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. 

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.

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.

Would You Go Skydiving?

Today's Long & Short Reviews prompt is not much of a challenge. Short answer:

"Would you go skydiving?"

No.

Some of the five other reviewers who have replied so far have explained why: 

https://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-July-15-2026/ 

Web Log for 7.14.26

A glyphosate reaction is going on.

Music 

Someone who has a lot of wigs and appeals to Elon Musk, more than she does to me actually, but everyone has a right to sing per own song.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2074738585727590547 

King Crimson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YecBv-5JXmQ

Ross Sisters. I'm not sure I even believe the gymnastics at the end. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1J3NLNWAPU

Sandra Boynton.

https://x.com/SandyBoynton/status/2077000962820985010

Book Review: All Creatures Great and Small

Title: All Creatures Great and Small

Author: James Herriot

Date: 1972

Publisher: Bantam / St Martin’s

ISBN: 0-553-10759-3

Length: 499 pages

Quote: “My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book...There was no dirt or blood or sweat anywhere.”

The author known as James Herriot earned his living as a veterinarian for years, but really made his fortune when he started writing about his animal patients and the humans who helped and hurt them. Although most of his readers no longer lived with cows and sheep, each book contained some instructive, and some merely poignant or funny, stories about dogs, cats, and horses too. Gruesome details about animals’ diseases are scattered sparsely amidst charming pictures of country landscapes and amusing pieces of human folly. Through the 1970s and 1980s these books were bestsellers.

Of course, some of the people mentioned in these stories were still living, so names and identifying details had to be fictionalized. This volume of a five-book series focusses on the quirks of Herriot’s first employer and co-worker, to whom he gives the names of Siegfried and Tristan Farnon and a story about parents who loved opera. Dr. Farnon and Dr. Herriot are young bachelors; Tristan is a student; the lady known to readers as Helen Alderson Herriot is a pretty, popular girl who can hardly fail to see the farcical side of the three guys’ mostly ridiculous dating lives, but eventually marries James Herriot...and gets a ridiculous honeymoon adventure, at least in the book, as her immediate reward. A theme that runs through the book is the image of an elderly man reflecting on how silly youth is. This image may have served as a drop of oil on the waters in 1972, when grandparents were often called upon to reduce the tensions between students and their parents. Helen is cast as the sensible straightman while Siegfried, Tristan, and James make fools of themselves as regularly as their contemporaries in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.

All the names in these books, including the author's, are fiction; the author's real name was Wight. The events in the stories happened, but not necessarily in the same sequence, or involving the same people, as the books suggest. Herriot originally planned four long volumes, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made Them All; later, by popular demand, he added a sequel entitled Every Living Thing. All are worth reading for pleasure, although the stories are fact-based fiction and the veterinary insights are a hundred years out of date.

Still, some information is evergreen. Instructive stories in All Creatures Great and Small feature a spoiled, overfed dog who nearly died from overeating but recovered his health when put on a reducing diet and treated like a dog, a sad sequence of cows who died because their humans never called the vet until it was too late, and a cow whose inflammation was actually cured by a devoted human who sat up bathing and massaging the cow all night. There are also warnings about the less obvious symptoms of tuberculosis in cattle and the postpartum “madness” in which mother animals can become dangerous. The birth process is draining even in animals, like cats, who give birth easily; brain chemicals can be unbalanced; animal mothers may attack their humans or, less often, their babies.

Although the stories fit together into a sequence with an overarching "story arc," each chapter can be considered an independent short story. If your leisure reading time is limited, no worries—all the books in this series are ideal for those who choose to read just one short chapter a day. Since the only aspect of these books that is less than tasteful is the inherent disgustingness of veterinary medicine, the books also provide what might be called good clean wholesome gross-outs for middle school readers.

This book is warmly recommended to anyone who has not already read it, with the warning that most people over age thirty probably have. 

Web Log for 7.13.26

Not a lot of online time today...

Music 

Randy Newman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR8BBJz416Q

Sports 

Someone shared a video of the "historic" (in terms of tennis) tie-breaker match between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe. What caught my attention was how tired both then-young men were when they started this game. If you saw people looking and moving like that on a job, you'd say "Go home." By the time Borg won, each had taken a fall, and both were playing like zombies. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnwYdF8a5ws

Book Review: Hour of Gold Hour of Lead

Title: Hour of Gold Hour of Lead

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Date: 1973

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

ISBN: none

Length: 323 pages with index

Illustrations: four black-and-white photo inserts

Quote: “I was warned by my husband-to-be...‘nver write anything you wuld mind seeing on the front page of a news­paper.’..I stopped writing in my diary completely for three years.”

The “hour of gold” in this book is what Mrs. Lindbergh wrote about her life during those three years. As a result, the first section of her memoir, the happy bit, is sketchy, patchy, and not much fun to read; it consists of letters that were preserved by friends and relatives, but the letters were kept as short and cryptic as possible. She was a minor celebrity in her own right, married to a major one. Although it was well known that both of the glamorous couple liked their privacy, they were hounded by reporters, fans, and weirdos wherever they went. The photo sections show that they were too good-looking, in too conspicuous a way, to get far incognito.

The second section comes from the “hour of lead,” in which Mrs. Lindbergh resumed keeping a diary to vent the anguish she felt when her first child, Charles Junior, was kidnapped. A few older people still remember how the newspapers publicized the Lindberghs’ effort to raise ransom money, only to discover that Junior had been dead all along.

In the third section, after the long crisis period, Mrs. Lindbergh seems to have felt that she reached a degree of healing. Since we’re still reading letters and diaries that were written at the time, this resolution is not as obvious as a more psychotherapy-oriented book might have tried to make it. What may be most important, for any reader who might have lost a family member, is what Mrs. Lindbergh seems never to have needed to say in so many words: the Lindberghs didn’t blame each other for the tragedy. They grieved. Sometimes they isolated themselves, apparently by mutual consent, and sometimes they tried to be nice to each other. They believed that marriage was for life. In some ways they seem to have grown closer together; among other things Charles Lindbergh seems to have resigned himself, although this isn’t spelled out in so many words either, to the fact that he’d married a writer, who was going to write, and write about him, and if he wanted any privacy he’d better keep her manuscripts well guarded rather than trying to discourage her writing.

They were Christians, in a modest and unobtrusive way, but this third section is not the religious story some readers might have hoped for. There is a rather derisive reference to the kind of people who were saying that of course God had been holding up the planes, earlier in the book. Mrs. Lindbergh refers vaguely to a “Christian belief in immortality, in rebirth,” which aren’t the biblical words and which now suggest Pagan beliefs more than Christian ones, but she was not a theologian—or even a Bible maven—and probably we do know what she meant; in 1932 relatively few Neo-Pagans were using “rebirth” to mean “reincarnation,” and likewise relatively few fundamentalists were asking churchgoers whether they had been Born Again. What is specifically described in this “healing” section are temporal kinds of love. Charles Lindbergh was “marvelous.” Having the rest of the family still alive, in another day’s entry Mrs. Lindbergh reports someone tactlessly saying to her, “But you are happy,” then lists her living relatives, friends, and in-laws and concludes, “Yes, I am happy.” By the end of the book there’s another baby. 

This book is recommended to anyone interested in studying Mrs. Lindbergh as a writer, and to any bereaved persons who can tolerate the possibility that a simple day-by-day narration of someone else’s grief might sound even more appalling than whatever they’ve been going through.

Readers with depressive tendencies may need to be warned that, although Mrs. Lindbergh later remembered the last months of 1932 as the end of her time in the depths of grief, even on page 317 she’s still feeling “bitterly and passionately that I had lived too much in the past years.” The book ends on a hopeful note, with a friend who had seemed near death recovering enough to be married, but it stops short of the really happy times that lay ahead as the Lindberghs continued flying, writing about flying and about other things, and raising their other children.

If you’re depressive and doing research on the writer or her family, you need only slog through this book and on to the next volume—but it’s a long slog and I don’t currently have a copy of the next volume to offer. However, your library might still have one. 

Petfinder Post: Learning About the Brussels Griffon

Next on the list of dog breeds the British Busybodies don't approve is the Brussels Griffon. I never heard of such a thing. The dogs have been bred in the United States, and Petfinder has a category for them, but they're not normally found in shelters. Searching four pages yielded one listing for one dog. 

Derry from Dalton, Georgia...see below.

So what is a Brussels Griffon? The griffin, griffon, gryphon, etc., was an imaginary animal used in heraldry. It symbolized different qualities of the human character in the form of an animal with features of lion, eagle, and sometimes other things. A Brussels Griffon is a smallish dog with a "mane" of long hair--not around the neck like a lion's mane, but on the face like a man with a full beard. A closely related breed, sometimes called a smooth-coated Brussels Griffon and sometimes given fancier names, has short hair on the body; the Brussels Griffon is somewhat shaggy all over.

Photo from the American Brussels Griffon Association. To my eyes, this show-quality specimen is not attractive, but that's probably due to the way his coat's been clipped. 

Show-quality Brussels Griffons are up to 10 inches high at the shoulder and weigh up to 10 pounds. These cat-sized dogs live as long as cats; people adopting one need to plan on a life expectancy up to 15 years.

Show-quality Brussels Griffons come in four colors: black, reddish brown, black and reddish brown, or black and tan. The dogs are sometimes born light tan or "blue" gray all over. In that case they are not show-quality and might, like the individual we'll meet below, be sent to shelters.

They usually get along well with other dogs and children. Because of their small size, you may need to supervise to make sure the other dogs and/or children don't hurt the "Griffs." They tend to bond with one human and want to stay close to that person, even to the point of showing separation anxiety.

Some health problems run in the bloodlines of this breed. Potential adopters need to check for eye, heart, and joint disorders. Individuals who survive long enough to be adopted are usually healthy but, because of their long facial hair, their eyes and ears need attention. 

The long hair doesn't shed a great deal. The short-haired variety do shed, twice a year.

Although small dogs can get most of their exercise indoors, they do need at least a half-hour of exercise each day. Many Griffons like to chase and fetch balls. They are typically clever enough to compete in dog athletic events.

The breed can be described as easy to train, or difficult, depending on your approach. According to the American Kennel Club, starting early and understanding the dog's psychology are important. 

"

Griffs have a high degree of intelligence and bond strongly with their owners, which makes them easy to train. As with many toy breeds, though, housebreaking may take some extra time and effort. Griffons have a very sensitive nature, and they don't respond well to harsh corrections or training methods. A Griffon wants to be with his family, often following his person from room to room, and undesirable behaviors can result if he is regularly left alone for long periods of time.

"

And of course, because of their small size, you need to walk with them on a short leash whenever they're out where they could possibly run out into traffic. 

It's good to see so few Brussels Griffons up for adoption. In honor of this small breed this week's photo contest will focus on other small dogs and small cats. 

About small cats not much needs to be said. Almost all domestic cats we see today have been bred down to the small end of their species range. Their ancestors weighed about 30 pounds; they typically weigh 10 pounds, with slim, light-boned breeds like the Siamese often even smaller. Some cats weigh less than 10 pounds because of ill health. If you like small, thin cats (as I do) it's worth checking, before you adopt one, to find out what medical conditions may have contributed to their small size and which of them need treatment. A real featherweight cat, especially if just rescued from an alley, probably has multiple long-term parasite infections, treatment for which may be the cat's only chance of survival. A small, slim cat with solid little bones and wiry muscles usually has a good chance of living ten or fifteen years.

Zipcode 10101: Adrian from Puerto Rico via NYC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/adrian-704f20ad-2309-42af-b56e-b8b69126d679/ny/new-york/the-sato-project-ny1140/details/

Sato is a Puerto Rican word for a street dog, but Adrian was actually rescued from a small house where he was crowded together with about thirty other dogs. One of those pathetic "animal hoarders" who wants to adopt all the homeless animals on Earth even after the situation in the hoarder's house starts to seem worse, to everyone but the hoarder, than living in an alley would be. Somewhat shy and unaccustomed to what North Americans consider normal pet dog life, this 20-pound young adult dog is ready to move to a safe place with adequate amounts of space and attention.

Gardenia from NYC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/gardenia-19e219ca-7688-429c-a5c0-3b279804f9f5/ny/new-york/linus-friends-fl1765/details/

Thought to be three years old and healthy at just six pounds, Gardenia is described as friendly and respectful with other cats, snuggly, gentle, and lovable. 

Zipcode 20202: Dart from Amarillo by way of DC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/dart-94bfd3e8-8397-41b3-b483-56f4d79b456c/dc/washington/scouts-street-smart-rescue-tx2821/details/

A stray dog called Buttons was rescued along with a litter of five puppies. Here are the others, Patch, Lace, Velvet, and Stitch, who are also up for adoption:

The best guess is that Buttons was some sort of mini-poodle and Shih Tzu or other shaggy lapdog mix, and the puppies' father was something a bit larger, possibly an Australian Shepherd. None of the pups is expected to grow over 30 pounds, though they might pass 20 pounds. The organization has a list of places where animals can be adopted. They have a long, though not altogether unreasonable, list of requirements for adopters. They might be control freaks. It's not unreasonable to want to see some indication that a dog is going to have an adequate home; I'd go ahead and send them flatphone photos of the fenced yard and a nice doghouse, porch, or basement space where the dog's crate will be parked, but that's NOT the same thing as showing strangers through the human family's actual home, which is something they deserve to be shamed for suggesting. 

Pablo from DC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/pablo-b4a10ade-8b73-4de6-be12-78e0fa0cdbd1/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-foster-homes-dc03/details/

Pablo seems to be a healthy two-year-old tomcat who, for reasons unknown, has a healthy weight of just six pounds. He doesn't have much of a story. He is in a foster family; you can learn more about him by e-mailing his foster humans. 

Zipcode 30303: Derry from Dalton 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/derry-00e12192-69b9-4356-89f7-1d3896460028/ga/dalton/humane-society-of-nwga-ga07/details/

...makes it clear that poor little Derry has fallen into the hands of a virulent Humane Society gaggle of control freaks. You have to beg for a chance to meet her. They decide, based on your application pleas, whether they think you can live with her. They're not giving out any information about her to anyone they don't approve of. There's a distinct possibility that the lack of a story about this dog indicates that the Humane Society are aware of her having been petnapped by some US version of the Busybodies of Britain.

Feh. FEH. A glance at Derry's web page makes me want to breed dozens of Brussels Griffons and air-drop them over Georgia, although obviously that would not be an ethical course of action. You can, ethically, decide to adopt an alternative small dog, such as...

Alternate: Alfie from Atlanta 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/alfie-26864aca-1093-4fa4-b3bc-3ff541fbafb9/ga/atlanta/rescue-angels-of-ga-ga194/details/

This mini-poodle was found on the street, possibly dumped out because he had a skin infection. The infection cleared up with treatment, which included a short haircut. He has a smooth short silky coat now but he'll need frequent trims to stay that way. His hair will grow long, curly, and tangly if it's not clipped. Now this quiet, mellow, mature dog (they think he's about 13 years old, but mini-poodles can live up to 20 years) is ready to snuggle up on someone's couch and be a house pet again. The organization insists that he be adopted by someone in northern Georgia, only. The adoption fee is quite reasonable for a Poodle.

Ms. Tabby from Atlanta 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/ms-tabby-c52e1649-341a-4df9-8151-0da7d402b307/ga/atlanta/atlanta-humane-society-ga829/details/

Not much information is available about Ms. Tabby except that she's a small healthy adult cat. 

Web Log for 7.12.26

Blog Hospitality 

So on Friday before last, I got to one of those "blog hop" posts in time to add a post here to the link-up. This only incurred a need to read about thirty other people's blogs. Not a problem. I opened all the tabs. Then the sun was down. Not a problem. I could read those blogs on Saturday night.

Except that on Saturday night nobody in the Point of Virginia had electricity. 

Electricity returned on Friday. By then I had cyberchores to do before I read those thirty blogs. But I left the tabs open.

Finally, this Saturday night, I got to the thirty blog posts. 

A couple of them were completely closed to comments.

About half of them had that Googlitch where Google, without bloggers' knowledge or consent, decides to block people's comments on one another's blogs as a way of whining for more cookies. Of course that's not going to get any more cookies onto the computer. 

One Blogspot blog included a message that comments were "open" on its Wordpress shadow blog. I clicked. Comments were NOT "open." 

I felt as if I'd wasted a lot of time and energy trying to post comments at blogs where nobody's being paid per comment any more, anyway, and nobody's interested in my comments, and that's just as well since the posts consisted mostly of pet photos and what's to say about them? I mean to say, some of these people took clear and clever photos of beautiful animals, but not all. "Nice photo" would not have been truthful in every case. 

Maybe the same thing is happening when people try to comment here. I don't know.

I know this. If you want me to comment on your blog, BE SURE "anonymous" comments are welcome. I'm not anonymous. How could you follow me back here and post a comment here if I were anonymous? I type in my name. But if the comment is blocked in any way, I feel unwanted at that blog and will probably never go back. I won't blame you--you're not a public figure, maybe you want only relatives to read your blog--but as an introvert I will naturally feel motivated not to intrude again. You want your blog posts to sit there in their pristine state without comments, have it your way! 

Blogspot actually has a system that allows you to wave some people's comments right through while holding others for "moderation," if you look for it and activate it. It's not perfect but it does catch 99% of the spam while bringing the legitimate comments from new people to your attention. 

Music 

Rhiannon Giddens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Xlyi8Is98

Van Morrison.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM-jHhUZfFI

Judy Collins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b9IWytZNtY

Some random soccer fan. I'm not sure exactly what the message was intended to be, whether or not it's true, but it works as a song.

https://x.com/TaraLaRosa/status/2072350974845260269

Bob Dylan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10NTsmRrnsc 

What I'd call a hammed-up rendition of "God Bless America," but the song is sung accurately by the crowd in between bursts of strutting and gurgling, and it's a good enough song to have survived a lot of hammy performances over the years,

https://x.com/Real_RobN/status/2073277880398930322

Tom Waits. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYRPhH60MRQ (Christmas in July, anyone?)

Sheriff Joe Arpaio...who knew he sang?

https://x.com/RealSheriffJoe/status/2073393358857511024

Polish Ambassador.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LMBVa-ktEw

Matthew Magnusson and company.

https://x.com/July4thPBS/status/2073226079146274820

The Pixies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ytJpODUUs

Pop-up mob.

https://x.com/seanfeucht/status/2073411750565666866

Tindersticks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2wf-JQ-XI

David Bay. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDsXkbw2p20

Tropic Vibration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZuWssuJdbw

Melanie.

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

I'm not sure I believe anyone played three-quarters of "The Star-Spangled Banner" perfectly on metal targets with a rifle. I think this amateur video might have been enhanced a bit. But it's a target toward which the audience can aim.

https://x.com/ArthurMacwaters/status/2073151060718629179

Pelosi Family in the News Again 

Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul, who was last featured in national news when a maniac beat him up, made headlines last week by driving irresponsibly. He has been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol before. This time he admitted driving under the influence of old age. While apparently sober, he slammed his Maserati into the back of a parked Tesla, then drove away for as far as the Maserati could go. Only when the Maserati, also damaged, came to a halt did Mr. Pelosi admit he was having trouble.

It can be hard to hand over the car keys but, when people start taking daily blood pressure medication, pain medication, Flomax, etc., handing over the keys can prevent expense and embarrassment.

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/05/g-s1-132046/paul-pelosi-hit-and-run-california-car-damage

Politics 

Google traces it to an Instagram account called Theeconomist, who may (it's hard to tell) have credited a cartoonist called Javi Aznarez. It's appeared in lots of places. It is viral.

Book Review: To Be Real

Title: To Be Real

Editor: Rebecca Walker

Date: 1995

Publisher: Anchor / Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385-47262-5

Length: 290 pages text, 40 pages introduction

Quote: “The greatest gift we can give one another is the power to make a choice.”

Rebecca Walker’s first contribution to American feminist thought was this collection of essays by young people who are still concerned about gender parity, but don’t fit the stereotype of the yuppie feminists of the 1980s. One reason they don’t fit the stereotype is that they came along too late to be yuppies. A few ambitious teachers and lawyers contributed essays to this book, but there’s also a model, a stripper, a rodeo showgirl.

There are also some men and some lesbians. Too many to suit me. Gloria Steinem used to cite a dictionary definition of “feminist” as meaning “anyone who thinks women are equally as valuable as men.” By that definition, these days, anyone who is reasonably in touch with reality qualifies as a feminist. If I were collecting a book about the female experience, however, I’d select writing by people who were unequivocally female and had lived an unequivocally female experience. Jeannine Delombard’s explanation of how her ambition to be as totally feminine as possible, too different from the boys even to want to kiss one, shaped her life of lesbian “Femmenism,” is an interesting story but not one the majority of women can really identify with.

I’d also try to include some viewpoints that are conspicuously missing from To Be Real. This book is supposed to be about the diversity of contemporary feminism but all the writers, without exception, are pretty far out on the left wing of twentieth-century politics. As Eleanor Burkitt observed, this is not an accurate representation of feminist thinking and action in the 1990s, which were also the decade when Republicans were begging Elizabeth Hanford Dole to run for President, when Laura Ingraham and Laura Schlessinger became media stars. Any historical study of the 1990s will need to balance this book with Burkitt’s book, The Right Women, a study of the diverse and sometimes baffling manifestations of right-wing feminism.

It might have been hard to persuade Laura Ingraham to write anything that would appear in an anthology along with a piece by Angela Davis, or vice versa, but that would have been the sort of anthology of 1990s feminist diversity that I would have accepted as “being real.”

Most of the contributors to To Be Real were not, and have not become, celebrity authors, although the book opens with Steinem and closes with Davis and includes pieces by Bell Hooks and Naomi Wolf. Most of them were in their early twenties when they wrote these essays, and it shows. The only way to describe the topics some of these writers chose, and the passionate intensity with which they made points they probably prefer to forget having argued now, is to say—as one had to say to some of what was collected in Sisterhood Is Powerful, years ago—“They are so young.” Anna Bondoc writes about being estranged from her conservative Catholic family by her activism on behalf of a left-wing group, or groups, that certainly don’t seem to have filled her life with joy. When she shares with a left-wing group the very personal story of how she’s given up her home and allowance to fight for their cause, a slightly older woman rejects her display of self-abnegation, complaining that Bondoc seems to have cut herself off from her roots...and Bondoc is so upset, you’d think she’d never even heard of the Queen Bee Syndrome. This is a teenage experience, even if Bondoc managed to postpone it into her twenties.

Then there’s Wolf’s essay, “Brideland,” which is remarkably revealing if you (a) are conversant with historical costumes and (b) have already read Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress. Wolf has absorbed a feeling that a wedding gown ought to resemble a “milkmaid” dress with “an eigh­teenth-century bodice, three-quarter-length sleeves, and an an­kle-length skirt with voluminous panniers.” (If you’ve never studied period costumes these descriptive words may not mean much, but you’ve seen the style—it’s in all the color illustrations of all the Mother Goose books.) Wolf has also absorbed the belief that a woman who wears this type of dress “is essen­tially dressing up like Queen Victoria.” In historical fact, Queen Victoria approved, more than created, several different fashion looks, but the “milkmaid” dress wasn’t one of them; the “milkmaid” dress was a late eighteenth century style, fondly recalled but not really repeated in nineteenth century fashions. There was a high fashion version of the “milkmaid” look, affected by Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette, and then there was the downscale version real milkmaids might have worn. The downscale version was preserved in many parts of Europe during the nineteenth century’s craze for distinctive “local costumes,” like the Austrian costumes in The Sound of Music. So is the modern woman who wants to put on a pouffy dress trying to feel like Queen Victoria, or like a European peasant...or is she just discovering that the basic idea of the pouffy dress, the fitted waist and full skirt, is remarkably comfortable and flattering to women who don’t fit so well into styles designed for men or children? Regardless of which historical period or village “uniform” might have inspired the details?

Bell Hooks had written several books before To Be Real. She’d even raised a point I consider very important—the need for women to raise our consciousness of the way some of us displace anger at “societal oppression” onto our children and students. Her contribution to To Be Real, however, will probably strike moderate to right-wing readers as surreal. In “Beauty Laid Bare,” Hooks addresses the Far Left: “Militant black power movement...did not encourage a reclamation of atti­tudes about beauty common in traditional black folk culture,” she complains. “All too often...living simply was made synonymous with...living without attention to beauty.” Her solution: “[W]e need to be vigilant in creating an ethical approach to consumerism that sustains and affirms radical agendas for social change. Rather than surrendering our passion for the beautiful, for luxury, we need to envision ways those passions can be fulfilled that do not reinforce the structures of domination we seek to change.” For middle-of-the-road feminists who were and still are likely to connect with each other mainly at arts, crafts, and music festivals, Hooks is probably preaching to the choir, but she is preaching to an “English Only” choir in Sanskrit.

Then there’s the weird effect created by placing Veena Cabreros-Sud’s call for toughness (“don’t ever not fight”) immediately before Elizabeth Mitchell’s whimper of tenderness (“It’s not that I did my dolls wrong,but that I secretly resented them. They made me a mother too soon...Through dolls, the heart muscles of females are strengthened, ensuring that they will be ruled by compassion and, trough that compassion, by others, for the rest of their lives”). Both of these young women have, it seems, been exposed to yuppie feminists who still think altruism is a good thing, who don’t want to hit a mugger because that would lower them to his level. Neither of them has thought seriously about the very radical Christian idea that “God’s will,” or the Highest Good, for two or more seemingly opposed people may be different from and better than either having their own way or giving up their own way. One in an aggressive way (Cabreros-Sud suggests that every undesirable thing in life be seen as “violence” not “limited to the physical” plane, and fought against with “ugly, angry, cuss-ridden mouths”) and one in a passive way (Mitchell talks about the healing benefit of selfishness, but what she seems to mean is that she wants to travel more before she has a baby), they’re still speaking the truth of early adolescence. Neither seems to have thought much about the empowering benefits of responsibility or of genuine, rather than altruistic, love.

For whom was this book written? Who could have learned something from it? I’m not sure. If To Be Real was meant to encourage more young people to think of themselves as feminists, I’ve seen little evidence that it succeeded. Of course, this cannot be attributed entirely to the book’s merits; pressure on public libraries to discard even excellent books to make room for ephemeral electronic junk kept practically any book that wasn’t a computer manual and didn’t feature Harry Potter from being as successful as it would have been ten years earlier, and then the mass media decided to publicize war, foreign policy, and the continuous fall of “the economy” to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t know of any feminists who’ve either abandoned our goals or seriously decided that we’ve met them, but I do know that not nearly as much is being published about feminists as was being published ten years ago.

If To Be Real was meant to persuade people like Alice Walker that people like Rebecca Walker were Real Feminists too, I’m not sure how well it succeeded in that goal either. It does conclusively prove that, although even China had admitted that Marxism or Maoism couldn’t work in the real world, the people for whom left-wing ideology had been a substitute for religious faith were still clinging to their faith in 1995. At the time one could hope that they’d outgrow it. The behavior of some people in the current administration suggests otherwise. The authors in this book were still left-wingers, and probably several of them still are. But “left-wing” and “feminist” are entirely different things.

For whom could this book be useful today? Future historians may want it as a study of the 1990s, but is anyone writing a book or even a paper about the 1990s yet? Well...in the meantime, this is a book of short stories about young people coming of age. Each contributor was asked to write about her or his personal growth through a personal experience of feminism, so although the stories are memoirs rather than polished pieces of literary symbolism, each story can still be enjoyed for its plot and characters. If, like me, you find fact-based short stories more interesting than the ones that are altogether fictional, you will enjoy reading the stories of 21 twenty-somethings.

Butterfly of the Week: Purple Spotted Swallowtail

Graphium weiskei is the Purple Spotted Swallowtail because it has pale purple spots. A few sources give it the more fanciful name "Purple Mountain Emperor," and a few simply translate its Latin name as "Weiske's Graphium." Emil Weiske was a nineteenth century naturalist. Another butterfly (in the genus Delias), a bee, and a bird species were also named weiskei in honor of him. Weiskei is most "properly" pronounced like "vye-sky-ee."

Photo by Gancw1 for Inauralist, December, 2024.

Photo by John Lenagan for herpsandbirds.tumblr.com.

Photo by Gan CW on Tumblr. A little actual pigmentation underlies the purple spots, but they can shade to pink or blue or fade to white, depending partly on the light and partly on the individual's condition. 

Swallowtail butterflies named after real people or places tend to have been named later, so less information is available about them. Graphium weiskei was named only in 1900. It is common in a small habitat, the higher elevations of New Guinea; few people have actually seen it alive, though its unusual color has generated much interest in pictures and dead bodies. 

The underside of the wings, which is more often seen, doesn't look very distinctive, though it may have a faint purplish blush on the upper wing tips. It could be mistaken for Graphium kosii or Graphium gelon or other species. One of its other distinguishing features is that, even for a Swallowtail, it has a big head and stout, furry body.

Photo from Gailhampshire, originally on Flickr, donated to Wikipedia.

It has been found between 4000 and 8000 feet above sea level.

A less than faithful drawing appears on postage from Sao Tome e Principe:

The stamp is for sale at https://touchstamps.com/Stamp/Details/411416/purple-spotted-swallowtail-graphium-weiskei .

The purple color can be conspicuous on a living butterfly:

Photo from papua-insects.nl. 

On some male individuals it can fade to periwinkle, or sky-blue like the blue spot on the butterfly shown above, or even white. On females, the black base color can fade to brown, and the purple spot can fade to pink. Even the pink spot makes this a very unusual butterfly.

Here is a slow-motion video of Graphium weiskei startled into flight:

https://www.facebook.com/papuainsectsshop/videos/a-slowmotion-of-flying-purple-spotted-swallowtail-graphium-weiskei-from-mtarfak-/729370264210177/

Nothing seems to have been documented about this butterfly's food plants or life cycle. Someone in New Guinea can still become famous by learning about this species.