For someone who follows the Poets & Storytellers United, I've missed a lot of the action at that site lately. But not this week. Finally. So, a senryu:
Before signing off
write one last little poem:
the finishing touch.
Friday, June 30, 2023
Web Log 6.29.23
Just a few quick ones...
Christian
"Plussed" (does anyone remember Google +?) for the C.S. Lewis quote, but all these quotes are worth reading.
Poems
Urban garden:
It's a viridian season here, too:
Book Review: American Patchwork Quilts
Reclaimed from Blogjob...
Title: American
Patchwork Quilts
Author: Lenice Ingram Bacon
Date: 1973
Publisher: Bonanza / Crown / Morrow
ISBN: 0-517-30940-8
Length: 190 pages
Illustrations: many full-page photos
Quote: “In that section of Tennessee where I grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, quilts still served…We had a goodly supply for ‘everyday wear,’ but they were not made at home. They were made by the Witt sisters.”
Lenice Ingram Bacon has collected stories of individual quilts and quilters to flesh out, and sometimes debunk, familiar stereotypes. I could wish she’d debunked the stereotype of “the areas of Appalachia”—a fine and scenic town, but too small to occupy many “areas.” However, Bacon was concentrating on quilts rather than general history, and her book is full of interesting anecdotes about European as well as American textiles.
Both typical and unusual quilts have been documented in this book. There’s a lovely, patchwork-appliqued, finely stitched “Pineapple Quilt” made in China, by order of a rich American, in 1791; an unfinished “crazy quilt” looking crazy indeed after a hundred years of wear and tear; a bizarre applique piece in which the figures represent scenes from history and the Bible, but few could be recognized without a page of written explanations, which was fortunately preserved in the same museum.
Anecdotes from quilting history make this book an entertaining read, and large, colorful photos make it an inspiring collection for quilters who feel confident enough to make their own templates. So it can be recommended to anyone interested in quilts.
Lenice Ingram Bacon is remembered in the Quilters’ Hall of Fame (http://www.quiltershalloffame.net/index_files/Page924.html).
Posted on October 5, 2015Categories Book, CraftsTags patchwork quilts
The Best Way to Stop Fixing the Borfin is Not to Start
It occurred to me after I'd written this morning's post that it might be considered to violate this web site's contract. What I've written I've written; it's not obscene, defamatory, threatening, or libellous, but I don't want to violate a contract. So this morning's post is at https://cat-sanctuary.livejournal.com/479967.html .
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Web Log 6.28.23
Status Update
Not much online time today. Old Sommersburr, who was ill and whom I expected to die a few times before, seems to have gone to his reward at last, and we have a new tomcat, or tomkitten, someone dumped out rather than pay to have neutered.
Cybersecurity
How quickly we forget...Mercola reports as "news" what Al Gore said in his books, which is also what George Orwell predicted in his. But people need to READ it as news.
Zazzle
Cheap plastic sunglasses are recommended as party favors. This flimsy style is cheap enough for children's parties. There are nicer models recommended as favors for bridesmaids and groomsmen, and you can transfer the design from one model to another. Basically a little album of our butterfly photos. You could mix them up, or add your own images and messages.
How would sunglasses with the image printed right on the frames work? I wonder.
Weird Weather
Last year, during a summer that was mild but well within our normal range, someone who'd been listening to too much commercial television asked me if I'd ev-ah seen such weather. "Of course," I said, reminding the person of years. Person obviously thought I was no fun.
But this year's weather has been weird.
First we hardly had any winter weather at all. No hard freezes, only one sprinkling of snow. New York State seemed to have grabbed all the cold weather and sat on it. I didn't even need to dig out the serious blanket-and-quiltage this winter. I ran a 300-watt room heater, and frequently turned it off, while sleeping under one sheet, one cotton blanket, and sometimes my knitted shawl. I took some more blankets out for airing but did not actually put them on the bed. From November to March the weather was chilly, but not what even Virginians can call cold with a straight face.
Then the mildly chilly weather just stayed and stayed through the coolest spring anyone can remember. Day after day the outdoor temperatures have been perfect for me, no real need for heating or cooling, days in the 55-to-80-degrees-Fahrenheit range and overnight lows in the 45-to-65-degrees range. Anyone who's mildly hyperthyroid will agree that if the weather were going to be the same every day for the rest of our lives, this is the way it should be. People taking blood pressure medication are actually complaining about the lack of sweaty, steamy afternoons in between the mildly warm, sunny ones and the windy, rainy, chilly ones. Our June weather report contains several record lows for the time of year.
It's been sort of unreal to read or hear the news from the rest of the world...Hot and dry enough for serious wildfires, in Nova Scotia, in spring? Who knew that was possible? Now e-friends on the West Coast are having normal weather, New York is basking in flowers and sunshine, I'm revelling in the sort of cool June we don't get nearly often enough to suit me, and Texas is scorching in day after day of afternoon highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Life is not fair. Weather is not fair. I didn't even want to post about this until the Weather Service assured us that it's due to change. Texas is supposed to see some sort of break, with no mention of tornados or hurricanes yet, this afternoon. Virginia is supposed to get the ninety-degree afternoons our cardiovascular patients have been pining for, too.
We have had years of weird weather before. Not exactly this pattern of weird weather, but others. They did not add up to anybody's predictions of "global climate change," for hotter or for colder. They were anomalies, after which regression toward the mean was observed. One or sometimes two years of really unusual weather are normally followed by several years of really normal, ordinary weather.
Early in the literature of almost every culture on Earth, as written language developed, there appears a legend of an epic weather disaster that seemed to destroy the whole Earth while only Our Ancestors, the Chosen People, escaped. In cultures that existed longer as cohesive cultures before written language developed, the legends tell of more than one disaster. In cultures that have had written language longer, multiple disasters are described in more precise, meaning narrower, terms: In Grandpa's time there were great and terrible droughts, and in his grandfather's time there were great and terrible floods, that destroyed whole towns but not the whole Earth.
Virginia's epic hurricane, which occurred after the Weather Service started giving hurricanes cutesy-wutesy human names and was called Camille, became a legend people told their grandchildren. By several measures of awfulness, Camille wasn't even much of a hurricane; it just happened further north and further inland than a normal hurricane, where people had never seen a hurricane before and weren't prepared. Camille did a lot of damage but not nearly so much as Katrina, which hit a place where hurricanes were not a complete novelty, but where denser population and more expensive buildings made Katrina, at the very least, ten times as expensive as Camille. But for those who want to compare the awfulness of recent weather disasters, someone Out There calculated that the Johnstown Flood, which destroyed towns in New York and Pennsylvania and was still remembered and talked about a hundred years later, did more damage to more people's property than Katrina did. Hurricane Camille deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when people don't prepare for the unusual. Hurricane Katrina deserves to be remembered as a story about what happens when everyone expects someone else--especially government!--to take care of things. The Johnstown Flood, which occurred after one storm broke a few large dams, approaches the scale of the weather legends preserved by people who had no means of precise calculation and long-distance communication, when fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc., appeared to be destroying the whole Earth--at least as much of it as anyone knew anything about, anyway.
Most of the people I know are what our ancestors would have called old, as in grandparents, and have seen a lot of unusual weather, a few disasters. We learned that the word tsunami was more accurate than the older word, "tidal wave," but during the winter before Hurricane Katrina people were still talking about The Tsunami that washed away whole towns in a few South Pacific countries. There were a few other hurricanes with human names that did a lot of damage; Agnes, Hugo, Ivan. During the short lifespan of this web site we saw North Carolina, where one foot of snow can be considered a disaster, buried in six feet of snow. Not too long ago we saw old Grandmother Pele, the fire spirit, redesigning Hawaii again. Alaskan baby-boomers and their elders remember "The" earthquake of 1964. Some African baby-boomers remember temperatures officially recorded as peaking at 131 degrees Fahrenheit, measured properly in the shade, but they weren't in the shade and they saw thermometers reading 140 degrees or more. In the Blue Ridge Mountains the summer of 1980 was pleasant, but continent-wide the 1980 heat wave has been blamed for more fatalities than any recent hurricane or tornado. So we've seen fire, and we've seen rain; we've seen things that don't happen in every decade, or century.
We have, of course, seen different ones than our grandparents did. Nobody I know has personal memories of the snow on the fourth of July in 1920, but our grandparents had. The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1901 rates in between the Johnstown Flood and Hurricane Katrina on the scale of property damage done by a single storm. The 1930s recorded some of the worst heat waves in US history, and one of the coldest, snowiest winters. Then there was 1816, remembered as the Year Without a Summer, and 1780, the year of the Dark Day--weather phenomena so memorable that major churches still point to them as the fulfillments of prophecies of the end of the world. (By now, how closely events of 1780 foretold the end of the world is a good question.)
On the scale of weather events, a mild summer, followed by an abnormally mild winter, followed by a positively chilly spring, is pretty tidgy.
It is not proof of "global warming" or the impending loss of most of the continent due to rising sea level.
It is not proof of "global cooling" or the impending ice age in which all but the tropical countries are doomed to become uninhabitable.
It is not proof that global climate change may not take place, however much it counters the claim that global climate change is taking place fast enough to be seen now.
It is proof that, once again, we're living through memorable weather. In thinking about global climate change, yearly weather quirks are irrelevant.
So is the local climate change that really is "warming" our cities and costing us a few lives, mostly of older people with cardiovascular disease, every summer. Actual weather patterns, movements of hotter and colder air driven by wind, aggravate the local warming or "greenhouse" effect in some places, some summers, and mitigate it in others. That's why, if you ask Google how many heat-related deaths the United States has seen within our lifetime, Google will direct you straight to epa.gov, where you'll see a spiky chart with its all-time high point in 1980.
Apart from the 1980 heat wave--and seriously, I was keeping a diary in 1980, there were lots of days when my brother and I took extra cold showers, just to cool off, and lolled in front of the window fan until ordered to get up and do something useful, but in the Blue Ridge Mountains there were no Code Red days in 1980--the chart of heat-related fatalities jitters up and down like an EKG, but the general trend is upward. To some extent that's because interest in the "global warming" narrative has driven some hospitals to count more cases as "heat-related" since 2000 than they did before 2000. In fact a new line has been added to the chart to show the looser criteria for counting deaths as "heat-influenced" since 2000; the summer of 2000 was brutal in many places, the heat-related death count for 2000 was higher than for any other year since 1980, and increased fear of Code Red heat has actually contributed to the local warming effect as more people have cranked up the air conditioning. But the bottom line is that extreme temperatures kill people, and local warming is increasing the frequency of heat-related fatalities.
What to do? Turn off the air conditioners, for pity's sake, and park the cars. Get out. But stay near water and shade. Maintain green space and healthy interpersonal distance. Consider replacing heat-trapping paved roads with shell or gravel surfaces. Recognize that living more than fifteen feet above or below ground level is like prostitution--there's no way to stop some people indulging in it, but it should be a crime for anyone else to make a profit by exploiting those people--and that, while it might arguably be possible to pack more people into a few "ghost towns" out West, the population of the Eastern States is unsustainably dense already and needs everything we can ethically do to thin it down.
Mild though the summer's been, on a sunny afternoon a town ten miles from mine is starting to show downtown temperatures fifteen degrees hotter than my home. The difference will be twenty degrees or more when the sun really starts beating down on us in July. The official temperature, measured in the shade at the weather station, used to run three degrees warmer than the temperature here, and still runs less than ten degrees warmer. The temperature on the streets, where the new stock of drug addicts imported from Knoxville lie on the pavement waiting to die, and the desperate working mothers try not to sweat through their clothes so they can keep their jobs, and the factory laborers, oh mercy, at least they're all young...So far it's only been in the nineties, in this record-"cold" June.
I don't think of myself as making sacrifices to minimize my contribution to the local warming of Kingsport, Tennessee. I don't live there; I have never, least of all when I did live there, wanted to live there. I don't drive; I wanted to learn how to drive, in case of emergencies, and in the learning process I soon realized that emergencies are the only situations in which I want to drive. I work close to home, and do what commuting I do on foot; I've wanted to do that all my life. I take extra cold baths and use a window fan, not an air conditioner. There's never been a television set in my home. I cut up food with a knife and stir them together with a spoon, not an electrical device. I minimize cooking in summer (baked goods, slow-grilled meat, and slow-simmered soup are winter treats), and do most of it outdoors. My taste always has been to listen to and participate in live, acoustic music, unamplified. My parents chose to set up the water heater and toilet so that they work efficiently enough for one person on solar power alone. Running all electrical devices entirely on solar power is still something I'm working on; all-solar lighting is within sight. When you get accustomed to living lightly on the land, Gentle Readers, it feels natural and pleasant, and you wouldn't want to live in an overcrowded, overheated city and waste energy heating up the "greenhouse." I certainly don't.
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Web Log 6.27.23
Topics: Agenda 21, Christian, Gardening, Green, Zazzle.
Agenda 21
The United Nations officially discarded something called Agenda 21, an unethical attempt on the part of the mediation group to push centralized planning with an overall goal of boosting the Chinese economy at the United States' expense. It's not appropriate for the UN to have agendas; any evidence that they're finding time to formulate domestic policy plans to push at national governments should result in funding cuts and reduction of work time. Nevertheless, people with enough brains to plan more significant actions than screaming "Marg bar America" still exist, they still hate the United States, and they're still funding the grants to install more slums in formerly nice neighborhood. In the name of our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters, who loved the upscale retirement neighborhood known as Upper Sevier Terrace, always wanted to retire there, did retire there, and died just in time to miss the sight of Upper Sevier Terrace becoming a "scary neighborhood" full of drug addicts squatting in abandoned stores and offices, this web site sends an empathy hug to James A. Tweedie of San Francisco.
Christian
I don't know to what extent this is true for other faith traditions...Christians who pay too much attention to the group dynamics at church, instead of the teachings of their faith, are prone to a sort of simplistic thinking. Because doing the right thing tends to feel good at least on some level, some of us think a good mood is the same thing as doing the right thing. Because some of us don't want to examine our consciences, we want to shift the focus away from honesty in business, fidelity in marriage, merit in creative work, etc., to the "feelings" some of us find easy at least to fake. Some of us think that just keeping a grin pinned on our faces, 24/7, makes us better or even nicer people. It doesn't. We need to be reminded that real Christianity has the depth and dimensions that come from admitting that real Christians, even the great saints, are not "happy all the time" and that nothing is more repulsive than a big toothy forced smile. Not only could we make it easier for the individuals in greatest need of consolation to find fellowship in churches rather than bars, we could even do something about the epidemic of homicide-suicides.
(Murder didn't start in the 1980s, but the homicide-suicide pattern did...because that specific mental illness is almost always a reaction to certain drugs, some of which are illegal, and others of which are popular "prescription medication" for "depression." So it's possible that if we accepted "depression" as something most people have, for hours or days or months, at some time in life as a symptom of a physical disease, if we monitored the "depressed" moods of ourselves and those closest to us as road signs on the quest for a cure of that physical disease, people would avoid taking the unhelpful medication for their symptoms and find their real cures.)
Here is a long, but much more cheering, Christian poem:
Gardening
Do you have more prunings than you can burn? Are they too big to break down well in the toilet? I have a big brush pile. This article shows some creative uses for a brush pile, especially if you live in a place where a brush pile is a fire hazard.
What about walls to retain soil on slopes and mark boundaries? My home came with privet. By the time I was born, nobody was sure just who had planted the privet, but it's still a lovely fragrant hedge that attracts cardinals, so Cheer! Cheer! Cheer! for whoever it was. Privet is great stuff for hedges--hard to kill, not attractive to nuisance insects, white flowers with a beautiful scent for about a week and just your basic green leaves for the rest of the year/ I find it hard to believe that anyone really doesn't like it, but possible to believe that some people can't grow it. Here are some alternatives that may work for the non-privet people...if you really enjoy fiddling with your garden, walls of fruit, vegetables, and herbs are possible. In theory you could have a "wall" of potted edible plants on the balcony of an apartment!
Green
Virginia should profit by Pennsylvania's example. We don't want no frackin'round here!
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pfas-chemicals-chevron-fracking-lawsuit-bryan-latkanich/
Zazzle
It's a cool, wet summer here, though I keep reading about fierce heat, killer drought, and wildfires in other places...but soon it will be hot everywhere. Beat the heat! Stay hydrated! The photo on the reusable water bottle was a lucky shot. These little skipper butterflies are mostly composters, but they do sip nectar, and here are two of different species sipping from one flower.
Not mine, but cute:
Someone bought a Tiger Swallowtails blanket for Virginia. Here is a Zebra Swallowtails blanket for Tennessee:
Not mine, but cute:
I tend to see, acquire, make, and sell things that appeal to women. Wonder why? So people ask "Where are the men's things?" Serious cyclists like metal water bottles but here, for those who believe women's gifts should be for the adornment of the person and men's gifts for the adornment of the vehicle, are butterfly car flags. Mine features a new Monarch image on front and my favorite Monarch on back, as a sample. You can substitute any image and text of your choice, from my collection or your own. :
Not mine, but definitely related in spirit--I think it's Florida's rare Zebra Longwing:
I don't know how to make the fullest use of Zazzle's foil cards technology.
Whoever did this Monarch image does know how to use the foil cards system.
Here's my silver version:
And this one, with silhouettes of different kinds of butterflies...lovely!
Mark Warner on Broadband
From U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-VA:
"
Friends,I’m just reaching out to make sure you heard the big news… Virginia is getting a HUGE investment to expand broadband!Today, I announced almost $1.5 billion in federal funding to improve internet coverage across the Commonwealth. This is funding made possible by the bipartisan infrastructure law, seismic legislation that is making transformational investments in infrastructure of all types – roads, bridges, airports, public transit, rail projects, and today… internet!I was a lead negotiator on this law, and I knew from the jump that funding for broadband had to be a priority. As I visit communities across the Commonwealth, I hear frustrations about lack of coverage time and time again… and if the pandemic made anything clear, it’s that high-speed internet isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a need-to-have, so families across Virginia don’t have to drive their kids to McDonald’s parking lots to do their homework.That’s why I made sure broadband funding was in the final version of the bill, and why I worked across the aisle to get it passed. Following huge investments from the American Rescue Plan and now the bipartisan infrastructure law, it’s safe to say that if we don’t have universal coverage in the next couple years, it’ll be a failure of execution… not a failure of funding.I also know that broadband isn’t actually accessible if it’s physically present but tremendously expensive. That’s why I also made sure there are programs designed to cut the costs of coverage for Virginians that meet certain conditions. Read more about the Affordable Connectivity Program and check your eligibility here.I’m going to keep working to make sure that this funding is deployed efficiently so that we can finally close the digital divide. This award is a tremendous step, but my work advocating for broadband is far from over. If you’re interested in hearing more about this announcement, I filmed a short video that you can see here.If you want to reach out to me about broadband or another issue that’s important to you, you can send me an email any time using the form on my Senate website. You can also follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
[signature graphic: Mark R. Warner]
"
Book Review: How Zantheus Fell from the Sky
Title: How Zantheus Fell from the Sky
Author: L.I.T.Tarassenko
Publisher: Kindle
Quote: "[I]t had not been a fire in front of him at all. What was in front of him was an enormous mirror."
Things that happen in this story are not necessarily physically possible: it's an allegory that works (sort of) on at least two levels, but as a fantasy novel it's not the kind that lets you believe that it could have happened in some other kind of world. Zantheus spends three days climbing up the mountain. When he gets there he sees an enormous mirror, feels that gigantic arms are throwing him down from the mountaintop, but lands unhurt and immediately starts walking back to town. Along the way he picks up companions.
They're not very believable as people, but neither is Zantheus. One of the metaphoric levels on which the story works is the reintegration of the personality. Zantheus is a "paragon of the knights" of an order who live in a "Sanctuary" below the mountain. As such he's brave, strong, disciplined, but a little bit robotic about how order's code of honor, having no personality to speak of. He meets Leukos, a young man who never stops writing, and Anthe, a woman who only feels and never thinks, and Tromo, a terrified little orphan who never speaks (funnily enough Zantheus is an orphan too), and Sophia, the woman Leukos is really following even as Leukos leads the group back to town. One of them will die in their many perilous adventures. The others will unite as a blended family, or integrated personality.
They meet some people who are friendly and helpful: nice older couples who share food, sell them stuff to replace what they've lost, and guide them through the country through which thy travel back to their town; and people who are less helpful. Zantheus has to struggle with the bizarre hamartia plant (does everyone remember that hamartia means error?). They cross the city dump, where they see people who become addicted to the smoke of burning dyed leather. Zantheus beats up, and the others flee from, people who want to take them prisoner or kill them for no very clear reason. Then there's the pair of twin sisters who seem, when they meet them in the flesh, to be completely insane and fairly annoying, but then an image that looks like them is enshrined as the goddess at the Academy where friendly scholars insist that they stop and lecture...
The story of these people's adventure is not quite a novel, though it's about as close as some things that attempt to be novels in the fantasy genre. It's a statement about Society, and also a statement about which parts of the personality Zantheus needs to keep. If you want something light yet also philosophical to read on the bus, How Zantheus Fell from the Sky should last about a week.
A Recent Song I Loved? How Recent?
This is another response to another Long and Short Reviews prompt. Click for links to what other people posted...
Music was a big part of my life up to about age thirty. Like all good Granola Green parents, my parents taught us to sing instead of turning on the stereo or radio. I was in the school band and chorus; as a result I was able to pay some of my tuition expenses by singing in college, and even made a little money with a retrospective recording in my late twenties. Then I slept on one side all night and woke up with some tinnitus and hearing loss on that side.
I'm Highly Sensory-Perceptive. I lived in an unpleasantly loud world before that hearing loss. I knew what caused it and how to cure it...and I preferred to live with it until recently, when it seems I've incurred enough "wear-and-tear" hearing loss that I don't mind letting the little stapedius muscles open my ears any more. The only disadvantage was that the tinnitus interfered with my enjoyment of music. I stopped buying new records or looking for new radio shows. I've listened to very little music between the summer my left ear partly closed itself off, and the autumn of 2020 when I found myself in a place where I could listen to music while using the Internet.
But mostly I've listened to songs e-friends shared, and while those songs often came out during my minimal-listening years, they are old enough to have been posted free for all on YouTube. They're not all that recent.
The most recent songs I've listened to have been topical, too, and some readers might hate them.
So the problem is to find a definition of "recent" that works for me. I hereby define "recent," in this post, as meaning "more recent than the Gershwins."
Then the question arises whether the song has to be recently written, or only recently recorded.
And most of the more recent songs I've heard, liked, learned, are religious songs. For some posts that would be fine. For this one, I don't know everyone else's religious identity, and I want a song everyone can sing.
And can it be a choral performance, or must it be a song people can sing or whistle?
I love that Wendell Berry lived to write this poem, that Malcolm Dalglish found it after he'd gone back to Scotland and set it to music. But it's not a song people are likely to sing around a campfire.
This one is recent, but not too recent to have stood the test of time. People can sing it and whistle it. So...I think that's the song I'd like to share today.
"Haven't you liked anything newer than that?" Well, actually, yes...In the 1980s the word for the kind of music I was into was "fusion." It wasn't folk, it wasn't classical, it wasn't country, it wasn't rock; it was just music, as performed and composed by people at different levels of formal training in different musical traditions. So I got onto the Substack list of this visitor from China who's trying to spread awareness of the Chinese zither called a guzheng. She's played country music duets with a banjo, she's performed a duet with a freight train...I like this wacky approach to music. Wu Fei has studied and trained for some time, obviously; in China this is a classical instrument. But she sounds as if she's having fun. Most of her "songs" are instrumental performances, like this "Silverleaf Night Song."
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Book Review: Lies My Government Told Me
Title: Lies My Government Told Me
Author: Robert W. Malone
Date: 2022
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 978-1-5107-7325-7
Length: 645 e-pages
Quote: "I never really allowed myself to confront the possibility that we might not be the good guys.”
[Kindle's automatic e-footnote: Malone MD MS, Robert W . Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (Children’s Health Defense) (p. 12). Skyhorse. Kindle Edition.]
With a title like that emblazoned in black on red on the cover, you've been warned not to expect a fun read. By the size of the printed book, you're warned not to expect a quick read either. This is a serious book for people who are seriously unhappy about the way our bureaucracy handled the coronavirus panic, and want to do something about it. No conspiracy theories, no advice to prepare for the end of life as we know it on Earth--just sensible facts, and solutions that are easy to implement, in a peaceful and orderly way, if we can muster the collective fortitude to implement them.
So what's Malone going to ask you to do, you might reasonably wonder. He's going to recommend that you get out of debt, stay out of debt, prepare to homeschool any children you may have if necessary, cultivate a garden, and be a kind, generous, spiritual, liberal-minded person. Politically, he will also recommend reviving the Trump rule that federal employees can be fired.
So watch a certain type of federal employee screech and howl that Malone has gone off the deep end, turned against his fellow bureaucrats, gone off the rails. Those are the ones who need to hear Trump's best known line, and they know it. Malone writes about our nation's capital with love and respect, as one who's lived and thrived in the city.
"Anti-vaccine." "Anti-government." Are we either of those things, Gentle Readers? I know some people are Orthodox Jews or committed vegans, but most of us are definitely pro-vaccine when it comes to things like rabies, smallpox, or diphtheria. An analogy came to me this evening. I was in this little convenience store that I'd like to see succeed; they'd had a good deal on peanut butter but they'd run out, so I bought some peanut butter candy instead. It was stale. Does choosing not to eat this peanut butter, because I don't need the candy coating and the peanut butter is stale, mean I'm anti-peanut-butter?
I'd propose an amendment more worthy of a President Kennedy, or a President DeSantis or whoever takes the responsibility for stopping the trainwreck toward which the current administration is careening. We don't need all those employees to be fired. They're superfluous, entitled, and annoying but they are, on the whole, good workers with pleasant dispositions and only slightly degraded work ethics. We need to put them on an assignment to learn about private-sector employment. Let them come back to Washington to report on what they've learned a couple of times a year, and pay them for that. Otherwise they're on their own, Let them find out for themselves what the taxpayers are up against. I'd expect that the best federal workers will be the first to recommend eliminating their former jobs from the budget.
Malone's right. So are the other people who've contributed sections to his book. If you've been reading your daily Defender the first half of the book, which recounts the story of the coronavirus panic from Malone's unique point of view as a federal employee who had worked on "gene therapy: himself, will be a long dry plod through memories you'd probably prefer not to remember in detail. Hang in there. Those events need to be on the record, and Malone's viewpoint adds value to them.
I particularly like that, although I think everyone in Glyphosate Awareness, the Children's Health Defense, Right To Know, and related movements shares a certain opinion of Anthony Fauci, Malone resists the temptation to make this book another attack on Fauci. It's a very ethical, rational takedown of evil ideas, not of people. Malone reminds us that there are people in the upper echelons of power who laugh at Klaus Schwab and limits himself to one throwaway line about how Schwab seems to be setting himself up as a target for blame. Cool.
I wish he'd written about the more serious, ongoing medical concerns raised by glyphosate and paraquat... "Mercy, Priscilla, are you suggesting that a book that's already 645 pages long needed to be any longer?!" Well, no, I suppose not. Though the last 57 pages are only endnotes. (There's an index, too; in the interest of keeping the book small enough to fit into people's hands, the index is on Malone's web site. If you're going to write about the coronavirus panic in history, later, you'll want to print the index before the Internet implodes.)
If you're alive and would prefer to stay alive, you need to read this book. You don't have to read it all at once. Let a chapter or section a day sink in, over a few weeks. It feels really good to finish reading this book. You'll be glad you've read it.
Tortie Tuesday Post
I'm doing some market testing with the timing and format of these Petfinder posts. It's about which of our little photo contests' "winners" find homes fastest. These posts are made for sharing, so please share them everywhere! The hashtag #TortieTuesday is not for Twitter alone.
Zipcode 10101: Molly from East Orange
They don't mention anything special about Molly except that photogenic face.
Zipcode 20202: Duchess from Bowie
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/duchess-65004476/md/bowie/spca-humane-society-of-prince-georges-county-md-md21/
Some may understandably want not to give money to the Humane Pet Genocide Society for any purpose. However, that photo is a winner.
For those who prefer not to support HSUS in any way, here's an alternate selection:
Mother cat's web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/triscuit-64775741/dc/washington/city-dogs-city-kitties-rescue-dc22/
It's the double dose of tortitude that makes this picture special. Mother cat Triscuit and daughtier Jolie can be adopted together. The black kitten has its own web page...you might as well take it too. Triscuit is said to be an extra-cuddly cat. This could mean that she thinks of cuddling with humans as a status indicator and won't be pleased if the kittens sit on her preferred lap without her, but since she will not be having any more kittens, in theory she should get along with the ones she's already had. Triscuit was less than a year old when these kittens were born, and may grow bigger.
Zipcode 30303: Olive from Milledgeville
Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/olive-61462587/ga/milledgeville/baldwin-county-animal-control-ga836/
They make her sound like a typical Torbie--sweet, sassy, playful, the usual things people say about adoptable cats. But if you go to her web site you'll see that she has quite a distinctive coat. Olive is currently incarcerated in a county shelter. Someone needs to go and bail her out. Whatever she's done, she'll never do it again, until the next time.
Monday, June 26, 2023
Book Review: Wolves
Title: Wolves (I Bring the Fire, volume 1)
Author: C. Gockel
Date: 2017
Publisher: cgockelwrites.com
Quote: "Fenrir isn't precisely friendly, especially not towards males."
Amy Lewis, 24-year-old veterinary student, travels with an animal some of her classmates identified as a large rodent. Taking a good look at the animal rather than just judging it, Amy recognizes it as a young female canine, wolf or wolfish dog, and calls it Fenrir. It's too little to do much damage, though, when Amy crawls out of her wrecked car to face the serial murderer who's stalking her through the dark, mean streets of Chicago.
But, because this is an urban fantasy romance, enter the Norse god Loki. He's not yet looking for love; he's looking for his ex-wife and their sons. Amy is his type, but the romance between them stays chaste and sweet...because this is volume one of a series where the adventures move too fast to leave the characters much time for romancing, and because the writer/publisher knows that wanting to see exactly how Loki would propose to a mortal woman will keep some readers interested in all of the novels and spin-off short stories, in sequence if possible.
Remembering the Eddas and Sagas in precise detail is not essential to understanding this story--Gockel has fun with the original storyline, anyway--but it will help. Norse lore seems to have spliced family legends into philosophical myths. The different ancestral families were sometimes friends with each other, sometimes enemies, both before and after peace was sealed--for one lifetime, at least--by the official weddings of young people who might or might not have been "in love" with other people. Loki, the rebellious son who came to embody the spirits of rebellion and mischief and chaos, was married in some stories. The stories that sound more like family history gave him a bland longsuffering wife, Sigyn, and two children. The stories that sound more like mythology married him to Angerboda, which means what it sounds like, and made them the parents of Fenris Ulf, a vicious wolf, and Hel, the queen of the underworld. For those who sympathize with Loki it's possible to imagine that his "goddess" wife might more properly have been called Anganboda, the foreboding or bringer of joy, rather than anger; Loki might have said that his pranks were meant to bring joy and mirth.
In this remake, Loki lost his first wife Aggie and daughter Helen long ago, got over them, and is still on speaking terms with his ex-wife Sigyn, speaking to her mainly about their sons. He's looking for them when he finds Amy. Though he last visited our world in Amy's grandfather's time, he knows a scumbag when he smells one, and his thoughts alone are enough to kill the murderer and set fire to the photos the nasty creep is carrying around (of other people he's killed). Amy immediately demonstrates that she really is Loki's type by stamping out the fire, saying that those people's families may want the photos.
Now she owes him. Now she has to take him home to meet her dear old Ukrainian-American grandmother. Actually the grandmother happens to have a rental apartment Loki can use. That's not all he'll ask of them, though. He will take more, of course, but what he's asking Amy and her grandmother for in this novel is to go with him to the Light Elves' world. The Light Elves like humans--too much to suit Odin, who banished them from our world for that reason, as you might or might not have remembered--and they all genuinely enjoy Amy's grandmother's story of escaping from her "Communist-occupied" country in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, the rest of the adventure is not so sweet.
Amy set out to see her grandmother, like Little Red Riding Hood, and met a predator, a "wolf" of the worst kind. Her own little pet, and Fenris Ulf himself--here Loki's subconscious mind and powers, a deadly force that sometimes assumes but is in no way confined to the form of a moral wolf--continue to interact and shape the story after the kind of "wolf" that needs killing is good and dead. If you like big wolfish dogs behaving well, you will enjoy this story.
The e-copy I received is not amenable to pagination, but Wolves is a short novel, not a mere novella or novelette. If you enjoy chortling at the odd mash-up of Chicago and Asgard, this book will keep you chortling through hours of commute and wait time.
If this review were being written by the sort of lower-case-t twits currently running Twitter, it would end with something like "Oh dear, oh dear! This novel is likely to encourage young women who are attracted to 'bad boys' to befriend or even date guys who bring stolen goods into their houses! It might influence people to do bad things! It must be censored!"
Since this is, instead, a libertarian feminist web site, I'll say it in French: Pouf!
Butterfly of the Week: Malayan Batwing
Naturalists have had fun with this one. Atrophaneura nox, the Malayan Batwing, has several variant forms that are consistent enough to be counted as subspecies, and the subspecies names on various lists include nix, noctis, noctula, nox, and nyx. All of which words can be translated as having something to do with "night." So it's the Red-Bodied Swallowtail of the Night-Night, or of the Little Night, or...Determining whether butterflies belong to separate species is tedious work, and it seems to go faster when the subspecies names get silly.
Photo by L.C. Goh, who seems to have spent years collecting and arranging butterfly pictures at pbase.com; this one is at https://pbase.com/lcgoh/image/161139269 .
The structure of its wings, and its life cycle, put it in the Swallowtail group, although it does not actually have "swallowtails" on its hind wings. Naturalists have quibbled about this. All of the Swallowtails were originally classified as Papilio, and in the nineteenth century some wanted to give nox the genus name Karanga. In the twentieth century, after all the Red-Bodied Swallowtails had been given the genus name Atrophaneura, some proposed that nox be assigned to the genus Parides. Others argued that Atrophaneura was the best genus name for the Red-Bodied Swallowtails most similar to nox. This argument seems to be currently accepted by most entomologists. Almost everything online about this species calls it Atrophaneura nox.
This male was found iridescing in a park in Thailand by O. Kosterin, who was visiting from Russia.
The butterflies are fairly large, with wingspans of three or four inches, sometimes a little more. Females tend to be larger than males. Forewings have a shape defined by what entomologists call an arched costa, a tough "rib" of tissue along the front edge. Males have a narrow fold along the inside edge of each hindwing from which scent is released as they fly. The basic wing color of all the Atrophaneuras is black, but it can fade to brown, shimmer in iridescent blue, or show highlights of pale grey that can look like white stripes. One English name for this species was "Blue Batwing," but since other Batwings can also look blue the official English name is "Malayan Batwing." Apart from the red patches on the body, nox doesn't have conspicuous red or white spots, as other Atrophaneuras do. Museum specimens fade quickly to a rich deep brown with or without lighter brown stripes on the edges of the forewings. Forewings are about twice the size of hindwings.
This one was tweeted by Dr Amar-Singh HSS. The butterfly's body tends to look black with a reddish halo from above, red from below. The red color may show only on the head, in patches on either side of the thorax, all around the lower thorax, and sometimes at the end of the abdomen.
A forest dweller, the Malayan Batwing occurs in slightly different forms in many different forests. A Singapore subspecies or variety is believed to be extinct. In addition to the nox, noctix, nyx wordplay, other subspecies names include erebus, henricus, banjermasinus, solokanus, niepeltiana, petronius, smedleyi, tungensis, mirifica, hirokane, and miekaae, each found on a different island. When the last two subspecies were added to the list, enough nitpicking studies of dead specimens had been done for
Masashi Hirata and Takashi Myakawa to write a book about them. Teachers can borrow the book from https://iss.ndl.go.jp/books/R000000004-I8030622-00?ar=4e1f .For a simpler illustration of the range of difference between subspecies erebus (typically large) and nyx (typically small), visit https://swallowtails.net/A_nox.htm .
Nix and nyx seem to be spelling variations but some other species and subspecies names have been proposed, and dropped, for these butterflies. Old books may list species strix, neesius, and memercus, which are now regarded as variations of nox, and may list erebus, henricus, and noctis as distinct species. A subspecies hainanensis was found to be more closely related to A. varuna, which looks very similar to nox, and is now usually called A. varuna astorion.
In the shapes of this pair of Batwings you can see the structural resemblance to the much bigger and more colorful Birdwings. Though new, these museum pieces already look drab. Like many living things, all their visual appeal fades in the minute the heart stops. Dead butterflies retain some scientific interest, but they're hardly decorative.
Photo shared on Flickr by Bugsmanyeh, who thought this was a newly hatched male and noted that it would stop and rest, as shown, in between flights up to the flowers on a tall tree nearby.
On a global scale, the many variants of nox are classified together as a "species of least concern," but local subspecies may be of greater concern. This web site officially deplores the multitude of sites offering dead bodies for sale. Dead butterflies are easy enough to find in nature that one should never pay for a body. Butterflies are now collected with cameras, which makes collecting much more hygienic and never fills the house with disagreeable Dermestid beetles who will, if your house is clean, fly out to check you for dead skin. The beetles don't bite living skin, they're only interested in body tissues that are completely dead, but the combination of prickly little beetle feet, that hurry-up-and-die-please vibe, and these beetles' superficial resemblance to the dreaded bedbug, should be enough to motivate any butterfly fancier to invest in a camera and burn any dead bodies that may be moldering away in a drawer.
Showy though the black-and-red color scheme can look, in its deep-woods habitat Atrophaneura nox is actually well camouflaged. It's worth clicking on https://www.naturalista.mx/taxa/469824-Atrophaneura-nox/browse_photos to see a whole series of motion shots showing how well this butterfly fades into the shadows, resting or flying.
Some living individuals' black wing veins are outlined with crisp white stripes. Fluttering in a shadow, they look like...shadows. Well, like shadows moving faster than usual. This picture was posted on Pinterest. I saw no author name, but a commenter addressed the poster as "Jimmy."
Not much is officially known about the life cycle or cycles of these butterflies. Liew Nyok Lin's Blogspot contains a beautiful photo essay of a nox Liew described as a "rather tiny male," which Liew found as a caterpillar and watched mature in Malaysia.
I wanted to gank one of the caterpillar photos--it looks like other Atrophaneura caterpillars only different; they're all designed to look as inedible as possible, like a large unhealthy bird dropping with bristles--and I have that right under "fair use," but I just couldn't. You have to see the whole photo sequence. This is the blog of a serious scientist. He didn't rear the little fellow in a cage; he went back and looked for the pupa, then watched Tiny Male eclose (in February; this is a tropical species for which "February" means warm, slightly less rainy, weather). You have to see it for yourself.
What he documented is that Atrophaneura nox is different from A. luchti, A. varuna, etc., at all stages of life. It's not radically different--nox and luchti have reportedly been forced to crossbreed and produced offspring that lived to fly--but it seems to be a species difference rather than a look produced by environmental conditions. Also, while the French Wikipedia page could only say that the caterpillars probably have osmeteria as most swallowtail larvae do, Liew photographed his little friend poking out a bright orange osmeterium.
Science is still being made, Gentle Readers.
Sunday, June 25, 2023
Web Log 6.23.23-6.24.23
It's a 24-hour time frame with a hole in it...
Amazon
I've shared this link several times; the comments are worth reading too, though the work-around some commenters suggested did not work for me when I tried it. There's another work-around I've described that also seems to need sharing every year or so, as writers wail, "Did you forget to post a review on Amazon?" about some book I've given four stars on Goodreads, Net Galley, and Library Thing. No, that's not possible. My Google account will never forget that it started out as an Amazon Associate account. Amazon buttons pop up everywhere. But Amazon is very deliberately blocking my reviews, although Net Galley sends them and Amazon does seem to be storing them. It's greed rather than a desire for transparency, and there's nothing really wrong with that except that Amazon tried to claim it was about transparency...Amazon now displays reviews only from people who bought the book from them. Publishers' review copies don't make any money for Amazon. What I complained bitterly about, when the must-buy-the-book-from-us policy went into effect, was that purchases made with giftcards don't count either, although they do make money for Amazon. (At the time a lot of online clients found it convenient to pay in Amazon giftcards.)
I don't use cards associated with any real bank account online, and I don't recommend you do either! If, however, you already do buy things online with a credit or debit card account, you may agree on a time when you will be able to log into my Amazon account, using a temporary password, and use your card to buy $50 worth of books. There's no rule about whose name appears on a card (more than one person has already done this) nor about where books are shipped. If you normally buy books for all your friends and relatives, you could have one book sent to my mailing address and the others sent to the next few people on your gift list. (Not that I'd object if you wanted to send me $50 worth of books from my wish list.) The only real requirements are that you buy $50 worth of books within an hour or so, then log out, so I can change the password back. I will not see your card number, nor will you see the password that will work after this shopping spree. "Priscilla King" is a business, of which you, if you choose to do this, are a temporary employee. After spending $50 on Amazon you quit.
In theory the non-writers who are thinking "What impatient little children these writers are! Don't they know that a book that gets four stars on Goodreads is sure to be bought by someone who will give it four stars on Amazon." Writers may understand this, but publishers don't. Today's publishers are no longer the mellow, independent old gentlemen of yesteryear, who had one list per year and could afford for people to discover the slow steady sellers. Today they're all driven yuppie-types, up to their teeth in credit-card debt, ready to shred a book (and its author's reputation) if it's not flying off store shelves in three weeks. After all they sent out review copies to well-known book lovers like Barb Taub and me; those review copies cost the publishers money, and they and the authors have a right to see our reviews on Amazon. But they won't.
I think this is heinously unfair to the authors and publishers, and amounts to religious discrimination against people who are seriously trying to "Owe no man any thing" and/or avoid extravagance. Most reviewers did, after all, originally go to Amazon because our houses and sometimes our stores had every available wall covered in books and we wanted to make a little room for a few new books. We buy books--new books, by the dozens, if we have the money. We go to book parties and ask authors to autograph books as graduation presents for our students. Chortling fondly, if not senilely, over memories of the relative who gave us the Bible (King James Version), Silent Spring, Albert Schweitzer's Life and Thought, and when we asked for "something about a kid" Anne Frank's Diary, for birthday presents in successive years in primary school, and buy similar book-as-flattery-and-as-goad selections for the children we know. But even the relatives who owned the oil fields in the years when they were gushing money, in my family, never did anything so extravagant as make small purchases with credit cards. We order books from publishers with postal money orders, or buy them from local stores with cash. The whole point of calling the bricks-and-mortar store I still want to open an "Internet Portal" was to make it easy for people I know to buy things from Amazon in a local store with cash.
The publishers, I'm sure, would come out ahead if they went back to the old plan of keeping ia book in stock and promoting it for two years, and Amazon would come out ahead if they limited reviews to people who had ordered books from Amazon, but accepted orders placed by publishers or clients or local booksellers for the reader, and orders made online with giftcards. Of course everyone feels desperate; the coronavirus panic has cost and is costing everyone money. But desperation is unseemly, and discourages customers.
Christian
Actually this article about spirituality is not specific. Sadhu Sundar Singh was a Christian but here, I think, he was writing to Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist people too.
Election 2024
Isn't it utterly typical of the Illiberal Left, not just to wallow in a lack of understanding of what RFK's actually said, but to go after his wife? She may not get another movie role, they threaten. Hoot. About time we had a First Lady who's a Summer and can wear colors that don't make practically everyone else look sickly. I think Cheryl Hines would be good in that role. And if they don't win? I think Kennedy's not advertising his wife's work is classy, and I didn't even know what she did, before...I think it's a pretty sure thing that if a big-name studio drops Hines for standing by her man, and a newer, smaller studio picks her up, they'll have a built-in fan club. I mean to say. I usually think blue-eyed blondes get more hype than they want or need already, but isn't she a fine specimen of the type?
Long story short, for those coming in late: Kennedy is not anti-vaccine. Nor am I. Pro-choice and pro-caution are two different things from anti-vaccine. It's like saying that people who sniff, squeeze, weigh, and thump before they buy are anti-fruit. I think even the COVID-19 vaccine actually did well, as poorly tested new vaccines go--it just didn't touch the now-dominant form of COVID=19, for which the effective preventive happens to be natural immunity.(Don't push me on that, though, because it's so likely that the last man I'll ever love, in a physical way, was one of the relatively few casualties.) I think there are some real anti-vaccine people in CHD, but that tells you as much about Kennedy's politics as the fact that there are some fanatical vegans in CHD. Y'know, there are women in CHD, too--RFK is a man.
(Is he the man for whom I'm going to vote? Afaik he's the only D who has a chance of winning, in 2024, if the Republicans don't totally throw away the election by in-fighting, but I find it hard to imagine the Chief Jackasses of the Donkey Party ever supporting a D so sensible. I find it hard to believe I'll have a chance to vote for him. If I had? Is a fish going to swim?)
Farming
A world without bees be a world without these:
Fashion
Actually, if you've ever looked at pigs' feet, their toe bones are exactly like high-heeled shoes. So when I see women wearing their sex toys out in the street, I redirect my mind from the image of what those shoes are actually built for doing to the relatively clean and wholesome image of pigs.
Holidays
I posted something for Mothers Day. I didn't post anything, except Zazzle merchandise, for Fathers Day. Probably that's because I've had twenty more years to get used to not having a father. Anyway the artist known as S.A.R.K. posted a lovely Fathers Day piece.
Pictures
You have to see JJ Pryor's pictures of the Dragon Boat Festival. Gorgeous decorated boats and vivid nighttime scenes:
Politics
Applied Conservative Studies 101: Always encourage any legitimate work as being preferable to welfarism...
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