-olds like seven-year-olds.

Exposure to porn does not precipitate puberty in young children. People my age should be able to remember that, too. We all saw, heard, read things, even if they were very wholesome adult-approved books about Being Born, that just didn't make sense until we were close enough to puberty to start to understand them. Depending on what we saw the effect might have been confusing, frightening, or even entertaining--misinterpreted as fighting. Adolescent hormone surges can cause suggestive phrases like "he said" or "her hair" to have emotional effects completely different from the effects of looking at a pornographic picture as a child. (Those effects, for any twelve-year-olds who may be reading this, may be described as wanting to die of embarrassment.) The search for causes of premature puberty and aging has to begin with experiences that the younger generation have and the older generation didn't have, and pop culture was probably smuttier, with more denial of the possibility that anyone might ever not want sex if it was called "love," in the 1950s than it is now. What's changed, most obviously, is the amount of animal hormones and synthetic animal hormones in the food we eat now. Then there are endocrine-disruptor chemicals, most conspicuously atrazine. 

There are some important facts in this article but it's flawed by that attempt to lump seventeen-year-olds and seven-year-olds together, and by Mr. Booyens' belief that looking at porn stimulates sex hormone activity before a body is generating hormone surges all by itself. If a seven- or eight-year-old child is looking at porn and reacting to it in an adult way, parents should not deceive themselves. Even if what's going on is that the child has watched an adult looking at porn and is trying to figure out what the adult saw in it, that child may have a few years left before puberty but probably is going to reach puberty in a different way than nature intended, because child's body is reacting to biochemical influences independent of porn. (If it's a boy, he might reach puberty later, and feel homosexual or asexual, due to being exposed to more estrogen than testosterone in food and perhaps also to atrazine. If it's a girl, she might grow into the sort of mess who can listen to Ariana Grande's caterwauling and not even cringe.)

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28758/the-midnight-zone

Cybersecurity 

Rick Moran is being set up to support a move toward  "social credit," but the reason why we should NEVER put the real name of a living private person on the Internet is simpler. Remember Friday's post about the image of the girl whose head and hands aren't even noticed, apparently wading through piles of bananas? Seriously, being female means being harassed. That's one reason why it must never be possible for all the Free Willies out there to be able to identify women in real life from what they've seen on the Internet. Yes, there used to be a witty and formidable Twit who could document that sixty-year-old breast cancer survivors, as such, are still harassed by men. 

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2025/08/01/people-who-see-others-as-stick-figures-deserve-a-special-place-in-hell-n4942299

And, Moran, as even you have probably observed by now, there are people who see all of us in cyberspace as stick figures. People who'd happily shoot you in the back because you're a Republican, just as there are people who'd at least try (if they'd probably fail) to rape the Twit known as Wise Athena because she is (or was?) a woman. That is why we use names like Wise Athena, which obviously is not a real-world name, or like Priscilla King, which was chosen because it could have been a real-world name and has since been shown to be one, but which is not the name of any real person in my part of the world. For similar reasons our big corporations have names like Microsoft (not "Bill Gates") or McDonald's (not "Ray Kroc") and so on, and in fact, if people are making money in cyberspace, our screen names are the names of registered corporations too. 

Historical Fiction 

For those who like "westerns," a quick reality check on what stagecoach travel westward was really like. Wells Fargo stagecoaches were much rougher rides than that "Wells Fargo" TV series suggests...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19utBmsot8c

Transhumanism, Steroidal 

A license to spray RNA "replicase" on plants embeds a license to spray various "therapeutic" versions of "replicase" directly on humans. Hat tip to Diamond for sharing:

https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/p/modernas-parent-company-now-spraying

You can Google for more reportage, including some from corporate apologists; I recommend this if you're not neck-deep in research on other drugs, vaccines, or "pesticides" already. Anyway, whatever elected officials you have (fear it not, or should I say fear it, this will be global if it's not already) need to know what you think of this obscene proposition. 

Women, Young, Pretty, On Television 

Candace Owens claims to have proof for an unlikely and very offensive claim about Brigitte, Madame Macron. Why UK or US journalists need to prove this, why French journalists can't prove it for themselves if they care, I'm still not sure. So I thought she was another conservative gone off the deep end, but if she can prove it...! Anyway, having thrown into the X firestorm a few scraps of live-human-bait about Sydney Sweeney having a right to enjoy her blue eyes and the other effects of her "good genes," I might as well share this evidence that blue-eyed blondes don't have the only kind of good genes. It is possible to see the genetic merits of both blue eyes and brown eyes. Below we see Owens (a) under stress, (b) as a brand-new mother, holding up like a thoroughbred. Not since Jackie Kennedy's time has anyone done so much for a basic black turtleneck. 

https://ncrenegade.com/tucker-owens/

That she also has brains AND backbone is almost like gilding the lily. (But no worries, Sweeney, your chance to show those things--if you have them--is sure to come.)

Book Review: Under His Wings

Title: Under His Wings

Author: Patsy Clairmont

Date: 1994

Publisher: Guideposts

Length: 143 pages

Quote: “[W]e move closer to the Savior and experience what it means to take shelter under His wings.”

Yes. It’s true. God is a Spirit, not bound to the gender, or even the number, much less the shape, of a single body with literal parts. The Bible calls God a “He” and a “Father,” but also credits Him with female reproductive parts (not male ones) and, in case that didn’t make the point clear enough, bird body parts. Ancient metaphoric language portrays God with a mighty hand, stretched-out arms...and wings.

In this book, drawing on her experience as a mental patient, Clairmont discusses some of the ways believers have interpreted Bible metaphors about seeking and being offered shelter under God’s mother-hen wings. Being carried on God’s soaring-eagle wings would probably have been another book.

Well, the author is known as a Christian comedian...what did you expect? But seriously, this is a book about some of the ways Christians deal with problem emotions like temptation, guilt, relationship problems, fear, and grief.

Clairmont’s individual medical case history would have been more useful to me than just another book of things Christians say to themselves and others, but obviously much remains to be learned about the precise way her emotional issues about being functionally homeless interacted with her “sweet tooth,” exercise avoidance, and other factors to produce her agoraphobia, and the precise way her doctors approached it.

But she has a right to remain silent about those things, and can hardly be blamed for using it...except that if asked she probably would have said “I wasn’t writing a case history for serious students of psychology! I wanted to offer some helpful advice for everybody!”

That was the big mistake of the whole “psychological self-help” school of thought, actually.

Clinical psychologists, working with people who are mentally ill, who don’t have present-time real-world business and family problems, offered to “help” fix the feelings of people who do have present-time real-world business and family problems. This is not always altogether bad. People who are in touch with external reality can have emotional problems, too...but the clinical psychologists forgot to explain to many churchgoing types that there are ways to tell whether the emotion is the primary problem or is even related to the primary problem, or not. When the emotion is not the primary problem, then we don’t need to waste a lot of time “validating the person’s feelings” or molesting the person’s “inner child” or otherwise playing psychoanalyst; that can reasonably be construed as an insult.(We don’t need a “friend” who does this to us, either.) We need to focus on the facts.

FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW.

“Ooohhh! This writer is saying I can’t just waffle on about the ‘feelings’ someone has about losing their home in an earthquake—I need to share my own home with that person, if I want to believe I’ve helped? That’s craaazy!”

Maybe...but I’m not the one who needs the prescriptions for “sleep aids,” antidepressants, or headache pills.

“But if I do the chores and errands for the family with the disabled person, if I buy things from the person with the floundering business, if I avoid the gossipper instead of the person I’ve heard some vague unlikely gossip about, I not only don’t get to play psychologist, and I not only may have to get up and move my lazy body—but I might be encouraging dependency!”

That’s better than encouraging selfishness...but if you can practice frugality and bring your own expenses well below the other person’s, it’ll be a rare moocher who’s brazen enough to exploit your generosity.

Maybe somewhere Out There really lives the adult who’s become Christian-phobic and floundered through dysfunctional relationships with skeevy characters because any suggestion that she’s not perfect reactivates the panic she felt when she broke a vase at age two, who develops a bleeding ulcer before telling his father he’s not willing to care for the father at home, and all the other 1990s-style Christian versions of all the classic emotional problems Freud and Jung identified in the 1890s; I’ve not met them but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. What I’ve met, many times, and what I’ve even been, are the frazzled home nurse who needs an afternoon of respite care, the undercapitalized entrepreneur who needs financial support for their work, the person (quite different from the stereotype that comes to mind when most of us think “homeless”) who’s working a long way from home or whose home was destroyed by a natural disaster...and many more: the people who need for fellow Christians to get up, shut up, and do something useful without one word about emotional feelings, much less any obnoxious, condescending babble about their early childhood.

So I can praise Under His Wings only with faint...recommendations to a very specific, limited audience. Yes, Clairmont is a comedian. Yes, her retellings of the stories of Moses, Hagar, Naomi, and Samson, as read by people in psychotherapy, are funny. Nevertheless this is not just another book of funny stories. This is the one where Clairmont seriously describes what she tells herself to talk herself through a panic attack (and a little about how she changed her eating habits). If you have panic attacks and want to read about someone who’s successfully lived with that form of physical-mental illness for a long time, then Under His Wings is for you.

Web Log for 7.31.25

Insanity, Violent 

In Danville the personal enemy of a businessman (and member of the city council, but the crime doesn't seem to be politically motivated) came into his business, poured what was initially reported as gasoline over the man, and set fire to it. The businessman survived. The Danville police emphasized that they don't usually report details of crimes to the public but are doing so in this case, not because the crime was so bizarre, but because as a councilman Lee Vogler was a minor celebrity who had forfeited privacy. All the mainstream media are reporting the same story. You can pick a link from any search engine for photos, ages, details about the Vogler family, and so on. The homicidal maniac,Shotsie Buck-Hayes, is not explaining his actions at the time of writing. We do know that his wife was divorcing him. Well, she is a decorator and he has no decorative value...

This web site will add: Nobody's mentioning why Shotsie Buck-Hayes was Mr. Vogler's enemy. For all we know, Mr. Vogler deserved what he got. Maybe he poisoned Shotsie's cats. But as Shotsie is about to see, when we take the law into our own hands, no matter how richly someone may deserve whatever bad things he gets, public sympathy instantly swings over to the victim. It is always better to enlist the sympathy of society by pursuing justice within the law.

(For our foreign readers: As a name "Shotsie" or "Shotsy" is usually given to dogs not children, but it's a legitimate name--a misspelling of schatzi, which means "little treasure" and is used as a term of endearment in German. Likewise used is mein Schatz, which means "my treasure" and might be misspelled as "Mineshots." I used to call a cat Schatzi.)

Poem 

Bad Poetry (TM) is now a Substack. Subscribe to get a new, ridiculous poem in your e-mail every week. I'm not aware of Substack sending out spam; I certainly don't.

https://open.substack.com/pub/priscillaking635929/p/bad-poetry-2-candy-land-as-online

Politics 

Division among left-wingnuts? Jasmine Crockett challenges Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders...

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/07/what-did-kettle-just-call-pots-crazies.html 

War 

This web site does not think warfare is "kinda cool." Nevertheless...this web site does think rapists and baby killers have no reason to live. This web site would have been pleased if only the participants in the October Display of Satanic Evil had been lined up and, er um, neutralized. For all purposes. As it might have been by hanging. And their families had been made to dig a common pit, kick their bodies into it, and curse their names. This web site is less enthusiastic about harm done to widows and orphans.

The writer of the post linked below has a different opinion.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2025/07/30/starvation-is-kinda-cool-ackshully-n4942227

Actually, it's quite interesting to read the story the New York Times still doesn't dare to print--because of the loathsome "Trusted Media Initiative" in which news media pledged to censor stories that could have affected the profits of Bayer, Lilly, and Merck, and other evil corporations, but those were the big three we keyboard warriors were going after in 2020. 

Seems more than one baby has been reported dead or near death from what appeared to be starvation. The babies in question were photographed in the arms of adult relatives who were...modestly draped in baggy clothes, per Middle Eastern custom, but obviously not emaciated. (Not, as some trolls claimed, obese. Some of them had saggy faces, more likely due to dehydration, given the season and location, than to obesity; under their baggy clothes their bodies seemed normal-sized. One man's exposed right arm showed healthy muscles.) Little Mohammed Zakaria, the poster child chosen by pro-Hamas idiots, was photographed with a brother who looked healthy. 

While reading the New York Times' embarrassingly ego-defensive admission that MZ did not die of simple starvation, I was watching a kitten with late-showing Manx Syndrome die of superficially similar symptoms. Serena's sole-survivor kitten will never be called Miracle, but he found a name before he died. He was Zakitty. He shared food with devoted relatives who are not obese, but sleek and healthy, on the same rations--relatives who loved and protected him and made sure he had his share, if he was willing to try to eat. He grew very fast while he could live on milk alone, then slowly starved when he grew big enough to need solid food. The gene that gave him a uniquely doubled-up short tail and a thick soft coat also prevented his digestive system from growing normally. He went from looking three weeks older than he was, to looking three weeks younger, a little sack of misproportioned bones. He rejected kibble. When offered rice and chicken he ate chicken enthusiastically. He even managed to excrete a little partly digested chicken; but the strain left him bleeding inside, crying with pain, smelling of blood and attracting flies. To frustrate the flies I brought Zakitty into the office. This seemed to improve matters in the sense that he stopped crying and focussed what energy he had on clinging. In any case his heart stopped around sunset, on the day when he'd made his first little pile in the corner of his box around sunrise. He was fed, and he was loved, and nature's plan was that he starved to death anyway.

MZ had an interesting medical history. At first, according to an aunt, he seemed like a normal healthy baby. But within weeks he'd received different diagnoses including at least two different kinds of brain damage. He was apparently still able to drink milk...but, with a striking resemblance to our unfortunate Manx kitten, around the time nature intended him to start eating solid food, he went into starvation mode. He had grown to a healthy length for his age, then suddenly shrunk down to a bag of misproportioned bones. 

It's a lot easier to believe that that was because his bowels weren't able to do their job than that his slim, healthy-looking brother and pretty-faced mother were eating his food rations. It is not believable that anyone was intentionally withholding food from him. If the Hamas bosses or the vindictive Israelis or whoever had decided to stop sending rations for the baby, the mother would probably have gone hungry before the baby did. Palestinian women told Hannah Hurnard, "No one has taught us anything. We are animals," and there may be some truth in this, but nobody has ever claimed there was anything deficient about their Inner Mama Bears.

No. For some reason MZ was not digesting food. Possible causes for this would include hereditary intolerance of the primary protein in the food his family ate, such as lactose intolerance. Or, possibly related to brain and nerve damage, failure to grow a functional digestive tract. (Humans don't get the Manx gene.) Or, rare in humans but possible when they're living in camp conditions, intestinal worms. Or sensitivity to a chemical in the food his family were eating, such as glyphosate. Or an unusually severe reaction to a medication or vaccination he was given at the hospital where he was diagnosed as brain-damaged.

I'm guessing MZ died of starvation caused by either a glyphosate reaction or a vaccine reaction (or, of course it's possible, by both), because those are two fairly common conditions that doctors would have been trained not to see when the conditions were standing up and screaming in their faces, and also that the New York Times had signed a pledge not to report accurately. I'm guessing that, whatever damage had been done to him by simply being in a camp in a war zone in a desert country in high summer, which was enough to account for brain damage all right, the (did he ever toddle?) eighteen-month-old was actually killed by food and/or medical supplies delivered by the very very humane United Nations,  because that's something the NYT wouldn't report, either.

But blame Israel for defending itself against the indefensible depth of human evil, of course, because left-wingnuts used to be pro-Israel but have recently gravitated toward favoring the countries where the oil wells are. Mercy, they're predictable. And tacky.

This web site will say that if Israel had consulted this web site, we would have advised them to go easy on the orphans. Grandma Bonnie Peters might even have said that, although Palestinians are not children of Abraham, they became adoptive children of Ishmael when they converted to Islam--however incompletely some of them understand the Way of Peace, even now. But why should Israel consult us? They answer to a higher authority.

Young, The 

Elizabeth Barrette's remarks on books a lot of bloggers said they hadn't read are interesting, to me, but what you must see is the last paragraph:

https://ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/6924870.html

Bonus Free Verse: Male Art Is So Confessional

Well they paint things like this,

("The Uncertainty of the Poet" by Giorgio di Chirico)

like a warning:

Girl, in a world where

men are not sequestered

even though all they see are

what you see as defects

your progress is and will always be impeded

by piles of useless disconnected bananas,

which is at least sort of funny

in a might-as-well-laugh-as-cry sort of way.

(Cue the banana music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoI-DIIX8_k )

But they'd rather look at things like this,

(would-be actress, certainly model, Sydney Sweeney}

mostly because

more of us look like the former image

than like the latter.

Having grown old with C-cups 

I observe young Sweeney and think

Girl, you need daily sessions on a swing set

or sailboat, or something that works those muscles.

If they depend that much on support now

your name will be "Saggy Maggy" when you're forty.

But what does she care, she's raking in

money from advertising denim as lingerie,

which is such a stupid idea

it might actually catch on among the very young,

and probably figures, if she ever reaches

an age as unimaginably far off as forty,

she'll be able to afford corrective surgery.

Girl, exercise is a LOT more fun than surgery.

But if we didn't let men run around unsupervised

we could be happy with our sagginess right?

Like lesbians. Eww. Ick. Keep exercising.

The Poet ought to be able to make

some crystal of ladylike logic out of these

displays of male emotional chaos,

but it's still early in the morning.

Enjoy this dribble of ekphrastic free verse

that could probably only ever have been writen,

much less published, by using the Internet.

I am chortling. So are you, I hope.

Oh wottha...the link-up is still open, so I might as well link this one to 

https://dversepoets.com/2025/07/31/openlinknight-388/ .

Book Review: Sekka

Title: Sekka

Author: Jeff Pantanella

Quote: "He was a simpleton, unworthy of the world he ruled. You were right to send me to destroy him."

It's another prequel to a series, and though human characters will appear in longer books in the series, the characters in this mini-book are devils. Sekka challenges an older devil for a fictional territory called Taarne. 

Names have a Lovecraftian sound. Plots have an anime or even online game feeling. If you like Lovecraft, anime, or games and don't mind a story told from a devil's point of view, you will probably want the whole series.

Bad Poetry: Scab

For the Poets & Storytellers United, a  poem about scabs. A scab is a crust of dried body fluids over a wound, or a strike-breaking worker.

A strike was meant to be a blow

if only wounding profit.

If workers thought job paid too low

they simply would walk off it,

and this was felt as "bleeding" labor,

money, all away,

and bosses tried to hire a neighbor

to fill in that day.

And so this man was called a scab.

It wasn't meant to injure,

until the striking laborers' gab

added gall and ginger.

A skilled coal miner's pay was low; 

work, dangerous and hard.

How far below could wages go

on a day labor yard?

So scabs could easily be despised

as lowest of the low

though, when disasters traumatized,

to scabbing men would go.

Those times are gone to come no more

and who would call them back?

So Hollywood said "Mining lore

a scab's viewpoint doth lack."

And someone wrote an eighties movie

simply called The River

and said "Mel Gibson's young and groovy!

He'll make girls' hearts quiver,

and for the boys, bring Spacek in,

and show them having sex

(from shoulders up) with sweaty skin

in scabs' grim little shacks."

Mel Gibson played a noble-hearted

man who saved his farm

by scabbing; Sissy'd not be parted

from him, but risked harm

and left the kids behind to meet him

in his pine board shanty.

From that day on, reviewers treat them

as poison, not eye candy.

Gibson's his own producer now.

Spacek's career was charred.

Bygones are bygones, you'd avow,

but bitterness dies hard.

(The River (1984) is currently available to watch online--for a fee. 

In 1983 the producers looked for a real Tennessee town that looked weatherbeaten but not hopeless. The farm scenes that ended up in the movie were shot in Tennessee. For the town, people said "They wanted Clinchport; too bad they didn't come out before the flood." Gate City wanted to be used as the scene of the movie--though we don't actually have a river. The producers didn't think my town looked weatherbeaten enough but finally agreed that a short stretch of a back street could be made to look down-at-heel when wet. So you can see an unflattering view of part of my town, with some real local people in the crowd, in the scene where Mel Gibson goes to the bank after the flood. 

We never were a mining town. People I knew liked The River and Gibson and Spacek and the whole foofarah of having a film crew in town. Those who remember 1983 still do. 

People who belong to unions, e.g. the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, haaaated the movie and have never forgiven those who made it.

I'd never claim that it was a great movie, no suspense, no comedy, not even a car chase, strictly a reenactment of some long-gone scab's apologia, but what pretty scenery it has!)

Malnutrition: Kitten Update

A photo of a skinny baby, whose given name is Mohammed Zakaria, inflamed some bloggers. "But he has health problems, some say? Anybody would have health problems if people keep killing the people who are delivering their food." The Internet kerfuffle has established, mainly, that Americans can't tell one kind of Semites from another. Semites are delivering food to Gaza and other Semites are attacking them, so the question becomes whether Israel, Iran, the United Nations employing local people, or whoever else, are delivering the food and whether Israel, Hamas, or some other group are attacking them. Maybe it's not a matter of politics. Maybe there are just a lot of men in this part of the world who will fight over food.

https://x.com/NYTimesPR/status/1950311365756817690

Meanwhile Serena's kitten was growing fast for the first few weeks. Sedentary, no indication that he'd ever be a hunter, but such a sweet, cuddly, well-behaved kitten. Then he hit a plateau, as he reached an age where he needed more food and his mother supplied less food. Nature intends six-week-old kittens to feel hungry after nursing, look around, and start eating solid food. Serena's kitten ate four or five kibbles one day--and no more. He stopped gaining bone length and started losing flesh. He went from adorably coltish to alarmingly emaciated. Kibble was set out for him, even held up to his mouth; he wanted nothing to do with it. I offered him cooked meat. He eats that, but he's not gained any length, weight, muscle mass, or energy yet. (Kittens are supposed to be just noticeably bigger almost every day.) Control of digestive functions seems to be coming slowly and with difficulty, rather than developing almost instantaneously as it does with most kittens. Self-cleaning is also coming slowly; this week Serena's kitten has a body odor most felines never allow themselves to have.

There are a few unfortunate baby lifeforms--in all species--who can starve to death even while receiving enough food to keep normal members of their species well fed. They're born without the ability to absorb nutrients from food. Sometimes a single food source, like cow's milk or wheat, may be the problem and the baby can develop normally if supplied with an alternate source of the same nutrients. Sometimes only mother's milk nourishes the baby. A few unfortunate creatures, like some tailless kittens, don't digest even mother's milk well enough to support life.

"Mohammed" is a human name, but if Serena's kitten fails to qualify for the name Miracle his name may be recorded as Zakitty.

Petfinder documents that some people do seem to want to make the effort to keep alive Manx cats who may be considered sicker than Serena's kitten is, Mix human-quality food, massage the posterior half, clean the fur. The cats can be "worth it." They have extra soft, thick fur and may reward their humans with lots of purring and snuggling. I think Serena's kitten may have inherited some ability to understand words. He certainly is affectionate. For someone who can commit to a lot of the kind of caretaking most cats never need and would violently reject, he might still be a satisfactory house pet.

Book Review: Suspension

Title: Suspension

Author: Claudia Silva

Date: 2019

Quote: "The werewolf hunter feared nothing. Sometimes he even believed himself invulnerable."

In the fictional world of the series for which this novelette is a trailer, vampires and werewolves are real, so the FBI employs law-abiding ones to track down and neutralize criminal ones. Dylan is a vampire werewolf hunter at risk for the occupational hazard of losing touch with reality. To keep his ego down to a size that allows sanity, he's going to have to work with a human partner.

This is the story of how he thinks it through and decides he can stand to work with a human if it's a young woman. To find out who she is, why Dylan wants her as a partner, and whether she'll have to become a vampire to work with him, you'll have to buy one of the longer books in the series.

I'll pass, thanks. But vampire story lovers might want the whole series.

How to Get Chores Done with Less Friction

(There's a reason why I was prompted to write this by seeing a cartoon strip, rather than observing any of The Nephews at home. The Nephews were all good examples of how this teaching/parenting tip does work...even if only one of the full-time resident adults in their homes was using it.)

Why Calvin lets a simple request to do a quick chore curdle his experience of his summer vacation...

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-vacation-spoiled.html

Well, because he's a horrid little brat, of course. That's the point of the strip. Named for a writer who said that most people just aren't destined for eternal happiness, Calvin just isn't destined to have a happy childhood. He has no friends. Even his own parents don't like him. Even his favorite toy is someone he imagines fighting with more than someone he loves. But Calvin does things real children do when they're caught up in passing clouds of stupidity, so how do we (adults and children) keep simple requests from curdling vacations, or weekends?

Calvin's parents could try considering his personality. Calvin shows little evidence of a moral sense, but he is a self-starter. He doesn't wait for permission or instructions. He has his own plans for every minute of every day. He does not like any interruption of those plans, even when it seems to adults that all he's doing is playing with a toy.

For kids like Calvin, playing, or reading, or listening to the radio, are work; the kids are learning things, even if those things aren't spelled out in the curriculum for their age group. 

So how can those kids do the work they assign themselves while also making some sort of contribution to the family where they're getting free rent, meals, and chances to do their self-assigned work? 

Short answer: Parents need to plan. This is difficult for some parents, like the poor little hypothyroid patient who got so many Calvin-like reactions out of me when I was older and deserved spankings more than Calvin in the cartoons. Whether just screaming for the child to drop everything and do something for you, when you feel like it, is merely an ego trip or is partly justified by somebody's disease condition, it's not going to work well with a child who has per own agenda for the day. Parents can get a lot more work out of the same child if they get up early in the morning, make plans, tell the child what's expected, and let the child make per own plans for the rest of the day--after they've done their chores.

Suppress any urge to yell "Yoo-hoo, Calvin, come and take out the garbage now" unless that's a punishment for his not having taken out the garbage on schedule. Instead, make it part of the family schedule that Calvin will collect and put out all the garbage after supper. 

Forget about "Hey, Calvin, come and peel the potatoes now." Instead, announce at breakfast, "I want to make a stew for supper. If you come in and clean and cut up the potatoes for the stew at five o'clock, Calvin, we might have time to bake cookies." 

If you feel tempted to holler "Calvin, come and tend this bean patch now," punish yourself with a forfeit: You didn't put it on the day's schedule, so you tend the bean patch. Next time you'll remember to say, "Calvin, I'd like to see the bean patch cleaned up by midday," at breakfast. Better yet, by next year Calvin will be responsible for the bean patch; if he loses crop yields to weeds or beetles, there goes his pocket money, without a word out of you. 

Even parents who are bringing up the sort of child who does want to be told what to do, and how to do it, at every step, need to think about whether that's the way to teach the child anything. This child may seem easier to live with than Calvin is; may be more motivated by adult attention rather than by actual learning, or may in fact be a slower learner, but in any case seems more fun to teach things to. But are you actually teaching the child anything? After guiding the child through every step a few times, it's good to let the child remember what to do next. If he forgets to empty one of the wastebaskets into the main garbage bag, he has to go back and do that step later, 

What about the middle school reader who may be saying, "Yes, but one or the other of the adults at my house is too sick, lazy, stupid, disorganized, hung-over, or whatever, to make plans and teach me how to do things on a sensible schedule?" You have my sympathy. My mother was too ill to make plans for a few years. I talked back and acted bratty and felt very sorry for her because I remembered when she'd had more use of her brain. Fortunately I didn't act too bratty to be able to work with and learn from her when she was thinking clearly--after changing to stronger medication, or eventually learning how to get herself off the medication.

(Some kids, like Huckleberry Finn, really do have to leave a dysfunctional adult alone to destroy per own life while the kids find alternative parent-figures. That situation is too awful to be addressed in a random blog post. We are talking here about adults who are basically competent, but, perhaps because nobody helped them form the habit of planning the day's chores in the morning, aren't doing that for you.) 

A better plan than whining and acting bratty would be to take over part of the adult's role on behalf of this unfortunate adult in your family. If person is hypothyroid (or hung-over) person probably sleeps later than you do. Practice getting up very quietly so you can tidy up the mess person very likely left in the kitchen and cook breakfast, or go out and pick the vegetables in the garden, or whatever you know needs to be done at your house. Get it right: your sick relative is likely to feel very defensive when you act more like a responsible adult than person does, and may try to defend per ego by whining that you've done the chore all wrong. If what needs to be done is something you've not done before, let the adult show you how to do it, on whatever schedule person is capable of moving on. It will probably be enough of a good healthy shock if you bring the adult breakfast in bed and say "Could you show me how to fix the porch steps today, please?" 

In any case, your strategy is to do more useful work around the house all by yourself than person can get out of you by nagging and spoiling your day.