Monday, July 20, 2026

Web Log for 7.19.26

Not much time online today...

Animals 

Those who read Spanish may like this cat and poetry blog.


Hubris, Corporate 

Now it's Google where somebody imagines that failing to post my comments on other people's blogs is going to persuade me to let Google install more cookies on the laptop. Will not happen. I just wanted everyone to know that I visited all the blogs that participated in the Feline Friday link-up, whether or not a comment went through. I'm guessing several bloggers visited the last Petfinder Post and their comments didn't go through either. Cheers. Stick to your guns. No cookies for Google until Google gives up this stupidity.

Music 

I'm not sure...some sort of musical drama.


Tom Petty.


Music with Relationship Advice 

Tim McGraw indulges in typical, emotionally abusive, male gaslighting:


Oh, he's so earnest! So full of that hypothetical soul she thought he had when she married him! So innocent! So tenderly pleading that he can't understand why she has to be angry all the time! Any woman who listens to this song just has to want to give him a sweet little pat with a 2x4 plank...

Boys. You may be fifty years old, a lot of you do this when you are about forty years old, but you are acting from the part of your brain that is four years old. You are acting as little boys. You are playing games to defend your ego from having to learn and change. Nobody should ever let you get away with it for one second. 

If she's "angry all the time," she might just have major PTSD from having survived a hatecrime, but if that were the case you'd probably know it. No. More likely you are annoying her all the time. 

So here is what you do, boys. This is hard, it is painful, it is very frightening, we understand you feel afraid to do it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Sit down and write down the words your wives said when you started telling yourself that they were "angry all the time" and it wasn't about you. It was about you. You may find yourself writing some general, all-purpose terms of verbal abuse that don't refer to any specific thing (other than throwing back some of the hostility you threw at her), but persevere until you come to ten specific things you did or failed to do that she mentioned when she was expressing anger. 

Your assignment is to work on those things. If you get to the end of the first list, start over and see if you can't remember ten more things.

Do not say one word about her. You know nothing about her. What you think you know is blinded by a sewer full of toxic ego-defense nastiness. She is a vast cosmic mystery of awesome perfection to which you can only blink up through your sewage-filled eyes. Focus on you for a change. What you said. Wht you did. What was so wrong with you. 

When you're throwing out generalizations about her being "angry all the time," boy, a lot of things are wrong with you. You have some hard, heavy, scary work to do. While you are doing that work, you must keep yourself from blurting out any of those ugly judgments about her, even the ones that you think sound sweet and loving. She is not angry, or if she is you wouldn't be able to know it. You are annoying. You are a source of anger. Chances are that anyone who loves you less than she does would find you absolutely unbearable. Deal with it. 

Because you have these horrible tendencies toward emotionally abusive behavior,. this judgmentality, this dishonesty, these sick ego defenses, you need to spend some time living with the presupposition that she's right and you're wrong, about everything, all the time. Kill that sick part of yourself, that thing that defends your loathsome behavior, dead. 

You are a thing. Think of yourself as her thing. You exist only to atone for the disgusting things you've done and said. Shut off your ego defenses and practice penance, medieval style. If she once mentioned the bathroom floor, keeping that floor clean enough to eat off is your job. If she complained about waiting on you, be sure that you're always the one waiting on everyone else in your household. If you were supposed to have bought something for the family and you spent your money on yourself, duh, you know all the money in your household belongs to her. If she throws an iron skillet at you and it happens to be full of boiling oil, you deserved it--say "This thing thanks Your Grace for helping this thing to suffer for its misdeeds." Don't try to be funny about this, either. Nothing is ever funny, and you must not allow yourself to smile, until she laughs.

Suffer. Like she's been doing for all these years when you just sat there defending the toxic infection that is your ego, whining that you didn't know why she was angry all the time. Lean into the pain the way you'd lean into a scalpel lancing an infection. Let that horrible, slimy, stinking ego ooze out. Wonder how you were able to keep breathing with such filth inside you. Stand in awe of anyone who could bear to look at you, or touch you, or smell you, while you were walking around with that stuff inside you. Try to get it all washed out with disinfectant. Let the burn clean your sick mind.

Eventually, if you do this sincerely, she'll tell you what you need to do to restore love and good will to your home, and you'll have a viable relationship again. 

Do not expect it to be easy.

Do not expect to be able to keep one tiny scrap of that feeling that you were right and she was wrong. 

Do not expect that you have any right ever to feel like the leader in your home again.

The surprising thing is that, after you have spent a few years living with the reality that you are wrong and you are to blame and if you had a thought in your head you shouldn't have given it any attention, because you exist only to serve and obey, people--including your wife--may start to think you are a decent human being after all. Try not to give too much attention to this. You are not worthy of any kind of leadership position but, if you know how unworthy you are and practice self-abnegation continually, your family may start to want to follow the spiritual light that radiates through you. 

Not that any well-preserved middle-aged woman who has to give this kind of advice to somebody's idiot husband every month or so can ever imagine how your family will ever see any spiritual light in you. They have had an opportunity to see something in you that was lovable. We have not.
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Book Review: Hooked Rugs

Just a few readers have seen this review before. It is being reposted for those who have not seen it.

Title: Hooked Rugs 

Author: Ann Davies and Emma Tennant

Date: 1995

Publisher: Sterling

ISBN: 0-8069-1339-8

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: many full-page color photos and charts

Quote: "The humble rag rug...[was] too lowly to figure in written records...[I]t is very difficult to trace their history."

Fortunately for rugmakers, the purpose of Hooked Rugs is not so much to trace the history of the craft as to provide outstanding examples of what can be done with it.

Davies and Tennant go on to mention that rag rugs have been made this way for hundreds of years, and some designs and terms suggest a link between British and Scandinavian rugmakers, but little has been written about them. Some rugmakers just used up one rag after another in random stripes, or made irregular patches of "crazy quilt" or "broken glass" designs. In more prosperous times, however, rugmakers could buy fabric, not necessarily worn to rags, or yarns in the colors they wanted, and create appealing texture and color patterns like the examples in this book.

By the twentieth century, rugmaking had become a color-by-numbers craft often done by children and disabled patients, who began with kits of pre-dyed, pre-cut yarn. Craft stores still sell dozens of rug kits to fill up time in schools and hospitals. Those who have worked a few precut rug kits and not completely lost interest in using their latch hooks, however, may want to try designing their own original rugs.

Hooked Rugs provides that intermediate step between blindly following a prefabricated kit and designing a completely original rug. The book contains a few dozen designs, charted in varying degrees of detail; it's up to you to copy the designs on canvas, find rags and yarns in appropriate colors, and create your own colorway for your rug (you're not likely to find exactly the same colors shown in the book).

In fact, it may be difficult to find supplies for making a totally awesome rug. British rag rugs were traditionally hooked from small scraps of worn-out clothes and blankets. Even in England, the authors admit that people aren't wearing out wool fabric at a rate that will satisfy rugmakers. The coarse acrylic "rug yarns" sold in the U.S. look like wool from a distance, but don't come in the beautifully subtle colors, nor have that finger-and-toe-soothing quality real wool has. (While acids and dyes used in processing wool can irritate skin, natural wool releases traces of skin-soothing lanolin whenever it's touched.)

Thick, fluffy wools marketed to knitters are delightful to handle, but are likely to be lopi, an unspun or barely-spun roving that pulls apart easily before it's been knitted or crocheted--not much fun to hook. Cotton, hemp, and jute are sturdy enough to hook but will pack down fast if the rug is actually used. You'll probably have to choose the compromise materials that work best for the intended purpose of the rug.

Despite its British origins this book contains an international sampling of rugs, with patterns that celebrate the United States, Canada, various European countries, and a bird the authors dubiously describe as "of indeterminate species" that looks like the winter coat of the Scarlet Tanager, as seen in South America, to me. (Use true black and red, look up exactly where the colors go, and it will be the Scarlet Tanager North Americans know.)

Even if you don't plan to hook a rug, this book is a treat for the eye.
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Butterfly of the Week: The Wenling Graphium

One of those pretty, ethereal white Swallowtail-type butterflies with fine black stripes on their wings was only recently declared to be a new species. Older Swallowtail species names always commemorated characters in literature. Graphium wenlingae was named only in 2019, and commemorates the town of Wenling. 


Photo from Hu, Cotton, et al. 

or

Native to Vietnam, it doesn't seem hard to find, but it's been hard to classify. It was part of the mess of species and subspecies that include Graphium tamerlanus, G. timur,  G. mandarinus and so on. In the few years since it's been accepted as a distinct species, very little has been published about that species. It does not have a Wikipedia page yet, and its INaturalist page shows only one museum specimen. 

Here is a page showing museum specimens, with field marks, variations and so on:



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Sunday, July 19, 2026

Web Log Weekender 7.16-18.26

Because a large part of 7.17.26 was lost to Microsoft's insane delusion that delivering worse and worse service will motivate people to pay more for more of their products. Should we go to Linux or should we go offline altogether? 


Lens can't find the original artist. I found it on the Meow.

Animals 

Cuteness overload in New Orleans with the annual crop of unwanted kittens born because lazy humans didn't want to bother either having their cats sterilized or finding good homes for their kittens. Nag, Nag, Nag. If Serena's kitten hadn't been claimed before I thought there was any chance of her having a viable kitten this year...well, actually, the social cats and kittens get along well in purr-units of six or more adults, there is no cat overpopulation problem in my part of the world, and finding homes for kittens has never been a problem. But if I anticipated any trouble finding places for kittens, kittens would not be happening here. Normal cats normally seem to feel that two cats to a house are plenty. For Messy Mimi's little shelter this looks like a serious overload. 


Books 

Brand-new one from Tom Cox:


Food, from Food Banks, Selling 

Selling food given to you at a food bank is technically illegal. I don't think it should be.


Given that food banks hand out what they have with a wonderful disregard for what people can or should eat, I think governments should reward people who show the initiative to sell their rejects, rather than just throw surplus food out beside the road as so many of our "poor, needy, hungry" people do.

There is no way people who don't have refrigerators are going to be able to eat a big bag of frozen food.

There is no way people who don't have stoves are going to be able to use dry beans or rice.

There is no way anybody is going to eat twenty-one zucchini.

Much of what is donated to food banks is unfit to eat in the first place--out of date, tainted with toxic chemicals, infected with bacteria. 

Food banks' mandate to serve everybody the same thing while supplies last means that much of what individuals get from food banks is food they don't digest.

It's very unlikely that anybody is going to sell zucchini, but I think it shows public spirit that people at least try to sell food they can't eat, rather than waste it.

So, how bad is this? Should these women be prosecuted for breaking five applicable laws, or should those laws be rewritten to encourage their frugality and use of what they have?


Note that I've taken some of that useless pasta in trade and have determined that (1) gluten-tolerant human friends won't eat it, (2) my cats won't eat it, (3) neighbors' dogs won't eat it, (4) none of my possums has so far touched it, (5) it doesn't even draw mice or rats, although they certainly like grain, so (6) it lies on the ground until centipedes find and eat it. A kind of centipede that normally eat dung. So these women are finding a Brit who will eat the stuff. Cheers for them! I don't know how long he can survive, but I wish them and him well.

Music 

The Peacekeepers.


Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland.


Hermanos Gutierrez.



Avicii.


Antonio Carlos Jobim.


John Lennon.


Jimi Hendrix.


Handel. (The Hallelujah Chorus is not season-specific. None of the three parts of the Messiah is "in season" at the moment but the Hallelujah and Amen choruses transcend seasons.)


1:00 Jukebox.


Tom Lehrer.


Willie Nelson.


Danny Kaye.


Tom Petty.







Janis Joplin.


Lamb.


John Lennon.


Avishai Cohen.



Adrian von Ziegler, who is Swiss, tries to compose music in the Celtic style. You may hear echoes but these are not real Scotch, Irish, Welsh, or Breton tunes.


Quicksilver Messenger Service.


Victoria. (Church music, traditionally sung at Christmas. Singers get accustomed to learning Christmas-concert pieces in summer and spring-concert pieces in winter and so on; if you find this jarring, you've been warned.)


The Fixx.


Canned Heat.



The Band.


Creedence Clearwater Revival.



Kenny Rogers.



The B-52's.


Van Halen.


Regina McCrary.


Franz Liszt.


The Beatles.


Black Angels.


Dire Straits. 


Bill Callahan.


The Eagles.


Steeleye Span.


Camel.


Bill Topol.


Nick Drake.


Lynyrd Skynyrd.


This one is music, but its star is the Photoshopped woodcock.


Maranatha Music.


Matisyahu.


Bob Dylan.



Blur.


Rod Stewart.


Mussorgsky.


Masks, Probable Return of 

Angelenos were starting to wear military gas masks when my parents left that city; then filters on cars were invented, so the custom died out. But it's coming back. Chinese people in some cities and mining zones started wearing face masks before COVID. If we continue driving where we could walk, air conditioning when we could open windows, allowing those monster "data centers" to be built, or just having multiple babies with no thought for the future, we'll be wearing them too. Because what we cough up, continually, hacking wherever we go like old cigarette smokers, will be clearer that way.


Phenology 

One of the native plants that are indeed competing with privet, in my hedge--and often winning--is a spicebush. I cut out walnut and maple saplings, but I don't imagine the spicebush is going to grow big enough to drop limbs on the house. It attracts Spicebush Swallowtails...and I saw a shed caterpillar skin on the underside of a leaf this afternoon! It was greenish black and had been about an inch long.

Swallowtails normally eat their shed skins. Possibly my wren family had already feasted on the wee beastie who would have looked something like this.


Photo from Google, credited to somebody on Facebook, Google didn't specify. While the young Pipevine Swallowtail tries to look like a centipede, the young Spicebush Swallowtail tries to look like a miniature snake. They are often leaf-green, but can be yellow or orange. They get about two inches long. They are not toxic to humans. Spicebush is aromatic but not very toxic; people chew the twigs and use them as toothbrushes. Nobody knows whether it would be safe for humans to eat the caterpillars, as nobody is known ever to have wanted to. Anyway they don't sting. They like to pull a leaf around themselves to form a shady shelter in the afternoon, securing the leaf with silk. They don't eat more than the bush can easily spare, though.


They can be as big as the Tiger Swallowtails who also mimic the smaller Pipevine Swallowtails. Female Tigers don't have the white spot on the forewing; male Tigers have yellow wings. These harmless, pretty butterflies are not totally dependent on spicebush; they can eat sassafras or other native plants, but the other plants are even more vulnerable to the fungus infection discussed at the link.

What you can do to help these butterflies? Don't spray anything but water on your garden. Glyphosate is known to promote the growth of fungi. It fosters fire blight and tomato wilt and other bad things, and also encourages mold and mildew to grow in your home.

Rhetoric, Excesses of 

No link, but a passing comment: At some time over the weekend I read some poems inspired by the "social justice" concerns from a few years ago. The tea leaf picker's bitterness flavors the tea. The flatphone causes...suicides? Seriously? 

If people committed suicide because of flatphones, weren't their mental shortcomings obvious? Are they missed?

It is generally a good idea to beware of excessive empathy, especially when it comes from the Left. In my long-ago childhood there was a locally owned enterprise that was generally considered a good place to work. Suddenly left-wingnuts started screaming about how overworked and underpaid people were and how they needed to go on strike. The idea of going on strike did not originate with the employees of this company; it came from a union and seemed, in hindsight, to have originated with employees of a company that aspired to compete with this one. But those of the employees who had joined the union went on strike when the union told them to do. Acrimony ran high. People avoided visiting the town where the strike was taking place because people on both sides were screaming and quarrelling on the street, and you never knew when somebody might become violent. The strike didn't actually last long; the workers got their pay raises. But somehow the company never recovered its competitive edge. It lost business to a company in a different part of the country...the one whose employees seemed, in hindsight, to have urged their competitors' employees to go on strike.

Then there was the horrible plight of secretaries. Secretaries, by definition, differed from typists in that secretaries were in on all the business's "secrets" and were in the line of succession to take over the company--if stockholders weren't too prejudiced against women. Secretaries were practically part of their employers' families. 

In too many cases, of course, they were the part of the families that were traditionally called concubines, which US law never recognized, and they were abused, not given the recognition and benefits that "secondary wives" have in societies that allow polygamy. The idea of the secretary marrying the glamorous single businessman, or the married businessman's son, was considered very romantic. In reality secretaries were often bullied into sexual relationships with married men, and they didn't even have job security if these men got tired of them. Left-wingers sometimes did focus on that specific abuse; but, although it was widespread, it was irrelevant to the majority of secretaries. Most secretaries simply did honest work for the pay they had agreed to accept, which was usually lower for women than it would have been for men. 

So the Left started screaming about the fact that, as prospective heirs to the company, secretaries were asked to do things other than typing and filing. In many offices the secretary made coffee for everyone! Often secretaries were asked to run errands and even buy presents for the boss's family! Shopping for a gift for a woman whose husband is exploiting your body undoubtedly is icky. Not that most secretaries would know firsthand. But ooohhh, it was so demeaning to be asked to pick out gifts for other people to give to other people...I never have figured out just why. The male accountant usually wasn't asked to pick out gifts, except maybe for a young male relative, because the male accountant was likely to be a nerd with no taste. And ooohhh, horrors, some secretaries were expected to...visit their sick employers in the hospital, or at home, to keep the business going! To walk their dogs! To take their cars to the garage! I did those things and never saw any reason to object to them, they gave me opportunities to get up and stretch, but I was told I was supposed to feel terribly demeaned by the mere idea. The new word and data processors of the Nineties were supposed to do nothing but tap on computer keyboards. Any variation in this monotonous and cramp-inducing job was supposed to be an insult to our skills. 

The real objective of all this was, of course, to convince people that employing secretaries was more trouble than it was worth. They could tap on their own computers. In the Nineties secretaries who might previously have inherited businesses suddenly found pink slips on their desks when they came back from lunch. 

Excessive empathy from the Left doesn't last long when people realize that something that may really be harmful is serving the purposes of global tyranny. Flatphones stopped causing suicide when left-wingers realized that they were surveillance devices. Global warming ceased to be a concern when corporations that just love the idea of business and government working together started drawing up plans for huge, local-climate-changing "data centers." 

I thought Al Gore was misguided, but respectable in his clueless way, for all these years of his ranting about global warming, until he stood up and said that--since local warming now suits his party's purposes--what we really need to worry about now is that impending ice age, after all. Right. 

We can recognize excessive empathy by its exaggerated claims. Too many motors running in the same place aren't merely overheating the air in that place; it's global warming. Flatphones aren't just overpriced toxic waste that don't work; they're causing suicides. It wasn't only a family tragedy when one little boy wasn't able to digest the food provided to his family, grow, and survive; it was genocide. It's the hyperbolic excess that identifies the rhetoric as fundamentally dishonest and discrediting those who participate in it.

When a wave of hype blows past us, it's helpful to remember things like: The perils of plastic was chosen as a talking point for US PIRG's student fundraisers to discuss with strangers because it's not serious enough, nor likely to be taken seriously enough, to motivate violent attacks on the students. Mistaking soda pop for food would be unwise if it were even possible, but as long as people eat food, drink water, and take exercise in a normal way, drinking soda pop is not going to make them obese or even destroy their teeth. Being shot, even in the leg, isn't fun but cars, glyphosate, and prescription medications each kill more Americans than gunshots do. Donald Trump is no gentleman but he was elected in opposition to a candidate who was no lady, either, and would have done an even worse job as President. The rising generation are, as all rising generations always have been and always will be, a mess, which indicates that a critical mass of them are now in the process of becoming respectable, responsible adults. And the world will keep on turning unless, until, it stops.

POSTSCRIPT: COMMENTS SECTION

Writhing, frothing, and biting themselves in their hubris, Google have decided to suppress my comments on my blog until they get more cookies. This is soooooo not the way to get cookies or anything else from me. Here are my replies to those who were able to comment:

Brian, it's nice to hear from you again. What was the name of your band?

Pilch, it's always good to see you here! May all our furry friends find good homes!
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Book Review: Bringing Up Boys

Title: Bringing Up Boys

Author: James Dobson

Date: 2001

Publisher: Tyndale House

ISBN: 0-8423-5266-X

Length: 257 pages of text, 11 pages of references

Quote: “Boys, when compared to girls, are six times more likely to have learning disabilities, three times more likely to be registered drug addicts, and four times more likely to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism, sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed wetting, and all forms of antisocial and criminal behavior. They are twelve times more likely to murder someone, and their rate of death in car acci­dents is greater by 50 percent...There is more.”

What was I doing even reading this book? I bought it, of course, for resale. I don’t have sons. I do, however, have nephews. Their father wasn’t man enough to live with four young children at one time, so they obviously have some genetic issues to cope with...and so I can tell you that Dr. Dobson’s motive, in overstating the problems boys have (and cause), is at least partly to assure readers that the boys we’re trying to raise or teach aren’t all that bad. Most kids don’t actually have any of the problems on the list just quoted. I like my nephews.

A funny sort of synchronicity occurred in between the time I spent writing a review of another of Dobson’s books and the time I sat down to write this one. I was near the phone, not actually hovering over the phone, but sort of waiting for updates on two elders in two hospitals—one not expected to live, one expected to go home for the night. The phone rang. Thinking, “That wouldn’t be about Jane, it’s still visiting hours and her children would still be at the hospital, so it has to be Joe calling from home,” I picked up the phone and heard, “This is James Dobson reminding you to vote on Tuesday...”

It was not, of course, Dr. Dobson himself. If it had been, I’m sure he would at least have been polite enough to absorb the information that I always vote. Most people in Gate City who are eligible to vote are peer-pressured to do so, because most of the old families are related to each other in some way, which means that few of us could get away with failing to vote for any Kilgore who is on the ballot. Regarding other candidates we might get away with saying, “They’ll win without my help; they always do,” but when a Kilgore is on the ballot we’d get, “You mean you think you’re too busy to vote for your own third cousin twice removed? Now that’s just ridiculous. You can’t be too sick to go in and vote. If you’re too sick to drive I’ll come out and take you.” So we vote. I don’t really need to be prodded, even by James Dobson in person, much less by some geek who’s wired a recording of his TV voice into a computer somewhere.

The annoyance of getting a “robot call” is enough to influence my vote—anyone a phone pest wants me to vote for, I’m more likely to vote against—and I’ll wager that, when the “robot call” sounds like some well-known person who’s respected even by the opposite party, it’s actually coming from the opposition party. Dr. Dobson has been on TV long enough, and stayed out of trouble long enough, that the worst thing his enemies can do to him is probably programming his voice into an obnoxious computer-calling device. 

End of rant...back to the book. Do you, as a parent, teacher, custodial relative, baby-sitter, etc., want to read what Dobson has to say about the care of little boys? A summary of what he says may be helpful.

As a family counsellor, Dobson isn’t worried by the appearance of gender stereotypes in rival siblings; he titles one chapter “Vive la Difference.”

He lists a range of sex-influenced mental problems that boys can have but discusses only attention deficiency in detail. Although the others are more common in males than in females, they’re not common.

Like too many authors, he hears loudly and clearly the words of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “This is for everyone who teased us,” but overlooks the “prescription medication” that was aggravating and distorting the memories of whatever blows to their self-esteem they and the other schoolboy killers had suffered.

He discusses evidence that little boys instinctively crave a father figure and typically start moving away from Mom and toward Dad, unless Dad is abusive, as toddlers.

He observes that most boys are noisy, impulsive, restless, destructive, and competitive, but charitably mentions that about 15% of little boys are relatively calm and quiet and are not likely to grow up effeminate...just intelligent.

He defends the traditional role of fathers as providers, protectors, leaders, and spiritual directors..

He warns mothers that, although disrespect should not be tolerated, most boys are going to have a need to reject or disrespect their mothers at some time in life.

He idealizes the work of a full-time mother, warning that yuppie mothers who worry about getting onto a “Mommy Track” may be merely “chasing the caterpillar” ahead of them, as the peculiarly stupid processionary caterpillar can often be persuaded to do until it starves to death. (I think conservatives are barking up the wrong tree with this one. Instead of nagging women to quit work for the sake of two to five years of full-time motherhood, after which the women's careers may never get back on track, the conservatives would do better to demand that employers rehire women who take time off to be full-time mothers and men who take time off for full-time military service.)

He insists that the origins of homosexuality lie in emotional problems parents should prevent. He observes that, while teenaged girls seem to do just as well or better without a father figure in the house, teenaged boys just might do just as well or better if they lived with their fathers and had no mother figure in the house—this doesn’t happen often enough for anyone to be sure. (I will say that my late lamented Significant Other, as a single foster father, did raise a shining jewel of a Lad.)

He affirms the benefits to children in spending quality time with grandparents.

He advises parents not to try to make boys less competitive, but try to help them win.

He’s concerned that “stupid guy” jokes may damage the self-esteem of little boys. He encourages home schooling as an option for boys who don’t fit into the classroom environment.

He classifies unchristian moral influences, as well as pedophiles, as “predators” likely to harm children.

He encourages parents to enforce rules, while warning them that “rules without relationships lead to rebellion.”

Although a well-known advocate of Tough Love, he recommends relatively mild displays of Tough Love as routine discipline for children.

My concern would be that today’s young parents, lacking historical background, may find some of his advice inexplicably strange. Doesn’t everybody know that nobody can afford to be a full-time mother any more, economically or socially, and society no longer has much use for guys who can’t develop the attention spans and self-discipline and tolerance for sitting still that the girls modelled for them in elementary school, and so on. Well, no; while today’s parents are beneficiaries of whatever the 1970s wave of feminism accomplished, good and bad, Dobson was one of the older, conservative-minded men who never were comfortable with the 1970s feminist movement. A full half-dozen TV stars, including Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank Gifford, Regis Philbin, and Kathie Lee’s first husband, got a huge publicity boost in the 1980s as Dr. Dobson gave Kathie Lee fatherly or pastoral advice to quit TV and try to be a full-time housewife, and her first husband discovered, along with her, that he didn’t want a full-time housewife, and so on. Dobson has lived and learned, and Bringing Up Boys reflects plenty of recent research and awareness of the way things are, but it’s still obvious that a part of him wishes that the “Leave It to Beaver” TV show had ever resembled the way most real families were.

How harmful is this kind of advice likely to be, especially if parents have girls as well as boys? I’m going to split hairs, go out on a limb,  try to think of another metaphor to add to this mix, stick my neck out and say: I don’t think this is the harmful kind of advice from the prefeminist era. The kind of devoted family Dobson has in mind may not be as bland or as smooth as the Cleaver family on television, but neither is it abusive or oppressive.

In the carefully orchestrated trend for people to abandon farms and rural environments and flock into cities, I see a massive male identity crisis: there aren’t a lot of jobs in the city that give men a chance to “win” by using their upper-body strength and physical energy. These things are assets; men deserve to be able to use and enjoy them. I could wish that Dobson had shown more concern about this, and less misplaced concern about stupid guy jokes or girls who excel in sports. 

Women my age learned to base our self-esteem, among other things, on our not acting like the female stereotypes in the dumb blonde jokes, catty brunette jokes, bossy mother-in-law jokes, nagging wife jokes, big-spending daughter jokes, etc. etc. ad nauseam, that men told; if men can’t learn to cope with stupid guy jokes in the same way, they really are inferior. 

But I don’t think there ever was or will be a problem with women lacking respect for Real Menschkeit (as distinct from stupid redneck macho acts). The problem is that not enough men are developing and demonstrating Menschkeit, as distinct from machismo. They probably need to depend on the help of God to become admirable human beings first and let nature take care of the sex appeal (no worries, it will). I think this is the problem Dobson is trying to address, and, to the extent that he or his audience are able to help resolve it, women will not complain.
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Thursday, July 16, 2026

Web Log for 7.15.26: Is X Dying of Stupidity?

I didn't find any good links on X, but today's reflections on what I found on the Internet are about X. 

Funny thing about X. I do read more than I write, listen more than I talk, in real life and in cyberspace. Yet, when X suddenly (no warning, no mention of this in the official rules) springs on us a new policy that people have to pay for the number of posts we want to publish per day...

1. There's no way I'm paying X. I don't object to Elon Musk earning his own money but Hell will freeze solid a thousand times before I send him any more money. 

(And I don't mean freeze over. I mean freeze solid. Picture the whole population of even southern Michigan being airlifted away from what Al Gore says is the once again impending ice age.)

2. I "unfollowed" all the commercial accounts long ago. This morning I went to the trouble of "unfollowing" all the accounts that don't give evidence of reading MY X posts. Never mind that several of them were writers' and musicians' accounts that I never expected would use X socially, from which I only ever expected to see news about scheduled books, records, or concerts. Never mind that a few were sports accounts I followed mainly to have posts to share with people who don't post on social media, but do check sports teams' accounts. (I joined Twitter at the urging of a relative who's had an empty profile page for years: "If you post something about the -- team, I'll see it and know you need a lift.") Never mind that a discouraging number of old Tweeps have not merely become Twitter Quitters, but actually died, in the years since I followed them on Twitter. I want to be sure that I don't "follow" anyone who thinks he's paying to set up a cyberspace where he does all the talking and never listens to me. Even if I never expected the person managing the account to engage socially with anyone else, from now on, if you're not reading and replying to my X posts, I don't want to see yours.

3. And I even noticed, when a long-term e-friend did reply to one of my posts, that she's only ever replied to my posts that replied to hers. Why do so many of her posts show up, anyway? Get outta my feed, you wretched paid account. Who wants to read what someone is paying to say? This person had posted some harmless disinformation under the line, "Nobody is really reading these posts." I said that I was, but I was stepping further back from X again. She replied, "I'm sorry you feel unheard." Hello? Who posted about "feeling unheard" first, and no, "feeling unheard" is not the feminine form of "seeing low engagement numbers" or "getting ignorant replies." "I'm sorry you feel..." is a sexist insult to a woman, even if another woman spews it. I don't follow this person any more.

The world became a less friendly place today...

Obviously Musk deserves blame for this. He can afford to run X as a charity, and he should do that. He should buy lists of the names of all the writers who were cheated by Associated Content, Bubblews, Chatabout, Hire Writers, Freelancer, and all the other writing sites that owe people money, and/or Yougov, worldwide; and he should offer those people a dollar a post, including reposts and quoteposts, up to 100 posts a day, for life. Rules should specifically include that we will be frank about corporations and their products, but only in an informative way, no "flames." ("Chatabout has owed me $4.85 since 2014" is informative. "Chatabout stinks" is a flame.) And they should stipulate that he's doing this JUST SO THE POOR SLOBS WHO THINK THEY HAVE TO PAY PEOPLE TO READ THEIR CONTENT, WHICH IF ALL THEY EVER POST ABOUT IS JUNK THEY ARE TRYING TO SELL IS PROBABLY TRUE, WILL HAVE AN AUDIENCE.
 
Meanwhile? Substack also has tiers of free and paid memberships, but it uses them in a reasonable way. Free accounts are encouraged to use the "chat" pages and e-mail their Substack'zines to everyone who wants to read them, free of charge. If your'zine takes off and people pay for subscriptions, then Substack starts talking about revenue sharing. You can pay for actual publication. The ephemeral nature of Twitter and X wouldn't support that...though X has tried to develop a "writers" division where in theory X might someday be able to publish long posts in the way Substack does.

All Xeeps, and all old Tweeps who migrated to Blue Sky, are hereby invited to join me on Substack until X recovers sanity or dies. 
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The Famous 25 Lost Candy Bars of the 1970s

People are googling for the recipes for the "lost" candy bars of our childhood, and not getting a nice printable article on the subject--only tedious videos. This web site will now fill an information need:

First...it's not true that there were 25 candy bars that were banned. About twenty candy bar wrappers were banned in 1976 because they were made with dyes that tended to seep into the food inside (it was not always or only candy). The companies could have repackaged the candy bars, and did try with a few brands, but decided these candy bars weren't big sellers anyway. In some cases they were clearly weaker competitors with brands that are still selling well. 

But a few of these candy bars might be brought back, with better branding and packaging.

1. Ayds 

These chocolates were marketed as weight loss "aids," not candy, although candy is what they were. They were made with artificial sweeteners and chemicals that were fairly toxic. They sold well to dieters, and were reformulated a few times, but then a new wave of attention to a disease called AIDS killed the brand forever. 

2. Candy Cigarettes 

Cinnamon candies with bright red tips, designed to attract children to the body language associated with smoking cigarettes? Well, that idea didn't fly for long. I don't remember a difference in the flavor between Cigarettes and ordinary Red Hots. Then again I didn't like either one...

3. Space Dust

Same sort of thing as Pop Rocks: lumps of sugar, artificially flavored and colored to suggest fruit, that fizzed on contact with saliva. They just weren't as strong a competitor because parents had heard scary stories about "angel dust" and thought Space Dust was a gateway, horrors. Loss to society? Nil. We still have Pop Rocks.

4. Big Time 

Thicker, peanut-enhanced version of the Milkshake bar, q.v. This one might be brought back.

5. Butternut 

Butternuts are a native American tree species, with edible nuts, in the walnut family but (I think) much nicer tasting than any other walnuts. Butternut candy bars did not contain butternuts, which would have been one valid reason to ban them (false advertising), but the candy was never banned. I never actually saw one; they weren't a nationally popular brand. They are described as like Snickers with more peanuts. Like the majority of candies that disappeared in the mid-1970s, they came in wrappers with red, yellow, or violet colors that were banned for adding toxicity to the candy, and the company decided not to try different packaging as the candies weren't doing as well anyway. Apparently people who had the choice preferred a higher ratio of sugar to peanuts, as in Snickers.

6. Caravelle

Caramel, lightened with crisped rice and/or pecans, wrapped in chocolate, sold fairly well but not so well that the company bothered designing new wrappers for them. 

7. Charleston Chew

Sticky chewy taffy that just might pull out the fillings from teeth that might have got cavities from chewing on too much sugar, already. Some people did like it. Charleston Chew was sold as a long strip of candy guaranteed to make a disgusting sticky mess. Then a different manufacturer bought the brand and repackaged it as bite-sized candies wrapped in chocolate, a little less messy, though when it got into the hands of children... Anyway, although some people liked this confection, more people hated it. It was banned, because the strawberry flavor was actually made with a toxic red dye, but was brought back with a red dye that seemed safer. It just didn't sell as well as other candies.

8. Cherry Humps

The idea might be revived, but they'd need a new name. The original idea was simply chocolate-covered cherries sold as candy bars at checkout counters. The cherries were preserved in "cordial" and wrapped in chocolate. Whole cherries formed little bumps in the chocolate bar. They were dyed red. The FDA objected to the dye. No dye, or a safer dye, didn't sell so well The company tried using chopped cherry bits in cherry-flavored pink nougat to fill chocolate bars. That didn't sell very well either. Apparently customers were emotionally attached to those dyed cherries. Today's customers have not formed such attachments...but real cherries aren't cheap. Fake cherries? Meh. I wouldn't buy them. It would have to be real cherries and, for me to buy candy bars, the price would need to drop back to 50 cents for the small bar, $1 for the large one.

9. Chicken Dinner 

The brand was patented about a hundred years ago, when many people thought of salt pork as their primary source of protein (which meant they were actually getting their protein from whole grains and beans, salt pork being mostly fat) and a chicken dinner as a special treat. So, this candy bar was the special dessert treat to be served with the chicken dinner. The chocolate bar was filled with peanuts and caramel, a recipe that worked better as Snickers.

10. Chocolite

Another candy marketed to dieters, this one consisted of real chocolate with air whipped into it so you ingested less chocolate, thus fewer calories and less fat and sugar, with the same size chocolate bar you were in the habit of buying. Europeans actually like this; they buy similar treats called Aero Bars. Chocolite was not a big seller in the US. Perhaps if it cost less than solid chocolate bars, in proportion to the amount of chocolate it contained, the brand might be revivied.

11. Coconut Grove

Wads of heavily sweetened coconut dipped in chocolate, not unlike Mounds. This idea might be revived by someone who doesn't mind that peanuts outsell coconuts in the US. Some people did like the coconut alternative, and still do.

12. Cristy

'Another peanut-nougat-chocolate bar that didn't sell as well as Snickers.

13. Denver Sandwich

I never heard of it, but apparently some people out West liked this version of peanuts, nougat, caramel, and sometimes crispy wafers in a chocolate shell. In the Eastern States we still have Snickers and Twix.

14. Hollywood

Another version of nougat, caramel, and peanuts covered in chocolate in a banned bright red package. I remember eating this one and thinking it wasn't as good as Snickers.

15. Marathon

Just caramel covered in chocolate made a cheap enough bar that the company could afford to make it much longer than competing chocolate bars. As a teenaged candy connoisseur I thought it was boring, but some people did like sticky caramel.

16. Milkshake

This one and the spin-off Big Time brand really were unique. They were made of malted-milk-flavored nougat. Nobody else ever replicated the recipe. It's thought to have involved special processing equipment that was destroyed by a fire. The malted nougat was covered in caramel, then in chocolate. The package was banned for being made with toxic dyes, but the company repackaged the candies and were able to sell them in the late 1970, before the fire.

17. No Jelly

Basically a peanut granola bar that just begged to be slathered with jelly or jam. The package was banned. The candy was fine; newer versions of it are on the market now.

18. PB Max

Peanut butter oatmeal cookies, with peanut butter filling, covered in chocolate...the brand survived into the 1980s but just didn't sell as well as similar cookies that were packaged as cookies.

19. Powerhouse

Caramel, peanuts, and chocolate fudge wrapped in chocolate. The wrapping was banned; the company was able to sell the candy in a different package until a corporate merger prompted the decision that it wasn't selling as well as Snickers.

20. Reggie

Caramel and peanuts coated with chocolate sold as round, baseball-shaped souvenirs of baseball star Reggie Jackson during Jackson's active career. He retired about the time the company had to repackage the candy, so they didn't bother.

21. Seven Up

There were several different versions, some cheaper than others, of the chocolate bar consisting of seven distinct bite-sized pieces of chocolate wrapped around different fillings, to be eaten one piece at a time or more than one at a time. The most common version had mint, nougat, butterscotch, fudge, coconut, buttercreme, and caramel fillings. Other fillings included peanuts, chopped brazilnuts, almond pralines, butterscotch, dark chocolate "truffle" candy, vanilla custard, Irish Cream, pistachio nougat, maple toffee, peanut butter, and pineapple. The FDA banned one wrapper and some of the sweeteners used with some of the fillings. Still, these chocolate bars were popular and survived repackaging easily--they'd been repackaged to advertise new flavor mixes several times before. What they did not survive was a lawsuit for copyright infringement. The company tried marketing chocolate bars with sections of different fillings in the 19808s and 1990s, but seven seemed to be the magic number for bites of different candy and apparently nobody wanted to try renaming the candy anything like "Sampler Seven." 

22. Snik Snak

Wafers layered with chocolate, like Twix. People who lived in places where this alternative brand was sold say it was different from Twix. I wouldn't know. 

23. Triple Decker

Layers of milk chocolate, white chocolate, and dark chocolate, on top of each other and all covered in dark chocolate, so that the different kinds of chocolate melted together in the mouth when people bit into one very thick bar of pure chocolate. Some people liked the candy (I don't think I ever saw it), but changing the wrapper was the least of the company's worries. The dark chocolate coating tended to stick to whatever wrapper they used. Some people thought the texture of the chocolate needed to be lightened with nuts. That wasn't easy to make work, either. The idea of just packaging three separate thin bars of chocolate in a stack, so that people could bite into them together or separately, doesn't seem to have been considered. 

24. Walnut Crush

This one was unique: chopped walnuts in white nougat with a thin outer shell of chocolate. Price may have been the reason why nobody tried repackaging this candy bar. Enough people like walnuts that it might sell, though not, of course, as fast as peanuts.

25. Whiz

Peanuts suspended in marshmallow, covered in chocolate, just might have worked if the company had worked at marketing them. Mallo Cups will never sell as well as Reese's Cups but they do sell. 

Disqualified for This List 

Mars Bars consisted of nougat, caramel, and almonds wrapped in chocolate. They don't qualify for this list because they were sold in the US into the early 1980s. In 1982 Sue Townsend had an American character who didn't recognize them and had to be told about them by other children when he visited England. This is anachronistic. Americans knew about the whole-almond bars, though perhaps American candy munchers didn't want to risk their teeth actually eating them. Or maybe it was the fatal commercial where that baritone who'd done the other commercials about Mars Bars being "out of this world," and so on, said "You get big crunchy nuts in a Mars Bar." The commercial aired around the time kids my age were discovering that "big crunchy nuts" had an alternative meaning. It always seemed to me that the candy bar died of embarrassment. Anyway it was officially discontinued in the 1980s due to declining sales, then brought back as Almond Snickers. 

As a bonus idea, one of the videos about these vanished candy bars self-advertises with a picture of a once popular dessert that was never marketed as a candy bar--white "seafoam" or "divinity" candy with chopped-up gumdrops suspended in it like stained glass. Seafoam candy was cheap, though hard to make. It was a popular party dish because it needs teamwork; someone has to pour hot syrup slowly over egg whites while someone else is beating them. In the 1970s fear that the hot syrup didn't cook the egg enough to kill possible salmonella pushed seafoam candy completely out of fashion. White nougat and white chocolate with bits of fruit jelly candy, possibly in the classic seven-bites arrangement, just might be a marketable idea.
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Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Book Review: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Title: The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook

Author: Jillian Michaels

Author’s web page: www.jillianmichaels.com

Date: 2010

Publisher: Crown / Random House

ISBN: 978-0-307-71822-8

Length: 276 pages

Illustrations: one-color drawings, not credited; black-and-white photo page at the back

Quote: “While [medication] may be an effective short-term aid to bring things under control, it fails to address the need to reverse and eliminate the most frequent under­lying cause of chronically high insulin: poor diet.”

First, for the guys: More photos of the body underneath that too-big T-shirt in the back of the book, along with information about how to buy full-color videos showing the body in action.

Now let’s dispel any illusions: The thing to remember about all those cookbooks and exercise programs featuring sleek, beautiful young people is that, if you’re not between the ages of 18 and 25, you’re not going to look like that. If you want your mature body to look like Jane Fonda’s or Jack LaLanne’s, or even like your own body before you settled down in a desk job, however, this new book just might help you.

Maybe. The trouble with all discussions of "healthy food" today is that people keep on repeating what they learned about the nutrients found in food, and ignore the fact that those nutrients are altogether irrelevant if the food contains glyphosate, since the body will reject the food violently in any case. If it looks like it just came from Old MacDonald's farm, bursting with natural wholesome goodness, and it's found in a supermarket and it doesn't have a hard shell you throw away, it is probably a glyphosate bomb and you'd probably be healthier not even walking through the "produce" section and breathing the fumes off it. Unless you know for sure that they were not exposed to "pesticide" vapor drift, don't even touch blueberries, raspberries, green leafy vegetables, apples, carrots, grapes, tomatoes, or any of your old childhood favorites. Also avoid anything that is sold or used in a hard, dry, seedlike condition--nuts, wheat or other grains, seeds, flour--unless you know for sure. Rice and wild rice are usually safe, but not guaranteed. The allium family (onions, garlic, etc.) are usually safe.

To test foods like hard-shelled tree nuts sold in their shells, oranges, melons, beans, coconuts, etc., eat one teaspoonful and wait for the early symptoms of your typical glyphosate and/or other "pesticide" reactions. If they appear, take a charcoal capsule and throw away the rest of the food. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook is loaded with fun facts about recent discoveries about the effects different foods typically have on our metabolism, plus trendy recipes that...well...some of them are on the granola side, but most of them will disappear fast if you take them to a potluck dinner. A short summary of what Michaels learned about foods that affect metabolism appears on pages 3-41, with key facts repeated as sidebars next to recipes that use the recommended foods. Most of them are not on the safe list. Briefly, metabolism-boosting foods include fish, Brazil nuts, whole grains, pumpkin seed, sesame seed, almonds, spinach and other greens, whole grains, olive oil, hazelnuts, barley, beans, oats, brown rice, onions, apples, pomegranates, cooked broccoli, carrots, molasses, apples, raspberries, blueberries, grapes, rosemary, cooked tomatoes,  sweet potatoes, oranges, turkey, walnuts, and yogurt. Meats can have mixed effects on metabolism and are used sparingly in this cookbook. 

People on restricted diets can use this book if and when we get the bans we need; plenty of recipes are “free” from whatever natural food you’re trying to avoid, and when farmers stop spraying poison on food you may find that you can enjoy that natural food again anyway. If you’re serving these dishes to people outside the family, it’s a good idea to list the ingredients, since many of them do contain stealth allergy triggers like coconut oil and orange juice in unexpected places. There’s a good-sized section of vegan entrees. Several sauces are thickened with fruit or vegetable purees rather than simple starches. A majority of recipes are lactose-free, gluten-free, and/or casein-free, or can be made whichever of those things you require. When Michaels does use a dairy product, it’s usually yogurt, usually offered as a topping.

Vintage granola-period recipes substituted honey for sugar. In the 1980s efforts were made to debunk the myth that honey had any special nutritional benefits over sugar; both are basically sucrose, only honey has more calories, is much messier, and usually costs more. “Loaded with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and antioxidants”? Not exactly; it contains traces of nutrients—enough to make a difference to an insect, but probably not to a human. Bees store honey made from different kinds of flowers separately and even humans can see and taste differences. Unfortunately, today nearly all honey is loaded with glyphosate and should not even be handled. 

The Master Your Metabolism Cookbook suggests agave syrup as an alternative to honey or maple syrup. Agave syrup is fairly new even to the health food market; I personally don’t live where it’s made, so I’ve never tasted it. 

More can be said for real maple syrup. It does not have to be made in Vermont. Sugar maples will grow in most of the United States (and in Canada); you just tap them at a different time of year. Maple trees that are native to areas other than Vermont  also produce syrup. “Invasive” Norway maples are excellent sources of syrup—we used to construct a little “syrup camp” and boil down sap from the Norway maple in the yard, and other maples in the woodlot, right in the shade of the tree, and it would become sweet and maple-y enough that a spoonful turned pancakes into dessert before it even became syrupy. As Noel PERRIN observed, federal standards for grading maple syrup were created at a time when the blandest, sweetest, most sugar-like syrup was considered the finest. If you’re after the more distinctive flavor and trace nutrients that help preserve male reproductive health—oh, what the heck, let’s stuff in a few keywords, real maple syrup may help prevent prostate enlargement and thus extend men’s sex lives and fertility—local maple syrup may actually be better than Vermont’s Finest. So if you like and can afford to pour maple syrup over your organic corn or buckwheat pancakes, enjoy it. (Women can safely enjoy real maple syrup too—if living with men under the influence of Jillian Michaels we may need it.) If you’re cooking or baking, however, read on.

If you’re trying to reduce the amount of sugar children eat, however, forget about the “honey is better because you use less of it in cooking” argument. What grainy, bready desserts partly sweetened with honey do for children is to activate sugar cravings without satisfying them. Mothers who cook with honey raise sugar junkies who beg, borrow, smuggle, and steal candy and sugar-saturated junkfood. I was one of the lucky little sugar junkies who found that, as an adult, exercising my legal right to eat sugary junk in front of Mother brought my sugar craving under control. I’ve known other sugar junkies who managed to ingest enough of Mom’s “healthy treats” and smuggle enough sugar to be hypoglycemic, diabetic, and/or depressed before age twenty-five.

What I’d recommend for kids is letting them fill up on plenty of raw organic vegetables before exposing them to sugar—natural or unnatural. Kids hate vegetables the way adults in our culture are typically taught to serve them—cooked limp and/or smothered in oil and vinegar. Kids love vegetables fresh from the garden and will happily snack on raw carrots, asparagus, peas, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, spinach, and almost anything else in the organic garden. The natural sugars in raw veg satisfy children’s sugar cravings, provide plenty of fibre, and are easier for children to digest than some adults would have believed. I would let a child snack on anything I tolerated in the garden, and insist on cooking a vegetable only if the child became flatulent or complained of tummy-aches after eating it raw. If this plan didn’t keep the child from gobbling up candy and commercial desserts when those were available, I’d calm myself with the knowledge that the child was well exercised and supplied with fibre anyway.

Personally, I think vinegar works best as a cleaning product because it motivates me to keep rinsing and scrubbing away all traces of that disgusting odor, so I think there’s far too much vinegar in these recipes, but the idea of serving fruit with lemon juice instead of sugar or honey, as a salad dressing, is definitely an improvement over serving mayonnaise with added sugar.

I’d heard about the mixed benefits of raw broccoli for people with thyroid problems, and about the mixed benefits of eating phytoestrogen-rich soy products, but that millet, peaches, strawberries, pine nuts, bamboo, and peanuts “have been shown to create thyroid problems” was news to me. How does that work? Well, one thing those foods have in common is that in 2010 all of them were likely to have been "ripened" with glyphosate, which does seem to cause thyroid problems, up to and including thyroid cancer. If you have a serious thyroid or ovarian disorder, you’ll want to read the recent findings Michaels reports in this book, but bear in mind that the research was done by a process of wilfully ignoring the elephant in the room. Foods that have not caused diseases for thousands of years have started to cause diseases only when and as they've been sprayed with chemicals that have been intentionally not tested, despise evidence that their use is correlated with those diseases.
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