Make Humanity Great Again?

"Make Whites Great Again" is trending on Twitter? Aaarrrggghhh. That settles it. This is Conservative Content Post #4.

First let's clarify matters for certain intellectual left-leaning types like the crowd at Making Light, who all know their genealogies and know exactly which European tribe they're entitled to claim pride in. I could relate to that, if that crowd hadn't been so insufferable about it. I have that information too. Old Virginia family on one side, old North Carolina family on the other. Ireland, England, Scotland, France, Germany, and also Wales. And Cherokee. And some of the English ones were among the aristocrats whose names are in the history books. Among some White supremacist circles that's creme de la White, while among others it's biracial mud-person scum who should not have children, which I've never done anyway. It is true that people whose families really have stayed close to each other, and to their European heritages, don't usually have to settle for "White Pride." We celebrate ourselves at St. Patrick's Day, Bastille Day, Oktoberfest, or other tribe-specific events, or at the Old Settlers Days in the towns where our ancestors disembarked from those sailing ships, or at the annual family gathering for which a public park has to be reserved.

It is also true that some people's families came to this continent in a different frame of mind. Maybe they didn't know how to write. Maybe they didn't have paper. Maybe they didn't want to stay in touch. Many Europeans were sent to the colonies as slaves, as convicts, or as "bound boys/girls" who sold usually five or seven years of their lives to the people who paid for them to get out of their home towns, because--at best--they couldn't find decent jobs back home. European governments soon learned that sending dissidents to the colonies as slaves-who-could-earn-their-freedom was not an effective way to suppress dissent, but even into the twentieth century well-off British families continued to export "remittance men" (and sometimes women) whose parents sent them money in the hope that they could enter a business or profession in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa. Or, failing that, at least they'd stay well away from people their parents knew.

Under such circumstances many people didn't bother keeping records and, as a result, there are a lot of White Americans who, if they run out of things to do, can always try to find out who their great-grandparents were. And when and whether they changed their names. (Ancestors who changed their names from Baumann to Bowman, Schumacher to Shoemaker, etc., in the 1770s are also creme de la White, as are those who changed from Moriarty to Moore or Gilleaspuig to Gillis even earlier. Ancestors who changed from, say, Krbovic to Kirby in the 1930s used to be considered a joke, although the Eastern European family might have ranked higher up the feudal scale.)

Meanwhile, those who always thought their great-great-great-grandfather's name was German, but on looking him up determine that he actually came from France, etc., etc., can at least identify themselves as White. That much they can determine just by looking in the mirror and confirming that they have blue eyes. Those of us who feel a need to look down on people in that situation have probably failed to grasp the point that our ancestors came to America, and should take their feudal attitudes back to Europe and find out how their titled and tiara'd cousins feel about them.

I have no problem with Whiteness and no problem with White pride, either, as long as it is pride in your own personal White American friends and relatives, as distinct from ill will toward other people. I do not believe those Minnesota Not-So-Nice guys who reportedly killed the misdemeanant were actuated by White pride; I don't know whether they had any special personal feelings about Black people, but from what I've read, which admittedly has been sensational reportage, they were just mean, angry, violent young men who weren't doing anything particularly nice for their own White relatives either. White hate is not White pride. White violence is White shame.

If you have no solid claim to English, Irish, German, Norwegian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, or any other specific flavor of White pride I'd suggest that you go ahead and enjoy generic White pride, but enjoy it in a solid, positive way. Celebrate your current neighborhood, if not your great-great-grandparents' neighborhood. Celebrate being American. Think of things your White children and grandchildren, if any, can feel proud of; do those.

I have no problem with Southern pride, either.

There's a book on sale in a gift shop in my little Southern town, a book-length list of things present-time Southerners can be proud of. Apart from whatever their individual ancestors did or did not do in any war. It runs a little bit heavy on food and popular music, as distinct from, say, literature or law, but that means you can open the book anywhere and find something any two randomly selected Southerners living today can probably agree that they like and feel proud of. It's a wonderful little gift book. When I can get the Amazon links back I'll put one here.

As this web site has mentioned before: I had Confederate ancestors--plural. I have family stories of what each one of them did before, during, and after the War. One thing that's not in those stories is wanting to continue fighting that war or any other war.

I have no problem whatsoever with people who have lost the stories. They know their great-grandfathers or great-great-great-grandfathers were Confederates because they were buried in Confederate cemeteries, and that's all. Their Confederate flags, which they still fly and display, are all they have of their Confederate ancestors.

I'm a Southerner, a Virginian, and a lady. Those are proud things to be. In middle school my brother and I read about Virginia history, and the War, and our brave Confederate ancestors. Ours were, in fact, brave men; good men, on the whole. (Though the one who had made that magnificent gesture of freeing three hundred slaves never recovered his money, and ended up going west, living on pumpkins, and having a hotheaded teenaged son who joined the Union Army, and it was probably just as well that that great-great-grandfather didn't live to see what else his son, my great-grandfather, did after the War.) We had a right to fly the Confederate flag and play "Poor Rebel Soldier," and we did. I'd hate to deprive anyone of those privileges in middle school.

Then I grew up and went to Washington, where, among other things, I saw that the Confederate flag distracted and intimidated people. Some of those people were in fact the kind of left-wing snowflakes who really do need a history lesson, or several history lessons, and if other people have the time to try out-haranguing them, all to the good. I don't. Others were the kind of inner-city students whose ability to work with a non-Black teacher from a non-ghetto neighborhood was seriously compromised by what they had always been told was the emblem of race hate. Well, it's not. Obviously. If the Confederate flag had been an emblem of race hate, someone in Virginia would have given us a hint about it. But it has never seemed to me that displaying things that intimidate students or visitors unnecessarily was the sort of thing my Confederate ancestors, or Robert E. Lee, or Colonel William Peters, or even Stand Watie would have done.

It seems to me that the Southern pride thing is playing out these days rather like the White Pride thing. I don't need my great-grandfather's flags. I have the family secret that allowed a half-grown boy to make himself useful in the War; I have his son's, my grandfather's, flag and his Bible; I live on a small patch of my great-grandfather's land, and know which trees he kept and which ones grew during which of the subsequent generations of the family.

I see people who are still hanging great big Confederate flags on the backs of their vehicles to protest not being able to get them printed on their license tags, and I wonder whether they have any other souvenirs of their great-grandfathers at all. Many don't. One of them told me, within recent years, that someone had asked nicely enough whether he belonged to the local family he most resembled, and when he said he did not she asked where he came from, and when he told her which town she said "So you are from Virginia," not adding "at least," and handed him a little Confederate flag. And when your grandparents lived in what was known as a shanty in a coal camp, and the shanty's been bulldozed and the camp is now closed to visitors, that's what you have for a connection. It does not imply hating anybody, although I can imagine a certain tendency to impatience with people who don't understand.

To some Southern correspondents of good will, I'd like to suggest that they stop apologizing for being Southern and having Confederate ancestors.

To others, that being Southern is more than something to quarrel about. Tease your non-Southern cousin about, of course; that's traditional and acceptable and, presumably, fun for all concerned. Your cousin knows he's welcome even if your way of showing it involves teasing and bickering. But if you think about what your Confederate ancestors were fighting for, "Southern hospitality" was probably high on their list...it did not mean making visitors feel that they were hated, or among enemies.

To non-Southern readers, I'd like to say that when you see vehicles that still do display Confederate flags rolling down local roads, that's not because you are among enemies. It's because you're among people who have reasons to believe that their ancestors were in Virginia in 1860, but that's all they have that goes back that far into history.

There is no morally perfect tribe or nation of human beings. Humans are morally imperfect beings.

"Make Whites Great Again"? Hah. "Whites" is a laundry load. Why not try "Make Humanity Great Again"? Begin where you are; pick something you can improve, and do it.

The Comment Word Mess May Not Like...

First of all, will everyone please read Jim Babka's post in its entirety, at his site, to show respect:

https://www.theadvocates.org/2020/05/ten-principles-of-the-reopening/

And you might even feel moved to send him money; that was an excellent post.

After reading it, if you read the comments, you might see a comment from a panic-prone person who frets that you might have coronavirus and not know it....just as you probably do have a lot of other virus, fungus, and bacterial infections that you don't know or care about, but that could easily kill a medically fragile person. That's why you might be advised to stay out of the intensive care unit or to shower and put on a paper mask and coverall before going in.

I typed this comment to him. Wordmess, er, Press, didn't like it. On consideration that may be because it turned out long enough to be a blog post. So the blog is where it ought to be. So here it is, edited to adjust to the fact that Blogspot offers italics and Wordmess comments don't.

"
@MikeHihn: As a health care practitioner in a city with a high rate of HIV, I've known for a long time that all of us normal healthy people are great big bundles of disease culture that can kill a severely immune-compromised person. My hesitation to work with an AIDS patient would be concern that I might make them sicker. Yet for years my professional code of ethics stated that we can warn AIDS patients, and take steps to protect them, but it's their responsibility to stay away from all of us "healthy" immune carriers of rhinovirus, staphylococcus, streptococcus, Epstein-Barr Virus, Aspergillus fungus (you knew that an AIDS patient's body will grow mildew, right?), and more--more than anybody's ever even listed.

I don't think that's changed.

For me and for most active "healthy" people, all the evidence indicates that COVID-19 is going to be just another chest cold that I probably won't notice when I have it. One more virus in an abundant existing supply. We'll get it, we'll spread it, and we'll think nothing of it because, like all the staph and strep and EBV we've been carrying around, it'll do us no harm. COVID has been thought to be related to SARS. There was a minor panic over the SARS virus too. What happened? SARS wasn't all that deadly, either.

For some people, it's not that COVID is going to be worse than rhinovirus; it's that rhinovirus could still kill them, too. Those people know who they are. Our society has needed to build more awareness of them and more ways they can engage with other people, non-suicidally, for a long time. Forcing everyone to live in a bogus simulation of their lives is not my idea of a good way to start building that, but it's a way.

I don't think we need a lockdown. I do think we have long needed a few tweaks, like:

* Public transportation...with separate compartments, no plopping down and rubbing knees and elbows with strangers.

* More work from home in more spacious offices. Absolutely no barging up behind co-workers to read over their shoulders, no matter how low their status may be, and no breathing down people's necks, even if that seems like the easiest way to "monitor" or "supervise." (I let a client stand behind me while dictating. I picked up her "little summer cold." I shared it with my husband. He shared it with a fragile child who developed pneumonia next week and died that fall. Yes, we healthy adults do  need social distancing.)

* Social etiquette that respects people's personal space. For instance, remembering that church is a place to worship God, not a place to run up and grab casual acquaintances while coughing in their faces.

But it's not true that COVID is so much worse than SARS or swine flu or Zika or Ebola or H1N1 or any of the other virus panics that it justifies totalitarianism. Even more than we need to think about ways to integrate medically fragile people into polite society, I think we need to oppose the dictatorship people are trying to build on the COVID panic.
"

Why Things Were Not Done Yesterday

What a messy day yesterday was! I had more things to do at home than in town, but I came into town because I'd promised to pay someone out of the money someone else had promised to pay me. Giving each separate person a temporary screen name in alphabetical order, Anne had promised to pay me. Anne is a responsible business owner, not the sort of bratty employee, or frail, forgetful retiree, or trashy welfare cheat whose word that it's raining outside is not worth basing a decision to water a flower bed on. So I came into town, carrying something of hers that Anne wanted to use later in the day, and waited for her to deliver the payment and pick up her possession.

On the way into town I saw Bill out gardening. Bill is a retiree. He does not consider himself fragile. He can still drive and read without glasses. He wanted to show me a letter he had received. It was a computer printout, but it had the President's name printed below a scribble at the bottom. He said his "stimulus check" had arrived at last, and he'd lend me half of it till mine arrived, for a $200 processing fee, har har. Then he said he needed to get in out of the wind.

(For those who don't know, I think about ninety percent of the men over age 50 in America today are on blood pressure medication that makes them feel cold whenever the rest of humankind are not on the brink of heat exhaustion. This is only one of the many reasons why a lot of us "Silver Singles" don't bother dating any more. If we were still "in love" with somebody at the age of 49 I think that's probably The Last Love.)

I waited for Anne all day. In a basement, with a view of a back road, I waited and looked at the computer and at the little sprinkles of rain that hardly darkened the pavement outside. It was a nice, cool spring day, a good day for getting house and yard chores done. It would have been a good day for getting cyberchores done if it hadn't been so much better suited to garden chores. I did a lot of cyberchores anyway. I kept thinking that when Anne came back from the bank with the money, on the way across town to pay some of it to Cal I'd find out whether my "stimulus check" was at the post office.

Why why why had I told Cal I'd pay before 5 p.m.? At 5 minutes before 5 p.m. Anne sent me a text message that she was ill and had gone home, but expected to be up and on the job "tomorrow," meaning of course today. This could mean any of several of the minor chronic things that basically mean that, these days, most people's grandparents thrive on work, but they need a lot of flex time, and when they say they don't feel like driving they are probably saving someone's life. Anne is a grandmother.

Hoo-ha! If I started walking home right away, I'd probably missed Dee, might or might not find Ed outside the convenience store, or at worst might have to ride with Frank the Crank who is not fun to be around, but I'd probably be home in a few minutes. I started walking. I did not see Dee, or Ed, or even Frank.

Bill came out in his yard again as I passed his house. He did not have symptoms of a chest cold but he was not feeling well. He wanted to give me a carton of eggs, not because I needed eggs, but because he has hens. I hadn't bought anything else to eat since I hadn't collected any money from Anne. I thought I might try cooking the eggs. Seriously, I said to Bill, could he lend me $45 to pay Cal? No, said Bill, his money was in the bank and it was closed. He could withdraw $45 early in the morning.

Gray, driving past, saw me taking pains not to let the egg carton spill into my tote bag, as rain began to sprinkle on the windows, barely enough to darken the pavement. Gray offered me a lift home, talked about a job, and thought he could lend me $45 to pay Cal if Anne wasn't there "tomorrow morning," meaning of course at the moment I'm typing this. He'd be back around 9 a.m.

Rain had hardly dampened the ground but it had definitely dampened the barrel I use for outdoor cooking in summer. I never have replaced the old electric stove my parents brought in, nor have I been able to get the chimney into condition to use the wood stove. I set up the stack of metal bowls and candles I use for indoor cooking. I thought it would be fun to find out how long it took to scramble eggs in a metal bowl over candles, and in any case the candles would relieve the damp chill in the air.

The eggs were just starting to set on the bottom of the bowl when Ed drove past. I blew out the candles and went out in the yard to talk. He had not been in town since Friday. He was checking that I was all right, having heard that some people in Gate City were ill but not feverish. There was some work that could be done around his house but he had no money. He still had not received a "stimulus check," nor had anyone he knew. He had a bag of chips to share. I went in, looked at the bronze color of the eggs that were now cold on the bottom and still liquid on top, and gave them to the cats. I ate chips and fresh greens.

The cats said that first batch of fresh country eggs tasted pretty good to them, by the way. I'm one of those humans who are particular about how eggs have to be cooked in order to taste good to us, but most cats will happily eat eggs raw.

Morning came. I waited till 8:45 to leave the house and was on the road that passes Gray's house at 9:01. I did not see Gray, nor did he answer his phone. Gray is another grandfather who should be publicly commended for not driving when he doesn't feel fit to drive.

Bill's car was parked in front of his house. He'd had time to buy breakfast in town at his usual time. Was he eating it in the front room, and would he rush out onto the porch to share the news as I walked past? No, and no again. Was he hiding because he did not actually want to lend me $45? Possibly. I listened at the open front window, and did not hear anything that sounded like "Help, I've fallen downstairs," so I went on toward town.

Anne did not immediately return a message. Was she bustling around, away from her phone? Likely.I kept walking.

Then I saw what had changed since yesterday morning, and why, although I felt cheerful and perky, people who had been working outdoors yesterday afternoon did not feel so good last night or this morning.

That's what was the matter with youall last night, Gentle Readers. The rain would have washed most of it into the soil (and the water people in Kingsport drink) before I walked past it last night. The Bermuda grass looks as badly damaged as the native plants above that curb, so I don't know whether the public enemy used something other than "Roundup" or used a lot of "Roundup." Anyway, it was that house. If anyone felt bad enough to go to a hospital and risk exposure to coronavirus, that's whom you ought to be able to sue for Reckless Endangerment.


I know all of our reactions to poison sprays are deadly boring "chronic conditions" we've been training ourselves not to mention for forty years, but if enough of us document enough of these things our grandchildren (or, in my case, The Nephews) may live to breathe unpoisoned air. I think it's time for all of us to be boring. We're not just old people nattering about symptoms of "getting older." Old or young, we are all sharing a bewildering range of reactions to the reckless use of poison sprays. If we compare notes and trace the source of problems like this one, it's not griping, it's scientific evidence.

Morgan Griffith's Bills to Promote Computing and Manufacturing

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

Griffith Backs Legislation to Encourage American Manufacturing and Technological Leadership

Tuesday, May 19, 2020 – The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for the United States to secure critical supply chains and promote domestic manufacturing and technology.
As part of a legislative agenda to reassert American leadership in these areas and reduce dependence on competitors such as China, Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) today introduced the Advancing Quantum Computing Act and joined as an original cosponsor the Manufacturing API, Drugs, and Excipients (MADE) in America Act of 2020. He issued the following statement:
“We can’t depend on other countries, particularly competitors such as China, to guarantee American economic leadership, shield our stockpile of critical supplies, or secure the benefits of technological progress to our people. It is up to us to do that.
“Fortunately, America has always been a nation of builders and inventors. The bills introduced today with my backing will draw on that characteristic of ours. They will encourage the return of manufacturing to the United States, protect critical medical supplies, and pursue advances in technology, all while creating jobs and growing the economy in the United States.”
The Advancing Quantum Computing Act, introduced by Griffith, identifies how quantum computing can benefit our economy and identifies and mitigates risks to the supply chain.
The MADE in America Act, introduced with Griffith as an original cosponsor by Congressman Buddy Carter (R-GA) and others, provides a tax credit for companies making pharmaceutical and medical products in distressed zones within the United States.
"

Editorial comment: Legislative propositions intended to benefit the economy in Virginia's 9th District have often had unintended consequences. Let's hope these have been double-checked for loopholes that would allow future corporate abuses.

Caterpillar, Black and Orange, Rose of Sharon?

Somebody found this web site by searching for "caterpillar, black and orange, Rose of Sharon" on Google.

As somebody undoubtedly learned, that's not the caterpillar that's a major pest on Rose of Sharon (the hibiscus leaf caterpillar), which is green, or the one that's a major nuisance on Rose of Sharon (the Saddleback or Packsaddle), which is green and brown. What could it be?

Not knowing where the reader is, I have no real idea. The good news, though, is that in the Eastern States a black and orange caterpillar on Rose of Sharon is not likely to be a problem, unless it's a newly introduced nuisance species someone smuggled in while we were busy panicking about coronavirus. Here's a Wikipedia link-o-rama to prove it. None of the big showy larvae is a real problem and the small one most likely to be seen in May is actually a friend to the hibiscus bush.

Several caterpillars in the Eastern States can be black and orange at some stages. The ones I've seen in May were little Baltimore Checkerspot butterfly larvae, which aren't big enough or common enough to be a serious pest on anything. They have bright colors and stiff bristles to discourage hungry birds. They're one of several baby butterflies whose bristles are shaped like those of stingingworms, but contain no venom. They usually eat smaller plants, mostly swamp weeds but sometimes plantain and other lawn weeds. In late summer they sometimes estivate in little hammocks of silk spun on leaves, which might lead them to explore a hibiscus bush in a really wet year, but they tend to stay near the ground.

The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation didn't mention the size of this caterpillar, donated to Wikipedia By Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources - Forestry Archive, , Bugwood.org - This image is Image Number 5020070 at Insect Images, a source for entomological images operated by The Bugwood Network at the University of Georgia and the USDA Forest Service., CC BY 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4037938. The ones I've seen were about an inch long and were feeding as a group on a swamp weed just above water in a stream. That was in May; by July they might have been bigger.

The adults are basically black with orange and white spots above, black-white-and-orange checkered below:

Photo donated to Wikipedia By D. Gordon E. Robertson - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33871430

Baltimores are scattered all over Eastern North America. Spread out, as shown, their wingspan can be more than 2.5 inches (7cm) but is usually less than that. They were probably always rare and are gravely endangered in Maryland, where they are the Official State Insects. Their need for weeds, as food and habitat, makes them casualties of glyphosate spraying; they've always been a favorite food source for little parasitic wasps.

Another black and orange caterpillar that might be found almost anywhere, but is usually found in late summer or autumn and usually stays close to the ground, is the very common and popular Woolly Bear, one of the "Bear" caterpillars that grow up to be "Tiger" moths:

You don't usually see them stretched out and showing their heads, feet, and skins so clearly, so Micha L. Rieser scores high for catching this one in this position. Photo donated By Micha L. Rieser, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36194509 .

Woolly Bears eat almost anything, specifically seeking plants that are toxic to internal parasites when they are troubled by such, and otherwise nibbling on what they find. They never become a pest on anything. The stiff hairs can make sensitive skin itch, but are neither sharp nor venomous. This is one of the species that can even survive being kept as pets by primary school children; since the caterpillar's defense is to curl up in a ball with its fur outside, children may delightedly imagine that they're cuddly pets, although they probably tolerate being petted rather than enjoy it.

The moths are straw-yellow and, like the caterpillars, familiar to most people in Eastern North America.

Photo donated By Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA - A Moth is Born, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2483723

Very common in May in some years is the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. Basically a black caterpillar with white and pale blue markings, in the final stage before it pupates it grows a coat of soft ginger fur, especially along the sides.

Photo is Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121771

These very sociable and well adapted caterpillars are one big lesson in the hazards of population density. Every ten years or so they overpopulate, defoliate their host trees, and become a major nuisance in the part of the Eastern States suffering the species population explosion. Then after one or two years when having little furry squishy things everywhere is a nuisance and seems likely to endanger the trees (which can survive being stripped once in a year, with little loss even to fruit crops), the caterpillars suffer plagues of insect diseases, die off, and seem rare. Then the cycle repeats.

Tent caterpillars live in families. The first few to emerge from a mass of eggs laid on a fruit tree twig begin to find food and build a nest of silk in a fork of the tree. The ones who emerge later follow the bigger ones' lead. They spend a lot of time grooming one another's fur and will die if they have to spend much of their caterpillar lives without this grooming, probably from suffocation.

This photo donated By J.R. Carmichael - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5671680 , shows a typical brood at home, resting and grooming one another. The nest has separate layers of silk through which the caterpillars can move ina nd out.

They like paddling in very shallow water to cool off, but can drown in deep water. They are sensitive to temperature, curious, and extremely nearsighted, all of which traits can make them quite annoying to humans as they will follow pedestrians and bicyclists across hot pavement, looking for shade, and crawl up humans' legs, exploring. Despite these tiresome habits they are mostly harmless unless swallowed--they eat mostly cherry and other Prunus leaves, and acquire that blue color from cyanide. (A herd of pregnant mares who inadvertently ate caterpillar-infested grass lost their foals in a cyanide reaction.) Before pupation most of them are about two inches long--not especially large caterpillars, but much bigger than most of the other caterpillars we see in early May. During the last few days before pupation, although they don't actually eat much, they explore everything. You might find them exploring your house or car.

When they grow up these caterpillars become cocoa-brown moths, and do a much better job avoiding humans than they did as caterpillars.

People often search for questions like "how to kill tent caterpillars." If you want to protect newly planted trees you can knock them down and whack them with a stick, but otherwise there's no need to kill tent caterpillars. Nature has been taking care of this species for a long time.

Pipevine swallowtail caterpillars eat the leaves of vines in the genus Aristolochia. Depending on their age and the climate in which they grew up they can be black, orange, black and orange, or brown. Here is a typical black and orange individual:

Photo donated By Meganmccarty - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5184926

In hotter climates the proportions of colors reverse, and the pattern changes:

Photo donated By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville - Pipevine swallowtail caterpillarUploaded by Ainali, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12168046

The harmless excrescences may make the caterpillar look more unappetizing to predators--more like certain millipedes that are even more inedible than the caterpillar is. It looks much prettier as an adult:

Photo donated By Greg Hume - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19840463

The Pipevine Swallowtail is one of the smaller, more modest Swallowtails. Caterpillars usually stay on food plants, and don't bother climbing up bushes, but y'never know.

Mourning Cloak (Camberwell Beauty) butterfly caterpillars are another very active species. In most lights they look black, with simple spines and orange spots on the back. This photograph highlights the fine hairs so that they look white...

Photo By Hectonichus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56035118

They eat a lot of different bush and tree leaves; hibiscus is not documented as a host plant, but just before pupation these caterpillars explore almost anything. The butterflies are, if not the showiest, among the biggest, the longest-lived, and the most intriguingly adapted of all North American and European butterflies; their feats include having developed a transatlantic population.

Photo donted By Pavel Kirillov from St.Petersburg, Russia - The Mourning Cloak, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46833959

They usually look black in flight, but again, in very bright light the upper wings seem dark brown and the underwings are mottled black and grey. Mourning Cloak butterflies can have wingspans up to 4 inches (20 cm), and the caterpillars can seem almost that long, but most are about two inches, like the others shown here.

Orange-Striped or Orange-Tipped "Oakworms" are the young of a moth called Anisota senatoria. There are two other species of Anisota that can almost be considered part of the same species. Though the moths are common they don't have an established "common name" in English. A. senatoria is one of the smaller of the big silk moths; after names like regalis and imperialis and the names of legendary giants were taken, this mid-sized moth was given a name just slightly less grandiose. If you call the big ones the Regal Moth and Imperial Moth and so on, this one would be the Senatorial Moth. Young caterpillars can look more yellow and green rather than orange and black. As they mature they become mostly black with orange pinstripes, about two inches long, with four soft fleshy "horns" at the front ends. They hatch in late summer, when they can devour oak leaves at an alarming rate without doing the trees any harm. They almost always stick to oak trees but occasionally fall out and wander about; like many caterpillars, just before pupating they're apt to wander.

Photo By Greg Dwyer - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1070329

Adult male and female moths look quite different. Females are bigger and lighter-colored; males are reddish brown. This individual is female.

Photo By Tom Nicholaides -, CC BY-SA 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27610952

Other black and orange caterpillars are fairly common. Several small species that look brown turn out, on close inspection, to be patterned in shades of black, orange, and other colors. However, in May a small caterpillar-like animal that's vividly black and orange is the flower garden's best friend, the Ladybird Beetle larva, or Aphid Lion. This bristly little mostly-black "worm" prowls among roses, hibiscus, and other bushes seeking aphids it may devour. It grows larger than you might expect a baby ladybug to be; though the beetles are only about a quarter-inch long, the larvae can be half an inch long.

This one is a young Asian Ladybird ("False Lady"). Though it will grow up to have drab brown wing covers rather than bright red ones, it's a "ladybug" and will eat aphids, scales, and other tiny pests like a good fellow (even after it grows up). Note its size relative to the raindrops around it.

Photo donated By Marcel Zurreck - Own work http://www.ref6.com/archive/2011/09/11/asian-ladybird-beetle-larva-harmonia-axyridis/, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16432340

The more colorful "lady beetles" were dedicated to Our Lady, Mother Mary, by medieval Europeans because they're everybody's favorite beetles. They're useful to farmers, their exploring habits make them seem friendly to humans, and their bright polka-dotted wing covers look cheerful.

Whichever kind of black and orange caterpillar Somebody found on their Rose of Sharon or Northern Hibiscus, especially if it was not really a caterpillar at all, it's likely to be good news.

Don't Love It, Just Do It

Is this the fourth of four planned "conservative" posts? In this post I make a Bible-based argument for a "conservative" use of language...

Specifically, a company with which I do business has been inserting into e-mails, as meaningless boilerplate, the words "I'll be happy to assist you with" as distinct from, say, "May I assist you with," or "-- is my department."

It brings to mind a conversation with a lady who said recently of a Young Thing who worked for her, "She does good work but I don't want her answering the phones. She doesn't mean to sound so curt with my customers, but she does. This morning someone called in and said, 'Can you do X number of product A by time N,' and she just said, 'Sure!' Imagine if that had been you!"

How little this dear lady knows me. "If she can have X number of product A ready by time N, and I were the one who wanted them, what's the problem?"

"Well, I mean to say, I would have said 'Certainly I'd be delighted to!'"

I've thought about this, off and on. I've talked about it with people I know better than her. I'm convinced that we are not talking about a generation gap, a North/South divide, or a socioeconomic distinction, so much as a temperament clash.

There are people who expect, and like, the extra dollop of emotion that the business owner might, for all we know, sincerely feel...and there are people who feel, as I do, that although it'd be a shame to spoil the owner's fun if the owner really feels "delighted" by a big rush job, really it's sort of disgusting to be fawned on in what we tend to assume is a dishonest manner.

Both of these categories include people currently between the ages of 40 and 75, people younger than that, and people older than that--although the proportions may vary; I wouldn't know.

Both include people from the Northern and Southern States, and from other countries, although Southerners of my acquaintance do show more tolerance for the gush of alleged emotion, since we've been told some people were trained to do it without thinking whether they actually feel anything or not. That is: Northerners who don't expect people to "be delighted to" do their jobs snap "Phony and disgusting," while Southerners say, "Well, some people were just brought up that way, but it is sort of sickening."


Both categories include rich people and poor people. Again, there may be some variation according to ethnicity and ancestral culture; I've not taken a wide enough survey to have noticed one.

The question brought to some of my relatives' mind a long-departed in-law who bought things everyone else considered tacky from a long-gone local boutique they also considered tacky. Let us say the in-law's name was Eva, as in "Deliver us from Eva."

"They gave her the 'Eva Treatment,' all right," one relative recalled. "I couldn't stand to shop there with her and watch them make fun of her. 'Eva this' and 'Eva that' and 'Oh that orange shirt looks beautiful with your red hair, Eva!' It was pathetic that poor old Eva used to lap it up. She must have thought that that was the way the middle class talk when they actually like somebody. Well, she was Little Miss Nobody from Nowhere."

The bottom line is that, for most of the people I know, the claim that the employee is "happy to" do the job is generally expected to be a lie. Most people can imagine that the owner of a business might feel sincerely pleased if a big order comes in at the same time a big expense does. Or an employee might--some people emphasized the indirect, nonverbal aspect of communicating this--be in an especially good mood that day and might even feel a need to verbalize it. If the employee does not, however, look and sound like a person who just won a prize or had lab tests come back negative, "Certainly I'd be delighted to!" is likely to be heard as both dishonest and hostile.

A minority of humankind, so far as I can see, have heard people say they'd "be happy to" do their jobs often enough that they expect to hear this kind of thing, don't really notice it as unusual, and miss hearing it when they don't. I don't know about those people.

Some languages and cultures have other phrases that have been repeated until they've lost much of their meaning, perhaps mutating into new words. Spanish has ustedes, a worn-down contraction of "Your Graces," now the way many people address any group even of toddlers or dogs. Italian has ciao, the worn-down contraction of an Italian phrase translated as "I am your slave." Japanese has so many of these flowery phrases that have worn back down to short useful words, and so many elaborate rules about who can use which ones in which situations, that all foreigners can do is compile full-length books about them and nobody's ever claimed to have completed a collection. Many languages have prayer phrases like "God be with you till we meet again" that have worn down to words like "goodbye," which are no longer even heard as ironic when they actually express "I hope we never meet again."

The English-speaking world has very few courtesy phrases that have acquired non-literal meanings of their own. "Fine" as the answer to "How are you?" is not quite a unique phenomenon in American English, but almost. "Dear" at the beginning of a letter doesn't mean that the person addressed is dear to, or even acquainted with, the writer: it means "This letter is addressed to." "Yours truly" meant, up to about 1950, "This letter is complete," but, as usual courtesy phrases start to become commonplace in English, people turned against the "meaningless" phrase. A term paper might be written about the gradual demise of "Yours truly," during which some people clung to it, some exaggerated it to "Very truly yours," some thought "Sincerely" or "Cordially" might sound fresher and more "meaningful"...and in the present century, I believe all the business letters I've seen had replaced the "complimentary closing phrase" with a sentence thought to be more plausible like "I look forward to your reply."

English-speaking people like to hear words that express good feelings, but even more than we like those words and phrases, most of us like to feel that the ones we're listening to are sincere and spontaneous. If an expression of good feelings is not "meaningful," many hear it as sarcastic. Thus, style guides noting the decline of "Yours truly" still warned letter writers not to substitute "Best regards" because, as Peg Bracken observed, it sounds "as if he has second-best ones." We do not seem generally to be a culture where a courtesy phrase less worn than "Dear" or "Goodbye" can be excused--and yes, an excuse is likely to be necessary!--as "just a pleasant thing to say." We are a culture where students read the literal translations of courtesy phrases from cultures that tolerate more of such--"'Honorable movement place' as a sign on RESTroom doors! REally!"--as comedy.

We are a culture where any exaggerated expression of good feelings is heard as hateful and insulting. "Bless his heart" was used in the nineteenth century to express not only sympathy but admiration. Has that ever changed. "Honey" is a hatespew all by itself, and "calling" anyone anything twice in a row is almost always verbal abuse, so if anyone in the South had actually said "Honey, honey, bless your heart" in my lifetime the person addressed would probably have known: it's too soon to call the police, but if you don't run you should definitely try to get the rest of the conversation on tape. "Nice" generally describes something pleasant, but sometimes means something pleasant at the expense of some quality more valuable than pleasantness. "Charming" generally describes something pleasantly interesting, but if the thing described is a person's behavior it's probably being described as also sinister and untrustworthy, so during the 1960 elections Americans adopted the new word "charismatic" to describe the personal charm of politicians, and in the 2008 elections some Clinton partisans actually mulled whether "charisma" should be held against then-Senator Obama. "Cute," which is what this web site officially calls Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is chosen advisedly both to mean that she's young and pretty and to mean that nobody should take her ideas seriously.

This is yet another question for which the bland tolerant answers, the "Everybody is different but everybody is OK" school of thought, tend to fall short. There is a biblical answer: "Let your Yes be Yes, and your No be No."

Because, as the popular song expanded this theme: people need to "do what they say, say what they mean, because one thing leads to another."

If the big rush job will both add stress to your day and help meet the big expense, and you say, "Sure," but don't add the squeal about how delighted you feel, you're not telling the customers, "I really am desperate for work" and asking them to urge everyone they know to pile more and more work on you until you're forced to say "I can't do that." And, Murphy's Law being what it is, the person to whom you say "I can't" is likely to be the one who was not trying to bail out your business, in a tactful way, but who desperately needs the job done.

You could have given everybody a full status report: "I have a whole free weekend and I'm broke, so I'd be delighted to type Al's paper. I have most of the weekend left and I could use more money, so I'd be pleased to type Betty's paper. I have plenty of time to do it and I could buy a real treat with the money, so I'd like to type Chang's paper too," and so on up to the point of "All I've done is type for three days and I have an exam in another hour and there's no way I can type Ukechi's paper!" Or you could have kept it businesslike: "Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Yes, I...can try. No, it's too late, I can't take this job."

If you think a customer looks tired or discouraged, wanting to cheer up that person is laudable. Do it right. The person may feel more discouraged by a big forced display of your teeth (every animal instinctively knows that's a threat display) or a loud "cheerful, friendly" greeting (also known as making a noise like a social bully). In the 1990s much attention was given to the advantage in "team building" Japanese workers gained from being trained to match the boss's or customer's energy flow rather than trying to force faked enthusiasm on that person. Unfortunately, many Americans seem to have wanted to forget what was learned. You cheer up someone who may simply be feeling quiet by quietly saying "Yes we can." If the person has asked you to help raise her or his energy in the morning, because the person's only concern is a sluggish metabolism, then you may squeal and giggle and bounce and do your little happy dance. Otherwise, your "delight," real or fake, may feel like vinegar on a raw wound to someone who has, you should be grateful, chosen to refrain from telling you about the untimely death that, if mentioned, will make him or her bawl out loud and leave everyone in the office feeling discouraged and distracted.

If you happen to feel perky...my sympathies are with you, actually. Many people's are not. Hand car washes and at least one restaurant chain used to specialize in offering opportunities for top-heavy young women to bounce around stretching, reaching, bending, getting their tight jeans and T-shirts wet, and grinning manically while stuffing tips into pockets that were already snug. Even on those jobs those of us who were raking in the tips used to be resented. The price of gravitas and having any of your ideas respected on a job will probably be to get control of that crazy late-adolescent enthusiasm. You can let your eyes sparkle pleasantly without grinning, if you try. I found that a little self-control drastically reduced the number of hateful things people said about either the C-cups or the messy-looking teeth.

Our emotional moods are generally determined by our physical condition, including things like hormones and immune reactions that are harder to control than metabolic rate and digestion. Most people can choose to be eupeptic, and should. However, the pernicious "Positive Thinking" fad, in which twentieth century Christians tried to pretend that things like "Rejoice" and "Fear not" were "commandments" more important than "Thou shalt not covet" or "Thou shalt not bear false witness," has led some people to act as if being eupeptic were a virtue, which it certainly is not, rather than a blessing, which it is. The Bible writers and teachers very often told people to "rejoice," and messages ascribed to angels always begin with "fear not," but they also told people to "tremble" and "howl." In no case were these emotional directives intended to tell people to force themselves to sustain any emotional mood longer than nature intended. In every case they were merely prefaces to the messages that followed. The Bible does not tell people to try to make themselves feel any particular emotion; it does contain some messages that, the original speaker or writer knew, were likely to provoke certain emotions in those who heard the messages.

Meanwhile, although it's true that sometimes we can force ourselves to feel a little more eupeptic, when we have been feeling only a little less so, than our own personal baseline, the Bible Maven regrets to inform Christians that pushing themselves to seem cheerful makes people who are genuinely unhappy and/or ill feel worse. That's why the Bible actually has nothing good to say about the one who "sings songs to those of a heavy heart," or who "have piped, and you have not danced." The Bible writers recognized that that kind of behavior is not helping anything. We may be able to please people by doing good work. Usually that is what we ought to do. Even when we do it, though, we can't make people feel happy, and it's really none of our business to try.

The Bible has some extremely harsh words for those who try to force others to act cheerful for their benefit. To the supervisor who orders people who are not happy to act happy, the unknown author of one of the Psalms that are not associated with King David addressed the ugliest words in the whole Bible: "O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed, happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."

Whew. Bible commentators have never been altogether sure how to take that verse. Probably the best reading is the most literal: The "daughter of Babylon" was hated, and though the author promises no heavenly reward to the man who either murders her children or smashes her trinkets, the author assures her that that man will enjoy doing whichever of those things the author had in mind. Why did this thought need to be handed down to posterity? C.S. Lewis, and other commentators who lived in more levelheaded times, thought it was most likely to be useful if interpreted as a metaphor: The only slavemaster most of us know anything about is Sin, our own sinful natures, and its "little ones" are the little temptations--just one little drink, one little "juicy" bit of spiteful gossip, one little "mistake" in our own favor on a bill--and Christians should lose no chance to smash those little monsters.

I like Lewis, and I like Reflections on the Psalms. I also like Kathleen Norris's reflections on this and other "cursing Psalm" texts. I also think we should stop resisting the obvious meaning of this horrid Bible text. It means, most obviously, that trying to order people to act out whatever it is that you want to be able to feel, and can't, is a vile thing to do. We must not allow "making us feel a certain way" to be part of anyone's job description. We must respect people's right to feel what they do feel.

Where the sinful world may tell us to look for "positive," enthusiastic employees in the belief that being around them will "boost morale," Christians are told to support the people who most need support. In many cases the people who most need jobs are not the most cheerful people. They are likely to be living with painful conditions, or to be bereaved, or to be overburdened with the care of children, parents, and sometimes grandchildren or grandparents as well. Corporate "human resources" departments will certainly snap up the perky, bumptious young people whose biggest worry is paying off their student loans. That leaves Christians responsible for hiring the brand-new widows who are probably excreting half of their total fluid intake in the form of tears, in any case, but may benefit from the distraction of trying to avoid dripping tears into their computers; and the frazzled new mothers who may, by a monumental effort, get to work only two hours late but are likely to compensate by falling asleep at their desks if they do, but didn't Christians tell them not to abort the babies?; and the guy with the brain injury producing quadriplegic spasticity, which can make him look quite alarming to anyone who makes the mistake of looking at him rather than at his finished work. Christians need to learn to look at the finished work.

"But shouldn't employees' finished work include flattering the customers, or being friendly to the customers, or making the customers feel..." As a customer I say: it should not. There may be customers, like that late unlamented Eva, who don't automatically assume that anything that sounds like flattery is a lie uttered with malicious intentions--that even "It looks good on you" probably means "It makes you look ridiculous, which is how I think you ought to look, because I hate you." There are customers, like me, who are willing to believe that--if employees wait for their opinions to be asked, if we ask for their opinions in ways that don't make them feel obliged to lie, if the words they utter then are mere vocalizations of what their faces and voices tell us--"It looks good on you" might be an honest opinion rather than flattery. We might, in case of doubt, test them to see whether they're able to state an unflattering opinion, or at least how they look and sound when they're evading having to state one. The best way to sell us clothing is to provide mirrors where we can compare different looks for ourselves. If we do want an employee's opinion it's a bit unfair to ask "How does it look?" We can and should give the employee a break and ask, "Which one of these would you choose?" But an unsolicited gush of opinion, even if it's honest, like "I like your shoes" to someone who is shopping for picnic supplies, is likely to sound like insincere flattery--to which quite a lot of us react by thinking, if not saying, "Oh shut your lying yap-hole and go play in traffic."

One of the parables of Jesus described what many Americans have unfortunately learned to expect when employees sound as if they're concerned with making anyone feel good. A farmer told his two lazy sons to get up and go to work in the vineyard. (We know they were lazy because otherwise they would have got themselves down to the vineyard.) The first one, who was probably still asleep, mumbled that he did-n-wan-na, but then, perhaps hearing his father continue to nag the other son, deciding that getting some work done would be the course of least resistance, he went to work. The second son beamed, "I go, Sir," and then, as his father moved away, he went back to sleep. Granted that everyone in the audience was probably glad not to have to claim either of these shabby excuses for sons, which of the two obeyed their father?

Nothing in the Bible or in English literature disparages the ways employees can show respect to customers in any language--by listening to what they're told, showing up on time, working efficiently. That's flattering.

That's why Christians are told that anything "more" than letting their Yes be Yes and their No be No "comes from evil." When an employee says "Sure, I can do that" and is sure she can do that, that's what tells the customers she really does respect them and like her job.

Status Update: Animal Dumping

So on Thursday morning I posted:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2020/05/tuxie-thursday-bad-week-at-cat-sanctuary.html

It does mention that we want to help keep cats out of shelters, and that Serena, having given birth to eight kittens, seven of whom were born alive and almost certainly viable, and had them all die while glyphosate vapor was drifting past us the next morning, seemed to be trying to end the lactation cycle and move on rather than extend the lactation cycle and adopt more young kittens right away.

Cats, like humans, produce different kinds and amounts of milk to meet what will normally be the needs of the offspring it's meant to nourish. The first gush of milk that comes in after birth has a special name, colostrum, because it doesn't even look like the milk the mother starts to produce the next day. Then for a few months the mother's body can produce more and richer milk if she gets adequate rest, food, and water--humans nursing babies say they have to remind themselves to try to drink water or juice whenever they're awake. Then the supply of milk tapers off. Cats can keep themselves producing small amounts of milk for six months, and some women have extended lactation in the same way for three or four years, after birth if they want to maximize recovery time in between pregnancies. A cat who has stayed close to her half-grown kittens, the way Serena has to Silver and Swimmer, can choose to extend lactation or not.

Serena has chosen not. To whatever extent cats plan these things, she may be planning to try to have kittens later this summer. This is risky, not because warm weather doesn't last long enough in Virginia to give July or August kittens time to grow enough fur to survive the winter, but because glyphosate and other poisonous vapors are even more of a hazard later in the year. I might have preferred for Serena to try to extend lactation and adopt another litter, but even for social cats who don't mind nursing one another's kittens when they have a lactation cycle going, extending or inducing lactation just to adopt another cat's kittens is a minority behavior pattern.

Heather did it once--not twice. (She learned. Heather seemed never to produce enough milk to rear even her own kittens without help.) Ivy did it regularly. Sisawat did it, apparently for birth control during her first year as an adult cat. But even social cats are more likely to go with the natural flow of things than to try to extend or induce a lactation cycle, even when they're exposed to orphaned kittens. Since Serena was exposed to glyphosate vapors too, it's likely that her milk wouldn't be good for orphaned kittens to drink right after the poisoning episode.

So...I reported that on Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon someone offered me a lift home in a van. It's hard to shout directions across a healthy distance in a big loud van so I didn't direct the person precisely to my home. Maybe it was just random chitchat when the person said, as I left the van on the main road, not within sight of the Cat Sanctuary, "So you live just down there?" I did not turn around and see exactly where she was pointing, but just waved cheerfully and called back, "Yes, I'm fine, thank you for the ride, have a good night..."  

Maybe it was just random chitchat. But for security reasons I don't like to give out any residential addresses in the course of random chitchat. The security reasons I mean...

I walked back up the road that is "just down there" from the main road, later. All the commuter vehicles parked by the houses "just down there" had already rolled off to work. A little car was parked in the road beside one of those houses. What was that car doing there? Was one of the commuters' cars in the shop; was someone car-pooling to work? No, only one head was visible above the seats in the Tennessee car as it moved away. The people who live in that house are tall enough that their heads show above car seats so, unless a short person from Tennessee had come out to that house to pick up one of the residents, then let that person drive back toward Tennessee, someone had just stopped in front of that house...to hang a flier on the door? To make a delivery?

Then I saw the two cats, a matched pair, not spring kittens but possibly last spring's kittens, brother and sister by the look of them, both sniffing and peering around the driveway as if they were exploring a place they hadn't been before.

I walked another half-mile and I saw a very big, rather fat looking dog, not on a leash, sniffing around the porch in front of a house that is in town where leash laws are enforced.

Attention Tennessee readers. Possibly someone overlooked this part of the post about Serena and me:

"
If anyone wants to send kittens to us, they need to tell me about it first...not just wander up here and dump kittens out of a truck!
"

Goes double for puppies 'cos they're twice the size! Yes, the two cats did look a bit like a cat the owners of the driveway had rescued when he was dumped out on them, years ago. Yes, some people in Scott County love all dogs. Yes, for a lot of people who live in the country, any reluctance to pet, feed, or bring home an unwanted dog or cat comes directly from our concerns about the well-being of our current resident dogs and/or cats. But you always need to ask. Don't just dump animals out in the general neighborhood of where you have heard an animal rescuer lives, or used to live. Talk to the human. The animal's chance of surviving will be so much better if you can deliver it directly to a place where the right kind of food, and a safe place where it can keep out of the way while showing due respect to resident animals, will be at its disposal. Dumped-out animals are apt to panic and run right into danger.

I personally don't like to accept responsibility for an animal until it's at least approached me of its own free will; I don't like to send animals to people the animals have not approached, either. Animals do have to accept and adjust to some changes that they would not have chosen. Their original humans may have rejected them, or may have moved away or died. They can accept an Emergency Backup Human if they have to but they deserve to be able to feel some sense of potential friendship with that person. Many animals who have been pets still feel terrified when they're dumped into the custody of total strangers. Far from being evidence of past abuse, I read that as evidence of common sense!

The big dog woofed at me in a lackadaisical way...not a challenge to a potential intruder on its home, not a cry for help. I walked on, having no way to help it.

What was that beside the road? A bullfrog, almost as big as a toad. It had been knocked down by a car but why had it been on the road? Frogs and other shore-dwelling animals look for higher ground when their homes are flooded after rain. No rain fell this weekend...since the dicamba poisoning. I'd continued to feel sneezy, sleepy, grumpy, bashful, dopey, and also blocked, but actually been less sick than the previous weekend. Someone else had been less lucky because another sprue spew in a plastic take-out box was also lying beside the road. If you didn't look closely you might have thought it was melted chocolate ice cream, but it wasn't. I see this type of mess on the same stretch of road regularly enough to suspect it's all coming from one person, who probably commutes through the neighborhood rather than living there, and if so, that person should move further away from the railroad.

What was that complaining noise coming out of a house along the road? It was somebody's grandfather. "I've been sick all weekend. I think I've got the coronavirus." People like him often say "sick," which I would not use to describe the reported effects of coronavirus, when they mean "ill," which is what people with coronavirus describe themselves being. I didn't ask him where the pain was, exactly, but if he'd had coronavirus all weekend I would not have expected a patient of his age and condition to be standing behind his storm door and complaining. I suspect Friday's dicamba and last week's glyphosate were what was bothering him.

But he might really have it. I might really have been exposed. He was talking through a storm door; I was standing on the porch step, taking an object I had for sale out of a bag to show him, not giving any gossips any ideas about my being with a divorced man in his home, but the door did swing partly open as the man leaned on it. I have been looking forward to getting that behind me for a couple of months now. If the rain that's starting to sprinkle down now, washing the poison out of the air, does not wash away all the urges to sneeze I've been having all weekend, or if I feel the least bit feverish, I will go home and quarantine myself. Most of the people I know are older than I am, and the others are close to their parents, who are older than I am. I would hate to cough coronavirus on them.

(It would be a pity to lose your sense of smell at this time of year. My hedge is just a cascade of roses this week, with privet not far behind. I paused to sniff my roses and iris almost every time I passed them--no, that wasn't when the urge to sneeze struck me. I enjoyed the tall brown-freckled yellow iris, which I hardly had to bend over to sniff, on Jackson Street this morning too.)

What was that fretful noise coming out of a business? "But some people will get closer than six feet when they hand us a card," fretted a worker. The worker was fretting about losing virus-phobic customers and thus losing work time; the worker was nowhere near old enough to have anything to fear for perself. "Masks or bandanas, I can order us some cute ones," the owner cheerfully replied.

I'm not keen on tying strings or stretching elastic bands around my head, or ears. In theory a veil draped over a straw hat ought to be the coolest face covering in steamy weather; in practice I tend to lose straw hats. When that Michaels giftcard arrives I plan to buy some cotton yarn and knit some of what some clients have been requesting, "open-topped hats" that can be pulled over the face if we have to talk to people, around long hair while we work, or around the neck for warmth in winter. The traditional word for such a garment was "cowl."

Some readers might want to think about colors. Black and dark blue might suit some people's taste, but cotton yarn does tend to shed dye when it's new and faded as it gets older. In Morocco the desert-dwelling Tuareg people used to be nicknamed "Blue Men" because they were always pulling indigo-blue scarves and veils over their faces to keep off the sand, and the dyed fabric would react with sweat and stain their skin blue. Some people who don't normally wear white might want white cowls.

Still so much panic about something that's actually not life-threatening for most of us, and so much denial about things that are life-threatening for many.

For animals, too. The incidence of Tennessee animal dumping in Scott County suggests that people in Tennessee like our belief that animals shouldn't have to be sentenced to life in solitary confinement, with sterilization and perhaps other surgical mutilations, just for the crime of being animals. We don't think being other than human is a crime! We don't think a non-human birth is a disaster! But that doesn't mean it's safe--or sane!--just to dump animals randomly out on our streets. Many of us drive motor vehicles just as people in Tennessee do.

My choice would be to move animals only when there's a reasonable expectation that they're not going to bolt or hide. When I've taken Cat Sanctuary "graduates" to their Purrmanent Homes I usually hang out with the humans for an hour or so, watch the cat eat from a new dish and find a new litter box, make sure any encounters with resident animals (or children) don't seem life-threatening. Some cats choose their own Purrmanent Homes, some gladly accept the ones humans have chosen for them, and some have been blessed to move in with friends who've visited them at the Cat Sanctuary and begun to bond with them there, so everything goes smoothly. Other cats, I'm told, have sulked or hidden, cried, or clung to things they recognized from the Cat Sanctuary for a few days before accepting that another place might be their new home. Sometimes this kind of thing seems to be hammed up for the benefit of resident animals, a sort of "I certainly don't want to be in your home," and sometimes social cats then proceed to bond with normal resident cats, after which they'll nonverbally tell us they do not want to go home with me any more! It's possible to move animals in a sufficiently tactful way that the move might as well have been the animals' own idea.

"I don't have time to do that. I'm a busy working parent with a geriatric busybody of a mother and a seriously disabled grandmother to worry about! I don't even have time to hang out with the school friend I swore would be my Best Friend Forever, much less make new friends. I need to move this animal out of the house my mother and grandmother have to vacate, right now!" What a regrettable, even deplorable, way to live...I do understand that, through no fault of their own, some people's lives do become crowded, and pets are likely to be among the first things they want to shove away as they struggle for breathing room. So you feel a need to make the cat be somewhere else right now and at least you don't want to put it in a shelter. That can happen. But you can take the time to confirm that someone, however partial to that kind of animal the person may be, can get the poor, scared, grieving animal into a pen or cage where it won't run out in front of a truck.

Morgan Griffith on Proxy Votes

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

"

Griffith Statement on House Democrat Proxy Voting Proposal

Friday, May 15, 2020 – Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) issued the following statement in opposition to the proposed rule change by the House Democrat majority to permit proxy voting on the floor of the House:
“The House majority has proposed a change in the rules that defies the Constitution and undermines the House of Representatives as a legislative body.
“The Constitution requires a majority of the House to conduct business, a provision George Mason called ‘valuable & necessary.’ The Framers knew that mischief could take place if the House met with less than a majority of its members.
“Allowing vote by proxy opens that door to serious mischief and legislative malfeasance. Gathering in person is essential to the legislative process. It’s how we talk through issues, gather support for bills, and build relationships for effective lawmaking.
“The House has met and voted several times during the pandemic, as has the Senate. Further, committees have met live in Washington, D.C. This is not a job that can be done just be phoning it in. Citizens should not trust the future of our great Republic to those who demand they be allowed to do their essential jobs while sitting at home in their La-Z-Boy recliner.
“As Members of Congress, we can and must do our jobs without tossing aside the Constitution. The United States House of Representatives should not be a sparsely attended debating society.”
"

What George Mason would have said about voting by phone, if he'd imagined it would ever be possible, I can't imagine...but "proxy voting" is a different bucket of worms! It's one thing for stockholders who trust the corporate chairman and CEO to make the most profitable decisions on the technical minutiae they probably understand better than the stockholders do. It's another thing for the U.S. Congress, whose job is to understand the bills on which they vote. That's a sufficiently unreasonable burden at best. We all know a few of the kind of well-intentioned, usually clearheaded people who could be tempted to let cute little AOC or money-smart Trump make the kind of decisions they make--which are neither well-intentioned nor even necessarily clearheaded--on important policy matters.

Remote voting is one thing. Not everyone on Capitol Hill is as young and tough as Rand Paul. By ancient and honorable tradition, Congressmen can keep voting on national legislation as long as they're able to take their seats and move their hands at the right time; if they want to keep working up to and beyond the age of 100, most Americans will applaud. If they get the flu and die of pneumonia, which occasionally happens, the House or the Senate have heretofore been able to carry on while the home districts of the deceased hold special elections. Coronavirus does present the risk of a critical mass of senior legislators not only becoming ill all at once, but leaving Congress in the hands of a brat pack led by the aforementioned AOC, who really need to be voted out before they have any chance to form a majority-of-those-still-standing. This web site would like to see several Congressmen retire (this web site's use of "Congressmen" most definitely includes Nancy Pelosi) but we'd prefer that they have a reasonable amount of time to go to the beach with their grandchildren after they retire.

I'd support a bill to let them vote by phone when they're worried about their health, understanding that every time they use that privilege can be used to feed the loyal opposition's campaigns, back home: "U.S. Rep. Tracy Smith phoned in votes on 27 key bills last year. Isn't it time we had a younger, healthier U.S. Rep.?" And also understanding that I have supported, in every way I knew how, measures to limit bills read in Congress to such a length that legislators who wanted to phone in their votes could reasonably be asked to read bills aloud, so that everyone could hear their voices and know they personally knew what they were doing with their votes by phone.

Proxy voting? People who have pneumonia and shouldn't speak, shouldn't vote...but neither should they trust their interns, or the young hotheads in their party, to vote for them. Congress should shout "No" loudly enough that we can hear it out here on the Point of Virginia. Gentle Readers, if by any chance you have Internet access wherever you're in quarantine today, please tell your Congressmen just to say NOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

Friday Market Reopens

People certainly maintained a healthy distance in the Friday market this morning.

I saw several masks, a veil, and a bandana tied over the face rodeo-style. I took some requests for masks, and should be knitting some soon...stylish knitted cotton masks that will also work as neck warmers after the virus panic subsides.

I saw the front-page news story: In Scott County, Virginia, seven people have tested positive for the dreaded coronavirus. Two have died. Names aren't being released; all that's being reported is that people who die from coronavirus have been people who go into pneumonia and nearly die whenever they're exposed to ordinary colds or flu--geriatric patients, chemotherapy patients, and in the city AIDS patients.

Everyone set up their displays three or four car spaces apart. Without any planning or discussion, everyone looked at the parking lot where the open-air market goes on and thought, "We could make it easy for people to drive through the market, not getting out of their cars except to buy something." Even on its most crowded days the drive-through option has been one of the things that's made Gate City's market special. In the past people have taken adjacent car spaces in order to take advantage of as much shade as possible. Today people were organizing their displays so that people could drive around on the sides and see everything from their car windows. I was glad to see most of the older shoppers taking the hint. It was not possible to hear nearly as much of "the talk of the town" as I usually do. I did hear several people say that they were, like me, still waiting for their stimulus checks, having filed taxes. I didn't hear anyone affirm that they know anyone who's actually received their thousand dollars, although I do at least know...one.

This is socialism, Gentle Readers. This is what lovable old Bernie Sanders and cute little Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wanted to do for you, but the virus beat them to it. (Oh yes, they blathered about guaranteed incomes...which would have run out fast, probably not reaching the majority of people in your neighborhood, just like the famous stimulus checks.) Now that you've experienced it under ideal circumstances--one lovely little spring vacation--picture having it in winter, too, and having it go on and on and on. I think the politicians who've called for socialism need to be planning their post-political lives now.

Anyway it was a nice balmy day with a cool breeze; more people bought books or gift items than bought bottled drinks--from me, anyway, and I didn't see anyone else selling bottled drinks. A few people just walked around not buying anything. Several people were, as usual, only really shopping for tomatoes. Several people seemed gloomy, but more as if they were fretting about where those stimulus checks had got to than as it they were ill.

Then just before closing time a certain disgrace to his parents' memory came out and sprayed poison all over a steeply sloping back yard.

Well, some vendors like to go to Nickelsville for the afternoon anyway. I had cyber-chores to do. I packed up and left. How much heavier everything had suddenly become. Other people were leaving too. They did not look happy although some of them, besides the fresh-baked-goods family and the vegetable man, had sold some of the stuff they were loading up.

I hadn't heard how many of them had been sick or ill earlier this week. I only really started to feel better after Wednesday's rain and somehow wasn't really surprised by the idea that, with our federal government allegedly caaaaring so much about keeping us all healthy, I wasn't going to be allowed to feel well this weekend either.

All the poisoners whine, "I spray poison only N number of times a year--how much harm can that do?" Well, if each of these people sprays poison just once a year, and (by chance, since no planning or regulation goes on) each of these people sprays poison in a different week, that's enough toxic waste floating around in the air to keep the whole town slightly sick all summer.

Some people who were in the Friday Market today are going to notice their senses of smell and taste diminished, their throats prickly, etc. etc. etc. That's not coronavirus. That's dicamba poisoning. If you were having a glyphosate reaction from earlier this week, the combined effect of the two poisons is guaranteed to exacerbate both reactions. Some people are going to be sick as dogs later this weekend. If they're really attached to the belief that "pesticides" are not toxic to them, they might convince themselves that, oh mercy, they caught someone else's tummybug at the same time they caught the dreaded coronavirus, oh woe, oh wail. It's not impossible that, in the process of getting tests and treatment for coronavirus and norovirus while actually having neither, they might manage to get both--on top of the poisoning they have as of the time I'm typing this.

It's not alway easy to tell whom we should sue for making us ill by spraying poison into the air because he's too lazy to pull up the plants he doesn't appreciate in his yard, but for anyone who became ill in the Friday Market today, it is. We all know his name. He really was ill at the time he destroyed his parents' business, so some of us might have been inclined to empathize too much about the fact that he really destroyed the business by using the best store space in town to sell drugs illegally.

It's funny how reselling surplus painkillers, which at most harms only the fools who willingly feed addictions to those poison pills, gets jail time for someone who's doing well to be out of the hospital and not destroying himself with those pills--yet actively poisoning the whole town is not yet recognized as a violent crime.

Gate City needs its Friday Market so desperately, right now...I think we need a local ordinance that spraying anything at all, even Deet, outdoors on a Friday morning should guarantee an immediate arrest, the hardest time the local jail has to offer, and a minimum six-figure fine.

Tuxie Thursday: Bad Week at the Cat Sanctuary

Sommersburr, the big old black and white neutered tomcat ("tuxedo-patterned" or "tuxie"), has a lot to say. He sounds as if he really used to "talk" to some human, in the past. All I understand of his "meows" is that he's dissatisfied with a lot of things.

Well, this week, that makes sense. I'm never sure exactly what Sommersburr is dissatisfied with, apart from the Cat Sanctuary not being his home and me not being his human, but I can imagine...a Cat Sanctuary Interview post. (This is not a "conservative" post. It's about human relations, so it's political, but it's not been claimed by a political party.)

PK: So, you don't like the generic version of Purina Cat Chow as much as you like the generic version of Purina Kitten Chow. I'm sorry about that. I'll pick up another bag of Kitten Chow as soon as I go back to the store that sells it.

Sommersburr: Well, that, and also everything else.

PK: You are now a writer's cat so why don't you tell the readers about "everything else"?

Sommersburr: Where do I start? I mean "everything else." I miss my human. I miss my home. I miss my long-gone youth. A flea was biting me; thank you for chasing it off the top of my head, anyway. I feel bad that Serena feels bad.

Serena: Oh I'll get over it. Don't mind me.

Sommersburr: Well, she's a large cat and carried it well, but when she started to look pregnant, did she ever look pregnant.

Serena: Without uttering a single "meow" I told our human to clean out the box where I spent my kittenhood and set up a place for my kittens. She was a good human and is now allowed to pick me up, which I've not allowed since she sent my two little Tuxie kittens away. She watched them wriggling around inside me and asked, "Are there four of them?"

Silver: If I'd been in that sort of shape there might have been four. Or maybe only two. I'm still growing.

Serena: There were eight of them. Four male, four female. One little male, who looked like his great-grandfather, was born dead. The other seven were all full-sized and very lively.



Some bigger than others, and as you see, if there hadn't been so many of them they might have waited another day or two to be born.  Still, they were crowded inside and wanted to come out all at once, all during one night. They could have been stronger when they were born, but they were far enough along that they could have lived, too. They came out the way I've been told I was when I was born, tiny and wrinkly, but "a hand full" for the human. They all had pink skin, and all seven living ones had spots of color on their backs and heads. It was a long night but the human looked in at me and said, "What a nice clean warm nest you've made! I'll leave you alone. I know you know what you're doing." The air grew very cold but I kept my babies warm..

Sommersburr: Then, just as the sun started to come up and we thought it might be safe for Serena to go out for a drink of water, there was one of those horrible smells humans seem to like in the air...the one they use to make the kudzu and Spanish Needles grow.

Swimmer: The human sneezed a lot. I heard. I was near the door and I sneezed too.

Serena: I came back before my babies were cold, and every one of their hearts had stopped. And the human came out to serve breakfast. I said, "Look at my babies! Do something!" She said, "I'm not going to bother your babies, Serena. I'll look at them when it's not so cold. Wow, the air temperature actually is below freezing. What seems like an early spring aaalways leads to a frost in early May..." I bit her hand. I said, "No, look at them!"

PK: It's hard to tell whether kittens are dead or sleeping. We brought them inside, all snug in their blanket, and set them near the heater and tried to resuscitate them. No use.

Serena: It was my fault. She wanted to put the nest box in the office room, where I had spent my infancy in it.

Silver: Maybe the walls would have kept out the poison vapor along with the cold...

Swimmer: But who knew that either of those things was going to happen? And what if the babies had lived through this poisoning and then died in the next one? We smell that smell almost every month from one direction or another.

Sommersburr: I never saw anyone die of it before.

Serena: Some kittens do. These two, and the other two who were born with them, were ill for a few days. The human gave them charcoal. Since then Silver's not been quite so ill again, but Swimmer feels it every time.

Sommersburr: Well, so do I actually, but not as badly as little Swimmer does.

PK: I feel it too, of course. It's never killed me yet but it's worse than any silly little chest cold like this virus that's got all the humans' knickers twisting this spring. Monday and Tuesday were beautiful days but I didn't feel like hauling the laptop back into town. Wednesday was wet, and even today, waiting for a car pool, I felt a couple of waves of nausea in the morning even though I had nothing much to lose from that. While as for the kittens...Sometimes kittens do go into comas and come out again. I didn't bury them until Wednesday. They still hadn't gone stiff but they'd started to smell nasty. Burying kittens in the rain made me think of a poem. Whoever poisoned all of us, on a night when no green plant was going to grow anyway, should not see the sun again; he should die in the darkness--painfully!--and be buried in the rain.

Serena: That wouldn't bring my babies back. Well, if their father and I live so long we can try again.


PK: Wouldn't it be nice if more kittens lived than died? Then you wouldn't have to keep trying to have kittens and lose them...if the wind didn't carry poison vapors. Wouldn't you like just to rest and be a grandmother?

Serena: Hah! How old was that cat my mother called old Heather when she started taking long naps every day?

PK: Six or seven. A middle-aged cat. To humans every month of a kitten's first year is like a year of our lives, and every year after that is like at least seven of our years.

Serena: Why would I want to retire earlier than she did? I'm barely full-grown. I'll be all right when the lactation cycle is over. I'm starting to feel like playing with Silver and Swimmer already--only not for very long.

Sommersburr: Isn't she a splendid Queen Cat?! I wish I could be the father of her kittens.

PK: I'm glad you can't. The world needs no more of your DNA, Sommersburr. But I have to wonder whether any amount of DNA could ever make another cat like Serena. She is amazing. Serena, can you imagine a day, however far off in the future, when you'd be content to stop giving birth to kittens and only adopt them, the way our Founding Queen Black Magic used to do? A lot of kittens get shoved into shelters at this time of year--and you can't imagine what awful places they are. Sometimes our readers try to give me guilt trips because we can't rescue more of those kittens. Could you adopt kittens as babies, the way you adopted Traveller as a brother and Sommersburr as a grandpa?

Serena: Not right away, because I was poisoned too, and my lactation cycle is shutting off. Later on I might consider it. It would depend on the kittens. And of course, even though you humans are trying to keep a distance from one another right now, you have suffered enough...

PK: I have indeed. If anyone wants to send kittens to us, they need to tell me about it first...not just wander up here and dump kittens out of a truck!

Sommersburr: And they should understand that even out in the country like this, where we're all so happy and so healthy, most of the time, the wind still carries poison! What do humans call what they need to do about that?

Everyone, loudly and clearly, including the non-talking spirit of Grandma Bonnie: BAN GLYPHOSATE!