Sunday, November 1, 2026

Web Log for 10.30-31.26

Finally! Oaks and maples are showing color at the Cat Sanctuary on Friday morning. I have a Fluffball to put together...

And a status update: This web site publicly stated that the heir and caretaker of Larry Ricky Calhoun, Professional Bad Neighbor, could earn a place in my will that would make him or his heir(s) the owner(s) of the Cat Sanctuary in the year 2070. Larry Ricky Calhoun has not been noticably better supervised since then, and during the past week I learned that \some younger people had been told that I'd been poisoned and am about to die. 

I don't think so. I'm not feeling good, but I'm still in better health and condition than many people are while they suffer and burden others for fifty years. At least, if I die from any cause whatsoever, it will do no Calhoun any good, nor yet any closer relative of mine who has allowed this confessed murderer to run loose for all these years. Life is uncertain; wills a little less so.

And God will judge the legislators who have failed to recognize poison spraying as a method that can be and has been used to commit serial murders. That recognition needs to be in federal law and in every state's law. Lean hard on your elected officials this year.

Animals 


Lucky cat picture from https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/10/30/when-the-cat-steals-your-chair/ , which is worth visiting for the discussion below, but the picture's too good not to steal. I love a black cat with a glossy "mixed hair" coat. Stopped at the home of one, on Friday's errands, and was sad when the two female cats in the family came out to say "He's inside, with the human, doing quarantine! Go away!"  (And I nonverbally said "Quarantine? Are you serious?" and one of the humans came out and confirmed it. Get well soon, people.) Anyway, comment on this cat behavior: When Serena sits down where she knows I'm going to sit, I've tested and confirmed this theory, she wants me to pick her up, sit down, and hold her on my lap. It's a dominance display for other cats' benefit, but not a challenge to the human.

Another tidbit of Serena's behavior that may or may not be relevant to anyone else's relationship with a cat: Most cats love having their heads petted, especially around their ears. Serena may let me do that when we're alone, but she does the "I may have to bite you" display, showing her teeth and bumping the edge of her open mouth against my hand, if I do it out in the yard where the other cats can see. Why? I've tested and confirmed this, too: because grooming their heads is the way she reminds the other cats that she's the Queen Cat, the Mother or Foster Mother of all other cats here. I'm her human godmother but she doesn't want to get into that in front of the other cats.

Butterflies, some rare:


Crime 

How the insurance industry promotes crime--your loss, their profit. Why we need a Castle Doctrine and a crackdown on the insurance racket.


And, as a direct result of this pro-corporate-greed attitude...


Exercise 

When you don't need to lose weight, exercise just feels good...


Found at the Marmelade Gypsy's Blogspot, Photos there are usually original, and high quality.The Halloween post celebrated skeleton displays in Harbor Springs, Michigan, where storekeepers apparently adopted the Mexican idea of letting skeletons represent departed friends of whom people want to call back memories/ghosts. 

Life 


Found at https://ogdaa.blogspot.com/2026/10/friday-nights-memes.html . Lens says it's circulated too long to be traced further.

Men on SSRIs 

Ernesto Rascon of Prescott (Arizona) blamed a dentist in Nogales (Mexico) for not fixing his loose tooth. The dentist was busy and couldn't give him an immediate appointment. Rascon killed the dentist, then was killed in a shootout with the Nogales police. And while the Daily Mail has photos and even video, they don't supply the answer to the question we're all asking: Which drugs were in Rascon's bloodstream? Considering the number of popular prescription meds Lindsay Clancy had reportedly taken, the probability of overlap seems high. 


Music 

The Mothra Song. (Are we madly eclectic, or are we MADLY eclectic?! This song used to be posted by a good old conservative blogger, and is now posted from time to time at some forums in memory of him. Some people did share Halloween songs; not many.)


Hugh Laurie.


Nick Fradiani.


Honey Piazza. 


Nelson Riddle.


Eric Bogle. ("Age-restricted" because the veteran of World War I observes "Never knew there was worse things than dyin'." A lot of them felt that way, young readers. A lot of them did die; a lot more lived with painful disabilities for the rest of their lives. I suppose the Socialists don't want young readers to be able to imagine what they have in mind for the young. Oh, it'll be different for youall, young readers. In the 1910s war was strictly a man's thing. What they have in mind now will give women equal opportunities to be maimed or killed. War is not something we want to do just because Europeans still think it's a way to solve problems they created for themselves by electing testosterone-poisoned "leaders.")


Parov Stelar.


George Frideric Handel.


Roberto Cacciapaglia.





Bill Monroe. (When I was growing up, in "Carter Country," we thought this was a different genre of music from ours--but we listened to it. Different is good. It's just that Northerners seem to recognize differences only between rockabilly and bluegrass, whereas I hear distinct differences between rockabilly, bluegrass, and Real Country music.)


Guillaume Poncelet.


Mashup: Weezer, Queen, Joan Jett.


Tom Petty.


Bon Jovi.


John Coltrane.


Bella Lam. (All very well but this is not, to my ears, country music. Not even rockabilly. This is rock.)




Cream.


Disney.



Ella Langley.


CGI. (Religious content, not mine, valid expression under the First Amendment.)


Aukai. 



Lulu. (I don't really like the idea of teacher-student romance, but as I recall, in the book/movie from which the song cam the romance heated up when the student finished the course so I'll allow this one.)


Buffalo Springfield.


Box Tops.


Crosby, Stills, Nash, and/or Young.



Bobbie Gentry.


https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5KlFk1EqXE (Warning: link opens a playlist.)

Yeah Man.



Turtles. ("Where were you in 1967?" asked the blogger who posted a batch of 1967 song suggestions. One thing I remember doing in 1967 was wondering why so many pop songs sounded so wrong to any reasonable child. I sang a lot of love songs to my animal friends, but let's face it, although feelings of happiness about a bond with a pet chicken do last all through life, where does that exclusiveness come in? Well, it's supposed to be about Teen Romance, of course. Well, that obsession with Teen Romance does exclude everyone in the audience who happens not to be a teenager. We need more songs that children and adults can sing, too. Though this experience did teach me that singers are supposed to be able to sing for and about other people besides ourselves, that songs are supposed to give us some sense of empathy.)


Strawberry Alarm Clock. (Probably also kids in 1967.)


Aretha Franklin. 


Smetana.


Doors.


Elijah Bossenbroek.


Pinetop Perkins, age 91. Now there's a senior who's still got game.


Simon & Garfunkel.


Fleetwood Mac.


Emancipator.


Atrox. (Warning: punk! A whole punk performance if you let it run on. Oh the crazy teenage energy, I wonder if any of these chaps can still stand to listen to the whole thing now.)


Searchers.


Lionel Richie.


Marty Robbins.


Gilbert & Sullivan.


Johnny Cash.


Incredible String Band.


Warren Zevon.



"Night on Bald Mountain."


Ray Parker.


Ludovico Einaudi.


Al Stewart.


Obituary 

Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard on Star Trek. I like that he rescued pit bulls; I'm not a terrier person but I respect terrier people.


Poems 

Baby-boomers must read this. Yes, we were once as young and clueless as today's young. Yes, many of us even believed in Socialism, though back then the Soviet Union still seemed to be a serious competitor for the title of World's Best Large Economy so we did have more of an excuse. And if we did have a solid sense of who was male and who was female, we had some very confused ideas about how to relate to each other...and so on.


Denise Aileen Devries worked with two prompts and came up with a good thought:

Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Book Review: For Women Only

Book Title: For Women Only

Author: Shaunti Feldhahn

Author's web site: http://www.shaunti.com/

Date: 2004

Publisher: Multnomah

ISBN: 1-59052-317-2

Length: 180 pages of text

Quote: "Hundreds of personal and written interviews with men--including a professional survey--form the core of this book." 

Shaunti Feldhahn wanted to write a novel with a male protagonist. So she asked men for guidance about how he would think and feel in certain situations. Men she knew started sharing things with her. She did a formal survey of a few hundred men she didn't know, and found the same general tendencies. A lot of young Christian husbands wished their wives "knew certain things about men." She summarizes what she learned as "seven revelations."

Some readers have commented that presenting the "seven revelations" in a non-judgmental way makes the book read like some of the antifeminist books of bygone centuries, where the woman had to do all the giving in and never talk back. I don't read it that way. I think there's a clear intention to open a dialogue, paving the way for For Men Only. As Rebecca Johnson says, if a wife reads For Women Only while her husband reads For Men Only, they are in for a lovely time.

What were the "seven revelations"?

1. The husbands wanted respect. Some of them didn't realize that there were things they could be doing to earn more respect. Some really did seem to have self-esteem problems; without necessarily confirming that someone had lost respect for them, they'd act like jerks because they'd rather feel that everyone was against them than that they'd lost someone's respect.

Not asking for directions was a matter of self-respect for some of these men. Never mind whether a problem could have been solved in one-tenth as much time; they wanted to feel that they'd solved it all by themselves.

2. They were insecure. The greater their need to "be in control," the more intensely they tended to feel that the situation was out of control.

3. They recognized that the biological function of a male human, most of the time, is "providing." Even if their wives were earning enough money to support a family in reasonable comfort, they wanted to feel that the family depended on their jobs. (Foolish, you say? Consider the alternative.)

4. They wanted sex. Most wanted either more encounters or more enthusiasm than they were currently getting.

5. They were obsessively visual. Although they didn't report that "thinking in pictures" impeded thought and communication for them in anything like the way it did for Temple Grandin, most of these men wanted their wives to understand that they did "think in pictures." They'd see an attractive woman for a few seconds, down the aisle in a store, on TV during a commercial, and the "picture" of her body would float back through their minds for days. Feldhahn's own husband expressed surprise that, when women say a man is attractive, we may or may not mean we feel any physical attraction to him, and most of us don't keep trying to visualize him naked.

6. They wanted more, not less, romance in their lives. However, they had different ideas of what was "romantic" than some of their wives did. If they admitted to thinking that the main reason for a candlelight dinner would be to conceal that the food didn't look quite right, they still wanted the "romance" of doing fun things together...hiking, biking, skiing, swimming, sailing, camping, and if their wives went about it in the right way even remodelling the house together.

7. They cared more about appearances than they were entirely happy to admit. "Women need to realize that their doubling in size is like a man going from being a corporate raider to a minimum-wage slacker," one of these guys told Feldhahn. "She is not taking care of herself, so she feels bad about her looks, she has little energy, and we are limiting our opportunities" to go out and have fun, another husband complained.

Some of us may have noticed these things long before 2004. For others of us they may not have been relevant: some men don't think in pictures; I was blessed with a hand-and-ear thinker. Then again...he died, and the "seven revelations" have contributed to the fact that I've been using the phrase "Significant Other" to refer to the same privacy fanatic for all these years.

For many Christian wives, these "seven revelations" may be invaluable. Feldhahn is not the only one out there who notices the "Wide Loads" waddling around many churches on Sunday mornings. "Wide Loads" of both sexes say, "Our emphasis should be on spiritual love, not physical attractiveness." Maybe so, but unattractiveness is not the worst consequence of obesity. Male "Wide Loads" become grumpy; females become depressed; their social and family lives become boring, and they may die "old" at or even before age forty. They do not present the healing message of Christianity.

Some Christian wives might reasonably say, "Didn't Feldhahn even try to explain to these men what happens to a woman who has had too many babies, too close together?" If she did, she doesn't mention it in this book. (When an earlier version of this review appeared on Yahoo, someone commented that at a book discussion Feldhahn had indicated that some of the husbands appreciated effort.)

She also doesn't mention the way some men's willingness to desert an obese wife can become its own revenge. I knew an alleged Baptist who walked out on his wife because the fourth baby had produced more weight gain, impaired thyroid function, and depression than the first three had. He'd been secretly exchanging e-mails with a woman who had posted pictures showing that she had a good figure...some years before he actually met her, anyway. When he found an opportunity to meet her she seemed more functional than his wife, so he left his wife for her. Hah. About a year after the divorce, the wife had recovered and looked pretty again, and the homewrecker had become one of those sloppy, heavy, middle-aged women who can be mistaken for sloppy, heavy, middle-aged men. Idiot Boy went to custody court to attack his wife's character, took a look at her, and has been repenting of his folly ever since.

Feldhahn doesn't actually say "The family that works out together, stays together," but when she quotes all these young men pleading for more romantic physical activity and complaining about how hard it is to be faithful to a fat, depressed wife, she comes close to it. Her take on this idea is positive. What wife or husband doesn't want more time to unwind from work, more time to supervise the kids while attending to each other, more cheap mini-vacation time, a good-looking partner, and a cheerful and healthy family? Getting out and moving around together can be the key to all of these things.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Saturday, October 31, 2026

Sunday Senryu

It's not yet Sunday here, but Rallentanda's Sunday Senryu are live, so...



man shall not live by
pumpkins alone, but my great-
grandpa almost did

(The first winter in Indiana, in the early1860s, Mother's grandparents had to eat what they'd raised--everyone did--and for them, that year, that was mostly pumpkins. Great-Grandpa and his siblings did not turn into pumpkins, as they feared they might do. They lived long healthy lives.)


Willie the Conker
politely ignored me; I
was Tabby's human

(A housemate had a big orange tabby tomcat like this one. He showed affection only to her. He was well pleased that a smaller cat whom another housemate wanted to adopt cuddled up beside her or beside me.)


the flower vendor
sweats on the corner, but he
picked that off MY bush
Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels:

Friday, October 30, 2026

Web Log for 10.29.26

Friday morning status update: FINALLY! Oaks and maples are showing full color at the Cat Sanctuary this morning! Color should be appearing in towns this weekend! Leaf peepers, THIS is your weekend!

Music, one poetry link, and one rant.

Music 

Haevn. (Indeterminate religious content.  The band name seems to be an acronym, not merely a typo.)


MC Hammer.


Indila.


Billy Ocean. (Such a totally 1980s song...expressing an attitude to "love" that was a great help to women practicing celibacy. I remember hearing the first few lines as background music for a boxing scene and thinking how appropriate they were for boxing--and what an utter turn-off for "love.")


Talk Talk. 


Beatles, together and separately.


Brian Adams.


Kinks. (Another great celibacy booster. If he--or she!--is "tired of waiting" for marriage, that's not a reason to go further in the direction of premarital parenthood. It is a reason to move back to "If he (or she) wants a date with me, he (or she) will be delighted by a handshake and a friendly word under the porch light. No more kisses until person works out whether person wants me or wants what person can find in a sleazy bar." Proud Prudes not only get more and more interesting dates...we marry well.)


Bread.


Marmalade.


Simple Minds.


Sanctus Real. (Christian content, and the link opens a full-album playlist.)


Poem

How I wish I'd written this and could post it on my Substack!


Technology 

It's official: Trump's ordered everyone in Washington to replace "AI" with "SI." He thinks that means "Super Intelligence." Actually I like "SI," as understood to mean "Stolen Intelligence," which is what the plagiarism-bots produce. A Craiyon image that cobbles together bits of existing images to produce something new, strange, and uncopyrighted can be amusing, as can the Mad-Lib-type song parodies this web site has used to write pop songs for robots ("You make me feel so updated, so incredibly updated, right now")--but when people use plagiarism-bots to produce remixes of other people's art and writing that they then pass off as their own work, that's stolen intelligence. 

It also tends to be rather dull intelligence, which is why the expansion of plagiarism-ware beyond art into the applied sciences ought to call out more caution than it seems to be doing. Self-driving cars do well enough at mixing their owners' decisions about where to go, stand in line, and pick up the goods ordered, with the Department of Motor Vehicles' decisions about general safe driving practices...until they come to a situation that's not covered by either of those sets of preset rules. In such situations self-driving cars do not make wise decisions. Sometimes they just explode. You do not want a robot running your pacemaker  or IV drip. You do not want a robot making actual decisions about how to vacuum-clean the floor or take out the trash.

But I think we can use Trump's use of his authority over Microsoft, both as President and as a major stock holder, as a measurement of Trump's intelligence.

If Trump still has the business genius that made him famous, he'll lose no opportunity to bring Microsoft up to standards for customer service. No more "leave a few bugs in to motivate people to buy new computers." Bill Gates got away with that when and for so long  as personal computers were strictly toys for rich kids. Now that they're the tools of people's trades and, too often, the primary or sole source of business records, all further development of computers needs to focus on keeping them "bug"-free. And efficient. Zero wait time. And reparable. One computer per person per lifetime. And, as computers become worth the cost of keeping, governed by the US Constitution's standards of individual rights and liberties, including privacy, such that any attempt to peek at anything stored on that essential private physical storage drive or private, physically wired printed, before it's published on a public web site, without a warrant from a judge or magistrate authorizing a search for evidence of a specific criminal activity, carries a substantial legal penalty. No need even to consider following China in the direction of self-destruction; an Internet that lets itself be used a a tool of oppression is an Internet that serves nobody's interests in the long term. Use the Internet as a means to spread democracy, and let China demonstrate the consequences of using their Internet without due respect for others if China insists, the way China demonstrated the consequenes of Mao's tyranny. Rapid movement of Microsoft in those directions would indicate that Trump's still got game.

Regretfully, I think Trump's game is over. Some people are as brilliant at ninety as they were at forty; some are not. Genetic factors are involved. Without blame, with due respect, in the case of his wife and children even with love, Trump may need to be supervised as closely as Ronald Reagan, Woodrow Wilson, or Joe Biden needed to be. He is still a popular speaker, with (I hate to say this but it's true) a level of talent comparable with Reagan's. Let him use the gift God has given him like a good Christian. He can still do some good as President even if he is no longer the business genius his original backers expected him to be. Only let him be watched, by people who will have the good judgment to guide the Internet in a sustainable and humanitarian direction...with or without Microsoft.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Another thing that's too real and frightening to fit in with the cute little dragons our kids paint on their cute little faces. And yes, it absolutely should be politicized: Though Rs are the party that allow involuntarily celibate young men to spew hate and bitterness without being censored, Rs are also the party whose policies have actually reduced the incidence of violent street crime. Against men as well as women.

Book Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Original Title: Man Som Hatar Kvinnor

Author: Stieg Larsson

Author memorial web site: http://www.stieglarsson.com/

Translator: Reg Keeland

Publisher: Vintage (English), Norstedts (Swedish)

Date: 2005 (Norstedts), 2008 (Vintage)

Length: 644 pages

ISBN: 0307949486

Quote: "Ninety-two percent of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police."

Stieg Larsson was a journalist whose primary field of research, during his active career, was neo-Nazi organizations. Shortly before he died, however, he wrote three long blockbuster novels about an odd couple of detectives, the successful yuppie Blomkvist and the punker genius Salander, on the trail of a murderer whose Nazi father taught him to hate and kill women. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is volume one. The theme of these novels is hatecrimes against women; section headings provide statistics on hatecrimes against women in Sweden.

What's to say about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? It's been a worldwide bestseller. Other translations available on Amazon have titles that literally translate Larsson's original title ("some men who hated women"). And its popularity says something very nasty about the state of our world....this is one ugly, hateful, gross-out-packed novel.

That Glamour described it as a "sexy, addictive thriller" disturbs me. All the characters do seem to have a lot of sex. Most of the consensual sex involves Blomkvist, who has the unexplained peculiarity of apparently inspiring women of many different ages and backgrounds with identical urges to tear off his shirt. Most of the sex is non-consensual and sadistic. The most detailed sex scene involves Salander, who has been misdiagnosed as autistic and assigned to the care of an evil-minded male guardian. Arguably she's justified in finding at least half a dozen different ways to violate this lousy creep's body, in one day, but did we really need for the narration of this scene to occupy ten pages?

Yes, of course she has the excuse of abuse (four more pages in this volume, and the guarantee, given the behavior that's caused her to be misdiagnosed as autistic, of revelations of more heinous abuse further back in her past). There again, it's possible for novelists to mention that a thing happened without lingering on every detail.

And yes, studies have shown that, although simply reading or watching pornography does not inevitably create an emotional addiction that eventually craves sadistic violence, reading or watching sadistic pornography does tend to feed an addiction that eventually craves more realistic, sometimes real-life, sadistic violence.

So in a way this trilogy is addictive...to people with very sick minds. And it seems to me that there has to have been a way of drawing attention to the problem without feeding it quite so, well, gluttonously. If Larsson was trying to appeal to people who enjoy detailed sex scenes, couldn't he at least have tried to think of different things for all those women to do after taking off Blomkvist's shirt?

When this review first went live (by reader request I might add), I added links to some sites that offered more updated, less inflammatory, information about the incidence of violent crime. Six links from the original list still worked at the time of rescheduling. Not all have been updated.

United States: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr

Sweden: http://www.scb.se/Pages/List____139369.aspx (Swedish language)

Scotland: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Crime-Justice

Canada: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/85-002-x/85-002-x2007005-eng.pdf 

Australia: http://www.abs.gov.au/

India: http://indiafacts.in/statistics/crime-statistics-in-india/

I don't agree that this book is the way Ingmar Bergman would have done Silence of the Lambs. I think both Bergman and Silence of the Lambs were more tasteful--though if we're considering strictly the fascination with violent gross-outs, the comparison is reasonable.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Bad Poetry: The Life and Love of a Cellar Spider

This little exercise is an example of a verse form called the A L'Arora, or alarora, one of several new forms invented by writing teacher Laura Lamarca and called things that sound like some part of her name. This one was invented to help students cross the gap between Free Verse and actual verse forms. That "conversational" irregular rhythm that Free Verse writers love is welcome. An A L'Arora consists of eight-line stanzas, at least four of them. (Careful! This easy form lends itself to long rambling poems.) Only the sixth and eighth lines regularly rhyme. The rhyme scheme can thus be notated by word-nerds as abcdefgf. 

I wanted to post this on Substack, then thought that I don't know whether any Substack readers are spider-phobic. Readers of this site should be accustomed to all kinds of spiders and bugs and gross-outs by now. You read about large caterpillars that sting; you read about large caterpillars that stink. You can stand to look at a cute little spider that does neither.


Cellar spiders are harmless. Their favorite thing is those fungus gnats that like to zoom, as if on dares, into other animals' eyes, ears, mouths, and noses. If you see cellar spiders in the house you probably need them in the house. However this photo was supplied to Google by Xceptional Wildlife Removal. If you can't enjoy having cellar spiders in the house, at least treat them as wildlife to be carefully removed. (They'll usually stay outside if they're put outside--unlike wasps, who tend and defend their nests.)

This wet summer bred masses of fungus gnats. The wasps tried, but couldn't possibly eat enough to keep the gnats from making themselves a nuisance. We needed all the help we could get.

So here is a celebration of the office-mates I've enjoyed watching since August. They've been no trouble at all; in fact they've been quite entertaining. 

In summer the computer screen
attracts tiny gnats and moths and flies
by dozens, parading up and down
and back, forth, sidewise, in circles,
each promenade a scent tour
of another invisible tiny trail,
a titillating gossip through
the last hour's P-mail.

A spider weaves a horizontal web
between the screen and a book
left on the desk for reference.
When the computer is in use
she hovers, fascinated by
insect-like movements between
the air beyond and plastic
layers of the screen.

She doesn't catch much here
although I'm on her side,
thinking the prancing nuisances
are better recycled into spider.
One does buzz into her web
but, instead of tangling
in what must now be dusty strands,
flies off, leaves damage dangling.

Yet somehow spider gets enough
to keep her watching the action,
the endless movement of pixels.
She'd like to pounce on a pixel,
as if she could eat those words,
crunch numbers for snacks,
feast on a Poem-a-Day,
stuffing herself to the max.

It takes her about a week to learn
that pixels can't be seized,
because her web's to the far right side
where brightest light attracts most gnats;
pixels left and center tease.
She still wtches each letter
with avid eyes, but stirs only
when real gnats' flight promises better.

In another week her mate
weaves a horizontal web below.
Neither has much hunting luck
where the pixels come and go.
How many calories does it take
to fuel a spider? Few.
He takes his week to see for himself:
pixels are only good to view.

The pair of food porn addicts
survive, but can they mate?
Probably that neds more protein
than the screen yields.
Early in the second week
the male moves on.
"He is gone, let him go, God blast him,"
the spider tells herself. "I'm glad he's gone."

When the nights grow chillier
gnats die out, as always.
Today, for the first time in
more than fifty days,
the webs hang empty.
I'd like to tidy dusty webs away,
but don't. The spiders may return
the next warm day.

I'd like to think the female
caught up with the male
before some mouse or bird did.
Outdoors, they found prey,
maybe the place where all the gnats go.
Maybe, protein-fed, she ovulated,
he produced sperm cells,
and Patient and Impatient mated.

Nature is not a publisher.
Nature does not demand
that every couple's story end
with happily-ever-after.
Actually most don't.
No red ribbon bow
is wrapped around each spider's tale.
I'll never know.

But from the ceiling, as I type,
descends a cellar spiderling,
gnat-size, but moving slowly
on a straight line of silk,
rappelling to the laptop's edge,
efficient, cellar-bound.
I wish it a good winter,
safe on the ground.
Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels:

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Web Log for 10.28.26

Beautiful weather continues, but I have to say this. My neighborhood contains a Professional Bad Neighbor. The growing season is over, but he's still riding around in his "smart truck" that notifies my computer when it's near, poisoning the air and land. If you are a local person who wants to live in this neighborhood, you need to know that fifty years of progress toward a clean, wholesome environment--still not achieved, as is shown by the lack of rock lettuce at the springs--have been reversed by one fool's intention to exploit corrupt laws to get away with murder. Literal murder. He'll not get away with it if he does succeed in committing it, and he must know that much, so he's only venting spite at this point, but he is doing damage. The land is not fit to pick morels or ginseng on, it won't yield crops, and it won't feed healthy animals, for another ten years or more. It's not worth a dime an acre--if that--for farming or homesteading purposes. And it will be worth too much, for those purposes, to be turned into parking lots or golf courses. Its only value for the next ten or twenty years will be as the home of those who love it and will work to restore its rightful value for organic farming. It will one day yield morels and ginseng and rock lettuce, probably even chinquapins, and I have seen a few actual butternuts not far from the Fabulous Feral Elberta Peach Tree, but for the time being the beautiful neighborhood where I grew up is a toxic waste land. Though if God ever made a prettier place, or one with more inherent value, God has yet to reveal that place to me.

And my cats all have acute obstructive pulmonary disorder, which is one reason why Silver is running around in the woods, courting neighbors' tomcats and trouble, and annoying a renter who frets about cats squatting in the yard where her children play. (That girl does not belong in this neighborhood; let us all help her find a place in town where she can be less miserable.) Silver has a right to look for another best buddy, even if she can't have kittens; she's always enjoyed the company of a male cat friend, neutered or not, and as that's about all she seems to ask for and she's certainly earned it, I say she has a right to it. Whether she brings him here, like Sommersburr, or moves in with him, like Trumpkin, or just encourages him to visit every few days, like Wild Thyme, is her prerogative. But it's absolutely reasonable of her to want to avoid the more toxic side of the hill, until rain washes some of the poison out of the air.

The wind blew a strong dose of "New Roundup" right across the screen porch around sundown. (I'm typing this on Friday morning, before posting.) I closed all the windows, lighted a candle to burn off the glyphosate vapors, took some charcoal, drank a bottle of water, and still felt my midsection puffing up, internal muscles locking down, voluntary muscles becoming so weak that I could hardly drag myself down the road leaning on a stick yesterday evening. So I stayed in town overnight. During the night I felt my waistline resurfacing, stiffness and soreness subsiding; this morning I walked in at my usual brisk healthy pace, having no use for the stick and wishing I'd been able to leave it at home. Glyphosate does wash out of the body quickly--though some other chemicals in "New Roundup" don't. But its effects really sink into some bodies and I sincerely hope that, for his sins, the Bad Neighbor finds himself spilling enough of his poison right into his face to keep him paralyzed for ninety-nine days. (I don't believe thirty-nine days is still the world's record but it is the longest-lasting glyphosate reaction that even Bayer-Monsanto have, so far, acknowledged. That record was set by a mere dumb laborer who probably didn't deserve it. The Bad Neighbor deserves to set an all-time record.)

Anyway, for visitors, leaf peeping is getting good, with chilly if not frosty nights and warm sunny afternoons, and the coming weekend is probably the optimal time this year to drive through the Point of Virginia. 

Books 

A new Scalzi? How the time does fly. Yes, Monsters of Ohio should reach a bookstore near you this week. If you don't see it, pre-ordering books always encourages writers.


Desperation 

I'm so glad that sponsors are keeping this from being me!


Found on the Mirror. The joke predates the Internet. 

Music 

The Beatles, together or separately. 


Porno for Pyros. (No, the song's not incendiary. Not even very hard rock.)


Velorith.


English Beats.


Tom Petty, with the Traveling Wilburys, Mudcrutch, Heartbreakers, or whomever else. 



Unknown group, video posted from China? But the song is in English.


Eric Clapton, with friends.



Buffy Sainte-Marie. 


Crosby, Stills, Nash, and/or Young.


Gims. 


Random background music for a pretty video.


John Coltrane.


Johannes Bornlof.


Roberto Cacciapaglia.


Florian Christl.


Politics 

Especially salient main entry on the Mirror:


Travel 

Marmelade Gypsy's human went to Stratford, Ontario, and among other things met a Great Blue Heron just like hers, back home:


Verbal Abuse Games 

Whew. Bradshannon walked right into this one.


The exchange should still be on X.

World Events 


This one was actually found at lifeafter50forwomen.com. Lens says it came from something called Appalachian Podcasts on F******k.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Book Review: Dachau Review (Volumes 1 and 2)

Apologies to those who think a dictatorship, pushed to cut population along the lines of hate it had been using for other purposes, is too real for Halloween. This Halloween, I think it's real enough that it should distract us from the cute little ghost and witch costumes. Not only do we have a party that overtly wants Socialism; that party has formed an alliance with a group who hate Jews. If ghosts can haunt, a lot of grandfathers are coming out after their grandchildren this Halloween.

Title: Dachau Review

Editor: Wolfgang Benz

Publisher: Comite Internal de Dachau, Brussels

Date: 1988

Length: 240 pages (v. 1), 206 pages (v. 2)

ISBN: 0854962697

Quote: "The Dachau Review is the first volume of a new periodical which contains in unabridged form in English the most important contributions of the previous three issues of the Dachauer Hefte."

These two cheaply produced, poorly bound paperbacks aren't fun to read. They weren't meant to be. They're a serious, scholarly collection of survivors' accounts and historians' studies of the German prison camps during the 1930s and early 1940s. Their purpose is to document the atrocities that really happened, and dispel the myths.

Although there's no reasonable doubt that the prison camps were the scenes of atrocities, one thing these reports confirm is the huge amount of concealment and deception that went on, the impossibility of knowing for sure whether some stories were true or false. Prisoners lied, for obvious reasons. Prison managers also lied, for reasons that may be less obvious. Bribery often worked, and the value of a bribe was completely unpredictable: a gold tooth might buy a prisoner a cup of dirty water, or a plausible English passport. Threats were used as discipline. Rumors abounded.

So, were prisoners' bodies used to manufacture household goods? After reviewing the evidence Benz, Barbara Distel, and others can't really say that that never happened; all they can say is that no such goods were found.

Were masses of prisoners gassed in shower rooms? In some other places--first in nursing homes for elderly and disabled "Aryans"--that happened. "In Dachau no gas chambers were used," our researchers report. In Dachau prisoners could be shot for any breach of discipline, for becoming unable to work, or just to intimidate other prisoners, but rumors about gas chambers seem to have been based solely on the existence of crematoria, which no living prisoner had actually entered. Poison gas cost money; both gas and money were in short supply. Guards and overseers could be vicious--there was no penalty for beating a prisoner to death. Still, starvation and infectious diseases killed far more prisoners than were either euthanized due to illness, executed according to what passed for due process of law, or murdered outright.

Were the majority of those imprisoned, or of those killed in the camps, Jewish? Not at Dachau.

Were individual guards kind enough to help individual prisoners escape? Sometimes, but not often or predictably. One informant describes having to thank for saving his brother's life the same guard he blamed for killing his mother.

In the end, how many people--Jewish or otherwise--did the Nazis kill? No true answer will ever be known. The number is certainly in the millions, but too much lying and destruction of evidence went on for any estimates to be accepted as facts. These books contain some eyewitness accounts of faked deaths that may or may not have allowed prisoners to escape.

Certainly faked deaths did allow several of the presumed dead to survive. In a family I know two teenaged boys, first cousins who had been friends, disappeared at about the same time. During the year each young man mourned the other's death, they were living within a mile of each other in London. Both enjoyed long and successful lives, and were able to recognize each other and share memories when one of those fifty-years-later TV programs featured one of the cousins.

Holocaust deniers have even cited the case of an entire town whose Jewish population, apparently decimated during the Holocaust, surged back almost to prewar levels between 1945 and 1946. And not many houses or businesses had been sold, either during or after the war, either. Apparently there was just a benign conspiracy to accept, for the duration of the war, that a few thousand individuals had never been Jewish--whom did people think they were talking about?--until it was safe for these people to identify themselves as Jewish again.

Unfortunately it wasn't always so easy, and while the species of contrarians known as Holocaust deniers were able to disprove some claims without much difficulty, the Nazi Holocaust was just too big to fake.

Meanwhile, people who view the Holocaust from a different historical perspective have exaggerated the sadism of the Third Reich and overlooked the profit motive. Dachau was built not to torture or kill men, but to profit from their labor as the (alleged) criminals "paid their debt to society." As long as it was profitable to keep prisoners healthy, most were well enough fed and sheltered, even medicated where possible, to keep them alive (as slaves) for years. That's why there were so many survivors. 

But why, now that most of the survivors have written out their memories and died of old age, do we need to go on reading about it? Certainly not for pleasure; and I for one don't think there's any comfort to be gained from comparing our own immediate misery with someone else's theoretically greater misery. If you're feeling sad because you didn't win the competition or the person you've had a crush on has asked someone else for a date, reading about how the victorious U.S. troops found one group of seventeen almost-survivors who were too sick and starved to digest food when they were fed may help you put your angst into perspective, but it's unlikely to make you feel good. (If it does, I don't want to know you.)

I don't get any particular jollies from thinking about "the triumph of the human spirit" in the survivors, either. My brother, adoptive sister, and I inherited the non-depressive gene along with the brown eyes and crooked teeth genes. My natural sister got the alternative genes. That humans can agree that some genetic traits are more pleasant to be around than others doesn't say anything particularly uplifting about the human spirit, to me.

Some survivors learned moral lessons in the prison camps, although that's not what you'll find in the Dachau Review. In one of Bob Schuller's books, reviewed here last week, a survivor shared the edifying story of how his camp usually offered two kinds of food to prisoners: bread, and soup. The bread was cold, coarse, and unflavored, and tasted vile, but did contain some fibre and nutrients from whole grains. The soup absorbed some flavor, but was usually just a cup of hot water with very little nutrient value. Some prisoners would trade their bread for other prisoners' soup rations...and at the end of the war, all the survivors turned out to be bread eaters; the soup sippers starved. Preachers have already publicized that kind of stories. The Dachau Review didn't need them, or use them.

So, what made this well-fed, non-Jewish American pay hard-earned cash for these books? Supporting the library that allows me to maintain this web site was one reason, but why choose the Dachau Review over the "westerns" and romances that had also been donated to the library's benefit sale? Obviously, I thought these books deserved resale; I do think this piece of history has some relevance to our time.

It's best stated, though oddly reversed, by Ralph Giordano in volume two: "I warn you young people of today: don't let anyone tell you that this undemocratically and un-humanly motivated anti-communism ever was, is or will be anything other than the belligerent brother of its own professed diametrical opponent."

Germany, a smaller country already impoverished by losing another idiot dictator's useless war, collapsed faster under National Socialism than Russia did under Soviet Socialism. In both countries, and in most other countries that have experimented with socialism, the socialist government collapsed and the result was chaos, wars, plagues, and mass deaths. A few countries that flirted with socialism, like Britain and China, have survived by learning from examples and giving up unsustainable socialist schemes. Either of those things could happen here.

German Jews, Lutherans, and "Communist" atheists had not exactly liked each other, but had coexisted peacefully, in times of prosperity. Religion became a cause of hate and war when the people felt poverty-stricken and desperate. Hitler whipped up hate of both minorities in order to unite the majority for his own self-aggrandizing purposes, while telling people he trusted how much he preferred the war and death cults of Pagan Germany to the Protestant churches he had to exploit. (What has survived of Germanic Pagan mythology was complex; there were "gods" and cults of love and peace, as well as war and death; Hitler had no use for the nice ones.) These United States have prospered as a nominally Christian, in practice predominantly Humanist, nation where all religions are tolerated...until what are still a minority of Americans have started to feel poverty-stricken, and although I doubt that most of these people know anything about poverty, immediately mistrust of all religions but one's own (including the pseudo-religion of atheism) sets in. Religious hate could happen here. Even the explosion of religious hate into mass violent insanity could happen here.

Hitler really owed his success, though, less to hate than to his Biggest Lie of All--the seductive lie that Germans could recover prosperity, rather than sinking into real plague-and-famine poverty, by giving their leaders total power over every aspect of life. The United Nations, once the trusted mediator between Europeans like Stalin and Hitler, has succumbed to this fantasy with its "Agenda 21" bid for total control over every aspect of life in every member nation. To the extent that the ostensibly civilized nations of the world cooperate with Agenda 21 or any of its successor schemes, the totalitarian government and the poverty it produces could very easily happen here...in the U.S., in the U.K., in any part of Europe or of any other continent, or, if the lunatics in the U.N. get their way, in all of them.

Probably everyone has, and should have, our own way of saying "Never Again." For me, as an American Christian, "Never Again" tends to blur into an older slogan: "Love all (never buy into collective hate as any kind of solution to anything), trust few (never entrust anyone with more power than is necessary to prevent violent crime), and always paddle your own canoe (make your own decisions based on what you observe where you are, which really is something about which you would know more than anyone else could)."

The Dachau Review is a good clear explanation of the alternative.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

What to Name Your Raccoons (Celebrity Photo Edition)

Years ago, I wrote an Associated Content Top Ten List of raccoon names for someone who had run through Rocky, Rikki, Ringtail, Bandit, and was starting on color names. Let's face it: raccoons, unlike cats and dogs, don't show enough color variation to make color names really fit. I proposed naming raccoons after famous people known for looking good in sunglasses.

It occurs to me, now that JPGs are easier to find and browsers can handle lots of them, that that list really needed some fair-use photos. If your friends do not immediately grasp the reference, you can show them the picture of the celebrity in whose honor you named the raccoon. All photos from Google.


It is not thinking "Will you be my mother, snuggle me on your lap, and give me a cute name?" It is thinking "This is my property. All edible, shreddable, breakable, clawable, or sleepworthy things belong to me." It probably won't answer to its name but you might as well pick one that's good for a smile.


Jennifer Garbagecaniston 


Eraccoon Badu


Joan Diditagain


Amelia Earocorn (she always pushed them up on her head for photo-ops, but she wore them!)


Greta Garbagecans


Coonella Harris (Yes! Kamala Harris finally found some decent-looking jeans that fit! Cheers!)


Mapachita Nyongo


Rackie Onassis


Hillary Rodham Ringtail


Melania Rump (sorry, couldn't help it; she loves and wears her sunglasses so well, she's been known to wear them at night!)

And for the males, we have:


Harry Belacoontail


Chow Lean-Fat-Whatever-I-Want-It-All


George Hairyson


Raccoon James


Offmylawn Musk


Rick Naughty 


Rack Obama


Raccoon Petty


Bruce Springstraps
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)