Monday, December 24, 2018

What a Difference a Camera Made

The physical Internet Portal store is open for the last day in 2018. Someone noticed how different some sweaters look, in real life, from the way they looked in photographs snapped with the Tracfone. Out with a new "smart" phone camera, and person snapped these pictures of three sweaters (Christmas red and green!) that were especially grayed-out by the Tracfone when originally photographed for this web site.

1. Here's a lightweight traditional gansey-type sweater, adapted from a design by Madeline Weston, as photographed by the Tracfone:


As photographed by the "smart" phone...for some reason Google has stopped uploading photos from the original angle. The photograph came through with the neck at the top and sleeves at the sides; Google insists on showing it sidewise.


To knit this or a good half-dozen more lightweight gansey patterns, plus fairisle motifs, Aran-style cable designs, and a lovely Shetland-style shawl, here's a book...Technically these are designer patterns rather than traditional patterns, because they were not copied directly from early twentieth century pieces. They are fairly close to the traditional patterns, which did allow for interpretation. Weston's interpretations are knitted in lightweight wools and cottons with a comfortable fit.



2. This cable sweater with mosaic stitch borders was a knitter's "Tribute to Barbara Walker," knitted around the turn of the century. Tracfone photo:


"Smart" phone photo:


I think, without checking, that the pattern was adapted from this issue of Knitter's magazine.



3. This cardigan and cap were knitted in 2010, when the back pleat made the cardigan particularly stylish. Now it mainly makes it harder to spread out flat. Those little lapels!



Smartphone version, in which the photographer didn't even try to spread it flat. In real life some of the stripes are broken by being knitted in multicolor yarn, but the stripes knitted in one color do line up evenly around the waist.


So, what I want for Christmas...is NOT a "smart" phone. I don't like gadgets that try to be smart. I want a serious digital camera or none.

GoPro HERO7 Silver — Waterproof Digital Action Camera with Touch Screen 4K HD Video 10MP Photos

Friday, December 21, 2018

Tim Kaine on the Farm Bill

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA):

"
Dear friend,

It's official - the 2018 Farm Bill, which included key provisions to legalize hemp, was signed into law today. This comprehensive bipartisan legislation ends the outdated ban on hemp production and allows Virginia farmers to finally grow and sell the plant, creating new business opportunities and jobs in our Commonwealth.
The 2018 Farm Bill also included significant investments to expand Chesapeake Bay clean-up efforts, protect Virginia commodities like dairy and cotton, and maintain funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that Virginia families depend on for food security.
I'm proud we came together and delivered these big wins for Virginia families, farmers, and businesses.
Sincerely, 
"

You can follow the link to another link that contains the full text of the Farm Bill--all 807 pages of PDF. However, if the Senator were in fact a friend of mine, he'd know that I don't give a flyin' flip about hemp. I want to know where to find the removal of protections for glyphosate.

Merry Christmas, Morgan Griffith

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9); editorial comment = title:

"
Christmas Traditions
Christmas brings with it many traditions and memories. Whether a family gathering, an annual party, a song, a food, or something else, almost everyone has something they look forward to savoring at this time of year.
I recall from my childhood the delight my sister Betsy and I took for years in a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer decoration my mother made for her classroom and brought home from the school where she taught. It was a profile cutout with the body covered in white cotton balls and a red ball nose. From when we were three or four years old to about fifteen, we insisted that it hang on the door of our little house on Broad Street, even having it remade when the original one wore out.
Certain songs and books centered on Christmas still strike a chord, year after year, and I have used this column during the holiday season to dwell on some of my favorites, each with its own backstory making it especially powerful or resonant.
For example, to return to Rudolph, this story originated with a Montgomery Ward catalog writer named Robert L. May. He created the red-nosed reindeer for a coloring book the store gave to children, pouring himself into it after his wife passed away. With the help of his brother-in-law, a composer, May then fashioned the story into a song. Several high-profile singers passed on recording it, so the legend goes, but Gene Autry’s wife persuaded him to sing it. His version is the one most familiar to us.
In 2014, I wrote in my Christmas column about Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which he published in 1837. One of its stories involved a lonely, miserable man, who on Christmas Eve was shown the past and the future by supernatural beings and reformed his life as a consequence.
If this story strikes you as familiar even though you have never read The Pickwick Papers, you may recognize it as the general plot to a book Dickens published six years later. A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ tale of the reformation of the miser Ebenezer Scrooge after his haunting by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, remains widely beloved, both as a book and in its various cinematic and theatrical adaptations. Just in the past few weeks, I enjoyed a play based on Dickens’ book with my family.
Each Christmas we revisit the traditions that mean the most to us. As other circumstances in our lives change over the years, the songs, stories, or other traditions of the holiday season maintain their familiar, timeless aspects. Even in the most horrific conditions, they can provide comfort.
This is what happened in 1914 along the Western Front during World War I, as I wrote in my 2016 Christmas column. On Christmas Eve, German soldiers in their trenches sang “Silent Night,” and the British responded with “The First Noel.” A few soldiers ventured from each side and met in “No Man’s Land” between the trenches, and soon hundreds met to swap gifts and play soccer in what is remembered as the Christmas Truce.
Whatever it is about this season that you most enjoy, I hope that you can spend this time in safety with your family and friends.
I will close with the subject of my first Christmas column, in 2011, which told the story of I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. This carol began as a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called Christmas Bells. He wrote it in the 1860s after he lost his wife, killed in a fire that left him badly burned, and after his son was severely wounded in the Civil War.
Despite these twin tragedies, the bells of Christmas still offered hope to Longfellow, as well as his fellow men and women:
I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men...

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men!

No matter what your particular faith, peace on Earth, good will to men!
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.
"

Don't Name That Feeling, or Advice to Young Writers

It's that time again...what Reason is calling its Holiday Hiatus. Merry Christmas to those who feel that that holiday is an important expression of Christian faith (and to the Christian-phobic crybullies). Happy Holidays to those who plan to celebrate at least Boxing Day and New Year's Day, too, before going online again. I don't plan to travel far, and may be in a place that has Internet access during the holiday week; then again I may not be in such a place, or it may not have access. So I may be online again before the third of January, but I make no promises.

"What happened to the book links and Paypal buttons?" Paypal ganked too much information about the personal identities of people whose identities are not being released on the Internet. If and when that's fixed, linking Paypal to a completely new bank account associated with none of those people's individual identities, then the Paypal buttons at this site will work again and the daily book reviews will return. I am still reading and selling books in the real world--just brought in a copy of Alias Grace this morning. The computer shows that a lot of you aren't missing the book reviews at all. It also shows that other people are. So we will work on setting up a new, securer Paypal account.

Meanwhile, another cyberchore I've started doing is sorting out the unread e-mail in my main e-mail account, much of which consists of links to Associated Content posts from 2009. Dead links, that is. And then at home I've taken up the long-put-off chore of reading through the notes I took in high school toward a novel I never wrote.

From grade five or six on, I wrote short children's stories, typed them up on a typewriter, and read or told them to children I baby-sat--my natural sister and her little friends. The children and their older siblings were fascinated. I also worked sporadically toward the goal of writing one or two good full-length novels for and about children, and sometimes my brother and I worked on one that he wanted to write. Then in high school I brought home some second-rate school stories from the school library, and my brother and I got into writing parodies of bad young adult novels. One of the depths of bad comedy that comes to mind involved a character being dumb enough to attempt suicide as a statement, by leaping out of a window--a first-floor window--but she did get seriously scratched and bruised, falling into a rosebush. Let us draw the curtain of charity over those stories. None of them ever reached full novel length, and that was a good thing.

Meanwhile, at school I was observing the raw material for what I thought might become a decent school story--competition between students at different grade levels when they were together in "open" classes. I started taking notes. Sort of.

What I actually wrote would have made no sense at all to anyone else. It doesn't make much sense even to my sympathetic older self. On one line I'd write "I like this class" or "Teacher A is okay." Ten lines down the page, "This class is so boring," or "I wish Teacher B hadn't retired. A isn't doing as good a job."

As I read these pages at fifty, three thoughts keep coming to mind.

One of them is "Who ever told this child she could write? What motive could they possibly have had?"

One is "Rereading things you wrote at the age of fifteen is a way to relive your adolescence--at least, part of it--the part where you wanted to die of embarrassment."

One is "Why did I fail to burn this rubbish at least thirty years ago?"

The answer to which is, of course, "So that I could see how what my teachers kept saying, in college where they finally looked beyond punctuation and tried to read what we wrote, applied to my writing too."

My English 101 teacher used to plead, "Try to write down every detail you see and hear, or remember seeing and hearing. Let readers make their own value judgments. Write what you see and hear, and then you can go back and remove all the details that are just taking up space."

My English 102 teacher used to growl, "Nobody wants to read about you any more. This is English 102, where we do real research. Save your feelings for your diaries. Write about what you learned."

My Music 105 teacher used to remind us, every time we had to write about the live concerts we were required to attend in the evenings or the records we listened to in class, "I want to see all the technical musical terms you can work in. Don't keep on about the 'I liked, I didn't like.' Tell me what you can hear the musicians doing."

In college I did not take the time to go back and reread those high school class notes as a bad example; I just tried to follow instructions and write things the teachers could stand to read.

Now, thirty-some years later, I do remember some--but only some--of the things I was seeing and hearing that prompted those useless notes like "This class is okay." I even remember what I was thinking. "We are reading about Europe. A guest brought in some photographs and souvenirs from her trip to Switzerland. The room where she stayed in a chalet was very dark. It had a scenic view of a steep, icy, melodramatic mountain. I wish she had brought some of the actual chocolates instead of a Polaroid snapshot of them" would have taken longer to write by hand than "This class is okay." Sitting in the class, I'd think that in the evening, at my typewriter, I'd have time to work these memories into my fictional story; for the moment "This class is okay" ought to be enough. And then I'd go home and, mostly, not work what had really happened into the fictional story.

Back then young writers had a problem that has to be less of a problem now. Then as now, it had been pouring down words all day at school and I wanted to do something with the other parts of my brain. Then as (I hope) now, teenagers had a few chores and responsibilities at home. I was the eldest child; my mother had less energy than I hope the mothers of most young writers have, so my natural sister had probably been bored witless all day; she expected to be entertained when my brother and I got home, and our parents would always order us to find a way to amuse her the minute she set up her whine. But also, back then, everyone typed on an actual clattering typewriter that my whole Highly Sensory-Perceptive family could hear all over the house. Much as my siblings wanted me to write full-length novels, much as my parents theoretically liked the idea of a teenager writing a full-length novel however dreadful--in practice, nobody wanted to listen to that typewriter. Everyone, including me, had a powerful unconscious motive to distract me from writing more than a page or two at a time.

All good writers have to type, or worse yet hand-write, every single letter in every word, several times until all the words fit together. There are writers, like Walter Scott, who reportedly spent a few hours working out the plot of a novel and then just wrote as many words as his publisher wanted--and his publisher liked fat novels--and hardly ever revised anything; those writers can usually be recognized by the feeling you have, while reading their books, that their books are at least twice as long as they ought to be. There are writers who are able to write out an outline and then write a page or two, one scene of a novel or one section of a nonfiction book, every time they have a free half hour, and come up with a readable book at the end. That's a gift. Those of us who don't have it have to rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite some more.

That's why I was an early adopter of word processing technology. I wasn't really geeky, didn't care about programming my first couple of computers to do anything but process words, and snapped up Word Perfect and Microsoft Word when those came along. I got into computers just to reduce the wear and tear writers inevitably put on our housemates' nerves.

Now that I have a computer, do I remember enough of what really went on in those "open classes" to write about the unofficial competitions, grades nine and ten against grades eleven and twelve, and grade nine against grade ten? Probably. Will I write a novel about it? Possibly, if convinced that the world needs another school story. But as I read my notes, I feel more internal motivation to write about how to take notes that are not a complete waste of time.

Nephews, as you live through your own material for young adult novels in high school and college, please take notes on what you see and hear (and perhaps smell) outside your head.

Your older selves will be able to add "...and s/he was feeling bored" if you take the trouble to write about what made that class boring.

"The recording of the classical opera sounded tinny, with soft passages she could barely hear in between the parts with a lot of people shrieking and bellowing at each other."

"The algebra teacher pulled down all the window shades any time the hag noticed a fellow looking out the window, where the ornamental trees he'd helped plant last month were starting to bloom, after he'd already done the stupid review problems."

"Scarlet fever was going around, and for once Tracy Jones with the perfect attendance record had not been able to get the family chauffeur to come to school--was the chauffeur ill too?--and the wall of gigglers behind which I hide my Snarky Class Notes were taking bets whether Jones was going to faint or vomit, but Jones only sat up front looking glassy-eyed."

Those are (fictionalized versions of) three of the possibilities that came to my mind as I read one of my "This class is boring"'s, and not even I, as an adult, can feel enough empathy for the bored and boring teen-troll who wrote "This class is boring" to care which one it was.

More advice for writers? I reviewed this book years ago; I still have one copy, and perhaps some day I'll sell that one.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Status Update: Physical Store a Success, but May Die

There's an old Irish-English joke: "The operation was a success, but the patient died."

It reflects the reality of life for people of Irish descent. In addition to the alcoholic and celiac genes, another mutation our ancestors bred into the gene pool is intolerance of a general anesthetic. After a simple and successful surgical operation, a patient who has this gene will have a fatal stroke anyway. We have to insist on local anesthetics only.

Anyway, that's the reference of the title of this status update. After six weeks of stress and anxiety, the physical Internet Portal store has finally shown a profit on the small investment I made. I'm pleased. On the other hand, what I have in the store is seasonal merchandise that won't be on display in January; my profits haven't been enough to fill the store with new non-seasonal merchandise--and I hate that,'cos I wanted to bring in a lot of things e-friends have made for sale--and other crafters aren't rushing to invest their money in making it a great multi-craft cooperative. I may have to take my profits and go back to open-air markets next year. The store has been a success but, if others don't want to take the same risk I did, the store may still...well, die back in the way frostbitten plants do. It will still have living roots but it won't be visibly growing above the ground. I'm not pleased about that.

This is a Tuesday and I'm not going to take the time to post a full-length rant about how completely cutting off all handouts to anyone who's able to come in and apply for tax-funded benefits, who is not either active as an entrepreneur or spending days in a day labor site, would actually help the so-called poor people in my part of the world.

The biggest source of distress to me, during these weeks in the store, has been those agents of the Evil Principle who may think they mean well when they say things like "Ooohhh, ooohhh, you're spending what little income you have and you're not instantly becoming rich! How terrible! How terrible! Why don't you just give up trying to do anything on your own, just go on welfare if you can't get an entry-level minimum-wage job at age 50, and for that matter just give up having your own home and move into Bedbug Towers, so at least people wouldn't be worrying about you or feeling sorry for you!"

If people are sincerely worrying about me or feeling sorry for me, the best way for them to deal with their emotional discomfort would be to bring a few hundred dollars into the store and spend it. Then I could set up a safe off-grid heating system and nobody would have to worry about my freezing in my own home, which I would prefer to smothering in some sort of horrible stack-and-pack warehouse for welfare cheats.

Given my able body, hyperthyroid metabolism, and habituation to physical activity, I'd probably be the last person in my town or county to suffer any permanent damage if we did have another snow disaster like last week's. Those who enjoy worrying and being busybodies might be better advised to worry about their lazy selves. For me, walking ten miles in the snow was fun. For them, it wouldn't be fun, and it just might become necessary.

Unfortunately other crafters who ought to be sharing the store and earning money have become dependent on a lifestyle of merely taking money. "I've 'retired' now," they wail, or "I'm a single mother and have to have 'benefits' to take care of the child," or "I can't afford to lose my Medicaid," and "Won't you just take a few things and sell them on commission, and slip me the cash under the table if you sell things?" I wouldn't mind selling other people's things on commission, but I mind bitterly that people are wasting their God-given talents by depending on a system that punishes them for earning fifty dollars here and twenty dollars there when they can.

We'd be better off with a welfare policy like Grover Cleveland's, where if people really didn't have food or clothing they got off the couch and bartered something for it, and nobody had time to sit around trying to tear down whatever their neighbor might be trying to build.

A book title comes to mind. Yes, Amazon still has a picture of the same edition I read when it was new. I remember being put off by the level of profanity in this comedian's books, but compared to the way many urban young people talk today it's almost tasteful.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Short Book Review: Life Begins When the Kids Leave Home and the Dog Dies

I finished reading the book, and even wrote a full-length review with quotes on my home computer, over the weekend. For now, here's the short review on Goodreads:

Life Begins When The Kids Leave Home And The Dog DiesLife Begins When The Kids Leave Home And The Dog Dies by Barb Taub
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Around the time Erma Bombeck's roll-on-the-floor mom-comedy mellowed into sweet grandma-type stories, her gift of hilarity moved on to Barb Taub. The Midwest has been keeping these mom-comedy newspaper columns all to themselves for too long.

What's not to love? In weekly newspaper columns it's possible to reuse jokes over the years. It's unfortunate that a joke is reused in two of the first few reprints in "Life Begins." I mention this because it made me wonder how much repetition there was going to be in this book. Actually, very little. Each page contains fresh lines and funny stories.

Read this book when you want to laugh out loud, and only when you can, because you will.


View all my reviews

And here's the link you can use to buy it from Amazon:

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Status Update: The Big Wet Snow

A sponsor complained about what the sponsor mistook for the "good" posts I'd promised another sponsor. This one paid for two more "good" posts. I need to make this clear. This, like most of the other things posted here lately, is not a paid "good" post; the book reviews were pre-scheduled last spring, and the me-me-me posts are merely status updates. Before revising and posting things for which people actually pay, I'm just letting relatives know I'm still alive. (Now that I've written down what seemed worth recording as my brain thawed, it looks like a Makers and Takers post, but it really is just a free status update.)

The livelier posts are late. The fictive conversation guest posts I do for a commercial site are late. The review of an e-friend's hilarious book, Life Begins When the Kids Leave Home and the Dog Dies, is late. I've been busy opening the physical store, the Internet Portal, and this week the store's not even open due to fear that customers could be badly injured trying to cross the ice to get into it. Everything is late, if it's happening at all, because of this weekend's Big Wet Snow.



Despite the discomfort of celiac sprue I'm still young and perky enough to love a Big Wet Snow. If I didn't have writing jobs and a store to worry about I would have spent more time out on the road sawing up fallen trees to make the utility guys' job a bit easier for them. I love the way moving fast keeps my hands and feet warm enough to warm out soaked boots and mittens. (Yes, Nephews, your Auntie Pris is still a hottie--in the literal sense anyway.) I love the way even falling down in snow feels--hey, make an angel! I thoroughly enjoyed giving myself bronchitis, helping deal with a Big Wet Snow at seventeen, and I'd do it again. But I do have the writing and the store, so when my electricity went off at 6:30 on Sunday morning, I rushed down to town in search of Internet connections.

Those were hard to find. Living outside Gate City, I automatically assume that people in town will have electricity when I don't, or if they don't, people in Kingsport will do. This assumption is correct for most Big Wet Snows. This was one when it was not. People in some Kingsport neighborhoods actually lost their connections before I did. Gate City didn't even have traffic lights.

So it's officially time for our readers in Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Sweden, Scotland, Russia, the Ukraine, Canada, etc., to enjoy their annual chortle at what counts as a winter weather disaster in Virginia. We are so pathetic when we get a tiny glimpse of what a serious subarctic winter is like. Everything was shut down for the weather emergency when we had a little over a foot of snow and temperatures averaging right about the freezing point, with snow melting in the daytime and freezing at night.

But for us this really is bad. Driving in snow? Hello, this is Virginia. Walking in snow? I enjoy it, but most of my townsfolk are much older and sicker or at least lazier than I am.

My lights blinked, then went off and stayed off. I looked out the window. Everything was white, with a good bit of hedge collapsing into the porch under the first foot of snow that actually fell. Snow was falling in an almost aggressive way with huge flakes pouring straight down, except when gusts of wind drove them straight in under my umbrella. I fed the cats, put on boots, packed up some books to read and some knitting to do if unable to connect to the Internet, and left home.

Deciding that those of my slightly-elders who live west of me could look after themselves (without verifying this), I knocked on the door of the first one between me and town.

"I'm trying to get to the store just to use the computer, but I'm sure nobody's shopping. You?"

"I still have an Internet connection you can use. There is no electricity or Internet in Gate City. It gets worse past this block. I know because the next-door neighbor just called to say she was stuck in the snow and ask if I could bring her in from town. She's on an oxygen tank but I expect someone else can take her to the hospital. I am not driving in this!!!"

"I wouldn't either. I would never ask anyone to drive in this--it's a blizzard, when that wind picks up, a real live blinding blizzard."

This person is not closely related to me; one thing we did during a long frustrating afternoon was confirm that. My Drill Sergeant Dad would have been burning up the phone lines looking for somebody who could rescue an old sick neighbor like that. That cousin on whom people look down because he's divorced would have been, and in fact was, risking his truck on errands of mercy all week. Some people are just wired to feel responsible for helping others, and some are not. I got the gene from Dad. I don't have much more than that hyperthyroid enjoyment of working in snow to offer, but I'm wired to feel that I ought to have. It has been a source of pain to me not to be able to provide anything better than their closer relatives have to offer, to some of my slightly-elders.

I can offer the following thought. Several people in Scott County, Virginia, have snowmobiles, which they are not legally allowed to drive on the main roads in ordinary weather. They buy these things for the mere pleasure of roaring around past other people's homes and being a nuisance. They ought to be organized into a Snow Militia who could rescue old, sick people who are stranded in falling snow. My own closest neighbor, who didn't try to drive his truck home all weekend, would have enjoyed taking his Sno-Cat out to haul that old lady and her oxygen tank to a place where she would have been safe and warm. I've never owned a snowmobile, or wanted one, but if I'd had one I would have gone after her myself, even though she's not my elder, or neighbor, or even a close enough acquaintance that I had a mental picture of her beyond "older woman stranded in truck in snow."

Anyway I shared this person's Internet connection for a few hours during which it kept blinking in and out, and very little was accomplished. During this time, I later found time to confirm by checking my own footprints, almost all of that first foot of snow melted while another foot of snow continued pounding down. Then the Internet went out and stayed out. Then the lights did. I spent the evening knitting by the light of a bottled-gas fireplace and talking the slightly-elder through hours of acute boredom.

"I should go home now. I am not looking forward to it, but once I crawl in under my hand-knitted blankets and stop shivering I'll be all toastyboasty for as long as I can stand to lie in bed. What I can't stand is lying in bed with my head covered up when I'm awake."

"Don't go after dark! You don't know what the road's like by now. Why don't you stay tonight and I'll run you home in the morning."

On Monday the electricity came back and we listened to the reports of which neighborhoods were still frozen in the dark. In town one fast food place had lights and a crowd, while the other one was dark and closed for business. Several stores couldn't have opened if they'd wanted to because their electric-powered doors wouldn't work. I went home long enough to feed the cats, then set the Sickly Snail (that's the individual name of my worn-out Dell Inspiron) in front of slightly-elder's gas fire and was able to do some cyberchores, but not to open the templates for the paid posts.

On Tuesday I was able to set up my main computer in the cafe. The store is on the shady downhill side of Jackson Street, where it's protected from cars rolling into it by steep, sharp, step-like cement curbs. The snowplows had piled three-foot snowbergs over those curbs, and another storekeeper was in the cafe saying "Don't anybody open today! Somebody'd come in just to fall on that ice and sue you--or me!" I wrote a batch of paid posts and did the Glyphosate Awareness chat in the cafe. Chat was easier because very few people in the Eastern States were online.

By Tuesday afternoon my next-door neighbor's porch light snapped on, and I was supposed in theory to join a car pool, buy my groceries for the week, and go home and start the next batch of paid posts. In practice the car didn't show up. I marched briskly out to the grocery store. On the way I met that relative who'd spent the week, so far, running errands of mercy in his truck. He was sitting outside watching the temperature drop below the freezing point, cooling off between errands, looking old and tired, but having fun. He has put a lot of miles on that Toyota Tacoma, and made some expensive repairs to it, over the many years he's had it, but it's still running over rough roads, ice, floods, falling snow, whatever, and he visibly enjoys being the one his neighbors call in a weather emergency. That is how I know for sure we're related. He was waiting for a stranded motorist he'd taken to work to get off work so he could take that one home.

I saluted him, left the laptop computer in his custody, and marched on through the fast-freezing snowbergs, and if I was thinking "People who don't dare to share their cars in a Big Wet Snow should not be driving them" with every step on one foot, I was thinking "I could be picking up groceries for other people, too, if we still had land phones and they'd been able to call me," with every step on the other foot. My blood pressure was up in that wonderful zingy way it goes up during a "runner's high." Warm? Nephews, I was radiant. The cousin wasn't sure I'd get back to where we left the computer in three hours. I was back to collect it in less than two hours.

The hard part was getting groceries and computer up the private road. "They have lights, so I should have lights too," I kept telling myself while baggage kept trying to slide down my arms and drag me downhill on the ice. I saw a patch of bright light ahead! Fifty more yards to my own warm office room with the Comfort Zone heater on its stand right beside the cot that serves as either workbench or bed. (Slip. Craaamp. Pause to rest.) Thirty yards more--likely even Serena could bring herself to snuggle up on my knee, chomping my arm in a friendly way. (Cramp. Pause to rest.) Twenty yards (cramp), ten (cramp, slide)...

That was not my light shining out the window, after all. That was the moonlight reflecting on the snow still weighing down the hedge.

As I pushed my way through bits of hedge that had broken down since Monday's visit home, I will confess, because confession is good for the soul, that I yelled some un-auntly words at the cats, on the general topic of keeping the bleep out from under my feet in this bleeping-blanking snow and bleepingwell waiting for their blanking dinner...

"Dinner? Yes! Dinner! Now now now!" squealed Traveller, running underfoot. Traveller is a natural-born pet, but not a Listening Pet. Anyone who wants to adopt that rare freak of nature, a lovable tomcat, should be prepared either to kick his little shins a lot harder than I've ever been able to do, or spend a lot of time stepping on him or falling over him. Samantha and Serena are intelligent cats who recognized un-auntly words as an indication that they should keep out of the way. They went back to the porch and waited, but I both stepped on Traveller and stumbled over him while crossing the yard.

No lights. No heat. No reason to bring the computer home except to test its ability to survive being frozen overnight. Slowing down enough to change boots for slippers made me suddenly feel cold and tired, with my blood pressure still up, but now in a bad way. I forced myself to feed the cats. I did not force myself to stuff my leather boots, which froze overnight and could not be stuffed in the morning and will probably fit a size 5 foot when they do dry out. I did not even force myself to clear the working documents off the cot. I spread a sheet and a stack of blankets over it and burrowed in for the night.

For the next hour or so my life was very unpleasant, as my legs kept cramping and my pulse and blood pressure stayed high and I wondered whether I was well insulated enough to sleep in a freezing-cold office after all. After shivering for forty minutes I even called the emergency medical service to ask if they could take me somewhere warm for the night.

"We've been taking people to [a certain] shelter in Kingsport."

"Kingsport? How are they getting back?"

"We have no information about that. Nobody else we've taken there is going to work in Gate City in the morning."

"Are a lot of people already there?"

"They're packing them in, so far."

I thought about spending a night packed in with old sick patients, like waiting in a hospital emergency room with a patient only moreso, and decided that I'd rather freeze in my own home than die from the sort of infection I'd be likely to get from a patient in a shelter where people were packed in. Anyway I could always put my coat and boots on again, and maybe the Blanket Shawl, and walk briskly until morning; maybe stomp around in the yard and burn some garbage. Once again, plans set up for a class of full-time professional "needers" have nothing to offer an active adult in a crisis.

Around the time I decided that, if I was going to freeze, that'd be the way I'd prefer to go, I warmed up enough to get to sleep. I hadn't slept well in slightly-elder's overheated house. For one thing a TV set to a movie channel had come on during the night, and I've never formed the habit of sleeping through what sound like people calling for help, even if they were only long-dead actors in a movie made before we were born. Once I got to sleep I slept for nine hours and woke up feeling sweaty enough to want a nice cool shower, which, of course, was still a non-option.

The view as I walked out was unsettling. Not just the little crumpled lumps of ice that had been my soaked suede boots--I still had the Neoprene pair, thank goodness, and I've had the suede ones longer than real leather boots can reasonably be expected to work for one person. Neoprene boots are wonderful things, however strange they smell. They shrink to a snug fit when cold, then start reflecting bodywarmth back to you in seconds, and then expand for ventilation. The view got worse after I'd walked out in the Neoprene boots.

I met the utility guys on the way into town--young, well insulated men in a truck, sipping coffee and making notes for their own status updates. "My lights are still off," I told them, "probably because there are cables lying across the road and along the creek almost all the way from that house to mine. Also at least one snow-covered log that looks smooth enough to be one of your poles is lying across the creek."

"We saw that yesterday," one of them mumbled, with his insulated hat amplifying the sound of his voice in his own ears.

"And a couple trees across the road," another one said, pointing up the other road that forks off from mine, and so exposing his notepad.

I looked at his notes. They showed the name of a hospital. Who had come to this neighborhood after taking a call from a hospital? Someone up the other road was going to the hospital. Not the one with the excellent cardiac unit; the generic one where people with random injuries and infections go.

I saluted the guys. They are in for a long day of hard work and I don't feel optimistic about getting my lights on tonight either. But they're young men, built to enjoy a long day of hard work. I would rather have been floundering around in their boots, today, than trying to thaw out my brain in front of the computer in my own (actually I pulled off the boots and put on sandals in the cafe).

Marching briskly toward town, realizing for the first time that after age fifty you really don't get all of your energy back after just one good night's sleep, I passed the home of the neighbor who was supposed to have gone to the grocery store. His truck was there; not a mark on it. The roads between his house and the store had been thoroughly scraped and salted. The snow in his driveway looked as if he hadn't gone anywhere last night. I said to myself, "Hmph," and was about to keep walking, but...no lights were on in his house. Because of daylight, or because he was ill or injured? I stomped up onto the porch and banged on his door. I saw a human-sized shadow moving inside the house and started to walk away, then thought that if I'd interrupted an old man's favorite TV show I ought at least to wait long enough to yell "Just checking that you were all right" around his door.

Instead the old man said "Come in and sit down; I'll drive you into town," and I felt cold and tired enough that that sounded good. Before and during the drive I saw a few other slightly-elders driving past, obviously surviving this great and terrible taste of what much of the world has to deal with all winter.

Not to go into any personal details...the old man mentioned three or four other people, including a close relative of his, that he'd refused to help during the evening. He'd waited for me to call, he said, before going out on his own errands, which he'd be doing now. (I'd called him twice. As usual during any weather emergency, the primary function of new electronic technology is to break down.) Anyway he would have been able to help those people before, after, or during the trip to the store, but he had to take care of himself first, he said, and what he'd felt like doing was catching up on his Internet, TV watching, napping, and computer games, after the blackout.

"They'll find you frozen to death up there on the hill some day," he warned. "Look at that man over there; they're giving him a nice warm place to stay in the retirement project."

"That project already had rats and roaches thirty years ago, and now it has bedbugs," I said. "I'd rather freeze in my own home." I did not tell him that I'd seriously wondered whether I was going to.

"Well, I worked for years to take care of my children, and now other people can take care of me."

I don't know the genealogy, but he has the same general kind of face and is about the same age as the cousin I'd passed while walking to the store. He probably shares a fair bit of my DNA but I'm not sure he really is a relative. Well, to be fair, his truck is no Toyota Tacoma. In any case the contrast between the two faces was striking. Both men are biracial but look White, with blue-grey eyes and white beards. Both are handsome, if you look past greying hair and thinning skin. (Neither one is too old to catch the eyes of women who aren't already related to them.) Both are living with similar degrees of not-yet-disabling cardiovascular disease. The one who'd been thinking about others as well as himself looked as jolly as a slimmed-down Santa Claus. The one who was putting himself first looked terrible. You could have seen them down the block and known which one was feeling fine and which one was feeling old-and-sick.

Try a little public spirit, neighbor, I (didn't properly finish saying during this short conversation). Even if you do overdo the output of physical energy while fending for yourself and any other people you might be able to help in any way, public spirit feels good...ever so much better than lolling around being a taker.

I don't know whether I'll have electricity tonight. I don't know whether I'll get any offers to spend the night with anyone who has, or borrow a Coleman heater or a generator. (I don't know whether I'd dare to use either one.) I do know that if not invited to spend the night in a nice clean sitting room, and not able to spend it basking in front of a little electric fire, I'll spend it under that stack of blankets. And I'll probably be warmer, and certainly feel better in every other way, than that poor old fellow in the housing project, or even the one who's taking care of himself first in that house where his immediate family leave him alone.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Book Review: Ramona and Her Father

A Fair Trade Book (incredible!)


(There have been several reprintings of this book. This is not the one I physically own. As usual, readers who don't insist on one particular edition will get whichever edition is available.)

Title: Ramona and Her Father

Author: Beverly Cleary

Author's web site: http://beverlycleary.com/

Date: 1977

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-14806-5

Length: 186 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Alan Tiegreen

Quote: “Girls, you might as well know. Your father has lost his job.”

Ramona Quimby has enjoyed a pleasant day in second grade and is making out a Christmas wish list when the recession of the late 1970s catches up with the Quimby family. Her father has been downsized. Her mother will have to go to work. There will be fewer treats. Her father will spend more time at home; his cigarette smoking will annoy his wife and children more; when he stops smoking to save money he’ll be grumpy and backslide.

For several of Ramona’s fans, this was the volume in which Ramona went from being a character they enjoyed laughing at to being a character they could relate to. Not all readers appreciated the transition, although, when the Henry/Beezus/Ramona books were made into a television series in the mid-1980s, the more contemporary stories in this book were featured; Henry’s carrying a big dog like Ribsy in an open crate on the bus, all by himself without adult supervision, already seemed like something that might have happened a long time ago...

Ramona thinks she’d like to help the family by earning money. How do kids her age earn money? The only way she’s seen them doing that lately is by acting in TV commercials. Ramona practices acting and gets into a mess.

Beezus has to interview an older person and write a story the person told her for a school writing assignment. Ramona and neighbor Howie decide to have some frugal fun making the kind of toy the old lady describes. More mess, and this time they mortify Beezus’s early-adolescent selfconciousness, as well, singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"—“People will think we guzzle beer,” Beezus whines.

Everything reaches a hilarious and happy ending at Christmas. (Is it fair, when the cover of the story doesn’t mention Christmas, that to the extent this book is a novel its climax involves a Christmas play? Ramona and Her Father is every bit as much of a Christmas story as The Shepherd the Angel and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.)

What’s the best age to read the Ramona books? I discovered Ramona the Pest when Ramona was five and I was seven; Ramona was funny enough that I didn’t mind reading about a younger child. Now I’m over fifty and, when I reread Ramona and Her Father for this review, a funny scene I’d forgotten made me laugh out loud again. Quite a few adults laugh at this series, although the Henry/Beezus/Ramona series are “chapter books” for primary-school-level readers, rather than picture books or short novels, so adults who enjoy these books seem to find it useful to explain to other adults that they’re buying the books for a child. Bosh. I won’t tell if you don’t. If you missed this series as a child and don’t have a child to give the books to, buy them for yourself and donate them to a school library after reading. They are that funny.

They’re funny enough to challenge five-year-old readers, too, to sound out words like “pumpkin” and “pajamas” and “affectionate.”

The reason why some bright children, who understand words like “affectionate” and know the letters of the alphabet, don’t curl up with books on wet afternoons is that they are going through a temporary farsighted stage that will correct itself before age ten if they’re not burdened with glasses. This bears mentioning in a review of a book by Beverly Cleary because she also wrote a book called Mitch and Amy, about fraternal twins who live in California rather than Oregon. In that story, Amy loves reading and acting out novels, and is already reading the Little House books at nine, but her twin brother Mitch can hardly spell out words...until one day he gets interested in a book and finds himself reading it.

Regular readers remember that, although we weren’t twins, my brother and I had a similar experience. I was the child prodigy who could spell out words, if not make sense out of them, in our pediatrician’s medical journals when I was three. My brother was the more “gifted” of us in some ways, but he was still reading a few pages of a long book, then asking someone to read the rest of it to him, up into age eight. Then on one rainy Saturday he picked up an adult-size novel (Zane Grey, as I recall), prepared to read six pages and try to get me to read the rest of it aloud, and just spent the whole morning reading the whole book. He’d been understanding books more sophisticated than Zane Grey for years, but eight was the age at which he became able to read a full-length book without eyestrain.

So if I knew a boy like Mitch, or even a girl like Mitch (girls grow up faster, but not always all that much faster)...I wouldn’t say anything. I’d just buy books by Beverly Cleary, Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, Jean Craighead George, Matt Christopher, and maybe Arthur Maxwell, and leave them lying about. Sooner or later a book will be funny, or interesting, or beautifully illustrated, enough to get a bright but slow-reading child to read. All books by Beverly Cleary are funny enough to be the one that changes a child’s life.

Cleary hasn't written a new book lately. I was quite sure she was dead when I typed this review into the system, but no, according to Bing, she's still alive--in between the typing of this review and its appearance on this web site, she'll be 102 years old. Awesome. That means any and all of her books, none of which is exactly new, can be bought here as Fair Trade Books: for most of them you'd pay $5 per book plus $5 per package (as many books as I can jam into the package) plus $1 per online payment, out of which this web site will send $1 per book to Cleary or the charity of her choice. Payment can be sent by U.S. postal order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or, if you want to order multiple books, by Paypal to the address you get from salolianigodagewi, as shown at the very bottom of the screen. To buy this book only, here's a new-style Paypal button:





Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Trump, Trans, and the Art of Persuasion (Updated with Better Book Link!)

If you read a lot of nonfiction, Gentle Readers, you're probably aware of the quirks that can occur in the genes that give most of us mammals, birds, and insects our sexes. In fertile individuals there's a pair of chromosomes that look vaguely like either two X's, or one X and one Y (or sometimes even a V). In sterile individuals there are all kinds of other options. Nature really plays around with some individuals' DNA.

The first time I heard of these genderquirks was in 1971, when a health magazine mentioned that two "women" athletes, "sisters," had been disqualified and denied their medals because a chromosome analysis of their hair showed that they were "really" men. This is a gene, not merely the effect of taking steroids to build muscles; it doesn't always show, especially when teenagers are being blitzed with "Darling, you are growing up" material and they, in fact, are not, or not in the way the schools told them they would. These are not the visibly abnormal kids who don't seem to be growing up at all. They're not even (usually) the ones who look as if they'd be gender-confused. They're more likely to be asexual than to be lesbians. They can be pretty, girly girls who just don't develop the ability to have babies--or want to.

(Grumble. I recently, as in since 2010, read a relatively new, as in since 2000, book in which an author who'd aged beyond writing young adult novels summarized the then-newest biological studies on gender issues. Fascinated by these girly-looking chromosomal males, she presented lots of information and even short interviews. I have the book at home where, like a lot of other books I've brought into my home since the last three or four people decluttered their home libraries into mine, it's been catalogued on my home computer and packed up in storage. But, having made no effort to remember it, I've forgotten the author's name.

UPDATE: So on the first of February I dug into a box and found this book:



I remembered three authors of novels about baby-boomers as teenagers who've moved up into nonfiction; Amazon isn't showing anything like the book I have in mind at any of their pages. Instead Amazon is trying to sell me a lot of new novels. Feh. Instead, here's a vintage science fiction novel about a human-friendly alien lifeform whose genetic quirks put it completely outside the four normal gender roles for its imaginary species...it turns out to be a "he" but it chooses a traditionally feminine name.)



Over the years, genetic research continued and science news revealed other ways humans and other animals can be born outside the whole question of "male" or "female." There are, for instance, butterflies who normally show conspicuous sexual dimorphism--males and females are different sizes and colors. Some individuals in these species have male-type wings on one side and female-type wings on the other. They can fly, and pollinate flowers; the only thing they can't do is produce more butterflies.



The vast majority of sterile individuals, in all species, are normal males or females who simply don't produce offspring. Others are sterile during some, not all, of their lives. Some individuals, like Abraham in the Bible, could have babies with some partners but not with the ones they've chosen. Only one or two people out of a hundred ever have any real confusion about whether they're male or female, although lots of people disagree with at least a few cultural expectations about what males and females "normally" do apart from sex, and as many as one out of ten may experience same-sex attractions. (If you've heard one out of three or even one out of seven, those figures were extrapolated from studies of young people who settle for homosexual activity when confined to single-sex institutions.) In the past, humans who were born with visibly gender-confused had a career cut out for them--as carnival freaks, flashing their private parts for coins per peek. Wotta career.

You would think that people who'd read the genetic science about this would at least want to be polite about it. Y'know, you don't walk up to people with different hair textures and say "I want to touch your hair," you don't just walk up to people with prosthetic legs and ask what happened to their legs, you don't give people a hard time about the fact that their asexuality is more than just a temporary effect of mononucleosis or something similar. If you know someone who appears to be a girl but has just found out she's a chromosomal male (hopefully before she's all grown up and married), and she wants to experiment with acting like a boy and asks you to call her "Jake" instead of "Jane" and so on, no problem. You wouldn't blare and bray about it and make person feel more like a freak than person already does. You'd know that person knows more than you know about what person is meant to be and do. You'd just wish person well and try to be a good friend no matter how strange Jane's or Jake's life may become.

You would imagine that even Donald Trump would do that. So you might have been startled, as I was, to read that Trump had issued some sort of order that people be locked firmly into the boxes of social gender, whether or not they have any real biological sex, on the basis of which sex they seem closer to.

In my family, and presumably in Trump's family, it's been quite simple. You stand up straight and look down at your feet and count the bumps in your clothes. One bump, male. Two bumps, female. So you might carelessly imagine that if people are less lavishly supplied with bumps, at least when they take off their clothes...well, that's not necessarily true either. So why would anyone give these people further grief for pity's sake? Trump's order looked a bit like something that might go on to specify what people have to do about microphthalmia or polydactylism...who knows, really, where that kind of order might lead. It did not look like the kind of order that would be issued by a very stable genius.

So I thought..."What's this all about, anyway? Oh, that orange extrovert from New York screeching for attention again. Ignore! Life's too short!" and I figured that, of all the Trumperies of this administration, a ruling that people must be permanently locked into identities as "he" or "she" was the least likely to need another blink of my eyes. The people who love any excuse to talk about sex would take it over. People new to this country learn to say "Trump is not a gentleman" before they learn to order a take-out meal, I've observed, so what else is new. I stuck to glyphosate.

As mentioned in several other posts, I'm not a great fan of President Trump, but I really detest the "politics" of personality cults. I like hammer-and-tongs debates, like the one my Twitter account has been documenting in Europe this year: to what extent does glyphosate harm people, must it be totally banned now, what are farmers going to do without it? I think a good debate where people are presenting facts is beneficial even if it raises people's blood pressure, but it turns ugly when people start bashing their opponents as human beings, screaming back and forth--"Your party's man is evil!" "Yours is a fool!" "Yours is a traitor!" "Yours is a murderer!" Etc. etc. etc.; it gets predictable, and lame, and it ruins the benefits of debating the facts.

Between the fact that some people love to show off how "liberal" they are about other people's sex lives and lots of people love to hate President Trump...well, I was appalled by Twitter's recent reaction.

Twitter has censored people who've observed that laudable efforts to protect (a very few) decent ordinary people who want a role in society other than carnival freaks have, in fact, inadvertently enabled people who are physically ordinary but not decent to do very bad things.

People who are genuinely, biologically, chromosomal men trapped in women's bodies or women trapped in men's bodies, or who aren't sure which is more alien because they're trapped in really unusual bodies, are not usually motivated to go into a communal restroom marked "Women" in order to expose their private parts. They're motivated to duck into a cubicle and latch the door before they unbutton anything, just as most normal women do. Likewise, if they have to spend time in jails or shelters, they don't spend that time hitting on young women or girls; they're motivated to look for ways to deflect attention from their bodies.

Then there are men who don't like or respect real women, who want access to "women only" space in order to harass women or molest little girls. These are extremely shabby specimens of manhood so it's not really surprising to learn that they're taking advantage of society's efforts to be polite about people with unusual bodies. While screaming that they are women, they've been doing things that would get a real woman locked up for life, if not lynched, and should have similar effects for men who want to put on skirts and claim to be "in transition."

(This web site does not encourage lynching. The position of this web site is that government should proactively discourage lynching by making sure that if, for example, a male body dressed in female attire is used to commit rape or child abuse, that body is immediately placed in solitary confinement, so the question of what to call it becomes permanently irrelevant.)

For those who don't go on Twitter, I recommend reading what's been tweeted using hashtags like #StopTheBias, #TwitterHatesWomen, #MeghanMurphy or @MeghanEMurphy, and more. People from different countries where public policy has emphasized tolerance are sharing statistics on the incidence of hatecrimes against women being committed by cross-dressed males.

Twitter has switched from a policy I've always endorsed (everyone should be free to say anything that can't be prosecuted as a crime, people can choose to filter out language or posters they don't want to see) to a policy of blatant censorship in support of the rapists in skirts.

Haters have shrieked that gender-confused teenagers are committing suicide because people aren't accepting whatever gender identity they're trying on that day. Statistics don't support this, probably because gender-confused teenagers are, like celiacs, rare enough that even if every single one reacts to certain things in a certain way it hardly makes a blip in the statistics. Statistics that concern society-as-a-whole are therefore irrelevant to questions about causes of death in really small minorities. Any real abuse of gender-confused teenagers is too much. But trying to force everyone to "call everyone else by their pronoun of choice" is no longer just statistically more likely to enable more real abuse to more teenagers than it would, hypothetically, coddle the feelings of a few. The statistics are in. Mistaking someone's gender identity, even if their gender identity is solid and the mistakes are blatant verbal abuse, is the kind of thing teenagers have to learn to laugh off. Admitting people who want to be identified as "women trapped in male bodies who are making the transition gradually" to women-only space is real abuse that can lead to permanent physical harm.

Pronoun errors happen to people if, say, their names are unusual or are not strongly identified with one gender or the other. No matter how famous people like Alexis Xenakis, Lindsey Graham, or Tatum O'Neal become, they learn to laugh off the people who either mis-guess their (obviously normal) gender, or pretend to mis-guess it just to be tiresome.

Then, of course, there's the tradition that screen names and images not only don't have to indicate Internet users' real gender (or species) but may deliberately misrepresent it. Quite a few people like to go online for the express purpose of finding out whether people would react to their personality differently if people thought their gender, or age, race, nationality, etc., were different. Some writers used to hang out in forums and chat rooms where they deliberately enacted fictional relationships among their male and female, younger and older and same-age, multiethnic personas. If you have absolutely nothing else to do and live in a place where US pennies will buy lunch, there are still forums where you can pick up a few pennies this way--say five cents a day for your "chats" as Chat Mama, then five cents for reactions as Chat Papa, five cents for more comments from Chat Son, and so on. It can add up. (My own paid guest posts in the form of conversations aren't usually gender-specific, but they could be--it's called writing fiction.) Accordingly, one reason why people on Twitter can't be expected to know or care about each other's "pronoun of choice" is that we all know that some Real Twits are using fictional personas.

@Cheerios is obviously neither a "he" nor a "she"; it's a box of cereal used as the Twitter identity of various company employees who post comments in aid of a brand. @5PriscillaKing is in fact the Twitter identity of a woman, but Twits have to take my word for that, because it was not the name of a real woman in my part of the world when I registered it as a brand. (It was the name of a little girl in Tennessee who is now a woman; I've never met her.) In the English-speaking world it would be hard for anyone to think that my screen name could be masculine or ambiguous, but it may well read that way in China, where English Bibles are not abundant and English dictionaries list "king" as a masculine noun. Strangers address me, collegially, as "King" now and then. If they extrapolate to "King...he," am I going to go crying to Twitter Safety that, ooohhh, they've huuurt my feeelings by assuming that I'm male? In real life, if someone looks at me in a group and says "you guys," I do usually stare and say "Guys?" or "Only the guys? What about us gals?" I do mind. But in cyberspace nobody should have the information that my body shape gives people in real life. In cyberspace, if someone guesses I'm a "he," I think: "Person doesn't know." That doesn't hurt my feelings; if the person has read only one tweet, it's the way things should be.

Cyberspace ought to be uniquely hospitable to the gender-confused because it offers a rest from having to have a gender at all. On Twitter, if Bruce Jenner hadn't already made a real-world show out of his surgical makeover, he could just have set up an account for Caitlyn and been instantly accepted as a "she." He could have set up an account as a box of cereal, a plant, a car, any kind of object, or animal or space alien from a genderless planet, and been accepted as an "it." Early adopters of computer technology tended to be people who preferred creativity and humor to conformity, and some bloggers have actually been using screen names like "Wetdryvac" or "Amoeba," with appropriate images, longer and more successfully than others have used "sexy" names and images. In cyberspace, science fiction fans can be "Hivemind" and other fans of the same sf series will happily visualize them as a swarm of bee-like alien lifeforms and call them "they." On Twitter, I imagine @Cheerios really is a "they" (written by several people) but its image clearly says "it." In cyberspace it's acceptable to be an "it."

Kardashian in-law Bruce Jenner, missing the attention he used to get as a champion athlete, adopted a female alter ego he calls Caitlyn. Being rich enough to get away with anything, he's had an extreme body makeover, with surgery and hormone treatments, to make the old man whose parents named him Bruce look like a daughter he never had who seems to be permanently stuck at about age thirty. I find Caitlyn Jenner easier to look at than I found the middle-aged Michael Jackson, although his abnormality was hereditary, in no way a parody of anything. Actors have the right to adopt new stage names; Bruce Jenner playing Caitlyn is most definitely an actor, like Flip Wilson playing Geraldine. When people persist in calling Jenner "Bruce," as when they persisted in calling The Artist Formerly Known as Prince "Prince," we're making a critical statement about his act. He may resent that, but if he were as good an actor as Flip Wilson he'd respect the audience response and learn from it. If he wants to stay in character as Caitlyn, he should let "her" laugh, as Tatum O'Neal, Meryl Streep, Brooke Shields, Jodie Foster, and Dale Evans all laughed, at the "mistakes" made by people who hadn't seen them and thought their names looked masculine. His surly response to being called Bruce while he's trying to play Caitlyn is one of the several ways we know that Caitlyn is not really a "she." Some celebrities' acts, like Dolly Parton's, Roy Rogers', and Ronald Reagan's, have been plausible, even improvements on those people's real looks and personalities; Jenner's is not in that class. Some find Caitlyn sexy, some find "her" offensive, and I personally find "her" a dead bore. But I find it very offensive that people's opinions of a third-rate TV act can be confused with the way they treat people with minority genes.

Twitter's Jack Dorsey might have admitted the "safety" policy dictating that people use other people's "pronouns of choice" just to humor Bruce Jenner's amateurish reaction to people's opinions of Caitlyn, but I wonder. Given the surreal quality of Twitter "conversations" among apparent humans, objects, and cartoon characters, the "Pronoun Police" policy seems a bit extreme even if the muddled old actor were a major stock holder. It seems more likely to be a display of what Scott Adams calls Trump's form of persuasion. You tell a lot of people who've become comfortable with role-playing and animated "it" characters, "You must all know everyone's 'pronoun of choice' and use it exclusively, overnight, or we'll accuse you of hatespeech and ban you from the site!" ? ??? ???!!

That's not going to make the school bullies lay off a gender-confused teenager. School bullies spend their extra time at school thinking of lots of different ways to make a victim cry. If insisting that young Jake can't be "Jane" (even on Twitter, where the rest of the world are seeing "JHSGiraffe") is specifically banned, they can just move on to "Who tripped over own ft in assembly" and so on. Instead, it's going to generate, it is in fact generating, a lot of attention for an otherwise unexceptional young writer, Meghan Murphy, who's been wrongly banned for outing a cross-dressing child molester as a "he." It is in fact calling a lot of U.S. Twits' attention to the hatecrimes against women that have already been committed by cross-dressers in countries where public policy has tried to pamper the gender-confused. And it is in fact bringing a lot of socially liberal thinkers, who believe in "live and let live" and would no more persecute people for having ambiguous private parts than for having surplus fingers, to see Trump's point of view:

Whatever you feel like being, today, the private parts of your body can be described in one of three ways: they look male, they look female, or they're too close to call but in any case they're not positively male enough to be used to commit rape.

If they look male, then as a matter of policy you can't be admitted to women-only space.

In private, informal situations, of course, who gives a flyin' flip. You rush into the nearest public bathroom, slam the door, throw yourself at the toilet, clean yourself and the toilet cubicle as best you can, and shamefacedly walk out--people are more concerned about avoiding your norovirus than about what you might have looked like with your pants down, so nobody cares. Or you get into a lively online conversation while using your opposite-sex persona, and someone says "You're awfully well informed and you look like a movie star. Let's do lunch," and you shamefacedly admit that in real life you don't even know the name of the movie star whose public-domain image you used, but nobody cares much. Trump's edict, annoying and orange though it was, is not addressed to that. Neither is it addressed to the person whose private parts, when viewed, give people something to think about, but what they're thinking is not that you're likely to commit rape. It is addressed to men who want to violate "women only" rules in order to violate women and children.

In view of which, it's not such a bad policy after all.

If you were an young involuntarily celibate male, or an aging postsexual male, you may well be unhappy enough to consider trying to "make the transition" to having yourself remodelled into what looks like a woman. You probably will never scrape up the money to have yourself rebuilt into a glamourpuss like Caitlyn, and even if you did you wouldn't be able to maintain that look, but you might enjoy acting as your female persona enough to stay with a surgical makeover. Or, more likely, you might not. Few people really care, as long as you confine "experiments" and "transitions" to ordinary social settings. If you're tired of being Jake the Stockboy, why not stop trying to hide your upper-body flab, buy a bra, and be Jane the Cashier at a different store; beyond an occasional "Do you have a brother who used to work at the other store?" you're still middle-aged and largely invisible to strangers, and no great surprise to your friends.

But once you get within range of official policies, this should change. Go to a prison, homeless shelter, or hospital, you should expect to be stripped, inspected, and, as long as you have a male-looking body, put on the men's side. Harass even one woman with your surprisingly male-looking body in any "women only" area, you should expect to go to either a prison or a hospital and stay there for the rest of your worthless life.

Donald Trump has made a career of issuing edicts in a voice-of-God tone that he knows, and his employees know, his employees are going to have to tweak and adjust to reality. He once railed against having Braille buttons in elevators--"People who stay in this hotel aren't going to be blind!" He got attention for saying that, while the hotel staff quietly kept the Braille buttons, and the people who love to hate him quietly continue to hope that cataract surgery will leave him...well, he would sort of deserve it. Similarly, I wouldn't expect that people would let Trump's gender edict be used to harm gender-confused teenagers. In practice it will work to protect them, too, from exploitation and violence.

Twitter is going to have to drop its "preferred pronouns" policy, and not wait much longer, if it wants to survive...meanwhile, let's salute the way Jack Dorsey has managed to serve his most famous customer's purposes while building his own credibility, on the opposite side, as a good Trump-hater who risked even corporate profits to show how profoundly he wanted to disagree, etc. etc.