Because a large part of 7.17.26 was lost to Microsoft's insane delusion that delivering worse and worse service will motivate people to pay more for more of their products. Should we go to Linux or should we go offline altogether?
Lens can't find the original artist. I found it on the Meow.
Animals
Cuteness overload in New Orleans with the annual crop of unwanted kittens born because lazy humans didn't want to bother either having their cats sterilized or finding good homes for their kittens. Nag, Nag, Nag. If Serena's kitten hadn't been claimed before I thought there was any chance of her having a viable kitten this year...well, actually, the social cats and kittens get along well in purr-units of six or more adults, there is no cat overpopulation problem in my part of the world, and finding homes for kittens has never been a problem. But if I anticipated any trouble finding places for kittens, kittens would not be happening here. Normal cats normally seem to feel that two cats to a house are plenty. For Messy Mimi's little shelter this looks like a serious overload.
Books
Brand-new one from Tom Cox:
Food, from Food Banks, Selling
Selling food given to you at a food bank is technically illegal. I don't think it should be.
Given that food banks hand out what they have with a wonderful disregard for what people can or should eat, I think governments should reward people who show the initiative to sell their rejects, rather than just throw surplus food out beside the road as so many of our "poor, needy, hungry" people do.
There is no way people who don't have refrigerators are going to be able to eat a big bag of frozen food.
There is no way people who don't have stoves are going to be able to use dry beans or rice.
There is no way anybody is going to eat twenty-one zucchini.
Much of what is donated to food banks is unfit to eat in the first place--out of date, tainted with toxic chemicals, infected with bacteria.
Food banks' mandate to serve everybody the same thing while supplies last means that much of what individuals get from food banks is food they don't digest.
It's very unlikely that anybody is going to sell zucchini, but I think it shows public spirit that people at least try to sell food they can't eat, rather than waste it.
So, how bad is this? Should these women be prosecuted for breaking five applicable laws, or should those laws be rewritten to encourage their frugality and use of what they have?
Note that I've taken some of that useless pasta in trade and have determined that (1) gluten-tolerant human friends won't eat it, (2) my cats won't eat it, (3) neighbors' dogs won't eat it, (4) none of my possums has so far touched it, (5) it doesn't even draw mice or rats, although they certainly like grain, so (6) it lies on the ground until centipedes find and eat it. A kind of centipede that normally eat dung. So these women are finding a Brit who will eat the stuff. Cheers for them! I don't know how long he can survive, but I wish them and him well.
Music
The Peacekeepers.
Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland.
Hermanos Gutierrez.
Avicii.
Antonio Carlos Jobim.
John Lennon.
Jimi Hendrix.
Handel. (The Hallelujah Chorus is not season-specific. None of the three parts of the Messiah is "in season" at the moment but the Hallelujah and Amen choruses transcend seasons.)
1:00 Jukebox.
Tom Lehrer.
Willie Nelson.
Danny Kaye.
Tom Petty.
Janis Joplin.
Lamb.
John Lennon.
Avishai Cohen.
Adrian von Ziegler, who is Swiss, tries to compose music in the Celtic style. You may hear echoes but these are not real Scotch, Irish, Welsh, or Breton tunes.
Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Victoria. (Church music, traditionally sung at Christmas. Singers get accustomed to learning Christmas-concert pieces in summer and spring-concert pieces in winter and so on; if you find this jarring, you've been warned.)
The Fixx.
Canned Heat.
The Band.
Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Kenny Rogers.
The B-52's.
Van Halen.
Regina McCrary.
Franz Liszt.
The Beatles.
Black Angels.
Dire Straits.
Bill Callahan.
The Eagles.
Steeleye Span.
Camel.
Bill Topol.
Nick Drake.
Lynyrd Skynyrd.
This one is music, but its star is the Photoshopped woodcock.
Maranatha Music.
Matisyahu.
Bob Dylan.
Blur.
Rod Stewart.
Mussorgsky.
Masks, Probable Return of
Angelenos were starting to wear military gas masks when my parents left that city; then filters on cars were invented, so the custom died out. But it's coming back. Chinese people in some cities and mining zones started wearing face masks before COVID. If we continue driving where we could walk, air conditioning when we could open windows, allowing those monster "data centers" to be built, or just having multiple babies with no thought for the future, we'll be wearing them too. Because what we cough up, continually, hacking wherever we go like old cigarette smokers, will be clearer that way.
Phenology
One of the native plants that are indeed competing with privet, in my hedge--and often winning--is a spicebush. I cut out walnut and maple saplings, but I don't imagine the spicebush is going to grow big enough to drop limbs on the house. It attracts Spicebush Swallowtails...and I saw a shed caterpillar skin on the underside of a leaf this afternoon! It was greenish black and had been about an inch long.
Swallowtails normally eat their shed skins. Possibly my wren family had already feasted on the wee beastie who would have looked something like this.
Photo from Google, credited to somebody on Facebook, Google didn't specify. While the young Pipevine Swallowtail tries to look like a centipede, the young Spicebush Swallowtail tries to look like a miniature snake. They are often leaf-green, but can be yellow or orange. They get about two inches long. They are not toxic to humans. Spicebush is aromatic but not very toxic; people chew the twigs and use them as toothbrushes. Nobody knows whether it would be safe for humans to eat the caterpillars, as nobody is known ever to have wanted to. Anyway they don't sting. They like to pull a leaf around themselves to form a shady shelter in the afternoon, securing the leaf with silk. They don't eat more than the bush can easily spare, though.
Photo from https://vnps.org/the-spicebush-swallowtail-butterfly-its-host-plants-and-the-new-threat-they-face/
They can be as big as the Tiger Swallowtails who also mimic the smaller Pipevine Swallowtails. Female Tigers don't have the white spot on the forewing; male Tigers have yellow wings. These harmless, pretty butterflies are not totally dependent on spicebush; they can eat sassafras or other native plants, but the other plants are even more vulnerable to the fungus infection discussed at the link.
What you can do to help these butterflies? Don't spray anything but water on your garden. Glyphosate is known to promote the growth of fungi. It fosters fire blight and tomato wilt and other bad things, and also encourages mold and mildew to grow in your home.
Rhetoric, Excesses of
No link, but a passing comment: At some time over the weekend I read some poems inspired by the "social justice" concerns from a few years ago. The tea leaf picker's bitterness flavors the tea. The flatphone causes...suicides? Seriously?
If people committed suicide because of flatphones, weren't their mental shortcomings obvious? Are they missed?
It is generally a good idea to beware of excessive empathy, especially when it comes from the Left. In my long-ago childhood there was a locally owned enterprise that was generally considered a good place to work. Suddenly left-wingnuts started screaming about how overworked and underpaid people were and how they needed to go on strike. The idea of going on strike did not originate with the employees of this company; it came from a union and seemed, in hindsight, to have originated with employees of a company that aspired to compete with this one. But those of the employees who had joined the union went on strike when the union told them to do. Acrimony ran high. People avoided visiting the town where the strike was taking place because people on both sides were screaming and quarrelling on the street, and you never knew when somebody might become violent. The strike didn't actually last long; the workers got their pay raises. But somehow the company never recovered its competitive edge. It lost business to a company in a different part of the country...the one whose employees seemed, in hindsight, to have urged their competitors' employees to go on strike.
Then there was the horrible plight of secretaries. Secretaries, by definition, differed from typists in that secretaries were in on all the business's "secrets" and were in the line of succession to take over the company--if stockholders weren't too prejudiced against women. Secretaries were practically part of their employers' families.
In too many cases, of course, they were the part of the families that were traditionally called concubines, which US law never recognized, and they were abused, not given the recognition and benefits that "secondary wives" have in societies that allow polygamy. The idea of the secretary marrying the glamorous single businessman, or the married businessman's son, was considered very romantic. In reality secretaries were often bullied into sexual relationships with married men, and they didn't even have job security if these men got tired of them. Left-wingers sometimes did focus on that specific abuse; but, although it was widespread, it was irrelevant to the majority of secretaries. Most secretaries simply did honest work for the pay they had agreed to accept, which was usually lower for women than it would have been for men.
So the Left started screaming about the fact that, as prospective heirs to the company, secretaries were asked to do things other than typing and filing. In many offices the secretary made coffee for everyone! Often secretaries were asked to run errands and even buy presents for the boss's family! Shopping for a gift for a woman whose husband is exploiting your body undoubtedly is icky. Not that most secretaries would know firsthand. But ooohhh, it was so demeaning to be asked to pick out gifts for other people to give to other people...I never have figured out just why. The male accountant usually wasn't asked to pick out gifts, except maybe for a young male relative, because the male accountant was likely to be a nerd with no taste. And ooohhh, horrors, some secretaries were expected to...visit their sick employers in the hospital, or at home, to keep the business going! To walk their dogs! To take their cars to the garage! I did those things and never saw any reason to object to them, they gave me opportunities to get up and stretch, but I was told I was supposed to feel terribly demeaned by the mere idea. The new word and data processors of the Nineties were supposed to do nothing but tap on computer keyboards. Any variation in this monotonous and cramp-inducing job was supposed to be an insult to our skills.
The real objective of all this was, of course, to convince people that employing secretaries was more trouble than it was worth. They could tap on their own computers. In the Nineties secretaries who might previously have inherited businesses suddenly found pink slips on their desks when they came back from lunch.
Excessive empathy from the Left doesn't last long when people realize that something that may really be harmful is serving the purposes of global tyranny. Flatphones stopped causing suicide when left-wingers realized that they were surveillance devices. Global warming ceased to be a concern when corporations that just love the idea of business and government working together started drawing up plans for huge, local-climate-changing "data centers."
I thought Al Gore was misguided, but respectable in his clueless way, for all these years of his ranting about global warming, until he stood up and said that--since local warming now suits his party's purposes--what we really need to worry about now is that impending ice age, after all. Right.
We can recognize excessive empathy by its exaggerated claims. Too many motors running in the same place aren't merely overheating the air in that place; it's global warming. Flatphones aren't just overpriced toxic waste that don't work; they're causing suicides. It wasn't only a family tragedy when one little boy wasn't able to digest the food provided to his family, grow, and survive; it was genocide. It's the hyperbolic excess that identifies the rhetoric as fundamentally dishonest and discrediting those who participate in it.
When a wave of hype blows past us, it's helpful to remember things like: The perils of plastic was chosen as a talking point for US PIRG's student fundraisers to discuss with strangers because it's not serious enough, nor likely to be taken seriously enough, to motivate violent attacks on the students. Mistaking soda pop for food would be unwise if it were even possible, but as long as people eat food, drink water, and take exercise in a normal way, drinking soda pop is not going to make them obese or even destroy their teeth. Being shot, even in the leg, isn't fun but cars, glyphosate, and prescription medications each kill more Americans than gunshots do. Donald Trump is no gentleman but he was elected in opposition to a candidate who was no lady, either, and would have done an even worse job as President. The rising generation are, as all rising generations always have been and always will be, a mess, which indicates that a critical mass of them are now in the process of becoming respectable, responsible adults. And the world will keep on turning unless, until, it stops.
