Book Review: Sleuths at the Spa

Title: Sleuths at the Spa

Author: Vikki Walton

Date: 2023

Quote: "I couldn't help over-hearing and while the drink may have been incorrect there's no reason to have pushed the tray..."

Let me guess: The writer known as Vikki Walton works at a spa, or her granddaughter does. In her idea of a proper spa, when an employee brings a customer the wrong drink, nobody considers how the customer felt--startled? disgusted? nervous because she was up to something she knew she shouldn't have been doing? Our heroine, Viviane, never considers that it's not her business, nor does anyone try to smooth things over. Everyone agrees that Mrs. Wilson, the customer who pushed the drink away, is a horrible, terrible, awful person and the employee deserves a promotion. 

While waiting for Viviane to confess her lesbian feelings for the employee, Callie (she doesn't, but it's all right, Viviane, that kind of thing is legal now), I forgot to notice any clues that anyone else had means, motive, and opportunity to murder Mrs. Wilson. But I will say this to students doing student labor jobs. People who tell you to feel entitled to better working conditions, more ego pampering, pay raises, etc., are not your friends. Callie did have means, motive, and opportunity but we're told up front that she didn't do it. One of the people who rush to soothe Callie's little ego is doing so in order to distract attention from the fact that she's also setting up things to make Callie look guilty. Now that part I can believe.

Butterfly of the Week: Apo Swallowtail

This is another very rare Graphium. It is thought to live only on the heights of Mount Apo on Mindanao island; hence its English name.

Photo from Swallowtails.com.

A subspecies, Graphium sandawanum joreli, is said to live on Mount Katanglad on the same island. Their preferred altitude is over a mile above sea level, but they have been seen as far down as 1000m above sea level.

Not everyone thinks it's different enough to be counted as a subspecies. The museum specimen shown is somewhat faded; in real life joreli can iridesce pale green or blue, too.

With a typical wingspread under 3 inches and a look that, although unique, does resemble some other butterflies, this species has had some difficulty getting the respect it deserves. It has been known to science only since 1977. In its very limited habitat, it appears to be common; on one side of the mountain or another, some think, an Apo Swallowtail may be flying on any day of the year. People want to cut down trees in the forests where it lives. People who don't want this species to go extinct have demanded the most severe restrictions on anything that might further endanger these butterflies. Some people have argued that the species is already extinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_threatened_species_of_the_Philippines

Photo by Z_Lesonge. 

Historically, people lived on Mount Apo. The Filipino government tried in the mid-twentieth century to take over the mountain and declare it a park. The people protested, and the government conceded limited rights to live and farm there. The people, of course, wanted to resume using the forest in the way they always had, while improved survival rates meant that more humans wanted to live on the mountain. People persist in cutting wood in protected forest territory. Indigenous people who want to go on doing things in their old traditional way tend to be skeptical about any need to change things for the benefit of an insect. 

Dead bodies of this species are sometimes sold. On the Internet a few sites claim to offer them. Claim to is the operative word; actually selling Apo Swallowtail carcasses is illegal and some carcass traffickers apply this name to completely different butterflies. Even if the picture on the web page looks like Graphium sandawanum there is no guarantee that what the purchaser receives will resemble the picture. Sandawanum carcasses sell for prices close to $100 and, when sellers are quite sure buyers can't find them, there must be considerable temptation to accept payment for Graphium sandawanum and mail out carcasses of Graphium sarpedon, which looks similar enough that, even if caught, the seller could plead ignorance. The best recourse against such practices is not to pay for butterfly carcasses at all. If foreign visitors came to the mountain and respectfully studied these butterflies, that might impress on the local people that animals they probably consider a minor nuisance are unique and interest people around the world. 

Nobody has reported any information about the life cycle of this butterfly, what it eats, how long individuals fly, what any of its pre-adult stages look like...there are opportunities for scientists from Mindanao to become famous! 

Web Log for 3.27-28.26

The first pair of Red-Spotted Purple butterflies flew yesterday. Last night was chilly enough to cramp a lot of flowers' and butterflies' styles, but yes, spring is here! Cheer!

Censorship 

Not that it really counts as censorship when someone doesn't want children reading a certain book at a certain age, which is what this story turns out to be. It's all about the idea that children are able to deal with references to sex and other body functions better as they mature. Children do not all mature at the same time. A book can be appropriate for 24 of 25 students in a classroom, but the 25th can be the bully who will make any discussion of sex, mental illness, personal hygiene, even flu symptoms, traumatic for the smallest child in the class. A good teacher minimizes attention to the body in a classroom.

But seriously...Scalzi's Lock In has a character whose gender isn't made clear. J.D. Edwin's Headspace trilogy ends on a planet where it's normal for humanoid children not to know which sex they're going to be until they're almost old enough for marriage. Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness is about humanoid space aliens who show a gender identity only during their mating seasons, not necessarily knowing which one they'll be next time. It's speculative fiction. Does that kind of thing make people want to be genderless or gender-confused? Do bug-eyed monsters in science fiction make people want to be bug-eyed monsters? Isn't science fiction about the problems that would be likely to arise if a thing could exist? Many people don't like science fiction, but banning it only gives it a special appeal to the students who want to raise those people's blood pressure. Get a grip. 

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/03/26/well-it-finally-happened/ 

Movies

I hadn't seen or heard of any of Netflix's top twenty movie sellers, either.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2026/03/what-have-you-been-watching.html

Music 

When we see "F. Mendelssohn" on a piece of music, we think of Felix. But Felix Mendelssohn had a sister, Fanny, who some thought was even more talented. Fanny was one of those women whose gifts really were suppressed by envious men. Anna Maria Mozart was comfortable with her having a musical talent while her younger brother had a musical genius, but the Mendelssohns were a less harmonious family.

Felix and Fanny composed and performed music together, but their father, believing that Felix's talent would earn his living while Fanny's was "only an ornament," promoted Felix's work and forbade Fanny to publish hers. (Some biographers think Felix was the jealous brat who pushed their father to insist on this.) Fanny Mendelssohn was apparently pretty enough that the family expected her to "marry well." Felix was not expected to have that option, so for Fanny to have competed with him would have been selfish and greedy, her family insisted. She found a husband who supported her musical career...but her father apparently held her to a contract that allowed her to publish only things on which she'd worked with Felix, only under his name, while Felix was alive. Neither sibling lived very long. Felix died in May 1847, not even 40 years old; Fanny died in November 1847, 41 years old. Her music was published after both siblings' lifetime. Both were trained to write in strict classical tradition, so questions of "better" probably apply more to specific pieces than to either sibling as a musician. Both were considered very good, and some of their best work was "theirs" rather than "his" or "hers." How convenient that they had the same initial...

For purposes of disambiguation, some people refer to "Fanny Bartholdy" (a name the whole family tacked on, after "Mendelssohn," to emphasize their identity as Christians of Jewish descent), and others to "Fanny Hensel" (her husband's name, which she used while living). She seems, nevertheless, to have been somewhere between one-third and one-half of "F. Mendelssohn."

I'd read this information before this weekend. I had not, however, found any recordings of music that's known to have been all Fanny's work, before this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThDCDTKw90Q 

Transportation 

Fellow Virginians may enjoy this documentation that it's possible for road problems to be worse than ours. Much much worse. I chortled.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2026/03/how-to-fix-roads-in-florida.html

Writing 

Another pair of well-known synergistic partners in "creativity" were Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. A recent video, not recommended, claims that Keller's story was "fraudulent." He's referring to the version of it he got in primary school, which suggests that Sullivan only taught Keller how to finger-spell and then finger-spelled lectures to her at Radcliffe. Little girls who liked to read, in my time, probably all became Keller scholars as new books about her were pressed into our little hands; reading her collected works (collected, at least, up to the point where she identified her religion as Swedenborgian and her politics as Socialist) gives what is probably a more accurate impression. Keller had been a bright, precocious child for her first year and a half, so as a toddler she had learned some words and seen colors, which made it possible for Sullivan to teach her. Sullivan was poor, had poor eyesight, and had no other prospects in life but becoming Keller's teacher; even after marriage she (and her husband) clung to Keller's fame as a prodigy. 

Keller's books weren't exactly Pulitzer Prize material. People read her writing, as Joseph Addison had said of a speaker of his time, as they would pay to watch a dog walk on its hind legs, not because it was done well but because it was done at all. A short essay, "Three Days to See," may be the only thing she ever wrote that would have been considered original and good if an able-bodied person had written it. But for a blind person's writing Keller's work was oddly...visual. 

In her own letters and essays as in her unconsciously plagiarized story Keller seems to have been obsessed with the lights and colors she got from Sullivan's inaudible conversation, rather than writing about smell, taste, and movement as a blind person might be expected to do. She wrote in a goody-goody tone but it seems obvious that she felt entitled to use anyone else's visual imagery she could, whenever she thought it would improve an essay; I'm not sure that that's a bad thing, either--only that Keller seems to have known that her image wouldn't support any statements as frank as "If I can't see things, other people ought to be generous about seeing them for me." 

Real blind people have been known to instruct their writing assistants to "colorize my story" when they're trying to sell their writing to the general public, so Keller's decision to publish a travel essay with a description of fireworks reflected in the water is not as bizarre as some think. Real writers, blind or otherwise, used to be told up into the 1970s that sight and hearing were "better" senses to appeal to than smell, taste, or touch, so that aspect of Keller's writing may also make some sense. The fact remains that Keller wrote clearly, vividly, and expressing strong opinions, only in synergistic teamwork with Sullivan. After losing Sullivan she wrote with help from other personal assistants, but never again in the writing "voice" she'd developed with Sullivan.

Sullivan herself...well, she died first...never published a book under her own name.

Is that a description of a writer, whose opinions were not destined for popularity, narcissistically exploiting a fraud? I don't think so. Considering the attitudes both women had to contend with, not only as women but as disabled and, in Sullivan's case, "shanty Irish," I think it's a description of two talented people who were shy about speaking or writing without literally holding each other's hands. With valid reasons. I think, if Sullivan had been a narcissistic exploiter, she would have found someone to market books about her role as Keller's Teacher--rather than leaving Keller to write her biography after she died.

With and without Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller wrote fourteen books. Several became hard to find in the mid-twentieth century. But have they ever been reprinted in this century.

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Helen-Keller/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AHelen%2BKeller

I've long been bemused by synergistic teams in creative work. Anne Sullivan was neither the first nor the best known Sullivan to become famous as a collaborator. Rodgers and Hammerstein were an interesting pair. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. Clara and Robert Schumann. C.S. Lewis and his Inklings...

Sunday Book Review: A New Kind of Zeal

Title: A New Kind of Zeal

Author: Michelle Warren

Date: 2013, 2018

Quote: "It's 2030, and...Temperature's rising, food's disappearing, people are fighting, and lunatics are still preaching."

It's a hypothetical dystopian 2030. Elizabeth II is still Queen of England--age 104. (She's not onstage in the story.) New Zealanders are generally nice, not overcrowded people, so they're coping with food shortages by raising their own food and sharing it with neighbors, but even that worries Prime Minister James Connor, who fears that if the national government doesn't appear to be in control of things the globalists will take over. Bishop Mark Blake, father of Tristan (who utters the line quoted above), is a deeply unhappy widowed father of even more unhappy adult-sized children. And Joshua Davidson, a plainly dressed, charismatic, Christian young man, is turning hobo camps on the beaches into real parties. Joshua is a mixed breed. Some of his followers have determined that he's descended from both British and Maori royalty. Someone starts publicizing his speaking tours by calling him a king, though New Zealand is basically a democracy and no one expects, or wants, Joshua to do any actual ruling. Joshua believes in the separation of church and state.

But in some mysterious way, that allows this story to become a political parable, Joshua is destined to reenact the story of Jesus. He heals people who may already be dead. He promises people a spiritual way to meet the war and tsunami to come. He suffers horrible migraines and seizures after making contact with sinful people, reacting to the "spiritual darkness" of people who've decided that it's more palatable to call sin "darkness," and without being suicidal he's not trying to delay the day when his physical body will be allowed to die. And he attracts people with coincidental names, though they don't seem to be drawn directly from the saints--John is younger than Mark, James is Mark's friend rather than John's brother, and Rau Petera is a priest who speaks with the voice of caution rather than a fisherman who's always first with the wrong answer. There's a Rachel, too, and although she's too young to have children, she weeps with motherly love before the story's over. There's a Luke, and not a Eunice but a Eun Ae. With a cast like this there's probably a reason why no major character in this book is called Mary.

And then there's Tristan, the Sad Man, who's been in the Army, and his baby sister Selena, who is so rebellious that, since her dead mother and emotionally distant father were Christians, she's become a Satanist. Together with James and Mark they find themselves drawn into the roles of the enemies of Jesus. But the roles overlap and break down. In the real world the enemies of Jesus didn't live very long--Herod feared a new king because he was dying, Judas went out and hanged himself, Annas and Caiaphas weren't young. In this story the enemies of Joshua need to repent and be reconciled, not only because repentance and reconciliation are what Christianity is all about, but so that they can be major characters in the political parable that continues to unfold in two more volumes of their story.

Sinful people, this story tells us, would react to Jesus exactly the same way now, as professed Christians, as they did in Jesus' time. Well, not quite. Technology now allows people to be killed by methods that at least work faster than crucifixion.

Christians are told that we have "one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Jesus was unique. His mission will never be repeated. Historically, however, there have been many Christians who wanted to offer up to God whatever bodily suffering they had to endure, who wanted--and tried--to do everything Jesus did. In this story Joshua is able to do what many of the saints have prayed to be able to do, only a little more effectively than they did. 

This story is primarily for and about people in New Zealand but it's worth reading in any country. Most of the world could stand to learn a bit more about New Zealand.

Web Log for 3.26.26, with Virtual Shopping Trip

Status Update 

The weather's been delightful at the Cat Sanctuary. Seductive. I've spent time outside. The first butterfly of spring may have been Iryna's Azure; the ones with white underwings are fairly common, and often the first to fly in spring, here. Then came a pair of Tiger Swallowtails, circling each other in the air in a courtship dance, and, minutes later, a small Fritillary, and a little dark Skipper, and on the next day more Spring Azures, some with white underwings, some with pale blue, and some with pale brown. Only two daffodils bloomed, got snow on the flowers; the rest seem to have decided not to bloom for a good long time. Neighbors who get more sunshine had crowds and hosts. Violets have bloomed, and azaleas, and forsythia. 

I had a fairly bad glyphosate reaction yesterday evening. Blood and pains--they weren't in the heart, thank goodness, though some women have said they felt the pain of a heart attack as coming from further down. I've had pseudo-cardiac symptoms that never turned out to be from cardiac disease, occasionally, for years. They all seemed to be reactions to some sort of chemical residue in the air. Not glyphosate, but something else that's sprayed along road verges. I don't know how common this is but want the idea to be Out There for discussion. If you or a family member have had something that seemed as if it might be cardiac disease, but it passed quickly and there are no other signs of cardiac disease, you might want to find out which local roads or fields have been sprayed recently, and with what. 

And the computer had a severe Microsoft reaction yesterday afternoon, and all through the night. I restarted itself once. It restarted itself six times. So when I was paying attention to the laptop it was misbehaving. I did get some butterfly studies done, but very little else. 

Glyphosate Awareness 

Glyphosate may be breeding "super" disease germs that resist antibiotics:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/microbiology/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2026.1740431/full

Virginia Election 2026: Special Vote on the 21st of April

This is the one where we vote on how the votes in November will be counted. The situation is dire. Basically the Ds, who have been advertising so heavily they're making the whole special vote sound sort of wix and like something you'd want to sleep through, want to redraw the election districts NOT to represent the numbers of people in different places fairly, but to get more urban welfare dependents into every district in the Hump and Swamp so that only the Point still maps red--although the property owners of Virginia still do map red. 

This is the way they want to redraw the map:

Don't let it happen, Gentle Readers. The map the Ds are proposing obviously does not reflect the actual views of the electorate. We do not want all those Swamp types letting themselves be misrepresented and misgoverned by people they don't support, and then fleeing out here. We want them to stay and drain their own Swamp. We should all go out and vote NO on the 21st of April.

What say you, fellow Virginians? Is it worth the trouble to do like a group of voters who called on our US Senators this week, and all wear red to the polls?

The one shown above was marked down to $10 at the time of posting, so it's probably no longer available...

Not my style, but it looks cute on her. Tall women who want to look shorter love knee-length looks. At 5'4" I'd wear a knee-length dress if for some reason I wanted to look 4'8"; it's just never happened. I mean, I might be attracted to a man who was 5'2", but the illusion would shatter the minute people actually saw me standing beside him, so why bother.

I would wear that to an office job. Everybody knows I'm more arty than yuppie and like to swish a skirt around, anyway.

Sort of a compromise between arty and yuppie?

I don't think it's fair that the dress with the belted, bloused fit costs so much more than the ones designed to show off a trim waistline. We're going to burn off the winter fat! It's only March!

This one would be comfortable, but for daytime wear I'd want to take a few inches off the bottom. 

There's always the stylish shirt, not a T-shirt, to wear with a skirt, or even with trousers that reach to the top of the shoes.

Or the white, blue, black, or beige shirt or dress with a little cover-up.

And nobody else will ever wear palazzo pants as well as Melania Trump, but for those of us who are in between 5'2" and 5'6" or 5'6" and 5'10", there is something to be said for trousers that look like a skirt, so nobody expects them to reach to the top of the shoes while being clear of the bottom. The line between palazzo pants and culottes is fine. You can wear any length, so long as you're not actually walking on the hems.

Just some ideas. Of course we want to buy locally. But it's always good to dress up a little at the polls, and red is the best color for a lot of us to be photographed in.

Just sayin'!

Book Review: The Missing Bride

Title: The Missing Bride

Author: Zanna Mackenzie

Date: 2015

Quote: "If I do manage to complete my apprenticeship...the agency will offer me a job."

Amber, an apprentice for a private detective agency ("We're not the police. We're better than the police"), is assigned to find out who kidnapped the bride-to-be just before a big expensive wedding. 

At least it's a twist on the usual mystery and the usual romantic comedy. I don't know what to say. For those who like this kind of plot, I suppose this is the sort of thing youall like. I did not get into it or suspend disbelief, but that's me. 

Meet the Blog Roll: Laura McKowen

Moving down the blog roll, I paused to delete a couple of links to sites that used to be writers' blogs but have evolved into publishers' marketing pages, which is all right if the writers are putting their time into writing books, good for them, but it means that no blog posts are actually showing up on the blog roll and the sites are only taking up space that keeps new blogs from being added. I am likely to want to buy new books by e.g. Louise Erdrich, whose Birch Bark Blog has grown into a full-sized publisher's site for the new Birch Bark Books imprint. This new site is easy to find on Google. It is no longer an individual's blog.

This brings me to Laura McKowen. Her Substack is now hidden behind a paywall. She's not updating the web site that's on my blog roll. I still follow her, sort of. I'll mention her here because some people may want to follow her Substack. 

I am not and have never been even in her intended audience. Knowing he had alcoholic genes, my Irish and Cherokee father kept our home alcohol-free. I grew up with stories about what happens when people who have alcoholic genes use alcohol other than the way nature clearly intended it to be used--as cleaning fluid.

A beloved elder "had two more brothers that died back in the 1930s. They would beg outside bars, dig in garbage bins and drink whatever kind of alcohol or take whatever kind of pills they could find. They started drinking beer with friends, and what it did for them was make them so sick they wanted anything at all to make them feel better for a little while. They were in bad shape before they died. They were like old men. Neither of them was even thirty years old. Seeing how they died at least turned the two younger brothers in the right direction, but you can see how much damage they've done themselves." Both of the younger brothers were sober men with disabilities that showed when they talked; neither ever married or had children. 

An elder I never knew had had a long healthy life, with grandchildren, before some loss or illness unknown made her want to alter her consciousness. "She's in a hospital, on a locked ward. They talk about 'hitting the bottom'--she went down fast and hit that bottom hard. Most of your cousins just forget about her. Well, she sort of adopted her husband's family and forgot about us for a while, before you were born. Anyway A and B go out to see her when they can." 

A man who served in the same war with my grandfather, though they didn't apparently work together as buddies, didn't go down quite as fast. Apparently he'd been the neighborhood drunk for years. People felt sorry for him, but the story they told about him was just too good not to share. "Some neighbors found him lying on the ground. He said 'Are you dead too?' He must have been so sick he thought he'd died...and A said, 'Get up, [name]! You're not dead! If you were dead you'd see the fire!'"

Then of course there was the man from whom we rented a house, at times, before inheriting the house where I live now. Things he had done for beer money had included throwing lighted sticks of dynamite into the river to kill a lot of fish, some of which he then netted and sold. He seldom got up any more, but would draw a hand out from under the sheet to show visitors the first joints of two remaining fingers, and the stub of bone inside the "webbing" that had been the base of a thumb. He could still expand his hand; you could see a little knob at the inside edge of the hand move the "webbing" in and out. "What I got for dynamiting fish," he said. "It's not fair to the animals. Never fish with dynamite." He had been a carpenter, even a "house carpenter" who built wooden houses, and the ones that have not burned down are still standing. After the fishing incident he did some unskilled labor. His sober wife, who still worked though I was bigger and taller than she was by age ten, got a pretty good widow's pension for twenty-some years after he died; they were about the same age. 

And there was another old man who always hailed my brother and me as "boys." Probably he could see the difference, Dad thought; he was just saying he intended to treat us the same way. He was the only man we actually knew who'd ever been a coal miner. (We knew an old lady who'd been a coal miner's daughter; she was "the one from Appalachia," accepted that identity with pride, organized car pools to go back for visits. It was not disreputable to be a coal miner if you lved in Appalachia.) The way this neighbor had become a coal miner was that he was a mean drunk and, though he used to be strong and hardworking, nobody wanted to work with him. He was known for going home drunk and beating his wife. She was relieved when he got work in a mine fifteen or twenty miles away, and rejoiced when he moved on to one fifty miles away. During Dad's school years the man "got saved" and became a total abstainer from alcohol. He was still bad-tempered and disreputable, Dad said. "He was mean to his kids--they all left as soon as they could and never came back. You should say hello if he speaks to you, and it's all right to take a lift if he offers you one, I suppose, but try to steer clear of him. If he needs any help I'll do the visiting." Mother added: "Remember that song Ernie Ford used to sing? Coal miners were proud of being rough and mean. Nice people didn't want to know them." Oh, people in the towns that never had coal mines, in the Appalachian Mountains, just love people who think we all had connections with the coal industry. Only after gerrymandering put mining towns into our state delegate's constituency did we discover that, "If you think coal is ugly, look at poverty." 

I've never felt inclined to drink cleaning fluid. I have friends and relatives and readers who struggle to remind themselves that for them, too, alcohol is cleaning fluid. Most of us in my home town have Irish or Cherokee ancestors, or both. For about three out of four Irish people and three out of four Cherokee people, a dominant gene for alcoholism makes the rule "One drink, one drunk." Responsible use of alcohol means don't ever drink it. In other ethnic groups alcoholic genes that produce different patterns of alcoholic behavior are recessive, but for us, social rules based on the idea that there's anything normal or healthy about drinking alcohol are harmful rules that have been deliberately used against us. (Those rules have been used to discriminate against the alcoholic minority in those groups, too.) We are best off when we reject those customs altogether; when even the Communion wine served in thimble-sized cups at church is unfermented "new wine," a.k.a. Welch's grape juice. People who feel a need to imbibe stuff that weakens their grip on reality are not the kind we want doing responsible jobs. Alcoholism is one category of "disability" that can and should remain potential rather than actual, without ever limiting anyone's opportunities in life.

In short; I believe Jesus turned the water into wine at Cana, but if He'd been present in the body at a wedding here and someone had brought wine, He'd be more likely to turn the wine into water. Maybe into soda pop, which, we in the Southern States have a right to affirm with pride, has displaced wine as a party drink in our culture. So let it remain. Let stupid German ideas about a real man not actually being an extrovert, but having built up a high tolerance for  alcohol as the depressant that acts first on the conscience and produces temporary extroversion, rot in the grave with Hitler. God gave sober Americans the ability to defeat beery Germany for a reason. We should celebrate the superior merits and achievements of our AA-friendly culture; we should help European visitors discover how much healthier and more productive they, too, can feel when they learn to drink coffee or soda pop or, at least when they're in parts of the US where water has not yet been made nasty, plain water, with meals. Maybe they could even stop destroying their cultural heritage with their never-ending tribal wars. European civilization would be a fine idea, if tried...but that's not the point of this post.

I have reasons to believe that I inherited alcoholic genes, but I've never tested the hypothesis. In the diplomatic community a lot of drinking went on. My husband was a heavy drinker when we met. I said, "I don't want to live in a house where alcohol is drunk." Ours was a house from which some expensive bottles were taken to parties, or to his big house in Maryland where up to six couples could stay in guest suites if they were too drunk to drive home, but if my husband reached for a glass I said, "If you're drinking, I'm driving," so most of the time we both stayed sober. Though he was not an alcoholic and said that some of those parties were only fun if you drank fairly heavily at them, he liked being sober enough to spend less time at those parties. He credited sobriety and daily meditative walks, in fact, for what turned out to have been remission from cancer, during the years when we celebrated that it hadn't been a more common and treatable kind of cancer. I never tried to nag him out of drinking. He had one friend who was a mechanic; when that friend came out to do maintenance on the car they'd drink at least one six-pack out in the yard. My husband was the one who noticed that he felt better on weeks when that had not happened. And that it's not necessary to have physical Irish ancestry to laugh out loud, or even sing out loud, in the company of Irish-Americans.

Laura McKowen is a recovering alcoholic who decided to publish books that are no longer anonymous. They're not case histories; they're about things she learned from life experience, going beyond the basic alcoholic story, that may be helpful to other people who are or are not alcoholics.

The "anonymous" twelve-step groups have produced books. Unfortunately, anonymity means that any details that might make a story fresh or funny have been cut out. People tell the same story over and over. 

My name is (kindergarten name or "street name"), and I am an alcoholic (or addict). (Number of years or even months) ago, I was drinking or using (whatever). I passed out and forgot to come to work a few times, like fifteen or twenty times, so my employer told me not to come to work any more. That made me feel bad, so I reached for relief in a bottle of booze/pills. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital feeling terrible. (Optional: They told me I had done something I was lucky to have survived.) (Optional: I had destroyed my own (body part/s).) While I was still in rehabilitation, I joined this group. I knew I had to replace my addiction to alcohol/drugs with an addiction to the group and I'm so thankful to have met such congenial people. When I feel like reaching for the bottle, I call my recovery buddies and, if we can't get to a full group meeting, we have a meeting of our own in somebody's house. (Optional: I know I will never work as a (surgeon, pilot, teacher) again but I am just glad to be alive and employed as a (dishwasher, salesman, massage therapist). I am just taking my life One Day At A Time...

It's a good story, but in these groups' "Big Books" it may be repeated fifty or a hundred times. For the person who needs to be reading and telling that kind of story, it's good to read it over and over and find that the same general process worked for the surgeon, the teacher, the truck driver. For the rest of us... well...

This web site has its own anonymity policy. Knowing that all blog hosting sites fund themselves by tracking our "interests" and selling our profiles to advertisers, we never mention anyone's real-world contact information. So all I'll say about the person who recommended Laura McKowen's blog is that person really worked a twelve-step program as a spiritual discipline during the last ten years of per life. One thing that person did was to recommend Laura McKowen's blog, and books as she wrote them, both to people at an earlier stage of recovery and to people who don't feel a need to get drunk or stoned.

Because McKowen's message is not limited to "just replace the physical/emotional addictions to substances with a purely emotional addiction to your group, call meetings when you feel tempted to drink or use other drugs, and take it one day at a time," but goes on into insights into work and family life and spirituality, I think sober women will appreciate her writing too. It's no longer available free of charge. If you have a disposable income, you might find her writing worth supporting.

Book Review: Claws Clues and a Deadly Detour

Title: Claws Clues and a Deadly Detour

Author: Pandora Gale

Date: 2026

Quote: "[B]est stay in your room tonight. Inn gets...restless."

When her car broke down, Crowe thought she heard a psychic voice calling her to go to the inn in town and help someone. When she lay down in her room in the inn, she dreamed about a big fluffy Maine Coon cat being locked up because people were calling him "the Phantom Cat" and associating him with human trouble. So she uncages the cat and immediately there's a murder for them to solve. 

The cat is in the lead. He has psychic powers. In his past he was worshipped by humans who called him Lucifer. He doesn't like most humans or wish them well. He likes scaring the guilty into confessing. I think this book was written with more comedic than satanic intentions, but it's the kind of book that used to trigger "satanic panic." 

If you read Lucifer as an animal who' s been abused by Satanists rather than an old school witch burner's notion of a familiar demon in animal form, you might want to read the rest of a series about Lucifer and Crowe. I wouldn't spend money. The cute, whimsical, funny part of this series is going to be a phobia trigger for someone you know. There are better cozy mysteries.

Book Review: Vision of the Heart

Title: Vision of the Heart

Author: Mary Crawford

Publisher: Diversity Ink

Date: 2015

ISBN: 978-0692619605

Quote: "We all made a pact to continue to be nurses as long as we could stand with walkers."

But Julia developed macular degeneration first. During the time frame of this story she still sees large shapes and colors, but is classified as legally blind. This is a short e-book in which Julia pushes herself to go to a reunion. Instead of reinforcing her belief that she's become useless, she finds ways to stay active in the nursing field.

It's fiction, but the Author's Note makes clear that it's autobiographical to some extent too. It's not a romance--Julia is happily married with grown-up children--but it opens a series of romances about the younger people in its fictional world. 

Everyone who works with computers daily, feeling the tension between "Looking at blinking boxes is hard on our eyes" and "To a considerable extent computers can replace our eyes," is likely to be interested in this book.

A Genre I'd Like to Read More

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "A Genre I'd Like to Read More of in the Coming Year." 

That would be nonfiction.

Nonfiction does not fit into the Book Funnel's marketing mold, which is one great thing in its favor. 

My tastes flipped, during my reading lifetime. As a child I was most interested in fiction, and various adults used to try to push me to read more nonfiction, to which I used to respond by choosing the most frivolous topics available. Books written to teach things to children tended to be dumbed-down and preachy and aimed at boys. Children's novels had a better chance of being interesting and aimed at least partly at girls, and sometimes piqued my interest enough that I even looked up a topic and read nonfiction about the topic, to find out what the characters in a novel were talking about.

As an adult I found it to be the other way round. Novels written for adults can be very good, but are generally pretty bad. In the twentieth century the consensus of literary critics' opinion was that genre fiction--romances, mysteries, "westerns," and many critics added science fiction--was garbage. So what were the rules for novels that were not considered garbage? Some critics liked a lot of travel; some liked a "cross-section of society," with something like DEI in the selection of characters. Depressingly few, and nearly all of them were female, wanted the female characters to be believably human. Serious literary fiction was usually about adultery, or murder when everybody knew who'd done it; it focussed on the male experience and usually involved a lot of alcohol and tobacco, and had the general mood of a dirty ashtray. The critics always paid tribute to authors who could write about war, but they were more interested in authors who, like themselves, had been unfit for service.  \

Cartoon by James Thurber, who was actually one of my favorite twentieth century male writers.

Mostly the male writers and their characters lived in places where women lived too, and had active relationships with women; in the twentieth century any hint of sympathy for homosexuality would cost a book sales, even after the left-wingnuts of then took up homosexuality as a cause and actively marketed it to, e.g., graduate students in literature or psychology. But the successful male writers tended to write about their relationships with women as if they would rather have been homosexual. They wrote like a lot of pathetic aging graduate students, all sitting around in someone's basement wearing black shirts and getting drunk, terrified that marriage would lead to responsibility and gainful employment and would destroy their creativity. In most cases, if they had lost all interest in writing books, from the viewpoint of English Literature that might have been a good thing.

This attitude had, of course, already spawned the beginning of the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of Loony Left feminism, as defined by divorcing men (sometimes they were those male writers, sometimes the audience for the male writers), having abortions, using bad language, wearing polyester leisure suits instead of dresses, not admitting it if they liked children, screaming in the streets at political demonstrations for this and that, picking up disgusting diseases because in the thinking of those days people who weren't married and weren't seriously religion were supposed to summon the stork as soon as they'd shaken hands, writing convoluted arguments about how a sexual act to which they had consented at the time was really a form of rape because male privilege, and sitting around in someone's basement wearing polyester pantsuits and getting drunk. Some women who got into that lifestyle were depressed, for what then seemed the obvious and sufficient reason that it was a depressing lifestyle. Meanwhile women of less extreme views made great progress just by being less depressing to have around than the Loony Left.

One sign of this progress was that literary critics were forced to stop raving about fiction in which male characters' idea of success was to sleep around without ever getting married, and acknowledge the merits of novels in which women achieve what they want to achieve without, or in spite of, men. Literary critics could now celebrate novels like The Color Purple as being much better than novels like I'll Take Manhattan, in which the twenty-something chick saves the family business from her evil uncle by taking a loan from the young Donald Trump. 

What the literary critics carefully avoided saying, Joan Aiken, whose father the literary critics admired, was able to say: Adults writing for adults usually rely on stereotyped characters and predetermined plots. Fiction for adults only occasionally reflects any real "creativity." Adults writing for children often mix up the stereotypes and twist the plots in ways that add humor and freshness to their fiction. As a result a novel for children, about how the protagonist survives the first term at a school with a tradition that nobody speaks to new students, or qualifies to be a prairie schoolteacher at age seventeen, or just wins the championship game, can be more interesting and realistic than a trite tale of adultery and murder for adults. 

Or even a good tale of adultery and murder for adults. Macbeth is a classic fictional reenactment of real history that gave new phrases and even new words to our language, but what it really tells us is that murder is a bad idea. Er, um, we knew that. 

But nonfiction liberates writers from having to worry about making characters recognizably different from stereotypes, and allow them just to describe what happened. Nonfiction written for adults is much more varied, realistic, broad-ranging, etc., than novels written for adults are. Good nonfiction does have a plot; it tells a story about how one unique event happened, or how several similar events have happened, or how a writer set out to find out what happened. Good nonfiction is fun to read even if you're not researching that specific thing that happened. Good nonfiction doesn't have to be as "creative" as James Herriot's veterinarian stories to be well worth reading, for information or for entertainment, and when the information in good nonfiction goes out of date, good nonfiction still has value as history and as entertainment. Good nonfiction is what blogs would like to be when they grow up. All bloggers can benefit from reading good nonfiction books.

Some examples of what I mean, or what I'd like to discover:

Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians

John James Audubon, Birds of America

Sue Bender, Plain and Simple

Elisabeth Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

Booton Herndon, The Seventh Day

Tony Horwitz, One for the Road

Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse

Shirley Jackson, Life Among the Savages

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (or The Five Loves)

Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes

Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Dedth

V.S. Naipaul, A Turn Through the South

Kathleen Norris, Dakota

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Vance Packard, The Waste Makers

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

New Book Review: Healing Hearts

Title: Healing Hearts

Author: Violet McBride

Date: 2026

Quote: "The second wave hit harder than the first--hard enough to rip the roof off my cafe."

This is a woman's romance. What does Terry look like? She looks like someone who really listens to a child, and like someone who visits an injured employee in the hospital, and like someone who's never had much money and is dodging a bill collector after the storm damaged her cafe. Even in the chapters narrated by Daniel, the father of the child to whom Terry listens, we see Terry's good character more than her pretty face or perfect figure. I'm not sure I believe it, but I like it. Women would like the men we marry to see us that way.

Anyway: Terry and Daniel don't like each other on sight, but "enemies to lovers" is a cheap grab at a popular plot element. They're not enemies; they just meet under unpromising circumstances, when Terry sees Daniel as an impediment to getting her injured employee into the right part of the hospital. Terry feels some urgency about that because, after Natasha is taken care of, she has to find a place to stay other than her wrecked building. Helpful townsfolk deliver her straight to Daniel's house. He has a room, and could actually use a housemate, because his wife died in a motor accident a few years ago. He has plenty of money and hardly any time, because he is a doctor.

When we see Daniel's little boy chattering happily and Terry really listening, we know the father won't take much longer than the son does to fall in love with her. Because both Daniel and Terry are basically nice people, their emotional wounds clean and simple, the story moves quickly.

If you like a clean, wholesome romance where most of the kissing goes on offstage, you'll like Healing Hearts. 

Petfinder Post: Furry Friends and the Philosophy of Love

Why do we love our pets?

Obviously the almost unconditional love dogs, cats, horses, and most chickens show to anyone who brings them food treats regularly is not the only attraction. We don't love all animals alike. We admire specific qualities in the individual animals we know. We love the big police dog who scares away evildoers while being just a playful puppy at heart, and the tiny Chihuahua who sits at our feet begging to be picked up, and the lap cat who always purrs and cuddles, and the tough old alley cat who occasionally deigns to sniff the hand that feeds him, in different ways, just as we love different friends and relatives. 

And what do we love in our friends (human and otherwise) and relatives? 

I was thinking about this yesterday. First the chap who does odd jobs for the neighborhood came into town. Nobody was paying him to do anything; he had errands to do, and thought he'd stop and see whether any money could be made along the way. I couldn't go anywhere, I said, because I'd promised to work for someone. Someone who didn't show up, and didn't show up, and finally rolled up the road at 2pm to say it was too late to do the job he'd planned for the day. 

As an independent contractor I have a very simple fee system for odd jobs.  Fifty dollars a day for scheduled work, a hundred dollars for those who want to pop in when they feel like it and see whether I have time to work for them. Because popping up at the last minute is always more trouble than doing a job as planned and scheduled. Always. Without exception. No matter how much I need the money, or enjoy the work, or even enjoy your company. I do enjoy the company of most of the people for whom I work, but they are a lot more enjoyable when they show enough respect for themselves and for me to make plans and stick to them.

This thought led me to further reflections on the difference between the way introverts naturally, instinctively make friends by showing respect for other people, and the way extroverts try to force friendship by grabbing for control of everyone's moods.

I've been reading, seriously, a trilogy of novels by a Christian who re-visions a man--not Jesus, but a great saint who chooses to serve as a reflection of Jesus--who does what Jesus did, in a modern, mostly Christian society, and, well, the difference is that we no longer crucify people, so this man gets shot. I'm reading these stories with this controversial premise because the author's e-mails have convinced me over the years that she's a serious Christian who wants to provoke serious self-examination in churches and individuals. 

In the novel, the people who take the place of Judas and Caiaphas are a family who seem sad more than bad, at first. They were a typical suburban nuclear family: father, mother, son, daughter. Then the mother died. None of the other family members can be blamed for the fatal car crash but, over the years, they've all dumped their bad feelings on each other and failed to make peace afterward. They've formed habits of emotionally abusive conversation that bring out their most unpleasant feelings, under the influence of which they make the bad choices that eventually lead to a conspiracy to murder a friend. Yes. If we take our emotional moods seriously, they can lead us to make bad choices.

So, should Christians, or people of good will generally, try to fix our emotional feelings so that they don't lead us to make bad choices? I don't think that's the best approach. Psychotherapists have traditionally fed attention to buried emotions, to help people who have buried emotions and memories come to terms with what is really troubling them and making them "neurotic." For some people who have in fact buried emotions and memories, that approach has been helpful. For most of us, who remembered all of the major emotional crises in our pasts, who may have "uncovered buried memories" of things that obviously did not happen after using drugs that are known to generate pseudomemories congruent with the damage the drugs do to the sensory-motor nerves, it's not helpful. Someone who really has managed to suppress all memories of having had painful surgical operations as a baby or having lost a parent at age six might really need to feel the emotions that come with those memories (or even with present-time reimaginings of what they might have been) to feel emotionally whole. For more of us, however, the emotions that went with everything from that bad case of flu we had at age four, on up through the school friend telling other people the big secret we told person in grade eight, all the way to the person who thinks person can get away with the ludicrous lawsuit person has filed against us now, have never been buried. They've been felt and faded out of our awareness. Dragging them back up to try to feel those emotions all over again does not fix them, nor does it stop us feeling fear, anger, or grief in new situations. We can't fix our emotions because they're not meant to be fixed. Like our physical sensations, they serve a purpose; they bring things to our attention, and then they fade away, replaced by more current "feelings" about the new conditions around us. 

Both sensations and emotions can, of course, be "false," as symptoms of unhealthy conditions, in and of themselves. We feel pain when our sensory nerves deliver the message that our bodies are being damaged. We feel angry when our unconscious brains deliver the message that a situation is harmful and needs to be changed, anxious when the message is that the situation is harmful and we need to flee, depressed when the message is that the situation is harmful and can't be improved by anything we might do. Any of those messages may be inaccurate. Pain may be felt as if it were coming from the foot the surgeon just cut off, not because anything is now being done to the foot, but because the nerves are recovering from having been cut. Anger or anxiety may be felt as if a situation were harmful when it's not. Even happiness might be "false"--when we receive what feels like good news, and it's not true. 

It's not easy for most young people, but it is a valuable life skill to develop, to route all "feeling" messages through the logical part of our brains. Think through those "feelings." Identify the facts and deal with them. Merely thinking about the facts will usually do a lot to distract us from unpleasant feelings. The facts may be very unpleasant and the unpleasant feelings may be there to stay for a long time. A broken leg is not going to win any athletic awards for at least a few months. A departed friend is gone forever and, no matter how many other people we like on how many different levels of friendship, But learning to focus on the facts can reduce the intensity of the pain we feel.

The young sometimes fear that learning to focus on the facts will push them prematurely into the future, making them the dreaded Older Person Who Has No Feelings. The physical process of "feeling" does involve hormones. The hormones that dominate most young people's attention are released into the blood at different levels on different days, and those levels drop significantly with age. The hormones associated with other things, like pain, food, nature, music, sleep, and doting on grandchildren, seem to be more reliable. People who have learned to Fix Facts First and let Feelings Follow can consider a situation, conclude that the relevant facts are very nice, just as they are, and choose to wallow in pleasure. Women in the generation before mine might not have admitted they wallowed in the pleasure of sex, and their denial may even extend to not liking the phrase, but most of them did unmistakably wallow in the pleasure of being grandmothers. 

The trouble is that some unfortunate people, namely extroverts, want to imagine that whatever other people are feeling is all about them. They are the center of the universe! (They think!) Someone else may have a tooth cracked right along a raw, bare nerve--dental surgery is not always perfect--but that person has no right to be more conscious of per tooth than person is of ME AND MY WONDERFUL SELF! 

Part of the twentieth century's attempt to make civilized society over as a support group for people who, in previous ages, probably would have been considered idiots if they survived at all, has been this obsession with good feeling at the expense of good will. It's become positively predictable that people writing about the benefits of kindness, nowadays, urge people to grin and chatter like monkeys rather than advising them to show good will through voluntary behaviors like paying debts, being on time, and doing good work. 

"Smile! It makes people feel good!" Oh, those poor people these writers seem to know. What ever would they do without these writers to manage their emotional moods for them? In previous centuries writers on etiquette advised people not to smile or laugh without explaining what they were laughing at. That advice may not sound as cheerful, but it seems to me more helpful, than the exhortations to try to force a "smile." In the first place a forced smile doesn't even look like the real thing. Then there's the genuine smile or laugh that, if not shared or at least explained, looks like a heartless laugh at someone else's distress. And then there's the fact that it's not my business, not even my place, to "make" you feel anything, nor is it appropriate for you to eset out to make me feel anything. Nobody likes being manipulated. 

People who are in fact friends tend to smile and laugh easily when they are together. If they were taught not to laugh without explaining what they were laughing at, as C.S. Lewis observed, "some pretext in the way of jokes is usually provided." but the jokes didn't need to be "good" enough to make people laugh when they weren't rejoicing in the company of friends. Or, if a friend is just a bit selfconscious and might think we were laughing at, e.g., her clumsiness with her new prosthetic leg, there might be some pretext in the way of an explanation: "It was the way you said 'beach.'  I've missed you and going to the beach with you so much for so long. It's good to see you back here." 

I enjoy smiling and laughing with friends as much as anyone else does but I'm annoyed by those exhortations to the ignorant to try to be a manipulator rather than a person who is really worth knowing--someone who pays debts and arrives on time and drives responsibly and doesn't litter and generally shows respect for self and others every day. I need no more monkeylike grinning and chattering in my life. Monkeys aren't even my favorite exhibit in the zoo. If you want to be someone at whom I laugh in sheer delight, saying, "It's so good to see you again," don't take monkeys or even television actors as role models. Take men and women of good character.

Responsibility, which can be expected only from adults, and respect for others, which is normally shown by children and animals too, are part of the good character of anyone a self-respecting introvert wants for a friend. The other things we like about our friends vary. To people of High Sensory Perceptivity every close relationship probably feels different from every other close relationship. If we have six sisters, there might be two or three for whom we have very similar feelings--"the little ones" who came along after we had emotionally or even physically moved out on our own; the ones with whom we grew up are as different from one another as A from B. 

And so it is likely to be with animals. Animals who aren't real pets may seem interchangeable. Some people don't give names to chickens; most people don't give names to wild animals that share their homes. Some people don't give names to cats. Almost all people give names to horses and dogs. It seems as if the differences among bigger animals' "personalities" are more easily noticed than the differences among smaller animals. 

I suspect this applies even to large animals that don't have a great deal of "personality," like cows. I remember a year when my parents boarded a total of four cows, two or three at a time. They weren't pets but each one seemed to be a distinct "person." 

For those who pay attention, it most definitely applies to cats. Serena, who was born a dominant female, and her daughter Silver, who has put up with Serena all these years because she's not at all dominant, are a nice complementary pair. One factor in Silver's having been such a dutiful daughter was probably that for several years, while he was alive, Silver had a real pair bond with the senior cat I called Sommersburr; after he died Silver went to live with another social cat, and when he, too, disappeared Silver came home. She lived with different humans and became accustomed to different arrangements; this has led to some behavior that seems almost like delayed adolescence. Both cats are middle-aged ladies by now, usually polite and decorous, but not altogether above mischief and silliness.

"Where's Serena got to? Oh there you are," I'm likely to say, not every single day but probably on more than half of our days. Serena blinks slowly at me, a gesture that seems to indicate trust and affection. "I love you, Serena," I say, blinking back.

"Gurk," Serena may or may not actually say. It's a sound she makes, not a mew or a meow. It means "Let's have a good fast game."

I may or may not run a few yards up and down the road, or trail a stick around the yard, for Serena to chase. It means "I like you enough to try to tell you I like you in your preferred love language."

Most readers of this web site already live with animals who exchange messages of good will, trust, affection, and yes, even family love with them regularly. Some of you blog about them; some don't.  I count several of your animals as e-friends: Mudpie, who started the whole Petfinder photo theme at this web site. Suzy and Toots and Old Buddy at the Meow. Mr. Baby Sir. Link Linker the Stinker. Loulou and her friend the alley cat. Louis the kayak cat, who recently bequeathed his place to a younger Maine Coon cat. Rolf the Campus Cat. Abby Lab, heir of Barkley. Winston of the Scottie Chronicles. And (may he rest in peace) Valentino the handsome hound. They're all privileged pets, Internet celebrities, spokes-creatures for good causes. Then there's Javier Reinoso's social cat colony in Venezuela, which everyone should follow and support to whatever extent their finances allow...

https://x.com/reinosoj2 (the social media posts)

gofund.me/7634249f  (the GoFundMe page)

They are all hungry, homeless, deeply lovable social cats who live in peace, on small rations of food, on city streets. Sometimes there are dozens of them. They don't have humans to help groom their coats. They seem to do that for one another. I worry about cat colonies of this size. Social cats are by far more interesting than normal cats, but they are more vulnerable to contagious diseases because they live in family groups who share food and may sleep in heaps. Donations can help buy food to maintain strong immune systems and vaccines against FIV, FLV, and rabies. 

So why, you may ask, do I subject these readers to appeals on behalf of animals they can't adopt? Because there are things we can do for the animals we can't adopt. We can help boost their signals by reblogging their stories and sharing their photos on social media. We can even, after careful investigation of a rescue organization, pre-pay part of the adoption fee to make it easier for people to offer them homes. 

Mudpie started it with a blog post about a cat her human couldn't adopt. Heather, who was Queen of the Cat Sanctuary before Serena, encouraged me to keep it up. (She didn't really engage with the animal photos but she did purr and cuddle on my lap while I was writing about them.) Serena...developed more tolerance for the laptop computer when she was ill enough to spend days indoors, but it's still more a thing she indulges me in than a thing she actually does with me. She does, as Heather did, seem to hope all these shelter animals find good homes, a good long way from here. For although social cats, like dogs, are able to increase hunting success by hunting as teams, they still instinctively avoid crowded conditions.

Here are some photogenic animals seeking homes in the Eastern States, guaranteed by people who've lived with them to be easy to love.

Zipcode 10101: Tiramisu from NYC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/tiramisu-22ddf55e-691a-46c0-b395-8f80076feb5b/ny/new-york/linus-friends-fl1765/details/

Tira mi su is Italian for "pick me up," often used as a name for a sweet snack, also a name for a friendly kitten. Tiramisu likes to be picked up and petted. Five months old in February, she's only just ready to take over a home of her own. She's not been around children, but she behaves well around other cats and dogs.

Pickles from NYC 

https://www.petfinder.com/dog/pickles-e7eefcbc-2600-4b8f-aeab-67c38a798dac/ny/new-york/linus-friends-fl1765/details/

He's a lap dog. Chihuahuas don't need much more space than cats--they can get adequate exercise as indoor pets--and they can live as long as cats do. Pickles is described as just a puppy. He's not yet house trained and they don't know how well he behaves around children, but he gets along with other dogs and cats. He likes to play and explore and snuggle up to his human for a nap, and has been known to lick people's toes. That would be a deal breaker for me, but somebody Out There will love it.

Zipcode 20202: Cordelia from South Carolina by way of DC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/cordelia-4a16f47e-4126-45a0-bed6-f88f2cb8ebde/dc/washington/final-victory-animal-rescue-sc497/details/

They say she's a small, quiet, young cat, probably as big as she's meant to be, looking for a place where she can feel safe. She can ride along with someone from South Carolina who drives up and down the coast weekly, or you can come there to meet her. 

Alice from DC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/alice-9b47b940-76d3-4d4e-b004-77e14ad2c3aa/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-dc28/details/

There is still an oldfashioned animal shelter on Oglethorpe Street. Alice is there. Go ask Alice and she'll tell you she wants a good home. She's still a puppy who needs training. She is described as goofy, eager, and affectionate.

Zipcode 30303: Shiraz from Chattanooga 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/shiraz-87cf044a-f7fa-498b-ab36-70cbfb7506dd/ga/atlanta/your-local-fur-mama-tn1052/details/

This kitten is a future Queen Cat. They don't insist that she be adopted along with a loyal subject who doesn't need a great deal of attention, but it would probably be a good idea. Shiraz is described as sweet and sassy. She'll snuggle beside you for a nap, and let you know when it's time to play. She does well with other cats ,dogs, and children, if they've been taught to show due respect.

Sasha from Pennsylvania by way of Atlanta

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/sasha-7d6fc508-db7a-4b23-b46a-d5fcf4de6171/ga/atlanta/sylvias-promise-rescue-inc-pa10002/details/

The adoption fee is ridiculous and the organization sound a bit control-freaky, but the pup is adorable. Ten weeks old when photographed, Sasha is thought to be a mix of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd. Those are large breeds, as indicated by her size in this baby picture. Her ideal home has a big yard with a high fence. Obviously Sasha has a lot to learn. A ten-week-old dog is a baby and can't be considered "trained" in any sense of the word. Really she ought to be with her mother. But she's described as bright, goodnatured, affectionate, eager to please. She could grow up to be an awesome dog.

Web Log, or Do I Mean Status Update, for 3.22.26

More of a status update than a web log. 

So where are the hot'n'juicy links? some readers are thinking. I feel their thoughts coming up through the keyboard. Actually I see them in the computer's report on what people are reading. 

Well...I've got into this pattern, lately. I allocate some time to reading the blog roll and e-mail. Every day I check the e-mail for anything real, y'know, hand-typed by a person I actually know. Then I read the e-mails that the Proton view flags as computer-generated and/or generated by a computer other than the one whose address they're using (meaning Book Funnel), which is 99.9 percent of the e-mails, from the top down for the time allotted. I read 10 to 20 e-mails per day. I receive 100 to 200 e-mails per day. There is clearly a problem; it would help if Book Funnel stopped spamming people who want to promote actual books and writers. Anyway, although I'm still on mailing lists for various news and writing sites, 97% of the e-mail comes from people who want to (1) sell me books, (2) send me review copies of books, or (3) nag me to post the reviews of the e-books they e-mailed to me last winter, which, if sent by e-mail, are probably still sitting in last winter's unopened e-mail. I don't receive a great deal of news links any more.

And very few of these people are even e-mailing about my books. 

"Your books? I've not seen your books in Books-a-Million lately...?" No; the ones that have been there have been under other people's names. I have written more than three dozen books by now. Some have been revised and published under author names and titles other people chose. Some are still waiting for a satisfactory publishing deal. Some are the "Special Products" this web site offers, the PDF or printed compilations of blog posts; technically they've been distributed rather than published since they've not been sold in stores, but those first-book-manuscript contest judges count them as having been published since they want to give the prizes to 25-year-olds. 

You can, of course, commission books. You knew that, didn't you? You can commission books you want to revise and publish as yours; you can commission books as souvenirs or special reports from me; you can even commission books you want to help publish as mine. They can be fiction or nonfiction, on almost any topic that has or has not been addressed in the blog posts as writing samples at this web site. They could contain gorgeous full-color pictures like some of the more recent posts at this web site, but while posting digital photos on a web site is "fair use," printing them in a book that is published for sale costs money. They can be poetry, recipes, humor, short stories, novels, or research. I enjoy the research most. 

You can even commission term papers or dissertations. Of course, although it's legitimate and traditional to use other people's term papers and dissertations in your own research, meaning you can use many of the same quotes and footnotes, you will want to rewrite the papers so they sound like you and throw in references to things discussed in your class and things you found in your school library. How else is the professor going to know you wrote them? You will receive term papers that got A's, or would have got A's, somewhere. If you just give them to your professor as I write them, you'll probably get an F and possibly be expelled, because the professor will know they are my writing not yours. It's up to you to ensure school papers can get A's at your school.

And this is the week you need to vote: Do you want this web site to have a Zazzle page? If we have one, the Zazzlers whose work is displayed may get more money from each sale; Zazzle's offering extra commissions to people who add Zazzle store pages to their sites. And my Zazzle page will sit modestly on the side of the screen and not interfere with your scrolling, as the Zazzle page at the Mirror does. And you should be able to see the digital mock-up of whatever you're buying, customize it, and order it by clicking on pictures at the page. And you will have to buy some merchandise that is decent quality for whatever it is, T-shirts or tennis racket covers or postcards or matchbooks or fabric--Zazzle prints lots of different things--but is, at least by Gate City standards, heinously overpriced; you will have to pay in advance for mail-order products and deal with any problems in the mail-order process yourself. Zazzle, like Amazon, generally delivers satisfactory products in a reasonable time. Nobody is perfect.

Microsoft 

It was a beautiful morning...and then Microsoft destroyed the afternoon by trying to force people to buy more Microsoft products. No, you can't use your Chrome browser! We want to show you the wonders of Microsoft Edge! The first mosquitoes of the season hatched this afternoon, too. 

MICROSOFT EDGE IS NOW BANNED FROM THIS HOUSE. Nobody is allowed to use Edge for any purpose unless Microsoft is well and truly humbled, probably by an act of Congress, such that Chrome runs without a hitch, without a blink, without a noticeable "update," for TEN YEARS. 

Boost Linux today, boost Linux today,

Oh, let's all go out and buy Linux today,

Because Microsoft are thieves, so let's make them pay!

Let's go and buy Linux today!

Anyone with the skills to reproduce what Microsoft Windows ME did, and to deliver complete web searches the way Google and Yahoo used to do, could submarine Microsoft and become a gazillionnaire. I mean you, Nephews. And the sooner the better.

War 

I hate war, as such. Any and all war. There have to be better ways of settling disputes.

I also hate when people express opposition to war in ways that amount to propaganda for the other side. 

Cartoon by Henry Payne for NationalReview.com; shared by Joe Jackson at TheViewFromLadyLake.com. 

If the wind off that plane were to sweep those clueless cheerleaders into the cold salt sea, wouldn't it serve'm right? We declared war. We need to finish it. By finish I mean win. And then we need to stay out of any other wars. And yes, I think it might help if we stopped electing men, at least for long enough to break the habit of killing foreigners just to flog our failing economy back to life.

Iranian readers, if we have any: I'm sorry about all this. Obviously I was not consulted. You should not claim to become Christians unless you really intend to be Christians. Be what you are. Do what the rest of the world do. Surrender, stop building bombs, and guilt-trip us into building all the shiny new schools and hospitals you can use for the next thirty years.