Sunday, July 12, 2026

Web Log Weekender for 7.10-11.26 (Unless All the Transformers Blow Up Again)

Gentle Readers, I hope your week has been more profitable than mine was. I spent most of mine sweating, wondering what was going on with "the grid" that we need to break down before it gets even more connected so that even more people lack electricity even longer after every little summer storm, and being very glad that I was not one of the people who had gone off to spend a week at the beach, leaving their freezers and refrigerators full of food...

Now I have a week's worth of e-friends' blogs to catch up with, not even to mention the e-mail. So of course Microsoft thinks my top priority should be spending two hours watching it roll out "updates." 

We need a law, if the Internet is to survive, mandating that companies respect the PRIVACY and SOVEREIGNTY of INDIVIDUAL Computer OWNERS. (\Those words are important because the people demanding the never-ending "updates" and obsolescence and wasteful "data centers" haaaate them).The wording of the law should include in a brief preamble a recognition that "Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other companies have gone too far" and should mandate, as a condition for corporations to be able to "update" computers or send unsolicited messages at all, that all computer operating systems block all input not invited by a specific keyboard command while the computer is in use. It should also specify that third-party input must be reviewed by the FCC and, if found to contain any attempt to "see" any content that has not been published under its creator's name, will result in the company and all of its employees having only "read-only" Internet access for a year.

The alternative? I don't like it, but given the current administration it will probably be necessary: Mass Exodus. If the Internet is not going to serve us the technorati in ways that are ethically acceptable to us, let it crash and burn. We can build a new one.

Animals 

Nice clear photos of England's version of our Ebony Jewel Wing damselflies, showing how different the species really are. In less clear (or lower-magnification) photos they can be hard to tell apart.


The speed at which kittens are adopted in Ohio...similar to here. I'm sure the adorable photos and video helped this purrfect pair.


Vintage meme revived for your delight:


Lens traces the photo to https://sirmend.weebly.com/ , where it's still top of a list of five beautiful bird pictures that seems to be the only post that's been left online. Lens didn't trace the caption. It may have originated with Pointman 12 Deplorable Garbage, who shared the photo and caption on the Meow.

Finally our own status update: Serena's kitten's eyes are open, his ears are starting to unfold, he's adjusted to the size and ugliness of humans and re-learned to snuggle into my hand, and he's walking on stubby little baby legs. He seems to feel a bit bored and lonely, trying to play and exercise all by himself, but to feel that that's the feline condition and not worth complaining about; he's not a whiny kitten. He is a talker, though. He makes it absolutely clear when he wants milk. From the "word" he uses to tell us he's hungry (which Serena is not allowing to happen very often), I've started calling him Mooch. The formal name "Miracle" is still unclaimed, of course, if he lives to claim it. 

I think he gets his looks and precocious activity from Wild Thyme. I think he's going to be absolutely adorable and, unless he's one of those kittens whose actual gender isn't what it appeared to be when they were babies, too much competition for Drudge to be asked to tolerate. He is not up for adoption, though. He's been claimed. If he lives so long, he'll stay here until he's six months old or until Drudge or Serena says he needs to leave, whichever comes first, and then he'll have his own barn to manage. The barn belongs to people with a good healthy level of Glyphosate Awareness so all he should have to fear are clumsy horses. If he's blessed with foster siblings, females who fit in with Serena and Silver can stay here. (Hard to imagine any female cat not getting along with Drudge.)

AARP, Wixness of 

The American Association of Retired Persons has exploited the concept of "retirement" for the Left for longer than I've been alive. I've been burning invitations to join them for years now, despite the benefits they offer members. They reached a pinnacle of wixness, however, with their advertisements on Right-leaning web sites today, demanding that people who they know don't support the group's political agenda "sign the pledge" to support that agenda anyway. 

Know this, AARP: I am a writer. My work is my life. I pledge, if unable to work, to stop eating. Stick your "pledge" up your noses.

Books 

Someone has finally defended the reputation of Warren G. Harding, the United States' only Seventh-Day Adventist President. (As a politician Harding drifted away from a church that didn't really approve of its members being "worldly" enough to vote, but he maintained some ties; his former home became the President's Residence at the Adventist college outside Washington.) Click for details that may make you want to buy the book.


Scalzi's auctioning off a bundle of e-books in aid of World Central Kitchen...hey, you don't have to read all 22 books; I'll take them.


Least Fortunate Criminals 

Although this web site is hiding the street slang title in one of those Embedded Links we don't usually bother to do, we do think this Weird News incident is funny: While Thief #1 was robbing a store, Thief #2 stole #1's vehicle.

Music 

Gentle Readers, this category is open to suggestions. I like the mix of styles, periods, ethnicities, etc., but it could be madder. I think (for example) every full-length music links entry here has some Canadian content; I could be wrong; we could have more, and not always Neil Young. Speaking of Young People, of whom Neil is no longer one, this web site is of, by, and for old ladies whom young people are supposed to visit in order to listen and learn, but listening and learning should work both ways. I like and often post music from my parents' and grandparents' times. I'd like to know more of the music of The Nephews' times, too. What do you listen to, repeatedly, by choice, and why?

Anyway: Roy Buchanan.


The Fixx.


Jefferson Airplane.





Little Texas.


David Crosby.



Dolly Parton.


Ludovico Einaudi.





Ricky Martin. Some PG-rated dancing--I hope nobody's watching videos at the office anyway.


Yuval Gilboa.


Jennifer Lopez.


George Winston. For me this tune is not associated with a specific season. If it sounds like December and brings a pleasant chill to you, all to the good. (It's on his "December" album.)


Alanis Morissette.


Baklava Klezmer Soul. (This song was actually in the school music books in California when I was in primary school, so I grew up singing it--in English.)


Chiloo.


JJ Cale.


Shania Twain.


Mark Knopfler.


One of the America 250 performances, US Air Force band. Amateur recording cuts off short of the end, but you can hear the words so I'll allow it.


Robin Williamson.


Justin Hayward.


Neil Young.


Felix Mendelssohn. Someone at the site where I found the link asked whether this was the piece Felix couldn't get to sound "right" to him, and started to throw away; Fanny made it come out "right" but Felix still published it under his name only. Nobody claimed to know, but that was the way their parents told Felix Mendelssohn to behave. Left to himself he might have shown a little more brotherly spirit. The parents didn't think it was fair for Fanny, who was pretty and married well, to publicize the fact that she was as good a musician as Felix was--until Felix died, and people began to wonder whether any of the works of "F. Mendelssohn" were really Felix's own. (Probably some of them were.)


Justin Johnson.


Emmylou Harris. (Content warning: this is a funeral song.)


Wes Montgomery.



Tom Petty.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaPj1GoDpQw (Christmas in July anyone?)


Townes Van Zandt.



Peter Green.


Sergio Mendes.


Antonio Carlos-Jobim.


Metallica.


John Coltrane.


Astrud Gilberto.


Incredible String Band.



Traffic.


Steppenwolf.


Poems 

Arnon Peterson, grade twelve...I'm sure some adult helped him polish these poems. Nevertheless. Dang fine work, and it's worth reading the comments for a live exchange in rhymed quatrains.


Politics 

Maine's Ds finally jettison Graham "Jonah" Platner.


Google says it was done by Chip Bok and posted in lots of places in just two days, including TheViewFromLadyLake, which is where I saw it first. 

This is partisan and uncharitable, but a party that can't find better candidates than Platner deserves it. Why why why can't Ds fold in to the center and reclaim moderates like, well, the current administration? Why don't they just once and for all take an adult view of socialism?

Zazzle

I have no idea whether either of the bloggers who commented about wanting T-shirts that said "Blog stalking--the sincerest form of flattery" have had those shirts printed and worn them out by now, or still want them. But this is the point of the Zazzle Page soon to appear here. Almost any idea can be printed on a T-shirt. And/or on matching ball caps, stationery, pillows, postcards, almost anything. 


In the post immediately after that one, Barb Taub described a family gathering when someone ran out of T-shirts and bought one, and the whole family bought the rest of the store's inventory so they had matching "team" T-shirts. That's what Zazzle is for. You can even order college, movie, or cartoon character themes, although if you do that you're feeding money to corporations rather than supporting this web site.

However, a great way to support this web site (morally--profits are still going to USPIRG until we reach our donation quota, and then and only then will I have a chance to cash an actual check) is to order a shirt with the message of your choice on it. You can add your own images (they need to be fairly high-resolution) or public-domain images from sites like Morguefile or Pixabay, or just play with type fonts, sizes, and colors. You can suggest a design for me to post, then tweak it to suit yourself before buying it; Zazzle is set up to encourage customers to add design elements of their own, especially names and event dates. For example, if I post a shirt that says "Blog stalking--the sincerest form of flattery," you could add a line that lists one or more blogs you follow and/or blogs from which you're hoping to raise a little subscription money for yourself. 
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Friday, July 10, 2026

Belated Petfinder Post: Just Some Cats and Dogs

If I could dash off a Long & Short Reviews post, I can dash off a Petfinder post. I'm not willing to squeeze in the time, this afternoon, to learn about the Brussels Gryffon or Bull Mastiff breeds. They will just have to wait. Here's potluck--the best of the first dozen pictures on each of the Petfinder pages I visit:

Zipcode 10101: Kenzie & Louie from NYC 


Born on 10.31.23, this tabby sister and brother aren't described as particularly good at recognizing words, but they generally seem to like hearing humans talk or sing. They could be adopted separately.

Rudolph from Puerto Rico 


Like so many humans from the island, this sato (street dog) came to New York City in search of a better life. He is about six months old, weighs about 35 pounds, and is described as very good at making his foster human feel loved.

Zipcode 20202: Katniss Everclear from South Carolina


Someone drives up the coast regularly so she can be delivered to DC or "the Northeast." If you're not near Route 1, you can still adopt this adorable, kitten-sized two-year-old cat but you'll need to come to South Carolina to meet her. Five pounds may always be her healthy weight. 

Alex from Cleveland, Texas, by way of DC 


Believed to be a Border Collie or more of that than anything else, this handsome dog probably won't be in search of a home for long. He is described as a young friendly dog who likes to cool off by swimming (could be part retriever?). Adopt Alex if you are, or are committed to becoming, an active person who enjoys walking or jogging a few brisk miles every morning with extra strolls around the neighborhood in between times. Border Collies are intelligent dogs who like to have "jobs." 

Zipcode 30303: Wisteria from Chattanooga 


She has siblings but they don't insist that you adopt a sibling with her. Wisteria is described as the smallest kitten in the litter, liking to play with her siblings and to be alone and think. 

Gage from Chattanooga 


He weighs about 60 pounds. He has probably reached his full size. He has a safe foster home; he's not in desperate need of adoption. That his foster family are willing to keep him until the perfect pawmanent home can be found says a lot about this hound's pawsonality. 

Bonus: Zipcode 37660: Shirley from Kingsport 


The alley cat family as rescued includes Shirley, her sister Laverne, and her kitten Squiggy. They're from Connecticut; any resemblance to the Patchnose Family is coincidental, but they could be another social cat family. Shirley is described as a shy cat, not completely feral but not eager to be a pet. If you can adopt the whole family together and wait patiently for the cats to become pets, that may help.

Simon from Texas 


A DNA test suggests that this lovable shaggy puppy is mostly poodle with at least seventeen other breeds mixed in. He was abandoned at a public park and is currently in foster care in Texas, but listed for adoption in every other place his humans are willing to visit. They say he needs to be adopted by someone who has experience training puppies. He is completely ignorant but seems smart and willing to learn. He weighed 15 pounds when photographed but is expected to weigh twice that much as an adult. Small dogs can live as long as cats, so you should plan on his being part of your family for ten to fifteen years or even longer. 
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Stores I Wish Still Existed

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asked about stores that we wish still existed.


Since I came in late, I can report on what everyone else named...

How could you not guess reviewers would put this first? Independent locally owned bookstores: Every middle-aged person probably knows at least one that closed because some dear older person or couple retired. Oh the days! Add mine to two other votes for bookstores as a general category.

Woolworth's: Sort of a smaller, older precursor to Wal-Mart, a discount department store where the young and underpaid used to look for most of the non-food items we bought. My Woolworth's memories include the ridiculous (the Tarr Shampoo Boy), the still vaguely embarrassing ("If they're not impressed by your resume yet, you'll just have to meet an employer the way they did in old movies. Wear your good school clothes, buy lunch and a newspaper at Woolworth's, and get to know the people who own all those offices!"), and the pure nostalgic delight: I still knit with my Woolworth's 9-pack plastic needles--some of them--and still wear, with pride, the first few sweaters I knitted with yarn from Woolworth's. Add mine to two votes for Woolworth's.

Record stores: To one vote for record stores as a general category, I'll add mine. Takoma Park's House of Musical Traditions sold records, sheet music, instruments, replacement parts, and accessories, and was a great place for anyone who liked music to spend as much time and money as possible. It still exists but it now specializes in instruments, not records. What students with only $5 to spend in any given week are missing!

Clothing stores: This is one type of store that should not be allowed to be eaten up by online stores. For some things, like T-shirts, mail-ordering a "small/medium/large" and finding out how it fits when it arrives may be good enough. For school, work, and party clothes, fit matters and people who buy off-the-rack clothes should insist on trying them on before they pay. Of course, store fitting rooms have always had bad lighting. People have assumed the colors would look better in natural light. That this assumption was often over-optimistic has traditionally fed the good charity stores where people sent their clothes for re-purchase by those whom they actually suited, heh-heh! Mail-order clothes ought in theory to feed even more clothes to charity stores but, hello, they're not feeding in good clothes, the kind one can be proud of saying one bought for two dollars in aid of the Prevention of Blindness Society. Too much of what people order online from Zara and Zulily and similar looks sleazy even before it's been washed and falls apart after. Add mine to one vote for clothing stores.

Malls: "One for all and all to the mall!" Children of two working parents used to be given some money and encouraged to hang out on shopping malls after school, before a parent came to meet them. It worked better for some kids than for others. Some teenagers were responsible enough to walk ten laps up and down the mall with friends, buy groceries for the family before Mom or Dad came to the mall, and save the money they had left for clothes, records, etc. Unfortunately several malls found that kids hanging out after school stole more than they bought. Meh. I never was a real fan of shopping malls, though I did meet the serious boyfriend while working a pushcart on an upscale mall; there was that. Two votes for malls.

Blockbuster: It seemed as if you could rent every movie in the known universe on videocassette at Blockbuster. I never actually rented a movie myself but I went to Blockbuster so many times with friends, friends' children, boyfriend, husband... Add mine to one vote for Blockbuster.

"Dollar theatre," a pre-TV concept where teenagers and/or local groups of people with special interests enjoyed semi-private chaperoned entertainment watching movies from bygone years for a dollar. (The Snarkout Boys, a two-volume series by Daniel Manus Pinkwater, was about teenagers who became friends through "sneaking out" to that sort of theatre.) We didn't really have one in any place where I ever lived; the closest thing was a church-subsidized Christian Cinema, free with offerings taken up at intermission, that operated in Kingsport for a few years. In Gate City, "Cotton" Roberts' "topless theatre" has been given a temporary roof and could easily be opened as a Dollar Theatre by any local movie buffs who want to revive, say, cowboy movies, or Disney Movies from the Walt & Roy Years, or silent movies, or, oh, any specialty that's popular enough to have its own Roku channel... Anyway, one vote for "dollar theatre." 

Waldenbooks: Never as big as Barnes & Noble or Books a Million, but it used to be a nice chain. One vote for Waldenbooks.

Child World: I don't remember this but it sounds like a toy store. One vote for Child World.

Pay Saver: Apparently that was another discount department store. One vote for Pay Saver.

Netto: George Thomas describes this as a Danish-based store that apparently spread to the UK and offered good prices on groceries. One vote for Netto.

The Harmony Club: Described as a "hangout" operated hippie style, more for fun than profit. Few of those survived even the 1970s but oh, they were fun. One vote for the Harmony Club.

Bookstar: Described as a large local chain bookstore. One vote for Bookstar.

Wet'n'Wild: Described as a water park. One vote for Wet'n'Wild.

Odyssey Records: Described as a specific, local record store in Las Vegas. One vote for Odyssey Records.

I should add something. Nobody else has mentioned a wool shop. So many needlecrafters saved up to open a wool shop to run for ten or twenty years between official "retirement" from a job working for someone else and real retirement. Often the shop reopened as a different store, in the same location with some of the same inventory, several times and customers hardly even noticed. Inez's Stitchery in Kensington (often classified as part of Silver Spring but it's a separate place), Maryland, was unique and probably couldn't have been run by anyone else. There was a real Inez; she was awful, but she stocked good yarns and pattern books and she could teach beginners how to knit, sew, and crochet. Even if you didn't like Inez, personally--did anyone?--you'd work there as Christmas help for the discounts. It was a huge store, the top half of a whole building. It had something for everyone who had discovered it. It was publicized and patronized by Goldie Hawn, whom I met while Christmas-helping there. (She was just a hometown girl shopping in her old favorite store. She was, at the time, much prettier in real life than her characters in movies; still, there are a lot of good-looking women in Silver Spring, so it was the voice that made me stop and stare, "Is that REALLY...?") I think I've sold everything I made with yarn from Inez's but I still have some of the pattern books.
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Web Log Weekender for 7.3-4.26

I hope everyone had a great weekend...with an adequate supply of dihydrogen monoxide. 

Dihydrogen monoxide? Say what?

Spell it out: H2O. Water. Hard to drink enough of it during a heat wave when you're sweating it out almost as fast as you can drink it in. But it makes the difference between enjoying traditional, sultry July weather, and spending most of it in an expensive hospital. (Where people who have "good" insurance may have the opportunity to learn all about a hundred deadly diseases they don't have, yet, before anyone mentions boring old dehydration.)

Though it can also be deadly, of course.


BayerScience(TM) just loves the dihydrogen monoxide story. Greedheads like that implication that all the garbage they want to dump on us is as natural and healthy as pure water. Though that's even a sillier claim than the claim that dihydrogen monoxide should be banned.

Personally, I had typed that entry, had not decided whether it needed to be in a Category or at the top of the post, had noticed a storm coming close, had set the computers to "hibernate" and unplugged them, minutes before all the transformers started popping in a premature fireworks display on Saturday, the Fourth of July. 

The heat wave was tempered by frequent rain showers and aggravated by extreme humidity, all week long. 

I'm not sure what happened to the linemen. Someone said he'd seen some in the neighborhood. Apparently they got halfway up the ground wire, on the way from the public road to the Cat Sanctuary, and had to stop. Nobody's telling me anything, but a little tree that was not in the way of their work had obviously been spray-poisoned. 

Then again, a lot of transformers exploded during the half-hour storm. 

During most of the work week I sat around in a puddle of sweat wondering whether the company had had to rush a lineman to the hospital with an acute chemical reaction, or wait for more transformers to come in the mail, or maybe both. 

Between a writer prevented from meeting a writing schedule and a bear robbed of her whelps, some reasonable people might prefer to meet the bear. However, when I finally broke down, washed off the existing sweat, put on a clean dry dress, trudged out in search of a phone, and arrived dripping wet on a phone clinger's doorstep, all I actually said was "What happened to the people who were here on Monday? This was not Hurricane Helene. This was the kind of storm we get almost every week in summer." It was Thursday evening. The corporate agent was duly humble, so I didn't need to berate her further, and assured me that my electricity would be working by three o'clock in the morning.

I felt bad about linemen having to work until three o'clock in the morning in the rainforest the Bad Neighbor has allowed to grow around the power line, which had been thoroughly soaked again, not that it had actually dried out since Saturday, but it had been soaked on Thursday afternoon. Possibly that thought gave them an incentive to work efficiently. The lights came on right after midnight and the linemen went home--I hope, to bed. 

And yes, although the cat update below was typed a week ago, it's still true as written. Serena is still trying to produce enough milk for three kittens even though she has only one.

Americans Doing Well 

US-born blogger on Top 100 list of UK blogs:


Animals 

More than most reasonable adults ever wanted to know about sloths.


Cat Sanctuary Update 

Local lurkers, this is important...

My resident Queen Cat Serena, "Serena-Seralini" who has coped with glyphosate poisoning by giving birth to a few dozen kittens who just dropped dead at their first whiff of glyphosate vapors, gave birth to kittens last week. I didn't even bother to count them at birth, or note the colors. I was so sure they couldn't live. 

Well, of course, most of them didn't. Our Bad Neighbor is still exercising a "right to use" the property he signed over, which he'll claim includes a "right to spray." We need to define that "right to spray" by giving the verb "spray" a direct object. It's ethically acceptable when its direct object is: WATER. There is no such thing as a right to spray poison. Anyone who claims there is needs a long rest in a place with bars on all the windows, and if he can get a lawyer, the lawyer does too. Anyway, the first glyphosate poisoning incident brought the number of kittens down to two. The next one brought the number down to one. The one kitten is a flat "blue" grey, not especially pretty as Serena's kittens go, probably male. I'm like "Why why why couldn't it have been the calico kitten?" But anyway she has this one kitten, and it's a lively little thing; even before its eyes opened it was sniffing around the closet.

The Cat Sanctuary agreed to take another cat family in transition, if necessary. As so often happens in our part of the world, it's not been necessary. I was asked to take these cats if A had not already found a place for them and B refused to keep them until A did. So far what I know is that they've not arrived. In any case those kittens would be much too big to be good playmates for Serena's lonely only kitten.

He shows no Manx features. He may or may not show damage from or extra sensitivity to glyphosate vapors, later on, but he's likely to be a bouncy little boycat who needs a sibling, or siblings, to play with. 

Meanwhile...Serena is a large cat who produces large litters of kittens and lavish amounts of milk. Here she was with all this milk and only one small kitten. So...her family are social cats. Her grandkitten Drudge, now three years old, and kitten Silver, now seven years old, are now sharing her milk. 

I feel that they're doing this for a reason. Serena did not try to maintain a milk supply for multiple kittens when Zakitty's brothers died. I think something is telling her that this year a kitten, or kittens, will need the milk.

Orphaned baby kittens don't need rabies shots--yet--but I would like confirmation that the mother didn't have FIV. 

Immigration 

Jeanie from the Marmalade Gypsy blog shared a lovely rainbow-colored map of American ethnicity. I loved the way it blends a surface level at which people in the Blue Ridge Mountains will say their ancestry is "English I guess--we all speak English," until they look it up, and then they might try to identify with one lot of ancestors for a while, and finally they admit that on the Point of Virginia most of us are a mix of three to seven European tribes plus one or more indigenous tribes and it may or may not be possible to identify all of our ancestors and their identities...so what we are is American. If there is such a thing as a plain unhyphenated American we're it. We come from a place where small select groups of relatively civilized Europeans and a select group of relatively sophisticated indigenous people agreed that a multiethnic buffer zone might serve the Cherokee Nation's interests, if and because those people were all capable of living like neighbors, putting the tribal feuds behind them. Possibly we have evolved a step or two ahead of much of humankind.

The trouble is that the map's on nytimes.com, where it has a paywall so I'm not sure I would be able to link you to it. (For a while, at least, you can find it from the link at https://themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com/2026/07/postcards-from-lake-reflections-on.html .) And it's part of an essay that draws on old, outdated arguments.

Fact: Americans, as we are today, are a nation of immigrants. Even indigenous Americans can often be shown, from archaeological evidence, to have moved into places where other people left, or died out.

Fact: From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Europeans caused a lot of indigenous people to abandon a lot of good land. They did not do this by force of numbers, technology, or personal superiority of any kind. They did it by bringing in filth and diseases. Indigenous people had evolved perfect herd immunity to several of these diseases, such that the diseases had ceased to exist here for a long time. When the pathogens came back, the people died. So the Europeans rushed in. Oh, how they poured in. We became the "trap" in the drainpipe of Europe. Europeans were totally fed up with living, or more precisely dying, in slums. They yearned for wide-open spaces created by the deaths of thousands, millions, of people from diseases to which Europe's herd immunity remained imperfect, so individuals still had high resistance. 

Fact: For a nation that was rebuilding itself on a mass of graves, wide-open immigration was a viable idea, and worked for everybody...as long as our population density remained generally low.

Fact: In the early twentieth century the plagues Europeans continued to bring in started to make a dent in our population. But something unprecedented happened: we discovered antibiotics, and other cures for the diseases that had thinned out the huddled masses in Europe. Our population started to become too dense. Like overcrowded animal populations we began to show patterns of decreasing fertility, increasing "sexual deviations" from the norm of simple reproductivity, first, with slower increases in infectious diseases, in loss of individual resistance to diseases, and in antisocial behavior--crowded individuals desperately lashing out in homicide-suicides.

Fact: Americans, as we are today, have to close our doors. Other people have to start controlling their own overpopulation. No other country can count on being able to send surplus young people to America any more. 

Fact: It has nothing to do with whether or not we like foreigners. Some people who want to end mass immigration are actively working to help this soldier's translator or this legal immigrant's husband qualify for one of a decreasing number of spaces for legal immigrants, and he's welcome to live in our town if he likes. But there's simply not enough room for them all. Rounding up and deporting the ones who have violated our laws, already, is a reasonable place to start.

I've liked the Mexican people I've known, and I've liked the Colombian people I've known, and I'm not even prejudiced against the people brought into Kingsport to give that city an instant slum, though I mind bitterly that the slum was plopped into the neighborhood where my mother should have had another ten years to live. That's another story. My point is: Rhythm is fine. Color is fine. Spanish is a delightfully minimalist language full of fascinating agglutinative verbs. Spanish-ness is not the problem. And I am poor as the proverbial church mouse myself, so it would be awfully hypocritical of me to mind other people being poor, although I do claim a right to hold opinions about what people do about being poor. And actually, although I speak Spanish slowly and with an accent, although I picked up the sound from acquaintances but learned the grammar and vocabulary from books, I have only pleasant memories of ever having spoken it, so when I hear people speak Spanish in shops and restaurants my feeling is like "Oh cool, she's One Of Us, she knows the special language I used to share with just a few out of my multitude of relatives." I have no problem whatsoever with Mexicans living in the neighborhood that was not, before about 2015, a slum, that had small but reasonably spaced houses a little closer to the factory than the bigger, pricier houses people saved up to retire to. A reasonable number of bodies, at a reasonable density, living reasonably clean healthy lives. 

That's not what the people screaming for more immigration want, and it's not what Kingsport got. What the screamers really want is to ruin the nice neighborhoods where it's possible, and in Kingsport it used to be visible, even in your face, to move up the economic ladder. Leftists want to believe in classes, a European phenomenon, where if you're a factory laborer living in a three-room house three blocks from the factory, you're never going to get a better job and you're never going to have friends who have better jobs and your children are never going to be allowed to marry the children of people with money and so on, because Europe had fallen into a dysfunctional thought pattern when Karl Marx was writing. What we actually have are economic tiers through which individuals move. If you're a laborer living in that three-room house three blocks from the factory, and you make frugal choices and have one child or none, by the time your child is old enough to need a room of its own you can afford to move into a four-room house. 

In Kingsport, the planned structure of "Snob Hill" meant that the laborer's child might be walking to the same school every day with the boss's child. The retired doctor drove his expensive car through the car wash where the laborers' teenaged children worked, to the same post office, the same library, the same selection of shops, the laborers used. Mother and her friends, mostly about halfway up the "upper" part of Snob Hill, had all started out as twenty-something entry-level "career girls" who might have thought they were doing well to afford a three-room house instead of a basement apartment, and all worked hard, married reasonably well, saved their money, and ended up in...Mother's house technically had eight rooms, but the bigger of the two big rooms on the ground floor had room for everything you'd find in a four-room house, easily. It was hard to overlook the way the social contract said that people weren't born into different "classes" because of their spiritual merits or whatever, but were on different economic tiers from which they could move up or down at will. 

Leftists hate that that kind of social contract exists. They want to break it up. So they yammered for more population density, replaced a good midrange shopping plaza with the horrible slum, stocked the slum with drug addicts out of Knoxville and Chattanooga, and watched the neighborhood people wanted to retire to turn--temporarily--into a neighborhood where people didn't want to roll down their car windows. Because tuberculosis.

One kind of opportunist does like it when drug addicts are packed into a new slum. You know what kind that is. They have organized gangs that run parts of Mexico and Colombia. They were there to keep the addicts slowly dying in their puddles of filth--many of them behind what was built, in the Eighties when I was young, as a shiny new upscale office building, especially the bank. 

So in due course, this spring, ICE moved in. Did they get all the drug dealers? I don't think so; the original pair were White and didn't sound as if ICE would have had any interest in them. They got some of them. Nobody likes a drug dealer. But nobody I knew received any of those panicky calls about how the only thing Jorge ever did wrong was live with Maria in between the expiration of his original green card and the issuance of his new authorization to seek citizenship. In Kingsport ICE didn't bother with Jorge. They had narcotraficantes to send back to Mexico and Colombia and, if they put those blighters on robot-controlled planes and programmed those planes to crash, that's fine by me. You can still be waited on by real Chinese waiters at the Chinese restaurant, real Mexicans at the Mexican restaurant, your real Pakistani doctor if you're one of that doctor's patients. The big corporations and the state university still have exchange programs. You still see different kinds of people in Kingsport. You see fewer of the ones most likely to harm you. 

Nice, ICE. 

I think we have to say no to any increase in existing levels of population density. No existing building is empty? No immigrant can move in. I think we can still afford a few immigrants, and I think being able to afford a few immigrants is a good thing, but we cannot afford to admit masses of immigrants any more. We have to recognize the 1950s-style "Don't be prejudiced against immigrants as people" line of  talk as irrelevant, a worn-out artefact of today's older generation's grandparents' time. 

I doubt very much that people my age and younger are prejudiced against any variety of people--except for the very young, some of whom seem to have been trained to hate their political opposition. Any debate about the amount of immigration we can afford needs to focus on the reality that there's no room for our population to keep growing. In fact we need a population decline--and I for one would rather see that decline come from a combination of fewer couples having fewer babies, and fewer immigrants being let in, rather than the historically more common combination of plagues and wars.

So, clue alert, NYTimes? The year is 2026, not 1956. Write for the audience that is still alive.

Men Behaving Well 

Vince Staten: 


Music 

Donovan.


Mitchell Feeney (John Mitchell and Jim Feeney).


Herbert Pixner.



John Coltrane.


Elijah Bossenbroek.



Olexandr Ignatov.


Stryper (see below).


Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young.


Tom Petty.



Religious Differences 

Muslims traditionally throw stones at the Devil. A Christian pop group in the 1980s sang "To Hell with the Devil" (see above). This church...I don't know, there are good things to be said for encouraging kids to visualize spiritual warfare in post-Roman form, but let's just say that for most city churches this skit would have been unthinkable. Because you don't discharge a bullet in a place where it might break someone else's window, or worse.


Technology 

AOC calls for restrictions on Big Tech's price inflation and pushes for unsustainable "data centers." Go, girl! Even if her working together with Bernie Sanders on this one means she's going at it the wrong way...you know how, if you need to cut down a tree, you make a few cuts in the wrong direction to encourage the tree to fall in the right direction?


Travel 

Martha DeMeo went to Cherokee Town to see how the attractions have been rebuilt. It doesn't look like disaster tourism any more, although it is. What caught my eye were the tailless Tiger Swallowtails...not a new subspecies; they look like the survivors of some predators that have been feasting at a lek site. But MDeM is not a butterfly specialist, nor do you need to be. There are all kinds of other attractions.

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Monday, July 6, 2026

Butterfly of the Week: Wallace's Jay

Passing over Graphium ucalegonides, which still appears on many lists but has been reclassified as a subspecies of Graphium fulleri at most science sites, we come to Graphium wallacei, Wallace's Graphium, or Wallace's Kite, or Wallace's Jay. 


Photo from Facebook. 

It was named for Alfred Russel Wallace, an intrepid naturalist who explored obscure places like New Guinea and collected specimens he sent to other scientists to identify, classify, and name. Wallace sent one male butterfly back to England; it was deemed unique and classified as a "new" species, formerly unknown to Europeans, named in Wallace's honor. 

Some other species in other genera were also named after Wallace for the same reason. This web site documents each of "Wallace's" species:


Although it's sometimes found in Indonesia and the Moluccas as well as New Guinea, photos of this butterfly, alive, are rare. While living it seems to be blackish or brownish, with white spots, blobs of lighter color, and some distinctive yellow-green or yellow spots at the overlapping edges of its wings. Collected specimens fade quickly to deep brown with cream-colored spots. 


Painting by Hewitson, who declared the butterfly a new species and named it after Wallace in 1858.

Though uncommon even in its limited range, it is not believed to be threatened. 

Nothing seems to have been published about this species' life history. 

  
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Sunday, July 5, 2026

Book Review: Horses Heartaches and Hope

Title: Horses Heartaches and Hope

Author: Brooks Wright

Date: 2023

Quote: "Should've come back sooner."

When Jemma loses her parents and comes back to their ranch, she wishes she'd never left. The ranch can be made profitable enough that she doesn't need to bother with her job in the city. (Props to Wright for mentioning this extremely important factor in come-back-to-the-old-home-place stories.) She has old school friends here; she didn't have close friends in the city. And of course one of her old friends has grown up into an attractive man. Who admits, in the course of the story, that he was a pest at school because he had a crush on her. He got over his crush when Jemma went to the city, married a girl who stayed in their home town, and lost her and their baby. Now he and Jemma begin to bond because both of them feel angry at God, because of these untimely deaths. 

This is a sweet romance, so you know...but, along the way, the plot takes a more suspenseful twist when men begin harassing Jemma, demanding that she sell or leave her property. Kudos to Wright for adding a real storyline to a short genre romance; I think she could have handled it better, anyway.

It's a serious issue. We as a nation have yet to recover from a time when women weren't considered competent to manage their own property. We've mandated respect for women's bank accounts but we have yet to pound into the heads of too many people, even decent people who may believe their intentions toward female land owners are good, that women have the same legal right to own land that we have to own money. 

The weekend before writing this review, I aggravated a chemical reaction that I already knew was going to be nasty--and it's being nasty as I write--by commandeering someone's employers' flatphone and documenting illegal poison spraying around a mountain spring...which was done not to prevent the spring branch silting up, which has been prevented by me if at all since the guilty person acquired a claim to the spring, but purely and entirely to harm me. To my disgust, the person with the flatphone failed to provide any emotional support but went into a panic attack, yipping "Come back, let's go, let's get out of here," as I photographed the evidence of the crime. Person was obviously more afraid of the criminal than of failing to do per duty and help prosecute the crime. 

We need to be saying to those who don't unequivocally support women's property rights: Have you a beard and call yourself a man? 

We need to be demanding that politicians stop babbling about the so-called "right" to be done horrible wrong, through abortion, and take a firm stand in support of women's right to own real estate.

We need to be telling those who are still drivelling about "reparations" for the long-gone past that "reparations" need to be made first and foremost to women, and need to begin with all real estate being owned by women, with men as co-owners who may have a claim on profits but can't inherit land in their own right, for a few hundred years. After all, good men would not want to be seen out of their homes or job sites alone, lest they raise suspicion that they might be involved in hatecrimes against women. 

Well, for a start, "reparations" to the dead being a silly idea in any case, we can begin by telling men that it's our property, private and public, and if we live on it and know what's going on they should not try to take over what we do about crimes committed on it but should follow our directions, living in fear of giving any slightest suggestion that they think their testosterone poisoning makes them more competent than we are. We can begin by reminding men that although they are more likely to have the mechanical talents to work on cars, their testeria and twitchiness keep them from being more competent even to drive cars, as a class.

Reading this novel so soon after seeing an old friend flake out on me, I wished something would happen to Tate so that Jemma would have to manage the ranch by herself for a few years before she found a husband. Oh, nothing fatal--maybe his first wife wasn't dead yet, after all? Until women have resolved serious questions about our basic civil rights, even an appealing husband can be More Of The Problem. Tate shows the right attitude but he functions, in relation to Jemma's real story, as a crutch that's not going to be available to most people in her situation and is not part of a satisfactory solution. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, this novel's "story arc" follows the cheap-genre-romance timeline rather than the grand-sweeping-epic-romance timeline. Jemma solidifies her title to her own property by marrying a man. All very well for women who like men, who are of course the huge majority of all women, but it fails to make a much needed statement about women's right to own, manage, and occupy land all by ourselves.

Anyway, politics aside: sweet Christian romance, reasonably likable characters, spiritual enlightenment as a plot element. If you like a story that has those features, you'll like this book.
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Saturday, July 4, 2026

Have a Happy Fourth of July

This web site does not usually display new content on Saturdays. Well, it's not being typed on a Saturday. This post was written on Friday, as some of our e-friends' commenters appeared to be gearing up to make the holiday weekend a source of bad memories, picking fights and spouting inflammatory comments. 

Here are some ways this web site would like to encourage everyone in the US to have a glorious Fourth of July. This is not an exhaustive list but this web site has tried to make it exhaustingly long. This web site hopes that the kind of people who want to pick fights will feel tired just by reading all these words, flop down near a television set, and fall asleep. 

1. Start the celebration by raising your main flag. This can be made into a ceremony if people want it to be. 

2. Make and drink lots of  the traditional Fourth of July beverage: lemonade. This is made by combining sugar, water, and lemons in any proportion that suits you. It will depend on the quality of your lemons. Tasting will be necessary. 

(In days of yore, our Founding Fathers sometimes ran short of lemons for the Fourth of July and had to stretch their lemonade by adding other ingredients. Limes won't change the color. Orange, grapefruit, or rhubarb (which grew well in the Northeastern States) juice will yield PINK lemonade. Pink lemonade was marketed as a special treat. Also, honey, molasses, and maple syrup were sometimes used to eke out supplies of sugar.)

3. Who wants to heat up the house on the Fourth of July? All cooking moves outdoors. Barbecuing meat, grilling corn, roasting potatoes in the ashes, and toasting marshmallows over the coals, are traditional ways to discourage mosquitoes too. Insects love to invite themselves to a picnic but will un-invite themselves if they smell smoke.

4. Read the Declaration of Independence aloud. At home, it can be fun to let the youngest person who is willing to try it lead the reading. Everyone else reads in unison.

5. Sing "The Star-Spangled Banner," all the verses if possible, and as many other patriotic songs as possible. 

6. If you have a town or neighborhood parade, or fireworks show, or other traditional festivity, go out and support it. Be neighborly. 

7. In 1976, when I dressed up for a Bicentennial pageant, all most people knew about what people were wearing in 1776 was that the women wore long skirts and the men wore knee-length coats, knee-length breeches, and knee-high stockings. I remember at least knowing that my costume needed a sunbonnet and an apron for authenticity, while being blithely unaware that paisley print (the one maxi-dress I owned was red paisley) hadn't been invented in 1776 and the fashionable colors were pale, dull pastels, to which darker colors tended to fade in those days anyway. I had not heard an actual song from the 1770s that described how fashions in the new United States differed from those in France and England: 

"Of economy boast! Let your pride be the most
To show clothes of your own weave and spinning.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear.
Love your country much better than fine things."

Patriots rejected imported materials during the Revolutionary War years. If you don't have a white wig, sunbonnet, or pair of knee breeches, you can still dress in authentic Revolutionary War spirit. 

8. For reenactments, know your options regarding "race." All thirteen colonies allowed slavery before, during, and for varying lengths of time after the War. Not all slaves were Black. Not all free citizens were White. Regardless of your ancestry or complexion you can reasonably claim the right to impersonate one of the slaves who were skilled artisans. Or you can reasonably claim the right to impersonate a free person. If you want to upset some people you can even impersonate a free citizen who owned slaves whose complexion was lighter than the owners'; that actually happened. "Race" became part of the slavery question in the early nineteenth century. In 1776 people who paid any attention to how other people looked could be blunt and rude about it because nobody thought it mattered much anyway, but people's "condition"--enslaved, apprenticed, employed by other people, in business for themselves, land owners, rich land owners, male or female, over or under age 21, part of the oldest active generation in their family or a subsequent generation--was a separate and much more important consideration. Social segregation followed lines drawn around money.

9. In 1776 many people thought special occasions should be solemn, observed with loooonnnnggg lectures if not actual sermons. Charles Carroll of Carrollton actually considered it a character defect that he had been known to laugh. The ideal facial expression was "grave," no more prone to smile than to cry or scowl. Declaring independence was considered a very solemn, even awful, event, not to be marked by frivolity. Few doubted that the Bible, as interpreted by their faith tradition, was literally true. Between 1776 and at least 1846 there are solid historical precedents for celebrating the Fourth of July with long, detailed sermons and Bible studies. To the extent that a backlash existed it was what Founders like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson called Deism. They never doubted that the world had been created by an Almighty God Who had given humankind specific instructions on how to serve their Maker. They merely questioned, seeing that people believed different things about what God wanted, how it was possible to know whether anyone was right. The idea of a separation of Church and State is something we owe to those Deists. There are historical precedents for keeping the Fourth of July a secular observance, too, thanks to them. But it's worth reading just what our founding Deists believed they ought to do. Franklin famously wrote that he at least wanted in "humility: [to] Emulate Jesus and Socrates." 

10. Some people celebrate and reenact what their ancestors or town founders contributed to the United States after 1776. How not? They should try, however, to celebrate what their ancestors really wanted, which was not a global socialist dictatorship. Individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of wealth or some alternative source of happiness, are what the United States are all about. If you don't like those things, please consider moving to a country whose historic values are closer to yours. Others will be glad to replace you here.

11. The United States is not about an individual leader you might love or hate. It is about a system that recognizes that every leader can and will be replaced. For the duration of this holiday, at least, consider not mentioning the name of any living President. 

12. There are historical precedents for celebrating the United States' prosperity with extravagant festivities, and for celebrating its frugal beginnings with frugal ones. For the benefit of perspective we probably need both. Consider celebrating early American life by unplugging and working on your self-sufficiency skills.

13. At least some family members should choose to stay inside and comfort dogs and cats who don't find the sound of fireworks entertaining. Animals who run away from what they believe is gunfire and bombing, in panic, are likely to get lost. Try to keep your four-footed friends in a safe, quiet room with any favorite toys, favorite cushions and blankets, and your snuggly reassuring self at their disposal.

14. If going to large family gatherings is not your favorite part of the holiday, consider acting on the assumption (which may or may not be true) that the stupid things some relatives say are the effects of jet lag, medication, and/or old age. Be charitable. Avoid arguments. Give politely cryptic answers to inappropriate questions while moving away into the crowd.

In some families political debates are part of the fun. Those families are not the people who need to avoid arguments. They know who they are. They can tell because they enjoy those debates.

15. Large family gatherings may work best in public or semi-public places that offer room for people to choose their own way to spend the afternoon. "Neurotypical" people can feel overloaded by travel, talk, food, and music too. Look for places where people can stroll down around the water when they've had enough conversation. Diversity and distance are American; they're what the "huddled masses" came here for.

16. Celebrating our natural environment is a patriotic thing to do, too. Why not visit scenic parks and waterfronts? 

17. Try to drink only lemonade (or "fizzy lemonade"--soda pop) and spring water all day, if possible. And don't drive, anyway. You know some formerly human creature with booze for brains is going to be out on the road, looking for a family whose holiday can be made into a tragedy. Let somebody else smash him.

18. Liberate a shelter animal. 

19. Celebrate our maritime history by spending the afternoon on a boat, or at least on a beach.

20. Make your own list of things you want to celebrate about being American: Ford cars, sarsaparilla, newspapers, football, stamp collecting, whooping cranes, Greyhound buses, redwood trees, junkyards, 
blueberries, whatever. Any thing that can be celebrated, thereby distracting you from quarrelling with and about persons, is good. 
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Friday, July 3, 2026

Book Review: Gorgeous Knitted Afghans

Title: Gorgeous Knitted Afghans

Author: Fatema Habibur-Rahman

Date: 2004

Publisher: Lark

ISBN: 978-1579903534

Illustrations: full-color photos

“Gorgeous” is the word for this book. The influence of Indian art is conspicuous. Very bright, clear colors, jewel tones and actual jewels, tiny sewn-on mirrors, make Indian textiles “gorgeous”...and that’s the look of many of these afghans.

Not all of them are bright-colored. There are some subtle effects worked in soft-colored yarns too...but there are enough jewel tones, beads, mirrors, paisleys, and mandalas to make it clear that the three sisters from Bengal are celebrating their artistic heritage.

That’s not the only Islamic Indian influence I see in this book. Why afghans rather than sweaters or shawls? Two cultural factors are involved. One is that, when people learned to knit “in the old way,” they didn’t buy and store a lot of fancy pattern books; they memorized simple “rules” for knitting whatever they wanted to knit, and learned patterns from “samplers,” which might be used as blankets, table runners, rugs...or afghans. The other factor is Muslim modesty. You can recycle these patterns into shawls or sweaters if you want to, but nobody is demeaned by having to pose for a picture in this book. The photos show afghans draped across chairs.

Then there’s the way the sisters write. Their use of English words, including knitting terms, is not incorrect; it’s foreign. Gorgeous Knitted Afghans was edited by its American publisher so that the directions are easy for Americans to use, but some of the discussion is...well...easier to follow than Salman Rushdie. “Ply refers to the number of strands that make up the yarn’s thread”? Technically that’s an allowable way to use those words; it’s just not a way an American would ever use them. . 

There’s also the emphasis on family life. The sisters Habibur-Rahman tell us about their family, not about where they live, where they went to school, what they or even their husbands do (apart from knitting). Typical of Indian Muslims as distinct from Muslims in some other countries, however, they do use their own individual names rather than honorific “Mother of...” titles.

Perhaps easiest for some Americans to appreciate is the concept of afghans for all seasons. Some of these afghans are heavy snowproof blankets, and some of them are light and lacy. 

Others will love just looking at the ways the sisters play with colors and novelty yarns. A plain cable-stitch panel is framed in two shades of heathered “fun fur.” One afghan mixes five different hand-painted yarns. The cover pattern plays two different multicolor fleck yarns against bright contrasting solid colors. Mandalas are accented with tassels on page 59; paisleys are elaborated with mini-mirrors on page 145. You won’t be able to get the same novelty effects this year, but you’ll be inspired to mix up the current novelty yarns to make afghans that are uniquely your own.

What some Americans will love, and others will hate, is the extravagant use of cashmere yarn. Presumably this is less extravagant in Kashmir, or in Bengal, than it would be in the United States. One entire multicolor afghan is worked in nothing but cashmere. Good luck even finding cashmere yarn in that many colors at your local wool shop...in a good year they might be able to order it specially for you. Mohair and alpaca are easier to get and look gorgeous, too, but they just don’t feel the same.

You need to be a fairly skilled knitter to reproduce most of these afghans. This should not be a problem. Afghans don’t have to fit exactly, and people sweating out colds on the couch won’t even care if the panels aren’t perfectly matched. Afghans are the way knitters build those skills. Gorgeous Knitted Afghans will entice you to perfect knitting techniques that may have seemed too much of a challenge when you were trying to knit a sweater. 
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