Should K.A.T.S. Buses Come to Gate City?

Regular readers may remember that once, long ago, I blogged about being able to ride a bus to a computer center where I could do this web site justice.

Then later...I don't remember whether or not I blogged about the computer center not being open on the same schedule the bus ran, and about getting free rides to and from the computer center on some days but not knowing which days those would be in time to arrange individual bus service a day ahead, and about scheduling a bus for one individual passenger not being a very Green alternative to car-pooling or walking, and about the Yuma (Virginia) computer center being only two hours' walk from home in any case, and about its being shut down for lack of patronage anyway...but all of those things happened.

Bottom line, as a good Granola Green I made a real effort to support what my home town has in the way of bus service, and I found it to be...more like a disservice.

Some days I walked to Yuma in the rain or snow. Many nights I walked back in the rain or snow, because there was no night bus and nighttime was when the computer center got what other patrons it got. The Yuma Road is a winding two-lane road with no berms, no sidewalks, large rocks and deep puddles right up to the paving, and a lot of incompetent night drivers who actually brighten their lights to make it harder for anyone to walk along the road after dark "because that was the only way I could see you."

The "public-private partnership" mess that may beg some of you for money in the name of "Mountain Empire Older Citizens" is not interested in expanding to provide a Green alternative for shoppers and commuters. They say they do that, but they don't. Staff are trained to think of themselves as overseers managing the "needs" of full-time professional welfare dependents, not employees working for customers. They do have a schedule, although it's not full, but they don't disclose that schedule. You practically have to pull their teeth to get information like "We have a bus going from point A to point B at ten o'clock on Thursday." They want to know all about you, first, who you are and where you're going and what kind of disability you have, and they're obviously not comfortable with the idea that you're an able-bodied, competent, cash-paying passenger. By way of restitution for having destroyed the locally owned independent taxicab service, they will--grudgingly--accept cash payment from someone who's not claiming a disability pension, but they can't seem to shake off that attitude that they're the responsible adult in charge of transporting brain-damaged patients to their occupational therapy sessions. They actually get more money in subsidies for hauling those brain-damaged patients, so their interest in transporting, e.g., working adults from Gate City to and from evening classes at Mountain Empire Community College, is subzero.

They run one bus between Gate City and Big Stone Gap. It arrives too late for any morning classes and leaves far ahead of any evening classes. It's pretty well filled up by brain-damaged patients, although the patients ride only as far as Duffield. It guarantees anyone from Gate City more time on the bus to and from than they'd actually be able to spend at the college. Not only are the drivers not trained to discourage the brain-damaged patients from harassing any paying passengers willing to ride with them, they're ordered to limit the number of competent people they haul and make sure they prioritize the "needs" of geriatric patients over any, y'know, workers or students or anything, who (according to greedhead-as-opposed-to-Green thinking) ought to own and drive their own cars anyway.

I don't know about M.E.O.C., which is actually part of an alleged charity that solicits money for "Poor Appalayshia" in New England. Whenever I've talked to anyone about them, any year since at least 1991, I always hear "They weren't of any use to me but they do good things for other people." Which other people would those be, exactly? I've never talked to anyone who knew any of them personally. I've talked to people who were promised visiting nurses who never visited, people whose sensitive personal information was blabbed to total strangers just because a bus driver thought it was an interesting story, people who were not rehired to visit patients who wanted them back after they'd taken leave or not given extra time to weekend "team-building" activities...the Older Citizens with whom I've worked, and the bus riders who were sane enough to be asked, always saw a lot of room for improvement. Nobody who had an alternative ever stayed with M.E.O.C. long, either as a visiting nurse or as a patient. I would warn you readers against giving money to M.E.O.C. or its parent organization, "Oxbow."

I would warn everybody against supporting any alleged community service that is oriented toward helping people depend on handouts rather than on becoming self-funding, or even profitable, by working with people who work, go to school, and pay their own way. The Southern Appalachian Mountain region is infested with more than one so-called charity whose actual goal seems to be keeping people trapped in welfare-cheating addiction rather than helping them get out of it.

Anyway, M.E.O.C. does run buses between Gate City and Kingsport, but...a few years ago, when I was commuting, we even considered that option. Could they arrange regular commuter bus service between, e.g., a convenience store in Gate City and a convenience store in Kingsport? "We don't just set people off on corners. We take you from your home to her home (or vice versa). We need your actual street addresses." We decided they did not need any old lady's street address, name, or day's itinerary, to broadcast over the radio and generally bandy about. When my visiting and working with and for one of my favorite living people in all the world became a problem, M.E.O.C. "service" was not an option we considered again.

Years ago, before "Agenda 21" had been officially denounced (but not really abandoned) by the United Nations, activists alerted me and I checked: Yes, there were people who saw themselves as "regional planners," with an actual unstated goal of interfering with anything managed by state governments, who really had made it a funding goal to recast Gate City, Virginia, as "a suburb of Kingsport, Tennessee" rather than a town in its own right. Their goal was to wipe Duffield off the map and to discourage any connection between Gate City and Big Stone Gap. They succeeded in getting federal financial aid rules rewritten to subsidize in-state tuition for Gate City students who wanted to go to East Tennessee State University. They did not subsidize transportation for those of us who might have wanted to take classes at E.T.S.U., which isn't really all that much further away than M.E.C.C., but only takes longer because of traffic, while working and living at home in Gate City.

I never found out what plans they had for Big Stone Gap or for Mountain Empire Community College, exactly, but those plans did not include allowing Gate City students to take junior-college classes in our own state school system, starting where our high school leaves off, and paying fees students can actually hope to afford. Obviously E.T.S.U. offers more advanced classes for more adults in search of continuing education credits, but, I've been credibly informed, for Gate City High School students in search of degrees, their junior college classes are mostly review and a dead bore. And even in-state tuition at E.T.S.U. is not kept down to a level a typical 18-year-old freshman could reasonably expect to afford. University is, by definition, for rich people's children and for people who are already earning a good living with the skills they learned in college. But that's a separate rant.

Well...Grandma Bonnie Peters, who has contributed nothing to this blog since telling me to stop doing it out of her home office, is still alive and alert and has a visiting nurse of whom there've been no complaints. (She's been the perfect visiting nurse for a lot of people, for a long time, and would, I would imagine, be the perfect patient. She likes doing everything she can possibly do for herself, before anyone helping her arrives, and using the person's working time to do things they can agree are fun.) However, at least two sponsors have cornered me, this year. "We want more GBP. It's not right to deprive readers of their role model of How a Healthy Celiac Grows Old in Style. GBP is a Treasure, like George Burns or Betty White or the Delany Sisters. Besides, admit it, you miss her. Besides, admit it, all able-bodied people who are even a tiny bit Cherokee have a sacred duty to spend time with their Elders, and although GBP is not even a tiny bit Cherokee, she is an Elder of yours."

My not spending time with GBP has been by her own request, and part of my responsibility to her. If someone wants to pay for land phone lines, which neither of us has any more, or cell phone minutes, which cost a lot, GBP would probably still be willing to talk to this web site on the phone. She wouldn't be typing or editing--how could she, I'm using her computer--but the last time I saw her, she was still walking and talking, having recovered completely from bronchitis. She has always hated being fretted or fussed over and always hinted that, in old age, she intended to become one of those eighty-or-ninety-year-old types who are more concerned with saying goodbye, making sure their friends are going to be able to say goodbye, than with holding together. Her silence is a message. "One of these days, it won't be too long, they will look for me and I'll be gone...on my way to Heaven." Rather than clutching on to our ideas of what might or might not make her more comfortable in this life, she is, to some extent, telling us to prepare to look for her in the next one.

Some Elders truly want to be visited only if and when younger people truly want to spend time with them (as long as that's not so often it makes them feel more tired). That thought deserves a paragraph to itself, to encourage people to consider to what extent it might be true for them or their Elders.

"Well, yes; but you do truly want to see her," one sponsor persisted, "and so do we."

This is true. I don't know how much energy GBP has left after riding around with her visiting nurse and talking on the phone to her grandchildren. I know her reactions to glyphosate-tainted foods were much more drastic than mine, three years ago. Mine have become more frequent and worse due to the increased use of glyphosate as a preservative. I've spent a few days at home when I would have yelled out the window, if anyone had come up to visit me, "Go away or I'll call the police!" because...I wasn't unfit to walk, talk, write, or even do yard work, but I might at any moment have become unfit to be around. Unpleasant as it is to clean up your own celiac sprue effluvia, the idea of anyone else seeing it is worse. If you're too sick to stand on your feet, you will crawl on your knees to clean up your own mess before you let other people see it. So I don't know when or how much GBP wants to be seen face to face. I'm fairly sure that that's not what she wants readers to remember about her, but it's part of the reality of growing older and slower with out-of-control celiac reactions.

Still, I've not heard that she's given up walking to Wal-Mart, or seen any evidence that she's less than delighted to meet friends at Wal-Mart. (Large public restrooms, as accessible as restrooms can be, not far from benches where people can sit and chat for an hour. Indoor and outdoor tables where they can eat while they chat. Free water from fountains built at different heights. Rows of emergency phones along walls. Bus stops about ten years from the door. Nobody can say the newest Wal-Mart outlet wasn't designed for an aging clientele in increasingly precarious health.) GBP hasn't been making dates to meet anybody, but by going to the right Wal-Mart at the right time I've been able to meet her every few months. So far, even when I'm having celiac reactions, I've been able to walk nine miles to Wal-Mart and nine miles back...but during the week that leaves no time for either the blog or the store, and on weekends GBP is usually out with friends from church. (She sings, when she's feeling fit to go to church, in two choirs.)

At this point one sponsor pounced. "The town planning committee is working on a plan to extend the Kingsport Area Transit System to include a Gate City route!"

One thing Washington, D.C., and Gate City have in common: You get used to thinking of state lines as just another landmark. You know there's no reason why interstate bus service should be a special problem; if safety standards differ, you hold the bus to whichever standard is higher.

In fact, although I've been thinking for years about ways the railroad that currently blights the heart of Gate City could at least be earning its keep, we used to have an interstate bus line. The company called itself "Bristol-Jenkins," Jenkins being the name of a town (at least back then), but what I grew up seeing in Gate City were commuter buses between Gate City and Kingsport. In 1976, when my family were the only passengers on the full-sized bus (perpendicular bench seats for 40 adults or 60 children) up from Kingsport, the driver told us "These buses won't be around for long." They weren't. If not the last passengers on that route, we were among the last hundred.

The median age was younger, then; relative to the national average, the median income was higher. More people were working rather than "retired." Everybody could afford to buy their own car, if only a clunker, and there was tremendous social pressure to let everyone see that you had your own car. I knew a lady who must have been only sixty or seventy years old at the time. She could still walk, and leap in and out of farm trucks, and sling bales of hay around, on her husband's farm. She did those things. But when she was at her house in town, she would never walk down the block to the convenience store for a loaf of bread, any more than she would bake her own bread. She had a big gas-guzzling car, and enough money to buy air-puffed chemical-preserved bread, and she hadn't worked long and hard on the farm to leave people in town in any doubt about either of those things. No bus, no car pool, for her! So help her, she had arrived! That kind of thinking is one thing about the 1970s that I don't miss at all; it belongs in the same sewer with "Married women shouldn't have jobs" and "All Black people have low I.Q. scores."

I've ridden K.A.T.S. buses at times. Not often, because they only run around Kingsport and I can still walk across Kingsport more easily than waste a dollar; but if I'm in a hurry or with someone who doesn't want to walk, in Kingsport I'll catch a bus. By comparison with D.C. Metrobuses, K.A.T.S. buses are smaller--vans, really--and, well, less satisfactory, with radios and video displays that never stop and silly rules about how many bags each passenger can carry; but they are real commuter buses. They run from point A to point B. The drivers watch the road and don't ask questions. There's a schedule that applies equally to everybody. If you want to ride, you wait at the bus stop until a bus stops. If a friend is driving the way you want to go, you hop into the car, with no worries, because the bus has not been specially arranged and (normally) nobody is looking for you. If you decide not to go, for any reason or none, you just stay home, or go somewhere else, or whatever; no questions are asked.

That's the kind of bus service that is a service, rather than a disservice, to a community of competent adults. "Anyone who meets the bus, and pays cash or shows a prepaid bus pass, can ride" and "No questions are asked" are key concepts. We are not talking about the demographic group "people who have been legally ruled incompetent ever to make decisions for themselves." In order to improve traffic conditions and reduce air pollution, riding the city bus needs to be as independent, as private, as driving is. Maybe more so; K.A.T.S. could take a tip from Metro about making buses soundless except for quiet private conversations between passengers, losing the video displays, selling the idea of a bus commute as a place to listen to your own headset and think your own thoughts. Greyhound has done well with images of people napping or reading on buses and the slogan "Leave the driving to us."

Kingsport's little commuter/shopper buses, with the cartoon "Kats" painted on them, are earning their keep in Kingsport and would probably earn their keep in Gate City, too. More young people are rethinking the idea of driving their own car everywhere, and, more to the point, more of the majority generation are no longer young. A few weeks ago I heard someone younger than I am admit, "My night vision is going; I really shouldn't be on the road at 5:00 in winter." As a bookseller I'm growing unpleasantly familiar with the refrains, "I don't read books any more," or "Let me see that one--no, not that one--what about that one, and that other one, and that one over there?" as it becomes obvious that a shopper who'd like to read anything in a certain genre is looking for the book printed in the largest type. As someone who wants to be a permanent paying passenger rather than a driver in any car pool, I'm also growing familiar with, "I didn't see that!?! Why don't you drive?"

As long as I can still read any book that appeals to me, and set the computers I use to display my "signature" 8-point font at 80%, I do not intend to sacrifice any visual acuity to the "adjustment" to special glasses that, I'm told, might or might not offset my astigmatism and allow me to drive without eyestrain. I enjoy reading. I do not enjoy driving. Nufsed. I'd rather ride a bus. I'd rather let the people who are no longer willing to do all, or any, or able to do all, or any, of the driving, in the ever-decreasing number of car pools, ride a bus.

More people are living on disability pensions now than in 1976. More people are in fact disabled than in 1976. So some of the talk we hear about "If I could get to (whichever town I don't live in) I'd like to shop at the stores A, B, and C..." is merely wishful thinking from people whose money is all spent for them, usually before they get it, by the medical industry. But some people do in fact want to be able to shop in both towns; some can even afford to shop in both towns. Especially if they don't have to pay for gas, insurance, and maintenance on a car they really need to hand down to a younger relative.

More shopping in Kingsport? Meh. "I don't know why you want to open a store on Jackson Street anyway," a shopper said last month. "When I shop I always drive to Kingsport." Hmph. Time for some reciprocity on that. I'll make Kingsport an offer. When five people from Kingsport have spent $50 or more, apiece, in my store I'll go shopping in Kingsport. In recent years the only store I can afford to visit there has been Wal-Mart, except once in a while when I get a giftcard for Michaels. I can't even afford to prowl through the bookstores any more. I would like to change this.

But shopping is not the only reason why people from Gate City go to Kingsport, and why the need to limit or give up driving seems like a hardship.

* Most people in both towns have close friends and relatives in the other town. Many personal relationships (e.g. my love life for the past three years) are currently being strained by the "I'd like to go (wherever) with you, but I (can't afford the gas, can't afford the repairs, don't have a car, don't believe I'm fit to drive, all of the above)" refrain. For a lot of people who really need to sell their cars now, giving up driving currently means giving up visiting parents or children.

* What do students do when they don't find the right books in one town's library? (The different selections of books in the Gate City and Kingsport libraries used to amaze me until I realized it was planned; one library tended to get the book the other one didn't.)

* What happens when typical 18-year-old students can get the trade school courses they want at the community college extension in Kingsport?

* Kingsport has a very extensive, self-supporting, "activities" club for people over age 55, with enough members who live in Gate City that they've worked out a special fee schedule just for us. What happens when club members are still fit to participate in their favorite weekly activities, but not to drive?

* I even know people who live in one town who've become active members of churches in the other town. I don't understand this. Driving fifteen miles to listen to a sermon? I'd ask someone to record it, thanks. But some people are intensely involved with their "church families" and/or loyal to their denominations; some people will drive thirty miles to get to their favorite church. Those people usually participate in church activities during the week. Car pooling to the regular service is seldom a problem, but they're the ones who can't bear to give up the business meetings and sewing circles and service projects that churches usually leave to housewives and "retirees" to do during business hours.

I think K.A.T.S. buses should come to Gate City, and the sooner the better. No special subsidies should be necessary. The extended bus service should pay for itself in increased shopping, patronage of "services" that are subsidized per user (parks, libraries, the community college), and traffic safety. Just make riding a bus as unobtrusive and comfortable as driving, and people will ride the bus.



A vote for more GBP at this web site is a vote for more of those little van-sized buses.

Season of Delays

It's called winter...I went out this morning and saw snow clouds. It was too cold for a really heavy snow to fall. The occasional little dry flake I watched fall wouldn't cover the ground in town or even at the Cat Sanctuary's elevation, but they'd been falling all night and had whitened the highest parts of the mountains.

This makes me feel a little better about today's status update. A payment for last week's writing was delayed. Therefore this week's writing was delayed. What should have been finished and mailed out yesterday ought to be started this morning, except...you know what day it is. Tuesday is Glyphosate Awareness Chat day. I have to read a lot of dreary stuff about the slow progress of glyphosate awareness. So my writing is delayed, and so, moreover, I have to warn people to expect delays all winter. Those correspondents who mail out postcards every week already know, but some people don't know...in the mountains not only Internet service, but all electrical service of any kind, can be shut down for days or weeks any time it snows. And people don't drive. And businesses don't open.

Meanwhile, people continue to scream back and forth about whether glyphosate causes cancer.

I suspect, if the matter were independently studied over the decades it would take, glyphosate may turn out not to be a primary mutagen or teratogen. So far as we know, that role in the development of cancer is nearly always played by a natural virus. The various toxins, bacteria, even other kinds of virus, to which we are exposed play their own parts in allowing the cancer to develop rather being zapped by antioxidants. From the fact that animals exposed to glyphosate consistently show only a slightly higher incidence of several different types of cancer, while showing a tremendous range of other nasty reactions (some of which kill the animals before cancer does), my guess would be that, instead of glyphosate being a primary cause of cancer, individuals' different reactions make glyphosate a facilitating agent for cancer and for several other diseases to which individuals are predisposed. So, for all practical purposes, what non-specialists mean by saying "Glyphosate causes cancer" is true, but so is what the glyphosate apologists mean by saying that in a more precise and technical sense glyphosate doesn't cause cancer--that is, it's not the sole and whole cause.

I say this distracting quibble should be dismissed from the whole discussion. If someone has cervical cancer, which we all believe we "know" is caused by one specific virus for which a (still experimental and hazardous) vaccine is on the market, and if it's possible to prove that she picked up that virus by sleeping around in 1979, and if her body has been holding the virus in check for all these years but the virus wins the battle and the cancer starts causing symptoms when she's exposed to glyphosate, then for all practical purposes, yes, glyphosate did "cause" her cancer. Even if what it actually "caused" was the kidney malfunction that merely made her feel tired and "old," and doze off at her desk, while the cancer started to grow and metastasize during the days her kidneys weren't doing their job...

By analogy, if a Bayer plant caught fire because someone dropped a cigarette, and people who now have reason to hate Bayer ran out and threw kerosene all around the plant, I expect Werner Baumann would agree that those people were arsonists? (Well, I would.)

Meanwhile, the majority of people who don't have cancer continue to suffer other unpleasant reactions to glyphosate...

Over the weekend, while waiting for the payment for the writing job, I had some knitting orders to fill and some quality time to spend checking the new hard drive on my home computer for losses and duplications from the data transfer process. I happened to check my records of the year when I was closest to that distant cousin of Dad's who died from glyphosate-induced narcolepsy last summer. He was an active farmer that year; his wife was ill. I spent several nights on a reclining chair at the foot of her bed that year. I don't want to go into all the disgusting, embarrassing details...let's just say that these people's grown-up children and school-aged grandchildren visited them regularly, and every one showed unpleasant reactions during each spray poisoning episode. The relative used "Roundup" on his garden, lived near the railroad where glyphosate was sprayed on the tracks at night, and also used "Raid" whenever he saw an insect. He and I and his wife each had a different reaction to each kind of poison; I didn't notice every family member reacting after he'd sprayed poison in his house or garden, but they all lived near the railroad and they all reacted when it was sprayed. So far none of them has had cancer. Not one. But each and every one has been ill, in a different way. The son who has the pseudo-celiac reactions is now "disabled" by them.

The patriarch of this family, who died last summer, was in most ways an admirable man. He shared Dad's interest in science and engineering, and even invented a machine they used but never mass-produced. He was older and smaller than the rest of Dad's cousins in that generational group; possibly that was why, at least on one occasion, he was the bravest and toughest of them all. But he wanted to believe that chemical "pesticides" could be safe. He wanted to believe that he felt sick and tired after exposure to glyphosate because he was "getting old," and sometimes he did doze all day when he personally had not been spraying "Roundup." He wanted to believe that he felt grumpy and had hypertensive headaches after using "Raid" for the same reason, and he did generally take care of his cardiovascular health.

So last summer, while feeling "old" after a double dose of glyphosate poisoning, he dozed off and never woke up. And meanwhile one of his sons, whose hair turned grey early but who is not old, is "disabled" by something that looks just like my celiac reactions, although he's not a celiac, was not a sickly child, and has no reaction to unpoisoned wheat. And the other children and grandchildren are "tired," or "nervous," or they have "allergies," or arthritis-like pain, or cardiac-like symptoms, or are grumpy or brainfogged, all at the same time, after being exposed to glyphosate.

I know what's wrong with them; some of them are beginning to suspect that I'm right. Can we do anything with this information, this year, like get the glyphosate sprayers out of the neighborhood? Because Big Business, Big Government, Big Money are involved, individuals suffering from the eight different kinds of painful non-cancer reactions that glyphosate is known to cause in humans can...expect delays.

(The list of glyphosate reactions, with gross-out photos and horrific emergency room reports, is still showing at epa.gov ; please find it and comment on it there, searching for "glyphosate," and noting that after commenting you'll be redirected to your comment rather than the page other people need to use to post their comments--so if you want to steer others to that precise link, copy the URL somewhere before commenting.)

Meanwhile, an increasingly feeble chorus of "But the (corporate-funded, highly questionable) 'science' shows glyphosate doesn't (all by itself, in a vacuum) cause cancer" is being displaced by a more credible chorus of "But what will we farmers do-o-o without glyphosate?"

Well, we're all better off without grain in our diet than with toxic grain, so I recommend that farmers who've become dependent on glyphosate just write off a year or two. Take jobs in town. Take time to think about what some people have been saying longer than this web site, or any of the humans behind it, have even been alive: That whole "Farmers should get big, or get out" idea always was stupid, immoral, and unsustainable. Grandma Bonnie Peters cast her first vote for President Eisenhower, and still feels glad and proud that her man won...but Eisenhower was no farmer and he gave a fatal nod to a disastrous model of "scientific" farming that is proving to be neither good science nor good farming.

George Peters' fans, if any of them are "reading" this web site through voice software (this group of people had major visual impairment twenty years ago), will remember that he always said that farmers should get small, or get out. Farming is best done by hand, without waste, without poisoning the land, without even fouling the land with any machinery heavier than a mule. The only sane way to control weeds and vermin is to be a predator rather than a poisoner. Pull up weeds and burn them or eat them. Pick insects into a bottle of water or alcohol. Don't kill the creatures that naturally work with you to eliminate these pests from your field. This fairly well limits the size of farms to about fifty acres per active farmer, which is enough to feed a couple and a reasonable number of their children and produce a modest cash crop...once the land has had time to recover from the Vicious Spray Cycle, in which pest species lack natural predators, so they proliferate out of control and you pick more insects than crops.

Yes, on this model of farming it takes many years of hard work for farmers to become rich. Yes, some factory-farm operators are going to lose some money. When we consider that these factory-farm operators have been poisoning humans and torturing animals for years, it's hard to feel very bad about their loss of money.

Anyway. When land begins to recover from being poisoned, you can expect to see huge aggressive weeds and swarms of insects. My parents did plant vegetables in fields that had been sprayed (for insects only) the year before. Learn from their experience: They lost a lot of time and money and barely harvested enough vegetables for our meals, all...summer...long. The field of tomatoes, meant to be the cash crop, had just started producing a few organically grown tomatoes before all the vines withered up and died, from a fungus that had thrived on the chemical fertilizers previously used to boost corn yields in that field. All income came from non-farming part-time jobs, and that was a bad year. Two bad years, actually. Then for the next two summers, and the winter between, Dad took a full-time job that moved us all the way across the country, and the land had two more years to rest. So actually it was the fifth summer when my parents actually had a harvest, and it was a poor one. The corn, especially, was riddled with earworms, which are a rare species in parts of North America where a Vicious Spray Cycle hasn't started, and a major pest wherever it has. The first year my parents planted crops in two of the three patches of arable land they used was 1971. The first year that land showed a small profit was 1981. Between 1976 and 1981 we ate well, even delivered crops to our short list of customers for cash, but recovered barely enough cash to break even.

There are things farmers do, other than switching to a different poison or set of poisons, to speed up this process of recovery. My parents knew about crop rotation--switching from corn to tomatoes, e.g. They did not know about the soil conservation benefits of mulch. (They'd read about them but, since their problem was insects not weeds, they didn't want to risk money on a heavy mulch, so they didn't find out how much good it can do for people with weed problems.) Just a light mulch, as in laying worn-out clothes and old newspapers between your vegetables and weighting them down with pebbles, will shade out weeds in a well tilled field. What if you have a flat, dry, wheat-friendly field where the soil dries out and blows or drains away if it's well tilled? A heavier mulch of organic material such as wood chips, several inches deep, will conserve topsoil and even build topsoil over time.

Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is to put bales of straw on the steeply sloping ground in he orchard, let them weather all winter, apply a lot of "plant food" in spring, and plant vegetables in them. Some people whose land is really too steep to plow are creating sustainable, relatively easy-care terraces and raising unsprayed vegetables this way.

Then for farmers who are willing to give up wasteful cultivating and harvesting machinery, there's the benefit of mixed planting. Each kind of plant has different biochemical properties and requirements, so some plants are natural "companions" for each other and some are the opposite. I was struck by this when I visited a newly organic farm whose owners had failed to hand-pick their Mexican Bean Beetles daily when trying to raise a cash crop of beans. Most of the bean plants had been skeletonized. Only the rows of beans near the tomatoes these people had planted for their own use still looked like bean plants. Tomato plants have a strong odor. Mexican Bean Beetles don't like that odor. A row of tomatoes between each row of beans would not have kept the beetles away, but it would have helped, especially during the years while the beetles' natural predators were recovering from the Vicious Spray Cycle.

Bottom line: Farming is work. You have to bend over. You have to get your hands dirty. You get wet, you perspire, and even though you learn to handle insects without touching them, you still come into contact with several insects--and some of the ones that sting or bite when touched are friendly species you want to encourage, too. However, when you limit yourself to reasonable quantities of non-native crop plants (no monocropping! don't even think about it!) and don't poison the air with those (counterproductive) "pesticides," it's pleasant work.

In the long term, it pays off. Not only you but your heirs reap rewards. Real farmers have to think in the long term. (At the Cat Sanctuary, my family revelled in apples, including Arkansas Black Twig apples, from trees planted by a long-gone relative who never picked an apple while he lived there. Yesterday morning, I picked up one of the last persimmons of the season, fully ripe and absolutely delicious, from a tree planted by my mother, who gave up hope of ever seeing the persimmon seeds she'd planted grow into fruit-bearing trees.) Eventually (if you keep at it) you start harvesting truckloads of "artisanal," organically grown produce for which you can charge obscene prices (if you can get it past your friends and neighbors to sell it in the city). But, to get there, you have to...expect delays.

Amazon book link? Here's an updated and expanded edition of a book my parents found helpful...



Postscript. The Internet is not the most logical place to look for links to True Green farming material because, as Wendell Berry observed long ago, the Internet is not a True Green phenomenon. Your best sources of material probably don't have electrical wiring in their homes, let alone Internet connections. There are, however, a few True Greens in cyberspace. Youall are cordially invited to post links to your most informative content in the comment section.

Holiday Shopping and Thanksgiving Dinner with Compost

So after Wednesday's trip to Michaels, where I bought three "Pounds of Love" (blanket yarn) with the giftcard because the cotton I wanted was priced higher than it is at the other stores, I did some other things and then cooked Thanksgiving dinner. Having written a short story in which a character serves something similar to my Rice a la Garbage to visitors, I did that. It doesn't seem to have made anyone sicker than we were already. Here is the recipe.

That's not the color I bought. Amazon is not showing a picture of the color I bought. The company call the color chestnut; it's not the color of chestnuts or of chestnut wood. Yarn shoppers now know which color I mean.

Equipment

1. A Dutch Oven type of cooking pot with a nice tight lid. Both sealing in the steam and sealing out the compost are crucial for this recipe. Don’t use the pretty, enameled kind of Dutch Oven for cooking directly in a frugal fire. Plain, heavy metal is good.

2. A secure container for a small cooking fire—either a barrel, or a pit in the ground, or a grill, that allows 6-8 inches (about 20cm) around and below the pot.

3. An average day’s supply of junk paper—junkmail, newspapers, manuscripts, wrappers, etc. About 50 pieces of paper will do. If you use canned vegetables or packaged rice, add the wrappers. One or two pieces of thin flimsy plastic (wrappers, photos, supermarket shopping bags) can help get the paper going in damp weather. Plastic that won't lie flat in a stack of papers burns poorly and releases toxic fumes, so it should be sent in for professional recycling.

4. Dry wood or charcoal: Rice can be cooked over a big fire, of course, but what I’m describing is a frugal little fire designed to get rid of trash and economize on fuel. By cleaning up what your hedge, shade trees, and fruit trees drop on the ground you should have a nice collection of dead wood in your shed. Trees shed lots of twigs and sticks, relatively few logs. For this recipe you don’t need to use up any logs. Take a scant handful of twigs and sticks, about a foot long and not more than an inch thick.

5. Contents of your Sun-Mar toilet, the drier the better. (Remember, you’re meant to put as much dry organic matter as possible—vegetable scraps, garden prunings and clippings, paper, peat—in the Sun-Mar to help soak up and dry out liquids. Even the sand or commercial litter that sticks to cat excrement won’t hurt anything in a Sun-Mar toilet, although it certainly would in an oldfashioned water-flush toilet..) Recognizable food scraps or excrement will dry out and burn slowly, making lots of foul smoke. Burn only well carbonized, peaty looking stuff that will char further and retain heat.

Ingredients

1. Meat, fish, beans, or those soy-wheat “vegetarian meat analogs” if you can eat them, are optional. For this recipe the important thing about any protein you add is that it needs to be fully precooked so that it warms up as the rice does. Grilling over a trash fire? Urgh. So use leftovers from the refrigerator if you have them, or use a can of your protein of choice.

2. Packet of quick-cooking rice. For cooking over a trash fire, Success Rice, Minute Rice, and Zatarain’s rice mixes are ideal. The company has been relatively proactive about glyphosate, so the rice is relatively safe, and the packets take just about as long to cook as an average day’s supply of burnable garbage takes to burn.

3. Water to cook the rice.

4. Vegetables, spices, and nuts are optional. If you like, or don’t hate, garlic and turmeric, they’re rich in trace minerals and good for blood pressure and immunity.

Mix & Match Variations

* Some Zatarain’s flavors are quite spicy (several with turmeric). You can extend meals, add fibre and protein, and also mellow the flavor by combining a packet of flavored rice with a packet of plain brown rice.

* All Zatarain’s flavors go well with canned chicken. If using fish, other canned meat, or “meat analogs,” test to find your favorites.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any member of the Allium family. I like wild garlic in season. I live close enough to Georgia to have access to Vidalia onions in summer; they’re worth paying for.

* All rice, with or without meat, goes well with any kind of beans.

* Zatarain’s Jambalaya Rice goes well with a little extra water and okra, when you have a safe source of okra.

* Zatarain’s Yellow Rice goes well with green peas—fresh, canned, or frozen--when you have a safe source of peas.

* Zatarain’s Spanish Rice positively begs for tomatoes, when you can trust your source of tomatoes.

* Zatarain’s Long Grain & Wild Rice goes well with fish.

* Zatarain’s Mexican Rice with Pinto Beans is better with additional pinto beans, when you have a safe source of beans.

* Wild greens picked out of your garden or pesticide-free not-a-lawn are best, to my taste, when they’re nibbled raw, leaf by leaf until your body tells you you’ve had enough. Non-wild greens go very well with rice and any form of chicken or turkey, but they soak up glyphosate and other nasty residues; I've gone off them.

* Venison is special. Deer are one of those species that nature really seems to have intended us to eat; they will overpopulate, and the consequences of deer overpopulation are nasty. As deer populations are increasing, I'd rather see male deer on a grill than on someone's grille--or beside the road. However, some alarming diseases have been found in local deer. Others ate my share of the venison that was consumed at this Thanksgiving Dinner. After age 80 I plan to eat venison.

Method

1. Clear fully carbonized residues away from fireplace. Make sure the Dutch Oven has a solid support. If not using a grill rack, put a flat stone, brick, or log in the center of the fireplace and surround it with compost. Compost should not touch the Dutch Oven.

(Important: In Virginia a barrel fire is almost idiot-proof—scraps of paper will occasionally blow out of the barrel on the updraft, but 99% of the time they’ll burn out harmlessly even if they land in the woodpile, because nothing ever gets dry enough to blaze up the way wildfires do in California. Barrel fires are legal even during drought-related bans on outdoor fires, but even on the East Coast we need to have a few jugs of water around a fireplace. Someone should watch a fire as long as flames are visible. I once talked to an old lady who once saw a scrap of paper blow out of a barrel and ignite dry vegetation in the yard.)

2. Wash hands thoroughly, combine ingredients in the Dutch Oven, and set it in its place.

3. If cooking in a barrel, you almost have to use a modified tepee-type fire-lay. Arrange paper, twigs, and sticks in a circle (more or less) around the Dutch Oven, letting them stand up vertically to maximize draft. Ignite. Continue adding pieces of tinder as the first few blaze away. By the time the paper's used up the twigs should be, too, and the sticks should have burned down to ashy coals.

4. If the weather is right you may be able to hear the rice boiling in the Dutch Oven. If not, rice will cook anyway. Know your pot. When mine feels too hot to hold, the rice is hot enough to cook. Once the rice is hot, the tinder is burned up, and the wood is smoldering nicely, leave them alone for 20 to 25 minutes.

5. Carefully remove the pot from the fire. It may or may not still be too hot to hold. It will be dirty. Dust off ashes and wipe off soot before lifting the lid to check the rice. If weather conditions are right it will be perfectly cooked and ready to eat. In cold weather you may need to burn another handful of sticks and let the rice simmer for another 10 or 15 minutes.

Thanksgiving Day was sunny and warm, over 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon. A good time was had by all, apparently including Burr and Samantha, though they didn't contribute anything to the dinner.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Yarn Shopping I Must Go

Thanksgiving Day? Actually, if we think about it, it's more like a week. The holiday is officially observed tomorrow, but anyone looking at my town can tell that a holiday is being observed.

What we used to call Thanksgiving Wednesday, I'm told, some schools now call Dead or Blackout Wednesday, from the look of a dormitory with all the window lights turned off. It's similar to the way some Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews observe the Sabbath: The day of rest starts at sunset on Friday, so at least Friday afternoon and sometimes Friday morning are reserved for doing all the work people need to celebrate their day of rest in the way they believe is appropriate. Shopping and cooking and cleaning and driving and putting fresh sheets on the guest beds have to be all done and out of the way in order for the celebration to begin.

My morning walk down to the paved road is usually a quiet reflective time. Not on Thanksgiving Wednesday, it's not. The woods are full of visiting relatives hoping to bag a deer, because why bother with a turkey if you can have fresh venison for Thanksgiving dinner. The hills resounded with gunshots all the way. I put on a fairly loud (for me) orange sweater and thought, as I walked, that the cotton has faded to an unhelpfully well camouflaged shade of cocoa-brown...

Whatever people are doing, they're not shopping. Some people shopped yesterday. Some will shop tomorrow. Today I've seen a total of three people on the sidewalk, and one of them was a sick patient out for the exercise.

So certain storekeepers, of whom I'm one, are about to close up and make our last runs to the grocery store before we start making merry...I was thinking about how much updating a pre-written blog post needed when someone else said "I want to go home." Right. I want to go home too. I'll update that post on Friday.

This Friday is what U.S. merchants like to celebrate as "Black Friday," the day they traditionally started writing the day's total in black (income) instead of red (investment). My home town has a long tradition of using Black Friday for road trips to Kingsport, Bristol, Big Stone Gap, or all three...but, for those who want to spend money at home, I have a tradition of joking about Black Friday by offering discounts on all black merchandise. Person who was fingering the black sweater, please take note.

There's another...it's not really a tradition, because the weather is hard to predict, but it's happened several times...kids always hope that the Monday and even the Tuesday after the Thanksgiving weekend can be celebrated as First Snow Days. Currently the weather is sunny and warm, but the young can always hope.

Anyway, I just picked up my Michaels giftcard in the mail from Yougov, and I can't miss a free ride to Michaels. I'll add an Amazon link "tomorrow," whichever day that means for the web site, probably Friday but who knows.



Happy Thanksgiving, Gentle Readers.

Flash Fiction Poem: Teacher

Happy Thanksgiving, Gentle Readers! Posts at this site appear when they're funded, so here's the first of three posts for the holiday weekend.

This bit of Bad Poetry was written a few weeks ago, before glyphosate awareness took over my entire online life. It's a mash-up of two different writing prompts: poem using five particular words (see the ongoing poetry challenge at http://www.obheal.ie/blog/five-words-poetry-competition/ ), and true story about a K-12 teacher...the first time I remember being able to imagine an Older Person having ever been young. She giggled at the Frenchified way "schottische" was pronounced on the record, like a kid, and then demonstrated the dance step, like a teenager.)

The pallid teacher drawls and drones,

a slug of flab that shows no bones.

We children lean back on our spines

considering how many lines

of penalty prayer might incur—

“God, let me never grow like her.”

To set a mood of long ago,

she puts a disc on the stereo:

Dalglish and McCutcheon join

to clap and whoop and toss a coin

when Old Mike plays his concertina

and tells of colder times and leaner.

Lights ripple on the flat black disc.

Though Mike is old, his tunes are brisk.

He played such tunes in cheap bars where

the drinkers breathed more smoke than air

while dancing on the peanut shells

that helped soak up the spills and smells,

pipe and suspenders, swirling skirt,

they drank so much they tried to flirt.

The teacher demonstrates a step

and for an instant verve and pep

enliven her; she might be tall;

her forty-inch waist might be small,

her hair both thick and dark again;

her eyes flash to long-gone young men.

Her worn-out sneakers have both springs

and pivots that the music brings.

The old were young once, I’ve heard said,

and now believe.—The moment’s fled.

The woman stands again, and slumps.

Her back forms secondary humps

above, below; her clothing’s puckered;

eight quick steps each way leave her tuckered.

Louder our little prayer wheels whir,

God, let me never grow like her,

who for a moment showed that she

was pert and musical as we.

It was a pleasant surprise to find copies of the album featured in this reminiscence on Amazon--for prices Michael Kennedy would never have believed.

Morgan Griffith's Thanksgiving Message

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9), to whom this web site wishes a good Thanksgiving too:

"
Friday, November 16, 2018 –
Two Churches and Thanksgiving
Most Virginians and most Americans are familiar with the words of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Fewer are familiar with where he said it.
When he uttered his famous declaration to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, Williamsburg was still the capital of Virginia, but it remained under control of the British authorities led by the King’s representative, Lord Dunmore.* So to meet freely, delegates to the convention gathered at St. John’s Church in Richmond.
I thought of this son of our Commonwealth, and his meeting place in particular, while attending a recent Congressional Prayer Breakfast.
A guest at the breakfast was Tunne Kelam, a citizen of Estonia who today represents his country in the European Parliament.
Estonia celebrated its 100^th anniversary of independence this year. As a small nation in the Baltic region, Estonia was long a part of the Russian Empire. In the wake of World War I and the collapse of Russia’s tsarist regime, Estonia declared its independence and repelled an attempt by the newly-formed Soviet Union to subdue it.
Unfortunately, Estonia would find itself twenty years later caught between the socialist Nazis and the communist Soviets, two of the worst tyrannies ever to afflict humanity. During World War II, the Nazis and the Soviets would both occupy Estonia, murdering thousands of its people and sending thousands more to the death or labor camps.
Yet these calamities and the ensuing decades of Soviet oppression following World War II did not crush the spirit of the Estonian people. They rejected the attempts of the Soviets to eradicate Estonian culture and sought to restore the independence they had once enjoyed.
Mr. Kelam was one of the Estonians determined to see his country free again. In 1988, he joined with others to form the Estonian National Independence Party. This was a milestone on the road back to independence, and he was at the meeting that formed the party. Just like that meeting in Richmond over two hundred years before, these patriots met in a church.
There are other links between this story and our American one, too. Mr. Kelam told the prayer breakfast that they drew inspiration from the fact that the United States refused to recognize Soviet rule over Estonia. He took comfort that the greatest democracy in the world didn’t accept that they had been extinguished as a nation.
One of the things we celebrate on Thanksgiving is that we became that greatest country ever based on democratic principles. Over the centuries, people have come to our country for the same things the Estonians who rejected Soviet rule wanted: the right to govern ourselves, to speak according to our consciences, and to live in peace with whichever faith we practice, among others.
In our country, we have flourished while securing these rights, so taking a national day to give thanks is entirely appropriate.
While Virginia’s Thanksgiving occurred in 1619 at Berkeley Plantation, many of the famous Thanksgivings in our history have occurred during momentous times for our democracy. The Pilgrims were celebrating the survival of their colony in 1621; George Washington issued his Thanksgiving proclamation in the first year of the Federal Government under the Constitution; Abraham Lincoln instituted the annual custom of Thanksgiving amid the Civil War. Perhaps it is during trying times that we should be most thankful for the blessings we do possess.
Tunne Kelam’s story certainly caused me to reflect on the things we can be grateful for in America. I hope you will reflect on them, too, when we join our family and friends around the table this Thanksgiving. The words of the classic Thanksgiving hymn “We Gather Together” still say it best:

We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known;
the wicked oppressing now cease from distressing;
sing praises to His Name, He forgets not His own.

During the Thanksgiving season, I hope that each and every one of you will have safe travels, find those things for which you can be thankful, and remember that in our nation of broad and diverse beliefs, we can celebrate America by giving thanks for the things which bind us.
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.

*Lord Dunmore would be chased from Virginia the next year by the Ninth District’s own Andrew Lewis.
"

Did You Get That Post-Election Survey, Too?

This is only a status update. Real blog posts, on topics suggested by sponsors, cost $5 each and are waiting to be funded.

I'm online live from the real-world Internet Portal store on Jackson Street. We buy, sell, or trade, but so far today all I've done is be harassed by a person who's stopped paying for hack writing and seems upset that the person's stopped getting it.

Cold November rain washed away most of the business in town yesterday. The rain seems to be stopping now, while people are still in town. Come out and shop, people. You are not limited to buying what you see in the store; you can order things online here, and we're looking for more suppliers of hand-crafted merchandise. Not secondhand goods. Lots of other stores sell secondhand goods, some of it quite nice. We are looking for new, handmade goods. If you paint, sculpt, carve, sew, cast, knit, crochet, embroider, tat, quilt, forge, or wire, we want you to be part of this store.

I've shared my Yougov link here before; since nobody's used it I'm guessing all US readers are already members of Yougov US. This is a legitimate paid survey site. No phone numbers, no spam, no obnoxious e-mails where halfway through a survey you're notified that you're not the demographic someone was looking for and will not be paid for your time. When you get Yougov surveys, once in a while you may get one that shuts you out, but if so it will be attached to one that doesn't; you do get some points for opening each survey link. The cash value of the points is low. Nobody gets rich at Yougov. Everybody who fills out a few legitimate sponsored surveys, mostly about shopping and brand recognition, earns a giftcard every few months at their choice of Amazon, Target, and various real-world chain stores. They have a social page where you can discuss unsponsored brands of your own choice on Disqus, if you have time; a gifted "marketer" could use that feature to promote a new product. Since I'm a knitter I've always opted to let Yougov buy me yarn at Michaels. Currently, I'm watching the mail for another giftcard to buy some yarn in time to knit something for Christmas.

If you're not already a member of Yougov, and you are in the United States, you can join on your own, but both you and I get points if you use this link:

https://today.yougov.com/refer/brglBv6yISldXGeAQbYXBg/

Yougov has pages in other countries too; I'm told that each one has different rules, and not all are as user-friendly as the US, UK, and Canada versions. On the other hand some may in some ways be friendlier. In some countries Yougov reportedly offers the option of cash payouts, which are not available here.

Anyway, following the election, I received one of the very few Yougov surveys that don't focus on brand-name merchandise. I suspect it was sponsored by the Democratic Party, because it began with questions about the voting experience.

My voting experience this year was totally normal. I went in after work, waited for one other voter to be signed in, showed my card, was signed in, and didn't even have to wait to go to a booth and vote. I voted for one winning candidate and one losing one. 

There were several other questions, some of which bordered on being insulting. Still beating that dead horse of "Republicans are racists," the D's asked which races (people guessed) their congressional candidates belonged to. 

They might have done better to have remembered their own rhetoric. In 2010, the D sponsors of former Congressman Boucher of Abingdon advertised in Gate City that then Candidate Griffith of Christiansburg was "Not from here. Not for us." Now, apparently, the same party operatives are under the impression that "Flaccavento" is a Gate City name. It's not. "Rossi" is, and arguably "Adenolfi" is, now, but nobody's even mentioned what town Candidate Flaccavento does come from. Either Abingdon or Christiansburg is more than a day's walk from Gate City but in view of recent D sloganeering, "Not from here. Not for us," kept coming to mind.

The survey went on to ask some more questions, including questions of foreign policy, about which I have no opinion. I think my final comment on the survey was worth sharing. It has been revised slightly for clarity.

"
Sponsors should try to avoid forcing choices on questions where respondents have no informed opinion. I could support either blocking immigration (or travel) due to a situation of special danger, or screening all foreigners thoroughly before letting them enter the country. I cannot imagine why people from one country, not at war with us, should be treated differently from others. That doesn't mean there can't be reasons; it means I've not been there and have no way to evaluate anything I've heard. The question is what people intend to do, not where they come from or what they look like.

This relates to the questions about race relations in the U.S. in a way...I think special problems that used to face Black people have been (mostly) resolved. Apart from individual relationships, which can be serious problems when the individuals involved are bigots, the special problems currently facing Black people are the ones they have in common with poorer people of any color. A more centralized economy makes it harder for people of any color to raise their standard of living. Young Black people deserve not empathy, but sympathy, from older White people because those of us who aren't wealthy face most of the same problems.
"

To which I'm sure regular readers are adding, "...And bigger government is not the solution."

Correspondents' Choice: October Book

My correspondence is so far behind that October's book e-mails started to pour in while September's were still open as links...so after that long list of book links, here's a "list" with only one book link.

First to come in was a promotion for a nationwide reading/discussion program featuring, among other things, Moby Dick and The Handmaid's Tale. Those stuck in my memory because the one by the U.S. writer was a favorite my Canadian husband always recommended, and the one by the Canadian writer is a favorite I always recommend. Does anybody not already have copies of both?

But the first one that made me rush to open October's book links list was one of those heartwarming collections of poems by students. This should be a pleasant way to learn Black American History; each poem (free verse, rhymes, or acrostics) tells the story of a famous Black American. Because the book's been published by Lulu.com, it's not in bookstores or on Amazon yet; by the time this post goes live, that may have changed. You can order it directly from Lulu, or order it from this web site to show support. I'll add an Amazon link when I become aware of an Amazon Store selling copies.

Correspondents' Choice: September Books

This is a pure-D disgrace: I was so busy, in October, that I never got around to posting this post. Well, one of the Amazon links had been sabotaged, so that was a problem. Also, Paypal.Me stopped working for this site, so that was another problem. I regret any loss of support these authors have suffered.

Note...correspondents are recommending these books because they're new, and new is how this web site recommends buying them. It's encouraging to read that, due to sellers of used books going online and using Amazon and the Internet as resources for programs like our "Fair Trade Books" system, publishers generally are offering better terms to authors (although they're also slacking off on the actual work of publishing, after they've printed new books). On the other hand they're allowing much less time to determine whether or not a book will sell, and, by extension, whether or not the writer's next book is worth marketing to those who bought the current one. So, most of these writers are in a position where you readers can really boost or hurt their careers, by buying their books new, or borrowing them or buying them secondhand. I recommend spending whatever you earn for one hour's work, each week, on new books. If you're self-employed, like a writer, and what you earn for one hour's work is not necessarily enough to buy even a used book, you can still click on the pictures to look for used books at a discount on Amazon--but if you could afford to buy the books new, and you don't, your conscience will get you.

New from Glenn Beck and team: Addicted to Outrage.

Bread? At a gluten-free site, bread? Why not? Everyone doesn't have to go gluten-free; when it's not been marinated in glyphosate, wheat in reasonable amounts will be a healthy source of plant protein for nine-tenths of humankind, the way it always used to be. For fans of Loulou, the Cat Sanctuary's adorable Tuxie e-friend, here is Her Human's bread recipe book:

And here's the general cookbook:

Reuters reporter Carey Gillam's new book is a must-read.

 

For those who can't get enough of the idea of a School of Magic, Joan Dempsey recommends Christine Grabowski's:

Robin Hutton considers the animals who fought alongside our Greatest Generation:

This one ought at least to be funny...

If you liked the "micropoetry" I retweeted one day in September, you might like the book those "micropoems" were posted to advertise. (Amazon will try to sell you the "e-book" version.)

First novel by the author of that short story collection that Google might not like, though Reese Witherspoon does:

Recommended by Jee Leong Koh:

Does Paul Krugman ever seem like Paul Smugman? Should somebody refute him? Somebody has:

First recommendation I found in the e-mail was this popular picture book, recommended by Penguin. There's a "grandma" sequel, and both are currently on display at Roberts & Jones in Gate City.

Full-length short stories from Alfian Sa'at, author of Malay Sketches...pricey at the time of posting, but demand should generate U.S. publication for a more reasonable price.

Beyond Crazy Rich Asians:

Alphabetically at the end...Clueless was fun, and I think one of the sequels may actually have tackled remixing Pride and Prejudice too, but what about a change of flavor? What if Pride and Prejudice were transferred to a Black city neighborhood? Then you might get Ibi Zoboi's Pride: