Books
By the time this post goes live, your local big-chain bookstore should have Barb Taub's new book Oh My Dog. It is probably the funniest dog memoir you've ever read. It's not really like The Cat Who Came for Christmas, but that's the only other memoir of a pet loved and lost that I can remember as being anywhere near as funny. And heartwarming. And you don't have to read about the day the animal died, though Peri Crossed the Bridge in between the writing and the publishing of the book--she was an old dog when Barb Taub was blogging about her, but sometimes the only way you can tell a dog is old is that it's less exuberant than it was as a pup. Anyway, Taub has posted this short excerpt to prod you to call your local independent bookstore and ask them to stock it. If you appreciate laughter as therapy, this book is well worth the price of buying it new.
Censorship
Well. After a quick peek at X around midnight last night (I was there just to post Zazzle links, not that people are following those any more) I'm glad to see that a lot of the panic reactions people were tweeting aren't true. Nobody's invaded the United States, no Trump fans have bombed any small towns. But some people who ought just to put their arms on their desks, lay their heads on their arms, and sit there groaning quietly for six hours or however long it takes their minds to clear, are making cyberspace a more unpleasant place than I've ever seen it before...I was not online in 2001. We're not yet at war, but no doubt we soon will be, thanks to the United Nations giving us such wonderful value for payments tendered in mediating among small foreign countries that don't want us fighting their wars for them...until they're actually fighting one.
I'm not sure whether I'm going hypertensive in old age, or infected with the latest batch of coronavirus, but it's making my head ache in a hypertensive way. (My blood pressure has always tended to run low; when it does rise I can feel it. I became conscious of blood pressure issues because several relatives had mild hypertension that responded quickly to treatment, and my husband had stubborn hypertension that did not respond to treatment--which, in his case, was due to multiple myeloma.)
It seems to me that the Censornet is falling apart. X certainly is. Some people whom I've been following for years have succumbed to the pressure to pay for advertisements. Actual tweets, social messages from private people, were apparently down to two people tweeting in two hours. And one of those people was definitely delirious.
I followed hundreds of people, mostly because they followed me, on Twitter. I never used to be able to scroll further than one hour down my home page; reading one hour's worth of tweets normally took most of a day. So X has already reached the "nothing but advertisers screaming at each other" stage i predicted for it. And other sites seem to be tottering blindly along behind X.
You've seen reports that the artificial "intelligence" writing services are plagiarizing real live writers who need the money? Those are true. And here's another piece of bad Internet news that's true, too, supported by my experience as a hack writer:
Confirming my guesses when (1) a site dedicated to "women's conversations" started e-mailing me discussion questions, then after I'd posted a few answers started blocking my answers; and (2) an author writing about a current social/legal issue, who identified as a moderate conservative, used AI to generate a page or two of discussion that came out sounding about as far to the Left as it could get without actually including the words "dirty capitalist system."
Don't support those AI writing services, Gentle Readers. They will totally ruin the Internet for all of us if we don't swat those mosquitoes now. (The silly little picture-generating sites like Craiyon won't do so much harm, but the "artificial art" that's good enough to be paid for will at least harm artists.)
And don't let the bot armies convince you that any significant number of Americans are soft on socialism or would vote Biden back into office, either. No, it's not just you and your friends. Most Americans, nationwide, are moderately conservative, as the paper ballot count will soon show. Most Democrats are, in fact, moderately conservative--they just want to keep enough government jobs and handouts going to keep them employed and/or handed-out-to.
"Mod. con." is an old expression I've heard and used all my life; I was surrprised that some young people don't recognize it. It's short for "modern conveniences" and is a real estate advertising phrase meaning hot water, central heating into which the resident does not have to shovel coal, electricity, and (originally) a wall-mounted phone somewhere in the building. It did not originally include air conditioning or television, much less the Internet. In any case, "mod. con." just might come back into use to mean something different...the people who, if God wants the United States to survive, are going to get tired of leftist nonsense, vote out any elected official who increases any budget for any reason, and put UN funding on a performance basis (any funds spent on helping our allies fight wars come straight out of UN funding, and when that budget item is depleted, no more money).
Peacenik, Old Subversive Thoughts of a
It hurts to think of Israeli families being murdered during their Sabbath morning prayers, before they even went to temple.
It hurts to think of what Israel's response is doing to Palestinian families, either. Well, maybe if they were Hamas families...? No. I can "see" Hamas widows and orphans showing enlightenment by plastering their entire faces with ashes and wandering from house to house, saying, "Please, kind people, this thing has the shame to be a homeless and nameless Hamas orphan, an outcast and wanderer over the Earth. Please, may this thing be allowed to clean your barns or kennels for a meal?" If they were sincerely religious they'd choose to d that, so I'd have no problem with it. But I do have a problem with children, even a Hamas man's brats who fully deserve to be orphans, being blown up by bombs.
Likewise Ukrainian children.
Likewise Russian children.
Or Irish Catholic. Or Irish Protestant. Or South Vietnamese. Or North Vietnamese. Or any other variety of human children you can think of. I am a human being, therefore I do not like the idea of human children being blown up by bombs.
But...just possibly...if the wealth of the United States were not supporting one side or another in other people's wars, those wars would end sooner, and fewer children would be blown up. Even if their side did not win the war--which, we learned in Vietnam, can happen anyway; even so, there would be fewer bombs and fewer children maimed by them.
Poems
Lamentation. Naturally.
Zazzle
Basoc yoga mat with one butterfly picture:
Elaborate yoga mat with several different butterflies:
Someone else's butterflies. I should know from which continent these came, but all I know is that they're not North American.
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