Title: Small Wonder
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Author's web page: http://www.kingsolver.com/
Date: 2002
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-050406-2
Length: 264 pages plus foreword and acknowledgments
Illustrations: drawings by Paul Mirocha
Quote: "I began this book, without exactly knowing I was doing so, on September 12, 2001."
After the physical attacks by Al-Qaeda on September 11 came the long siege of emotional terrorism by People Who Are Part of the Problem (Without Knowing It), which began, in the newspapers, on September 12. It was a weird season for writers. Even comedy writers were asked to write about The Tragedies, not because they had anything to say that anyone else didn't know, but so that certain newspapers could print All September 11 All The Time.
The emotion I remember feeling in the last third of the year 2001 was irritation. So much that was being said and written about the situation in the United States, or even in Washington, showed such total ignorance about what the people I knew were actually thinking, feeling, doing.
Real memories: The autumn of 2001 was beautiful, with day after day of picture-perfect weather. Grass had grown over the graves where my father had been buried in January and my husband's brother in November. Cormorants moved into the Anacostia Waterfront Park. Some creep mailed anthrax culture to a few personal enemies at the same time that a nasty strep infection was going through the D.C. schools. Despite strep throat my husband and I went to Stitches Fair and Knit Out.
Some reverberations from The Tragedies did reach us. We turned down a trip to Ireland because the airlines had become so tiresome. We discussed a Caribbean cruise, then ended up actually going to a memorial service for a friend who died of cancer in California. First we laughed at W Bush's advice to patriotic Americans to spend money ("What did you do in the War on Terrorism, Daddy?" "I charged!"), and then we did some serious thinking and writing about the benefits of buying locally produced items, which did not include the China-made flags other people were buying.
Barbara Olson, whose books I'd cited in research writing, was on one of the planes that were hijacked. That was sad, but the losses of personal friends and relatives and the well-earned success of another friend's book (the book parties started in January) took up more of our emotional energy.
I mention this because it resonates with some of the essays in Small Wonder. Kingsolver was not a newspaper wage slave obliged to crank out a certain number of words about yesterday's headlines before breakfast. She had lots of things to say that other people were not saying. She was writing about pollution and conservation, wildlife and child life, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, being a successful novelist, foreign aid, national parks, pesticides, the "locavore" eating plan, going to Japan, the Columbine tragedy. She mentions in Small Wonder that she felt only about as sad, when John Kennedy (junior) died, as she imagined Caroline Kennedy would have felt if a member of the Kingsolver family had died. And some people were outraged. How dare people be more emotionally involved with their own lives than with the public events blaring out of the TV.
The four "September 11" essays in Small Wonder are, to my mind, dreadful...but then all of them were. They were products of a very bad idea: the idea of cheapening the real grief and anguish some people were feeling by ramming phony anguish down the nation's throats until mass nausea set in.
The other essays in Small Wonder are Green and/or literary. They contain some opinions I don't support, but they also contain so many useful facts and quotes that I bought this book for reference purposes anyway. The natural history pieces are beautiful.
There is one inexcusable mistake in this book. Kingsolver is a native of Kentucky. After living in the West for several years, she moved to Virginia. She doesn't want to name the town in Small Wonder. I won't name it either, although I know which town it is...but it's not Appalachia. In Kentucky "Appalachia" may mean the mountainous half of the state, but in Virginia it is the name of one particular town. Kingsolver has been here long enough to know.
There is also some very good writing, research, and thinking in this book. There is, for example, the discussion of genetic modification on pages 93-108. I've read longer and shorter, older and newer, essays on this topic. From time to time I've even contemplated writing one. I remain unconvinced that a better essay on genetic modification can be written. If you've not made a study of this topic, Small Wonder is an excellent place to begin.
I completely agree with Kingsolver on genetic modification. I completely disagree with her on the place of cats in our ecology. So I can tell you that it's possible to enjoy her writing even if you're reading it to use her facts for the purpose of further research intended to refute her interpretation of the facts. Small Wonder and this writer's other books are recommended to anyone who is not frightened by numbers and who appreciates a well-rounded, realistic, humanitarian approach to science.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Petfinder Post: Mutt Day!
This Friday is Mutt Day, an international day for celebrating the specialness of dogs whose ancestry is too complicated even to guess.
"What kind of dog is that?"
"An excellent dog!"
Zipcode 10101: Clyde (and Tammy) from NYC
Clyde's web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/clyde-33c55546-e093-49c7-b421-308cfba4b65e/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/details/
Tammy's web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/tammy-ac75b762-6ee1-44eb-bc43-39987fe96a02/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/details/
They say both cats are on the small side. These two sisters were born as alley kittens in 2019. They became ill, were brought indoors and cured, and have been waiting to be adopted ever since. They are described as somewhat shy but friendly and snuggly when they get to know you. There is a possibility that they have already found their Purrmanent Home and their human just can't scratch up the money to make it legal, in which case this organization can help you find another adorable adoptable cat.
Bowie from NYC
His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/bowie-b316c94c-e1cf-486b-b837-768fa5ab9bf2/ny/new-york/linus-friends-fl1765/details/
Part Husky, which explains his pale eyes, and part who knows what-all, Bowie is less than a year old and is learning basic manners and commands already. He is described as eager to learn. He can become overexcited around cats and is not recommended as an ideal pet for small children, but he wants to please humans and is said to improve with guidance. He currently weighs somewhere between 26 and 60 pounds--no guarantees that he'll not grow past that size range.
Zipcode 20202: You-Can't-Call-Her-That from South Carolina by way of DC
They say they named the litter after "Alani Nu flavors" and the black one was "Witches Brew." What an utter cliche. Michiko? Richie Lou? Kitzebue? Bitsy Boo? She is a bouncy-pouncy spring kitten, just barely of legal age to be adopted. The web page doesn't insist on it, but bouncy-pouncy kittens get into less trouble if there are two of them. They can practice flipping each other over instead of flipping your belongings off shelves, scratching each other's fur instead of scratching your furniture. Ask about her adorable siblings. You'll need one.
Klinger from DC
His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/klinger-5da1bc8e-bedb-4c55-b07c-9eada39dadc5/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-dc28/details/
Ohhh, take me back. They still have that shelter on Oglethorpe Street and WTOP still does features on the most adorable adoptable pets there. Klinger has been a featured pet. What his ancestors may have been is anybody's guess--terrier and ???? He's described as friendly, snuggly, and teachable, but only just beginning to be trained in even basic dog manners.
Zipcode 30303: Lainey and Colton from Atlanta
Brother and sister would probably be happiest together. Though they've reached normal adult cats' size, they are not a year old yet and may continue growing. They are playful energetic kittens.
Minnie from Atlanta
Her other ancestors include retrievers and poodles. At the time of posting they were just eight weeks old, really too young to leave their mother. Minnie is expected to weigh about 60 pounds as an adult.
Monday, July 27, 2026
Web Log for 7.27.26
Music
Stephen Bishop.
The Coral.
A whole album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XzfXKbYX4s
Quotes, Misattributed
A few weeks ago the Poets & Storytellers United were running with a quote, misattributed to C.S. Lewis, about being "never too old to pursue goals."
Considering the ages at which he took on new jobs, new styles of writing, new languages, his marriage and stepfatherhood, it does seem as if Lewis would have agreed with the idea. But he didn't say it. "Goals" was a buzzword of the 1980s. The quote about "You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream" was actually first recorded about twenty years after Lewis died; it was spoken by a Christian motivational speaker called Les Brown, who published a book called Live Your Dreams in which these exact words don't appear, but they've been traced to transcripts of his speeches.
Another thing Lewis never said was "I sat with my Anger long enough until she told me her right name was Grief."
In A Grief Observed Lewis did document his movement through the emotional stages of grief, beginning when it "felt so like fear" and going on through other stages Kubler-Ross counted as main and secondary...but he didn't write that line. Any number of grieving people might have written it. It's normal to feel angry about our losses, then feel that anger subsiding into "pure" grief as we accept that the losses are irretrievable. So far, all Google knows about who did write that line is that it wasn't Lewis.
And Lewis never wrote "You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body," either.
Nor did Oscar Wilde write the exact words "Be yourself! Everyone else is already taken," although he might have chortled at that line if he'd ever heard it. The line has been traced to an anonymous journal entry someone made in the 1960s.
Einstein didn't say "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Rita Mae Brown did. Though some say she was quoting a Narcotics Anonymous document.
Nor did Einstein say "You don't really understand a thing until you can explain it to your grandmother." Google thinks Kurt Vonnegut said something like that "first," in the 1970s. I know firsthand that Herbert W. Armstrong said, at several times and in several ways, that if you really know what you are talking about you can explain it to a reasonably intelligent ten-year-old child. He had said it several times, and Dad had tried to test it on my brother and me, well before I was ten years old. Armstrong's genius was for synthetic reading and explanation, not for original phrasing, and he probably got the line from someone else. It's in his Autobiography and in several things he'd published before that.
Arthur Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "Elementary, my dear Watson." According to Google, P.G. Wodehouse had Psmith say it in Psmith Journalist, which I've never been able to find.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi did write "“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.", which sounds close, but he never actually wrote "Be the change." That phrasing is of our time, not his. Thoreau wrote something similar to "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams," too, but it was less succinct.
What Machiavelli actually wrote has been reasonably translated as "One must consider the end result," but "The ends justify the means" is just too good a line in English to be an accurate translation from anything anybody ever wrote in Italian.
Voltaire of course never wrote "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," either. He wrote in French. Apparently what he wrote can't be accurately translated in those exact words either; the quote comes, Google says, from a summary by an English writer.
Happy browsing from these beginning points:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/68007/50-famous-misquotations-and-what-was-really-said (Warning: ads at this site behaved badly.)
Graphic from Google. Lincoln never said that, either.
Sports
Video of Sepp Kuss's narrow escape in the Tour de France.
Women's Issues
To hold their lead, especially with the CHD "Moms" contingent, the non-Left needs to establish itself as the party of women. So, gloating when a misguided left-leaning woman CEO is replaced with a more "conservative" man is out of order. It should have been possible to replace Cracker Barrel's Julie Fels Masino with a woman who was more attuned to what customers expected.
Instead of jeering at Fels Masino for being a "woke girlboss," we might do better to jeer at, e.g., Satya Nadella of MicroHubrisSoft with his rape-your-computer philosophy, or Bill Anderson of Bayer, David A. Ricks of Lilly, Rob Davis of Merck, or Albert Bourla of Pfizer, as "macho d'head boybosses who need for someone to feed them Ritalin and put them in time out until their nannies can take them home."
Considering job performance in terms that go beyond male employees' willingness to dodge family responsibilities by working overtime, males really should become rarer at every echelon of corporate management, vetted for things like their respect for the customers, for the company's reputation, and for Life Itself. Taking time off to have a baby may be irresponsible in this overcrowded world, but raising costs while slashing benefits to customers, like Hans Vestberg, should be even worse from a business's point of view.
Web Log for 7.26.26
Fiction and Gender
One of the best analyses I've read of why women prefer "women's fiction," when as a class we don't consistently prefer women's conversation, was a "Gene & Gina" feature in the Washington Post Magazine, in which Gene Weingarten let himself be schooled by Regina Barreca on writing columns women found funny.
In this column Gene and Gina wrote alternate paragraphs of a flash of fiction about two yuppies meeting for lunch in a yuppie restaurant.
Each paragraph showed us what each yuppie was thinking as they said the first half-dozen or so lines in their conversation. Basically they were selfish, friendless, one-dimensional yuppie jerks, more concerned with being rated better than others in their field than with accomplishing anything in particular. She was a "top" oncologist; he was a "top" lawyer. She wanted to hire him to investigate something. Before she had a chance to explain what, however, the male yuppie became twitchy. They'd been just sitting and talking and thinking for 500 words, he howled, using up another hundred or so, and nothing was happening! He was trapped in a modern, female-friendly story! "DO something!"
"So she shot him."
Readers like it when fiction moves a little faster than real life, but only believably so. We don't have to sit through the process of elimination in which she decided to hire this particular lawyer and not one of the other 500 lawyers in the city. We do expect him to sit still through the explanation of what he's been hired to investigate.
Music
These music links came from a site that attracts a slightly older crowd. You may notice. However: Steppenwolf.
Skeeter Davis.
NRBQ.
Dan Hicks.
Cowboy Frank.
Greg Abbott's computer parodies a song by Frank Sinatra. The voice sounds almost real...until you listen to the words.
Van Halen.
Aaron Neville.
Pennsylvania in Danger
Proposed "data center" could inflict more unwanted climate change on Virginia, Maryland, and New York as well. You must live in the county to sign the petition but you can publicize it, and fund it of course, from anywhere. Pennsylvania was not designed to support these things. If they exist they need to be somewhere, I don't know, out in the Sonora Desert, or in the glyphosate-soaked prairie of Iowa, or buried in the permafrost on the Canadian Shield. No "data centers" should be allowed within fifty miles of any town or working farm.
Prepare for the walkout. If the corporations insist on rolling their "data centers" into our towns the way they ram their "updates" into our computers...there's one thing we can do before weak town council members come up for reelection. That is walking out of the Internet. We all remember how to unplug. It will seem odd and uncomfortable at first, but we were living adequate lives before the Internet existed and we will live adequate lives if it has to come all the way down. But a solid, early walkout is the best chance of keeping the Internet going. All we have to demand are NO "data centers"--NO "cloud storage" for our data--we will connect to the Internet, if at all, only from computers with hard drives AND external data drives. No Chromebooks. No Windows 11. No "phone apps." (No flatphones!) If even a few technorati do it and stick to it, the corporations will have to back down. There'll be no demand for "data centers" if they're having to negotiate whether there's a demand for computers at all.
Pennsylvania is meant to look like this...
(photo: Homeworthy)
...not like this.
(photo: China.org)
Weather
What's your local Air Quality Index rating? Kingsport's and Bristol's, and presumably Gate City's, are primo just now, according to this map:
Of course, that's in terms of smoke from other people's wildfires, only. Actual air quality just now is so humid that one wretched smoker walking down the road below is likely to make breathing unpleasant for hours. Smokers should avoid walking on this road.
This particular smoker should know that what I see out the window is a kid, a nice lad a bit older than The Nephews, married to a nice girl, hardworking and intelligent young people I would like to help to succeed. And because I've never actually heard of a case where an elderly widow wrecked the home of a nice young couple, because Kathy Lee Griffin's toy boy is at least a bachelor and so was Shug Avery's and anyway she was fiction and real old ladies who have toy boys have money to support the wretched things, but even so the filthy minds of some neighbors can imagine that I might want a toy boy--which I do not--helping you succeed means that you walk on other roads, where all the houses have men in them. If I talk to you it needs to be in front of your house, with your wife in sight. If you walk up this road for the exercise and the scenic mini-waterfalls, you should walk as a couple, preferably by daylight, and leave the cancersticks at home. (The dogs, of course, are welcome.)
Book Review: American Needlework
Title: American Needlework
Author: Georgiana Brown Harbeson
Date: 1938
Publisher: Coward-McCann / Bonanza Books
ISBN: none
Length: 232 pages including index
Illustrations: photos, mostly black and white
Quote: "Many fine works, notable for their beauty of design and high standard of craftsmanship, were produced even when the manner of life was crude and exacting and when dangers threatened on every side..."
Adelaide Hechtlinger outlined American women's history through quilts; Georgiana Brown Harbeson here outlines it through embroidery. American Needlework begins with a chapter on Native American quillwork and proceeds chronologically through discussions of bead embroidery, "stump work," crewelwork, candlewicking, samplers, and on through the patriotic wall hangings of the early twentieth century and the first of several twentieth-century bargello fads.
Certain academic authors have tended to support a vague impression that art historians always respected painting because men did it and ignored embroidery because women did it. Harbeson seems unaware that this question would come up for debate, but presents evidence that American intellectuals did respect embroidery as an art form. (Of course, they recognized that some embroidered pieces were more artistic than others.)
In fact, during periods when American Protestant churches seemed to be competing to see which group could adopt the strictest rules of discipline, embroidery was encouraged while painting was considered frivolous or even sinful. American Needlework contains a large, selective sample of needlework pieces that were preserved in art museums and some literature that was written about them.
However, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries artists did not become celebrities by producing outstanding embroidery. During this period a pretense was being made that English "gentlemen" would publish their writing only anonymously, forfeiting all chance of payment, because doing any kind of creative work for money lowered one's status down into the working class. Americans affirmed that a "gentleman" could demand payment for what he did, even if it was creative work that he enjoyed, but clung to a philosophical notion that "ladies" didn't want fame or money. Harbeson tries to recognize the women (and the two men) whose embroidery she documents in this book, but many of the living artists hid behind titles or aliases, including "Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt."
What does it say about American male artists that only two men produced embroidered pieces good enough to be mentioned in American Needlework? (Remember, Roosevelt Grier, Kaffe Fassett, and other men who are active as needle artists today hadn't been born yet...)
American Needlework does not tell people who've never done embroidery how to make the basic stitches, but it can fairly be called "a practical handbook," as it is in the blurb on the jacket. Embroidery is a visual art. Looking at a good photo of what someone else has done is enough to show you whatever you might learn for your own artistic purposes. Although the color and clarity readers have learned to expect in glossy magazines like Threads and Piecework were not available in 1938, the pictures in American Needlework can still teach needle artists a great deal.
This book deserved to remain in print at least until someone else had taken the trouble to re-photograph all these embroidered pieces. Perhaps someone will.
Author: Georgiana Brown Harbeson
Date: 1938
Publisher: Coward-McCann / Bonanza Books
ISBN: none
Length: 232 pages including index
Illustrations: photos, mostly black and white
Quote: "Many fine works, notable for their beauty of design and high standard of craftsmanship, were produced even when the manner of life was crude and exacting and when dangers threatened on every side..."
Adelaide Hechtlinger outlined American women's history through quilts; Georgiana Brown Harbeson here outlines it through embroidery. American Needlework begins with a chapter on Native American quillwork and proceeds chronologically through discussions of bead embroidery, "stump work," crewelwork, candlewicking, samplers, and on through the patriotic wall hangings of the early twentieth century and the first of several twentieth-century bargello fads.
Certain academic authors have tended to support a vague impression that art historians always respected painting because men did it and ignored embroidery because women did it. Harbeson seems unaware that this question would come up for debate, but presents evidence that American intellectuals did respect embroidery as an art form. (Of course, they recognized that some embroidered pieces were more artistic than others.)
In fact, during periods when American Protestant churches seemed to be competing to see which group could adopt the strictest rules of discipline, embroidery was encouraged while painting was considered frivolous or even sinful. American Needlework contains a large, selective sample of needlework pieces that were preserved in art museums and some literature that was written about them.
However, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries artists did not become celebrities by producing outstanding embroidery. During this period a pretense was being made that English "gentlemen" would publish their writing only anonymously, forfeiting all chance of payment, because doing any kind of creative work for money lowered one's status down into the working class. Americans affirmed that a "gentleman" could demand payment for what he did, even if it was creative work that he enjoyed, but clung to a philosophical notion that "ladies" didn't want fame or money. Harbeson tries to recognize the women (and the two men) whose embroidery she documents in this book, but many of the living artists hid behind titles or aliases, including "Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt."
What does it say about American male artists that only two men produced embroidered pieces good enough to be mentioned in American Needlework? (Remember, Roosevelt Grier, Kaffe Fassett, and other men who are active as needle artists today hadn't been born yet...)
American Needlework does not tell people who've never done embroidery how to make the basic stitches, but it can fairly be called "a practical handbook," as it is in the blurb on the jacket. Embroidery is a visual art. Looking at a good photo of what someone else has done is enough to show you whatever you might learn for your own artistic purposes. Although the color and clarity readers have learned to expect in glossy magazines like Threads and Piecework were not available in 1938, the pictures in American Needlework can still teach needle artists a great deal.
This book deserved to remain in print at least until someone else had taken the trouble to re-photograph all these embroidered pieces. Perhaps someone will.
Butterfly of the Week: The Great Zebra
The last Graphium species we'll meet here, at least until the reclassification of Chinese species sorts itself out, is Graphium xenocles, the Great Zebra. (You may remember that Graphium macareus is the Lesser Zebra. The wings look somewhat alike, but xenocles is much bigger.) Graphium xenocles is regarded as having several subspecies, scattered through southern Asia. It is found in India, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam, and parts of China.
Photo by Rejoice Gassah at https://indiabiodiversity.org/observation/show/16924019. The organization notes that the butterfly was found in a "tropical wet evergreen forest," with temperatures between 23-25 C and rainfall between 240-280 cm in March and April, when this species is usually seen.
Greater and Lesser Zebras are photographed together, among many other species, at
The list is more complete, the photos less stunning, at
The species as a whole does not seem to be in any danger. Local populations are threatened by the usual menaces to butterfly survival, which also, of course, threaten rare and endangered species. In India the Great and Lesser Zebras share habitat with endangered Birdwings, and all of those populations, along with the smaller "commoner" species, may become endangered.
It was named in 1842, in honor of Xenocles, an award-winning Greek playwright who lived about 400 years before Christ or Caesar. The name was popular; there were also poets, an athlete, a teacher, and a politician called Xenocles. It derives from two words that were often combined into names in ancient Greece, xenos meaning "outsider, foreign, stranger, visitor, traveller, guest," and cleos meaning "famous, distinguished"; it can be translated as "distinguished guest" or "famous among travellers, a good host," though ancient Greeks probably heard it as just another man's name.
The upper wings of this butterfly are usually black and white, the white stripes and dots sometimes appearing greenish or bluish. True to the general rule that male Swallowtails show clearer colors and more contrast, butterflies with black and white underwings are likely to be male.
Photo by Shirdipam,April, West Bengal.
The underwings are often brown and white. Brown stripes are more likely to appear pale or drab in males and bright chestnut brown in females, but individuals vary. This seems a departure from the usual Swallowtail pattern. Females of this species who look different from their brothers may look more like the butterflies, some similar to our Monarchs, that they mimic.
Photo from https://www.wildmentor.de/index.php/species-details/fb9d02b4-c4ba-4396-8075-99c5cd5e5db6 .
An orange or yellow spot can be conspicuous at the corner of the hind wings; the spots are more often conspicuous in some subspecies than in others. The yellow spot can look almost like a firefly's tail light.
Photo by Amir92.
Variations in the pattern of stripes and dots can identify subspecies. This and other species are considered mimics of a different butterfly found in some of the same places, Parantica melaneus.
Great Zebra shares a puddle with another popular Asian Swallowtail, the Red Helen. This photo and others, including a nice clear photo of Parantica melaneus, can be found at
As in many Swallowtail species, males gather at puddles along with other males of this and other species. In this stock video from Ponds, we see Great Zebras among other Graphiums and some smaller butterflies at a puddle.
The subspecies of Great Zebra include:
Graphium xenocles kephisos, found in Burma and Vietnam
Photos from Wingscales.com.
Photos of Great Zebras in Vietnam:
Graphium xenocles lindos, found in Thailand and Cambodia. Some photos of this subspecies and other Asian Swallowtails are at
Photo from wingscales.com.
A museum collection of G.x. lindos:
Graphium xenocles phrontis, found in India.
Photo by Supratimdeb, April, India. This butterfly looks faded partly because it was photographed in bright sunlight, perhaps also because it was female, and also because it was G.x. phrontis.
Here is a gallery of mostly male phrontis, mostly found at puddles.
Graphium xenocles xenocles, found in the Himalayan parts of India, Sikkim, Assam, and in Bhutan
Photo by Rohit Girotra for Ifoundbutterflies.org.
Graphium xenocles xenoclides, found in parts of China, is less well known. The only photos I could find were of dead specimens:
Like other Swallowtails, it favors small flowers, presumably because Swallowtails have relatively shorter probosces than other butterflies.
Photo by Cavefishsupremacy, February, Vietnam.
And what is it about Swallowtails and the color blue?
Photo by Pemayangdenlepcha, Sikkim (India).
Apparently some of them sometimes look bright blue, themselves...
Photo by Savethitiphon, April, Thailand.
This caterpillar was found in May and reared; it grew up to be Graphium xenocles. Its host plant, shown, is Miliusa sinensis.
Photo by Abyssss at INaturalist.org.
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Book Review: Hide and Seek
Title: Hide and Seek
Author: James Dobson
Date: 1974
Publisher: Fleming H. Revell
ISBN: 0-8007-0653-6
Length: 159 pages
Quote: “Our youngsters need not hide in shame; by applying the strategies I have outlined, we can give them the courage to seek the best.”
Credit or blame for our concern with children’s self-esteem does not belong to James Dobson. Several of the ideas found in Hide and Seek are updated restatements of ideas first credited to Alfred Adler. However, not everything in the original writings, either Dobson’s or Adler’s, seems to have been understood by the people whose obsession with their children’s self-esteem seems to others to be making monsters. If you think today’s children suffer from excessive self-esteem, you might appreciate a discussion on page 59 of how it’s “possible to create a spoiled brat by telling him his every move is wonderful.”
My concern about parents reading this book is that specific advice that seemed important to Dr. Dobson, perhaps in the families he was counselling, may not be relevant to every child. Should parents worry if a child forms a habit of self-deprecation, not just telling friends “You’re good at...” or “I wish I had...like yours,” but telling them “I’m so dumb” or “I’m so fat”? Not necessarily about the child’s inadequate self-esteem, or worse, so much as excessive self-esteem. Those who are winners in the beauty/talent/money competitions, and know it, may have become complacent by competing for too long in too small a group. “I’m so bad at math” may not be a way of saying “I’m an inadequate human being”; it might also be a way of saying “You don’t have to hate me because I’m so lucky in every other way,” and the child might benefit more from spending time around someone who is even luckier than from making a learning problem part of per identity.
Does playing with TV-character toys, many of whom are supposed to be teenagers or adults, hurt children’s self-esteem because they’re not teenagers or adults? I’d have to wonder what else was going on if a child’s self-esteem was all that brittle. Children have always imitated teenagers and adults; that’s what playing is all about. Even running, throwing balls, and climbing trees could be considered instinctive rehearsal for hunting and dodging predators in the jungle. I’d be more concerned with whether a child is able to make up his or her own ways to play with toys, or thinks he or she has to have all the pre-packaged accessories to act out only the pre-packaged stories.
One piece of advice in this book that I hope won’t reappear in Bringing Up Girls appears on page 88, where Dobson even tries to answer the question asked by an adult who begins by saying that a “little girl is sometimes sugar-sweet, and other times she is unbearably irritating. How can I get her out of a bad mood?” Dobson actually suggested, in 1974, that the adult should tell the child that she has two personalities, one “sweet and loving” and one “cranky and noisy and silly,” and she needs to stifle the less lovable part of her personality. Based on my experience of being a child, I’ve meticulously avoided saying things like that to children. I can say to adults that that’s about the most counterproductive thing that can be said to a child.
First of all, vague adjectives like “sweet” and “silly,” which can mean several different things to adults, don’t mean anything to a child, except that you, the adult they can’t possibly respect, are caught up in one of your mood swings again; if you’re flattering the child with words like “sweet” you can probably be manipulated, and if you’re attacking with words like “cranky” you’re probably dangerous; you are not saying anything about what you would like the child to do. If you want to see any difference in a child’s behavior, you need to state your wishes in exceedingly clear, concrete, objective terms. Never use any form of the word “be” when discussing the child’s behavior. Use nouns and verbs, not adjectives. Yes, it will take a long time to spell out all the details of what you mean by "be good" in a way that means anything to a child. Yes, do it anyway, because that's the only way to give a child a working definition of "good." “Don't hit people” and “Hang up your coat” are rational, intelligent things to say to a child; “Don’t be mean” or “Be neat” are counterproductive things to say, no matter how obvious and reasonable they seem to you. Constantly telling a child to “be” different than he or she is can do much more damage to the child’s self-esteem, and to per respect for your advice, than merely letting the child notice that, at a particular stage of development, the child’s face isn’t considered beautiful.
Secondly, human beings aren’t supposed to “be sweet”; nobody wants a child to be diabetic. They’re supposed to communicate what they mean in ways that don’t harm others. It may be helpful to try to guide a child to help adults monitor the child’s “bad moods.” Ask whether the child feels “bad” when doing certain things. Keep a logbook, over a few months, to see whether there are consistent correlations between “bad” feelings and physical factors like what the child eats, how much sleep the child gets, how much time the child spends around other children, what the weather is like, where the child has been. Paying attention to “bad moods” can save parents and children a lot of medical expenses. Trying to enforce a permanent “grinny mood” on yourself, the adult, or on a child can do a lot of damage. A permanent "grinny mood" is a sign of brain damage; if you’ve even thought that you wanted a “grinny” child, you were not ready to become a parent, and you need help.
Because I feel that my own childhood learning experience was confused to the point of emotional abuse by adults who seemed unable to say whatever they really meant, and insisted on throwing meaningless words at me and other children, I’d even add a third caution to parents who are likely to read page 88 of this book. When you feel that a child is in a bad mood, and aren’t sure how to explain your perception in clear objective terms, it’s possible that your child has discovered the many ways to insert an implied insult into an ordinary sentence in English by using word emphasis. The child probably learned the “vaps” (verbal attack patterns) from you. If not, there are plenty of other places person could have learned them; it doesn’t matter. What you must not do is emote about “that tone of voice.” The child’s voice is not the problem, unless of course the problem is that you are feeling a need for quiet time. If, after prolonged consideration of the possibility that your unmet need for solitude may be harming your relationship with your children, you find that bad language habits like not really listening, interrupting inappropriately, judging and labelling, vapping, or nagging still exist in your family, then the whole family can profit from studying The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense books. These books are especially valuable because they're not about labelling and judging emotions, but about building skills.
In an older book on what an older man was learning from fatherhood, Art Linkletter described his initial annoyance with a letter from a young fan asking "What are parents for?" His annoyance subsided as he realized that too many parents and teachers have only told children what they're against. To which I would add, "...and even then they've not explained what they do want." One reason for that is, of course, that often people who seem to be finding fault with something someone else does (or is or has) are merely expressing their own emotional problems. What difference does it make to you what sort of mood you imagine someone else to be in? Do you seriously imagine that you need to try to control someone else's moods? You can reasonably say "Don't slam the door so hard things fall off shelves" or "Even if you don't feel like speaking to anyone, your dog still needs his walk" or "We don't speak to other people unless they hold eye contact and smile," but there is no need to generate emotional problems by projecting your value judgments onto the moods growth hormones are going to continue to produce until the child is about 25 years old.
When he’s dealing with parents less obviously dysfunctional than that one, Dobson gives better advice. “Avoid overprotection.” “”Discussion is to be done without finger-wagging and accusations.” “[Be] very specific rather than general.”
Studies have shown that the majority of words many parents say to their children are directives. The more these directives tell children clearly what to do (and acknowledge when it has been done), and the less they try to judge any way the child might seem to “be,” the more effective the parent’s words can be in helping the child develop an adequate, realistic level of self-esteem...a sense that only God can judge what any living person “is,” but other people appreciate things the individual can do.
Friday, July 24, 2026
Web Log for 7.23.26
Not a lot of online time...
Glyphosate Awareness
It's not only glyphosate. In this California study, the "pesticides" found at the most dangerous levels in killed butterflies were "pyrethrins," insecticides that people sometimes try to claim are "organic" because they can be derived from plants. In plants, these chemicals occur at levels that discourage most animals from eating the plants, but don't usually kill those who nibble enough to notice that they don't want any more. In concentrated spray forms they can become deadly. We know there's no way these butterflies were glyphosate-free when they died, and we know that glyphosate would have aggravated the effects of the pyrethrins, but...gardeners and farmers must not listen to anyone peddling pyrethrins.
Language, the Case for Cleaning Up Your
Once again someone cited this 2021 incident. This time a comment occurred to me:
How old is he? Generation X, I'd guess, like my sisters. In which case he grew up with the following unofficial rule about what the rest of humankind called people of African descent: When talking about someone you like, there's no need to mention the person's "race" unless someone else was trying to make something out of it. When talking about someone you don't know well but respect, or don't know of any reason not to respect, "race" may be ignored but, if mentioned, the person is either "Black" or "African-American." When talking about someone you don't like, don't respect, and don't wish well, that is what the N-word means. The rest of the words surrounding it generally formed a curse or a death threat. That was why we all agreed that it was a Very Bad Word.
Older people might have learned different rules. In Virginia there used to be some perception that the N-word was the way lazy-mouthed cotton pickers in the Deep South mispronounced "Negro," which was considered the proper word in the mid-twentieth century. Regardless of your feelings about the person the N-word was "incorrect," like "brung" for "brought" or "worsh" for "wash." Using the N-word as it is constantly used by today's rappers was an indication of a person's utter lack of Background. The only situation in which a White gentleman would ever use the N-word was if he wanted a pretext to become violent, in which case he might say it, quietly, while staring at a Black man, possibly with a sneering expression on his face. The Black man would then feel obligated to throw a punch, and the White man could then give him the full Scott Sherwin treatment--if able. Many a White man who had no hope of ever being mistaken for a gentleman avoided using the N-word, anyway, because he knew he was likely to receive the Scott Sherwin treatment.
Anyway. Here's this full-grown man, the school basketball coach, which is practically a teacher for pity's sake, not liking that another team of half-grown girls are kneeling on the gym floor. The majority of the girls look White. And this coach was caught in front of a live microphone growling, "F'g n's."
No gentleman ever says that in front of any female. Nor does a lady ever say it in front of any male.
No teacher ever says it in front of any student.
He's supposed to be giving these children a good example of how to talk, and how to think before the big game. He could have jeered, "Oh, see them all kneeling like Kaepernick. What an ignorant, unpatriotic lot they are. Go and beat the pants off them." That would have had a locker-room sound, but it's something a coach might be excused for saying.
But no. "F'g n's."
So then he whines in public that he has diabetes, and his blood sugar was spiking.
"Diabetes does not cause racism," people sneered at him. Not unreasonably.
"But I'm not a racist," he whined, presumably meaning that, like a typical late Boomer or Generation Xer, he does like and respect some Black people, especially his students, he loves his students as if they were his nieces, but those little Kaepernickazoids, on the other hand....
So that happens to be the truly hateful way to use the N-word. Stupid Man may not be a racist in the sense of disliking and disrespecting all Black people merely because they are Black, but he is certainly a race baiter, a person who's willing to bring people's race into it when he wants to pick a fight. Right. With half-grown girls.
Trashy. Utterly trashy. Schools are supposed to keep people like that away from our children.
Why did he do it? He might have hated coaching. He might have wanted to make it so that he would never be asked to coach again so that he could go back to that other job his wife hated his doing. But that's unusual and I'm inclined to believe the diabetes excuse. Diabetes, and medications and other things that go wrong with the body, don't cause racism but they can cause people to blurt out things they would normally know better than to say.
Stupid Man's problem was that he let himself think, and talk among his friends, in words teachers don't say in front of students. So when his illness flared, his guard dropped, and there he was, letting his students hear words that he was legally responsible for protecting them from having to hear.
If he had formed the habit of thinking in more "stilted, oldfashioned" language, even at the risk of not fitting in with his friends, his students might have heard him muttering "Unpatriotic Kaepernickazoids," which would not have been a valid reason for all schools to make sure he never had an opportunity to speak to a student ever again.
Music
Michael Jackson..."Thriller." You have been warned.
Nat "King" Cole.
Book Review: Silver Linings
Title: Silver Linings
Author: Christine Pope
Date: 2025
Publisher: Dark Valentine
Quote: "At least a decade had passed since the last time I'd seen a unicorn out here."
Sidney is the heir to a family secret that's caused her mother and grandmother to become Missing Persons, her father to disappear out of their lives: The forest they own, near Eureka, California, contains a portal through which mythical animals come from other worlds to visit. Unicorns, it seems, sense humans' intentions and don't actually care about virginity. They were still appearing to Sidney's grandmother before she vanished; they're practically Sidney's pets, when they show up.
Ben met a discouraged older man in a bar, where the man dropped a photo on the floor. It was signed by Sidney. From the photo Ben could tell that the woman photographed was the man's daughter and that he'd find her attractive. So he goes out to Silver Hollow to find Sidney and offer to help with anything she's doing, if possible. He can tell Sidney's the type of woman who's only interested in a man who can be a real friend and partner in her life.
The forest is being threatened by a corrupt logging company. Ben and Sidney can work together on something: organizing community resistance to logging. The unicorn can help.
I've read better fantasy novels. I've read worse. This trifle may amuse you, may inspire your own activist work...and, of course, it's meant to sell you a series of novels that answer the questions that haven't been answered at the end of this one. Where are Sidney's mother and grandmother? Why did they go there? Will Ben and Sidney get married? There are three more volumes so far.
Bad Poetry with Birds
Earlier in the week Sherry Marr quoted Mary Oliver: "A poem should always have birds in it." She went on to say that finding birds in a poem made her happy.
So here is a poem for Sherry Marr.
Because the cardinals own the privet hedge,
the wrens own the back porch, and hummingbirds
own where the jewelweed blooms, long as it does
(and it is blooming now), I seldom see
the rest of the Cat Sanctuary's birds:
the little drab ones camouflaged in trees,
beyond the reach of astigmatic eyes
because they seldom perch for long enough
to aim binoculars if I've brought them.
I seldom do. I've never paid that much
attention. But they're threatened by incursions
of English sparrows and pigeons, in the towns.
The worst thing one can do is put out feeders
and birdhouses that the English sparrows claim.
The best is leave them in the tops of trees
untouched, left to grow back to oak and beech
for future generations to enjoy.
Meanwhile song sparrows, Carolina wrens,
nuthatch and chickadee and Tufted Titmouse,
most years an oriole, a water-thrush
some years, and then of course the mockingbirds
who mock those who try to know birds by sound,
flit through the woods still hardening back from years
when farmers clear-cut to the tops of hills
and watched the hilltops shrink beneath their cuts.
Where trees are cut and soil's left to grow
in grass, the robins and killdeer move in.
Bluebirds were common once; now they are rare
though loved. All birds are predators. The big
ones, crows and hawks and owls, will let
you watch them if you choose. They knew
when people used to shoot them. Now they know
that people want their species to come back.
The great blue heron, rare when I was young,
is now almost a pest. They kill the trees
where they roost; five or ten years all a tree
can stand of herons' sociability.
We used to think they lived alone. They fish
alone. They roost, when they have fished enough,
in great big happy families, noise and smell
louder than cormorants'. They will share a tree
with cormorants, lesser herons, pelicans
at a good healthy distance if the tree
is big enough. The fertilizer burn's
what kills the tree. Next day the herons fish
alone again; the cormorants stand in rows;
the pelican, presumably, tried to think
how it could get back south where it belonged,
while it lived on the river. People of
good will always enjoy the birds, here, though
fanatical birdwatchers congregate
back east, along the flyway. Birds are nice
to know, especially in mosquito season.
(All photos are fair use from Google. All bird species shown coexist peacefully with cats, though some die after every "pesticide" spray poisoning incident. All normally coexist peacefully with humans, too, though orioles sometimes claim a fruit tree as theirs and fly around, crying "Sweet! sweet!", while humans pick the sweet fruit and laugh at the birds for saying something so obvious. Generally, the smaller a bird is, the higher the proportion of mosquitoes is likely to be in its diet.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
