More of the same. More time spent recovering from forced crashes even than copying stuff to files.
Music
Jefferson Airplane.
Carl Orff.
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
A Thing I Couldn't Live Without
This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt was "a thing I couldn't live without." We've had that one before. I almost didn't do it, but then I thought I might as well...
Water.
You can't live without water.
I can't live without water.
Huge corporations can't build those "data centers" to store, and abuse, all the information foolish people put into "the cloud" without very large amounts of water. And electricity. And air conditioning.
Likely, to keep their computers going, they'll use up enough water and electricity that there won't be enough for the rest of us to go on living our lives. And so on.
Why even speculate about the bad consequences? Let's just accept that "data centers" are intended to provide jobs and an economic boost for one year, two at most, and then decrease the number of job openings and depress the economy after that. I know of no American neighborhood that needs that effect. We need to stop racing with China toward an economic cliff, and instead, step aside and plan to help China recover from its fall.
How do we do that?
Very simple. We don't need to listen to the partisan political bickering about how this allegedly necessary evil is to be regulated, in which way will do us, personally, more damage. We need to make the evil unnecessary.
Don't put any more information into "the cloud."
Use a simple phone that doesn't try to be a computer, or none. Don't use flatphones. Try to avoid touching them--they can be used to gank images of your fingerprints for nefarious purposes.
Use a computer with physical data storage, or none. Don't put data in "the cloud."
Demand printed bills, and pay bills with cash. Don't give people with whom you do business an excuse to put data, especially not your financial data, in "the cloud."
I believe (I could be wrong) that if a critical mass of Americans are religious about these three things, we may be able to save the Internet and our personal, Net-free home computers that are still running Windows 95.
Tablets, flatphones, Windows 11, QR codes as a pretext for discriminatory pricing, Handmaid's Tale nightmares of mass confiscation of funds and deletion of accounts for individuals or groups--out they all go. Simplify your electronics. If it was rolled out after 2016, it's probably "cloud-based." Tell the company to stick it up their nose.
Don't buy new electronics unless and until the manufacturers get back to cloud-free equipment that's built to last. Nobody really wants to store data on tape for pity's sake, or even on floppy disks, but if it doesn't have a hard drive and a port for stick drives, leave it in the store.
Too bad if this disappoints Donald Trump, but he's from the generation that's never really understood or appreciated computers anyway, and his decision to cling to notions about "the cloud" performing the economic miracle our system of checks and balances won't let him use tariffs to perform...well, it came from desperation and from ignorance. Empathy is appropriate. Empathy, but not indulgence.
Petfinder Post: Glen of Imaal, Bassets, and Manx
Last week I asked whether it was Petfinder or Microsoft that was interfering with this web site's bringing you photos of adoptable Dogues de Bordeaux, or crossbreeds. On the Tuesday morning, it was Microsoft. By the Friday night...I'm seeing clear evidence that Petfinder is under attack by the control freaks who want to censor domestic dogs into extinction.
Like this little crossbreed. More about him below.
Speaking personally and frankly as a pet owner, my recommendation would be that people looking for a good pet expose themselves to animals of the species that appeals to them--friends' pets' puppies, kittens, etc., shelter pets, Petfinder features--and see for themselves that, even if they have preferences about size, color, and coat type, it's easiest to bond with a mixed breed. Given their choice, animals will breed out funny-looking dysfunctional mutations and produce healthy offspring. Not only will natural selection do this; animals who aren't forced or desperate will usually choose healthy mates who don't share any defective genes they may carry. Thus our Serena consistently rejected tomcats who showed the Manx gene until one winter when the only breeding male in the neighborhood showed that gene, and gave birth to a kitten who died from the effects of the Manx gene rather than, as usual, the Seralini gene.
(Having kittens is Serena's best chance, as a Seralini cat, to survive all the drive-by spraying to which we've been subjected. She has not been feeling well this summer. If she didn't have the Seralini gene I'd think she might be more comfortable being spayed; since she does have that gene I know she might not live a year after being spayed. Silver's still alive, but she's not the beautiful healthy cat she used to be. We've all been poisoned. With overtly, admittedly, murderous intentions. Why I think so little of the men who are currently alive may have something to do with the fact that one of them is trying to kill me, under the terms of a loophole that shouldn't be in the law, over a small patch of land that's not even arable, and I've yet to see any of the others doing one thing about it. Well...the one who might be expected to do something is over eighty years old and has been poisoned too. I expect online readers are at least leaning hard on all of your elected officials to close the loophole, making it illegal to use or sell "pesticide" sprays outdoors. They have been and are used to injure and kill human beings. I have some names. And if the busybodies gave a dahm about animals, they'd stop whining about dog breeds and focus on those poison sprays.)
Anyway, mixed breeds tend to be healthy and lovable and, if you're not obsessed with a specific breed's look, appealing to the eye. But that's only one side of the coin, here. As Americans we need to be concerned about censorship. We must never allow censorship to work in the way the people who demand it want it to work.
There are some breeds of animals whose look depends on genes that I'd agree should be bred out of the pool. Bulldogs? Absolutely. Manx cats? Totally. Sometimes the lethal gene can be bred out while the valuable traits that go with it, other than a freaky look, are passed down separately through a line of normal-looking animals. Serena's grandfather had a defective tail, but although the Manx gene is dominant, Serena is only a carrier; she has a normal tail. If the fathers of her kittens also have normal tails, and the Seralini Effect doesn't turn fetuses into mere self-cleaning mechanisms for the mother's body, the kittens will be healthy. Meanwhile Serena is an American Short Hair, if on the wide-framed side, known to have a Manx grandfather and a Siamese great-great-grandfather, and she has all the best features of all three breeds. It's worth getting to know crossbreed dogs, too.
But that's before the busybodies stomped onto the scene, screaming for suppression of any mention of the breeds they hate--even beagles (maybe they got some funding from Anthony Fauci?). Right. Until the busybodies have stepped forward to confess, repent, and atone, it would be a good thing for human society if people intentionally adopted dogs of those breeds. If the look is in fact dysfunctional, then adopting those dogs from shelters where they've all been sterilized anyway is a good option.
Failing that, one can also adopt them from responsible breeders who sterilize the puppies who show the worst problem genes--the bulldogs who not only can't swim and have trouble breathing in hot weather, but also inherit heart or eye disease, e.g.
Either way, the individual dogs may not live as long as dogs of different breeds born in the same year, but so long as they're not in pain, they can be valuable to society by making a statement about censorship. We can burn up the Internet with pictures and stories of what wonderful pets our beagles and corgis and spaniels are. We can show the would-be censors that interest in dog breeds rises when idiots squeal that they want newspapers to stop printing pictures of certain types of dogs. The censored newspaper have, I believe, already learned how much censorship is costing them. We all need to work to remove any possible pay-off from any kind of censorship.
In the case of dogs whose breeds are defined by defects, like the next breed on our list, the ideal thing would be to rescue the dogs from shelters. Free shelter space for other animals in need, and choose a dog who won't be adding any more problem genes to the pool to parade past a bossyboots' house every evening.
Petfinder is trying, with this next breed...but people are sabotaging efforts to get these dogs neutered and adopted.
The first breed I looked up today was the Glen of Imaal Terrier. This is a small, somewhat defective dog that was first bred in a remote rural corner of Ireland. I had never heard of it before the name turned up on the list of breeds the would-be dictators want to render extinct. There are some obvious problems with the breed; few Americans are interested in it. I was surprised that Petfinder even had a page for it, but they have one.
Shelters and organizations associated with Petfinder have created a total of three pages for Glen of Imaal Terriers in search of homes in Washington and eleven in New York. And all fourteen pages are in aid of exactly two dogs. Both are crossbreeds. I was able to get a photo and web page address for the gray dog, shown above; his web page at
...is likely not to work by tomorrow morning. Enemies of the US Constitution right here in the United States have tampered with most of the web pages set up to help these two lovable little crossbreeds find homes. Other pages for these two dogs didn't work. Some opened messages saying the pages did not exist. Some redirected back to the main page with all the mixed breeds, which I thought could probably be guaranteed an effective way to steer someone looking for a specific type of dog straight away from rescue organizations, running to a breeder. People yapping for censorship in the name of animals do not, in fact, give a dahm about the animals. They are all about control.
The Glen of Imaal Terrier has a look defined by a gene for a type of dwarfism. It's a full-sized dog on miniature legs. Short legs both reduce the efficiency with which terriers can dig and reduce the size of the tunnels they need to excavate to dig out rats and other nuisance species, so their overall effect on survival may be neutral. Nevertheless, to most people a purebred, truly typy GIT looks ridiculous.
A show quality GIT is a little over a foot high at the shoulder, weighs 30 to 40 pounds, and is likely to live ten or fifteen years. Most owners give these dogs full marks for affectionate bonds with the family, high marks for behaving well with children, and average ratings for relationships with other pets--terriers have been known to eat other pets who were smaller than the terriers. Tendencies to joint, eye, and neuromuscular diseases run in some bloodlines; responsible breeders will sterilize the dogs who inherit these genes and at least tell you what you're adopting. The coat needs brushing and the ears need cleaning once a week. (The American Kennel Club recommends buying a "grooming table" for a GIT; they don't recommend this expense with every breed.) Grooming is necessary to keep the coat from forming mats that harbor fleas; GITs don't shed much. They need frequent exercise but will flop down when tired, before those stubby little legs can carry them very far. For the first year puppies should be protected from jumping off furniture or going down stairs. They're intelligent enough to be easy to train, can be stubborn about training that goes against their instincts, and are not known for bonding with other dogs. All terriers are built to run and hunt differently than other types of dogs; few could run very far with a pack of hounds and collies, but the Glen of Imaal Terrier is sometimes said to be more independent than other terriers. I have seen homeless terrier and spaniel type dogs running in their own little packs. But some, not all, GITs attack other small dogs.
Problem? GITs like to be with their humans. When they're left outside in a fenced yard, see something they want to chase, and burrow out under the fence, then there may be a problem for neighbors' pets and potentially for your GIT. If your dog stays near you or indoors where it can't get out, there should be no problem.
There aren't a lot of GITs in North America and there probably don't need to be more. There aren't a lot of the next breed on the list, either. Petfinder doesn't even have a listing for Grand Bassets, but it has plenty of Basset Hounds. We looked at them last spring. There are enough Bassets in shelters that we can look at them again.
Bassets are also good-sized dogs on short stubby legs. And they have long floppy ears, which busybodies don't like. They are also prone to the delusion that they can sing, which your neighbors may not like.
Since I found three cute Persian cat photos last week, this week I'll go with Manx.
Zipcode 10101: Tigress from Corpus Christi by way of Ridgefield, New Jersey
Part Basset and part Labrador Retriever, Tigress is unlikely to be mistaken for any other dog. When that photo was taken she was not quite 6 months old and weighed 32 pounds. She's probably bigger than that by now and likely to keep growing. She is described as a sweet, gentle, affectionate pet. Neither Bassets nor Labs are known for cleverness, but she can probably learn basic dog etiquette if people are patient and gentle with her.
Cressida from Mississippi by way of Oakland
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/cressida-4b5007b9-88fb-44fe-a61d-7b6816602b8a/nj/oakland/for-pets-sake-rescue-ms229/details/
Typical gray tabby Manx, Cressida likes to make up her mind about when or whether to snuggle, but when she lets her inner snugglebunny out to play she makes people feel loved.
20202: Beau from Jarrettsville, Maryland
Have you seen a more classic Basset? This young hound is described as a sweet pet who needs some work--basic training, ideally with a better trained senior dog companion. He's prone to stray and needs lots of walks, with a double leash, to burn off his adolescent energy and a strong deep fence to keep him from being a nuisance. He does well with cats. He does not do so well with men or children. So he's not for everybody, but he'd be a great pet for some people.
Sasha from Herndon
Sasha is available as a foster pet! She likes to take her time getting to know people. While she's getting to know you, you can get to know her, free of charge. If you can bear to part with her, you can help her find a purrmanent home.
30303: Gelato from Carrollton
This Basset-terrier crossbreed is just five months old--a friendly, bouncy, yappy puppy who likes going for walks and running up to the fence to greet other dogs. He needs someone who can discipline his enthusiasm without breaking his happy spirit.
Jinx from Winder
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/jinx-manx-2026-308-a8dc1002-115e-44f6-8fd1-45ab3354d960/ga/winder/pup-cat-co-ga76/details/
This cute, quiet, slightly shy kitten has no tail at all. If you love her, which you probably will, you'll have her spayed. She takes her time about deciding whom to snuggle up beside. If she chooses you, you will know you've been chosen.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Music Link Log for 9.28.26
Microsoft's spite-ware has caused the laptop to crash five times this morning, and it's only midday. They think this is a way to sell Microsoft products?!?!?!?!?! Boybosses, a thing America does not need...
By midnight, all I've done with the computer has been pasting content into document files for printing and, part of the time, listening to the videos people shared. A pasting job that should have taken half an hour took, between a quirk built into Libre and Microsoft's incessant attacks, from 2 p.m. until midnight.
Have all of you readers either installed Linux, or at least had it on order, by now?
Music
Boogie Belgique.
MDC.
Frenic.
Moby.
Tom Petty.
Matthew Halsall.
The Beatles, together and separately.
Chequerboard.
Sonics.
Nanci Griffith.
Cannonball Adderley.
War.
Bob Dylan.
Rolling Stones.
The Byrds.
J.S. Bach.
Ludovico Einaudi.
Steeleye Span.
Avishai Cohen.
Lamb .
Movie Review: Napoleon Dynamite
At the Meow, LoneStar Neanderthal mentioned that Napoleon Dynamite could be watched free of charge (via a Russian web site...hmmm...could that have anything to do with the extra cyber-annoyances lately? One never knows what may find one's computer while one is merely watching an old movie...You've been warned).
I watched it. It has a simple plot, simple enough for high school viewers:
(1) High school is a bore, but what else are you going to do while you're too young to get a job or go to college. So you keep going, even if you're being physically abused there.
(2) Being nice to someone who is new and looks likely to have a worse time than you're having is a good idea.
(3) Exercise solves a lot of problems.
Napoleon Dynamite is a nerd and the son of a nerd. Even worse, he's also the nephew of a jock (who actually spends money on a time machine he buys online, which, when assembled and plugged in as directed, delivers electric shocks to the purchaser...Uncle Rico's best years were in high school and he wanted to go back to 1982 so desperately he'd try anything). The school bully likes to bang his head against his locker door and demand his money. He doesn't have any, when the movie starts, because giving him pocket money was one of the many things his grandmother did, and she's in the hospital as the result of playing stupid childish games with Uncle Rico, a grown man who still spends most of his time throwing balls around the yard.
The first thing Napoleon does right is be nice to the new boy, who is short, but travels with two college-drop-out types in a snazzy car. After school they see the school bully picking on another boy who's even smaller than they are. New boy George's buddies drive past. George makes a sign. The two older boys look at the bully. Now the bully knows he's being watched, and he ain't no bully no more, at least not where George and Napoleon can see him.
Napoleon decides that George would make a better class president than the well-connected blonde who dates the bully. Napoleon is still a nerd. George is still short, and still speaks English with an accent. However, Napoleon figures high school boys will vote for someone who can offer them protection.
He works on self-improvement. He draws cartoons that seem unlikely to impress anybody, but as the girl he's chosen to invite to a school dance doesn't have any other invitations she goes with him. He practices dancing with videos. He and his father take a martial arts course. He even tries handing out campaign flyers with George. Even though the blonde's idea of a campaign is "Vote for Summer! It'll be Summer all the time!", people do at least take her folders. People walk past the boys, embarrassed for them.
Meanwhile, Uncle Rico's ideas for ways he and Mr. Dynamite can earn some money go from bad to worse. They start peddling dishes that are carefully not labelled Tupperware. That doesn't work; in their neighborhood anybody who'd consider plastic dishes already has them. When Uncle Rico tries to sell some girls from school a product advertised with flyers headed "BUST LUST," Napoleon knows he has to step in, or the police will. He tells Rico to move out of their house. Rico won't move without a fight; he knocks Napoleon down. Napoleon has learned some things to do to guys who knock him down. Rico moves out.
Before the election, each candidate is prepared to make a speech. They've apparently not heard the part about being asked to follow the speech with a "skit." Summer gabbles out an inane speech, then does a dance with the rest of the cheerleading squad that leaves the boys in the audience speechless. Between that and the thought of a "skit," George can barely mumble "I'm George. Vote for me." Napoleon does the dance he's been practicing at home and gets a standing ovation...
It was fun. Who's afraid of remembering high school? But I'm posting this review mostly because I'm curious whether anyone else watched the movie, or others on the same site, and subsequently had more than the usual amount of cyber-harassment. (I don't mean personal harassment. I mean "security" ware constantly slowing down or crashing your computer.)
Monday, September 28, 2026
Web Log for 9.27.26
the
Books
Mee, Bob. Poems in the Key of Aardvark. Recommended at
Long list of recommended reading for civil libertarians, who may or may not be interested in the Libertarian Party as it has been organized (?) during my lifetime.
Crafts
Is this not a beautiful quilt top? And does it not suggest a glorious knitted coverlet?
You will be able to buy the finished quilt on Etsy when it's all made up. You can order the knitted coverlet here. (Yarn colors won't match fabric colors; I like the crayon-box-bright on white effect but you can suggest other colorways--shades of white, or brown and beige, or colors on black, or flower colors on leafy green, or cloudy whites and grays on sky blue. Pink, red, and purple on orange if you want that; it's your coverlet.)
Details of the quilt, and other cute decor items to go with it:
Music
Mathias Duplessy.
Theme from "X-Men"video game. (This link opens a longish playlist, if you let it. I didn't. Too many commercials.)
Tom Petty.
Weird Al Yankovic.
Theme from "Godzilla."
Kingdom Hearts.
Parov Stelar.
Lupin the Third.
George Harrison.
Linkin Park. (Warning: these lyrics sound as if someone who was depressive would find them very depressing. I don't; they describe the speaker's feelings about a failed personal relationship of his, which is about him not me. But the song was shared by someone who was taking medication for "depression." The person dropped out of university and became a "tradwife." Pregnancy was not involved. Whether that felt to her like a cause or an effect of depression isn't clear. Depression serious enough to warrant medication is a physical disease, but it's possible that some people today are being medicated, sometimes fatally, for the variety of acedia Betty Friedan called the Problem that Has No Name.)
The Drifters.
Charles Aznavour. This is a valuable song. It expresses exactly how and why men get dumped. A man who says any of these things to any woman should be dumped immediately. (The way they speak to their exes or their mothers is the way they'll speak to their wives, or worse yet the women who've been sucked into "committed monogamous relationships" outside marriage, when the novelty wears off.)
From Watership Down. Rights are said to belong to a British rabbit rescue organization.
Elvis Costello.
Bob Dylan. (I think everyone else makes his songs sound better than he did, but he did write them.)
Aqua Velvets.
Roy Clark.
Gramatik.
Bing Crosby.
Ludovico Einaudi.
Shirley Bassey.
Elvis Costello.
New Book Review: Sons from Afar (Columba Booth)
This is a Sunday book; it contains an evangelical sermon with a major character making a commitment to Christ. It is not connected in any way to Cynthia Voigt's Sons from Afar. (I e-mailed the author about this; she had not been aware of the earlier book with the same name.) After a brief appearance here on a Monday, this review will be reposted on a Sunday, per site policy.
Title: Sons from Afar
Author: Columba Booth
Date: 2026
Quote: "God was about to hand us a miracle with this job in California."
When the Browns move to California to work for a church, they meet the Ropers, who aggressively "rope them in" to the Crossing the River project. A little investigation reveals that the immigrants they're trying to help are illegal. A little more suggests that they're being illegally trafficked. Mrs. Brown, who didn't want to get involved in risky charity projects, soon finds herself in a car chase, leading cartel members into a police trap, while hauling a van load of children to a "safe house."
I think the ending of this story is too good to be true, but it does give a picture--it'd make a good "moving picture"!--of the complexities of illegal immigration into the United States.The Ropers, who claim to think everyone's entitled to live in the US and spend money lavishly on the migrants in their care, privately refer to these people as "product" they sell. A child found hungry and dirty turns out to be the son of well-off parents, kidnapped by their political enemies. The question of whether to help people cross borders illegally, or help them earn more money where they are, has nothing to do with "race." This novel is obviously fiction but, if it provokes people to look up the facts behind it, it will be an eye opener.
The title refers to a subplot in which a character whose foster parenting experience didn't end well reconnects with her foster son, and the idea that the risks of things like foster parenting are worth the rewards.
Butterfly of the Week: Eastern Giant Swallowtail
"Giant Swallowtail" refers to different butterflies in different countries. Jamaica has a Giant Swallowtail that is more gigantic than Heraclides cresphontes. Florida's Giant Swallowtail is, however, the biggest butterfly normally found in the Eastern States.
Photo by Aabge001, February, Florida. For a long time, the Monarch and the Tiger Swallowtail could claim to be the biggest butterflies most people in the Eastern States would ever see. (They have different shapes, and individuals vary; some Monarchs, including all that I've seen, are bigger than some Tiger Swallowtails, but Google says Tiger Swallowtails hold the records.) The Giant Swallowtail is bigger than either--at least in Florida.
Photo by Jim at MarylandBiodiversity.com, taken in Maryland, in July. In the twentieth century this species was reported only from Florida and south Texas, but it has now been found in most of North America.
Photos by Terrymortier, Wisconsin.
Photo by Robert Rold, Kentucky.
For a long time it was believed that the Giant Swallowtails that occasionally infest California orange groves were straying H. cresphontes, but the caterpillars look different at some stages and the adults' tail ends look different, so they are now classified as a separate species, H. rumiko. We shall consider the Rumikos, or Western Giants, in their turn.
Meanwhile, this chart (scroll down as necessary to see the chart) explains the typical minor differences in color markings on cresphontes and rumiko. H. thoas typically has an even wider yellow stripe across the upper forewings. Swallowtails can be variable. It can be hard to tell the species of a living, flapping butterfly. Reportedly the tail ends of the males can be identified by touch, but who wants to touch a butterfly's tail end? (They don't sting but they do stink--or, depending on your species, smell irresistible. People who handle moths and butterflies have been mobbed.)
H. rumiko was identified after the tradition of naming Swallowtails in honor of characters in literature had broken up; it was named after a researcher's wife. H. cresphontes, however, was named early enough for its name to make sense at least as wordplay. Heraclides means descendants of Heracles (the Greek form of the name) or Hercules (the Latin form). Cresphontes was said to be the descendant of that character. Aristodemus and Temenos, his brothers, are also commemorated in the names of Heraclides species. One of the butterflies' favorite food plants is Zanthoxylon clava-herculis, or Hercules' Club. Humans notice them more often on citrus trees, but Zanthoxylon is classified in the citrus family.
The easiest way to tell the Eastern Giant from the King Swallowtail, H. thoas, in places where both are found, is to inspect their tail segments under a magnifying glass. Traditionally very large black and yellow Swallowtails found in Florida have been presumed to be cresphontes. This is not necessarily always the case. Butterflies get around. Heraclides thoas is normally found further south, but has been found in Florida and Texas. Heraclides cresphontes have strayed up into the Northern States and even Canada. There is a variant form called pennsylvanicus. They also fly as far south as Brazil.
Photo by Johnslowry, August, Ontario.
It's possible for H. cresphontes to expand its range to places where oranges don't grow because, although they eat orange leaves, they can eat other things. We didn't always know that the caterpillars can survive a few frosts before pupating. Now we do. They can eat the leaves of rue, hops, prickly ash, and a garden plant sometimes called "gas plant." Naturalists reported finding them in Northern States in the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century the population had retreated into Florida. It appears to be rebounding.
To believers in some theory of climate change, this looks like evidence. However, climate has not changed all that much. Orange trees aren't growing in Canada. In fact, the butterflies do not require Florida-type temperatures to survive, nor do they depend on orange trees, as we used to think. It seems more likely that a parasite, predator, or pathogen that wiped out the northern, prickly-ash-eating population has ceased (for the moment) to prevent this population from reappearing. The northern population may disappear as quickly as it appeared--even if the greedheads build data centers that cause serious local warming.
In Florida Heraclides cresphontes flies all year, but it is consistently most abundant in August.
Male wingspans are usually 4 to 5 inches; females' are usually 4.5 to 6". The record is 7.4". Wing markings are usually similar for both, with some differences from thoas that seem to be consistent but not conspicuous.
Along the southern tier of the United States this species has four generations a year, a generation lasting about 67 days. Wikipedia still affirms the old belief that they are only capable of "overwintering" in Florida or at least the Deep South, but we now know that they adapt into the pennsylvanicus form: Further north they adapt to a four-seasons climate, pupating after a few frosty days and eclosing in spring. Adaptation includes that northern caterpillars grow to a smaller size, and butterflies are likely to be at the small end of their size range too. Giant Swallowtails who have always lived in the North are not necessarily bigger than Monarchs or Tiger Swallowtails, after all. They can still mate with true Giants; their offspring could develop as true Giants if taken back to Florida.
This Massachusetts caterpillar has molted through four previous caterpillar skins and is ready to pupate at just two inches long. Photo from UMass.edu.
Heraclides cresphontes is found at elevations from sea level to almost 4,000'.
Photo by J-Stauffer, August, Florida. Like the Atrophaneuras, these big Swallowtails can move their fore and hind wings separately. They fly somewhat slowly, with pauses between wing beats, but strongly.
Unlike many Swallowtails, males of this species tend to fly into the woods looking for females. Females spend most of their lives looking for host plants for their eggs, like other Swallowtails. In nature their preferred trees grew in forests, but they'll fly through open country and lay eggs on garden plants too. Populations can become established wherever they find enough host plants to start a colony.
They are pollinators. Favorite flower species include
"
Schinus terebinthifolius, Bouggainvillea glabra, Bourreria ovate, Carica papaya,
Eupatorium odoratum, Lantana involucrate, Metopium toxiferum, Morinda royoc,
Pithecellobium keyense, Lantana camara, Senecio mexicana and perhaps Delonix regia
"
...in Florida. (Quote from Delano Lewis.) In New England, they like
"
purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), common and swamp milkweeds (Asclepias syriaca and A. incarnata), joe pye weed (Eutrochium spp.), blackeyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), blazing star (Liatris spicata), and summer phlox (Phlox paniculata). Non-natives like butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii), zinnia (Zinnia elegans), and Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia) will also attract the adult butterflies.
"
(Quote from UMass.edu.) They are also known to like milkweed and azalea flowers. They may sip at almost any flower once.
Males do, however, do some composting. Here an Eastern Giant Swallowtail joins Eastern Tiger Swallowtails sipping brackish water off a dead animal.
Photo by Richard Orr, Maryland, in May.
At the Reiman Gardens, Heraclides cresphontes also roosted together in same-species groups at night.
Photo by Bill Bouton, Arkansas.
Photo by SpecialMoth9897, May, Florida.
The female in a couple is usually bigger, but the most reliable way to identify females is that they lay eggs. If you have a clear photo of the underside, though, or don't mind handling the animals, Giant Swallowtails are big enough that it's possible to see whether an individual has retained "clasper" appendages at his tail end (male) or not (female). With a magnifying glass it's possible to see these features on smaller butterflies too.
Photo by Jeffrey S. Pippen, North Carolina.
Eggs can be more than a millimeter in diameter, and, although the female butterfly usually tries to place one egg on one leaf, she may place several eggs on a leaf if not sure where to find other host plants--so this species annot be foiled simply by planting other trees in between the orange trees. Eggs are whitish when freshly laid, reddish when about to hatch.
Photo from the University of Florida's FFL Gardens. Eggs and caterpillars are most often found on the top sides of leaves, though not always.
Hatchlings eat the shells from which they emerged. Even before they've done that they seem ready to go into their "Back off or I'll stink at you" display.
Caterpillars can be over three inches long,, and have long, bright red osmeteria. Their nickname is "Orange Dogs." They can be a nuisance, occasionally even a pest, in orange groves. Warts and markings between the head and the hump can look like tiny faces; the caterpillars are variable and their "face" markings can be quite amusing--or alarming, depending on your point of view. They can look like miniature snakes, dogs, lizards, even alligators. Some individuals have "face" markings on their tail ends as well.
Photo from Enciclovida.mx showing that in addition to the typical Swallowtail humpback, the caterpillars can have wide knob-shaped end segments. Or not.
Caterpillar on hops leaf in Ontario. Photo by N. Zitani.
Photo by Mark Eanes, August, Maryland.
Photo by Kent McFarland, Vermont.
Photo by Dorian Atchison, April, Florida, when the caterpillar appeared to be aggressively defoliating a small lemon tree. (It was feeling aggressive all right! Note the fully extended osmeterium. This species seem to display their osmeteria freely. The odor is described as sour, pungent, foul, unpleasant, detestable, and like a stinky cat litter box, though recognizably derived from citrus oil.) The trees usually survive their depredations. If stripped in spring, they still bear fruit next winter.
Photo by Christopherswan, September, Ohio. Not related to the horned-devils, this Orange Dog probably wouldn't mind being mistaken for a horned-devil. However, his "horns" subside back into his neck in a few seconds, and none of his little bumps and warts has even a bristle. People who don't mind the odor have been known to stroke and handle these caterpillars. (The caterpillars probably hate that.) Several of his bumps are paired and might look like eyes to a predator, but he's presenting the back of his neck and what is probably as close as a caterpillar can get to shoulders. The face faces down, jaws parallel with legs, directed toward a caterpillar's main interest--food. Caterpillars get no rewards for being pretty or nice. The most repulsive survive.
It is possible that Orange Dogs are considered pests, not so much because they reduce the orange harvest (they can, but not all that much) as because they are disgusting to orange harvesters. Like Zebra Swallowtails, they will rub their osmeteria against anyone perceived as an attacker and may spit to raise the squick factor even higher.
People who really hate these caterpillars--admittedly the caterpillars make that easy--have sprayed chemicals on them, with the usual results. Bacillus thuringiensis can kill the caterpillars, painfully, when they are young enough; it's cruel to watch. Methionine, an amino acid thought to be an essential nutrient for humans in its natural form, is being synthesized and tested for toxicity on Orange Dogs. As a guess that will work as well as other attempts to poison the little beasts have done. Most people like the butterflies. If humans think they have too many, they probably have too many. Simple predation is actually good for overpopulated butterflies. No caterpillar has ever evolved resistance to tongs or shears.
But some people, like this Brazilian butterfly fancier, actually keep the caterpillars as pets. The video has captions and some spoken content in Brazilian Portuguese. The captions say that the caterpillar called Poop grew up to be handsome--or pretty--whichever. I'm guessing "handsome" because, as a butterfly, he "adored" his human's face and hand. Male Swallowtails like human sweat and need to drink mineral salts in liquids so that they can mate; females need only find a mate to start offloading eggs. A male would be more likely to stay close to a known source of salty liquid for a few days, a female to flit away as soon as she could.
This is a longer, more sciency video, produced in the US. Nice scenery and fun facts if you want to watch a 45-minute video.
Pupae are about two inches long, grey and tan, camouflaged as short thick sticks.
Photos from garden.org.
Photo by Miscelaineous, May, Texas.
Sunday, September 27, 2026
Web Log for 9.25-26.26
So far today (Friday), when it's been connected to the Internet the laptop has obeyed 5 out of 17 commands given to it without Microsoft programming it to balk and sulk. Sticking to a schedule seems hopeless but this web site will do what it can; we should get Linux soon.
After the "equinoctial" storms last week, we had a few hours of lovely cool sunshine before another drive-by spraying last night. I woke up ill.
My late father, a radical Christian, used to wish that more Christians would admit that we don't know the tenets of our faith in the way we know what's happening on the physical plane of reality. I want, for the sake of others who may believe as he did, to make that admission. I don't know that there is a benevolent and personal God who "has got the whole world in His hands." At some times I have felt like a favored child of a Heavenly Father. Then again, at some times I feel that it's easier to believe that this world was created by a cosmic principle of Powerful Goodness than that it came to exist by chance, and that's about as far as my faith goes. If and when God wants it to go any farther, God will so indicate, by stifling the sort of people who think all the world's problems would be solved if they could only tell other people how to feel, and stimulating the ones who can do something worthwhile, like guarding the property at night, or contributing amounts of money for purposes that can be discussed in real life, or leaning on our government to demand that total ban on all outdoor spraying of chemicals with formulae other than H2O.
Music
Mannheim Steamroller...out of season? Maybe. Though the historical facts suggest that Jesus was born around the end of September or beginning of October, so then again...
Bon Jovi.
Lakme.
The Impossibles.
Pet Peeve
It's too late to add this post to the Long & Short Reviews link-up, but the prompt for Wednesday's post was pet peeves.
Long ago I read an otherwise forgettable young adult novel set in an invented world, written (iirc) as a cautionary tale for girls who thought venting anger was "liberated." In the fantasy world characters activated their magical powers by getting so angry they developed hypertensive headaches. They had names based on names from our world plus the suffix "-mad." The main character, Harimad, was a girl travelling alone on some sort of quest. Along the way she met an animal called a peeve, which was indigenous to this invented planet; built like a fat cat, it was about the size of a pig and talked a bit the way a pig might talk, if it could. The peeve was not her pet but when she stopped in towns people saw the animal and, after she'd identified herself, announced her to others as "Harimad and her pet peeve."
None of the peeves in that novel sounded as much fun to know as the pet cat who owned me at the time, but the idea of a cute, if surly, furry pet peeve has stayed with me ever since. Even after Piers Anthony wrote a novel called Pet Peeve, where the peeve is a sort of parrotlike bird who joins a party of human and humanoid Xanthians on a quest and is always spouting middle school type insults. The cat-pig-peeve animal sounded like a real animal that might have existed, saying things like "feed me." The parrot-peeve sounded more like a computer.programmed to try to annoy people.
In our real world, of course, a pet peeve is something people find annoying enough to grumble about though not annoying enough to do much else about.
Mine is the way Microsoft's annoyance-ware regularly tells me that the computer or a program running on it "is not responding." Durrrrr..of course it's not "responding." How could it ever "respond" to anything? If anyone lived through the 1980s without being told that machines react and only living creatures can respond, why was that person allowed to write the script for the computers of people who do remember the 1980s?
That's only a peeve, because I seriously want Microsoft brought to heel and forced to stop interfering with other people's computers. Once it's recognized as theft to send to anyone else's computer anything that delays that computer's following its owner's commands, the only situations in which computers will be not processing input will be mechanical failures of magnitudes great enough to distract even word-nerds from caring if the error message is "Yo'puter's dade." Computers can't die because they've never been alive, but we'll be too worried about how much theye're going to cost to care. But as we'll be working offline most of the time, saving data on physicaL storage drives, and not receiving daily annoyances from Microsoft, we'll not be seeing any messages of that kind in most years.
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