I spent most of Sunday in town--no complaints, good traditional gospel songs including the Primitive Quartet were involved--so might as well make this another two-day log.
Animals
Freshwater birds.
History
What do or did the Hopi people know about the petrified forest on their traditional land? Who can ever say? All I know is that the petrified forest is real. I was dragged through it as a small child, even given a chip of petrified wood to take to show-and-tell in grade one.
Housing Problem
CBS broadcast, this morning, what someone thought would be a feel-good show about how people in various places that had survived massive losses of personal property were crowding homeless neighbors into "tiny houses" on their property.
Hello? Why are these houses not being put on these people's own property, where their own houses were, before the fire or the flood or whatever it was?
We could do with a law restricting banks' right to own real estate. Individuals are endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Banks are endowed by the people who use them with the right to hold onto their money. Banks have too much power already, without adding to it. I think banks should be required to sell any houses they have acquired to the highest-bidding individual in thirty days after the bank has reclaimed the title. That would restore reality to the real estate market and also keep rich foreigners from buying up too much land, giving them too much influence, in the United States.
I said nothing at all about government owning land. I don't think government should own land, either. I think there's a good reason why the Bible tells us how land in ancient Israel was entailed in families, with the current generation having the right to sell the use of a house or field for a few years at a time, the real estate then reverting to the next generation of the family.
In any case, I call foul on the CBS piece for glamorizing the idea of people packing into tighter space, which promotes diseases, rather than focussing on children having enough space to grow up healthy. We don't need more "tiny houses"...unless they're being put on tracts of land with room for each child to have a garden, with the intention that the "tiny" foundation will expand into a full-sized house. We need to recognize any situation where people don't have the acre of land it takes for a human to survive, in most of these United States, as a situation of toxic overcrowding, barely better than homelesness, in need of being fixed--by, among other things, more young people getting themselves fixed so they don't give birth to big litters of children.
Even when people feel fond of and close to the people with whom they choose to live in crowded environments, they become less fond of other people who are perceived as the source of the germs, pollution, and bad air. Crowded environments generate scenes like this one:
I don't believe the poet is young enough to believe the crowd's callousness was new. Most people at DVerse are old enough to remember Kitty Genovese. I think the poet is trying to rouse a sense of outrage at something that neither poet nor audience can honestly call news.
Music
Pink Floyd.
David Darling.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Shedaisy.
Aurelien Routland.
Jeremy Soule.
Kellie Pickler.
The Band Perry.
Hawkshaw Hawkins.
Etta James.
Vernon Dalhart, with his big hit from just about a hundred years ago.
Little Walter.
Edith Piaf.
Yves Montand.
Claude Debussy.
Lonely Island.
Camille St Saens.
Andrews Sisters. With apologies because the shoeshine "boy" might have been a grown man addressed as "boy" because Black, in the 1940s, though in earlier years polishing shoes, selling newspapers, weeding gardens, and similar were regarded as kids' jobs. Sometimes they were done by children who hadn't done well at school, or by homeless orphans...and sometimes by clever lads who were staying in school, too, though as crowding, automation, and war wounds caused men to compete for "boys' jobs" people preferred to forget about that possibility. Anyway, yes, the Roosevelt Administration officially sent all the shoeshine boys who really were little boys back to school.
R.E.M.
Frances Faye.
Matchbox 20.
Breaking Benjamin.
Christodoulos Halaris recreates an ancient Greek Pagan hymn.
Minutemen.
Names
Y'know, about an hour's walk from the Cat Sanctuary is what we call the Bristol Highway. One of those early "highways" that were really winding two-lane country roads, that are fun (and a bit of a challenge) to drive along. We call it the Bristol Highway because it leads to Bristol. What could be more logical than that?
Except that nobody in Bristol calls it the Bristol Highway. They have put up signs along the road identifying it as the Gate City Highway. From their point of view that's logical, too.
So I can see some logic in some people's desire to call the Gulf of Mexico "the Gulf of America."
When in town, though, I heard someone turn on a radio that was playing Gordon Lightfoot's song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
Hello? Who, at the height of the last heat wave of August, is looking forward to the gales of November? October frost, I thought, or Christmas parties...but November?
Then I remembered...oh right, Trumpistas have decided to call Lake Ontario "Lake America." Sort of a signal of insider status, I suppose. It's not our lake to name. People who live on it call it Lake Ontario, which is a good Algonquian name, much easier to pronounce and spell than many other names that ethnic group have handed down to us.
I used to know some children who were called by different names. At school two girls were, let us say, called Jane and Mary Doe. Older people in the neighborhood, however, called them Jane and Mary Smith. I didn't ask questions. Apparently Mrs. Doe said she was legally married to Mr. Doe but, whether he was divorced or they disapproved of the minister who'd officiated, some neighbors said the wedding was invalid. The girls said their name was Doe so that was what I called them.
Even into the present century, I was told...There was no doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Jones had a valid wedding. Mr. Jones died young, though, and some of Mrs. Jones's family thought it would be proper for her to reclaim her own name--say it was Miller--and bestow it on her children, as if Mr. Jones had never existed. Whereupon, I was told, the twelve-year-old boy threw quite a tantrum, shouting "I won't be called Miller! My name is JONES!" Even if it had been one of those cases where an ancestor had told the heirs to keep some land in the Miller name, and changing his name would have qualified the boy to inherit something (I never heard that it was, but why else...?)--I thought he had a valid point.
Wanting to erase the boy's name and his memories of his father, I thought, was profoundly tacky. So is wanting to erase the history and present inhabitants around Lake Ontario.
Politics
Well...as long as we keep electing aggressive outgoing males...he might as well.
Second Amendment
Newt Gingrich's speech is cogent, historically interesting...and a warning. Too many American youth are no longer accustomed to slogging through all sorts of weather in the name of fun and games. We need to be. The Chinese are.
Women's Issues
Lens says it comes from "The Institute for Health Metrics." Not a big-name organization, but the generalizations fit the world I see so I'll accept the statistics as likely to be reasonably accurate. So why, assuming that these statistics are accurate, are young women supposedly so unhappy? Actually I think a variety of social issues are involved:
1. Television has conditioned people to fear any slacking of the manic pace, pitch, and volume in extrovert-dominated offices. Young women's energy runs in cycles. If people who think they're supposed to be paying attention to other people's moods like being around a young woman this week, they probably won't like being around her next week. There are ways young women can reduce this effect, being super-productive when they have more physical energy and scheduling easier tasks for days when they have more, shall we say, reflective energy, but most entry-level jobs are not designed to give people that much control over their work. (Some minimum wage workers don't even need higher wages; they need more autonomy on their jobs.) Extroverts need to learn that a lot of the hyper energy they generate is completely wasted, that the people who barely acknowledge extroverts' greeting (greeding) behavior and go straight to their cubicles are probably the ones whose productivity is keeping the place afloat.
2. Computers have reduced the number of jobs available for humans. Heavy labor is usually done by machines these days, light industrial work is usually outsourced to other countries, and the fact is that women do office jobs--including executive office jobs--better than men, as groups. Mental illness is primarily a male thing but, unfortunately, too many young women want to be "in love" so much that they make themselves feel bad every time their men vent their chronic, souring-testosterone-based anger.
But mostly: 3. Women let themselves be terrorized by the hatecrimes males commit against us. (Males are more often killed by other violent males, but males don't admit they're worried about this.) Women try to be nice and stay indoors and be safe. As results (a) violent men come into our homes and commit hatecrimes against us, and (b) most of us don't get enough exercise to forestall a kind of chronic disease condition whose first symptom is "depression." (Obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease follow.) If we say we feel depressed, instead of just arming ourselves and walking, a lot of money has gone into making sure that people swarm around us, offering us a selection of "antidepressant medication" that makes some people (male or female) violently insane. And if you want to understand what truly does seem depressing, when women think about it...Most women never use these drugs. Only about one in twenty of the women who do use these drugs even starts to develop "Prozac Dementia." And most of those women at least tell their doctors about their new "buried memories" of impossible abuses before they decide to kill people. And yet the media allow envious males to say, "Some woman somewhere became 'depressed,' took antidepressants, and killed her sons. This teaches us that women's feeble minds can't take the strain of doing productive jobs! Every woman really needs to quit her job and have fifteen babies!"
I'm not saying the media need to censor this kind of garbage. I'm not saying the media need to censor ideas like "Putting sugar in the gas tank is a special treat for your car." I'm saying that the idea that women who are out-competing men for office jobs need to quit their jobs and have babies needs to be met with exactly the same range of facial expressions as the one about sugar in the gas tank being a treat for the car.
