Monday, July 27, 2026

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.) 
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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.
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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.


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.
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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. 
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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.

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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. 
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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.) 
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Thursday, July 23, 2026

Web Log for 7.22.26

Note to Serena's delivery staff: We are low on kibble. The kitten isn't eating solid food yet, but before the cats finish their next shrunk-down-from-20-pounds bag, he undoubtedly will be.

More online time was spent ganking things I'll want to keep if the Greedheadnet forces all the sane people offline, rather than reading e-mail or news sites. A first: other people shared more music links than the Meow pages I visited.

Animals 

How shall we do the Summertime Nag today? ScottieChronicles wins the prize. Guess what he's thinking about getting up to go for? Do your pets have some?


Music 

Ray Charles. (News flash for some, apparently: In the US the season for patriotic songs runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Halloween starts in October. And Christmas starts after Thanksgiving. Some people do not understand this because they are tacky. Then again, the writer who sent me a Halloween-theme book probably just wanted to make sure I had time to read it.)


The Cascades.


Lee Greenwood.


Yeahman.


Bruce Springsteen.


Joe Satriani.


John Mellencamp.


Chaka Khan.


Don McLean.


Queen.


John Denver.


Paul McCartney.


Neil Diamond.


David Crosby.


Simon & Garfunkel.


Bob Marley.


Tom Petty.




Dolly Parton.


Elijah Bossenbroek.


Miley Cyrus.


Toms Mucinieks. 


Toby Keith.


Ludovico Einaudi.


Waylon Jennings.


Blake Shelton.


"Speedy" Toliver, who moved from Virginia to Washington, DC, possibly due to people's reactions to his desecrating folk music traditions in this way. 


Proposito Music.

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Book Review: If I Were You (a.k.a. Deception)

Title: If I Were You (US), Deception (UK)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1987

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 978-0385239646

Length: 337 pages

Quote: "Good heavens, Alvey thought, what kind of establishment am I proposing to enter?"

(Partial spoilers appear in this review. No worries, I've not given away how the murder, the elopements (more than one), the medical cases of the 1810s, or any of the really "plotty" plot elements end.)

Alvey Clements and Louisa Winship met for the first time at boarding school, where everyone noticed how much they resembled each other. Rather than being intrigued by the idea that they were cousins, they tended to resent each other: Alvey was an introvert from the fledgling US, Louisa was an extrovert from the British border country. Nevertheless, Louisa wanted to be a missionary in India rather than just go home and marry a neighbor as expected. Alvey wanted to write books. So Louisa pushed upon Alvey the idea of going to the border country and impersonating Louisa, whom nobody had seen for four years or, Louisa guessed, missed very much.

This is a literary novel with elements of Regency and a faint whiff of Gothic. It's not a romance; Louisa will of course find somebody unsuitable to fall in love with, but we see Alvey having a fancy for Louisa's brother, which of course never goes anywhere, and Louisa's brother's friend having a crush on Alvey, which of course is not returned, and Louisa's sister having a crush on the brother's friend. There might have been a sequel in which all this doomed Teen Romance was resolved. There never was. The story ends, to my delight but some readers' resentment, with all four young people dutifully suppressing their feelings.

So what happens? According to the resentful review Amazon has chosen to feature, the novel lacks a plot, presumably meaning that Alvey doesn't have a romance (though other characters do). I disagree. On careful reading it has a lot of plot. In fact part of what happens is that Alvey, who has written a clever, plotty novel (readers of Jane Austen's biography will recognize many plot elements in this novel), discovers that a family story can be even more interesting than a romance. In a quiet way, typical of what happens when an introvert replaces an extrovert, a lot of things happen. Some of them are very bad; when Alvey comes home, people don't stare into her face and realize she's a different girl because they're distracted by an untimely death. Most of the things that happen work out for the good of everyone involved. 

Alvey knows better than to talk to Louisa's immediate family (except for one of the sisters, who becomes her best friend) so she listens politely to them. (Luckily for Alvey it was fashionable for young adults to call older relatives "Sir" and "Ma'am" instead of, say, "Father" or "Grandmother"; if Louisa's grandmother thinks this is an affectation, she doesn't complain.) Having someone to talk to helps each of Louisa's relatives resolve a private problem the others didn't seem to understand. By the time Louisa decides to come back to her own home, everyone has noticed that Alvey is a different person, but they're carrying on with the deception because they like having her around. Alvey never realized that she had any personal charm, any gift for anything but writing witty genre fiction; she discovers that she has. Her brother's friend, a medical student, would want to be a research psychologist if the specialty existed yet, and Alvey would have been an excellent therapist. 

I say this is a splendid coming-of-age novel, no less than The Color Purple, and much easier for sensitive readers to take. Alvey wanted a writing retreat because she'd lost her elders in the US, so her story ends brilliantly with the Winships affirming that of course she's a long-lost cousin and she "ain't drinking out of my cup but of her own." She has a home. Readers may overlook that, in Regency England, she couldn't have had a legitimate romance without one. Maybe she'll stay in her home and be the heir, as everyone else marries or dies; maybe she'll find a man and move out. But there never was a sequel to tell us which.

Let's just say that the attention to a new e-book called Deception made me wonder whether people were looking for the review of this book. I searched the web site. I'd never posted a full-length review of Joan Aiken's 1987 novel here. I thought I had because I'd mentioned it favorably in several other posts. It is in fact one of my all-time favorite novels marketed to adults. I would have loved it in high school or college; I loved it in 1988 when it reached US libraries, and I love it still.
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Belated Book Review for Wednesday: The Haunted Birdhouse

I read three whole e-books on Wednesday. All of them were seasonal. Those reviews will appear in their season. Here is a review that's not been online for a while.

Title: The Haunted Birdhouse

Author: Flora Gill Jacobs

Date: 1970

Publisher: Coward McCann & Geoghegan

ISBN: none

Length: 74 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Reisie Louette

Quote: "It's a martin house. Martins, you know, are very fond of nesting together in birdhouses that are almost like little apartment houses."

Five-year-old Jamie thinks the elaborate antique martin house looks haunted. Nine-year-old Polly feels "all the scorn of a nine-year-old sister" for this idea...but there is something spooky and strange about the birdhouse! The cat thinks so too!

The mystery stretches out to tantalize readers between ages five and nine. Possibly some nine-year-olds know the perfectly rational solution, but let's not spoil it for them.

This is a nice, cheerful, friendly, spooky but occult-free mystery for primary school readers. If it inspires them to build their own stark, modern-style martin house, all to the good. Even the "ghost" in this story is a fairly nice creature to have around.

Fair disclosure: the copy of this book that I sold was not in good condition. It had not spent forty years in an antique birdhouse, but the children's room in a well-used public library is almost equally hard on books. Then it was stored in a shed, where it was found and greatly appreciated by my frequently annoying cat Bisquit...Bisquit never expressed much interest in the grown-up mystery series by Sneaky Pie Brown, but she thoroughly enjoyed a more juvenile mystery with cat pictures in it. I've never seen a cat show so much interest in a book before. Her stamp of approval was on almost every page!

Right...so this copy is recommended to anyone looking for something to read in a tree house or share with a cat. A clean copy, which I'd be delighted to send you, is recommended to any primary school reader who would like to know what really might haunt an old abandoned birdhouse.
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Bad Poetry: Go West, Rain

"Though our traditions served us well,
No longer must we wait
On them," said the young fool in the north.
"Now we have glyphosate.

Instead of burning strips of pine trees
We might easily sell,
We'll kill all other things but pines
That dry and burn so well."

And so they did, that spring. That summer
Miles of pine trees burned;
The smoke lay heavy on the land.
Yet autumn soon returned.

Fools don't learn. That's what makes them fools.
Next year they did the same.
For many miles away, folks choked
On smoke. They were to blame.

"Though glyphosate is killing people,
We can spare some numbers,"
The old fool in the south said. "Onward
The Economy lumbers!

Let more old folk die younger! Let
The young produce more babies!
And have a War, to thin the herd!
And..." you know. Christian? Maybe his

Claim to conversion's real, but his brain's
Not attuned to the Spirit,
And he must be struck down and blinded
So that he can hear it.

Is poison worse if made in China?
So he bloviated.
Who sells you poison's not your friend.
Hunched in his web, he waited

To see more spraying in the north
Bring back the choking pall
Of smoke that drifts from north to south.
Then, well known for his gall,

He blamed the north for fouling air
People breathe in the south,
And, far from help to fight the fire
Before the south's own drought...

Forgive us, Lord, both south and north.
The east has too much rain,
While once again a deadly drought
Has gripped the central plain.

Please waken people in the north,
Convict them of their sins,
And westward blow our surplus rain,
So everybody wins.

(Cut-off point for tired eyes)

For those who've not been paying attention...These are just some popular links from Google. If you dig you can rake up even muckier stories, conspiracy theories, etc. I don't want to bother. This is a legitimate news story the CBC, the BBC, Reuters, etc., have covered, but not publicized well due to their Trusted News Initiative mandate to smother stories about what's wrong with sponsors' profitable products under layers of celebrity gossip and silly quibbles. The big US news outlets have tried to avoid this story altogether. Ignoring it's not going to make it go away.

Canada's spraying glyphosate on the old forests that might be considered among its great treasures:

 
Canada's claim on reciprocal help to fight its ensuing wildfires:


Trump's un-neighborly and hubristic response to that claim:


The Cat Sanctuary is currently in one of those weather patterns, described in old British and Western European folklore, where rain on (local lore disagrees on exactly which day) a certain day in early July indicates that more rain is going to fall on every one of the next forty days. In the US this rain usually occurs as part of thunderstorms. The lights didn't go out yesterday or last night but I unplugged the computers, just in case, four times. One day last week, by chance, rain didn't fall on the Cat Sanctuary itself but we could see it a few miles away. Tennessee had floods the weekend before last. New York City had floods last weekend. We could spare a little of that rain, and how gladly we would, if it were in our power to send a good natural water-bombing to Canada.

But who knows? If Canadians confess and renounce their sins, show a healthy distrust of those in the US and China trying to sell them more of the poison that plays such an obvious role in this sudden explosion of wildfires, maybe God will help us all with a helpful weather pattern. It's worth trying.

This poem was provoked by last weekend's Poets & Storytellers United prompt. Google's blog feed has been malfunctioning recently so I received the link only on Monday night. The poem that came to mind seemed topical enough for a Thursday post here, so here it is. I'll try to post a more cheerful poem to the PSU link-up on Friday, as well as the one on Substack.
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Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Web Log for 7.21.26

Sometimes I think of writing a Southern Wholesome Novel, as distinct from Southern Gothic, and then sometimes I think nobody'd want to publish it any more. The story I've been playing with, from time to time, since grade nine, is so wholesome it's romance-free. It's about a family of three generations but I still think it works best with the focus on the teenagers. Totally non-commercial. Of course that means it's a natural choice for Amazon...but hasn't everybody gone off Amazon now?

Fiction, Horror 

First of all, when there's a YouTube channel that claims to offer Shocking True Stories, you know it's a venue for fiction, right? E-friends have written for these channels. Priscilla Bird had one of her Baker National Forest fables solemnly read as a true story on a Bigfoot channel.

But what's with the "Appalachia Horror" genre? I think I know.


Ooohhh, the isolation! Fear the isolation! No street lights, no noise from rude neighbors at night? That's not peace--it's daaanger! Something's likely to go horribly wrong if you're not where your social worker can take care of you and know where you are! You might be offline! The government couldn't surveil you! Horror! Horror! We must seal all the entrance points and federalize all the rural land so that people can't be in the danger of being alone, seeing real dark and real stars at night--doing horrible things to each other--like dying of a then-incurable disease in peace in their own homes, which many people really did a hundred years ago. (Yes, what you might find in an "abandoned" house might still be sad, even gruesome--as it might be, anywhere. People die; sometimes the process is messy.) Or like teaching each other how to live independently of the Internet and the housing programs and the big government to make sure you never get anything better than everyone else has. 

There are people who should be afraid of the Appalachian Mountains. The social workers and big-government theorists should be. These low and nurturing mountains, where nobody ever needs to starve or freeze, make them irrelevant and obsolete; they have to change, to become fully human, or else know themselves to be useless. (I'm in favor of that.) People of good will respect one another enough not to want to trespass on other people's land, and have very little to fear from the mountains. Although, if the socialists take over, that will change; the Global Community Forces will no doubt come in to ferret out every last surviving Southern Baptist. 

What makes a noise like a child laughing that doesn't sound natural? Or like a cell phone, or like a day-flying bird singing at night? Mockingbirds, for one thing. The guilty consciences of trespassers and of writers with evil intentions, for another thing.

If what you feel in the Appalachian Mountains is fear, and it's not the healthy fear of encountering an unknown growling dog or an indignant land owner, then by all means to back to California or some other "Blue State" with lots of big government to make sure to "equalize housing opportunities," after anything happens to the remaining decent neighborhoods, by herding all the former home owners into housing projects with lots of homeless addicts lying in puddles outside their tax-funded flats. The horror stories there are real but at least you'll be safe from the uncanny, or at least unfamiliar, feeling of being alone in (an unusually benign part of) Nature. Though not, of course, from the possibility of a guilty conscience following you home.

Knitting 

I'm delighted to see that Carol Fun is knitting again. I don't know why a leg injury put me right off knitting, the year I had one, but it did. She's had a leg injury and...I hope this pair of socks means she's feeling much much better.


Music 

Aaron Copland.


Horst Jankowski.


Procol Harum. (Sometimes people discover their favorite albums floating around on YouTube...)



Angelo Badamati, TV composer ("Twin Peaks").


Spencer Davis.


Tom Petty. Some links are to the Traveling Wilburys recordings on which TP was not usually the featured singer. 





Moody Blues.


Robin Williamson. (I started to type "Robin Williams." LOL. Wishful thinking. No relation.)





Alessandro Moreschi. (Not a fan of opera? Neither am I. He flourished about a hundred years ago and was remembered as "The Last Castrato." You've been warned.)


Traffic. 



Atlanta Rhythm Section.



Neil Young. Does not deserve a rant on the subject of how men block out self-awareness and improvement by exaggerating self-blame, because I think he's exaggerating that to the point of self-parody already. 


ZZ Top.


Mark Knopfler.


Some young person who's presumptuous enough to call herself "Buffy," no family name. Hmph. "Buffy" implies Sainte-Marie, not some random twenty-year-old. This "Buffy" has talent, but Buffy Sainte-Marie she is not.


J.J.Cale.


Emancipator.



R.E.M.


Tchip-Tchip.


War, the band.


Matthew Halsall.


Police Behaving Well 

Joe Jackson says he used to be a cop, so he's especially appreciative of Good Cop Joshua Swisher, who saved a motorist's life at some risk to his own.

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