Monday, October 27, 2025

Web Log for 10.26.25

Animals 

Malaysian butterflies, with a special study of the little blue ones (most photos showing their drab spotted underwings). 


Election 2025

""If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try again!"

--Longfellow

"If you know you can't succeed,
Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!"

--The campaign staff of Angry Abigail Spambucket

Gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing electoral districts in the hope of being able to claim more districts for your party. The practice got its name from a long-ago politician called Elbridge Gerry who redesigned a district in a shape that people said looked like a salamander. Apparently the Ds now think last-minute gerrymandering is Angry's only chance. 


Meanwhile, Mis--Ter--JONES! turns out to be married to a woman who's poured money into the cause of getting violent criminals out of jail:


I saw a big red Sears campaign sign beside the road last week. Classic design, and they'll have collection value some day, Gentle Readers, Buy your signs and set them up!

Book Review: Borrowed Time

Title: Borrowed Time

 Author: L.A. Boruff

Date: 2021

Quote: "I'd managed to step through time to 1993."

Where Rowena, the narrator, is about to learn that she's a genetically altered descendant of old-school wicked witches. She's forty-four years old and has never been "in love," not because she never happened to meet the right man and not because she's asexual, but because she's been bred for near-sociopathic levels of detachment from emotions. Because, when her powers kick in--which is only when her biological mother dies, and that's how she learns who her "real" mother was--they've been programmed to make her a time-travelling assassin. By the end of the book she's zipping back and forth through time, magically ending the lives of people "the council" decide have done enough evil, and liking it better than managing a grocery store.

I've never been vulnerable to "satanic panic." I've seen people who seemed to have let the Evil Principle ride them, and it didn't happen because they laughed at fantasy fiction, it happened because they yielded to Deadly Sins like greed or laziness. I do think, though, that this fantasy crosses a line. Nobody is ever going to be seriously tempted to change the weather by pulling a face, or use magic to solve a corn maze faster than another game player. Someone Out There might very easily be tempted to become an assassin. Reading Borrowed Time won't make people grovel hand and foot in Satan's gripe, but becoming comfortable with the idea of killing strangers on orders from strangers does seem like something that the evil forces of tyranny might want to promote. I don't think this book should have been written.

It's entertaining...only about a topic that I don't think should ever be made entertaining.

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Megaera

This week's butterfly is another rare and endangered species, Graphium megaera, found in the Philippine Islands, most associated with the island called Palawan.

Megaera was a character in Greek mythology, but not one that would normally be called a hero. She was one of the three Furies, portrayed as terrible old women who enforced Greek Pagans' stern moral code by hounding evildoers to death. The Furies were not usually characterized--the emphasis was on avoiding their attention, and it was thought best to refer to them indirectly and ironically as "the Kindly Ones"--but Megaera's name meant "jealousy," so she is sometimes called the goddess of jealousy or envy. 

Some artists portrayed the Furies as ordinary-looking women; some gave them other metaphoric attributes such as dogs' heads or bats' wings. Some saw them as personifications of guilt. The Furies are sometimes described as robed in rusty or faded black. If an individual Graphium megaera were fluttering around a naturalist, trying to lick his sweaty skin, that might have suggested this name. 

Some Graphium megaera might be said to resemble some Graphium meeki. The proportions of dark to light on individuals' wings vary. 


Dark museum specimen  from WorthPoint.


Light museum specimen from Insecta.pro. 

They are small as Graphiums go, with wingspans about three inches. Most individuals seem to be well camouflaged. Google does not show a photo of a living Graphium megaera at any stage of its life. One photo, showing the living butterfly's wings iridescing coal black and milky white, can be found at the bottom of page 276 in 


All this book says about G. megaera is that it's local and uncommon. 

This species lives in forests. Most of what's been published online about it has been a debate about whether to preserve natural forests on Palawan or plant oil palms there. Conservation reportedly won at least the official debate.

According to the IUCN Red Book, the species is most often seen in March and April, sometimes seen in May through August, usually near wet spots on the ground. It is not positively known whether anyone has seen the female of the species. Some think they have, and think the sexes look alike. 

Needless to say, just how endangered the species really is is also unknown. As with so many Graphiums, there never have been very many of them and they've always done a very good job of lurking in forests and looking like little dots of sunshine on dead leaves. This makes their risk of extinction hard to assess. Being so seldom noticed, they might not even be missed--at first--if they went extinct. They are, however, part of an ecosystem that includes Atrophaneura atropos and several larger animals; the whole ecosystem needs preservation.

Sunday, October 26, 2025

Link Log for 10.24-25.25

Actually it's for 10.25.25. I spent most of 10.24.25 on a job and the rest of it watching Microsoft's continued efforts to destroy the laptop, as it only promised it would stop doing on 10.14.25 all summer long. That law we need so badly may need to specify that Microsoft Edge may not update unless it's open...and that "camera" and "microphone" features can operate only when a special physical switch, a solid piece of physical wiring that only the computer owner can operate, is turned on. Not knowing to whom you're really writing is a vital way to retrain some people to think what they say and say what they mean...to stop lying. 

Anyway, computer berserkery lasted all weekend. Possibly it had something to do with the Time Change since four hours of craziness started when the older computer simply ticked over and waited to be reset manually. Y'know, I don't mind having to go into the clock software (1 minute, max) nearly so much as I minded four hours of the computer's being completely useless for any purpose. 

I found one link worth sharing.

Animals 

Everyone knows at least one of two famous "poems" about the pelican. Would you like to see a pelican poem that tries to be serious about this ridiculous-looking bird?

New Book Review: Blessed Disruption

Title: Blessed Disruption

Author: Suzie Hall

Date: 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9986493-1-8

Quote: "I noticed similarities in the descriptors that people used to describe me. Strong. Competitive. Intimidating. Beautiful. Independent. Intelligent. Complicated. Self-centered. Religious. Sweet. Sexy. Strong-willed. Impatient. Spirited. Why did I pay so much attention to these labels and emotionally agonize over them, which subsequently caused me to judge myself and play small in life? It’s because I didn’t truly know how disconnected I was from who I was created to be."

Preach it, Sister. Yes, this is another book about how someone grew up Christian and felt traumatized by the church. They're becoming a genre. I read this type of books because one day I may write one, though I'm also concerned about whether the popularity of these books is discouraging Christians who feel called to stay in their churches. What Suzie Hall brought out of her church, however, sounds an awful lot like what I shook off my feet when I left.

It's gone from an obscure theory, when Hall and I were growing up, to settled medical science: People not only have the ability to choose what look like introvert or extrovert behavior, but are literally, physically born introverts or extroverts. There has been a lot of misunderstanding about this. Wanting to be with others sometimes does not mean that a person is an extrovert; it means that the person has friends. Feeling shy, or tired, or alienated from others in a certain social setting does not make a person an introvert. We're born with one kind of brain or the other, though some people who were born introverts "become extroverts" after a long high fever. 

Introverts have more complete brains. The development of individual neurological "wiring" varies, but there are a few recognizable patterns that link introverts of "artistic temperament," introverts with talents for math, introverts who think things through with their long brain stems, and others, as having one crucial thing in common: We're born with a moral sense--a sense of right and wrong, honor and shame. 

Extroverts are defined by their failure to develop complete enough brains to have this sense. Some extroverts' academic intelligence is comparable with introverts', but in a very important way, the extrovert brain is handicapped. Disabled, even.

I think evangelical Christianity has been particularly vulnerable to a sort of minor heresy that casts Jesus as "the greatest salesman in the world." Say what? Read the Gospels. He was not a salesman. He was a religious teacher who intentionally restricted his audience and turned away followers. Great salesmen aren't hanged! The idea of Christians applying lessons from the Bible to their business seems good, but in some churches it has created a cult of people who think they are saved by some combination of Christ plus extroversion. 

A real religious life is an introvert thing. Extroverts can enjoy the feeling of being in a crowd, singing and clapping and even praying, but they're not built for serious spiritual discipline. We're told enough about St. Peter's life to indicate that he was, although an extrovert and a bit of a burden to Jesus and the other disciples, loved and saved...but as work, because he was a burden, because his whole brain had to be rewired in order for him to represent Christ to anybody. Which is why the rest of the Christian world will probably always have very mixed feelings about the evangelicals.

Extroverts are also prone to make hasty, superficial judgments, which can lead to bigotry, so in some evangelical churches--not the ones I attended--there is a well documented history of embracing bigotry, both against women and against various demographic minority types of men, perhaps also against the young, certainly against those with less money and those with physical disabilities. (Except for extroversion.) Evidently Suzie Hall's family's evangelical church was one of those. She felt traumatized by her church's attitudes toward women, which were harsh enough that as a teenager Hall reports letting herself be raped outright without even calling for help from family members sleeping only a few yards away.

Seriously. It wasn't even a "date rape" where the girl wants to touch but wants to stop at a certain point. It was an outright rape in which a larger, older boy barged into a hotel room and shoved little Suzie down on one of the beds. Her brother (!!!) was in the other bed, their parents in an adjacent room, and they apparently slept like logs through the whole episode. Years after my mother told me, tersely, how to make a boy stop groping and whining for "more," and my father didn't even go there but just ordered me to carry a pistol--loaded with gas pellets rather than lead, so no whining!--there were still teenaged girls who hadn't even been taught to yell for help. Who might, after years of "depression" and therapy, finally tell their parents what had happened, and, when their fathers blurted out "I thought we were family," think their fathers were blaming them rather than the boys the fathers had been teaching or coaching. (Suzie Hall's father was college football coach Skip Hall.)

God in Heaven, turn Your face from our intolerable race...

Right. This goes out to all Christian young ladies of the world: Boys mature slowly. Sometimes they still act like toddlers when they are fifty or sixty years old. Sometimes they are so confused they even try to deny how pitifully sensitive some parts of their bodies are. They may even try to pretend their sensitive parts are weapons. With one good gouge of one fingernail it is possible to clear up their understanding, even at some risk to their lives. Most of the other effects your dainty little hands can have on a 300-pound footballer's sensitive parts are more fun, and put you in the position of "sympathetic friend" rather than "plaintiff," but if you ever meet the type who would attempt outright rape, you should be the last girl he ever thinks about in that way. Don't leave him capable of thinking those thoughts about your younger sister. Possibly the reason why this was omitted from Suzie Hall's education was something to do with her not having a younger sister.

Few survivors of physical violation want to spend the next year or so of their life telling everyone they meet all about their experience of shame and pain. Many, like the teenaged Suzie Hall, try to put it behind them and behave so well, achieve so much, that nobody would ever guess what happened that night. Suzie played sports well, did well in school, did well on jobs, went to all her father's students' games and cheered, married a man her parents liked shortly after graduation, and had two perfectly beautiful children. And then for no obvious reason she flopped into bed with another man. Well, she admitted when her husband guessed what she was doing, she didn't like his assumption that he was in charge of the family's money. But she couldn't consciously say, even to herself, that the easiest way to walk out on her husband without suffering financial loss was to catch another man who could afford to pay her to be a "full-time homemaker." And she didn't want to be a "full-time homemaker" anyway.

Yes, when Christian young people stay single, this is the kind of thing older Christians should give thanks that they are avoiding. It's far better that people in their twenties spend enough years alone to know that they don't need to be coupled, to wonder if they'll ever even really want to be coupled, until they prove someone to be a good enough friend that they know for sure.

So why didn't Suzie Hall forge on into the world and do the job she wanted? Her book doesn't show a single reason why she chose to be a full-time wife when she wanted to be a TV news reader. Those of us who remember the 1980s can remember that there would have been more even than the two reasons she lists--a Christian youth group preaching that girls should try to be full-time wives (in the name of "submission" to their husbands, following a "tradition" concocted by the French Socialists and contrary to what the Bible actually says a good wife does), and her own post-traumatic stress disorder warning her that "being seen" might lead to being attacked again. There was also the well publicized bigotry against women in an industry where Christine Craft was so famously fired for being "too old, too ugly, and not deferential enough to men." There was also the fundamental moral ickiness of the industry, which went beyond the analyses of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Hall probably wouldn't have liked being a news reader. What is certain is that she resented being told to be a full-time wife, instead. We may read between the lines that this resentment leaked out in a passive-aggressive way that ended two marriages and cut off half a dozen "relationships" after her second divorce.

And so, after lots and lots of the kind of "therapy" extroverts love, with lots of ego inflation and a suggestion that financial benefits are tied to perfecting their personalities (I won't say it it's too easy), Hall took the very very courageous step of identifying herself as a "believer" rather than a Christian. That she'd been sent an actual letter from a church she had attended, warning her to repent and advising the rest of the congregation to guide her toward repentance, she's still denying as a factor in this. That some people, or spirits, or cosmic principles, just love it when people's righteous indignation with other people separates them even in name from the love of Christ...

People recovering from emotional abuse by fellow Christians do seem to find some strange words gushing out of our mouths. No Seventh-Day Adventist church I attended literally had a Cradle Row for believers' babies, but all of them had "Cradle Roll Classes" at their "Sabbath Schools." They had songs, which the infants couldn't sing (except for my natural sister the musical prodigy), for the benefit of brainfogged mothers. One of those songs went "I'll share my goodies'cos I love you, and that's what Jesus wants me to do." I knew a rather awful woman who used to chant "And that's what Jesus wants me to do" when she was bullying some younger person into doing what "Mrs. Awful" wanted person to do. In my early twenties I told her I had felt led to adopt the belief that, when she was doing that, I was meant to "take 'what Jesus wants me to do'," I chanted, then changing the tune, "'and throw it out the window'!" Jesus, I'm sure, understood. It was not necessary to reject what Jesus taught, either by His reported words or by His example, in order to reject Mrs. Awful's insinuation that what Jesus wanted me to do was what she wanted me to do...

It's true that Christians who accept the idea that they have something to repent of, that other people in the church are meant to guide them to repentance, are often making the kind of submissive display that invites emotional abuse. There is no simple, objective behavioral rule about what they did that was so bad or when the blaming and shaming has to stop. It cam become an ongoing unwritten contract that if X wants to belong to the group, X needs to enjoy having everyone else find fault with everything person does, because anything X does might be said to show that that spirit of whatever-X-did is still present.

That tended to happen to introverts. The mere fact that many of us liked the traditional rules of modesty and frugality probably started it. I remember that at one church about a dozen people had asked me whether I was a Seventh-Day Adventist. I thought it was a simple question of fact, no more tiresome than "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", so at some point I asked someone else that question. Poor Baby was so hurt she couldn't even say anything like "I feel hurt by that question," but could only cry on the shoulders of about a dozen other people until they agreed to tell me what a horrible person I was--asking someone the same question that many other people had asked me.

At a certain stage in the spiritual formation of a serious introvert Christian, many of us will continue to talk to people who play that sort of game. Some part of us must notice that we're behaving like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football, but we want to be humble and teachable. Correcting this harmful social pattern usually involves cutting off communication with the person who needs encouragement to leave cravings for dominance in the bedroom.

Hall has heard, of course, about the damage it supposedly does to lesbian couples that some churches don't invite them to become members. I am afraid there is a biblical basis for this. I am afraid, also, that churches have a right to require members to give up other things that the Bible doesn't even describe as "unseemly" for Christians. People who believe in Christ but don't believe in the rules of these churches have a right to join churches that have more liberal rules. Nobody is really harmed. I don't have a lot of sympathy for homosexual lobbyists who come to churches where they know they don't belong, just to try to make people feel bad about taking the Bible's rules about homosexual behavior seriously. 

I don't know that most of these people understand the Bible's teachings about homosexual behavior correctly. I suspect that most of them are quietly thinking that, because they're not tempted by homosexuality, homosexuality must be worse than the sins that appeal to them; the Bible never says anything remotely like that. Any serious spiritual practice does involve subordinating the body's appetites to the spiritual discipline. "Gay" promiscuity is absolutely not acceptable for Christians. Homosexual attractions are just one more of the carnal appetites spiritual people can choose to overcome. Whether that means that a committed couple, of different sexes or the same sex, have been called to separate, to repudiate commitments they've made to each other, is more than I would presume to say. Vocations to break off relationships and reject people are individual matters. Sometimes the clear biblical teaching churches could benefit from rediscovering is the one about, before Christians judge someone else's behavior, reexamining their own behavior in case something they are doing is even worse.

But I think Hall and so many of the other ex-churchgoers need to be called out for blathering about the positions some churches take on homosexuality, and never recognizing that another whole set of churches positively persecute introverts. Homosexuality is not an hereditary, permanent, physical trait. It is a behavior. Introversion is an hereditary, permanent, physical trait--and a valuable one, at that. Hall seems never to have noticed how any "friendly" feelings nice, quiet, respectful people used to have can be systematically beaten out of us by social bullies for whom we never are or could be "friendly" enough. In fact, among introverts some social problems don't even develop. People whose instinctive tendency is not to sniff at other people's crotches, to respect other people's personal choices enough not to ask whether people we are not personally pursuing are in any kind of sexual relationship, aren't likely to bother our heads about whether other people are committed to relationships that are not the marriage-for-the-sake-of-children the Catholic Church so slowly and grudgingly accepted.

Would I go to hear Hall speak? I would not. I can tell by the way she writes that at any meeting where Hall would be likely to speak, the audience would be packed in like sardines, there'd probably be sing-along songs played back on somebody's computer with the lyrics flashed on a screen, requests for money would be made repeatedly before, during, and after the performance, nothing at all would speak to my soul at any point where it had been on any stage of my life's journey, and there would probably be a group hug. If I had been wanting a spiritual, or social, or emotional experience when I went in, I'd still be wanting it when I went out of such a meeting. And at some point, very often in the first meeting, any effort I made to share some kind of fellowship with the extroverts would be slapped back into my face--I didn't seem "friendly" enough to them, so what was wrong with me? That, if anything was wrong, it was wrong with their selfish and bigoted way of presenting Christianity, would not be something extroverts would let themselves consider...

I wish extrovert Christians whatever joy they are capable of feeling in their fellowship with each other, but until they are ready to accept that spiritual people have completely different kinds of worship, faith, and fellowship, and learn our ways, I'm afraid these extrovert Christians don't have fellowship with me. But that's my reaction to Hall and her current life and work. It may not be yours. It may not be God's.


More to the point is the question whether Hall ever really repented of her adultery...because my understanding of the Bible is that, if unable to reconcile with her original husband, she is now called to celibacy. Married couples can separate but if they marry other people it must be a civil union, not a Christian marriage. I know there are churches that bless second, third, and no doubt on up to thirtieth marriages, just as there are churches that bless same-sex marriages. I don't find that in the Bible. 

In the Bible I find an affirmation of celibacy that the modern church needs to recollect. Evangelical extroverts don't like the parts of the Bible that teach that people may have to work, travel, or even sleep alone. And it's all one to me if some church somewhere feels led to blSess somebody's civil union with his motorcycle, saying that he who forsaketh a gas-guzzler and espouseth a Harley findeth a good thing, but all Christian churches need to be encouraging celibacy more clearly than they currently seem to be doing. Jesus called a woman who had had five husbands to spread Christianity in the town of Sychar; perhaps modern evangelical churches' tolerance for multiple marriages has good qualities, but it does not leave evangelical churches in a very strong position to denounce other deviations from the ideals of either celibacy or strictly monogamous marriage. 

Hall's insights can help church members who want to avoid alienating the young, but only in a limited way. Do churches need to invite same-sex couples to become members? There may be specific individuals a church wants to have as members, but if people are worried that offering membership to anyone amounts to encouraging sin they should know that the Universalist Church already exists and the other denominations don't need to merge into it. Do they need to try, in an era when most jobs tend to call for intelligence more than upper body strength, to revive the morbid French Socialist idea of male laborers being uplifted by "angel in the home" full-time wives? Does anyone seriously think that idea has any chance to work? Do the churches need to offer more support to young people, probably difficult and prickly young people, who have been sexually abused? That might work. Hall might be called to show the church the way. 

But a church that wants to recruit seriously spiritual people needs to focus on affirming and encouraging introverts. With that Hall can't be much help. Because people who are likely to replace churchgoing with private prayer are more likely to be committed lifelong Christians than people who would replace churchgoing with "partying," churches may have to make mindful choices about how much effort they want to invest in evangelizing "partying" types and how much in encouraging the kind of Christians whom churches need more than those Christians need churches.

Friday, October 24, 2025

Web Log for 10.23.25

Serena had some more kittens today. She and Drudge have been trying to civilize some dumped-out, probably feral-born adolescent cats I've been calling Wild Thyme and Wild Rose, and yes, small short-haired kittens with long tails indicate that a wild time's been had with young Wild Thyme. The babies are probably only Seralini kittens; viable kittens tend to arrive in spring, so no commitments can be made at this time. The ones I've seen are all tiny, as if premature, but their instincts and reflexes seem normal. This is no guarantee that they'll live through their first day.

I don't know Wild Thyme's temperament yet. What I know is that he and Drudge are still scuffling; neither of them seems to mind it enough to try to avoid it, but sometimes Drudge shows a surface wound. Whether this indicates that they're bonding and Drudge is delighted to have someone he can play with roughly, after all these months of being gentle with smaller kittens and respectful of his grandmother, or that Wild Thyme is a suicidal violent idiot, remains to be learned. Drudge is not reporting any concerns. If Wild Thyme is suicidal, Drudge feels confident about being able to deal with him.

There were three dumped-out kittens, originally. I've never had a close look at the other one. I don't know whether it's still alive, or, if so, where. It was not exactly delivered. The kittens were dumped into the yard of someone who tried to shoo them toward the Cat Sanctuary. None of them has, so far, taken a step toward me, or the yard, or food, when I've been outside. 

Anyway: lots of time was spent being on call for Serena. Lots of time to ruminate on these links.

Animals 

Dorahak found a snapshot of three little barn owls peeking out from a quatrefoil window.


Andrew Wilson imagines the story a butterfly might tell if it could talk.


Archetypes 

Jamie Wilson raises a valid point of Jungian psychology, the psychology of art and literature...but she overlooks Jung's larger point. While Jung did see adventure as developing a "masculine" and suffering as developing a "feminine" aspect of the self, Jung also observed that in real life we all have the "masculine" or "animus" AND the "feminine" or "anima" sides to our personalities. A woman can enjoy leaving "the home" on a quest that may involve slaying dragons. A man can mature through the loss of loved ones. 

Upward/outward and inward/downward stories, in fact, intertwine, both in myth and fiction, and in historical stories that linger in people's minds. Odin wanders, fights, overcomes, and ends up paying an eye for the "privilege" of hanging on a tree for three days to gain wisdom through suffering. Theseus goes deep underground to slay the Minotaur. Draupadi loses everything it seems an ancient Hindu woman would want to keep, dances away from an attacker, and vindicates herself. Demeter spends the winters mourning for the loss of her daughter and the summers working beside her daughter again. Huckleberry Finn grows and learns from his adventures, then becomes a man through a dark hour of spiritual wrestling. Jane Eyre leaves what she has in the way of "The Home," wanders off on her own, slays her own dragons, and returns to "The Home" as a mature woman making her own choices. The Bible has more to offer than its stories, but it too tells stories that mix yang and ying movement for either male or female characters; Sarah and Esther make bold decisive upward/outward movements; Moses and Job rise from periods of passive, inward/downward, spiritual suffering into periods of active, upward/outward success. 

The Gospel of Jesus can be classified as the ultimate example of a man who ascends in a triumphant upward/outward direction from a period of inward/downward suffering. This is why many find it unhelpful to associate yang and ying movements in stories, or biographies, with masculinity and femininity. Jesus was clearly recognized as male throughout the Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Nevertheless many Semitic tribes that had recorded prophecies of a savior who would be killed and resurrected had visualized that savior as female; those stories were what Jung characterized as the feminine spiritual journey of suffering. 

In fact, Jung recognized, people may be unhappy or neurotic because they've neglected to develop the sides of themselves that have been stereotypically identified with the opposite sex. Jung vented some very nasty thoughts and feelings about people who he thought were "ridden by" an unsatisfied and therefore harmfully dominant aspect of their personalities. On the whole he encouraged patients to embrace the "shadowed" aspects of their personalities that they had associated with the opposite sex; this is where twentieth century psychologists got the idea that men needed to cry and women needed to yell, swear, and bash at pillows. 


I've always felt, since I was old enough to notice, that children suffer from being brought up by an "angel in the home" who's not developed competence and independence before having babies...and if Little Miss Soft-And-Pink-As-A-Nursery happens to become a widow, it's a miracle if the extended family can make it possible for the children to survive, a tragedy if they have to depend on government.  My mother had a business when I was a wee tot, even a baby. It was one of the major privileges life handed to me. "The Home" is where both heroes and heroines return in the happy endings of stories, but it's where both have to leave in order to have stories. 

Excuses, Pathetic 

Angry Abby Spambucket blames sexism for her dropping in the polls?


That's the one excuse neither of the candidates can make in this election. Well, actually, their not being natives of Virginia, much less old-line Virginians, would be another excuse neither of them can make. The qualified one was born in Jamaica, the blonde in New Jersey. But mercy, Angry, you don't think it might have had anything to do with

a. your annoyingly repeated ads,
b. being really bad ads that repetitiously called attention to
b(1). Mrs. Sears' skin holding up better than yours, which a woman of fortitude might have tried to chalk up to melanin but we know you're showing stress,
b(2). Mrs. Sears' saying elective abortion is wicked, which most Virginia voters agree is true,
b(3). Mrs. Sears' saying that convicted sex offenders should not be allowed to expose themselves in high school girls' bathrooms at school sports events, which most Virginia voters agree is true,
b(4). your whining that disagreement angers you, which many Virginia voters believe shows mental immaturity and weakness of character,
b(5). your hiding from the camera in your own ads, which might be perceived as showing dishonesty even more than it shows fear of acknowledging your current physical condition,
b(6). Mrs. Sears' opposition to raising taxes, which voters everywhere like even if they don't trust it, which in Mrs. Sears' case they probably do,
b(7). your perception of voters as being naive enough to think that taxes on "billionnaires" are ever enough to appease the greed of an out-of-control bureaucracy without extending into taxes on anyone "rich" enough to pay taxes, which voters are not,
b(8). your lack of understanding of what Governors do, as shown by your grandiose talk about being able to reverse "Bidenflation" all by your pallid little self,
b(9). your bigoted obsession with Mrs. Sears' lips being fuller than yours, as if refusing collagen injections were the bravest thing you've ever done, which may even be the case,
b(10). your belief that teenagers benefit from radical gender-change treatment in high school, which we all know by now is not the case,
b(11). your belief that Governors are meant to oppose rather than to work with the President,
b(12). your general contempt for voters if you thought anyone would not notice these things,
c. your failure to reply to a question about any positive talking points you had, in July, 
d. which drove me to your social media pages, where I not only 
d(1). found no positive talking points 
d(2). but found the infamous picture of your rally where obviously none of the White people in attendance saw anything insensitive about the "Black People Can't Use My Water Fountain" sign,
d(3). and abundant documentation that you, Angry Abby, had no problem with that sign until Republicans commented on it,
e. and, meanwhile, your loyalty to the indefensible Jay Jones, which a stronger personality might have made into an extreme libertarian position that would have won respect if not the election, but you completely failed at that,
f. and, meanwhile, your SCREAMING display of contempt for a blogger, 
f(1). who appeared to be considerably older than you,
f(2). who is not even known to be unfavorable to you, it's not as if he were Tucker Carlson or Glenn Beck,
f(3). who scared you into hysterical yowling just by asking you civil questions, O Pallid Baby Sister to Kamala Harris,
g. and your visible tremors and speechlessness in the debate, when you're at least thirty years too young to get any sympathy for possible cardiovascular syndrome or Parkinson's Disease,
h. and your having been endorsed by Barack Obama,
i. and your association with the Biden Administration we all want to put far behind us,
j. and your failure to defend the right to privacy, the right to choice about things other than abortion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, property rights, or the environment,
k. and the three rogue policemen in your worst ad, claiming you as a fellow policeman 
k(1).when your own Wikipedia page denies that you ever were one,
k(2). and the actual police organizations are supporting your opponent,
k(3). and Officers Porter, Ross, and Jenkins then don't say anything good about you but implicitly threaten voters with their corruption,
l. and, on top of that, your association with the Schumer Schutdown, which may well compromise some Virginia voters' food supply, on Election Day, if your fellow Burros don't smarten up fast?!?!?!

People might be going to the polls without breakfast, having your party to blame? You don't see those as factors in your sagging poll numbers, Abigail? (Not even to mention the promise of corruption made by the three rogue policemen who appeared in your worst ad, apparently on the grounds of your claiming to have been a policeman, which seems not to be true unless it was a cover you used while working in some very junior capacity with the very unpopular CIA...) Not to suggest that all or even very many Northerners are that thick, but...Yankee, go home.

Fiction 

If people seriously confuse renting a painting for "20,00" pounds with renting the scene painted for 20,000 pounds, how do they imagine that that would work? Much fiction has its origin in writers' attempts to imagine what goes on in differently able brains. 


Nostalgia, Good and Bad 

Like most people who've been around for a while I like to reminisce. (Actually, my mother positively encouraged all of her children to start reminiscing--"What do you remember of this time last year? What do you remember about this place?"--around age two. My natural sister held on to a few accurate memories from before age two, into early adulthood; this is clearly a special gift though it doesn't seem to have added a great deal of happiness to her life.) 

I think all this reminiscing is valuable. It's good to preserve good things from the past; it's good to record why other things weren't worth preserving.

But nostalgia can become positively toxic.


As people who've always identified as "the young" become unmistakably "the old," there is a temptation to bog down in toxic nostalgia. 

"Oh, there's the house, that dear little house where we lived in the year...and I was so happy!"

You weren't, the listener thinks. Don't you remember? Your dog died; you cried every day for a month. You were ill most of the year. You deliberately aggravated your symptoms because you were so miserable at school. You were bullied continually at school, especially after Nasty Natasha told people about having found you crying, the day after the dog died. You wanted a bicycle and your parents refused to buy one...

"Well...I didn't have the kind of childhood babies cry for, actually. But once in a while when Daddy took me out fishing, or Mom took me to the library, I was happy! Of course now my parents are gone, the library's closed, and there's a big new store where the fishing hole used to be...but still...I think I want to sell our house and move my whole family back here!"

Usually it's not quite that obvious. But it's close. This person is not enjoying (let's say it's "his") Now very much. He actively hated most of his Then, but he's remembering moments of Then that felt good by contrast to most of the rest of those years. 

Demographic generations have romanticized entire decades to the point where people feel a need to debunk...These stereotypes come from US history. Other countries have different ones.

* /The wide-open 1820s, when American pioneers pushed westward, blazing new trails, clearing the land, bringing civilization...

...Western European immigrants, that was. Filthy, plague-carrying immigrants on a mission to destroy existing civilizations. They rented fishing rights to a place for a year and claimed they'd bought it forever, for a handful of glass beads. 

* The romantic 1850s, when real Southern Belles wore dresses that were actually shaped like bells and didn't have to do anything but flirt, dance, and go to parties...

...and grab the richest possible husband before they were old enough to vote, which of course they weren't yet allowed to do anyway, because men pursued Southern Belles for their money and, though married women had no actual property rights, a rich husband was more likely to let his wife enjoy some small portion of her inheritance than a poor husband was.

* The "gilded" 1890s, when Americans made millions, were as rich as European aristocrats, and tried to revive "Society" traditions that re-created Europe's...

...and blamed poor people for the diseases that were starting to kill them by dozens and hundreds...and \invented segregation...and didn't let women vote...and tried to make it a crime to join a labor union... 

* The "roaring" 1920s, when everyone was young and feeling frisky...

...except the ones who weren't. The thing about what was called the "fast" or "sporting" life in the 1920s was that people weren't living very long. Crowding and lack of sanitation...

* The friendly 1950s, when everyone could afford a nice house in a nice suburb, white picket fence, yardman to maintain the grassy lawn, cook who came in every day and cleaning "lady" who came in twice a week to do the housework while Mom maintained her supply of little white gloves and beamed angelically oveer her 2.75 perfect children...

...and antibiotics seemed to have ended the plagues at last, but nobody felt confident enough about this to want to get too close to someone from a poorer neighborhood. And instead of never being alone with a young man because she might be raped, young women were now expected to spend time alone with young men and agree to a shotgun wedding after being raped....By the way, those suburbs were planned to replace overt segregation against ethnic or religious groups with overt segregation by income.  In smaller cities the small, cheap houses weren't necessarily bad, but some jobs and schools weren't available to people who lived there, and some people didn't want to know them. In big cities the neighborhoods that had small, cheap houses  became slums.

* The swinging 1960s, when everyone revelled in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll...

...and the sex and drugs killed enough of us that some of us wanted to say no even to the rock-and-roll, which admittedly did hit a lot of the genre's high points in the 1960s. 

* The awesome 1980s, when everyone could admire President Reagan and get rich on an easy job...

...and people hated and wanted to kill President Reagan because people feared that his policies would heat up the Cold War, or were even meant to lead to "Armageddon" after he made a speech referring to the Last Battle. And many of the jobs that were so easy for young people to get involved heavy physical labor. And let's not forget that measles vaccines, which had been controversial for  years, were suddenly made mandatory and a few contaminated batches of vaccine left hundreds of young people too ill to do even easy jobs.

I'm not saying I didn't have fun in the 1980s, or for that matter the 1960s. I probably would have had fun in those other decades if I'd been alive during them. So would you, I hope. But they were not actually golden windows of time when everything was wonderful. 

It's good to be able to remember that the year when you were bullied at school because someone saw you crying when your dog died did contain those moments of joy at the fishing hole, but it's not so good to spoil Now with distorted memories of Then.

As a writer I've always tried to remember it all, and how it all fitted together, and remember that nice and nasty things mixed in the same general way in the times and places I don't remember firsthand. How much I enjoyed the swing set, until the chain broke. What fun it was to go around shovelling paths during the Big Wet Snow, and the whole school term with bronchitis that followed. What a great speaker President Reagan was, and how people used to revile him.

Photography 


Photo by Martha DeMeo--read on: 

Believe it or not, this could be a recent photo. Although the last image of my part of Virginia posted at this web site commemorated the extraordinarily colorful autumn foliage in 2016, although the Cat Sanctuary is far enough up the mountain that we did have a light frost and are now watching red and orange leaves fall, lower elevations in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina are still green. Riding through Duffield yesterday, I saw some older-growth woodlots where all the trees' leaf color is tied to temperature rather than light...still bright green, with only an occasional bare shrub...

Anyway, regular readers will remember that Martha DeMeo is a grandmotherly blogger I started following back in the days of Bubblews and Blogjob. Her blog always features big splashy pictures. This blog always shrinks pictures. Click through to see the photo in its full glory:


MDeM wondered whether this post would "go viral" because, although the photo is simple, the subject is so pretty (and, at this time of year, unusual). It lacks the vulgarity of most "viral content" in cyberspace, but let's see...how many links and shares can her post get?

Content that "goes viral" is ganked and reposted all over the place so I hope Martha DeMeo won't mind that I pasted the photo into a set of silly limerick-y things at Substack, too--properly attributed, of course, with the link.

Bad Poetry: Ten-Line Obituary

At the Substack I had pre-posted a cheerful silly poem about this week's weather. The first real cold front of winter produced only scattered patches of frost "in the higher elevations." Usually that phrase in the weather forecast means "not at the Cat Sanctuary," but we are a few feet above sea level (water boils at 217 or 218 degrees on a Fahrenheit thermometer, not 212) and the leaves that turn color in cold weather turned this week. In the towns the leaves were still green. I'm guessing they saw color this morning, though, because my thermometer was down just below the freezing mark this morning.

The other news was not so cheerful. It popped out of my head in this form when I looked at the Poets & Storytellers United prompt for poems "to the power of ten."

Ten little eyes that never will open,
Twenty wee paws that never will run;
Five tiny Seralini kittens,
None lasted through the night, not one.
In the warm room their mother laid them
In the warm spot, right on the mat.
Warmth was no use to them, nor milk either;
They were born only to cleanse the cat.
I heard them squeak in the night to say,
"We never came into this world to stay."

Researchers, one of whom was called Seralini, determined that exposure to glyphosate and apparently some other toxic chemicals causes some females, of all species, to sequester these chemicals in non-viable embryonic offspring. The mothers show no reactions except that, if they give birth to living young, these babies aren't able to live very long. Women who have this trait have gone on record saying that they would rather have been sick themselves than lost their babies. Other animals don't seem happy about it either--but they do survive, and thrive. If they're not exposed to "pesticide" (why did I start to type "petsicide"?) vapors before or during their next pregnancy, they may have healthy babies later.



Book Review: Magpie Goblin Word Boy

Title: Magpie Goblin Word Boy

Author: V.R. Friesen

Date: 2022

Publisher: Dimmare

ISBN: 978-1-7774062-7-1

Quote: "Magpie's first collection was rings...he'd leave every third one for the crows."

I cheated. This is not really a Halloween book. It's about a more serious kind of horror. In its unlikely post-apocalyptic world, the law of gravity has been amended, at the same time that large numbers of humans have died. Survivor children roam in packs of orphans in active competition with the "biggies" who compete with them for food. There's an extensive series following different characters at different times of this fictive world's history. This is the short introductory e-book where we meet just a few of the characters who will appear later on as teenagers or adults. Different friends and competitors call the protagonist Magpie and Goblin and other names; this is the story of how he earns the name of Word Boy, a potential rebuilder of civilization. 

Word Boy and his acquaintances don't seem to know that their environment was once called British Columbia, but there are clues, like the magpies that don't live in most of North America. 

Friesen is "voicey" enough to satisfy anybody, even on the poetic side, and those who enjoy haunting dystopia stories probably will want to buy the rest of the series. 

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Book Review: Wedding Day Brews

Title: Wedding Day Brews

Author: Bella Colby

Date: 2023

Publisher: Beresford

ISBN: 978-1-913422-14-1

Quote: "My dog was talking to me. To passers-by it sounds like he whines a lot, but I understand every word he says."

Skye, a Scottish witch or psychic as seen on "Charmed," had mixed feelings about returning to the British coastal town that caught her eye. After her divorce she'd become involved with an environmentalist group but the terms of having charges dropped, after she helped sink a ship, specified that she stay in the UK for two years. She'll need a job, of course. Applying for the first job she's told about, she's passed over in favor of somebody's obnoxious niece, then finds the said niece dead in the parking lot. 

Skye has been to witch school but used only one spell even there. She'll use her spell, and rely on protection by her familiar dog, while solving the mystery but she will use logic, not magic, to find out whodunit. It's a fairly short, simple plot; if you guess whodunit (I did), there's still the suspense of finding out how Skye can prove it.  

This series was published in Britain before ChatGPT, and is much better written than the series-opening short mysteries I've been receiving since. I don't think Colby is really trying to write like Joan Aiken, Mary Stewart, or Peter Dickinson, but her voice may appeal to people who miss theirs. 

Meet the Blogroll: Barb Taub

If you don't already follow Barb Taub, this early reflection on whether or not to continue her blog might be a good place to e-meet her:


The title was a joke. Taub is one of the funnier writers in English today, and her blog and social media have been working for her for these twelve and a half years.

Another joke was the title of her retrospective comedy collection, Life Begins When the Kids Leave Home and the Dog Dies. It was "mom-com," about those moments in parenthood that become funny when they stop being infuriating. Reading it, I immediately recognized the heir to Erma Bombeck. Chortle for chortle; laugh out loud for laugh out loud.

So why did Bombeck's books sit at the top of the bestsellers lists for more than a year after each one was printed, while it's possible that you've never heard of Taub? I think the answer is trends. Publishers haven't been trying to market mom-com, or anything else that pertains to or might conceivably encourage parenthood, in recent years. Hello? Publishers are mostly found in New York City. People don't have to spend a lot of time there to find that their ideal of the perfect wife, or daughter, or female friend has become a mildly child-phobic yuppie, possibly a lesbian, or--because the nesting urge has been known to strike lesbians--a gender-dysphoric woman who's had herself spayed and likes to be referred to as "he" or "they."

But chill. Taub had children, in the past. She and her husband stayed close to the children and have adopted other dogs, but their years of adding to the population are safely over. The husband's job took him to the UK and Taub started writing about the expatriate experience as only the well paid know it. They lived in castles. She could afford yearly get-togethers with old school friends...in India. 

This web site raved not only over Life Begins but over Oh My Dog, which is mostly a reminiscence about living through the COVID panic with the dog Peri. Anyone who likes either humor or dogs needs this book. That some individual chapters were drafted on Taub's blog is gravy. But yes. The blog is where you get to read the first publishable drafts of parts of some great humorous essays. You will laugh at both book and blog...even though you may shed a tear at the inevitable aging and death of Peri. 

Taub is a Democrat and occasionally cracks a political joke, but never a really hateful one; her husband is a Republican. Mostly she's a writer of warmhearted funny stories and essays. R readers can enjoy her blog and books.

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Book Review: The Accidental Witch the Half Witch

Title: The Accidental Witch Book 1 The Half Witch

Author: P.J. Tremblay

Date: 2023

Publisher: P.J. Tremblay

ISBN: 979-8223718871

Quote: "I'm an accidental witch. My parents are Normies, or non-magic folk."

That's how Lily Hawthorn, whose name isn't mentioned until the second half of chapter two, introduces herself in this series-launching cozy mystery. A disagreeable old woman called Abigail has died, there's evidence that a European botanical well known to witches was involved, and Lily has to clear her best school friend of suspicion. 

Neither magic nor logic really counts for as much as the feeling that characters are too nice to have Done It, but if you feel that there's just something about the convenient loss of a politician called Abigail, you'll enjoy this cozy and even mildly comic mystery. 

The trailers for additional books at the end aren't to be missed. In addition to a sequel about Lily, there's a series about a ghost detective and a couple of theological books by another member of the Tremblay family, a Christian minister. I don't know about the positions he takes but he's certainly not a victim of "satanic panic."  

Things That Scare Me

Writing this in May (I can't connect to the Internet today so I might as well write some planned posts in advance), I wonder how many people will post anything at all in response to the Long & Short Reviews prompt, "Things That Scare Me."

In between infancy, when we don't know enough to be scared of anything but loud noises or sudden drops, and middle age, when it's to be hoped we know enough to cope with most situations in a practical rather than emotional way, it's human to fear The Unknown. And when we're young, that category of "The Unknown" includes a lot.

When I was little, the fashionable idea was to rear children in a sweet, happy, safe fantasy of a "nursery world" where we wouldn't develop any phobias because we could feel secure that Mother and Daddy would keep us safe.

It didn't always work as planned. Parents also wanted to believe that that nursery world fantasy would keep us feeling secure when we were dragged from place to place, when we were threatened by things beyond Mother's and Daddy's control, when relatives died. And they also wanted to believe that they weren't supposed to take any real notice of how children felt about things that had moved from "The Unknown" to "The Loathed"--medications and even operations (sometimes unnecessary), nasty situations at school, Mother's difficult pregnancy, Daddy's disabling injury, Grandpa's dying...

For me and for the children I used to baby-sit, that was when the really ridiculous phobias started. Around the time my grandfather died, I developed a fear of public toilets. After a long-distance move, a child I knew thought a chip in the paint on the kitchen stove looked like a wolf's head, and avoided the kitchen. After her grandparents' house burned down, a child I baby-sat developed a fear of the sound of water gurgling in a culvert below a road she'd been walking all her life. While her mother was ill, another child I baby-sat described "bad dreams" about "horrible slippers, with eyes and a mouth that talks and whispers horrible things."

Yes, bunny slippers can look pretty horrible when your life in a whole world of The Unknown gets especially stressful. So did that silly blue Knickerbocker Toy (before the Beanie Babies there were Knickerbocker Toys, very similar) that was meant to be some sort of cartoon image of a paddling duck, that seemed to zoom around the room in a fever dream I had just before vomiting. I wasn't afraid of the duck when I was awake, before or after that dream, but I never have liked badly drawn, cartoonish toy animals.

During Grandmother's last illness I remember silently praying that I wouldn't dream about an image that nobody had thought would upset me--a drawing in a comic book of humans walking away from a dead horse on the trail. It didn't take Freud to guess that, although nobody talked to me about Grandmother's condition and I didn't say or do anything that showed fear, some part of my mind saw the image of a blob of brown ink representing a dead horse as also representing all the real unhappiness I and everyone else was feeling about losing Grandmother. When she died there was actually some sense of relief...the drawing of the dead horse didn't scare me any more.

Adults usually look back on these things and either laugh, or empathize with the ridiculous phobias of the children we now know. I think of them as evidence that adults don't need to bother trying to keep children away from stories and images adults think might be too frightening. If a child really is happy in the nursery-world fantasy, Disney's wicked fairy turning into a dragon won't cause nightmares; if not, bunny slippers and chips in paint will figure in nightmares anyway. Don't blame the books, parents. Blame yourselves. Specifically blame the decisions you make to change the children's routine, uncovering that hole in the nursery world through which children fall down to The Unknown. If you don't want to deal with childhood phobias and nightmares, don't even think about changes of address, let alone divorce, and keep all the children's elders healthy until the children are at least thirteen.

By that age most of our fears are reasonable. Well...sort of.

Most spiders can bite, some inject enough venom to make the bitten place hurt, and most humans don't like the sensation of spiders walking across our skin in any case. Since spiders do not particularly want to be picked up and snuggled by humans either, it's reasonable that most of us don't want to touch a spider. I don't scream or faint if a spider runs across my hand (and I live in a place where a lot of spiders hunt down smaller insects by running madly about, trying to surprise them). I don't reach into a box where spider nests are, either.

Yet everyone seems to know a sensible, reasonable person who really can't stand spiders, who may look greenish if people even talk about spiders. I think Spider-Man cartoons may have helped some people cope with the fact that spiders share our planet. Still, many spider-phobics aren't triggered by Spider-Man, because he obviously has nothing to do with real spiders, and are triggered by harmless little animals who actually protect them from insect bites. Why do spiders invade people's beds? Because they like to eat gnats, flies, and mosquitoes, of course. Spiders will then bite us if we happen to crush them, and can they be blamed....but they're there to eat mosquitoes that intend to bite us.

Again, everyone who speaks or sings or performs for audiences in any other way feels some performance anxiety. Most of us don't talk about that adrenalin high having an addictive quality, but it does. But while most of us learn to deal with the feeling that we've not practiced enough (it's not possible to have practiced enough), even learn to improvise something the audience may think was part of the act if we forget the words, some people build up real performance phobias.

Usually people call attention to their phobias and try to elicit sympathy in their teens and twenties. In our thirties we usually realize that there are better ways to get attention, and work through our phobias. College students used to be shown an educational film in which a man who'd formed a phobia of rabbits modified his behavior to the point where he could enjoy the company of Playboy Bunnies. We all broke through our fears that people who were different from us wouldn't liiiike us, that we'd break the new office machine if we used it, that we'd literally die if anything happened to our beloved elders, and many more, too.

So at sixty I don't feel the emotion of fear very often any more. Fire? Deep water? Violent attacks? I've faced the danger, assessed it, and acted on a rational assessment of the situation. A fire is to fight. When throwing buckets of water on it is likely to help, I know I'll run toward the fire with buckets. When it's time to step aside and see whether a fire hose can do what buckets are failing to do, I know I'll do that. I know from experience. For a younger person these situations may still be part of The Unknown.

I've built up a history of bravery. This is a good thing. If some reader is thinking "I have a history of cowardice," ask yourself whether that thought is useful to you. Does someone special hold your hand in a nice way when you scream at the sight of a beetle? If not, it may be time to lose the beetle phobia. Meanwhile, I'd suggest, instead of identifying with a history of cowardice, thinking that you've not built up much of a history of bravery because you are young. The times to (take a swimming course and then) dive into deep water, (hire a local guide and then) walk into the rough neighborhood, (practice climbing and then) climb as high as the tree will hold your weight, are still ahead of you. All of The Nephews come from long lines of brave people and will probably do very well.

However, even if wailing to your friends and relatives about your phobia of birds is working nicely to get sympathy, reduce the phobia people feel because you are bigger than they are, etc., I don't recommend wailing about present-time phobias on the Internet. Well, especially not if you feel, as I do, that you don't want any evildoers attacking your loved ones as a way to hurt you.

Everybody has to have watched at least one movie scene...

"Tell us your secret (or agree to stop whistleblowing, or cooperate with our regime) or we'll shoot you."

"I certainly won't be in a position to do that if you do shoot me. Fire away!"

"We have your daughter. If you do as we tell you, we'll let her go. If not, we'll kill her. Bwahahaha."

"Eeek! Daddy! Daddy!"

In movies this is usually where Superman or Robin Hood or some character played by John Wayne comes in, kills the evildoer, and reunites the threatened family. Though, depending on the age and shape of the actress the producers could afford, the audience may have to watch her squirm and squeal for--several minutes, if she's about twenty years old and has a bosom that heaves well. If she really is one of the grown-up actors' daughter or niece, age six, one quick shot of her squealing "Daddy!" will do.

In real life I don't have any superheroes to count on. I do have anonymity. Because the web sites I use don't know where to find the writer known as Priscilla King, evildoers who track me through cyberspace don't know where to find The Nephews, either. Hello, did anyone really think I'm this much of a privacy fanatic merely because I don't like being interrupted by phone calls? Well, I don't like being interrupted by phone calls. It's not exactly a lie. And all anyone in cyberspace needs to know about The Nephews is that the group includes both sexes and several colors. If you feel that everyone on Earth deserves to see how adorable your grandchildren are, you might want to reconsider this...not that they're not adorable, of course, but that everyone deserves to know it.

But there are milder levels of fear that are perfectly appropriate for book reviewers to tell the world about. "I fear it's not a good day for a picnic." "I'm afraid those things are more fun to look at than they are to own." Most relevant of all, there's the set of things that might make us say "I fear this book's not going to be much fun to read."

1. Very bad "mechanical" writing skills--spelling, grammar, punctuation. An occasional "they done" for "they'd done" or "Criminals Trump and Obama" for "Criminals, Trump, and Obama" can happen to anyone, but sometimes self-published books are hard to read.

2. A "correct" but vague and nondescript tone of writing "voice," suggesting that the book was written by plagiarism-ware. Those things are not "intelligence." Nor are they friends to writers. By all means run a manuscript through a spelling and grammar checking program--after you have written it--but don't let your computer try to do more than that.

3. Things that feed into hateful old stereotypes, especially about women. Women who venture out of "The Home" alone may be harassed in some way but the tone of your writing should leave no room for the suggestion that that's normal or acceptable. Women who may be twenty-five, but whose behavior would be noticed as unusually immature at fifteen, may deserve a romance but should get several chapters, or better yet volumes, to grow up before they marry anybody. We really did elect a President who imagined there could be peace while the Hamas goons who participated in the terrorist attack two years ago were alive, but we've lived and learned and will probably remember not to elect another one: No man should ever trust a man who abuses women, any more than women would do.

4. Painful p.c.-ism. In a story set in the 1980s it's authenticity, not hate, to mention the employers who are more concerned with a character's stockings or hairstyle than with whether the person can type. In a story set in the 1850s your characters don't need to be slaves or slavemasters--in fact the lives of free Black Americans at this period is one of the fresh, little explored chapters in US history, and my personal feeling is that most members of "Peace Churches" North or South, at this period, were more interesting than most slaves or slavemasters--but they will most definitely be aware that slavery still exists. In a story set in the 1650s your characters may not believe that God really cares which set of church-related words people use, but they have surely been notified, probably by physical abuse, that other English-speaking people care very much about this. (One can hope Addison was exaggerating when he described how the little boy found St Anne's Lane, but would he have claimed the story was true if it hadn't happened to someone?) If you let a character in the past spout ideas that belong to the present, you need historical evidence that the person or someone like the person really said whatever you want your foresighted character to say.

5. Self-contradiction happens in fiction. The storytelling mind says or writes that something happened in the springtime and then notices that it would work better in the story if it happened in the winter. The character's name changes in mid-conversation. I once wrote about a scene that actually happened in a Camaro, which has a vestigial back seat, and, while routinely blurring all details, changed the car and had a character in the back seat of a Corvette, which has no back seat. But writers are supposed to read their work and fix these things before they allow other people to see their stories.

6. Product placement. Until you've actually signed a contract that specifies that a character drives a Corvette, it's probably better to keep your options open, anyway. He drives a sports car.

7. Annoying word usage quirks. You want things to affect or impress people, not "impact" them. A computer is running or it's not, but it's not capable of "responding" and never will be. Characters sharing the stage might be speaking with each other, but characters talking privately are talking to, or with, each other. Though of course a character might misuse these words to show that the character is the sort of person who misuses them in real life.

8. Buying into the misbeliefs of a pressure group. If you're fantasizing about some future technology, show its bad and good points without partiality. If your characters are religious people, try to avoid having everything go splendidly for them and horribly for unbelievers. 

9. Redundancy. If you have not thought of an equally witty variation on "a face so face-like in its expression as to be absolutely facial," try to avoid using "face," "face-like,' and "facial' in the same paragraph. 

10. Romanticizing what is "different" or, conversely, familiar. Real people who have been in two very different places usually have lists of things they liked and disliked about each place. Even the Prisoner of Chillon regained his freedom with a sigh, because he'd formed emotional attachments to some things in the dungeon. You might have a character who believes that some sort of "social change" will make everything better or has made everything worse for everyone but you, yourself, should not make such a mistake.