Animals
It took a while for an animal picture to come up in today's stack of e-mail. When it did, it was this absolutely adorable cat:
http://www.mochasmysteriesmeows.com/2017/01/book-review-my-cat-hates-my-vet-foiling.html
But, but...we just did black and white cats! The ones that may be showing further down the screen haven't had time to find homes yet! Hmm...what about white and black cats? Petfinder doesn't separate the color combinations based on the proportions of visible color, but enough homeless cats fit into this category that this web site can try it. Actually, to narrow down the selection to only the three cutest pictures, I limited the search to older cats near Atlanta, Washington, and New York.
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| Bethany from the Bethany Road in Alpharetta, Georgia, seems to be a stray or stolen pet! Please help her search for her rightful home before adopting her, and maybe even work toward justice against the cat haters who brought her to the shelter: https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/34313995 |
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| Those paws! Felicia and Olivia just might have been petnapped from homes in North Carolina. I have to give this Virginia shelter points for making it a bit easier to locate the rightful home...you know a polydactyl pair like this are likely to be missed! https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/34941508 |
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| Prince from New York: https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/33220985 |
And I've not read this book, but now I want it:
Dog people, here's Barkley's Heir's urgent warning about a medication that may help humans but kill dogs:
http://thebookofbarkley.blogspot.com/2017/01/health-alert-from-honorary-dog-tor-for.html
Smaller animals anyone? This one's small even for a moth. It took hard work for a researcher to notice enough specimens to see that, under a microscope, the tiny hairs on these tiny moths' heads resemble Donald Trump's infamous topknot. (I'm convinced that it's not a toupee, by now, but if it originally grew on his head and wasn't transplanted, he has my sympathy...)
(link to page that includes detailed description of moth body parts)
On the wild side, white tiger pictures:
https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=227848
Black History Month
+Lloyd Marcus prepares...Yes, he's posted some things that even this legally White follower thinks looked as if he were trying too hard to reach across the color walls that he and I want to pull down. Maybe some of my posts look that way to readers (on either side, or both) also. Traitors? Well, cottonpick, as Ozarque would have said, and also feh, and likewise dang! We're not traitors, stupid people, we're just refusing to recognize your dang stupid war! This web site celebrates Black people (American and others) who have reasons to be proud, during but not limited to February, and encourages LM to do likewise. It's just that there are so many of them who have, and are, better sources of pride than some poor clueless bloke, like Rodney King...this web site has often noted that Rodney King, David Koresh, Norman Allison, Trayvon Martin, and many more deserved less horrific corporal punishment than they got, but this web site has also noted that, er um, being a suspicious character and not cooperating with the law is hardly as heroic as, y'know, actually achieving...almost anything. Black Lives Matter, yes...a Real Man "matters" to other people for reasons beyond the mere fact of his being alive. LM at least writes songs!
http://noisyroom.net/blog/2017/01/19/black-history-aka-demonize-white-america-month/
Books
Can Americans dig African speculative fiction? I've found African realistic-contemporary fiction hard to follow, myself...here's yourall's chance to show how much hipper and multicultural you are than I am. (I also find Salman Rushdie a challenge, though I used to know people from northern India who enjoyed explaining things from his books to me, which helped...I'm one of the United States' foremost bookworms. We are a backward and insular people.)
http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/4230259.html
Here's a writer worth encouraging. Though Dutch, she says some things in this interview much more clearly than many Americans seem to manage...and lots of us don't even speak anything else but English. I have one small problem with the interview though. What happened to the needlework pictures? (Small, sharp, browser-friendly pictures are good--it's only the big splashy ones that push me into #ReadersRevolt mode.)
https://asexualartists.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/interview-marescha-muys/
Censorship
Facebook users should have been seeing this one on Facebook. If Facebook hadn't censored it, it would hardly deserve reposting; it's not exactly a new meme. Because Facebook did censor it, and because it does not need censoring...Editing, yes. The standard English transliteration is Allahu Akbar. I don't know whether the mistyped version has an obnoxious meaning in Arabic, the way pronouncing the late dictator's name as "SAD-dum" makes it a term of contempt in Arabic. If convinced that it has one I'll pull down this image, but for now I'm posting it on the assumption that all it means is that Grant Phillips doesn't speak Arabic.
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Should we call this the Turner Diaries effect? The Turner Diaries was a bad, boring, unrealistic book, apart from featuring hatespews. (Notice it's not linked, although you can buy it on Amazon if you want to see just how bad it's possible for a novel to be.) The narrator actually brags, on one memorable page--I've not bought the book or written down the page number, but the paragraph sticks in the mind--something like "We went out for a Sunday afternoon walk in the park, and we met a Jewish family. I shot one of them, my buddy shot two, my girlfriend shot one, but the old grandfather got away." There would have been no way anybody would have kept a copy of this novel after buying one, or even considered reprinting it...if it hadn't been censored. Censorship is keeping it alive...well, censorship and the fact that we all know that Timothy McVeigh did not use it as a blueprint for a successful revolution.
And in the same vein...here's +Allen West Republic and The Blaze promoting a (White) credit card scam victim's effort to promote "Black Lives Matter"...because Wells Fargo censored it. (Suggestion for Rachel Nash: Try "Black Is Beautiful" with an image of Mary McLeod Bethune
, or maybe Frances Watkins Harper
. For others: your library should have some books by or about both of those historic figures that would make good school and conversation reading for Black History Month.)Cybersecurity
+Martha DeMeo offers a detailed warning...One thing I'll say for Yahoo: that tight spam filter does keep most of this garbage out of my in-box. That, plus the fact that I don't do any banking or shopping online.
http://themarthareview.com/dont-click-that-link/
Food
Wordpress ate my comment on:
https://foodwithaplan.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/recipes-arent-always-tried-and-true/
Basically I steered everyone to:
http://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2015/03/grandma-bonnie-peterss-gluten-free-rice.html
Troubleshooting: Gluten is what holds biscuits together while you hold them in your hand and spread something on them. Since Rice Biscuit Bread is gluten-free, you have to spread your favorite biscuit topping on a dish and crumble your biscuits onto/into it, instead. If your rice and rice flour are fresh it tastes like normal Southern-style buttermilk biscuits. If they're not it tastes like stale rice. If it does taste even a bit like stale rice, apple butter would be a major improvement.
In view of the warning above...curries are notoriously unpredictable recipes (and Indian spice mixtures are notoriously controversial), so you might want to test this recipe with caution. Indian cooks often say it's important to begin by toasting the spices, with or without the oil, to get the right flavor. People who don't tolerate a lot of spices may prefer a blander flavor, and want to begin with just a pinch of spices--or without them, and let everyone sprinkle just a cautious shake of spice on their dish. That may be more of a chicken-vegetable dish than a real curry--but an unusual chicken-vegetable dish may be what some people prefer.
http://www.justonecookbook.com/indian-curry/
Fun Facts
If you use anything that runs on batteries, you need the fun fact at the end of Dan Lewis's post about the coldest town in the world:
http://nowiknow.com/where-ten-degrees-below-zero-is-unreasonably-warm/
Health
I'm not sure I want to know what Sarit Rogers is writing about, but here I stand to tell you that this is what mononucleosis-complicated-by-hepatitis felt like, at the times when it didn't feel like one big cramp running from the liver area to the scalp and toenail areas and all points between, like a really bad case of flu, or like passing out on the desk from the strain of, ooohhh, typing for three hours. As they say...the good news is that people live through this kind of disability, and the bad news is that people live through this kind of disability. A little more good news, though, for SR--if you do recover completely, trivia like flu and food poisoning will never put you off your stride again.
http://www.adiosbarbie.com/2017/01/the-invisibility-of-the-disability/
Music
Tune for this week comes from the end of a "humour" post:
https://niume.com/pages/post/?postID=227591
If it doesn't make your toes tap, click here to buy the baby-boomer anthem on Amazon...Lots of people who recorded this song are easier on the ears than Bob Dylan was. This obscure band was and remains my favorite. I enjoyed the whole album, which Amazon doesn't want to link to a specific non-title song...nearly all the songs on this album were written by old flat'n'raspy Dylan, to whom I refuse to ask the young to listen:
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| Sample "Times Changing" on Amazon at http://amzn.to/2jDH7UT |
Obamacare
The Washington Post has a cool interactive page where you can post "letters" to our President-Elect:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/opinions/dear-president-trump-letters/
Here's mine:
"
Please put the medical care system on a sustainable basis...cash, with a safety net to pay actual costs of care. There's no way we can sustain a system that keeps third-party profiteers in the middle of the system. We have to put the insurance gambling scheme out of the picture and support patients and doctors only. We can afford to do that.
I'm not a number cruncher, but the numbers have been crunched...if anybody out there wants to make this a dare bet (instead of a gambling-type bet), for $75 I'll do a Berea-quality paper on this, readable text and lots of links to numbers.
Mr. President, when you and I were at the minimum-wage stage of life, we could afford to pay for the medical care we needed and a lot more than we needed, even on busboys' wages. Insurance was not necessary until a critical number of people bought into the racket. Doctors could afford to help poor people on a sliding-scale basis, as Ben Carson clearly recalls, before that time, but many poor people didn't even need to bother petitioning for the reduced rates! That is what we need to bring back...and the way to bring it back is to make insurance unnecessary again. Help the principals by cutting off the parasites.
"
Politics (Philosophy)
I personally do assert the primacy of individuals over groups. "Because we are, I am" is a philosophy that leads to the enslavement of nations. "Because I am, and you are, we are" is the philosophy that has made America great. Individuals who have no loyalty to groups whatsoever, of course, have another problem...I agree with Erica Carle that the whole idea of the primacy of groups is a religion first and a pathology second. If I didn't believe that, it would not be possible for me to have outlived my brother, father, and husband for all these years. If and when it's possible for me, in good conscience, to fit into a group of like-minded individuals, I savor that experience and cherish those individuals. If that group ceases to exist, I survive.
https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/myths-individualism
Politics (U.S. presidential)
Inaugural addresses are in newspapers, online, collected in books...and I can imagine no better way to get ten-year-olds to try to read one than to tell them a teacher at school thinks they're too little to read it. This one makes me chortle. (But the joke will probably be on the kids; your Auntie Pris listened to a fifth grade teacher who told my class that we were old enough to follow the election and listen to the debate, and since an eleven-year-old and an eight-year-old will tackle anything that involves staying up late my brother and I did try to listen to a presidential debate, and we didn't understand anything the candidates were saying and fell asleep in half an hour.)
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/19/4th-grade-teacher-declares-he-wont-show-trump-inaugural-speech-to-students-and-reaction-is-swift/
Wendy Welch is dealing with it:
https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2017/01/19/passing-the-penguins/
Y'know...it's not what I'm sharing this link for, but the thought uppermost in my mind after reading this post is "Ouch, those eyelids." They're not an indicator of the age Mrs. Reagan was in this photo. They're an indicator of how tired she was. Letting herself be photographed with eyelids like that? Trouper and a half wasn't she?
Anyway, this web site officially felicitates Vice-President Pence and Justice Thomas, and invites everyone to catch up on the controversy about one of the most often quoted Scriptures in America:
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/19/pence-to-take-oath-of-office-on-very-specific-verse-using-reagans-bible/
Travel
Here's an interesting, low-cost way to collect beach souvenirs...if everyone did it, would we lose all our beaches?
http://itsjustlife.me/the-sands-of-time-2/
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