Do you ever want to shout "STOP STOP STOP rushing by so fast, you summer days, it's not TIME for August yet"? Well, if you're in one of those places where May through August inclusive seem to have felt like the July heat wave, maybe not. Sigh. How much e-mail can I get through?
Books
It's fun being able to add books to a virtual bookstore, especially when they're reprints of books other people loved as much as I did. I read Vance Packard's Waste Makers for the first time when I was ten years old. It was one of a minority of grown-up books that were handed to me, as a child, that I understood in something approaching the way the author intende. A ten-year-old can understand that greedheads are encouraging people to waste stuff just to transfer money from our pockets to their pockets, that some other intelligent people of good will (besides my parents) like the idea of saving a tin can instead of buying a vase, poking holes in the lid of a gallon jug rather than buying a watering can. I liked Packard's style and I've been a recycler all my life. I'm not sure what Packard would have said about the new paperback edition of his book costing twenty times as much as it cost when he was here to collect his share of the money, but the book did give him a long, profitable publishing career for the second half of the twentieth century.
The National Book Festival...before the fifteenth of August? Mercy. Most years, even up to the twenty-fifth of August, Washington is a place to get out of. However, this has been a weird year. At the moment of posting: 75 degrees Fahrenheit at my local weather station = about 68 or 69 here, but that's only because we just had our thundershower for the day. It was 84 and 78. In D.C. they've not had rain yet and, per Google, it's 88 in the shade. They expect 92 again tomorrow afternoon, then the north wind and the break back to daytime highs in the low eighties, overnight lows in the 60s. Adding local warming and a crowd, the Book Festival will not be a good event for cardiac patients, but it never is. Others may enjoy it.
I'll admit it: I'm sharing this link because NetGalley dangled a review copy of Scalzi's new book in front of me, then said I couldn't get it. Say whaaat?! I begged the Scalzis themselves. They said they'd hold a contest, write down a number between 1 and 1000, and send the review copy to the person who guessed closest. By the time I opened the link there seemed to be over 1000 entries, and the number I was going to guess had been guessed. Repeatedly. I resigned myself to the idea that a lot of people want to read a book that has both Scalzi's name and a cat in an overcoat on the cover. Official publication date for that one is still a few months away, but the Book Festival might be a good place to pick up bargains on the authors "related" books. The National Book Festival tends to overhype the prestige and popularity of the authors it attracts, but usually does attract some good ones--and you never know who might be standing in line next to you. Celebrities and security. I prefer the Arlington book sale rumble. Someone Out There wants to go to this one.
Censorship
Must everyone in the White House be barred from all social media to keep them from anonymously whining for censorship? I remember a D relative enthusing at the computer center, "Don't you want to get e-mail from Michelle Obama?" Well, not necessarily e-mail...I will admit following the White House and FLOTUS accounts on Twitter was kinda' neat, even if they were constantly being hacked, pulled down, and re-created so that one had to notice not having seen them for a few weeks and go back and re-connect. I didn't follow Donald Trump, because he tweeted too much, because who wanted to look at his face, and because people always retweeted his tweets anyway. I did follow Melania Trump, though, for her insights into fashion for top-heavy women.
But of course, if they continue to allow censorship, filtering, "free speech does not equal reach" or any other effort to control social interaction, there won't be any social media..Passive message-absorbers already had television.
Child Safety
Obviously your grandchildren, if you have any, are The Most Adorable Children There Ever Were. If anyone thought otherwise, the grandparent brain would form a permanent filter around that person as Clearly Someone Who Doesn't Know Anything. The aunt brain is special, too. Aunts have the ability to imagine what grandparents see in their grandchildren, even while recognizing that our nieces and nephews really are...but anyway, whether you are an aunt/uncle or a grandparent, pictures of children don't belong on the Internet until the child is over 21 years old and can give legal consent, or not, based on the number of acquaintances who can guess who the child in the picture has grown up to be.
So this is the way to share grandparent-love on the Internet. No pictures that might identify the child or trigger people who have sick sexual or violent reactions to children. This post uses words, which people have to use their rational brains to read, thus short-circuiting any sick reactions that probably aren't triggered in their brains anyway. It describes something the child does that is obviously great fun for the child, the grandparents, and the readers. Other grandparents might share this poem with a child who might think of some similar way to provide good healthy laughter. Total winner in all categories.
On a more serious note...Twelve dead babies in the clinical trial, and our CDC still approved this vaccine for babies? A suggestion: Maybe we should be thinking about minimizing vaccines for babies. I survived, I think, six vax as an infant...my mother used to wonder whether that was why I was such a Weepy Weed. When my brother came along Mother happened to read that convulsions were a possible side effect, and belladonna was given to relieve them if they happened, for one of the recommenced vaccines. My siblings received no vax. My brother definitely was stronger and healthier than I was, and my sister had a horrible time with scarlet fever (not one of the recommended vaccines) and shows some damage from that, but she's still alive today. Maybe babies were meant to get most of their immunization from their mothers' milk. Maybe most or all vaccines can wait until children are old enough to want to go to school.
Cute Things
Hummingbirds don't often perch but, this morning, one of them perched in the hedge and held eye contact with me. It seemed to be saying, "Hello, I am a hummingbird. Despite your concerns about the fatal effect of excessive growth on the jewelweed blossoms, I am finding enough to make this visit worthwhile." Then it buzzed away, a few feet, to sip from a jewelweed blossom.
History
Early "social Darwinism" appalled Charles Darwin...aome Republicans have yet to recover from it.
To buy the full-length study, click here.
Movie
I saw a lot of recommendations for Sound of Freedom at "conservative" sites and thought "Well, that may mean it's a load of right-wing agitprop." Here's a recommendation from Alice Walker, who is definitely not a right-winger. That doesn't prove the movie's true in all of its implications, but it definitely means it's not just a load of partisan anything. If you absorb information from movies this one may be worth seeing.
https://alicewalkersgarden.com/2023/08/on-the-sound-of-freedom-film-and-mens-work-ending-male-violence/
Quotes
Politics
Big Government (federal/national/global is bigger, thus more corruptible, than "state") has much to hide and to fear. But seriously, not that the meme below isn't serious too..,the human need for and right to privacy is one of those things, like color and spirituality, that define a normal human brain. If you don't understand them, you need to accept that you have a defective brain. Private conversations are private because normal people are disgusted by the idea of other people listening to theirs and by the idea of their overhearing other people's. Nufsed.
A total commitment to nonviolence on the part of government would mean no punishment, or at least no formal agreed-upon punishment to put an end to the private feuding, in murder cases. A total commitment to local self-determinism puts us in the awkward position of fighting for a more repressive government for Ukraine. A total commitment to "democracy"...for Romania, where admittedly what they had was a dictator who was admittedly, even as dictators go, vile?
Quotes
I mentioned recently that our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters was one of a group of very individual characters who were sometimes confused with each other. To people who didn't know them well they all seemed to be just on the brink of retirement age right up to the end of their lives; that "She must be sixty years old" (when they were eighty or ninety) routine. They had once been pretty in different ways; by the time most people now alive came along, they were looking good in the same general way, more or less straight-shouldered though top-heavy, white-haired, dignified, not giving Old Age an inch. Some of them were born into the extended family group that includes the Peters family, and some married into it; people forgot which of the non-local ones came from where. Their names started with B--the queenly Miss B's. There were Bonnies and Bessies and Betties and a Beatie and a Blanche; there was a Bessie who was, for some years, a mentor to Grandma Bonnie. (Yes, I can remember a time before GBP was anybody's Grandma.) I thought of that Bessie's favorite quote when I heard a local news item recently.
Reportedly a teenaged boy, not in Gate City proper but in a smaller town nearby, had a COVID jab for some reason or other. Likely he wanted it because he had other health problems. Anyway, at the height of the panic the County Health Department had a drive-through COVID jab clinic. People sat in their cars in line, waiting to roll up and have someone lean out of a window to jab the arm they held out of the car window. This youth had his jab and, later that evening, sitting on his parents' couch watching television, he said, "I don't feel good. Can I have a glass of water?" Not "I'm going to get a glass of water. Does anyone else want one?", as a normal healthy teenager would have said. So his mother apparently guessed he was going into some sort of symptoms he'd had before, and fetched a glass of water for him--and by the time she'd brought in the water, he was dead.
New experimental vaccines are not always right for everyone--not even for everyone who may be at special risk from the disease.
Miss Bessie used to quote Alexander Pope:
"Be not the first by whom the New is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside."
Weird News
Remember the weirdo with the horns in the debacle of January 6, 2021? He's served his jail time and been invited to discuss, with Michael Malice, the difference between having eaten a lot of toxic fungus (he has) and being schizophrenic (he says he's not).
The interesting thing about this Scottish band's comment is that they wrote it before anybody ever heard of buffalo-man:
Zazzle
Save the Butterflies pocket folders. Maryland edition is shown.
Not mine:
Update, regarding the teenager who died right after the COVID jab: People clarified that he had no pre-existing medical problem, that he begged someone else to bring him water because he felt so bad so suddenly. Just a datapoint, fwiw...
ReplyDeletePK