It was not among the great weekends of my life. I was having a glyphosate reaction and spent most of Friday on the bed-to-bath circuit. What time I spent online, I spent looking at live, mostly magnified, images of insects, creating the next butterfly post and an index for the moth posts. Gentle Readers, if you choose to fund the moth posts, this web site is going to rank on Google searches. There are books on the market today that offer people the information they want about a kind of moth or butterfly, and all the writer's done is add a few photos to a freely quotable Wikipedia article. Hah. I think youall must agree that when I write about a moth or butterfly--or it could be a bird, flower, starfish if youall want to read about starfish--I go well beyond Wikipedia and synthesize data from lots of sources, most linked or credited in the post. I read psychology, but I read it at Berea, and I like biology. Though not so much caterpillars, not so much on an upset, er um, digestive system. If I chose to market the Hemileuca stories as a book, that book wouldn't be as good as Tuskes' book and I'm not sure I could make it cheaper by enough to make printing it worthwhile, but it would be better than a lot of the new natural history books people are dumping on Amazon.
Real-world insects were not as much of a nuisance as they've been at this time in other summers, though. I was inclined to thank the new cardinal in the orchard. He's either math-challenged or a compulsive nonconformist, because he doesn't pick a word to repeat three times, as normal male cardinals do; he says "Cheer!" four times, and then "birdy" four times. But somebody has certainly been cleaning up the mosquitoes. It's not only been the cardinal--which is good to know, as he's due to go into molt mode any day now. (In molt mode, which most birds go into in August, birds shed a lot of feathers and lie as low as possible until their new feathers grow in. Chickens do it too; from what chickens nonverbally tell me, molting birds may really not be able to fly as well as usual, but in any case they feel vulnerable, embarrassed, and itchy.) Mosquito control is also being provided by a resurgent colony of Polistes fuscatus wasps, a few Polistes carolinensis, and a mixed group of new dragonflies and damselflies--none so pretty as the Ebony Jewel Wings, but more aggressive. Had an enormous dragonfly, more than two inches across, zoom into my hair one day while I was out in the yard keeping in touch with Serena. I knew it was after a mosquito, so I just hoped it had caught the mosquito and enjoyed it as it zoomed away.
Books
My real-world book display is different from my Bookshop display. In real life, I sold the copy of Platero y Yo I had, many years ago, and didn't even post a review here to remember it by. But I can tell you that this is a classic Spanish story about a burro, family-friendly, loved for at least a hundred years. Platero the burro and his human work and travel, share some adventures in pre-modern Spain, bond, and then the man outlives the animal. Dover has acquired the right to sell the latest reprint. Dover is known for binding books well. You can buy this book at my virtual Bookshop or order it in real life.
Other books, on your right, you can order from my Bookshop: Continuous and Embedded Learning, Lunch Money, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Other books reviewed last week aren't available from Bookshop because they work through one supplier and sell only recent books; you can buy them from me if you want to, of course.
History
In the seventeenth century, more Irish than African slaves were sold in the American colony. Africans were usually sold as slaves because of debt, though family problems, political dissent, and plain old kidnappings happened there too. (A distinction is preserved in the Bible between legitimate slave traders, who trafficked in people legally enslaved for debt or crime, and "menstealers," who illegally detained, transported, and sold people not legally enslaved.) Irish people were usually enslaved because of political dissent or fear of it. There was an upside to being enslaved because one was Irish: Irish slaves, like those from Britain and Europe, were recognized as fellow Christians and usually rewarded with freedom after they'd worked for a few years; nobody tried to make them a permanent slave caste. Apart from that they got about as raw a deal as African slaves.
The nonfiction book discussed here interests me. I'd like to read it. I've already read (and sold) Captain Blood, though I've not seen it. In the book Captain Blood was one of a group of upper-crust English and Scottish dissenters who were sold as slaves in Barbados for "treason" (protesting). They weren't Irish, though some of them were Catholic. Those men really existed, too. They considered themselves superior to the Irish slaves, though probably not to the extent that their hair stayed perfectly styled while they were working, trading, and sailing in the Caribbean. LOL! That's the Hollywood cultural influence!
From the comments on NCRenegade's book review I suspect false assumptions may be being made. The early Irish immigrants to the Appalachian Mountains were not slaves but "Scotch-Irish." Mostly Protestant, mostly better off than the poor Catholic farm workers who became slaves, they'd emigrated to Scotland or even England before emigrating again to America. They have generally been considered a very respectable group of immigrant ancestors, to be claimed with pride. Their descendants would not be eligible for reparations from the U.S. government.
From Canada, a live celebration of history, much more visual and cheerful:
Poems
Free verse, but amusing:
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