I didn't spend most of these days online and the computer is showing that youall didn't either. We will have a Butterfly of the Week, though, and a Petfinder Post.
Animals
Your daily cuteness overload.
(I hope being shorn doesn't feel like an Alpacalypse to them...if the weather stays warm long-haired animals seem to like a haircut. Anyway, all that gorgeous, undyed, colored, fluffy yarn! Lens says the words were first added to the photo on Pinterest, and that on Reddit someone replied with a photo of llamas marked LLAMAGEDDON.)
Cartoons
Like, one thing leads to the other...
From Dr. Malone's Substack. Lens traces the cartoon to Instagram but makes no guarantees that it was original when posted there.
For those who are not testerical young men and would like to break the let's-go-outside-and-fight thought cycle, this web site continues to attempt to cite Canadian content and give uneducated US residents a general sense of where e.g. Saskatchewan is, relative to e.g. New Brunswick, on a map. International cooperation and empathy are appreciated.
For young men, this web site observes that, of the two toons, the clean-shaven Canadian looks much better than the messy-faced bloke disgracing our flag, because as a general principle a man can look good with a full beard or no beard, but even a man we know and love cannot look his best with a three-day beard. Yes, men with certain kinds of ancestors are likely to have only a three-day beard if they let the mess alienate potential friends all winter long. Deal with it. (A phrase which, in this context, means "shave it.") Little or no facial hair is part of the Native American mystique.
Funding
The basic problem is that decent people expect other people will be able to earn money all by themselves, whereas horrible people are in the habit of handing out money every time the daughters of the horseleech cry "give." (Whom do I mean by "daughters of the horseleech," someone asks in a place where they don't read the Old Testament much. According to the Book of Proverbs "The horseleech has two daughters, crying 'Give! Give!'" That's all we're told, though meditation on this proverb has led Americans to identify the horseleech with tax-and-spend politicians.)
We all know $42,000 is not going to pay for a lot of time in the burn unit at Johns Hopkins. So why didn't people shell out for Hero Mom the way they did for Mad Murderous Mom?
The graphic comes from the Mirror. Lens says it's viral, but the photo of Hero Mom Emma Schols can be traced to Facebook, 2019, when the fire happened--in Sweden. Lens says her story has been documented. One thing Ms. Schols forgot to do was be in the United States, a big boost for fundraising sites.
Otherwise? Meh. Long black hair has a special appeal for men. Long blonde and red hair have, too, in different ways. Clancy's hair is not black but can look as if it were in digital photos; it certainly is long. Maybe Emma Schols needed a wig.
People.
Music
Tom Petty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZm-qe4-EfY (Shared at the Meow, dedicated to kittens.)
Anna Calvi.
Matthew Halsall.
Joan As Police Woman.
Ludovico Einaudi.
Teddy Thompson.
Dolly Parton.
Florian Christl.
Mid Mod Music.
Jerry Lee Lewis.
Neil Young.
Newsboys.
Henry Mancini.
Probably the computer of "Meta Ronin" on Substack, with a song about Substackers' attempt to evolve a slang of their own, as Twitter did...Some language in the song is rude.
Traffic.
John Prine.
The Kingsmen.
Loretta Lynn.
The Sonics.
Names
Some people have risen to the challenge of living with names like Clive Staples Lewis, Revilo Pendleton Oliver, Campbell Bascom Slemp, Hermione Ferdinanda Gingold, or Spiro Agnew.
(You may have heard that Spiro changed his name; I heard that, too, but according to Wikipedia that was his father, Theophrastos Anagnostopoulos, who changed his name to Theodore Agnew and named his son Spiro Theodore Agnew. The first name means "I breathe" in Latin and is said to be a short form of Spiridon in Greek. The future Vice-President sometimes answered to "Ted" in youth but kept his odd given name as apparently his only tie with his ethnic-minority culture. In all other ways Spiro Agnew was remembered as a conformist's conformist, a 1950s "square" squared, a TV watcher before it was cool who liked Mantovani, Lawrence Welk, the Baltimore Colts, and Readers Digest--and didn't like baby-boomers.)
Some people have been able to tweak names like Alisa Rosenbaum, Paul Harvey Aurandt, or Helen Mironoff into things the average American can pronounce--Ayn Rand, Paul Harvey, Helen Mirren. Then there are people who just collapse under their names...Richard Leroy Trickle coped, but Randon Sprinkle totally flaked out, letting himself be caught distributing what appeared to be child pornography. Whether actual children were harmed, or plagiarism-ware was used, was unreported.
Sprinkle was, of course, a Democratic Socialist. At least that may help him survive prison.
Pictures
Someone e-mailed that her husband thought a drawing of a person sitting in a field, apparently conversing with crows, looked creepy. Everyone has different associations to pictures, but seriously?
Google traced this one to The Dodo.
This one came from Reddit.
This one was posted by the University of Washington; I think Pbird may have met the man.
There's nothing creepy about the fact that some humans like and befriend crows. Some people even like and befriend vultures, the black species of which are often confused with crows. If you slowly and patiently share food with an animal, it will probably start to like you.
There are different kinds and levels of affection for animals, as there are for humans. Crows don't have to like everyone whose attention they call either to good news, like food, or bad news, like something recently killed beside the road. They simply want other animals to break open the box of food that fell off the truck, or skin the dead animal, so they can get a bit of what the other animals leave. Crows and ravens have not generally been treated well by humans. Most of them don't like any of us. However, a few crows and ravens do bond with humans. They know one person from another and recognize friends (and enemies). They have been known to give humans shiny trinkets such as they like to play with, which have included keys and coins. They have brought food to human friends and guided hunters to game.
They have also guided other predators...to join the hunt, thinking that, the more bigger, stronger predators are stalking one deer, the sooner the crows get a few bites of raw venison? Or in hopes of killing the hunters, who may have been conveniences rather than friends to the crows all along? Or in the belief that wolves and bears aren't usually interested in human meat when they can get deer, which is usually true, so why not watch them fight over the prey and let the best predator win. Who knows? Crows and ravens can learn to say words in human languages, even with some understanding--but we'll probably never really understand crows.
Crows also harass and may even bite people they have special reasons to dislike.The problem with making pets of crows is that, as Jean George described in a poignant novel, a crow who bonds with one human is likely to have lost its crow family--possibly to other humans, possibly to one of its human's friends and relatives. What happens if your crow knows you are its friend, knows your brother killed its brother, and so, when your brother visits, your crow goes for his eyes?
The corvid family of birds love fresh meat (unlike vultures, they can't eat rotting meat) but aren't built to be able to tear into a freshly killed animal unless someone with fangs or a knife removes the skin. So there is a reason why they're associated with death. If you think a wounded rabbit dead beside the road is bad news, the probability is high that a lone crow flapping, squawking, and calling to you beside the road is bringing you bad news. But they are natural animals, not spirits come to lead anyone to the grave.
Poem
Graybelle wasn't that bad--I suppose because she'd never actually lived with Her Human. Graybelle was the cat heir to a big house on a big farm on a big hill. When her mother's human died, Graybelle's mother disappeared into the woods. After chickens were restored to the farm by those remodelling it, and scraps of lunch were left out for the chickens, Graybelle and her sister started coming back to the house. The remodelling crew all set out food for "our ghost cat" or "our mythical cat"--cats, as it turned out--but Graybelle let herself be seen first by the big, loud bulldozer man, miffing the catpeople on the crew. (Possibly because he lived with a tomcat.) She only ever bonded with him. She and her sister allowed the rest of us to see them when he presented us to them--by ones. Both allowed me to touch them after a week or two; Graybelle moved away when she'd had enough, her sister bit, so we decided Graybelle had to be rescued and the sister left to her fate. I asked Graybelle, "Would you like to come home with me?" She jumped away. She was at her home, she nonverbally said. Poor kitty. Her chosen human said, "Will she sit in the truck with me?" She would, and he drove the truck to the Cat Sanctuary. And there Graybelle loyally stayed. And on days when I'd been on that job and ridden home in the bulldozer man's truck, she snuggled. She just kept putting her fore paws on my leg to be picked up, and after a few months I noticd that her fore paws weren't even reaching up to my belt any more, but up to my..bra band?! Graybelle was growing up to be one of those ancestral-size Manx cats. She was still a hollow-boned growing kitten but she looked, from a distance, like the atypical gray bobcats in the local nature park. She clearly thought I, and the Cat Sanctuary, and even the hill on which it sits, were small emergency backups for her human and her home. She was a nice, polite, patient cat but she never loved me.
Politics
Cruz, Rubio, or Vance in 2028? I'm not happy about that line-up, frankly. Not because they're all used to being the smartest man in the room. Not because, even so, they lack Trump's peculiar extrovert genius--there will never be another Trump, and in 2028 he'll be too old to run, thank goodness, and people will just have to deal with that. Because I don't feel old enough to vote for a presidential candidate who is younger than I am.
When there's a choice among qualified candidates, and I'm not voting on a single issue, which I probably still will be doing--anyway, assuming I consider the candidates qualified, my preference is to line'm up on the ticket by age, oldest first, on the premise that the younger ones are more likely to have a chance next time. There is a slight problem with this. The problem is not that all the likely Republican presidential candidates for 2028 are close enough to the same age that lining them up by birthdays is a technicality. (However they look, Cruz is only one year older than Rubio and DeSantis is actually younger.) The problem is that Cruz is the oldest and, on another technicality, he's ineligible to be President. Trump offered, but Canada doesn't want to be a State and, until it is one, we can't have a President Cruz.
Trump is too old. Carson is too old. Ron Paul is too old. Rand Paul is the right age to be President but has failed, even as a US Senator, to become presidential. Rubio, DeSantis, and Vance are old enough to preside over a younger nation but, to a critical mass of US citizens, they're children. As Cruz's gray beard shows, this is not a matter of actual age. It's a matter of having grown up with television.
I think we should probably move beyond the tendency to look at men as presidential candidates, in nay case. Conservatives desperately need to appeal to women voters. We can't advocate censorship for the morons squawking that the existence of Lindsay Clancy's supporters proves that women shouldn't be allowed to vote. But we can demonstrate distance from them by nominating and backing women candidates.
Never mind that the charges of anything worse than ordinary adultery against Trump are about as credible as a three-dollar bill. Never mind that, when we sorted through the whining to find the facts in what Congressman Massie's ex-girlfriend said about him, she said he was a lousy lay but he was still the decent ethical young man she called on to protect her from the guy who really was a creepy stalker. Any male can be accused of sexual misconduct and there will be a high probabillity that he's guilty of some form of it. Never mind that, actually, a lot more men are guilty of not listening and not doing their household chores than are guilty of even ordinary adultery. They are male. Therefore there is a 99% chance that somewhere there is a woman they've mistreated in one way or another. They should get out of politics and go home and clean the bathroom floor.
Marsha Blackburn, Deb Fischer, and Susan Collins have senatorial experience. Young Oak Kim, who isn't really young but looks as if she might be, has congressional experience. Condoleezza Rice has experience, and class, but probably wouldn't run. Tulsi Gabbard was serious presidential timber, but doesn't have to go back to work by 2028. Kelly Loeffler and Linda McMahon have Cabinet experience. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kay Ivey, and Kim Reynolds have experience as Governors. We should be looking harder at qualified women candidates...who were born before 1970.
Scams
Familiar scam moved from writing sites to social media to Substack...Robert Reich joins Elon Musk and Mel Gibson as people scammers impersonate in pleas for private chat, usually using newer and less secure sites, asking for bank information. He should at least feel flattered. Reich is one D who knows that criticizing and questioning the Federal Reserve has nothing to do with hating Jews, is in fact something some Jews, including Reich, have been willing to do, and this demonstration of simple clearheadedness has won him friends Left and Right. He has enough credibility that creeps are trying to capitalize on it.
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It has come to my attention that scammers are continuing to impersonate me online, preying on people in the comments of my posts here on Substack. Apparently, the fraudsters create fake profiles and suggest that the conversation move to a different messaging platform, such as Signal. And they use generative AI to craft very convincing text messages. Please know I will never ask you to chat back and forth with me in a one-on-one, personal capacity
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Just because we would...I didn't like Bill Clinton and, for that reason, I still feel sympathy and good will for many of his staff. The King of Tacky used staff like toilet paper. Though it worked for them in the long run--the ones still looking for jobs did seem to get good jobs.
