"Moms Across America" has used this week to barrage Thomas Moriarty of the Environmental Protection Administration with e-mail. I think I'd rather not share his e-mail address here. Those Gentle Readers who aren't already on the Twitter or e-mail list should be prepared to stand with the Moms, even though a lot of them are left-wingnuts and some of the petitions they circulate are consequently silly. Also, I imagine Mr. Moriarty and his office staff are getting a high volume of e-mail this week and will be more likely to read your e-mails if you wait till next week...just as long as you e-mail them then. Here's what I just sent him. (Like all activists, I address letters to people in the expectation that the letters will actually be read by several other people.) I've made a few small changes: I've upgraded the formatting to eliminate words in all capitals, and changed sentences that some of you might recognize as identifying individuals.
"
Dear Mr. Moriarty:
You're probably receiving a lot of e-mails from "Moms" describing their children's known or suspected reactions to glyphosate. This one is a bit different. I'm an aunt not a mother. Although some children I love share the Irish-American celiac gene that produces a very specific (and disgusting) reaction when I'm exposed to glyphosate, and I'm doing this for their sake, I am The Celiactivist. I host a Twitter chat/hashtag that's collected literally reams of documents about how glyphosate really may be to blame for almost any symptoms anyone's developed since 2009, and why most people I know are feeling more than ten years "older" than they were in 2009 (it's especially noticeable if their current age is 15).
I know this information is pouring in. I'm the one who spends Tuesdays documenting that fact. Go to twitter.com, search for the hashtag #GlyphosateAwareness, scroll down, feel free to ignore the banter, and click on the links. People have really done an awesome job of linking to real scientific studies, a few flawed, most important. We began with EPA's very own glyphosate dossier when I noticed what the Monsanto lobbyists who submitted those documents wanted people to overlook: In every study, of any animal species or hospital patient group, each individual's reaction to glyphosate can easily seem both rare and insignificant. Yet these reactions recur, across all species that can display the reaction in question (it's hard to document memory loss in fish)--and the majority of all living creatures do show adverse reactions.
Full-blown celiac sprue used to develop in about 1 out of 10,000 people of Irish descent, 1 out of 100,000 other Europeans, and virtually no one anywhere else. Now pseudo-celiac reactions are global and things that resemble celiac sprue are appearing in people who don't even have the celiac gene, in pets, livestock, wildlife, birds, fish, and even insects. While Monsanto shills scream about how theoretically unlikely they think this is, Bayer refuses to fund medical studies that might confirm or disprove what celiacs have confirmed for ourselves--that we react to glyphosate the same way we react to wheat gluten, only much more intensely. This could be done with a simple blood test. I've been offering healthy celiac blood for months now; so far nobody's volunteered to study it.
As a celiac I'm accustomed to feeling like an alien here on Wheat Planet, but glyphosate is actually bringing non-celiacs together with celiacs again. Typically their symptoms are much more subtle and are easily dismissed as "just a flare-up of something you have anyway," and if no chronic disease can be blamed, everybody has an age or gender that can be blamed. Also by now everyone seems to have some sort of allergies.
My best friend is disabled by chronic Lyme Disease. Guess when it flares up.
A child's diagnosis of astigmatism and hearing loss has been downgraded to autism since she moved to an area with a higher level of glyphosate exposure. (She does not lack empathy. That's why she's so shy, especially when her disabilities became worse than they'd been.)
A neighbor employs someone who's "gluten-sensitive"; most days she's merely quiet, but after glyphosate exposure she's routinely threatened with unemployment for surliness and incompetence.
I'll stop with three examples but I've observed hundreds. If you sat down and made a list of people you know, you'd probably be surprised by how many of them have "bad days" and how many of those "bad days" coincide...I was.
We've all been told that Bayer-Monsanto was told that this administration had "got their backs." I'm actually a fiscal conservative who likes to see people get rich, and I'd like to see Bayer stay rich enough to pay the damages it owes us...but could you clarify this a bit? Protect Bayer from violent hate (believe it or not I try to encourage people on Twitter to focus on collecting compensation) on condition that they stop producing "pesticides," support a total ban on glyphosate, and support a phase-out of poison sprays. How can a company that's connected with Bill Gates not take the lead in moving toward robot technology?
After all, the First Lady's unpublicized medical condition and the First Child's ability to learn are among many things that are likely to be helped by a total glyphosate ban.
Sincerely,
Priscilla King
"
Some of you Gentle Readers can write better e-mails than that. Please do.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Status Update, Tortie Tuesday, Phenology and All That
"This is Tortie Tuesday. Would either of you gorgeous three-colored cats like to do today's blog post?" I asked Samantha and Serena.
"Hmph," said Serena. "Why don't you stay home, grow some fur, and play with me all morning, then snooze on the storage bin just below mine all afternoon, instead. That would be much more fun."
Serena, the Queen Cat next to the barrels, sorely misses Traveller, the young tomcat next to the camera. While he was living I didn't think this photo of Traveller was especially good, but since it's the last one there will ever be...Traveller was the cuddliest kitten ever, and, sadly, it's often the case that kittens who aren't as healthy as they ought to be are extra-cuddly; presumably the sensation of snuggling distracts from pain.)
"Hold out for readers to send us some more of that premium-grade kibble," said Samantha, who is Serena's mother and who induced lactation, as social cats often do, around the time Serena was ready to end the lactation cycle. "If they'd been sending us glyphosate-free, GMO-grain-free food, Trav might be with us still, and Swimmer might not be so bony. I worry about that kitten. It demonstrated the ability to swim at such an early age because it was weaker than the others, and although they were all born the same size--small--it's hardly half the size of Silver now. Even my milk supplements aren't helping it grow."
Swimmer was the cuddliest, friendliest kitten--not that there's ever been much range of variation in this look-alike litter--so when it rejected cuddling this weekend, I suspected that its ribby little body is in pain. Fatal Manx Syndrome would have happened earlier and would not have affected a kitten with a complete tail, but glyphosate sensitivity, or who knows what else, may be interfering with its growth.
"I'll write it! Let me at the computer!" said little Black Stache. "I may not be a Tortie or even a calico cat, but I do have a patch of mixed black and white hairs that look gray, on the back of my neck, as well as patches of black and white. I ought to count as a three-colored cat. And I'm three months and three weeks old now, so I know everything! I'm big enough that Ma's let me go out to the gate several times and even spend the night on the porch twice now!"
"That's because I was out late and fell asleep as soon as I came in, fed you, and leaned back on my bench beside the computer," I explained. "But by all means, since I'm getting tired of picking your little two-colored body out of the doorway every time I go in or come out, such that I've felt tempted to grab you by your long white tail--which is a cruel act no cat owner should ever do--let's show the world how adorable and adoptable you are."
12
34 Z
ZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjhhhhhjjjjjjjjjj
"That's enough typing for one day, Stache," I said. "Now I'll tell readers what we really mean to say here."
1. Black Stache got its (I suspect her) name from the character on the cover of this book, which is as funny as you'd expect from the authors' names on the cover:
"Hmph," said Serena. "Why don't you stay home, grow some fur, and play with me all morning, then snooze on the storage bin just below mine all afternoon, instead. That would be much more fun."
Serena, the Queen Cat next to the barrels, sorely misses Traveller, the young tomcat next to the camera. While he was living I didn't think this photo of Traveller was especially good, but since it's the last one there will ever be...Traveller was the cuddliest kitten ever, and, sadly, it's often the case that kittens who aren't as healthy as they ought to be are extra-cuddly; presumably the sensation of snuggling distracts from pain.)
"Hold out for readers to send us some more of that premium-grade kibble," said Samantha, who is Serena's mother and who induced lactation, as social cats often do, around the time Serena was ready to end the lactation cycle. "If they'd been sending us glyphosate-free, GMO-grain-free food, Trav might be with us still, and Swimmer might not be so bony. I worry about that kitten. It demonstrated the ability to swim at such an early age because it was weaker than the others, and although they were all born the same size--small--it's hardly half the size of Silver now. Even my milk supplements aren't helping it grow."
Swimmer was the cuddliest, friendliest kitten--not that there's ever been much range of variation in this look-alike litter--so when it rejected cuddling this weekend, I suspected that its ribby little body is in pain. Fatal Manx Syndrome would have happened earlier and would not have affected a kitten with a complete tail, but glyphosate sensitivity, or who knows what else, may be interfering with its growth.
"I'll write it! Let me at the computer!" said little Black Stache. "I may not be a Tortie or even a calico cat, but I do have a patch of mixed black and white hairs that look gray, on the back of my neck, as well as patches of black and white. I ought to count as a three-colored cat. And I'm three months and three weeks old now, so I know everything! I'm big enough that Ma's let me go out to the gate several times and even spend the night on the porch twice now!"
"That's because I was out late and fell asleep as soon as I came in, fed you, and leaned back on my bench beside the computer," I explained. "But by all means, since I'm getting tired of picking your little two-colored body out of the doorway every time I go in or come out, such that I've felt tempted to grab you by your long white tail--which is a cruel act no cat owner should ever do--let's show the world how adorable and adoptable you are."
12
34 Z
ZZZZZZZZZ
ZZZZjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjhhhhhjjjjjjjjjj
"That's enough typing for one day, Stache," I said. "Now I'll tell readers what we really mean to say here."
1. Black Stache got its (I suspect her) name from the character on the cover of this book, which is as funny as you'd expect from the authors' names on the cover:
 |
| Way funnier than the original Peter Pan and Wendy, this one started a series. |
2. Samantha is the true Tortie (a three-colored cat with large areas of black-and-orange mottled fur). She is still beautiful. She's been much calmer and friendlier during the prolactin surge of being a nursing grandma cat. She has not only purred and cuddled, but positively called me to participate in purr-and-cuddle sessions.
Though she's reached her full adult size--average, smaller than Serena--Samantha is still a young, bouncy-pouncy cat, still learning the rules of etiquette about which she was badly confused while growing up around middle school boys.
She is strong and energetic, and likes to show off her ability to jump five or six feet off the ground. This is a bit of a Cat Sanctuary record. One of our Founding Queen Black Magic's many unique achievements was routinely jumping up through the transom, over ten feet, in what might have been called a single bound, but actually Magic relied on little booster push-offs, placing one forepaw on the doorknob and one hind paw on the top of the door before surging through the transom--it only looked like a single move. Samantha can get one forepaw up above my head by leaping straight up in the air.
Unfortunately she likes to practice by trying to grab anything that might contain food out of my hands.
So during the recent heavy rain, when Samantha grabbed a bucket and spilled water all over us, I devised a new game called Mad Pans, which all humans at the Cat Sanctuary are encouraged to play. To play, the human picks up any container, full or empty, covered or open, and waves it about shouting, "Beware the Pan! Pan's coming to get revenge on Samantha! All cats off the porch now!" Containers may be clunked against objects, or against any cats who fail to clear off the porch. (Not hard enough to hurt a cat, just hard enough to jangle their sensitive nerves.) After all cats clear the porch, humans may or may not choose to show the cats what's in a container, and offer it to them if it's food.
Mad Pans is similar in principle to my new, temporary-I-hope, policy of blocking all "promoted tweets" on Twitter. It's excessive and may seem mean-spirited to strangers, but its goal is to resolve a problem before the problem gets worse. The cats know the porch is still their home; the sponsors know they're still welcome to behave politely on Twitter.
My goal is to get corporate Twitter accounts to use Twitter in the way that made Twitter great, just as my goal is to get the cats to step back and warily watch anyone carrying any rounded container.
3. Twitter has, for whatever reason--Google updates that made all web sites less functional last week, the activist Twits (others as well as me) blocking all the promoted tweets, Jack Dorsey's not actually being as stupid as the political statement behind New Twitter made him seem--gone back to its original format, at least for me. Hurrah! Does anyone miss anything about New Twitter? Well...I liked the nice neat f'list format...but that's still available at mobile.twitter.com. The "dark mode," which shows up on browsers other than the user's as a black screen? I was curious about whether New Twitter really would show that on other people's browsers; none of my Tweeps was new enough to the Internet to try "dark mode" but apparently it did cause a few tweets to show up in a few Twits' screens as black holes. The filtering and "top views"? Feh. Bury them deep! Long may original Twitter wave.
(This week's chat worked very smoothly on original Twitter. Not nearly as tedious as the last few Tuesdays have been.)
4. In phenology news (I really ought to do more phenology posts! Youall ought to sponsor some!), summer flowers are blooming beautifully. Along Route 23, the red clover, chicory, fleabane daisies, and white vetch recovering from last year's glyphosate madness are especially colorful. White roses are gone, red roses have peaked, and I saw the first mimosa tree in pale but lovely bloom this morning.
I also noticed, on some private person's lawn, an especially gorgeous selection of daylilies. Orange "tigers" are the daylilies we all know best, but they've been cultivated in a wild array of colors. This local daylily fancier has decorated the lawn with some orange daylilies, some pure lemon-yellow ones, some in a lovely shading of cantaloupe-pink that my cheap cell phone failed to capture, and these great gaudy things...Google got something right. Who knew the cell phone could photograph shades of red?
These showy flowers take root and spread. With a little encouragement they'll crowd out grass, which is a plus point as far as I'm concerned. If you get tired of looking at them, which is a possibility with this purple-and-gold variety, you can also eat them! Pure white daylilies have also been cultivated. If you want to spend money on daylilies, rather than just digging up some of the neighbors' surplus as is customary, it's possible to buy strains that will reliably bloom in every color except blue.
Many moth and butterfly populations are also rebounding. I saw Vanessa, the Painted Lady, sunning her wings on the not-a-lawn this weekend, but didn't even try to snap a picture as good as this one:
 |
| Shared at Wikipedia By Jean-Pol GRANDMONT - Self-photographed, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27747981 . |
More about this group of "Cosmopolitan Butterfly" species at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_cardui and https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/09/status-report-money-phenology-news.html . The bottom line is that although there currently seem to be three distinct species of Vanessa in the Eastern States, it can be hard to tell by looking which one an individual butterfly belongs to. Generally V. atalanta is darker than V. cardui, and V. virginiensis has showier underwings, so the one who visited me was probably V. cardui.
Baby Vanessas have bristling spikes that seem to be trying to copy those on stingingworms, but the bristles don't have sharp points or contain venom, and the caterpillars are much smaller. They eat "weeds," so they are among the lovable animals threatened by glyphosate. (The butterflies need little nourishment and are "cosmopolitan" partly because they can get what they need from all kinds of sources, including sweat; if you sit still on a hot day you might get one to lick your hand.)
Real weather news is that, while we've been complaining of too much rain and too cool mornings, here in Virginia, a deadly heat wave may be moving our way. Last week in India several people died of 45-degree Celsius heat. (45 degrees Celsius is approximately 113 degrees Fahrenheit.) As usual I've seen no real local news from the Middle East but now the brutal heat is menacing France. That we've not had a deadly heat wave in Virginia for some years did not disprove global warming theory, and if we get one next week, that won't prove global warming theory either; our ancestors survived many heat waves, at least long enough to become our ancestors. But it will make the flatter and hotter corners of the state unpleasant places to be and it is my (not very) painful duty to report that although Gate City just doubled its downtown AirBNB capacity, the new BNB rooms are already booked for most of the summer. During August Race Week, refugees from the north and east may have to settle for lodgings in Roanoke. Urban Virginians, plan your escape routes now.
5. The cafe will as usual be closing for the first ten days in July. In search of long-term writing jobs I've referred people to this web site. Here are the links some new readers may be looking for:
Survival food:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/05/survival-food-weekend-part-1-may-yea.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/05/survival-food-weekend-part-2-may-be.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2019/05/survival-food-weekend-part-3-may-nay.html
Review written from research...This one originally started with the sentence "Vietnam has many beaches and enjoys lots of beach weather."
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/02/beaches-of-vietnam-another-hack-writing.html
Post specifically about women aging well:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/10/my-mother-is-beautiful.html
Me:
salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com
twitter.com/5PriscillaKing
Friday, June 21, 2019
Are You Still Shadowbanned?
Disqus has been tweaking things that didn't need tweaking, recently, also. I should have seen notification of this comment when I opened Disqus and saw that other people had posted comments on other blogs. The commenter is a Real Twit, a real blogger, and a real Zazzler.
Poster: Cactus in Mission Garden, San Luis Obispo Poster
by barbsbooks
In theory I get a few pennies if you use that specific link to buy that specific poster. Who knows? Zazzle has been tweaking and "innovating" and messing everything up too. If you browse the whole Barb's California store and like other things better, no problem. If you're not able to follow the link, find Barb's California, or buy stuff, I wouldn't be surprised; almost everything at Zazzle is currently malfunctioning for sellers.
Anyway, here's the comment:
"
Valid questions. The thing about Twitter's infamous "shadowbanning" is that it's hard to know when or whether it's happening to you. Your profile page looks the same way it always does. People who take the trouble to visit your profile page still see your tweets there. People who are following you, however, and looking for your tweets in their stream, don't see them.
I keep opening Twitter and checking, and although I've taken the trouble to turn off all the evil, anti-free-account "filtering" and to tag several hundred people, and to keep resetting my stream to "Latest" rather than what greedheads are paying to call "Top" (which are generally around my bottom rating), I'm still not seeing any tweets from Real Twits like @barbsloco in my stream where they ought to be. So yes, BarbRad, you're still shadowbanned.
If someone is being "timed out" today but someone has retweeted one of their previous tweets, and/or you've blocked them or they've blocked you but someone you follow has retweeted their tweet, or if they've chosen to delete a tweet that was attracting a lot of unfavorable attention, what you'll see (at least in Google Chrome) is a white box with a note like "This tweet is not available."
I've not seen the black boxes--yet. I suspect they would be tweets from people who've chosen to turn on "Dark Mode," which would be the innovation cravers, which would not include any of my Tweeps. (I follow people on all sides of issues, but I try to pick intelligent ones.) "Dark Mode" displays your words in white-on-black rather than black-on-white. White-on-black is hard for many people to read, but on different devices the code for white-on-black might show up as deep-purple-on-black. (Live Journal has offered "Dark Mode" for a long time, and on any random day browsing there is likely to pull up a complaint from people who "can't read some people's 'exciting' all-black Journals.")
Currently, even the tweets that aren't being blocked and that do belong in my stream, from the newspapers and the superstar writers, are still being crowded out by nasty irrelevant ads. I'm working on this. Block! Block! Block! About all I do when I check my own feed is block the advertising garbage.
I don't like blocking people. I don't like blocking even corporations, because I still think of Twitter as the place where real people can have real conversations with corporations that might help them improve their products and services such that we might actually buy their stuff. That is, I now realize, an old, outdated position to take. Greedhead corporations wanted to turn Twitter into another channel on commercial television where they blare deliberately obnoxious ads, on the principle that we might block the annoyance from our memory and remember the brand and buy the product when we're in a quieter place and thus in a friendlier mood. Twitter's given them what they wanted. The corporations aren't seeing and replying to my tweets. They're just screaming and not listening. So, until each corporation prevails upon a private person using a free account not linked to a phone to tweet to me, personally, "Please, @5PriscillaKing, This Corporation sincerely apologizes for Twitter's Rudeness Policy and humbly begs permission to follow your account without being blocked. This Corporation promises to read and interact with your account daily to retain access to your Twitter stream"...Block! Block! Block! If it's "promoted," even if it's from an account I might have wanted to follow on Original Twitter, it must be BLOCKED!
I'm no longer an "insider" at a web site whose idea of monetizing itself seems to be destroying itself. I don't want to be one. Should Twitter decide to stop sabotaging its sponsors by "filtering" private accounts in any way except by letting users block them, Twitter will need to publicize its return to sanity. Maybe the first "sponsored tweet" everyone sees, at the bottom of the first 25 tweets of interest to the Twit reading per stream, should display the words "Twitter isn't filtering anything any more. Twitter respects your ability to filter your Twitter stream for yourself."
Then the tutorial for those who don't know how to use the "block" button should feature, "Block all videos. Show thumbnail views of pictures only (100x100 pixels) until I click on them. Block all "promoted" tweets from people I'm not following," and nothing remotely resembling that awful "Block all accounts that haven't linked to a phone number I can use to annoy them with sales calls."
Unless and until that's done, Twitter is, by its own choice, just another "free" but basically hostile web site that needs to be replaced.
The Internet has been made "free" to the public at considerable expense to the corporations who've been subsidizing it. As those corporations realize that more access to private individuals' thoughts is not automatically going to generate profit for them, we can expect Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Zazzle, Instagram, Youtube, Paypal, and probably also Google and Amazon, to become increasingly less user-friendly as they claw and yowl for our money. All I can advise is: Don't give it to them. If cyberspace ceases to be a happy place for us, let's go back to real mail with real paper. The Internet can continue to be free and friendly to private people who have spent twenty or fifty or eighty years learning to ignore anything that resembles a corporate advertisement, or it can disappear--and we might all be better off if it disappears.
For posterity's sake, just in case any of the corporations begin to wonder where their audience went, here's a short list of what the corporations must do to keep the Internet alive. Non-negotiably:
1. Only newspapers and magazines that already have high subscribership and choose to offer their full content online, at a price well below the price for subscriptions to the printed edition, can afford to consider a paywall, or any form of discrimination against visitors who aren't paying them a penny.
2. As a general rule, web sites need to remain compatible with all browsers. People who rejected Windows 10 did so for a reason. Maybe when Microsoft recognizes its mistake and unrolls Windows CR (for Customer Respect), featuring an external, physical data storage system to which everything must be backed up before contact with the Internet can be made, a program that makes it impossible for anything that looks like a phone number or Social Security number to be transferred through the Internet, and an upgrade back to the version of Word that worked with Windows ME for everybody at no extra charge, maybe we'll change the browsers we have. Not before. Computers' memory is finite and people don't want to waste it on changing browsers.
If web sites are too shabby to be able to hire people who can keep them fully compatible with everything, they should be required to list the browsers with which they work, up front, ahead of any graphics, so those of us who are rejecting Windows 10 will know which sites aren't going to work for us, and not waste any time on them.
Which means advertisements must display quickly and smoothly in 1992 Google Opera, or they do the company more harm than good and should be removed.We click. We blink. If the command we just clicked into has not been executed, you're an inadequate web site...goodbye. Never imagine that looking at a white screen while a flashy ad loads, or seeing words jiggle up and down around big messy graphics, is going to build any kind of support for your brand. Get a computer that still has 1992 Opera and make sure your site works efficiently on that thing. If it doesn't, remove all graphics and start over.
3. Anticipate that a lot of us deliberately block audiovisual content. If you want your message to be reached, put it into printable words. Don't bother with podcasts for which the full text is not on the screen.
4. Free users, whose contact information YOU MUST NEVER TRY TO FIND, are your prospective customers. Many of us aren't going to buy anything online but, if you're very polite and respectful, if you show that you're good neighbor types whom we want to support, and if you make your product available through real-world Internet Portals, we might pay cash for it in the real world. Never, never, never put anything anywhere on the Internet that offends us, or even anything that openly makes sites friendlier to paid customers. Any benefits you offer to individual customers should be mentioned in private messages to them only. For-profit sites can only hope to become actually profitable if they market their brand to people who don't buy stuff online. The Internet could possibly be a great marketing tool, reducing the cost of all those annoying "traditional" ads we systematically ignore, if you don't get greedy.
5. If you can't make the Internet pay by keeping it friendly to those of us who don't buy things through it, the time may have come for the whole Internet fad to pass on.
Poster: Cactus in Mission Garden, San Luis Obispo Poster
by barbsbooks
In theory I get a few pennies if you use that specific link to buy that specific poster. Who knows? Zazzle has been tweaking and "innovating" and messing everything up too. If you browse the whole Barb's California store and like other things better, no problem. If you're not able to follow the link, find Barb's California, or buy stuff, I wouldn't be surprised; almost everything at Zazzle is currently malfunctioning for sellers.
Anyway, here's the comment:
"
Got here by way of the Twitter link you sent me. Not sure still that I completely understand your tweet to me (@)barbsloco) -- You sent a tweet I'd posted on May 2 and said I'd been shadowbanned. Does that mean you and others are not seeing my tweets on my profile the way they look to me? Or do you mean they get lost in all the ads that are inserted?
I'm as careful as I know how to be to check every profile before following anyone to avoid fake followers. I'm not sure I understand this whole shadowbanning thing. (I don't use chemicals in my garden, either, just so you know.) How would I know if I'm shadowbanned? Does that mean those empty black tweets I sometimes see in my stream are from shadowbanned people temporarily on restriction. I work hard on Twitter to try to show followers what I think they will enjoy. I send different tweets to accounts focused on different subjects. If no one is listening, I may as well spend that scheduling time blogging. Feel free to notify me if you answer this comment. I'm not finding a box to check.
"Valid questions. The thing about Twitter's infamous "shadowbanning" is that it's hard to know when or whether it's happening to you. Your profile page looks the same way it always does. People who take the trouble to visit your profile page still see your tweets there. People who are following you, however, and looking for your tweets in their stream, don't see them.
I keep opening Twitter and checking, and although I've taken the trouble to turn off all the evil, anti-free-account "filtering" and to tag several hundred people, and to keep resetting my stream to "Latest" rather than what greedheads are paying to call "Top" (which are generally around my bottom rating), I'm still not seeing any tweets from Real Twits like @barbsloco in my stream where they ought to be. So yes, BarbRad, you're still shadowbanned.
If someone is being "timed out" today but someone has retweeted one of their previous tweets, and/or you've blocked them or they've blocked you but someone you follow has retweeted their tweet, or if they've chosen to delete a tweet that was attracting a lot of unfavorable attention, what you'll see (at least in Google Chrome) is a white box with a note like "This tweet is not available."
I've not seen the black boxes--yet. I suspect they would be tweets from people who've chosen to turn on "Dark Mode," which would be the innovation cravers, which would not include any of my Tweeps. (I follow people on all sides of issues, but I try to pick intelligent ones.) "Dark Mode" displays your words in white-on-black rather than black-on-white. White-on-black is hard for many people to read, but on different devices the code for white-on-black might show up as deep-purple-on-black. (Live Journal has offered "Dark Mode" for a long time, and on any random day browsing there is likely to pull up a complaint from people who "can't read some people's 'exciting' all-black Journals.")
Currently, even the tweets that aren't being blocked and that do belong in my stream, from the newspapers and the superstar writers, are still being crowded out by nasty irrelevant ads. I'm working on this. Block! Block! Block! About all I do when I check my own feed is block the advertising garbage.
I don't like blocking people. I don't like blocking even corporations, because I still think of Twitter as the place where real people can have real conversations with corporations that might help them improve their products and services such that we might actually buy their stuff. That is, I now realize, an old, outdated position to take. Greedhead corporations wanted to turn Twitter into another channel on commercial television where they blare deliberately obnoxious ads, on the principle that we might block the annoyance from our memory and remember the brand and buy the product when we're in a quieter place and thus in a friendlier mood. Twitter's given them what they wanted. The corporations aren't seeing and replying to my tweets. They're just screaming and not listening. So, until each corporation prevails upon a private person using a free account not linked to a phone to tweet to me, personally, "Please, @5PriscillaKing, This Corporation sincerely apologizes for Twitter's Rudeness Policy and humbly begs permission to follow your account without being blocked. This Corporation promises to read and interact with your account daily to retain access to your Twitter stream"...Block! Block! Block! If it's "promoted," even if it's from an account I might have wanted to follow on Original Twitter, it must be BLOCKED!
I'm no longer an "insider" at a web site whose idea of monetizing itself seems to be destroying itself. I don't want to be one. Should Twitter decide to stop sabotaging its sponsors by "filtering" private accounts in any way except by letting users block them, Twitter will need to publicize its return to sanity. Maybe the first "sponsored tweet" everyone sees, at the bottom of the first 25 tweets of interest to the Twit reading per stream, should display the words "Twitter isn't filtering anything any more. Twitter respects your ability to filter your Twitter stream for yourself."
Then the tutorial for those who don't know how to use the "block" button should feature, "Block all videos. Show thumbnail views of pictures only (100x100 pixels) until I click on them. Block all "promoted" tweets from people I'm not following," and nothing remotely resembling that awful "Block all accounts that haven't linked to a phone number I can use to annoy them with sales calls."
Unless and until that's done, Twitter is, by its own choice, just another "free" but basically hostile web site that needs to be replaced.
The Internet has been made "free" to the public at considerable expense to the corporations who've been subsidizing it. As those corporations realize that more access to private individuals' thoughts is not automatically going to generate profit for them, we can expect Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Zazzle, Instagram, Youtube, Paypal, and probably also Google and Amazon, to become increasingly less user-friendly as they claw and yowl for our money. All I can advise is: Don't give it to them. If cyberspace ceases to be a happy place for us, let's go back to real mail with real paper. The Internet can continue to be free and friendly to private people who have spent twenty or fifty or eighty years learning to ignore anything that resembles a corporate advertisement, or it can disappear--and we might all be better off if it disappears.
For posterity's sake, just in case any of the corporations begin to wonder where their audience went, here's a short list of what the corporations must do to keep the Internet alive. Non-negotiably:
1. Only newspapers and magazines that already have high subscribership and choose to offer their full content online, at a price well below the price for subscriptions to the printed edition, can afford to consider a paywall, or any form of discrimination against visitors who aren't paying them a penny.
2. As a general rule, web sites need to remain compatible with all browsers. People who rejected Windows 10 did so for a reason. Maybe when Microsoft recognizes its mistake and unrolls Windows CR (for Customer Respect), featuring an external, physical data storage system to which everything must be backed up before contact with the Internet can be made, a program that makes it impossible for anything that looks like a phone number or Social Security number to be transferred through the Internet, and an upgrade back to the version of Word that worked with Windows ME for everybody at no extra charge, maybe we'll change the browsers we have. Not before. Computers' memory is finite and people don't want to waste it on changing browsers.
If web sites are too shabby to be able to hire people who can keep them fully compatible with everything, they should be required to list the browsers with which they work, up front, ahead of any graphics, so those of us who are rejecting Windows 10 will know which sites aren't going to work for us, and not waste any time on them.
Which means advertisements must display quickly and smoothly in 1992 Google Opera, or they do the company more harm than good and should be removed.We click. We blink. If the command we just clicked into has not been executed, you're an inadequate web site...goodbye. Never imagine that looking at a white screen while a flashy ad loads, or seeing words jiggle up and down around big messy graphics, is going to build any kind of support for your brand. Get a computer that still has 1992 Opera and make sure your site works efficiently on that thing. If it doesn't, remove all graphics and start over.
3. Anticipate that a lot of us deliberately block audiovisual content. If you want your message to be reached, put it into printable words. Don't bother with podcasts for which the full text is not on the screen.
4. Free users, whose contact information YOU MUST NEVER TRY TO FIND, are your prospective customers. Many of us aren't going to buy anything online but, if you're very polite and respectful, if you show that you're good neighbor types whom we want to support, and if you make your product available through real-world Internet Portals, we might pay cash for it in the real world. Never, never, never put anything anywhere on the Internet that offends us, or even anything that openly makes sites friendlier to paid customers. Any benefits you offer to individual customers should be mentioned in private messages to them only. For-profit sites can only hope to become actually profitable if they market their brand to people who don't buy stuff online. The Internet could possibly be a great marketing tool, reducing the cost of all those annoying "traditional" ads we systematically ignore, if you don't get greedy.
5. If you can't make the Internet pay by keeping it friendly to those of us who don't buy things through it, the time may have come for the whole Internet fad to pass on.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Book Review: The Irrationalist
Title: The Irrationalist
Author: Andrew
Pessin
Date: 2017
Publisher: Open
Books
ISBN:
Length: 508 pages
Quote: “For
a moment the two men glared at each other, their breath steaming in the air.
From the side, from a certain angle perhaps, they almost resembled each
other...”
The
Irrationalist by Andrew Pessin (Kindle Locations 24-25).
And neither
of the poor fellows, one of whom was to become known as René Descartes, was
much to look at. The short pudgy guy with the sneery face at the
right side of the red-draped table, in the jacket drawing? People who drew or
painted Descartes’ face agreed that he really did look like that, or sort of. As this novel suggests, the facial expression may have been
produced by scarring.
Of the
things for which Descartes is remembered, a mysterious death isn’t one. He
wrote brilliant late-Renaissance-to-early-modern works of scientific
philosophy, was famous, invited to teach in all the best universities but attacked
by would-be rivals at each of them, and died middle-aged, possibly from
pneumonia or tuberculosis. He was the first of many authors to use the phrase
“Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am,” in a book. He wrote that dogs
had no consciousness and couldn’t feel pain, but he lived with a dog and was
accused of making a ridiculous fuss over it, pampering it in its old age,
probably having some sort of sick and
perverted relationship with the animal...in the seventeenth century fear of
“witches” and “wizards” whose religious cults allegedly worshipped animals ran
high, and it was a dangerous time for anyone, however devout a member of the
church, to have a pet. During his carnivorous phases Descartes ate some
remarkably disgusting meals (Pessin relishes the yucky seventeenth century
recipes), coughed a lot, and was believed to be unhealthy. During vegetarian phases he apparently felt better. He outlived many
people of his own age.He was a Catholic school product and, though not a priest
himself, never married; he was the quintessential nerd-who-never-outgrows-it.
But could
he have been murdered? His contemporaries didn’t think so, but who knows? Apart from a facial expression he may have been unable to help, how
obnoxious was Descartes? He
had enough enemies to generate an intriguing murder mystery with a heart.
Pessin invents a young ministerial student, troubled with nightmares and lost
memories, who discovers his own courage and maturity in the process of trying
to solve the mystery of Descartes’ death. (The fictional student Baillet shares the name of a real Adrien Baillet who wrote a biography of Descartes, but the real Baillet was born much later than the fictional one.)
A good
detective story should keep readers guessing. I congratulate Pessin on that.
Although I guessed part of the ending after reading the prologue, I didn’t
guess the other part up to the end.
What I didn't like (and the only thing I didn't like) was the polite, but trite, presentation of Christina of Sweden (Descartes' last employer). Male
historians always tend to focus on her sexuality rather than her achievements
of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. Like other ruling queens of her era, Christina was sometimes titled "king" (in some languages "she-king"), described as "manly," and generally conceded the benefits of being an honorary man. Unlike some other ruling queens
of this era, Christina at least didn’t develop a reputation for flirting with
or sleeping with other people’s husbands, and it just tears some male readers
up to imagine that she might really have been capable of self-control. What options did she have? Well, Elizabeth of England wasn’t very kind to other women, ordering her male "Peers" to report to court and leave their wives at home, and was vindictively accused both of being male and of having secretly disposed of unwanted babies. Catherine of
Russia spared her court ladies’ reputations by overtly using men as sex
objects. Nzinga of Angola officially married wives and, as tradition required,
claimed paternity of some of their babies, too. (Angolans, at least, apparently managed not to laugh.) Christina summoned men to her court
as counsellors and teachers and, apparently, resisted all of their charms, or
at least avoided pregnancy, though some of her court gentlemen had to have been
more attractive than Descartes--in their day fifty really was old. Christina slept with other women for security, and possibly for other reasons; she called Ebba Sparre "Beauty," but I've seen no other writer claim that they smooched in public.
But The Irrationalist generally steers clear
of graphic sex, apart from noting the number of seventeenth-century working
women who didn’t own rental property, were barred from most legitimate jobs,
and therefore earned their livings as legal or semilegal prostitutes. Descartes
at least tried to appear to be chaste; Pessin’s fictional detective really is
chaste. Instead the lives of real and fictional characters are fleshed out with
lots of historical details...and with murders. This is a murder mystery after all.
There are fights, some of which are kept miraculously bloodless, some of which
are not, and there are freshly and not so freshly killed bodies.
There are
moments when I’m aware of the presence in the novel of a narrator from my own
time: people protested Christina’s edict changing her legal gender, we’re told,
until she “nipped them [the protests] in the bud by nipping a few of their [the
commoners’] heads in the bud.” And there are a few computer-editor typos: a
“pour hound,” and a priest wearing a nice “cossack.” (Cossacks, or Kazakhs, were not
Catholics, and the possible ways a Catholic priest might have been described as
wearing one--or maybe just the fur hat?--beguiled me for a few seconds before the thought “Cassock, of course” came to mind.) And then there
are the flashes of genuine wit that a novel about seventeenth century writers
needs. Their own sense of wit could be dry, obscure, longwinded and sometimes
rather horrible (among the attractions of a “Gala” is a fight staged for a
buffalo, a lion, and a bear), but at their best people like Descartes could be
as funny as Shakespeare. Witty epigrams were much admired, and definitely belong
in this novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Irrationalist and imagine a lot of people in cyberspace will, too. What U.S. students read of European history tends to fixate on England and France, probably due to the idea that foreign history is more palatable if your own personal ancestors are mentioned in it. (This is true, but a lot of people's ancestors did not come from England or France.) Dutch and Swedish history is fresher. Descartes is part of both, and Pessin sketches lively, plausible pictures of both of those countries in this novel. If you like armchair tourism, buy The Irrationalist now. It's long enough that your eyes will thank you for buying the printed book, although I received a review copy via Kindle and can report that, yes, Kindle was able to handle its length, sacrificing only page numbering.
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Book Review: Eat the Evidence
Title: Eat the Evidence
![Eat the Evidence (The Bar Jonah Trilogy Book 1) by [Espy, John E.]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51h0dYFADML._SY346_.jpg)
Author: John
E. Espy
Date: 2019
Publisher: Open
Books
ISBN: 978-1948598156
Illustrations:
black-and-white photo section
Quote: “He
finally uncurled his hands from around the little girl's throat, sat down on
the floor and started screaming that he hadn't done anything. Mary had grabbed
his hands and put them around her throat, he said. She made him choke her.”
John E.
Espy. Eat the Evidence (Kindle Locations 218-219). Open Books.
So he said...to people who'd seen that his excuse was not true, who'd watched him get up and attack another little child.
In the
commercial media, images of mental illness tend to be selected for their soothing qualities. Usually young and
pretty faces are matched with terribly sympathetic, motherly voices throbbing
on about dainty, girly "mood disorders” that ought to be treatable with an extra dollop of mothering: depression, anxiety,
sometimes anorexia.
In the real
world, major mental illness usually appears in reaction to
drugs—including the pills some women (and men) legally pop in the hope that
pills will help them feel happier. Serious mental illness also appears in old
age, in reaction to atherosclerosis and other things that damage the brain. What people my age mean by autism is another major mental illness, which is still rare; the young report more autism at least partly because they use "autism" to mean any brain or nerve damage, including cerebral palsy.
Once in a
while, though, people really do seem to be born, not with understandable
perceptual differences, learning disabilities, chemical sensitivities, or mood
swings, but with their brains wired so completely at cross-purposes to the rest
of humankind that they really can’t be allowed to live among other people. They
can’t be understood or reasoned with; they have to be stopped. They're not even clever sociopaths like Hitler; their violence doesn't even have an understandable motive like greed or fear. Their existence supports the idea of a cosmic Evil Principle. With few exceptions, this genuinely dangerous mental illness is almost always found in males. (Some claim to find it in male animals other than humans.)
Jeffrey Dahmer had it. Charles Manson had it. David
Brown, who changed his name to Nathaneal Bar Jonah, had it. Eat the Evidence is volume one of what
would fit into one printed volume, but is being published as an e-book trilogy,
of the preposterous stories Bar Jonah told a psychologist and the extent to
which other people could verify that some of those stories were partly true.
Bar Jonah was “legally sane” enough to try to deny or justify the things he
did. His fascination with the Bible and membership in churches even suggests
that some part of his brain was close enough to normality to want to be healed
through religious conversion. But he wasn’t healed. While people clung to hope
that Bar Jonah could overcome relatively minor spiritual challenges like
gluttony and homosexuality, Bar Jonah’s real problems were pedophilia, sadism,
murder, and cannibalism.
He was
different from other babies, in bad ways, even before birth. He was born with
hereditary defects, like teeth that grew in without enamel, and his brain was
probably damaged by a fever and by other things in early childhood. He was just
a little boy when he suddenly started choking little Mary and claimed she had
“made him” do it. His father found him repulsive—as did most people throughout
his life—adding layers of emotional trauma to his fundamental insanity. Bar
Jonah was the sort of guy people tend to pity, figuring he can’t be as bad as
he looks. Bar Jonah was worse.
Espy tries
to understand Bar Jonah and concludes that the whole idea of understanding a
man like Bar Jonah is probably what readers will like least about his book. I
will agree that Eat the Evidence is
not your average true crime story about how a smart baddie almost pulled off a
series of crimes until an even smarter detective, etc., etc. If you like true
crime stories about nice clean bank robberies or clever swindles, you will not
like Eat the Evidence. I would guess
that, if anybody actually liked Raven
or
Helter Skelter
, even they would not like Eat the Evidence. Bar Jonah was not clever at all; he got away with
his crimes for years because the normal human brain does not comprehend such
pure abomination. He confessed one of his murders in horrible detail to an
acquaintance; when she told the police, the police assumed she was “crazy” and failed to investigate.
or
Helter Skelter, even they would not like Eat the Evidence. Bar Jonah was not clever at all; he got away with
his crimes for years because the normal human brain does not comprehend such
pure abomination. He confessed one of his murders in horrible detail to an
acquaintance; when she told the police, the police assumed she was “crazy” and failed to investigate.
Where I
think the book falls short of its own goal is that Espy tries to understand Bar
Jonah as a typical pedophile. The concept of a typical pedophile may be as
oxymoronic as the concept of a typical case of autism, but Bar Jonah’s insanity seems to me to be a separate
thing from either his pedophilia or his homosexuality. Pedophiles who are not
otherwise insane can, like Nabokov’s famous character, live with a sexual
obsession they know better than to act out in any way, or can focus on building
a relationship they can legally consummate when the child reaches age sixteen or eighteen
or whatever the legal limit may be. Those who physically molest children often
rely on denial, or on ordinary emotional blackmail, rather than physical
brutality, to keep the children quiet; relatively few commit murder.
What
readers probably need to know about the Bar Jonah Trilogy is that it’s not been
edited to spare any sensitive readers anything.
We’re not only told repeatedly that Bar Jonah had unusually small and
foul-smelling private parts; midway through the book we get nude photos. We’re
told exactly what his boyfriend did before moving in with him, in words of
three and four letters. We’re told exactly how the same police department that
refused to believe Bar Jonah’s confession, secondhand, tortured the mother of
the murdered child with accusations based entirely in their own bigotry: the
mother had been divorced and remarried a few times, and the child was biracial.
Do you need
to read a book that’s guaranteed to disgust you? My impression of young parents
in my part of the world is that they already tend to overestimate the number of
pedophiles out there and the pedophiliac appeal of their offspring. And another
stereotype to lay on fat guys with bad teeth, dead-end jobs, and exploitative boyfriends is probably not something
the world really needs, either.
But, given the persistence of the undead “Ignore any
new information a woman offers, however well researched and verifiable it may
be, because ‘she’s incompetent’” meme, perhaps we do need more awareness of
what real “craziness” is: a
rare thing found almost exclusively in males. On that ground, this close-up look at a genuinely mad man may have some redeeming social value.
Nathaneal Bar Jonah is no longer able to dispute Espy's representation of him; he died in prison in 2008. If you read this book, you'll probably be glad to know that.
The Saddest Moment at the Cafe
A couple of cafe philosophers were talking about the saddest moments observed at the cafe. (Click on that word "cafe" to see the foodstuffs discussed below, photographed with a good camera-phone.)
Obviously, this did not include one-off moments of private personal anguish such as break-ups, rejection slips, or noticing that a now-retired neighbor read the part of your long-ago Yelp observation that his store was seldom open, due to illness, rather than the part about its having good deals on good stuff when it was open. This discussion was limited to the kind of dissatisfactions cafe customers generally have to be prepared to encounter.
There are moments behind the scenes...let's just say there's a reason why these books are displayed on the reading table.
There are moments of dissatisfaction, like realizing (if you still eat oatmeal) that they're out of your favorite flavor of oatmeal...you wanted the mad Moroccan spices, and you're going to have to settle for the red-white-and-blue-berry-flavored Patri-Oats.
There are times when people go in too late to ask for a fresh batch of Appalachian Morning coffee, which tends to move fast, and have to cut Jamaica Me Crazy (which is sweet) with decaf (which is bitter).
There are moments that stir up activists, such as realizing that, although a cafe that employs a gluten-sensitive baker gets full marks for offering gluten-free food options like oatmeal cups at any time of day, chocolate oatmeal "Cow Patties" cookies, or just the icing for a cupcake, or taco soup in winter, or salad in summer, these days all of those things are still likely to be contaminated with glyphosate. I ate taco soup last winter and didn't get sick, ate a Cow Patty last week and didn't get sick, but it still feels like gambling...I just give thanks that the cafe doesn't serve glyphosate-drenched Kona coffee. I can safely drink coffee here. So few things sold as food and drink these days are safe for me that people have expressed concern about my "having to live on weeds." Currently that would be fresh raspberries so I don't feel terribly deprived, and although the waistline reflects different levels of inflammation from day to day I'm still sitting on a nice cushion of honest flab...other years have been worse.
Most days, however, these things don't happen to anybody.
The saddest moment that regularly recurs at the cafe, if you think about it, is when you eat the last bite of your cookie (or whatever).
Another one would be too much. The portion you get was a generous amount for most people to eat at one sitting.
Although they're oatmeal-based cookies the Cow Patties are mostly chocolate fudge...a thin slab of nut-free fudge about as big as a man's hand.
The wheat-based cookies aren't quite so rich so they're even bigger. If you're enjoying a conversation you could probably make them last ten minutes or more.
The Fat Bottom Girls (high-frosted cupcakes with cheesecake underneath) turned out to be a little too much for some people. Customers now have to ask for the full original pile of frosting, because it seems that a lot of people can enjoy a fist-sized wad of frosting or a full-sized cupcake filled with cheesecake, but not both at the same time.
The Buckeye Brownies are double-wide brownies. (The buckeye, foreign readers, is a sort of inedible nut, which is usually bigger than a buck deer's eye but similar in its glossy brown color. It's not sphere-shaped; it has a flattened patch of lighter brown on one side. Though sometimes considered an emblem of Ohio it grows abundantly in Virginia too. The original "buckeye" candy was a ball of peanut butter fudge dipped in chocolate, with a patch of peanut butter fudge showing at the bottom. The Buckeye Brownies are just bricks of chocolate and peanut butter yumminess.) If not literally thick as bricks, they're certainly generous portions of rich cake. People might buy one to share, or wrap up half of one to take home and eat later.
Whole cakes on display tend to be baked in smaller pans than the standard nine-inch round layer cake pans used at home, but since each one has two layers with a thick mortar of penuche, or caramel, or ganache, between and on top of them, people know better than to try to eat a whole cake at once. You can have one boxed up to take home, or share one with friends in the cafe, or buy just a slice.
Winter soups, summer salads, and year-round sandwiches also tend to be generously portioned. (And I don't particularly want to mention the quiches, because after perfuming the cafe with onion and/or bacon the cook then fills the cafe with the smell of melting cheese, but yes, some people love those quiches.) The cafe is one of those eateries where nothing is cheap, but you do get your money's worth.
But now it's gone.
There's nothing to do about this. Your only recourse is to come back and buy another one tomorrow.
Sad...ish...isn't it?
May this be the saddest moment of your day, Gentle Readers.
Obviously, this did not include one-off moments of private personal anguish such as break-ups, rejection slips, or noticing that a now-retired neighbor read the part of your long-ago Yelp observation that his store was seldom open, due to illness, rather than the part about its having good deals on good stuff when it was open. This discussion was limited to the kind of dissatisfactions cafe customers generally have to be prepared to encounter.
There are moments behind the scenes...let's just say there's a reason why these books are displayed on the reading table.
There are moments of dissatisfaction, like realizing (if you still eat oatmeal) that they're out of your favorite flavor of oatmeal...you wanted the mad Moroccan spices, and you're going to have to settle for the red-white-and-blue-berry-flavored Patri-Oats.
There are times when people go in too late to ask for a fresh batch of Appalachian Morning coffee, which tends to move fast, and have to cut Jamaica Me Crazy (which is sweet) with decaf (which is bitter).
There are moments that stir up activists, such as realizing that, although a cafe that employs a gluten-sensitive baker gets full marks for offering gluten-free food options like oatmeal cups at any time of day, chocolate oatmeal "Cow Patties" cookies, or just the icing for a cupcake, or taco soup in winter, or salad in summer, these days all of those things are still likely to be contaminated with glyphosate. I ate taco soup last winter and didn't get sick, ate a Cow Patty last week and didn't get sick, but it still feels like gambling...I just give thanks that the cafe doesn't serve glyphosate-drenched Kona coffee. I can safely drink coffee here. So few things sold as food and drink these days are safe for me that people have expressed concern about my "having to live on weeds." Currently that would be fresh raspberries so I don't feel terribly deprived, and although the waistline reflects different levels of inflammation from day to day I'm still sitting on a nice cushion of honest flab...other years have been worse.
Most days, however, these things don't happen to anybody.
The saddest moment that regularly recurs at the cafe, if you think about it, is when you eat the last bite of your cookie (or whatever).
Another one would be too much. The portion you get was a generous amount for most people to eat at one sitting.
Although they're oatmeal-based cookies the Cow Patties are mostly chocolate fudge...a thin slab of nut-free fudge about as big as a man's hand.
The wheat-based cookies aren't quite so rich so they're even bigger. If you're enjoying a conversation you could probably make them last ten minutes or more.
The Fat Bottom Girls (high-frosted cupcakes with cheesecake underneath) turned out to be a little too much for some people. Customers now have to ask for the full original pile of frosting, because it seems that a lot of people can enjoy a fist-sized wad of frosting or a full-sized cupcake filled with cheesecake, but not both at the same time.
The Buckeye Brownies are double-wide brownies. (The buckeye, foreign readers, is a sort of inedible nut, which is usually bigger than a buck deer's eye but similar in its glossy brown color. It's not sphere-shaped; it has a flattened patch of lighter brown on one side. Though sometimes considered an emblem of Ohio it grows abundantly in Virginia too. The original "buckeye" candy was a ball of peanut butter fudge dipped in chocolate, with a patch of peanut butter fudge showing at the bottom. The Buckeye Brownies are just bricks of chocolate and peanut butter yumminess.) If not literally thick as bricks, they're certainly generous portions of rich cake. People might buy one to share, or wrap up half of one to take home and eat later.
Whole cakes on display tend to be baked in smaller pans than the standard nine-inch round layer cake pans used at home, but since each one has two layers with a thick mortar of penuche, or caramel, or ganache, between and on top of them, people know better than to try to eat a whole cake at once. You can have one boxed up to take home, or share one with friends in the cafe, or buy just a slice.
Winter soups, summer salads, and year-round sandwiches also tend to be generously portioned. (And I don't particularly want to mention the quiches, because after perfuming the cafe with onion and/or bacon the cook then fills the cafe with the smell of melting cheese, but yes, some people love those quiches.) The cafe is one of those eateries where nothing is cheap, but you do get your money's worth.
But now it's gone.
There's nothing to do about this. Your only recourse is to come back and buy another one tomorrow.
Sad...ish...isn't it?
May this be the saddest moment of your day, Gentle Readers.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Status Update: Yelp Is Seriously Whacked
So I opened an e-mail from Yelp, and this is what it said:
"You have a new Follower! Great News! -- thinks your reviews are Top Notch!"
And some more blah-blah and graphics, and a link to click to meet my new e-friend, --.
Actually, Yelp now gives people only three options for rating reviews: "Useful," "Funny," or "Cool." Actually, -- was an owner of a store about which I'd tried to think of something nice to say fast, although the store was about to go out of business, which it has since done. I knew the reason why the store was seldom opened, by part-timers if anybody, was that the owner and some of his family were ill; didn't know them personally enough to ask who was suffering from what. So I dashed off something like "If you're in town when this store is open, probably on a Friday or Saturday, they still have some good deals." That was many years ago; I'm surprised Yelp even displayed the review by now, but apparently -- had gone online, seen the review, and retorted that I must "dislike him personally, maybe his hair."
Yelp thinks THAT's a follower who thinks my reviews are Top Notch? ??????!!! What happens when computers are programmed to generate e-mail...apparently Yelp's system is reading all replies as raves, when in fact they may be rants!
For --, who read my review as a rant when I meant it as a regretfully qualified rave, there's some excuse...meds and all that.
And Yelp would even have some excuse for taking this interchange as support for Yelp's main thesis--that big-chain businesses are better than independent local businesses, because in a big-chain business, when somebody becomes ill, the corporation can just order somebody from a different outlet to go in and keep that store running at something like par.
Meh. There's something to be said for another independent local business moving in to take the first one's place, but Yelp didn't even debate that.
Instead, what Yelp has to tell us all, today, is that automated customer service is seriously whacked.
"You have a new Follower! Great News! -- thinks your reviews are Top Notch!"
And some more blah-blah and graphics, and a link to click to meet my new e-friend, --.
Actually, Yelp now gives people only three options for rating reviews: "Useful," "Funny," or "Cool." Actually, -- was an owner of a store about which I'd tried to think of something nice to say fast, although the store was about to go out of business, which it has since done. I knew the reason why the store was seldom opened, by part-timers if anybody, was that the owner and some of his family were ill; didn't know them personally enough to ask who was suffering from what. So I dashed off something like "If you're in town when this store is open, probably on a Friday or Saturday, they still have some good deals." That was many years ago; I'm surprised Yelp even displayed the review by now, but apparently -- had gone online, seen the review, and retorted that I must "dislike him personally, maybe his hair."
Yelp thinks THAT's a follower who thinks my reviews are Top Notch? ??????!!! What happens when computers are programmed to generate e-mail...apparently Yelp's system is reading all replies as raves, when in fact they may be rants!
For --, who read my review as a rant when I meant it as a regretfully qualified rave, there's some excuse...meds and all that.
And Yelp would even have some excuse for taking this interchange as support for Yelp's main thesis--that big-chain businesses are better than independent local businesses, because in a big-chain business, when somebody becomes ill, the corporation can just order somebody from a different outlet to go in and keep that store running at something like par.
Meh. There's something to be said for another independent local business moving in to take the first one's place, but Yelp didn't even debate that.
Instead, what Yelp has to tell us all, today, is that automated customer service is seriously whacked.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Thank You On Behalf of Friends...
(This post is applicable to the United States. Amazon links may behave differently in other countries.)
As most of you already know, Amazon offers two forms of commissions on sales through associated or affiliated blogs. When readers buy things in the ordinary way, using the precise link they see on this web site, Amazon adds a small commission to my for-profit account. Readers can, however, shop for the same items at smile.amazon.com, which directs the commissions to the charities of bloggers' choice.
When you click on the Amazon links at this web site, they usually open the page for what Amazon wanted you to see first at the time of posting. That was days or years ago. There's a high probability that another seller on Amazon is offering a better deal by now. As a result, even when you buy things to which I've linked, I don't get a commission. That's not a problem so long as you remember to type the "smile" in front of "amazon.com" before buying that item that's a better deal. Then you should, in theory, get a choice of which charity you'd prefer to receive the commission.
Most links at this web site go to my for-profit account but I also link to two charities: Heifer International, in memory of the blogger known as Ozarque (ozarque.livejournal.com), and the Adventist Disaster Relief Agency, in honor or memory of the occasional writer known as Grandma Bonnie Peters.
Heifer is so called because it places farm animals, such as a heifer, a female calf, with poor farm families. A poor farmer who invests the work in rearing a heifer for a few years will soon have a cow who repays the farmer with milk. There are other ways this Arkansas-based charity supports small businesses in poverty zones like Ecuador and Cambodia--you can give a goat or chickens, or vegetable seeds, or tuition for a needy student. They have a "gift catalogue" at www.heifer.org. This is a legitimate, well established poverty and disaster relief organization.
Despite their focus specifically on disaster relief, ADRA actually offers similar benefits in areas where people are recovering from physical disasters. Their "gift catalogue" at giftcatalog.adra.org looks similar to Heifer's, with options for donating the cost of chickens or chicken coops, vegetable seeds, tuition, shelter meals, and so on.
(Today's Amazon book link is an ordinary for-profit link, unless you browse around to Amazon Smile.)
In a 1960 book called The Seventh Day, Booton Herndon described a recent ADRA mission after an earthquake in Mexico: "Most of the damage was in the nice part of town where people were used to new things, and the Adventists did not let them down," having previously been blessed with shiny new plastic-wrapped bedding. As a child I remember hearing people ask GBP whether ADRA raised money to deliver brand-new stuff to the rich. Actually the gift catalog doesn't even discuss shelter supplies. Adventist churches generally collect, refurbish, and redistribute store overstock and gently used stuff through a separate, volunteer-run, local-church-managed program they (used to) call the Dorcas Society. Let's just say that when they do hand out clothing it's likely to have all of its original buttons.
Both charities support ongoing missions in some parts of the Southern Hemisphere; both web sites display those familiar images from poverty pockets in Africa and India. Both are, in fact, global. There has never been and will never be a charitable organization that didn't "lose" a fair bit of donated money on operating expenses, and in many countries on bribes to local honchos; Heifer and ADRA are two of the most efficient.
So when I get an Amazon giftcard, I personally like to run it through Amazon Smile and give a few pennies on the dollar to one of these two beloved elders' favorite charities.
Today Amazon started a new thing. Amazon always reports on the tiny amount of commissions this web site has earned on for-profit sales. They mail out the check when affiliate site commissions reach US$100 and this web site is...actually quite ambivalent...to report that, at the current rate, this web site should receive a check in approximately 75 years. (I'm already over 50 years old; GBP is over 80--and we're going to split that check.) But today they also e-mailed out reports on the amounts our charities have earned. According to Amazon, Gentle Readers, you've raised over US$2,500 for ADRA and over US$23,000 for Heifer.
Presumably Amazon Smile aggregates funds directed to these charities through all uses of Amazon Smile, not only those referred by this web site, to calculate these figures...
Anyway, you have been most generous in supporting two legitimate charities that don't promote a political agenda or build up a handout culture. Thank you. Thank you all.
As most of you already know, Amazon offers two forms of commissions on sales through associated or affiliated blogs. When readers buy things in the ordinary way, using the precise link they see on this web site, Amazon adds a small commission to my for-profit account. Readers can, however, shop for the same items at smile.amazon.com, which directs the commissions to the charities of bloggers' choice.
When you click on the Amazon links at this web site, they usually open the page for what Amazon wanted you to see first at the time of posting. That was days or years ago. There's a high probability that another seller on Amazon is offering a better deal by now. As a result, even when you buy things to which I've linked, I don't get a commission. That's not a problem so long as you remember to type the "smile" in front of "amazon.com" before buying that item that's a better deal. Then you should, in theory, get a choice of which charity you'd prefer to receive the commission.
Most links at this web site go to my for-profit account but I also link to two charities: Heifer International, in memory of the blogger known as Ozarque (ozarque.livejournal.com), and the Adventist Disaster Relief Agency, in honor or memory of the occasional writer known as Grandma Bonnie Peters.
Heifer is so called because it places farm animals, such as a heifer, a female calf, with poor farm families. A poor farmer who invests the work in rearing a heifer for a few years will soon have a cow who repays the farmer with milk. There are other ways this Arkansas-based charity supports small businesses in poverty zones like Ecuador and Cambodia--you can give a goat or chickens, or vegetable seeds, or tuition for a needy student. They have a "gift catalogue" at www.heifer.org. This is a legitimate, well established poverty and disaster relief organization.
Despite their focus specifically on disaster relief, ADRA actually offers similar benefits in areas where people are recovering from physical disasters. Their "gift catalogue" at giftcatalog.adra.org looks similar to Heifer's, with options for donating the cost of chickens or chicken coops, vegetable seeds, tuition, shelter meals, and so on.
(Today's Amazon book link is an ordinary for-profit link, unless you browse around to Amazon Smile.)
In a 1960 book called The Seventh Day, Booton Herndon described a recent ADRA mission after an earthquake in Mexico: "Most of the damage was in the nice part of town where people were used to new things, and the Adventists did not let them down," having previously been blessed with shiny new plastic-wrapped bedding. As a child I remember hearing people ask GBP whether ADRA raised money to deliver brand-new stuff to the rich. Actually the gift catalog doesn't even discuss shelter supplies. Adventist churches generally collect, refurbish, and redistribute store overstock and gently used stuff through a separate, volunteer-run, local-church-managed program they (used to) call the Dorcas Society. Let's just say that when they do hand out clothing it's likely to have all of its original buttons.
Both charities support ongoing missions in some parts of the Southern Hemisphere; both web sites display those familiar images from poverty pockets in Africa and India. Both are, in fact, global. There has never been and will never be a charitable organization that didn't "lose" a fair bit of donated money on operating expenses, and in many countries on bribes to local honchos; Heifer and ADRA are two of the most efficient.
So when I get an Amazon giftcard, I personally like to run it through Amazon Smile and give a few pennies on the dollar to one of these two beloved elders' favorite charities.
Today Amazon started a new thing. Amazon always reports on the tiny amount of commissions this web site has earned on for-profit sales. They mail out the check when affiliate site commissions reach US$100 and this web site is...actually quite ambivalent...to report that, at the current rate, this web site should receive a check in approximately 75 years. (I'm already over 50 years old; GBP is over 80--and we're going to split that check.) But today they also e-mailed out reports on the amounts our charities have earned. According to Amazon, Gentle Readers, you've raised over US$2,500 for ADRA and over US$23,000 for Heifer.
Presumably Amazon Smile aggregates funds directed to these charities through all uses of Amazon Smile, not only those referred by this web site, to calculate these figures...
Anyway, you have been most generous in supporting two legitimate charities that don't promote a political agenda or build up a handout culture. Thank you. Thank you all.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Mailing List Update
Well...let's just say nobody seems to be hanging out on Twitter any more.
Lacking faith that Twitter can continue to exist very long in its current form, I am hereby, as a matter of policy, blocking all corporate tweets that aren't relevant to any ongoing conversations. Jack Dorsey had every right to offer to "promote" corporate tweets by shoving them into everyone's Twitter feed, if he hadn't insulted his audience by "filtering" our tweets out of each other's feed. There are still writers I follow who still use Twitter to promote their books, and I'm still not seeing their tweets in amongst all the corporate rubbish.
So, until all private individuals' free accounts are reestablished as Prime Accounts and the Lifeblood of Twitter, all accounts of the other kind will be blocked. I'm sorry about this. As mentioned before, I think insurance companies could make a worthwhile contribution to the Glyphosate Awareness page...if Twitter's "filtering" system weren't preventing them from even seeing what their self-advertising sludge is interrupting. Sorry about that, corporate accounts. Unless there is a two-way dialogue you do not have my permission to fill up my Twitter stream.
In order to give corporate accounts the kind of exposure they claimed to want, New Twitter blocked the dialogue. Buzz! Buzz! Wrong answer. On social media, there is not and should not be much tolerance for anyone blaring on without listening to other people and participating in a social conversation. On Twitter there has generally been a high level of tolerance for lots of different conversations among people who aren't interested in each other--Twitter has made it easy to tune those out--but, even if you're paying for maximum exposure, you can't get that exposure by insulting and locking out the people who are talking to each other. That is just too rude.
There is, still, a way private people can counter the rudeness. In addition to tagging each other so we see one another's tweets, we can block the commercial squick. Banks, insurance agencies, and car manufacturers can continue to tweet to me--if they tag me, directly, and reply to something I've said. Otherwise they can pay to tweet exclusively to one another, and I wish them joy, screaming their throats out in a room without a single listener.
Everyone is cordially invited to join me in hitting that "block" button every time we see anything from a corporate account we don't follow. It'll be fun. If Twitter goes into a fatal tailspin, well, it seems to be heading in that direction anyway.
Meanwhile...I'll continue to post links to all the good stuff I find online at Twitter, as long as Twitter continues to be there. I'll continue to host the Glyphosate Awareness chat, ditto. You should be able to find the Glyphosate Awareness chat a little longer but, since Twitter is not enabling us to chat easily, I'm asking those who want to continue to hear from me to sign up for either an e-mail or real mail list.
I've considered, even tested, allegedly free mailing services and decided against using them. Mailchimp, the one that's sometimes considered most trustworthy, is currently making no secret of its ambitions to go all-for-profit and become spammier. I don't want to do anything spammy. I don't want to send out e-mail in a way I would object to receiving it. So, no Mailchimp, no Paracom, no Paper.li; if you sign up for my e-mail you'll receive individual e-mails, no automated list for hackers to gank and sell.
E-mail will be free. Once a week you'll receive an e-letter that summarizes the week's Bayer Boycott News. It will be plain text; it will be short; you'll see only your and my e-mail addresses.
Real mail will cost me money. Again, I don't want to run afoul of the elaborate and ridiculous laws that govern bulk mailing for reduced rates. I'm not doing Glyphosate Awareness for profit but I will have to charge a fee for printing and postage. That fee will be an even amount in U.S. dollars, covering the cost of printing and mailing whatever number of pages the weekly newsletter amounts to. People who choose this option can choose small, medium, large, extra-large, or huge print, and they can choose to receive links, abstracts, or full text of documents cited.
I don't want to know anything about you except your e-mail or mail drop address and any information, whether published or "anecdotal," you choose to share about glyphosate and the Bayer Boycott.
To join either mailing list, please send the appropriate address (yours) to the appropriate address (mine) at the bottom of the page. Real mail to P.O. Box 322 should be addressed to "The Boxholder."
No, weekly newsletters won't (usually) require big envelopes...but Amazon's picture of small, plain, cheap envelopes, which are white, didn't stand out on the white background. Newsletters will be mailed in the plainest, cheapest envelopes the post office offers. You will not have to pay for fancy packaging.
Lacking faith that Twitter can continue to exist very long in its current form, I am hereby, as a matter of policy, blocking all corporate tweets that aren't relevant to any ongoing conversations. Jack Dorsey had every right to offer to "promote" corporate tweets by shoving them into everyone's Twitter feed, if he hadn't insulted his audience by "filtering" our tweets out of each other's feed. There are still writers I follow who still use Twitter to promote their books, and I'm still not seeing their tweets in amongst all the corporate rubbish.
So, until all private individuals' free accounts are reestablished as Prime Accounts and the Lifeblood of Twitter, all accounts of the other kind will be blocked. I'm sorry about this. As mentioned before, I think insurance companies could make a worthwhile contribution to the Glyphosate Awareness page...if Twitter's "filtering" system weren't preventing them from even seeing what their self-advertising sludge is interrupting. Sorry about that, corporate accounts. Unless there is a two-way dialogue you do not have my permission to fill up my Twitter stream.
In order to give corporate accounts the kind of exposure they claimed to want, New Twitter blocked the dialogue. Buzz! Buzz! Wrong answer. On social media, there is not and should not be much tolerance for anyone blaring on without listening to other people and participating in a social conversation. On Twitter there has generally been a high level of tolerance for lots of different conversations among people who aren't interested in each other--Twitter has made it easy to tune those out--but, even if you're paying for maximum exposure, you can't get that exposure by insulting and locking out the people who are talking to each other. That is just too rude.
There is, still, a way private people can counter the rudeness. In addition to tagging each other so we see one another's tweets, we can block the commercial squick. Banks, insurance agencies, and car manufacturers can continue to tweet to me--if they tag me, directly, and reply to something I've said. Otherwise they can pay to tweet exclusively to one another, and I wish them joy, screaming their throats out in a room without a single listener.
Everyone is cordially invited to join me in hitting that "block" button every time we see anything from a corporate account we don't follow. It'll be fun. If Twitter goes into a fatal tailspin, well, it seems to be heading in that direction anyway.
Meanwhile...I'll continue to post links to all the good stuff I find online at Twitter, as long as Twitter continues to be there. I'll continue to host the Glyphosate Awareness chat, ditto. You should be able to find the Glyphosate Awareness chat a little longer but, since Twitter is not enabling us to chat easily, I'm asking those who want to continue to hear from me to sign up for either an e-mail or real mail list.
I've considered, even tested, allegedly free mailing services and decided against using them. Mailchimp, the one that's sometimes considered most trustworthy, is currently making no secret of its ambitions to go all-for-profit and become spammier. I don't want to do anything spammy. I don't want to send out e-mail in a way I would object to receiving it. So, no Mailchimp, no Paracom, no Paper.li; if you sign up for my e-mail you'll receive individual e-mails, no automated list for hackers to gank and sell.
E-mail will be free. Once a week you'll receive an e-letter that summarizes the week's Bayer Boycott News. It will be plain text; it will be short; you'll see only your and my e-mail addresses.
Real mail will cost me money. Again, I don't want to run afoul of the elaborate and ridiculous laws that govern bulk mailing for reduced rates. I'm not doing Glyphosate Awareness for profit but I will have to charge a fee for printing and postage. That fee will be an even amount in U.S. dollars, covering the cost of printing and mailing whatever number of pages the weekly newsletter amounts to. People who choose this option can choose small, medium, large, extra-large, or huge print, and they can choose to receive links, abstracts, or full text of documents cited.
I don't want to know anything about you except your e-mail or mail drop address and any information, whether published or "anecdotal," you choose to share about glyphosate and the Bayer Boycott.
To join either mailing list, please send the appropriate address (yours) to the appropriate address (mine) at the bottom of the page. Real mail to P.O. Box 322 should be addressed to "The Boxholder."
No, weekly newsletters won't (usually) require big envelopes...but Amazon's picture of small, plain, cheap envelopes, which are white, didn't stand out on the white background. Newsletters will be mailed in the plainest, cheapest envelopes the post office offers. You will not have to pay for fancy packaging.
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