Priscilla's Zine & Bookstore: September 10 Link Log

I don't normally come into town on Saturdays. Today I did, so decided I might as well get in some computer time...and guess what, the cafe's staying open way-late for the Town Festival and street concert. (I only came into town to pick up some matches.) Time for lots of links. Categories: Animals, Books, Crafts, Events, Food, Fun, Funny, Green, International, Keystone Pipeline Updates, Local, Maryland, Nice, Obamacare, Philosophy, Pictures, Politics, Psychology, Television, Weird, Youth Behaving Well, Zazzle.

Animals

One of the main differences between a Cat Sanctuary and a Humane Pet Genocide Society shelter is that, at the Cat Sanctuary, no cat has to live in a cage. Nevertheless, there are times when I do lock cats or kittens in cages...I call it "Cat Jail." Kittens really should be exploring the outdoor world with their mother at that stage where they look terribly cute and innocent as they play at "claiming territory" by destroying your property inside. Nature intended them to be learning to climb and dig and chase grasshoppers. If you can't offer kittens a natural outdoor place to do that, the next best thing is a kitten-proof room with scratching posts, bags, boxes, and travelling cages scattered about. Failing that, a nice roomy cage where kittens can climb and dig, bounce and pounce, bat a ball around or shred a worn-out sock, may save everyone's sanity. +Kimberly Dalessandro wrote this Amazon Affiliate blog post to market a particularly kitten-friendly cage design; you might want to open it just to see an adorable kitten picture:

https://blogjob.com/theadventuresofpandazeusandbaby/?p=1486

Books

Thomas Sowell explains lies, **** lies, and statistics...

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439710/misleading-statistics-household-income-numbers-can-support-lefts-alarmists?

Amazon is still trying to move copies of the old edition, but here's the new edition:

Call me a dinosaur...I don't think any of these books should qualify as "required reading" even for Feminist Studies. I think some of them are good reads and some of them aren't, and some of them are new books I'd like to read and some are new books I can give a miss, thanks, but if I were teaching a course in feminist literature, "required reading" would be things like The Woman's Bible (the publisher deliberately left off the word "commentary" to make it sound more inflammatory), The Second Sex, Our Bodies Our Selves...I think students are capable of discovering things like Jane Eyre, The Dollmaker, Native Tongue, even the less pain-inducing works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and enjoying them, all by themselves. How much less The Greatest of Marlys, although I love Marlys myself. I think we should wait another fifty years or so before anybody should get college credit for needing to make a scholarly study project of being able to understand Marlys.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/feminist-reading-list_us_57d19bcbe4b03d2d45991893?section=&section=us_arts

Crafts

For knitters who like skinny scarves, here's a scarf that's definitely not a Brownie project...but it's not really hard to knit, either. Time-consuming, row-intensive, and you need lightweight yarn to keep the scarf light enough to look like wings, but easy to do and oh so stylish. (Thanks to the Twit known as @BristolIvy for sharing.)

http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEdf16/PATTtwoforjoy/PATTtwoforjoy.php

Events

If you enjoy watching live "streaming" video/audio coverage of events online, you can watch Lloyd Marcus's #BlueLivesMatter event in Florida...if my computer were set up to function as a TV rather than an interactive typewriter, I could be watching it as I type this:

http://www.lloydmarcus.com/2016/09/live-stream-today-lloyd-marcus-blue-lives-matter-celebration/

Next week, this web site has already mentioned Bristol's "Rhythm & Roots" Town Festival. For those on the other side of the continent, or willing to go there...what about a vegan convention with Dean Ornish? (Thanks to the McDougalls, who organize these things, for sharing. Dr. Craig McDougall will speak also.)

http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=5e58f59d97611f910916b6276&id=6417626030&e=4d57a9fdfb

Food (Yum)

J.I. Rodale would not have approved of these visual "recipes." Neither would Robert Rodale. Neither would Mark Bricklin. Neither would Jane Kinderlehrer. I can't believe anything with the Rodale name on it would...but I can believe the founders of Rodale Press would, privately, have enjoyed these (all gluten-based, as shown) treats. Anyone who likes sweet things and can digest wheat products will.

http://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/food/10-crazy-delicious-smores-variations/slide/10

Vandana Shiva lists alternative ways to get better nutritional benefits than those claimed for "golden rice." Some of these additions to a rice dish will definitely add Indian flavor, but they can be found in many parts of the U.S. now and, with a dash of sugar or salt, they'll make the rice taste pretty good. (This web site assumes that everybody in the U.S. has already tried rice with shredded carrot.)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/37560-false-promises-avoid-miracle-rice-and-just-eat-a-carrot

And here's a really easy recipe for spaghetti sauce...I'm tempted to say puttanesca rather than marinara. (Both sailors and sluts were supposed to favor quick-and-easy spaghetti sauce recipes.)

http://www.samsplaces.com/2016/03/marinara-sauce.html

Fun Things

I'm not sure whether doing a roofing job is fun in et per se, or only fun-when-it's-done...anyway, here's a well written post from +Andria Perry about the joys of roof work.

https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=94573

Funny Things

If romantic comedies are rom-com, and zombie comedies are zom-com, is this list of funny blogs that appeal to young mothers mom-com? ( +Mona Andrei is #51. Cracked.com is #2; Dilbert.com is #4.)

http://healthymomsmagazine.net/2016/09/100-best-humor-blogs.html

Green

Er. Um. It will be interesting to find out whether there's a link between glyphosate and any specific form of cancer in humans, but it will take a long time...and meanwhile I can show you a link between glyphosate and lots of things that appear more immediately in humans. Like, if you're up for a nauseous gross-out, celiac sprue.

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/09/08/state-health-officials-to-review-roundup-as-possible-carcinogen

International Politics

In addition to the Labor Day post, Morgan Griffith sent out an E-Newsletter on the topic of foreign policy. Since this web site has no foreign policy, I'm exercising editorial prerogative and steering U.S. readers to Congressman Griffith's web site. Local readers may request a free printout of our Congressman's E-Newsletter.

http://morgangriffith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398621

Keystone Pipeline Updates

Interestingly, these are now coming from the Left. Thanks to Elizabeth Barrette for sharing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/09/09/federal-judge-denies-standing-rock-sioux-tribes-request-to-stop-work-on-four-state-oil-pipeline/?utm_term=.65050bd78439

This one came in the e-mail:

http://earthjustice.org/features/faq-standing-rock-litigation?

Local

From time to time I visit a web site that "wants to track your physical location." This is my physical location:

http://www.robertsfamilybakery.com/

...and the news is that they've just acquired a whole new line of local souvenir T-shirts. Gate City's Town Festivals traditionally occur in autumn; this year's is being billed as "Tailgate City." Although most people prefer either royal blue or navy blue, there are those who might like a local souvenir shirt in a more neutral color, and these new "Tailgate City" shirts will suit those people. They're a nice dark neutral gray that won't really clash with blue, brown, black, gray, or khaki trousers:

Maryland

Bowie State in the news...I can't listen to the audio interview with the teacher, grumble grumble grumble.

http://www.autumnmagazine.com/digital-issue

Nice Things

As a legally blind visual artist celebrates his eightieth birthday, his fans remember his wife and the unlikely way their abilities/disabilities meshed. The widget for sending him birthday greetings didn't work for me, though...

http://www.dailygood.org/story/1384/a-special-kind-of-grace-the-remarkable-story-of-the-devadosses-dailygood-org/

Obamacare

I'm starting to see why some Tea Parties show so little respect for Paul Ryan. In this (annoying PDF, I apologize) I'm not seeing a word about making medical care more affordable and safer for everyone by getting the insurance boondoggle out of it. Without preserving patients' and doctors' right not to involve any insurance scheme whatsoever, any kind of medical care plan is unlikely to be much of an improvement over the disaster we currently have. Any insurance-based medical care plan is a trainwreck; the name of the individual failing to stop the doomed train doesn't matter.

http://abetterway.speaker.gov/_assets/pdf/ABetterWay-HealthCare-PolicyPaper.pdf

Philosophy

+Coral Levang reflects on the currently trendy buzzwords for "living with intention." The part that most attracts me is the Tolkien quote, "Not all who wander are lost." Or, to put it more specifically: people whose primary purpose in living is to make money often seem, from either a moral or an intellectual viewpoint, to be "wandering," or "floundering," or "lost"...and those whose primary purpose in living is to follow their vocation with integrity may seem, from a careerist/money-oriented viewpoint, to be "wandering" or "floundering" or "lost."

https://corallevang.wordpress.com/2016/09/08/living-with-intention-or-wandering/

Pictures

Scotland:

http://www.personapaper.com/article/47100-yes-we-are-back-in-the-land-of-the-wifi-signal

Politics

People from the Illiberal Left have explained to me that, as they use the term "racism," it cannot be applied to haters who belong to a disadvantaged minority group even in situations where that group may be advantaged. (For example, as I understand these people, the defunct store that used to give me a discounted "Cherokee price" and charge my Whiter-looking relatives the full price was not practicing racism.) This argument occupies the same part of my brain that Hindu theology occupies. I know the kind of thing people say in support of it, but I can't really believe that anybody really, seriously, rationally believes it. So I salute Allen West and Michael Cantrell for calling out an egregious example of, yes, racism, as any reasonable person understands racism, coming from a Black writer:

http://www.allenbwest.com/michaelcantrell/paper-publishes-racist-diatribe-liberals-silent

I don't know +Jack Snider 's ethnic identity, at the time of sharing. Nor do I care.

http://thegreatconversationmovement.blogspot.com/2016/09/real-racism.html

"Controversy?" I Tweeted. "Does anybody not think this guy is tacky?" Then I thought of a better joke: Kaepernick should convert all the way and play soccer for Iraq...under Hussein rules.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/08/27/controversy-erupts-after-nfl-quarterback-converts-to-islam-and-refuses-to-stand-for-national-anthem/

Psychology

It's harmful to our psychological health to carry around rancid, festering old anger against our parents, even though some parents deserved it. The one thing about Bill Clinton I really like is that he gave our generation a solid model of how to love and forgive a formerly unlovable, later pitiable parent-figure. Here, for the young, is a psychological explanation of how to start preparing ourselves to take this step.

http://theopenedbox.com/reflection/daddyless-daughter-yes/

My comment there, if @landofbrooke leaves it up, summarized my relationships with my parents on one level. Here's a post that prompts me to reminisce on another level...Mother had learned, for business purposes, how to ask the kind of questions that keep a conversation going. Dad had learned, possibly for the purpose of being a classic drill sergeant, to ask the other kind. As teen/"tween"-aged children, my brother was able to work around Dad's communicative shortcomings, and I wasn't.

http://www.aha-now.com/asking-good-questions-empower-teen/

Here's a young man's take on the genuine conflicts involved in being a Dad...how can he watch the kiddies when a cute chick from outside the family is hanging out in the park?

http://hubpages.com/literature/Did_I_say_I_Took_Kids_To_Park

+Sandy KS shares good tips for any parent (or teacher or tutor) helping children learn to read:

http://www.blogbourne.com/8-ways-to-teach-a-child-to-read/

Television

Norb Leahy seems to feel about as curmudgeonly toward television as I do. I suspect the basic problem is that video just inherently does not appeal to writers. We're not wired to enjoy television. For me, even if a movie is as pretty as The Sound of Music, sitting still and just looking at a moving picture is an efficient way to fall asleep. NTL has, however, looked at enough displays of "fifty-seven channels and nothing on" to have written a witty analysis of why so many of the current shows aren't even pretty:

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2016/09/tv-show-subliminal-messages.html

Not that left-wingers like the current shows and their lack of inspiration, either...This one is not as well written, as well displayed, or as much fun to read as NTL's, but I suspect (having lost patience with the full-length article) it includes just about every major program NTL left out.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-reality-tv-women-should-just-be-grateful-to-be-loved_us_57d1c9e5e4b06a74c9f3ba8d?

Weird, News of the

Thanks to +Martin Kloess for sharing:

https://david-latkinson.blogspot.com/2016/09/writing-10-things-in-news.html

Youth Behaving Well (with Commercial Link)

Cautionary comment: I'm a car-free middle-aged lady who's worn out a lot of shoes while carrying a large knitting bag, and often large shopping bags, across town. If some twerp offered me a pair of shoes, even while I was getting every bit of wear out of a pair I was introducing to friends as "lucky golf shoes--see the hole in one?", I just might spit in the twerp's face. Laron Tunstill, however, lives in a city where people are actually homeless, and managed to find a homeless man whose worn-out shoes could be replaced by the shoes young "Ron Ron" had on. So the kid pulled off his own shoes and made the transaction. Cool move Ron Ron! Purr! (For those who don't know, "ron ron" is the French word for the "purr" sound cats make when they're pleased.)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/09/08/teen-gives-shoes-away-to-homeless-man-hoping-to-overshadow-violence-in-his-community/?

I should perhaps mention that I have some connections whose mission is to make cool shoes available to poor people. They sell Nikes and Skechers and Reeboks and Rockies and so on at huge discounts in the Friday Market; they distribute them to children of needy families in the local schools. Here is a picture of a pair of Rocky Goretex boots, men's size 8 (which, for those who don't know, is generally the same as women's size 10; male and female foot shapes are identical, only the size numbering is different), currently being offered for $50. For those who don't know, that's a steal. I snapped the picture and sent it to a woman who wears a size 10, yesterday; it was still on the phone this morning, so why not share it? Readers can order it through this web site next week, if you know for sure that somebody can wear Rocky size 8.