Web Log for 3.9.26

Animals, of Personal Acquaintance 

A few years ago I mentioned on this web site having found a big Leopard Moth caterpillar clinging to my clothes, looked it up, confirmed that the younger one I'd found would grow into the older, bigger one I also knew and that it was harmless, and left it nibbling on a plantain leaf beside the front steps. 

Since then I've continued to see Leopard Moth caterpillars beside the front steps. They're not that common. They tend to wander about, munching on a different plant every day, and they've always been attracted to the not-a-lawn, but it seemed as if a local family had learned that they'd found a safe place. I don't know that they are capable of learning anything. Caterpillars and even adult moths have very little in the way of brains, and their behavior usually shows this. But these little animals kept finding their way to the front steps.

When their remote ancestors used to find their way to the front yard, so many Leopard Moth generations ago, I used to be scared of them, assuming that any caterpillar that big with that much stiff, bristly hair would have to pack a lot of venom. Actually they contain no venom at all. Touching caterpillars is not good for the caterpillars and should always be avoided, since the ones you want to kill are the ones you don't want to touch, but for the human who touches a baby Leopard Moth, they feel just like the round brushes they look like. Prickly but harmless. 

Anyway, last winter the Leopard Moth larva who was hibernating off and on beside the front steps, burrowing into the ground when it felt cold and coming out to eat when it felt warm, was a casualty of the Big Freeze. I don't think it had even achieved its final molt. It was hardly more than two inches long.

I found myself missing the hapless moth-child.

Books 

I've linked to other reviews of the Little House books here, so...

https://blbooks.blogspot.com/2026/03/29-farmer-boy.html

Fwiw, I was a farm girl and I enjoyed Almanzo's interest in crops and livestock. Though I'm pretty sure he didn't eat as much as his memories of home cooking must have suggested to his wife. And I could do without the pigs.

Chocolate 

Found this on an old link I was clearing out of "history"...

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/worlds-chocolate-supply-under-threat-virus-researchers-call/

I wonder what this has to do with my sudden intolerance of the chocolate in some gluten-free baking mixes, whose ingredients are otherwise the same as the ingredients in tolerable non-chocolate-flavored baking mixes--although M&Ms have been on the safe list of foods I can eat for a long time. The chocolate in King Arthur's and Betty Crocker's brownies does not induce a glyphosate reaction; it just doesn't seem to want to stay down. 

I wonder how many other people are noticing bizarre new reactions to chocolate...but only some chocolate.

I wonder what we'd learn by proper labelling of chocolate to identify which chocolate products are coming from "vaccinated" trees.

I wonder if these helpless trees are being used as test subjects for mRNA "vaccines" (if it's mRNA, is it still a vaccine?).

I wonder if virus-infected trees, or vaccinated trees, or both, are the ones suddenly making people sick.

*

Ethical Purity, Importance of 

The wrong means to the right end...

Garden Reminder 

Dandelions are food for bees. 

And for the Little Yellow Bear caterpillar, and most of the other Bear Caterpillars that turn into Tiger Moths, or Giant Leopard Moths--they like variety, they typically nibble on one plant one day and another plant the next day. 

And for Iryna's Azure butterfly, the warm-weather-long Azure with white undersides on "her" wings. (It sometimes flies around the Cat Sanctuary.) Protect your dandelions in memory of the little Ukrainian girl who was murdered in Charlotte...

And, of course, unsprayed dandelions are excellent good for people. Specifically they're said to be good for the kidneys. In moderation, of course. If you pay attention your body will tell you how many you should eat; probably a smaller volume than you would eat of lettuce or spinach. When they stop tasting fresh and interesting and start tasting bitter to you, even though you're an adult and are accustomed to the basic dandelion flavor, you've eaten enough. 

Dandelion stems are also good to apply to warts. If you lack or lose resistance to the virus that causes warts, they will come back, but if you apply enough dandelion sap almost all warts will wither up and fall off.

So let's make this meme viral: 

A lawn without dandelions is suspicious. This is the year when nobody likes a "pesticide" sprayer. If your friends' lawns lack dandelions, try to help them fix this.

Islam 

Worth reading. If the United States stays predominantly Christian, we have nothing to fear from Islam. If we go Socialist, letting the state compete with or usurp the functions of the church, those "God-shaped vacuums" in the human soul will suck Islam in, and since Socialism never works for very long at all but Islam works--badly--for centuries, we will soon be a Muslim country.

("So, by 'Christian' the writer means capitalist?" I do not. I do mean individualist--believing in the primacy of, and respecting the liberty of, the individual. Individuals can choose communist, or say "communalist," styles of life and work for themselves, so long as they don't try to enforce such styles on others through any system of tyrannical government.)

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/31310/why-now-if-not-now-when

Land Use 

Shared by Joe Jackson (surely you guessed). Google doesn't find any other source for the photo; it's probably his own. Goes double for Virginia. 

Logic, Leftists' Lack Of 

Shared in that format by Joe Jackson.

Of course, right-wingers aren't necessarily doing all that much better. JJ also posted this meme:

#1: He's not a real Republican, and #2: It's temporary.

One of JJ's readers mentioned a stamp for use on $1 bills that gives George Washington a speech balloon saying "I grew hemp." I thought it worth mentioning here...George Washington did indeed raise hemp, or have his staff raise it, at Mount Vernon. But they used it, as people back in England did, to make rope, and cheap heavy (itchy) fabric for the servants' clothes. They had not yet noticed any reason to smoke it.

About hemp clothing a British legend records that a brownie, you know, one of the sort-of supernatural beings that looked and acted remarkably like men who were in hiding, did so much good work for the humans who fed him at night that at length they decided he might want a new suit of clothes like their regular servants were getting at Christmas. Like many brownies he was oddly shaped, but they told the seamstress that he was about the size of their twelve-year-old son and she should do the best she could. So she did; made him a nice little hempen suit. The family laid it out for him on Christmas Eve. The brownie came in, and the humans sitting upstairs, listening, heard him yell, "What have we here? Hempen-hampen! Here will I never more tread nor stamp in!" And they never sawhim, or any of his helpful work, again.

But for real stupidity, consider: 

https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2026/03/08/virginia-dems-force-insurrection-label-on-jan-6-in-classrooms-n4950402

It'll be "What are you going to believe--your teacher or your lying eyes?" Teachers' credibility was none too high, among students, without that. 

Parents who don't like their children's teachers can always suggest that their children enlighten their teachers. "MY Daddy says there WAS no 'insurrection' during the Censorship Riot! What happened was that Trump saw that some troublemakers were trying to turn the rally into a riot and told people to go home from the rally, but because of CENSORSHIP nobody got the message!"

Meh. When I was in grade one I said "ag'in," the way most people in my home town did. Mrs. Fatso said that the word was "a-gann." I went home and mentioned this to my parents. "That woman's trying to teach you to talk like her?" Mother bristled, and Dad said the word was "a-gayne." (Senator John Warner was the only person I heard who said "a-gayne" all the time.) Mrs. Fatso had to admit that we were in Virginia and in formal speech the upper-crust way to pronounce "again" in Virginia is "a-gayne." And that young Georgia Crackers were in no position to teach us how to speak (one never says things like that out loud, at the time--one looks them). And I was Mrs. Fatso's least favorite child all year long. 

Even a person who's still confusing the Loony Limousine Lefties with the real Democratic Party, who obviously is not very observant, ought to be able to perceive that it's just plain wrong to order teachers to teach things that (a) set them against the students' parents and (b) are easily disproved. What did those poor longsuffering teachers ever do to these Ds? 

Book Review: Fitness from Six to Twelve

Title: Fitness from Six to Twelve

Author: Bonnie Prudden

Date: 1972

Publisher: Harper & Row / Dial

ISBN: 0-385-27895-9

Length: 312 pages plus indices

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “It isn’t only the lessons of life that come out on walks. There is a world to be discovered.”

For those who don’t remember, Bonnie Prudden was the physical fitness activist of the Kennedy Administration. Most people have heard by now that “young,” energetic President Kennedy, much like his coeval Robert Dole, had been badly injured: both veterans would have been completely disabled for life without physical therapy programs based on exercise, massage, and also Dr. Janet Travell’s innovative program of “trigger-point therapy,” which initially involved giving innocuous fluid injections into the “trigger point” of a cramped muscle.

Brief digression: Although I came along too late to meet Bonnie Prudden personally, I can fairly be called a “grand-student” of hers. Travell and Prudden experimented further and found that the injections weren’t necessary—simple pressure against the “trigger point” would relieve the pain. The results are discussed in Prudden’s later books, Pain Erasure (for families) and Myotherapy (for massage and rehabilitative therapists). I remember learning about these techniques from a small group of factory laborers who claimed that they were the only thing that relieved the tension built up by twelve hours of heavy labor. When I found Myotherapy in a library I realized that there was some theory behind the laborers’ odd demand for a massage treatment that I didn’t imagine could be helpful. I learned that trigger-point massage really does work what more primitive people have long considered miracles—we really can restore sight to some blind people and hearing to some deaf people, although it won’t happen during every practitioner’s career. I was able to help enough people to save up enough money to study with Judith Walker Delaney, who was Prudden’s designated heir and now teaches cutting-edge trigger-point techniques known as Neuro-Muscular Therapy (NMT). I have seen hearing restored, seen marriages revived, seen people go in to a therapy session “walking like old ladies” and go out walking like teenagers...but even Bonnie Prudden never personally restored sight to a blind person. Blindness can be caused by muscle cramps too, but this is rare.

Anyway, the concept of regular physical fitness tests in elementary school, and the “President’s Medal” for kids who did well on fitness tests, originated in the synergy among JFK, Prudden, and Travell. Prudden, already a grandmother, demonstrated to the country how bouncy and stretchy senior citizens could be, while she put groups of children through their paces; she taught primary school children the rudiments of trigger-point massage, and didn’t even mind writing what quickly became a rare book called Exersex. She wrote a variety of books promoting the idea that actual fitness, as measured by strength and flexibility, rather than success at games was vital to children’s future health. She advocated swimming lessons for infants and gymnastics for schoolchildren.

It should be noted that most exercise gurus no longer use some of the tests and exercises Prudden used. If the instructions in her books are followed carefully, exercises like standing knee bends and straight-legged sit-ups are safe, but too many people were doing them too fast and without adequate preparation.

This is the book specifically about exercise and stretching for elementary school students. Prudden considered this is a key age for fitness, when most kids are starting to calm down enough that they can become sedentary, sluggish, and not fit enough to become healthy teenagers. She shares the benefits of years of experience organizing fitness classes for kids, whether they were “little girls’ dance classes” or “conditioning classes” for mixed groups of future athletes. Her “conditioning classes” were to some extent customized around the trendiest physical activities of the period—horseback riding, tennis, swimming, ballet, skiing, skating, gymnastics—but she also give tips for students who might be more interested in baseball, basketball, etc. There’s also a chapter on the benefits of “conditioning” for children in this age group who have major disabilities (she recommends going back to her books on exercises for younger children, since disabilities may place children in the developmental equivalent of a younger age group).

A funny thing happened when I wrote about the benefits of exercise on AC, especially for middle-aged women. My audience betrayed a degree of gender polarity. The loyal female readers who read reviews of books like Shaunti Feldhahn’s For Women Only rated my summary of one chapter as “The family that works out together, stays together” not helpful. The male readers who skipped the book reviews and read the firsthand sport-and-exercise articles rated those articles helpful. So I may be addressing the least receptive part of the audience here, but I’m going to say it anyway, just to “spite the devil.” Most middle-aged women are not going to look like our First Lady in any case. We have to work with what DNA gave us, and some of us just aren’t ectomorphs. If your ancestors handed down genes for a top-heavy or bottom-heavy shape, a wide frame, and/or round face, the range of celebrity looks available to you may be narrow. Exercise is the key to looking more like Dolly Parton or Jennifer Lopez than like Lizzo or Roseanne. Then as a bonus, if you stick with the exercise for another twenty years, exercise is also the key to being a trim, alert, energetic grandma like Bonnie Prudden! So you might as well get the children into the swing of things, and this is the book that makes it easy, fun, sociable, glamorous, and musical.

Fitness from Six to Twelve is warmly recommended to all parents and all children.

Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate

(This week's Petfinder Post will appear on Thursday.)

I've been mulling this since the news of Trump's loathsome executive order slowing the natural disappearance of glyphosate, which is no longer even considered effective as an "herbicide," due to the inevitable Vicious Pesticide Cycle, and is now known to feed harmful fungi and disease bacteria even though it has an "antibiotic" effect on several neutral or benign bacteria, from the Earth...

I think Glyphosate Awareness has entered a new era.

We've seen that every responsible researcher has come to accept that, if not a primary carcinogen, glyphosate certainly and obviously is a powerful pro-cancer factor.

We've seen that glyphosate predictably harms people each of us knows personally--people who are not motivated by money or politics or conformism or even that syndrome where a certain percentage of medical students tell the school clinicians they think they've got every condition their classes have studied. Glyphosate does not have a distinctive taste or scent of its own, so people usually don't know when they've been exposed until their reactions set in. People don't always even recognize when they are having reactions that are obvious to observers; their obvious reactions feature mental symptoms and they think their anxiety, depression, anger, or stupidity are perfectly reasonable, until the reaction passes. Although not everyone has an obvious physical reaction to glyphosate, by now the statistical odds of anyone not knowing a person who has such a reaction are minute. Most of us have a close relative who has been systematically tortured by these reactions since 2009. Many of us have a close relative who has been killed by them. 

We've seen that, while politicians clearly motivated by money are trying to dig up old whines about the poor pitiful farmers who can't raise crops without glyphosate, the fact is that "organic" farmers--even though their crop yields per acre are lower in weight--are producing crops that don't make people sick, are earning some small amount of profit more years than not, are keeping their land, and are, if anything, healthier and likely to live longer than city dwellers, while chemical farm workers' life expectancy is...I said "little more than half" of organic farmers', recently, on X. It was revealing. The actual figures are, with some variation among sources, 48 or 49 years for immigrant laborers who are more often used to handle pesticides because that group includes less educated and more desperate people, 50 to 58 for native-born chemical farm workers, and 75 to 85 for organic farmers. You can reasonably say that 58 is a lot more than half of 75 but the self-styled "farmers" didn't make that sort of reasonable quibble. They tweeted as if they thought that confusing activists with words, confusing the average age of present-time workers with their average life expectancy, and throwing in the odd verbal attack, would keep them happily profiteering on alleged "food" that makes people sick for another twenty years.

They are not debating ideas in order to learn facts and make informed decisions. They are intentionally harassing people who present facts.

It's time to stop talking to these people. 

Really stop talking to them.

What I'm actually calling for, let me make this absolutely clear, is nonviolent, Amish-style shunning.

When an Amish person sins against any of the church's multitude of rules--from murder to wilful persistence in wearing or using something that doesn't fit into the group's uniform--other Amish people stop talking to that person. 

Person's spouse may move back in with per parents.

Person is not served or waited on if person enters an Amish-owned business.

Person's business no longer exists, as far as the Amish community are concerned. Non-Amish people who persist in trading with the person being shunned, if any, may be warned that the business is not really Amish.

Usually an Amish person who gets this treatment is on per knees, weeping in penitence, in a few weeks. Their subculture has such a strong social bond that they don't hold out the way a few non-Amish people who have been shunned by their former social circle have done. Most non-Amish Americans who've been shunned on account of their opinions have, in fact, been able simply to move to the other side of the social aisle: before their relatives officially disowned them most Jews who've become Christians, Christians who've become Buddhists, Democrats who've become Republicans or vice versa, hawks who've become doves or vice versa, public school employees who've become advocates of school choice, psychiatrists who've recognized the dangers of Prozac Dementia, etc., have built up social networks on the other side and prepared themselves for the loss of some old relationships, even if the loss still hurts.

But what if all these people have in common is that they're clinging to profits...and the people who shun them are able to take those profits away? 

Gentle Readers, they are going to be sooo miserable. And they deserve it. And if anything can do them any good, our laughter at their tears is likely to be it. 

Enough farmers had naturally stopped using glyphosate, seeing that it made customers complain (and avoid their products) while it wasn't actually having much effect on the nastiest weeds, even by 2022 that even those of us whose bodies detect and react to glyphosate on the parts-per-billion level have been able to eat an almost balanced diet. All the rest of you have to do is shop and eat in solidarity with people like me to bring the Bitter Clingers to Glyphosate to their knees.

Will you miss a lot of foods you've always loved? I still do. I have found Mott's applesauce to be a safe food, although processing destroys the Vitamin C and I've not found a safe brand of fresh apples. (If you do eat apples, even if you live in Michigan and you traditionally bite into those peels, it's a good idea to peel apples thickly; the inner part of the fruit may be less damaged by glyphosate vapor drift.) I've found it safe to eat peeled oranges--but I like orange peel. I've not dared to eat any commercially grown green leafy vegetables. You have to raise your salads in your kitchen or back yard, and if you don't get a lot of sunshine your selection of salad greens may no longer include lettuce. I've not chosen to risk eating any kind of berries yet, either, because berries, cherries, and other fruits that don't have thick rinds just soak up glyphosate vapor drift like little sponges. So do carrots. So does celery. 

But I have been able to eat some oranges, pineapple, bananas, melon, even commercially grown peaches; some beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peas, cucumbers, squashes, and lentils, in addition to onions, garlic, rice, and nuts. So should you be. Vitamin supplements aren't as good as food but should prevent deficiency diseases long enough to leave supermarkets and their suppliers sitting on a lot of alleged food nobody's buying. 

Let them cry. Let their families break up as they lose what they've made of their family farms. 

Don't wait on them in stores or restaurants. 

Block them on social media, in order to activate shadowbanning algorithms. If you happen to see a point that needs to be addressed in something they've said, address the point after blocking the Bitter Clinger. 

Walk out of religious services if they walk in. Without making your usual donation. 

Withhold membership dues from social clubs if the clubs don't drop Bitter Clingers from their membership.

Don't see Bitter Clingers as patients.

Don't trade with businesses that continue to employ them in any capacity.

Don't talk to the Bitter Clingers. That's all. Until they confess that they're not fit to own land and use their savings to compensate people who are willing to accept the financial loss involved in reclaiming the land they've poisoned. Repentance for actual physical deeds is not an emotional matter. Ignore the emotions until they've shown sincere repentance with more actual physical deeds.

All these people, or things that nature intended to have been people, care about is money so the effects of seeing their streams of income dry up should be valuable to other Bitter Clingers as examples. It's not absolutely necessary to laugh out loud in public when a Bitter Clinger commits suicide, as some of them will do, but it may be good for the other Bitter Clingers if we do.

I'm posting this after having had a sort of vision of an alternative future in which Bitter Clingers were allowed to roll on, in the way Trump and Kennedy seem to imagine they can be, and groups of their neighbors, armed with everything from machine guns to pitchforks, beat on their doors. In the group I was watching a Bitter Clinger came out to the door and tried to duck back inside. People beat on the door until the frame began to crack. The Bitter Clinger came out onto his porch. The crowd shouted, "Bring out your daughter," and a man stepped forward carrying a sack, unzipped the sack, and threw the dead body of a child right into the Bitter Clinger's face. The Bitter Clinger gasped, "No, not my daughter! Take me!" Then his wife was on the porch and the crowd shouted, "Take him back!" and threw a bleeding, broken body into her face. 

Justice denied tends to lead to violence and to further injustice.

Justice can be served, I believe, if enough people decide simply to stop speaking to the Bitter Clingers. Including "speech" on social media, or in the form of trade. 

Make the farmers themselves demand a ban on all open-air spraying of any chemical with a formula other than H2O, so that nobody will feel as much hated as they feel this summer.

Hurt their feelings so that nobody has to do more permanent damage to them.

Web Log for 3.8.26

I walked a little too far, a little too fast, on Friday and have been feeling unreasonably tired again all weekend, but I'm starting to feel less tired than before, so no worries. 

Animals 

This web site has just adopted a virtual guard burro. 

(Photo from Google.)

I don't know its gender but its name is Lily White, because...

Though I personally don't own one, I can now speak for the web site, according to the Rule of Perfect Auntliness, and advise the bitter clingers to glyphosate to kiss my Lily White Ass. 

Burros are not perfect guard animals. They are pretty good at defending themselves from coyotes if they can see them coming. Living among wild canines has caused them to evolve a general feeling that nature intended all canines to be doormats, so if they can get at a coyote or even a pet dog they will stomp it into the appropriate shape and level of passivity. Burros like to run with a herd but can become frustrated if the other animals in the field don't include any other donkeys; they have been known to lose patience with sheep and start trampling them into doormats. They usually like horses, cows, goats, and alpacas as company, but they need a different diet from any of those. And, because burros are right about coyotes being enemies, sometimes a pack of coyotes or feral dogs kills a donkey--usually at the cost of one or two of the pack. Nevertheless, burros are reasonably good and cheap guard animals.

Considering everything, this web site has decided to keep Lily White well separated from the Petfinder kitties and pups. LW is free to spend most of its time hanging over the fence and visiting with the burros who frequent the Meow.

Meanwhile, on the Mirror, I found an old photo of a behavioral anomaly:

It's been available online for some time and is for sale as a poster, titled "The Jury Is Out." It shows something that is very rarely seen in nature: Six male and three female cardinals are flocking together even with smaller birds.

This can happen when young cardinals are caught in a snowstorm. Before the spring chicks pair off, they travel as a family group for a few weeks. Siblings find mates and go their own ways. Cardinal couples usually avoid each other and drive smaller birds off their territory once they've found a place to rear their own young, but in the first winter, before they've chosen mates or territories, they can be as mellow as the other little "snow birds" who form big mixed flocks when they have to travel further south during unusually cold or snowy weather.

I've seen my cardinals' brood move out as a family group, here at the Cat Sanctuary. I've not seen them flying south in groups with "snow birds." Usually our young, if any, move out before the snow; most years our adult pair stay through the snow. But a flock of "snow birds" including cardinals does occasionally happen.

National Security 

Hoot!

Found on the Mirror. Lens traces it to someone whose Instagram name is Theruralbadge.

Page View Counts 

Something went wrong last week. My page view count shot up and, as suddenly, dropped back down. Google's system still highlighted the country where twenty thousand page views had come from, on the little map graphic, but counted it as "Other" on the list. In any case we now know that, when some sort of glitch allowed Russians to visit US web sites for a day, they rushed over here.

Everyone should be reading this web site! Twenty thousand Russians can't be wrong! LOL is ROFL!

Actually, of course, more than twenty thousand humans (of any tribe) have been known to be wrong about the same thing at the same time. I doubt that private Russian people have been consulted about bombing towns, but they do seem to have a high level of Glyphosate Awareness.

Weather, Effects of 

To find the video, go to x.com, type @accuweather into the search bar, and scroll down to see the video of gold, blue, and purple flowers in Death Valley. 

Book Review: Deliver Us from Evil

Vintage book of the week...and is this one ever "vintage." Historical interest.

Title: Deliver Us from Evil

Author: Sean Hannity

Date: 2004

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-058251-0

Length: 326 pages plus index

Quote: “We cannot prevail tomorrow without courageous leadership today.”

This book makes the case for war. Since I believe war is generally a bad thing, and I know that complete and accurate information about the justification or lack of justification for any specific war is not going to be made available to civilians until the war is over, it’s not possible for me to like this book. It has historical value. It’s a well written summary of what we read in the papers. How true was what we read in the papers? Future historians may be able to judge.

I’ve read articles by Hannity, on other topics, that I liked. I’m not thrilled by the way he comes across in Deliver Us from Evil as a 24-karat fire-breathing hawk; I understand the competitive urge, the sense that we thrive on conflict, that whole Irish thing, but my feeling is that if tennis and politics aren’t a sufficient outlet for your competitive urge, either you’re not getting enough exercise or you’ve spent too much time in New York. Hannity presents himself here as a patriotic Irish-American writer who needs to nurture his talent with a nice long working vacation on an organic farm. 

Butterfly of the Week: Monkey Swordtail

In the tradition of naming Swallowtail species after characters in literature, Graphium rhesus was named after King Rhesus of Thrace in the Iliad. So in English it was promptly nicknamed the Monkey Swordtail. 

Photo by Mangge Totok, June 2024, Sulawesi.

Photo by Iwank, June 2021.

Relatively little is known about this species. It  has been seen and caught often but most of what Google has to tell us about it is who's offering photos and who's trafficking in dead bodies. 

It is found on a few islands in the Malay archipelago. Males are often found sipping brackish water from sand, often in large mixed flocks. With a wingspan typically a little over three inches, it's comparable to the larger North American swallowtails, but in the company it keeps it seems small:

Photo by Erlandreflingnielsen, April 2017, Sulawesi.

Four subspecies are recognized: 

Graphium rhesus parvimacula is found on Sula and nearby islands. Parvimacula means "small spots," but the three individuals described for the record had larger spots on their underwings than other Graphium rhesus had.

Graphium rhesus rhaphia is found on Tanahdjampea and Tukangbesi islands.

Graphium rhesus rhesulus is found to the south of Sulawesi and on Banggai island. The subspecies name means "little Rhesus." The dark stripes on its wings are said to be blacker than on other subspecies.

Graphium rhesus rhesus is found in the northern and eastern parts of Sulawesi island.

None is considered especially uncommon or threatened. However, this species' survival is tied to its host species' survival in humid lowland forests. Local populations disappeared when forests were "cleared" on Sulawesi. Exactly which species the caterpillars eat is not known. 

Link Log Weekender for 3.6-7.26

Animals 

The British nanny state contemplates banning 67 dog breeds and, to keep you from feeling a need to click on any clickbait links that don't tell you up front which breeds they mean, here's the list: 

Affenpinscher

American Cocker Spaniel

Australian Cattle Dog

Australian Shepherd

Basset

Basset Bleu

Basset Fauve

Beagle

Beauceron

Bergamasco

Bloodhound

Border Collie

Boston Terrier

Boxer

Bracco

Brittany

Brussels Griffon

Bull Mastiff

Bulldog

Cairn Terrier

Cardigan Welsh Corgi

Cavalier King Charles Spaniel

Cesky Terrier

Chihuahua

Chowchow

Clumber Spaniel

Dachshund

Dandie Terrier

Dogue de Bordeaux

French Bulldog

Glen of Imaal Terrier

Grand Basset

Great Dane

Japanese Chin

King Charles Spaniel

Lancashire Heeler

Lhasa Apso

Mastiff

Mudi

Neapolitan Mastiff

Newfoundland

Norfolk Terrier

Norwich Terrier

Old English Sheepdog

Pekingese

Pembroke Welsh Corgi

Petit Basset

Polish Lowland

Pug

Pyr Mastiff

Pyr Shep

Rough Collie

Schipperke

Scottish Terrier

Sealyham Terrier

Shar Pei

Shetland Sheepdog

Shih Tzu

Skye Terrier

Smooth Collie

Spanish Water Dog

St Bernard

Staffordshire Terrier

Sussex Spaniel

Swedish Valhund

Tibetan Mastiff

West Highland White Terrier

They claim that it's because these breeds' genotype can involve dysfunctional genes, or genes for dysfunctional traits. Reality, I suspect, is pure control freaking. Each of these dog breeds has typical health problems, but most of the individual dogs don't have the problems. Or they're not serious--the small and short-legged breeds are automatically considered dysfunctional just because they're small, low-slung dogs, which was a survival trait for cow-herding dogs and is still one for dogs kept in urban apartments. 

Which is the point. The idea of herding people into apartments where they pay rent forever is to break up the whole system of owning and passing on homes, land, farms...and family ties. Including ties to animals. Never forget Wayne LaPierre's infamous assertion that in the future, when "we" as a species (a "we" that excluded himself) are all herded into slums, "we" can just redirect our urge to bond toward the cockroaches we'll all be living with. (Cockroaches are thigmotactic; although they run away from lights and people, once caught they like being held. And they're trainable; they could learn to hide from light in people's clothing.) Think of that as you make the mere suspicion of being soft on socialism a career ender for any politician.

How is this different from my saying that nobody should breed Manx or Rex cats? Saying people shouldn't do something is one thing; calling on government to ban it, which would probably involve mass killing or at least mass neutering of pets, is a very different thing. 

Additionally, the alleged dysfunctionality of these dog breeds does not compare with the dysfunctionality of Manx and Rex cats. Short-legged dogs are vulnerable to a lot of things, long-haired dogs are vulnerable to eye problems, and floppy-eared dogs like beagles are vulnerable to ear infections if and when people don't look after them properly. With the right human companions they're just fine! Yes, collies and poodles need a lot of grooming, and small short-legged dogs need to be close to their humans whenever they're outdoors--and the right humans for them enjoy doing it.

Books 

When Jeanie at themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com reviewed a novel inspired by the life of Margaret Fishback, and she mistyped the real writer's name as Fishbeck, I confused Fishback (who wrote lots of advertisements, several books of poems, and some children's books and the sort of guides to etiquette that amounted to advertisements) with a different author. Margaret Lee Runbeck was a contemporary of Margaret Fishback. Runbeck wrote more books, and she was the one who wrote mom-com magazine articles that grew into several books about a daughter anonymized as "Our Miss Boo." 

https://www.amazon.com/OUR-MISS-ORIGINAL-PHOTOGRAPHS-LAID/dp/B0007E0KTA

The Miss Boo story that was reprinted in junior high school literature books, which my parents liked to offer to me as storybooks when I was in primary school, was about Miss Boo's love of what was then a new fad food: peanut butter sandwiches. 

DEI Must Die 

It's not altogether bad that employees were asked if they had friends in different demographic groups, including "gay"...but to what extent did the time spent on that sort of chitchat take away from their ability to respond to the Big Freeze?

https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-before-historic-stormCat-embattled-electric-service-asked-workers-if-they-had-gay-friends 

Religious Issues: From Sabbath to Sunday 

For some people, the decision to observe the biblical Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday is an affirmation of religious liberty, a statement that "we ought to obey God rather than man." But it's possible to read the change, which occurred long after Christ's time, from mostly Jewish-born Christians observing the Sabbath as their day for rest and worship, to the Roman Emperor decreeing that they so observe Sunday, as something other than a statement of arrogance and egotism. (The Roman solar cult really worshipped the Emperor.) It's possible to read it as a shrewd political move.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2026/03/and-on-seventh-day-they-rested.html

Religious Issues: How Groups Acquire Image Problems

Cat Stevens thinks it takes a "monstrous propaganda machine" to turn people against Islam. Meowreally? You don't think little things like ricin gas in the London Tubes and THE ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 have been factors? You don't think the basic tendency for people to dislike a "fellow who came in to sojourn, and now wants to rule over us" may have something to do with anti-Islamic feeling in the US and UK right now? 

Program for Muslims who don't want to find people turned against them when they move to English-speaking, historically Christian countries:

0100 Accept that you are and must remain a minority--that if you become even a large minority you risk expulsion. The more successfully you proselytize, the fewer of your compatriots will be allowed to move here. 

0150 Accept that our culture is Christian. Make NO attempt to change that. 

0200 Accept that we no longer live in a world where God has made souls of equal value, but humans have deemed male bodies to be more valuable than female. Accept that the majority of jobs that are still done by humans today are jobs for which women are better suited than men. Accept that the biological reality, unenlightened by Christian, Jewish, or Muslim religious teachings, is that male humans have become as biologically disposable as most other male lifeforms are. Spend time in basic training courses learning to defer to any female you may meet on any point, to lower your eyes so that you don't know what non-Muslim women are wearing on the street, and to take orders from female superordinates with good grace. Affirm that no man who has touched any female without her full consent has any business being alive.

0250 Affirm that you understand that eye contact works differently here than it does where you came from. Specifically, some parents work hard to teach their children to stare into the eyes of people of the same sex who may be annoyed by them and people of the opposite sex who might feel attracted to them, even though it's probably true that this behavior is unnatural and confusing. If necessary, take a course in breaking eye contact that feels inappropriate to you by looking at your shoes, without blaming or reacting to the local person in any way.

0260 When hugged or kissed by same-sex friends most of us may think that you're overexcitable or that your inferior education never taught you that that behavior spreads diseases, rather than reacting violently, but accept that you're not supposed to hug or kiss same-sex friends. 

0300 Sign a statement affirming that, if you object to any behavior that our culture accepts and yours didn't, your way to express your feelings will always be to go home. 

0400 Accept that sharia law is not the law of the land where you are sojourning and never will be. If not satisfied with the way our law punishes crimes, go home.

0500 Use your opportunity to study what our laws actually say, and what the Bible actually says, so that you know your rights and can lawfully claim what's due to you. Accepting that you're in a minority in no way implies encouraging bigotry, which does our native-born bigots even more harm than it does you.

0600 Accept that, if you bring children here or stay here long enough to have children, those children will have a legal right to flout your cultural and religious rules. Try to surround yourself with people of different generations who can encourage your children to respect those rules. Jews and Christians don't have to fast for Ramadan or wear tunics outside our belts, much less study Arabic and the Quran, but many, perhaps most, of us do believe that it's honorable for children (even adult children) to follow their parents' rules while living in their parents' houses. Some of us will say to our children, "If your school friends are fasting, don't eat in their faces."

0700 If you come here as a bachelor and want to be married, marry someone from your own country. Although we do, in practice, have "temporary marriage," we don't have a tradition that accepts and respects it. We require ourselves to pay lip service to the ideal of marriage for life; we associate marriage with love rather than obligations. There are American women who could probably be satisfied with a "temporary marriage" to a guest worker if our culture honestly said to them, "Look, you're not a virgin, you're not planning to give this man sons and bring them up as Muslims--you don't want a permanent marriage to this temporary resident. You want to play house with a cute boy for two to five years. Just don't complain when it ends." But no. When you leave our cultural perception is going to be that you USED and DUMPED and BETRAYED a woman who, we want to believe, wanted you to be part of an American or British Christian marriage for life. Why go there? Marry a nice hometown woman for life.

0800 There are things you have to teach us, by setting a good example. Show us what loyalty, honor, hospitality, generosity, friendship, and even relative freedom from color prejudice look like. 

0900 It IS One God. There is only One God. To whatever extent people perceive a difference, they perceive human misunderstanding. Wa Salaam Alaikum.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2026/03/07/yusufcat-stevens-complains-of-monstrous-propaganda-machine-that-makes-people-dislike-islam-n4950370

Women's Issues 

Tacky human beings take credit for an idea when it seems to be working and blame other people for it when they have to deal with unpleasant consequences. Trump reassigned Secretary Noem because Trump is a tacky human being. The alarming thing is Trump fans' willingness to play along with this tacky game. How else is it possible to account for anyone calling this woman ugly?

And why, after all these years, should it have mattered if she'd been uglier than a warthog?

(Photo by Alex Brandon.)

"Do they mean that she did ugly things?" The confrontational quality of last winter's INS raids was ugly all right, but Trump took credit (in his mind it was credit!) for that and it does seem more Trump's kind of thing than any woman's. Nobody's claiming to have any actual "dirt" on Noem. If they're saying she did ugly things, they're passing judgment on her speeches or gossipping about her teamwork with another federal employee (the old "If a woman and a man support each other on the job, they're undoubtedly a couple" line of slander). 

To me Secretary Noem looks as if she's trying a little too hard to copy more of Melania Trump's styles than she can copy effectively, but she's certainly not ugly. At the very worst she might be called a fashion victim.

Writing Life

 Shared by Mona Andrei. Google says this one is actually for sale on Zazzle, and so are several other "Writers' Clocks" with more helpful timetables. Buy the one that features "Drink heavily" (which I don't do) at 

https://www.zazzle.com/writers_clock-256978240498008203. 

Buy one I consider more relevant, although it doesn't mention things like "Read Pbird's blog so I can exercise to her favorite songs," "Network," "Go into town to use phone to negotiate ways to schedule bill payments, fending off poorer people begging for help to pay their bills approximately every third of a mile," "Try to think of different ways to cook beans that don't cost more money," or "Generate Monthly Fluffball," which might be why this month's Fluffball was so late, at 

https://www.zazzle.com/writers_clock_humorous_writing_humor_in_aqua-256229033879932749.

Book Review: Facing Death

Title: Facing Death and the Life After

Author: Billy Graham

Date: 1987

Publisher: Word Books

ISBN: 0-8499-0474-9

Length: 265 pages plus 6 pages of endnotes

Quote: “Only about one in everry five adults has made a will...Such situations create needless hardships and heartache for loved ones.”

Yes, of course Billy Graham’s book on Facing Death has a lot to say about the Christian doctrine of judgment and reward. “A Christian funeral should be a coronation.” I chose to quote the section on wills because Christians need to know that this book was meant to do more than endorse their religious beliefs, or some debatable variant form of their beliefs. It really is meant to help people prepare for their parents’, their mates’, and their own illness and disability as well as death, in practical more than emotional ways.

In 1987 Graham was only 69 years old. In the picture on the cover, he hardly looks that. Still, this is a book only a senior citizen could write, full of the kind of insights that come to people as their friends grow old and die. Billy and Ruth Bell Graham would remain active for several years after Facing Death was printed, but the book shows that they didn’t take their longevity for granted. Both of them had considered the possibility of widowhood, and taken steps to make things as easy as possible for the survivor.

Young people don’t like to think about such “heavy stuff.” “I’m only twenty, forty, or sixty years old. I hate funerals. If I die unexpectedly, just donate the body to medical science.” Even if the body is donated to medical science, the family will probably want some kind of memorial service. If you want to keep people who loved you from being exploited, you might as well plan something simple and sensible while you have some say in the matter. Dying costs money. Whether you pay into a life insurance policy or a savings account, your family will appreciate any financial preparation you can make, during the crisis.

Should you make a will, a living trust, or some other arrangement to ensure that your estate is transferred to the right people? Different states recognize different ways of directing the transfer of property. Graham discusses a few possibilities, but encourages readers to get legal advice about what works in their state (or country).

What is your position on life support devices? Are there medical procedures you want to refuse in advance? Are you willing to risk a transplant or transfusion? If these risky and expensive procedures seem “indicated,” hospital staff are not going to make it easy for your relatives to reject them on your behalf. If you want a Living Will that rules out certain treatments, Graham recommends obtaining legal advice, reading and signing your Living Will on videotape, and having your primary physician as one of the witnesses identified on that tape (or disk or whatever).

Usually, before facing our own death, most of us face the death of several other people. Facing Death contains some counsel for the bereaved, and for those who want to help them, too.

Shortly before writing the first draft of this review, I’d received a comment on an AC article that mentioned “excessive” grieving. By now everyone has probably heard that there is no timetable for grief. If the family really grieved for their loss of Grandpa when he became disabled, and empathized with his pain for several years, his death may seem like a merciful release for all concerned. If Grandma always seemed more like a 50-year-old than a 90-year-old and was actively involved with the things younger people were doing, they may think of her and shed tears every day for a year. If, however, you are still feeling overwhelmed by grief after a year, there is some possibility that your feelings of grief may be covering other feelings, e.g. guilt, and counselling might help. Facing Death contains some counsel for people in this situation.

Facing Death and the Life After was written primarily for Protestants, but it’s the sort of book that could be helpful to anyone who is alive. 

Link Log for 3.5.26

I do like men...mine, anyway. I'm not supposed to like other people's men much. The trouble is, my men (father, grandfathers, uncles and great-uncles, brother, husband, 16-year fiance because I didn't meet anyone else I liked in all that time) are all off doing manly stuff and being buddies in the Good Place, and other people's men are still here! 

Sorry, Nephews, those of you who literally are nephews. You're still here. By now you're men. But the majority of men, as a group...well, consider this batch of links.

Politics 

A Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from North Carolina became agitated during a congressional committee hearing and was told to leave, or the police would remove him. So he didn't and they did. Something in Candidate McGinnis went snap. It was a bone in his left arm, which he had shoved into a crack behind a door to make it harder for the police to carry him out. Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican from Montana, helped the police subdue the candidate. Exactly what they were arguing about, my sources don't say, but they do mention that McGinnis is Marine Corps and Sheehy was Navy. Google says McGinnis is currently 44 and Sheehy is currently 40 years old. Boys will be boys...

Women's Issues

We can count on male bloggers to misreport the fact: Most men know by now that they should not expect to get their own way twice in the duration of the marriage. 

It may happen, when and because we love our men and want them to be happy, but they shouldn't expect it ever to happen. 

Also, we need to be proactive in training little boys from infancy that they don't sit down, nor do they play games, as long as there's housework to be done. And vacuum cleaners are big, expensive, noisy power tools that fit into male hands better than female hands...instead of buying little boys pieces of plastic junk that make a noise when pushed around, sensible women tell them that if they're very good they can run the cordless mini-vac. 

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2026/03/survey-says.html

New Book Review: The Forest Is Forever

Fair disclosure: I've been one of the beta readers of all of Priscilla Bird's books, as they were written and posted, chapter by chapter, at howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com. So it's not occurred to me to post reviews of them. So I searched for the Amazon page to recommend one of them to someone I know in real life. The Amazon page to buy The Forest Is Forever is messed up; the book was written in the US, for US readers, about a place in the US, but searches show only the pages to buy the British or Australian editions. Say what? When Americans want to publish things that may mention or allude to people who may not like what we say about them, e.g. novels in which characters have parents or spouses who are Bad Examples but we're not positive that we've made those parents or spouses different enough from our own, we have traditionally told our agents "Just publish it in England.' Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. But The Forest Is Forever is available in the US. You just have to search for the author, not the title. You can buy it at 

https://www.amazon.com/Forest-Forever-Collected-Ralph-Stories/dp/B0GP8SN6ZL/

--but oh well search engines are saying Amazon's server is down, intermittently, today anyway. If you search for "books priscilla bird" they show you books by other people called Priscilla and books about birds. And if you search Google for "priscilla bird book forest is forever," the algorithm, no doubt attracted by our using the same half of a screen name, will--as of this morning--put a Link Log in which I showed the terribly cute "The late Albert Einstein recommends PBird's books" graphic designed by e-friend LoneStar Neanderthal, in between links to buy the book in England and to buy it in Australia.

Well. If they're going to do that, and maybe Google has more respect for this blog now that our daily page views are growing, then I ought at least to post a full-sized review of The Forest Is Forever.

Title: The Forest Is Forever

Author: Priscilla Ann Bird

Date: 2026

Publisher: Amazon

Length: 486 pages

ISBN:  979-8248948628

This is the third volume of stories about a magical place in the Baker National Forest in Washington state. Humans, even the fictional ones in the book, can find the settlement where the wolves, pumas, ravens, Neanderthal Men, and only a few other Sasquatch (they spread out), and other living things recognize Ralph the Sasquatch as their king--but only if the Sasquatch let them. Harmless but alarming pranks deflect unwelcome humans. A few select humans like reporter Millie, Ranger Rick, and restless student Marge, become friends and, whether by keeping the settlement secret or writing about it in such a way that hardly anyone believes their stories, are allowed to visit the Sasquatch family often.

Sasquatch believers are divided on the question whether Sasquatch are more like giant humans or more like giant gorillas. They agree that the creatures, if they still exist, would be a separate species but don't agree on which genus that species would belong in. In these stories the Sasquatch are clearly more like humans.

Sasquatch believers also disagree about whether Sasquatch bodies have never been found because the creatures intentionally destroy bodies that might lead researchers to their dwelling places, or have the ability to disappear (and dispose of bodies) into alternate dimensions, or are demonic delusions that exist only to lead people astray. In these stories they have the ability to pop in and out of interdimensional portals, and other super-powers, and they are good though not perfect creatures. There are different tribes and clans of Sasquatch. Some, Ralph admits, may be hostile to humans. His clan are benign.

In fact, Ralph, his wife Ramona, and their son Twigg and daughter Cherry, are generally smarter and nicer than the average human. Stories about them often include solutions to human problems, though sometimes the Sasquatch family solve problems by using their super-powers.

In this book Twigg grows up, likes young females he knows he's not meant to marry, finds and marries his beshert, and moves out on his own. 

There's nothing else quite like this series. The general concept reminds me of Kipling's children's stories, but the perspective and philosophy, the author's voice, and the characters themselves are altogether different from Kipling's. If you like whimsical, goodhearted, very gentle short fiction, you'll like the Ralph Stories, and you'll want to collect them all.

Web Log for 3.4.26

I have been just a bit under the weather. Actually the weather's been very nice. I've been under some silly little infection. The main symptom was that I kept feeling tired, lying down, dozing for ten minutes, and waking up feeling completely unrefreshed, and after one of these little cat naps I woke up thinking, "I feel as useless as a computer with Windows updates running on it!" 

For humans there are remedies like drinking extra water and taking extra vitamins. I did a simple at-home test this web site's contract won't allow me to explain and identified a minor bacterial infection that shouldn't require prescription medication. For computers, there really ought to be a law.

Animals 

Lovely Malaysian butterfly photos including three similar-looking Graphiums:

https://ronnieooist56.blogspot.com/2026/03/butterflies-in-february-2026-peninsular.html

War 

By Bill Watterson. Shared by Joe Jackson. Graphics displayed here because nobody seems to have much trouble viewing them any more, and many people like them, and I agree with this one. But I promise not to embed videos.

Ramadan happens this year to coincide with Purim, the Jewish celebration of the right to self-defense. Unlike Simchat Torah and unlike Christmas, its historical tradition is not about peace; Muslims aren't supposed to eat during the daylight hours of Ramadan but they are allowed to fight.

https://pjmedia.com/rabbi-michael-barclay/2026/03/02/why-this-month-of-ramadan-is-the-perfect-time-for-war-with-iran-n4950155

Bad Poetry: If Death Were a Woman

(This poem is "heavier," more "sombre," than Bad Poetry usually is. Depressive readers, please go to my Substack and read the cute cat shadorma instead. Today's book review will be "light" in every sense, and goodhearted and fun, because I just discovered that Google has been using this blog as a primary link for a book I've not even reviewed yet--only mentioned--and that book deserves a full-length review.)

Years ago, when Dame Helen Mirren was cast as Death in a movie, some online poets wrote answers to the prompt "If Death were a woman, what would she be like?" 

For example, Kim M. Russell, whose collected works I've been reading:

https://writinginnorthnorfolk.com/2016/09/15/death-wears-it-well/ 

Up here near the Cat Sanctuary, it brought to mind memories of our long-gone Queen Cat Graybelle's kittens. Whether cats are resurrected in a "real" afterlife, who knows--but all of Graybelle's kittens left this world, unmistakably, as if they were going to be with someone they loved. 

I thought it was cute to give all of them "gray" names, since they were gray cats, distinguishable by size and tails. I had not learned that if two cats' names begin with "Gray" I'll probably call both of them "Gray" for short and then I'll never know whether they really know their names. The male kitten was first called Grayham but, when his eyes opened, I told him (in front of somebody whose name was Alfred) that he was being so difficult I could almost mistake him for Alfred. Alfred thought that was funny, and after that the kitten was Little Alfie. Graylin was the biggest kitten, and took over the "mother" role, as best she could, after they lost their mother. 

If I'd known then what I know now, the kittens might have survived. If the Young Grouch had known then what he knows now, Graybelle would have come home and reared them. But in a sweetly sad way, the kittens' last moment gave me hope for all of us wretched clueless humans. Wherever they went was clearly a Good Place, and at least one of them seemed to be saying that humans will be there.

All three of them had been so ill

they turned to Death as to a friend.

Alfie went first, and made it plain:

that Death looked motherly to him.

Death looked like Graybelle, a big Manx

mix cat, long blue-grey coat, stub tail,

almost the classic Persian face,

alarming size, and heart of gold.

Then Graylin went, and made it plain

that Death to her was Alfie, loved

and tended in a motherly way.

Then Grayce, who clearly would have been

my own Manx cat, bonded for life--

Grayce turned to meet Death with a look

of love and joy. She turned to me.

Death was a woman for young Grayce.

I was that woman, and young Grayce

put up her paws and begged a lift

from Death, and turned to kiss her face.