Book Review for 10.12.24: Murder and the Ex-Con

Title: Murder and the Ex-Con

Author: Alyssa Payton

Date: 2023

Quote: "Somebody killed him. He's dead!"

Derrick, who's spent fifteen years in prison for homicide, shares a house with his sister. He's on a ladder changing a light bulb when the sister runs in screaming that their new neighbor has been murdered. And, because he's still "on parole," he's an instant suspect. So he's motivated to find out whodunit.

It's more an action-adventure novelette than a mystery, but it qualifies as a cozy myster. Whatever. If you like short contemporary stories, or want a way to bring up the topic of prison reform in a class or book club, you'll like this mini-book.

Web Log for 10.15-16.24

I spent Monday at McDonald's, sipping Coca-Cola because it is cheaper and thinking coffee thoughts about how much I'd rather be on the screen porch, or better yet in the cafe, or best of all in that lovely brick-and-mortar store I've been working toward all these years...Anyway, came home, did not even try to connect, but plugged in the laptop. About one a.m. I inadvertently clicked on the Chrome icon. Lo and behold, it showed a weak connection! Out to the screen porch and, yes, there was a good strong steady connection. Huzza! Now I'm only about a month behind. It feels as if I've spent the whole calendar year in catch-up mode at this web site. No sooner do I get caught up with online reading and writing--poorly paid writing, I might add, because where else are you going to get the amount of research I put into those insect posts for five dollars and only one reader even paid the five dollars--than the connection goes awry and there's another month of neglected web site chores to catch up with...

(Google traces this meme to Nancy Wisniewski on Piinterest. I got it from Messy Mimi.}

If you are an author waiting impatiently for a book post, once again, your e-book is undoubtedly in the computer somewhere, but Microsoft likes to foul up Chrome every so often and lose all the tabs, so it will probably take a while for me to find your book and find my place in it. But that will happen. 

Links:

Election 2024

Yet another plagiarism story about Mean Girl O'Dowdypants. I'm starting to wonder about plagiarism on this scale.

Ellen Gould Harmon White, the nineteenth century author, missionary, and "prophet" of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, became famous for having healing visions. It was obvious to all observers that these visions were mystical experiences of great power. Half-grown Ellen, whose raspy whispers could hardly be heard by family members sitting beside her bed, would shout "Glory! Glory! Glory!" and sink back in a trance, her lungs spontaneously collapsing, her breath hardly clouding a mirror. Then she'd sit up and preach, often reading Bible verses from a Bible she held out to observers, pointing to texts she herself could not see. These visions reversed the course of what was probably tuberculosis. The child who had been kept home from school due to illness since grade four described her visions in words that could have come from the scholarly works in a minister's study...

Because they had. As a homebound elementary school student little Ellen had been a precocious reader who asked for serious grown-up books. As a visionary she quoted entire sentences, even paragraphs, and described scenes from those books as if she'd been reading from the books. In fact she had read them, not necessarily in the same year when she quoted them. Ellen had a true photographic memory. She always felt that other people could put things better than she could--as most of her readers would always agree. As an adult, when her fame sold enough books that she could afford a secretary, she'd tell her secretary to quote a paragraph or a page, sometimes putting quotation marks around her long quotes but never a proper attribution. Victorian authors did that; it was not considered plagiarism. But the writer who grew up to incorporate big chunks of other people's books into her own, consciously and deliberately, started out as a little girl who "heard" words and "saw" scenes, in a trance state, almost exactly as she had found them in a book she might have read three years before. She did not know where these words and  images were coming from, at the time. Her unconscious mind stored clear, unfading pictures of other people's books, on which the spirit that guided her visions drew. 

A child moved to preach in a visionary trance, in 1843, could hardly be blamed for reading the words she saw in her vision as if they were her own, or came from an angel. An adult, educated at schools that taught people how to attribute quotations, ought to be expected to add reference notes when she pastes chunks of Wikipedia articles into a manuscript...and pay the other writers and speakers whose words reappear in her speeches, The popular Democratic Party pundits whose TV acts were recycled into Tackypants' speeches might feel flattered, and not demand payment, but Dowdypants' use of other people's words now seems to be a long-term serious problem.

Does she have a photographic memory in which other people's words pop up without any memory of where to accredit them to? At sixty, in apparently ecellent health, does Dowdypants' mind work the way Ellen White's worked at thirteen, while wrestling with tuberculosis? Keep in mind that, by the time she became Mrs. White, Ellen White had outgrown the visionary trances and become a normal Bible teacher, though her career certainly coasted on her childhood fame as a "prophet."

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/15/kamalas-plagiarism-scandal-explodes-and-her-publisher-knows-disaster-looms-n4933342

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/15/kamalas-plagiarism-scandal-just-got-worse-n4933359

But Ellen White never stooped to this kind of thing. This is pure undiluted Mean Girl.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/15/desperate-kamala-called-out-for-blatantly-lying-about-a-trump-event-n4933356

Will women vote for Tackypants? Would you vote for the Queen Bee Bully-ette from your sixth grade class? If you know a Mean Girl when you smell one, and you're thinking that all politicians have sex scandals in their pasts and a call girl is better than a molester, consider Bill Ackman's Top 33 List of reasons to vote against Dowdypants:

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1844802469680873747

History of Pop Culture and Decor

Alarm clocks...Joe Jackson thinks every family had one of these in the 1980s. I think mine managed not to have one until I inherited my husband's, but at least two roommates had this clock or a later clone (black rather than woodgrain). 

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2024/10/every-family-had-at-least-one-did-yours.html

Actually, when I was little my parents' alarm clock was a then-new-and-stylish electric model with a really jarring buzz sound. Similar, though not identical, to this...I think it was a GE clock but a different year's version, because the numbers were in a different font and the case was a dingier shade of dirty-straw-beige. Ugly little thing, but I've kept it for years, from nostalgia and sentimentality.

If you want to buy it, click here.

Then as my brother and I grew older and wanted our own alarm clocks, first I got something like this from the local Goodwill store...I liked it because it looked so retro. And the alarm tone was more like a loud bell rather than that horrid buzz. I was sloppy about winding it, though, on nights when I didn't think I'd need to get up ahead of everyone else, so it spent most of its life gathering dust and not ticking.

If you think you need one, click here.

Later in the year my brother got a newer, cooler alarm clock on some sort of special mail-order sale. It had luminous numbers and hands, and ran on a battery. It was similar in size and shape to a lot of little square battery-powered clocks shown on Amazon, Ebay, etc., only the face under the plastic outer case, and the plastic back and sides, were flat black and the hands and numbers were pale green. 

If you like the pocket size and battery power, and can do without the radium content, click here.

My husband left me both the classic GE digital alarm clock and the classic round wall clock as seen in schools, hospitals, etc. You'll find them easily if you search, but I'd pick either the wind-up clock or the battery-powered clock as things to keep on hand if you need to be on time during an extended power outage. I don't recommend this one, although my husband left me one of them, too, and it is cute:

Totally unreliable. It may keep time and alarm on time over one night, but will lose time and run down fast after that--you have to let it run completely down in between windings. And it never was guaranteed to keep time over one night. I suspect it was invented as a prank, possibly aimed at retailers who sold these things as real clocks and then had to pay refunds. This was also the era of the collapsible plastic drinking glass that fitted into any pocket and collapsed if it touched a lip.

History Being Made

I missed this...but Pbird saved the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLwi9kYvM0o

Hurricane Aftermath

Helene, of course, need anyone ask? I do know that Florida had another vicious one, but they're Florida, they get hurricanes all the time, they can cope. North Carolina reached a saturation point with some kinds of donations. You can still send money. Beth Ann Chiles shares a list of the first hurricane zones to bounce back and reopen for leaf peeping...

https://itsjustlife.me/take-another-deep-breath/

Actually Gate City should still have some good leaf peeping, too, since even walnut leaves mostly hung on until the hurricane passed. My walnut tree is now close to bare. Some other trees are yellow, and several are still bright green, waiting for frost. Everybody is back in business, you don't need to bring your groceries, and if anything we may love visitors more than usual this year. 

Mold Remediation--Unpaid Ad

I take Norb Leahy's recommendation seriously enough that, if I ever find this stuff on sale, I'll try it. I've cleaned books with bleach, and it gets rid of most mold spots and odors fast, for a good long time, but it does age the paper fast. Original formula Listerine contains specific natural antifungal oils, but (1) you don't want oils in things like paper or fabric, and (2) it'd be awfully expensive to scrub down the whole house with Listerine. Will Shockwave be found to be as toxic to humans as Adobe Shockwave Flash is to browsers? Who knows--bleach is pretty toxic if you're exposed to much of it at a time, and Listerine would be toxic if you drank it the way some "bottomless" alcoholics do. It's hard for us humans to poison other lifeforms without risk to ourselves. It's probably meant to be that way.

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2024/10/flood-remediation-10-13-24.html

Book Review for 10.11.24: Between Ink and Shadows

Title: Between Ink and Shadows 

Author: Melissa Wright

Date: 2020

Quote: "Nimona Weston...was an unwilling thief, bound to do the bidding of the very organization that had seen her shunned."

And how is she bound? Her father left her enslaved by debt to a magical organization that is, under the law of their country, nothing but a criminal gang with super-powers. But how does their magic get its power over her? Is it possible for Nim to reclaim her own magical powers in her own right? The nice but limited king is growing old. The queen is wicked, but she's not getting any younger either. The king has two illegitimate sons who use Nim to steal magical objects from each other...but is that an exercise of her powers that will make clear whose partner she is best suited to be? And what adventures await them in the next two volumes of the trilogy?

This novel is a little too steamy for me, not explicitly sexual but explicitly sadomasochistic. I knew an addict who was writing a novel just like this, once. I'm tempted to wonder whether "Melissa Wright" is her pseudonym. Addiction and sobriety are like two lovers, one evil and one benign. I don't relate to the idea of being "torn between two lovers" when one is a solid friend and one is an abuser; it's one thing to be "torn between" the serious one and the goofball, the rich one and the cute one, etc. etc., quite another thing not to have enough sense to walk away from abuse when you can; but I liked the turning point when Nim claims her power. 

For people who feel like slaves or prisoners, literally to drugs or emotionally to bad habits, this novel may be an empowering mood booster. I hope so. What I didn't enjoy about it was that it captured the emotions my addicted friend used to write out, more compulsively than with any literary ambitions, all too well. I didn't enjoy seeing her in that emotional place. I didn't enjoy seeing the fictional Nim there, either. It's worth looking if Nim's fictional example inspires people to grab the reins and bind what has bound them.

Something That Has Improved Since I Was a Kid

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt has a short answer. I don't need a lot of words to describe it.

The answer is: computers. Computers are purely a luxury. Neither individuals nor societies need them, and the case could be made that we're better off without them. Ah, but for some of us they're so much fun.

The number of people for whom computers were fun was much smaller when I was a kid, when about all computers could do was simple calculations using very large numbers. "Small" computers were the size of refrigerators; they had to be all but sealed into their own offices, away from potential contaminants like loose hairs or stray hairpins, or the certain death of computers exposed to natural changes in temperature and humidity. Most people didn't expect we'd ever see a computer in real life.

I was a teenager when microchips were invented. Suddenly, instead of getting their information from big clunky punched cards and storing it on disks the size of two-hour movie reels, computers could get their information from little chips of silicon and store it on floppy disks the size of greeting cards. There was room for one in your house, your office, even your dorm room. In a few years computer "languages" were efficient enough that people who didn't have the math gene were learning them. Children's magazines offered simple programs (a few very rich children of indulgent parents) could type into the family computer to get it to display a message like "Happy Mothers Day" or draw a simple image of a desktop computer with strings of X's. Children I knew personally were locked out of the office rooms where their parents' computers were kept, as were their baby-sitters,

By this time I was old enough to be expected to write programs that would do something useful. To stay on the Dean's List I programmed a school computer to drill freshmen on Spanish verbs, with instructions for tweaking the program to sdd other languages. On a job I helped, mostly by typing in zipcode parameters, to get a computer to look up zipcodes, because older subscribers were still forgetting to add them to their addresses when they wanted to subscribe to magazines. Then I bought a computer that came pre-programmed to do very simple word processing, and that was all I, personally, needed. I coded no more. 

It was cool, though, to be able to work on computers. Before 1979 my brittle, continually shedding hair would have been a valid excuse to ban me from the computer lab. The 1980s were awesome because now even girls with brittle hair could play with computers too.

And, perhaps foolishly, we thought that all humans had enough human feelings for our fellow humans that the ability to build robots with "artificial intelligence" wouldn't lead directly to the slaughter of humans deemed not intelligent enough to be fun to know...or too intelligent to support dictatorship. 

So everybody and their dog and cat, sometimes literally, wanted computers of their own. I vowed I'd never spend money on one after the long-gone word processor from Radio Shack; I was in control, I could stop with one.. I've acquired quite a collection from grateful clients. I sold Arnie's desktop computer, with the version of Word that was hustled off the market because it could be copied and added to any desktop computer via floppy disks, and Mark's word processor, which was really just a typewriter with floppy disk storage that allowed quiet typing and editing-before-prnting, long ago. The one we always called Joan's (Zahara Heckscher's original given name was Joan), the Original or Practically Perfect Toshiba, was a classic but eventually its plastic outer shell started crumbling at a touch; I discarded it only this year. The desktop computer Earle built, in the free Saturday afternoon class for seniors at the community college, has been in the repair shop a few times but is still working, almost perfectly, and still plugged in today; it has Windows ME, the practically perfect program for practically everything I want to do on a computer, except connect to the Internet. 

That brings us to the current century. I still have most of the floppy disks I used and reused with the computers I may always love best, Earle's and Joan's, which also became memorials to two very dear friends who died too young, both from cancer. It became more practical, however, to keep the New Desktop Computer, which can transfer documents from floppy disks to more functional thumb drives, and the Sickly Snail, a puny Dell laptop that never had enough memory to work very well but \did allow me to compose documents offline and upload them right into blogs and hackw riting sites. Then came the sleek HP laptop Grandma Bonnie Peters seldom used for a few years and then handed down to me, another precious gift from another departed friend; by now it's consuidered an antique rather than "top of the line," but I paid to have its memory resurrected because it's still a treasure. When it ran out of memory and died, yet another dear friend, who also has died from cancer by now, gave me the Piece Of Garbage; it was not his fault, he just went into a store and grabbed the one secondhand laptop computer they had that met my specifications, and nobody told him it reduced electricity consumption by crashing every time the battery came close to a full charge to force its owner to use that battery. I was glad to replace it with the Unsatisfactory Toshiba I'm using now, which may be physically worthy of the same brand as the Practically Perfect Toshiba, but is infested with Windows 10. 

Finally there's the one I rescued from the landfill this summer, currently in the shop having its passwords reset and being scanned for porn and virus. Most men are reported to be unable to own a computer without using it to look at porn, but women are at least frugal enough to remember that porn attracts bad things to computers, so I want it all scraped out of mine before I log into any web sites. It took me three months to find a way just to get that thing into the shop and I'm still not sure when I'll be able to get it out. But I will. Before I ever owned anything electronic I knew that my Green conscience won't let me send them to the landfill, even if they are the POG, programmed to make any user want to pitch them into the nearest lake. I didn't scrap the POG. I traded the POG. I would have had trouble sleeping at night if I had thrown it into a lake, despite its incredible Lake Magnetism. 

I still have all the useless shells of cell phones I've ever owned, too, and the camera that uses the cards no other device seems to be able to read any more. I don't like to send them to the landfill either. 

I think the state of computer technology has, for most people who want to use it, actually gone down during my lifetime. Windows ME did just about everything a private person or small business could want; the only "app" I ever wanted to add was one for setting up sheet music in PDF documents, and you can download those for free on anything that connects to the Internet now. Windows 10, Windows 11, now Windows 365, may offer more spyware for the corporations but offer no additional benefit, and actually offer reduced functionality, for people who want to type term papers or work with spreadsheets or check e-mail. But I was not exactly a kid when ME came out and, relative to the skewed population in cyberspace, I was "old" when Windows 10 came out--so I can still say that computers have improved since I was a kid.

Book Review for 10.10.24: Mistaken Gifts

Title: Mistaken Gifts

Author: Elena Aitken

Date: 2018

ISBN: 978-1-927968-48-2

Quote: "Would you believe she came tromping through the snow in tiny little heels and then gave me attitude because she was slipping and sliding and falling in the snow?"

Yuppie Eva (Andi's friend from Unexpected Gifts) and cowboy Jeff meet when Eva is asked to organize Andi's wedding at the Castle Mountain Lodge, where she and Colin met. Eva has just dumped a boyfriend., To forestall Andi trying to find her a new boyfriend while she and Andi have more urgent things to do, Eva is fake-dating an acquaintance of Andi's, a "gay" man. 

When Andi and Eva brainstorm ways to make Andi's wedding memorable, one idea sticks in Andi's mind. She wants to ride down the "aisle" on a white horse. She and Eva have seen the perfect horse on the ranch where Jeff works. Eva goes to make the arrangements and discovers that what she has in the way of boots are useless in actual snow. She scolds Jeff for not clearing the walkways. Jeff thinks she's cute when she's mad.

After lots of misunderstandings involving Eva's fake date and a pretty, predatory Hollywood agent who has signed Jeff up for a part, you know how this story is bound to end. If you like tasteful "contemporary adult" romances set in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, here is one more you'll want to read.

Book Review for 10.9.24: Golemcrafters

Should this be a Sunday book? I don't think so. "Jewish" can refer to either a religion or an ethnic identity. In this book it refers to an ethnic identity.

Title: Golemcrafters

Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen

Date: 2024

Publisher: Chronicle

ISBN: 978-1646142699

Length: 264 pages

Quote: "You let them learn Hebrew, become b'nei mitzvot--why not golemcraft?"

Because golemcraft is pure fantasy, that's why. In this fantasy story it works. Yona and Shiloh, whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Japanese American, feel conspicuous even at the Jewish Students Association at their school. Neither is popular. They've been ordered to join clubs. Neither is interested in any of the possibilities. Just as they're looking forward to a quiet "and solitary" spring break, their Jewish grandfather sends them a suitcase full of clay meant to be used to make golems.

According to Jewish folklore, a golem is a robot made from clay animated by the magic of ancestral memories, used to help Jews who were facing religious persecution, only nobody's ever been able to get one to do very much. 

According to this novel, which is full  of snarky wisecracks but is not really a comedy, the grandfather is able to get golems to do very small things before de-animating them. When he tries teaching the children, Shiloh doesn't get the clay to move. Yona does. Then both children start having dreams, which appear to be "portal fantasies," but turn out to be the memories of the departed ancestors they are putting  into the clay. The clay expands; the kitchen becomes crowded with half-seen, half-heard ancestral memories, one of whom insists that they are "Not! Ghosts!" The strongest memories that want to go into Yona's golems are memories of people who were martyred for their religion. It becomes an intensely sad spring break.

The grandfather takes the children to an amusement park with themes inspired by Grimm fairy tales, then points out that although the Grimms' monsters and witches weren't supposed to be human they can be read as having Jewish-like characteristics. Why do witches wear cone-shaped hats? Because cone-shaped hats were a medieval fashion that some people wanted to bring to an end, so they drew pictures where unsympathetic characters wore cone-shaped hats. No witch would have considered a more practical form of headgear while flying on her broom. And in some places in the Grimms' Germany, Jews were required to wear cone-shaped hats. And what about Rumpelstiltskin? Was his long, funny name...Jewish? And so on.

Who knows. Probably those who used fantasy stories to scare children into good behavior did associate their fictional bugaboos with real enemy tribes who might have kidnapped children for ransom. Jews were very far from being the worst offenders on any list of savage European tribes that did it, but they were a different tribe that lived nearby, easy for children to see as funny or scary-looking.  

Was your family one of those that "know a funny little man, as quiet as a mouse, who does the mischief that is done in everybody's house"? Did he have a name? Around the turn of the century I remember feeling disgusted to read that, in some parts of the United States, his name was not "Mr. Nobody" or "the Ghost" or "the Possum," but "Yehudi." People didn't know that this is both a personal name and a tribal identity name, "the Jew, the descendant of the tribe of Judah," nor did they know how to spell it, but they knew that that was whom to blame for plates nobody remembered having chipped and mud nobody remembered having tracked in. The heavens hide their face from our intolerable race.

Cohen, through her characters, frets about the possibility of religious persecution reviving through blather about "the globalist Zionist elitists" who orchestrated the COVID panic and marketed the clot-shots. I see more evidence that people are willing to hate Dr. Fauci individually than that they are blaming him for belonging to any larger group. But I can think of a strategy Cohen doesn't let her characters consider trying: Jewish Americans who don't want to be hated could dissociate themselves from "globalist elitist" thinking people have valid reasons to hate. George Soros was Jewish and dreamed of global tyranny. Other Jews could recognize him as a troubled old man who never realized that he'd fallen into a then-popular but misguided way of thinking, and so never climbed out of it. Most US bankers aren't Jewish and most Jewish Americans aren't bankers, but it wouldn't hurt Jewish Americans to recognize that lending money at interest is not the most ethical way of earning a living and the Rothschilds, may God have pity on them, are not the examples anyone wants to follow. Such little things may prevent a wave of hate from forming. 

What's not to love about Golemcrafters? Apart from its being probably too heavy for readers the ages of Yona and Shiloh (11 and 13). That's not necessarily a serious fault; many young adult novels are more interesting to adults than they are to the young. Beyond that, though, Cohen paints herself into a corner. She objects to stereotypes of possibly-Jewish "outsiders" as ogres, then upholds the stereotype of Jews as eternal victims that makes everyone else ogres. Obviously Jews have been a victim group, but all Cohen offers in the way of a solution is to perpetuate the same irrational thinking that fosters bigotry and hate. 

Snow White, Cohen and her sources forgot to mention, had the pale skin and raven waves that are a rare combination even in central Eurasia, but were seen as the ideal of Indian, or Slavic, or Ashkenazic Jewish beauty. (The physical type may be even more rare in England and Italy but has certainly been idealized there.) When persecuted by an envious stepmother, Snow White ran away and lived with some short people wearing cone-shaped hats. German "dwarfs" were not a stereotype inspired by Jews but an actual genetic mutation found in some German families. Snow White's friends were, however, definitely an "other" group, disadvantaged--miners!--who had a separate, alternative subculture that was prosperous enough to help a refugee from the dominant culture, such as Snow White. Reflection on this might make Cohen's next novel more fun to read.

Book Review for 10.8.24: Summer Solstice in Swindon

Title: Summer Solstice in Swindon

Author: G. Clatworthy

Quote: "Swindon was voted the worst place to live in the country."

Here is another short story published as an e-book, meant to introduce readers to the fictive world in which a series of full-length novels are set. Agent Jones, a cute young woman who can transform into cat shape at will, defeats the pig demon for whom the town of Swindon was named (in this fictive world anyway)

There's a real town called Swindon in England. I don't know whether it's actually been voted the worst place to live in the country, but I'm guessing it's a place the writer known as G. Clatworthy intends never to see again. Nonfiction authors usually interpret the town's name as referring to a hill where someone kept pigs, rather than a hill dominated by a pig demon, but who knows.

When an e-book opens with a warning that it's "written in UK English," I'm not really sure what to expect, but it's hard for the book to disappoint me. Unfortunately this book was less of a surprise than it ought to have been. 

If a fictional world where people turn into animals and fight duels with demons appeals to you, you may want not only the e-book but the series. 

Book Review for 10.7.24: Unexpected Endings

Title: Unexpected Endings

Author: Elena Aitken

Remember Andi and Colin from Unexpected Gifts? That novel skipped lightly from the Declaration of Romantic Love to the happily-ever-after epilogue. There was time for another lovers' quarrel before the formal proposal of marriage. That could have been an extra chapter or two in the original novel, but it was first published separately, as a short e-book. Andi listens to a friend who has not found True Love (yet) and almost dumps Colin.

Canadian Content. Sweet romantic comedy. Rocky Mountain scenery.  I think volume 3 of the box set ought to have been kept in volume 1 where it belongs, chronologically, but if you're going to read the series you'll want to read it as a separate mini-book. If you buy the box set you can consider it "free."

Book Review for 10.6.24: Love of a Lifetime

Title: Love of a Lifetime (formerly published as Love, Lies, and Homemade Pies)

Author: Sally Bayless

Date: 2019

Publisher; Kimberlin Belle

ISBN: 978-1-946034-08-3

Quote: "Cara wasn't a professional mechanic."

But she has an idea how to fix the car she passed on the road, in which the mayor just happened to be stuck. Right away the new girl in the little town of Abundance has a job in the town hall. Right away she meets, and likes, the editor of the town newspaper--except that she doesn't want any news about her to be known. Cara, short for Caroline Ann, used to be known as Ann and work with her father...before he was sent to prison. Now she's looking for a fresh start in a place where no one remembers her family business, which she always believed was legitimate; with her father being in prison her townsfolk were venting their feelings on her.

Then money is stolen from the town hall. Could Cara have done it? Who is Cara, anyway, and why is she so secretive about her past? For a few minutes even her admirer, Will at the newspaper, thinks about running a headline that accuses Cara: like father like daughter. They share a taste for the sweet treats sold at a local bakery, but what does he really know about her?

Then, realizing that he hates Cara's being in jail (she can't afford to post bail), he gets busy acting like a real newsman, finding out who did have means and motive to steal the money. But this is not a mystery, it's a romance. The mystery is solved with one guess and the couple will live happily-ever-after.

It's a Christian romance, specifically. It's part of a series; in each volume a different character quotes different texts from a different translation of the Bible. (In the 1980s, at least where I was, there was controversy about whether to call "The Living Bible" a translation or a commentary, and The Message was unmistakably a commentary. Both are paraphrases--free interpretations that reflect individuals' background and beliefs. Some characters in this series quote TLB and The Message. If authentic, this would mean that Christians were more liberal in Missouri than on the East Coast, or maybe the standards varied by denomination.)

Some tropes are all very well in their way, but they're used more often in fiction than they seem actually to happen in the real world. Romance itself is one of them. I enjoy stories where people marry each other and live happily ever after, but I love stories, much more common in real life and less common in fiction, where people have adventures, stay single, and live happily ever after. 

"Everyone is happier when all the secrets are told" is another one of that kind. In real life, sometimes unfolding all the secrets leaves everyone happier, and sometimes it leaves them less happy, and sometimes everyone's better off when some of the secrets will never be known. Love of a Lifetime is a very sweet story. (A little too sweet. Will and Cara share the lifelong taste for sweets that identifies a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and/or diabetes.)  Abundance is a sweet little town. Small town people who have learned to say "It's their business not mine" and "I don't need to know anything about that" are rare, but they exist. A story I'd like to read might be about a town where most or all the characters have learned that they can be happier when they don't pry into each other's affairs. I like to know where people came from and what they're doing in my town, too, but I don't take offense and suspect them of being criminals if they don't tell me their life stories.

But this story is set in 1980, tapping into the fad for 1980s nostalgia. (Which makes me chortle because in the 1980s a major part of pop culture was remembering as much as one could about the 1960s, Working was back in fashion and freshman-class baby-boomers, as P.J. O'Rourke named people my age, were always trying to keep up and fit in with the senior-class boomers with whom we worked.) That "let's tell all the secrets" line of thinking was very much a part of the Age of Therapy so, like other details in this book, it belongs in the 1980 atmosphere. People did oldfashioned pre-electronic jobs; women damaged our carpal tunnels whacking staplers; people who liked or used computers were expected to be eccentric, which made computers all the more attractive to young people who felt socially awkward and made people like Will and Cara leave us alone. And women carried "buttery soft leather" purses, in those yellowish and orange-ish brown tones that made bornw-eyed redheads look so fabulous and made the rest of us look as if we'd been ill. And the grocery store that was about to sell out to a big chain probably had a big cash register that rattled in a special way when it added up prices, with a little bell that went ka-ching when the cash drawer popped open. And people enjoyed stories where everyone ws happier for all the secrets being told.

If you are a Christian who enjoys small-town Midwestern romances (Abundance, we're told, is in Missouri) that expand into series and are set in the totally awesome Eighties, this novel is for you.

Book Review for 10.4.24: Ruins on Stone Hill

Title: Ruins on Stone Hill

Author: F.P. Spirit

Date: 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9984715-7-0

Quote: "'Orc!'...A split seocnd later, two arrows embedded themselves nto the seat above."

Even n fantasy fction, should mortals be able to raise the dead? Does that break your suspension of disbelief? In the "Heroes of Ravensford" series, which this novel opens, a skilled "cleric" can raise the dead if someone's paying enough., Resurrection costs less than a really good battle  hammer. And that odd splatting sound you just heard was my disbelief hitting the floor.

People can, of course, die and return to life in fantasy games, as different characters in different lives. They can come back from playing dead, or being thought dead. Gandalf can be merely transformed by what would have been certain death for a human, and Piers Anthony's characters can trade "souls" through the magic of the daemon Xanth, and there can be ghosts, a unique humanoid species, even at Hogwarts--but when human characters die, as was explained at length in the Harry Potter books, they have to stay dead. Even fantasy needs some firm rules.

So this episodic novel is not at the top of my list. It does have some entertaining additions to the Tolkien, Brooks, Eddings, Anthony, Dungeons & Dragons, etc., canon on which it draws. There are humanoid "bugbears," or were-bears, or bear-people, who can speak. There's a raven who speaks Elvish. There's a warrioress called Titan who's just a shy, awkward teenager when she's not using two swords at a time to cut attacking zombies into small pieces. They have a long series of adventures and learn that, in a fantasy kingdom, after surviving a few adventures you become a hero.

If you like "high" yet whimsical fantasy fiction with some potential for development into an online game, you may want to collect the whole series. Other books remain at the top of my Wish List. Still, I was amused by this one, and so will you probably be.

Book Review for 10.3.24: Hidden Gifts

Title: Hidden Gifts

Author: Elena Aitken

Quote: "'Hidden  gifts'....'They're the best kind.'"

Morgan has always felt called to be around children. She's earned a degree in the subject. But when she learns that she can't have children of her own, she doesn't want to work with children for a while.

That's until Ella, the daughter of a single father who works with her at the Castle Mountain Lodge, is plopped down at the "Cubs' Club," the lodge's guest daycare facility. So far this season Ella is the only child there. Morgan was working somewhere else, but the manager sends her to the Cubs' Club because of her education. She's stuck. Despite her reluctance to be there, Morgan and Ella bond.

Her bond with Ella even makes Morgan reconsider Ella's father, Bo, a playboy type who's turned her off by bragging, "I don't do relationships." Bo has never wanted to spend two nights in a row with one woman, but something about being a father, watching his daughter bond with a woman who'd make a good stepmother, affects his hormones and...

It can happen. It's not to be relied upon. Humans' pheromone receptors and responses are weaker than the lower animals'. As a species we cannot reliably determine whether or not a given child is ours; a woman may know that she's given birth but, if the child's been adopted, after a few years  Men's ability to spot their own offspring is even feebler: the ancient Romans may have allowed a mother's husband to claim or disown an infant, but the ritual of his claiming the child had to have been understood as a commitment to rear the child, not a positive ability to know whether or not he was its biological father. Nevertheless, in some dim unconscious way, biological fathers do seem to be better fathers--more likely to spend time with the children, less likely to abuse or molest them--than stepfathers are. It's almost a cliche in fiction, because it's so often true in real life, that people burdened with emotional complexes about how badly their fathers treated them feel a great relief when they find out that those men weren't their fathers.

Anyway, watching Ella play and snuggle with Morgan starts that long-forgotten record of "Isn't She Lovely" playing in Bo's mind. Suddenly he wants to marry Morgan, although he's panicky with fear that marriage might not always be one big emotional "high."

It makes one wonder: If Bo had been disciplined enough to stay with Ellas mother when Ella was born, would he have fallen in love with her, too? Would she have survived? (We're not told how or why she died, but apparently she and Ella were very poor.) Or would things have been even worse when Bo realized that marriage, fatherhood, love, and life itself for that matter, is not one big emotional "high"? Everybody enjoys the emotions of a romantic comedy; paradoxically, we're likely to enjoy them more often in real life if we understand that they're not going to last long, that a good life offers occasional bumps of "high" and "low" in a baseline of unemotional general contentment.

You have to pity people like Bo and Morgan, trying to get through this world with only emotions to guide them. If you enjoy reading about the good times in such people's lives, here is a story about those.

Did I mention Canadian Content? The lodge is on the north side of the border; this whole series is solid Canadian Content. It's well written, and has sold well n Canada. It's pleasant reading in any country.

Book Review for 10.2.24: Unexpected Gifts

Title: Unexpected Gifts

Author: Elena Aitken

Publisher: Ink Blot Communications

Quote: "Blaine and I, we're over."

This has to be the ultimate revenge romance fantasy. Andi and Blaine had a baby together before the official engagement was even announced. From Andi's point of view, Blaine dumped her. (His story is that he hid away from her because he couldn't deal with the situation.) Andi's buddy Eva, the voice of sex-worshipping pop culture, urges Andi to find another man. Blaine's old pal Colin, who has begun to notice that their friendship reflects Blaine's immaturity too, is willing, but he's still at the one-night-stand stage of social development. When Andi tells Colin she's outgrown that stage, Colin accepts that. When Andi worries that she's lost Colin by being too much of an adult for him, and tries to tempt him, Colin spends the night "just cuddling" with her, not even having safe sex. And so, when Blaine turns up at Christmas, counting on holiday spirit (and spirits) to put his relationship with Andi back together, Andi gets to watch both men suffer for a few hours, but you know what's coming next.

Anyone in search of a good revenge fantasy will enjoy this novel. Is there anything to enjoy beyond the revenge element? Well, there's a comedy scene where a character who's always lived in Canada learns to skate...and there are several sequels about Andi's and Colin's friends. I received a review copy of the first "box set" of five stories in the series. There's another "box set" by now.  Some of the stories involve Christmas at a Rocky Mountain ski lodge, and some involve summer camping there.

Book Review for 10.1.24: The Glittering Star

Title: The Glittering Star

Author: Frances Dallalba

Date: 2024

ISBN: 978-0-6451162-7-4

Quote: "[W]hat does she understand about how wind farms can only be built in remote locations, which then destroys the visual aesthetics of that landscape? What about the impact they have on our unique local wildlife?"

Twenty-eight years before the main story begins, a woman hid a large white sapphire, well wrapped, in between the submerged roots of a tree beside the lake. Then she went home and married an old friend who had the same coloring as the father of the baby she was about to have. When the man her daughter Roberta always called "father" died in an accident, the woman told Roberta where to find the sapphire, hoping that Roberta would find her own father for herself. She will, but first she'll find an attractive young man...

It's another contemporary romance, with a few explicit scenes, from an author whose goal is to celebrate the unique and romantic environment in her corner of Australia. A tree kangaroo will pass through one scene.  Roberta's temorary job, waitressing on a tour boat, will lead to moments of wealth and fame. And Nate, the attractive young man, is protesting the destruction of virgin forest to build a wind farm. When the clever local policeman handcuffs them together, Nate and Roberta hiss and spit, but you know they'll be purring and cuddling by the end of the book.

The story could have been written as a mystery--who now rightfully owns the sapphire? Roberta's mother had received it as a gift, but had it been stolen? As it's written, the romance pushes the mystery to one side. The mystery will be solved, but not by Roberta.

If you can relate to a heroine who's been allowed to indulge her "temperament," up to and including hitting people, because she's small and cute, and don't mind a little explicit premarital sex in a romance, The Glittering Star is for you.

Book Review for 9.30.24: Ten-Minute Super-Quick Mediterranean Diet for Beginners

Title: Ten-Minute Super-Quick Mediterranean Diet for Beginners

Authoir: Oliver Sanders

Quote: "The Mediterranean diet shines in its approahc to snackng."

"Mediterranean" has been used recently to describe a diet based on fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and ocean fish, as found in countries around the Mediterranean or in places like California that enjoy a similar climate. At least close biological relatives of favorite Mediterranean foods will grow in California and in many of our southern and central States. Gardeners and locavores were therefore delighted when doctors started studying what allows so many people in the Mediterranean to eat so well and live so long. 

Is it only the diet? Probably not. Certainly most of us seem to be better off without the wine people in the Mediterranean countries drink daily. Traditionally people in the Mediterranean countries got a fair amount of healthy natural exercise, walking to most of the places they go, rowing, swimming, gardening, dancing. They get a good deal of sunshine and spend a good deal of time out in it. Traditionally they raised their own locally grown, unsprayed food. The Mediterranean countries are home to Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim communities in which most people traditionally lived by the rules of one faith or another, which involved regular prayer and meditation and a mandate that, as much as in them lies, they live at peace with all. These cultures are sociologically notable for having a strong sense of family, a sense that life is good and happiness is found in family love and work. Economic inequities, though extreme, were palliated by a belief that God put people in different economic brackets for a reason--people whose family businesses were not well paid weren't expected to be rich, so much as to live frugally and work, eat, love, and worship well  Before antibiotics were invented, diseases sometimes reached plague proportions in these countries, but food-borne pathogens were at least reduced by heavy use of alcohol, garlic, and rosemary in food preparation and preservation. 

Rules for a "Mediterranean"-influenced diet are not strict, but emphasize lots of plant-derived foods and ffrugal amounts of vegetable oils in cookign. Basically, have a big vegetable garden and use it as a primary food source. If you don't have a garden, be very nice to someone who does. And don't live near a public road or railroad, because the health benefits of all those plant-based foods depend on their not being sprayed with chemicals used in place of mowing and trimming verges.

The most popular "Mediterranean" recipes came from Italy but French, Spanish, Portuguese, Moroccan, and Middle Eastern recipes use many of the same ingredients:

* Lots of grains--a good variety--wheat, rice, barley, and today often corn (maize), buckwheat, quinoa, amaranth

* Lots of leafy green vegetables, raw or cooked, often topped with oil, nuts, or fish. Arugula, basil, celery, chicory, dill, endive, escarole, fennel, lettuces, mache, mustad, oregano, parsley, radicchio, rosemary, sage, sorrel, spinach, thyme, watercress, and more.

* Asparagus

* Artichokes

* Beans and all the "pulses"--peas, lentils, garbanzos, fava beans. 

* Cabbage and all the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, rabe, Brussels sprouts

* Celery

* Cucumbers

* Carrots

* Capers

* Eggplant (melanzane, aubergine)

* Garlic, leeks, onions

* Lotus root

* Mallows (the vegetable, not the candy inspired by its texture)

* Mushrooms

* Olives and their oil

* Pickles of all kinds. These cultures invented vinegar.

* Potatoes were introduced fairly recently, but are sometimes raised and eaten in Mediterranean countries. 

* Radishes'

* Sesame seed

* /Squashes

* Tomatoes aren't native to the Mediterranean region but, when introduced a few centuries ago, they were a huge success. Today it's hard to think of Italian food without thinking of tomato sauce. 

* Turnips

* Tree nuts, especially almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, walnuts

* Peanuts grow further south, but people in the Mediterranean countries sometimes buy and use them.

* Avocado--not native, but sometimes used

*  All citrus fruits

* Carob

* Dates

* Figs

* Grapes

* Melons

* Pears thrive in the Mediterranean climate. Apples usually do better in colder climates but people in Mediterranean countries eat them when they can. Authentic Mediterranean recipes feature pears.

* Peaches, apricots, plums

* Pineapple usually grows further south, but seems to be welcome wherever it's been shipped

* Pomegranates

* Raspberries and other bramble berry species

* Strawberries aren't native to the Mediterranean countries. Nor are blueberries. They are sometimes available in Mediterranean countries and eaten raw or in mixed-berry recipes.

* Sumac (the dried berries, usually ground up, used as a sweet-sour seasoning)

* Tamarind fruit

* Fish and shellfish

* Milk and milk products from cows, goats, and sometimes sheep 

* Eggs and poultry

* Meat, but it's used sparingly; small farms didn't kill even a rooster every day

* Coffee

Recipe books, or even heating up the kitchen to cook, are optional for much of this food. Washed, and arranged attractively on the table, it's feast.

This short book does not have room for a complete collection of what even one person can do with the classic Mediterranean foods when a special occasion, and/or the need to use up less than perfect vegetables, does inspire a Mediterranean cook to invent a fancy elaborate recipe. And it does include some recipes that call for American ingredients not normally found in Mediterranean gardens or recipe books, though bananas, tortillas, and watermelon fit into the general idea of a "Mwditrranean diet" of home-grown or locally grown produce as a primary food source.And, while presenting Americanized recipes, the author uses tediously European measurements and what may be Chinese Pidgin wording. "KCal/serve"? When Americans use "serve" as a noun we are talking about tennis; food comes in servings.

However, if you're new to this way of eating and don't want to recreate authentic ethnic cuisine or adapt its flavors for restrticted diets, but just to learn a few efficient ways of using garden-type food, this small, cheap e-book may be your idea of a real bargain. This is a first book of plant-based, not vegan but fibre-rich, nutritious cooking. If you have a reliable source of unpoisoned plant-based foods and minimal time to cook, buy this book.

Book Review for 9.29.24: Creating a Culture of Repair

Title: Creating a Culture of Repair

Author: Robert Turner

Date: 2024

Publisher: Westminster John Knox

ISBN: 978-1747983773

Quote: "Simply put, reparations are not merely given; they are a matter of justice."

As a minister, Robert Turner was invited to preach in a place called Greenwood, Oklahoma, near Tulsa. Greenwood has an interesting, if deplorable, history. It was part of the "territory" ceded to indigenous people as a reservation, on which White and Black people encroached. It became the Black neighborhood, or town, that was a counterpart to White Tulsa. It prospered. It had what was known as "Black Wall Street"--Turner gives the names and histories of some of his congregation's grandparents who were part of that success story. Then, in 1921, rioters whipped themselves into a froth about a reported crime and destroyed ss much of Greenwood as they could, because it was not about revenge for one man's crime; it was about race hate. "How did we ever let them get all this?" 

But that is not all. Greenwood people were optimistic, energetic, motivated. They built back better. And then, one generation later, Greenwood sustained real economic damage from the construction of a US highway that seemed designed to divide and destroy the town. And then even Greenwood people began to feel bitter. 

Turner is in favor of the kind of melodramatic gestures toward "justice" that are not just, are boondoggles, and are likely to be as divisive as that highway. That's what's not to love about this book.

He is also willing to do the research, identify what was done to whom by whom, and talk sensibly about the kind of specific reparations that would be a very good thing if the law required them to be settled within the complaining victim's lifetime. We need to stop letting offenders stall and play the system. We need no system that, e.g., Bayer can run out before compensating victims of glyphosate poisoning; we need a system in which, on the day glyphosate is proved to have harmed a persn, all glyphosate production stops, Bayer's assets are frozen, and all Bayer is allowed to do is pay damages to victims while we are alive.  And something similar should most definitely apply to any living survivors of what was done to places like Greenwood. Turner makes intelligent cases for specific reparations, not the kind of "pay everybody for being Black even though every other kind of people on Earth have been victims of past injustice too" that would ruin the economy if taken seriously, but the kind of "pay this and that individual for specific material harm done to them" that ought to be the basis of our legal system.

That is why you want to read his book. I don't expect anyone will be able to take all of Turner's 100 suggested acts of reparations seriously, but his list includes more good ideas than bad ones. He suggests things like:

* It's true that most Americans don't know where their ancestors were in 1850; many don't even know, by now, where their ancestors were in 1950. We can do something about this. Trace your own ancestry if you can afford it and it's not already been done. Help other people trace theirs if they can't afford it. Find out, so far as possible, which of us are descendants of slaves or slavemasters. In some cases, descendants of the owners and the slaves on specific plantations may even want to have a reunion. Are the owners' descendants still rich? Are the slaves' descendants still poor? Is it the other way round? If a "legacy of slavery" has harmed the descendants of slaves, what would they suggest, once they know what the descendants of plantation owners have, that the descendants of plantation owners do for them?

* Black schools were historically underfunded. (Turner ignores the fact that being underfunded can actually motivate students to achieve more, given the right kind of teachers.) Individuals could make contributions to equalize funding, or to provide scholarships for qualified students.

* Black churches historically did fantastic feats of mission work. Often this left little money available to maintain the church or its grounds. People in both churches may want to preserve individual churches' identity and the different liturgical traditions that have developed in segregated American churches, while rejecting rigid segregation, but also White churches could contribute to Black churches' maintenance funds. 

This and much, much more. I may come back to some of his ideas in posts here. I'm not going to try to summarize 100 ideas in a blog post. Read the book for yourselves. Turner is angry, and sometimes he's unrealistic about what a suggestion might actually accomplish, but he's not hostile, and more of the time, I believe, he recommends things that could be good for both sides. Airlines, e.g., might profit by giving away visits to people's ancestral homelands. Why not publicize research and essay contests that award a Black American family a trip to Cameroon, once they've traced their ancestors to that country?

Book Review for 9.27.24: Ten-Minute Carnivore Diet Cookbook with Pictures

Title:  Ten-Minute Carnivore Diet Cookbook with Pictures

Author: Olivia Graham

Quote: "The carnivore diet...consists entirely of meat, fish, eggs, and some dairy."

Cruel joke gift for a tenderhearted vegan, serious response to glyphosate in the food supply, or the cookbook your cat wishes you used? All three. This collection of simple meat recipes, with only a few low-calorie vegetables used as seasoning or garnish, made me feel vegan. It's a total meat overload.

These recipes work, in the sense tht each one is a simple, palatable way to cook half a pound of meat. Im not so sure about the "diet." One meal like these might be palatable road food,b ut it'd leave me with a craving for vegetables. If you want to make yourself crave romaine, watercress, parsle, cucumbers, or spinach, reading this book might help.

The sad truth is that, although meat and eggs contain toxins, possibly including glyphosate, they contain so much less glyphosate than vegetables do that some people will find relief from chronic conditions in a "carnivore diet." It's not a balanced or adequate diet for humans. Deficiency diseases would appear if a human followed a "carnivore diet" for very long. But people report getting a detox high when they eat a "carnivore diet" for a few weeks. They're not cured, but they feel so much better...

God, have mercy upon us.

Book Review for 9.26.24: December on 5C4

Title: December on 5C4

Author: Adam Strassberg 

Date: 2024

Publisher: Nat 1

ISBN: 

Quote: "I remembered many stories from my residency years, some apocryphal, some accurate, of involuntary hospitalizations of various patients with delusions of being either Jesus or Santa. It occurred to me it would be interesting to see what might happen if a patient with similarities to Jesus were hospitalized concurrently with a patient with similarities to Santa. Would they be friends? Enemies? Both?"

/First, Strassberg imagines, they'd get into a quarrel about their different approaches to giving. Then, as men who've chosen to identify with models of generosity, they'd become friends and help each other...In the best Christmas-fairy-tale tradition, Josh N. will give encouraging counsel to the other patients, and Nick K. will hand out trinkets.

/Josh left his Orthodox Jewish family after realizing that they just wouldn't understand that he thought an incestuous act with a male cousin was a kind of baptism. He had since organized other street dwellers into a community who share their skills and resources and help others. He is frequently troubled by mad suicidal urges, which he identifies with Jesus''s temptation to throw himself down from the Temple. Hospital staff want to give him stronger medication that will suppress these urges, but will also cut off what he experiences as a sort of communion with God.

Nick likes the "trinity of coke," cocoa, Coca-Cola, and cocaine. After using a lot of the latter he was arrested for trespassing when he got stuck in an acquaintance's chimney. His purpose was to rescue three immigrant girls, and their parents, from coyote types who were prostituting the girls. Nick seems to think he has a wife at home. His wife has been dead for a long time.

They're homeless mental patients but somehow their giving seems to be touched with supernatural grace. They heal the other patients' emotions; the gifts they make in Occupational Therapy seem magical. Josh prays and preaches traditional Hebrew prayers as Jesus might have done.

Maybe, Josh appears to think, in another incarnation they'll be born in the right time to be Jesus of Nazareth and Nicholas a.k.a. Kriss Kringle. 

This story is funny, sad, and always close to the edge of blasphemy. Strassberg isn't saying that Jesus was either schizoid or homosexual or a street character; He is saying that it's possible for a Christian t see reflections of Christ in schizoid homosexual street characters. 

This is not your usual Christmas story. Josh doesn't even have a Christmas tradition. But it's worth ordering now if you want to read it during December.

Book Review for 9.25.24: Dare I Ask

Title: Dare I Ask

Author: Zoe Adams

Date: 2023

Quote: "I'm sputterng in the lobby of my apartment building as iced coffee soaks into my button-down shirt."

Ann-Marie Smith and Adam Smith (who seems unaware of his famous namesake's work) have been renting apartments in the same building. They've not been friends, but Adam finds himself slipping mail into Ann-Marie's box just so they have something to bicker about. When he learns that Ann-Marie is looking for a job working for "the Blaine Astor," he gives her a reference that lands her the job.

Next thing they know, they've all flown out to Aspen, where Blaine's sister has proposed a temporary wedding to Adam to enable him to spend more of his inheritance now. But when Ann-Marie sees Adam under circumstances that aren't annoying, and sounds ever so slightly friendly, he proposes marriage to her. 

It's a "slightly spicy" contemporary romance, so here's what you don't already know:

(1) It's part of one of those series of mini-books that add up to one full-lenght novel. This is volume one, where the couple admit they're attracted to each other. They'll be married in volume five.

(2) It's one of those books where "contemporary" means "lots of profanity and the girl thinks sex should come before marriage."

If you like that sort of romance, you'll porobably enjoy Dare I Ask. 

Web Log from the Hurricane Season

This post actually started in September. It's hard to do a Link Log when, for days on end, Google holds only thirty pages in memory in between visits to places that have Internet connections. Nevertheless...

Animals

Some parts of North Carolina reported horrific flash floods while Virginia was getting aaaall...that...rain. (That's Drawling as distinct from Yelling. Drawling is something Southern Ladies sometimes do when things, not people, are exasperating. It does not imply that any of you Gentle Readers is less intelligent than other people.) I heard someone on radio blethering about a hundred or so bodies being found stuck in trees, the way one normally sees stray clothes, shoes, shopping bags, and similar clutter after less disastrous floods. So of course animal shelters were not in a good situation, to put it mildly. Some animals were evacuated to shelters on higher ground and suddenly Petfinder is sending out e-mail and refusing to show the pages I usually search for the photo contest. I have to look at the Jonesborough page. There's a conspicuous link to make online monetary donations to  North Carolina shelters that need rebuilding. Flood refugees are swelling the cat populations in Jonesborough, Johnson City, and other places in Tennessee. Look carefully--this is two very cute kittens currently stuck in the Johnson City shelter:

One of them is called Scout but the staff were too busy to explain which one. Updates may have been posted at Scout's web page by the time you read this:

https://www.petfinder.com/cat/scout-hl-good-72396403/tn/johnson-city/washington-county-johnson-city-animal-control-ctr-tn16/

Books

Authors Kim Griffin, BR Goodwin, and Hannah Hood Lucero are donating all proceeds from their book sales to hurricane relief for our North Carolina neighbors. Kim Griffin wrote that Starry Night devotional that digs deep into doctrine, not just the usual pleasant thought for the day, reviewed here last winter. 

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2023/12/new-christian-book-review-starry-night.html

If there's a nondenominational devotional you want to buy in hardcover, Starry Night is probably it. By ordering in October you can not only support hurricane survivors (I mean the ones who are really hurting, not us in Virginia who have merely been inconvenienced) but also be sure of getting the book in time to read it in December.

Censorship

Yop. Ds, you get two options. Either you oppose censorship, or Gina Raimondo's political career is over. If this stupid cow's voice is ever heard in public again, it needs to be saying "Absolute freedom of speech is keeping me out of jail. I support absolute freedom of speech for all people."

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2024/09/25/when-will-gina-raimondo-resign/

Election 2024

Mean Girl O'Dowdypants tells us nothing about fracking, war, censorship, the civil rights of the loyal-opposition party (never mind alternative parties), any attempt to reduce the damage done by chemical pollution of any part of the environment...but she does have things to teach us, here. Her teeth are probably natural, because artificial ones are usually more symmetrical than that, but her mouth really is wide enough to show them as far back as they go; she seems not to have molars. Young children manage to eat without molars so Dowdypants probably doesn't mind. And very very few people look good in purple; Dowdypants is not among them.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/08/was-this-kamalas-biggest-trainwreck-interview-yet-n4933150

Something for Virginia to consider. Remember the Censorship Riot? Remember Mark Warner's tweets during it? Remember that he had the opportunity to let those tweets fade into oblivion, but he chose to write an op-ed amplifying them? Young, strong, healthy-looking man, not even sparing a thought for fellow Senators like Reid, McConnell, Pelosi, Feinstein, just tweeting about how scared he was for his precious self. If you saw the op-ed, didn't you want to fire back... "You're not representing me!" "You call yourself a Virginian?" "Pull yourself together, man! Protect your elders!" I mean, I am glad he was mature enough not to go out and rumble...At the time I tweeted back that I was praying for him, and it was true. Him and every other law-abiding person involved in a riot that could so easily have been so much worse than it was. Afterward, it is hard to respect a big strong man who claims to be so totally intimidated by idiots wielding stolen lamps and yet so unconcerned about those who might need his help. 

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2024/10/10/how-big-a-majority-can-the-gop-expect-after-the-election-n4933208

Europe

This isn't even the worst thing about Europe...it's that they still can't seem to settle their differences without killing each other. And that is where most of our ancestors came from (even if we claim Black or Red ancestors, we still probably have some European DNA). If we sink into their levels of population density, government nannyism, and general hopelessness we could sink back to their level of barbarism.

https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/ordinary-people-lose-with-european-sized-government/

Hurricane Updates

From Brevard, North Carolina, 10.8.24:

https://itsjustlife.me/you-dont-have-to-look-far-to-see-the-helpers/

Dolly Parton pledged a million dollars to hurricane survivors generally. Kamala Harris offered them $750 per person, like wow, probably not enough to pay for hotel rooms much less food, but it's vote-buying time right? (To be fair, that was the immediate bailout money from the emergency fund; survivors are eligible for more handouts later, if they still want them.) But the emergency fund had to hand out more than Kamala realized...

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/10/10/hurricane-helene-victims-cant-even-get-the-750-kamala-promised-them-n4933216

President Biden went to Germany for the weekend. Meh...Dad went to Germany once and always gave the impression that anyone would rather go to North Carolina than to Germany, so I'm not sure how bad that is. Maybe our Prez just wants to spare disaster areas the inconvenience of hosting his entourage.

Phenology

Belatedly, butterflies. The majority of these butterflies are found on both sides of the Atlantic, presumably introduced from the UK to the US by travellers. Some are still found only in the UK.

https://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2024/09/autumn-butterflies-along-woodland-edge.html

Whereas, afaik, all of the moths are UK-specific.

http://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2024/10/some-moths-during-september.html

Pun

Google doesn't like McDonald's connection. I found it at How to Meow in Yiddish.

State of the Net

In any weather-related disaster, the role of new electronic technology is to break down. Our local ISP has finally caught up with the times and started taking reports of outages through their web site, a huge improvement. Two full weeks after the hurricane, I saw a couple of supplementary phone/Internet service trucks at McDonald's, and THIS is what their web site had to say:

"All service out...multiple main fiber breaks near (three roads) in Duffield affecting service on up into Lee County...no estimated time of repair.

"All service out...multiple main fiber breaks near Castlewood and Coeburn affecting service through Russell and Wise Counties...no estimated time of repair.

"All service out...fiber break in Yuma...under investigation."

They're not even listing damage to individual houses or neighborhoods' wiring. What happened in my neighborhood was that at least two big trees fell across power lines, under which phone and Internet wires had been strung. All the lines were broken and one pole had to be replaced. The men repairing the power lines apparently strung all the wires back up, but it remains for the phone/Internet company to reconnect those wires to the actual Internet. (WiFi exists in between ridges, not across them--which is as it should be. For example, on the screen porch where I've been working for the past year-plus, I was using a WiFi connection to a wired connection inside the house...but there's no WiFi connection to, e.g., the business district where everybody was supposed to have free access in town.)

And even McDonald's independent, company-owned, generator-powered Internet connection blinked on and off five times in six hours. 

Support This Web Site

It has occurred to me that one reason for the sudden surge of interest in this post...

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/07/phenology-caterpillars-attack-rose-of.html

...may be the link to a Patreon page I used to have. No use. I no longer use e-payment sites that aren't forbidden by law to dip into customers' funds. To support this web site, please send US postal money orders to PO Box 322, Gate City, VA 24251-0322. I currently have no way of accepting non-US payment. Non-US readers are encouraged to support web sites in your country that this web site follows.

If funded, I could do an updated post about the hibiscus caterpillar and the moth it turns into.