This is not the review that was scheduled to appear here this morning. I don't know what happened to that review. Maybe I'll find it, maybe not. Here's another review.
Title: Discovering Your Neighbor
Author: Shane Shepherd
Date: 2021
Quote: "'He doesn't even know me!' Win exclaimed... 'All the more reaosn for you not to get on his bad side.'"
Win, a young scientist, has discovered evidence that the planet Neighbor was once the home of intellgent life. He's more interested in that life than in stripping the planet of its mineral resources. That is why his boss dislikes him. How dangerous is the boss's ill will, and how can Win protect himself, as he discovers that (gasp!) his government job amounts to his being used for the benefit of a private company?
What came in the Booktober Blitz was a few chapters of the actual book, Volume 1 of 6 in a "boxed set" of e-books. The thinking is that reading the first three chapters of a book will make people want to pay for the whole thing. The thinking is inaccurate in my case.
If you can still relate to the plight of a young man who's never thought about big government projects being funded by and for private enterprise, you might want to buy this series.
This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "a series I wish had one more book in it."
Lydia Schoch made a particularly interesting case for the Narnia series. C.S. Lewis wrote seven books that illustrated points of Christian belief through adventure stories written for children, though adults seem to like them as much as or more than children do. As a throwaway line, at the end of the last book, he mentions that one of the English children who visited Narnia was "no longer a friend of Narnia" and thus missed being killed in an accident in England and going to the Narnian part of Heaven. Susan had become too fully engaged with social life in England to want to reminisce about Narnia with her siblings.
So, is Susan lost, because Narnia was where her siblings had their early encounters with the spiritual dimension of life? Or, is she saved, as everyone else in the children's fictional version of England can be saved, by faith in Christ that will allow her to live a long and good life in England? She seemed to deserve the latter. But...but...the story, or stories, of her life in postwar Britain wouldn't be Narnia stories. They wouldn't even be children's stories. They'd be stories that Helen Joy Davidman Lewis could have written if she'd lived longer, but C.S. Lewis could not.
Click here to read other people's picks...could you stand to read a book in which Bridget Jones has custody, however briefly, of a child? Could Andrew Mayne's series go on and on and on? Would anyone like to encourage a Booktober Blitz author here?
I'm not generally inclined to write or read fanfiction, in which other writers try to continue a series. The seams always show. Series like Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, etc., that were written by different people under one pseudonym, were cheaply done in the beginning and are amusing in their discontinuity. Series like the Oz books, which began with an individual's inspiration, didn't hold up so well under the process of posthumous serialization. I appreciated the fact that a couple of Holmes fans who thought they could write successors to Arthur Conan Doyle's work chose to write about Mycroft Holmes' very different life from Sherlock's, but the better they did that, the better they succeeded in creating a different atmosphere for a different character that had limited appeal to Sherlock Holmes fans.
So there's one series that I've read that I really wished had one more book in it. P.G. Wodehouse's Blandngs Castle series wasn't really a serial story so much as the setting for a lot of variations on the basic romantic comedy plot. There wasn't a particular character readers really wanted to see more of; there was the Earl of Blandings, a dotty old chap, and about a dozen of his younger siblings, all now old people too, with children and sometimes grandchildren who were always coming to Blandings Castle, usually hoping for money to get married on, and having comic misadventures in which glass got broken, animals got stolen, and nice but irresponsible people got arrested but were always out of jail at the end, and usually at least two young idjits were married to each other. Readers knew each story was only meant to be something to laugh at, and so they all were.
Except the last one. At ninety-three, P.G. Wodehouse knew he might or might not live to finish writing a novel that was published as Sunset at Blandings. He outlined it in some detail and wrote a first draft of about half of it. He had made it possible for his heirs to publish the draft, with some explanatory notes about his last days. So they did. It sold. But Sunset at Blandings wasn't nearly as funny as readers knew it would have been when Wodehouse finished it, if he'd only lived so long.
I wish Wodehouse had had time to write the novel he intended the last Blandings Castle story to be.
Not much link hunting...Oh, why not admit it. Booktober Blitz put me on too many e-mail lists. Too much of my e-mail is mere book advertisements without links to share here.
History
Have you ever wondered why little red wagons used to be branded "Radio Flyer"?
Have you ever wondered how Scrooge got that way? Considering Charles Dickens' biography, is it possible that Scrooge was the "shadow self" Dickens imagined as having reacted to a life experience in the opposite way from Dickens' own reaction?
Quote: "It was another typical night for Bella Torres: successful interior designer and insomniac extraordinaire."
In real life insomnia is often a symptom of lack of physical exercise. In romance novels it's a symptom of lack of romance, so Bella's friend Maria drags Bella onto a cruise. Where do they cruise? Probably the Caribbean islands, but what Bella remembers is the man who asks to take her picture.
I think it's possible that this story is just too short. Morgan tells us that Bella and her photographer, whom she and Maria instantly nickname "Bermuda Shorts," have common interests; she does not actually show us that they have any interests at all, and this makes it hard for me to care about their happy ending. If she'd taken the time to write scenes where Bella actually designs and Bermuda Shorts makes some positive contribution to her life, they'd be a more appealing couple. Oh well. Anyway they have a nice romantic cruise and the genre-guaranteed happy ending. If you've taken a cruise, or wanted to, you'll probably like this short book.
Actually, the Internet celebration of black and white (Tuxedo, hence Tuxie) cats fell on Monday, but since it is #TortieTuesday and our three-colored Queen Cat Serena is partial to a Tuxie, we're celebrating Tuxie Appreciation Day on Tuesday. Here are three especially cute photos of adoptable Tuxie cats. In grateful acknowledgment of readers' interest in Bad Poetry (TM), each cat's write-up includes an exercise in a verse form that was new to me when introduced at DVerse, the toddaid.
From place to place they've moved me, just to try.
They say I'm shy--lost in the city.
They say she behaves well with other cats and will come and join a human who sits on the floor, so if you want a quiet, well-behaved Tuxie, bear with a little shyness at first. The shelter sounds a bit control-freaky and the price is inflated. You might be willing to negotiate with the shelter staff. If not, there are only about 1800 other Tuxies in search of good homes in New York City.
Zipcode 20202: Decker (and Perry) from Garrett Park
The black one answers (sort of) to "Decker. " The gray tabby answers to "Perry." Neutered brothers were born feral but very quickly decided, at that crucial age when kittens seek homes of their own, that they wouldn't mind becoming pets. They are young and may grow a little taller and longer.
Our long-ago Founding Queen, Black Magic, had a completely black face, only a little white spotting on one hind paw, and three white spots--the "bib" and two larger spots below--that did not run together and show whenever she lay down. There's just an indefiniable similarity about Misty's general build and attitude. Probably part Siamese, she "talks," is close to her siblings, loves to cuddle and be petted, and is described as one of those small cats with great big loud purrs. Does that mean that you'll be able to count the words you've taught her and confirmed that she recognizes, and then be amazed when she understands words you had no idea a cat could understand? Who knows, but she does have all the credentials to be a purrfectly adorable pet.
These are not the only adorable cats seeking homes through the organizations with which they're currently staying. They're not even the cutest--only the ones whose photos caught my eye. As always, Petfinder photos are for sharing! Please share these pictures everywhere!
Isn't it fun that the Petfinder posts were the first department with which this web site caught up, after our long winter hiatus? I think so. In February we're going back over 2023's Petfinder posts and revisit the animals who were not adopted. Please help find homes for these pets now, so that you won't have to read about them again!
This one's been waiting for a few months--years, actually, by now. One week a local newspaper reported what eighteen elementary school students wrote about their favorite songs. The Internet can do better than that. Here is a PLAYLIST of as many of their favorite songs as Google could find.
Not all of the students specified the writer or performer of the song. Some songs have been recorded by more than one band, and some completely different songs have the same name, so there are no guarantees that the music linked here is necessarily what the students had in mind. But this web site has tried.
5. "Look What You Have Done": The student credited Anne Wilson. What Google has is sung by Tasha Layton. The student said that the song is suitable for church, and starts low and goes high in pitch, so it sounds as if this is the right song.
13. "Savage Love" by Jason Derulo. Seriously. Parents let children listen to that? The third-grade student wrote, "I like it because there is a dance to it. The dance is very fun and cheerful."
14. "You Are My Sunshine"...The student mentioned who sang the version person had in mind, all right. Per late grandmother did, and then later the student sang it for the grandmother. In memory of all the grandmothers who have sung this song to grandchildren, here is a recording by Jasmine Thompson.
15. "Bless the Lord." This is a song I've been known to sing, and this is how it goes...It's been kicking around for years. The Youtube versions I found have been are jazzed-up interpretations by charismatic church choirs. I can't imagine a person who didn't already know the tune learning it from the videos. A person who can read basic musical notation--we are talking about autoharp music, not even scored for guitar--can learn the song from this book:
The book is recommended because, from music written for the autoharp, a person with minimal skills can adapt the song to anything else the person plays.
However, it's likely that the student was thinking of a new, copyrighted, popular song, properly called "Ten Thousand Reasons," by Matt Redman.
19. "God on the Mountain" is the name of a song by Gloria and Bill Gaither. Lots of people have recorded it since they did, but their version has to be considered official.
Should I add a favorite to make a nice even number? I remember making lists of my current favorite songs several times, in elementary school, often actually in school while daydreaming away the hours the teachers spent repeating things for the most intentionally slow learners. What I remember is that there was no overlap. Each time I made a list the songs were my favorites of what I'd heard that week.
One song, however, was consistently the favorite of the songs my siblings and I used to sing. It was our favorite to sing, with or without arm movement, with or without chickens. (The chickens' participation was their own idea. We were singing Sunday School songs one evening, and the chickens gathered around to listen. Realizing that they actually enjoyed our songs, we started practicing as we brought them into their coop for the night. Their acts, which were of course simple things like chirping or stepping forward on cue, were things they did that we taught them to repeat as part of the rotuine.) It was the favorite of people who invited us to sing it first. I think it may have been the favorite of the pet chickens who had parts in our renditions of it, too. This Youtube video is a little more polished than our performances usually were, with an instrumental accompaniment and all...
20. "His Banner Over Me Is Love" is in that Mel Bay songbook, too, though we were singing it before that book was printed.
Actually these links come from Saturday night and Sunday only. I spent most of Friday in town, and spent all of that day's online time looking up fun facts about butterflies.
Readers, please weigh in with your opinions! Do you, who read the link logs, also read the butterfly posts? If so, do you prefer a short, simple search of the best known facts, or a more thorough investigation or more scholarly sources?
I ask because I had assumed that, as their publicity suggests, Google's infamous algorithm was designed to yield the most "sciency" search results for animal and plant studies, at least when Latin names were used as search terms. Wrong! Google's algorithm yields fewer scholarly studies (and more paying commercial sites, where applicable!) than the other search engines. And there's no way, when hunting for whatever is out there, to tell Google to behave itself and deliver material for a solid research article. Google reports thousands of results and displays only a few hundred, in which many of the "science" links connect to different places on the same page and different sites that have acquired the same papers, and it will not go further. Google has admittedly listened to commercial site sponsors' pleas to keep people from scrolling down through a thorough search, to "force traffic" to the top-ranked sites...and in the case of butterfly studies, those top-ranked sites may include places that sell dead bodies rather than studies of the survival benefits the butterflies' species traits have for them.
It's almost as if they were saying outright, "You're only a woman! You don't need to read all those big words in the science articles! Here, Schnookie, look at these shopping sites! Hmmm...nice bottom!" Because, of course, Google's algorithm is customized to any Google account into which you might be logged while searching. And Google is actively trying to keep informative posts on personal blogs from being noticed and read. The self-anointed "gatekeepers" of the Internet want individuals' blogs to be read only by (1) personal friends and (2) marketing people who want to use the information about bloggers they can gather in efforts to sell things to bloggers. Or, perhaps, personal enemies who want to know where we live.
Attention marketing types: Bloggers have no e-money, or if we do we have enough sense not to mention or spend it. The only way you can sell us stuff is admittedly slow: Pay a few bloggers to try and blog about your merchandise, then wait for the rest of us to be looking for that sort of product, which will probably take years, and offer us a real bargain price. Further applications of marketing psychology are wasted. From a turnip you can't get blood. Allow your products to be seen only in blog posts about them. Don't shove advertisements in among any web page's main content--that's negative publicity. When we're interested in the product, we'll look for it.
Real scientists are not the ones trying to segregate the Internet. Real scientists observe that we amateurs sometimes observe things that are useful. It's the global-totalitarian Party of Censorship who want to prevent private individuals from seeing even the first-page-and-sales-pitch for a new scientific study.
So, are you satisfied with a Google study of a butterfly, as I did with Battus polystictus, or do you prefer a different search engine, as I used with Battus polydamas?
Music
Don't take the daydream too seriously! I just happened to find a song that came out when I was little, but that I discovered and loved in university. Nostalgia trip.
Quote: "Dr. Selgia...thought she had the technical talent to become a successful artist, but she lacked the inspiration."
And this promo-disguised-as-a-book has the setting and characters of which a successful book, or five-book set, might be made, but it lacks the story.
A "prequel" is worth publishing as a book, or a story, depending on its length, when it is a story. Not merely a sketch, but a story in its own right, with a plot that resolves while leaving room for readers to imagine further incidents in a series.
I'm not inclined to be charitable about so-called "prequels" where the author introduces a character, characters, a setting, but fails to deliver a story. I think they're too disappointing to work as a marketing gimmick. Writers just shouldn't bother. If, after writing a full-length novel, you then think of a story about something one of the characters did before the events in the novel, and you write that story, it's a prequel. It can be a short story that leads into a novel, or a novel that leads into a novel, or a short story that leads into a short story...but it does need to be a complete story.
The White Fork Chronicles may be a good read. R.J. Radisson has the ability to write. If you read the full-length novels and like them, you'll want this "prequel."
Length: 177 e-pages including promotional front and back matter
Quote: "Espero que las historias en este
libro les animen a seguir adelante."
Old age, as Art Linkletter was not the first to say, is not for wimps. It generally happens to tough and resolute people. Still, even tough and resolute people can benefit from having made plans for what they are likely to need to be tough and resolute about. Hence this book, written by a great-grandfather, about the physical infirmities he and his friends had already coped with and how they were helping one another cope with the others, about bereavement, and about the fear of death itself.
Yes, being a Christian is a great help with the fear of death. Yes, although the author and his religious community believe that God can choose to deal with people where and as they are, where and as God will, this book does contain a short passage of guidance for those who want to become Christians.
This book narrates a pivotal time in the history of the author's religious community, the Bruderhof. As regular readers know by now, this is a growing Christian denomination, not merely a church-owned furniture factory. The group started with a single congregation in Germany, after a succession of reformist pastors had urged people toward a closer imitation of Christ and those people had decided they could not participate in wars. Hitler threw them out of Germany and their descendants, and many others attracted to their faith, have formed new Bruderhofs around the world. Members of the church live in self-supporting communes and take vows to allow reassignment to different communes, or new ones, where their abilities may be needed--or their disabilities cared for. Bruderhofs have particularly good records of finding ways for physically "less abled" people to be useful to their communes, working part-time in the group's business and caring for one another. The 2010s and 2020s are the years when the generation who really established the groups in the Americas and Australia are fading away, when it's of greatest importance that their message be handed down/
So in this book the great-grandparents, Johann Christoph and Verena Arnold, affirm that they want to spend their last days within their tradition, within their group. They share stories of other senior members of the group describing how gradually reduced responsibility, fellowship, faith, and prayer helped them survive illness and bereavement and prepare for death.
Probably nobody under age 50 will really appreciate this book, although elders may try to share it with them. Even between ages 50 and 75...well, I received a copy of the book a year ago and it's taken me a while to sit down and read it. While enjoying middle age we don't particularly want to think about old age. Beyond trying to live like those of my elders who just carried on enjoying middle age into their nineties, I don't often think about old age--at least not in relation to myself or people I like. We jollywell intend to be "forty-five with [however many] years of experience" when our hearts stop in our sleep at some age over ninety.
Yet, as Arnold observes, the great blessing that many people can in fact look forward to extending an active middle age beyond age ninety has not come without its perils. Some people aren't prepared to deal with the possibility that that blessing might not reach us. Some aren't even willing to cope with the reality that our loved ones may reach old age.
Is there a baby-boomer who doesn't know someone, our age or older, who has callously abandoned a parent, sibling, even a spouse because "I can't deal with what person is going through"? My husband's initial cancer scare and his older brother's diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease occurred around the same time, when they were about 55 and 70 years old. Both were married when they became ill. Both wives were still active and healthy, and both filed for divorce, saying callously "Maybe you can find someone who has time to stay home and look after you if you start looking now, before you're too old and sick." My husband did, and then his ex-wife had the gall to want to inherit his estate--and she had literally bankrupted him the year before she divorced him.
How many baby-boomers have "ghosted" away from friends who've developed disabilities or chronic illnesses? Maybe in some cases our friends felt relieved. Maybe their only interest in us had to do with some job or some kind of sport, and when they have to give up the job or the sport, they're just as well pleased not to see us any more. Then again, maybe they actually thought more of us than that. Or maybe they didn't, but still, we might have been what they had in the way of friends.
So we do need to think about old age, as something to help parents and then friends endure, and then as something that may happen to us. We need to accept that reading about, thinking about, and actually talking to, and working for, those who reach old age may help us if we reach it ourselves. Arnold was as good a guide as any, for those who may need to approach this kind of thought, warily, through a book. Still writing, still teaching, still the head of his clan and of their church, he had serious medical conditions and, as of 2014, had to reduce his work hours to half a day.
I think most who read this book will agree that Arnold has succeeded in his intention of showing that old age is preferable to the alternative. A steady practice of love and loyalty, faith and courage, can even give old age a beauty and dignity of its own.
The posting of this review was delayed by a not entirely unexpected call to go out and help a slightly older friend--still with a project that wanted extra hands, thank God, and not with a disability. Somehow I suspect that Arnold, if still living, would have approved.
This is the post that should have gone up Friday morning, 1.26.24. This web site's sponsors will get the posts for which they've paid, although it may take time. The prompt at Poets & Storytellers United was one you don't want to over-think: If ghosts can come back and haunt places or people in this world, and you became a ghost, where, what, or whom would you haunt?
It has to be taken whimsically. I don't believe people's ghosts really are condemned to haunt this world. I believe they are allowed to rest. I believe the sense of a beloved presence we feel, when we're in places we used to share with departed friends, generally comes from our memories, though spirit beings may in a few cases be able to use those memories to help or harm us.
Christians are supposed to get our beliefs about the afterlife from the Bible. Christians have disagreed furiously about how to interpret the paradoxical teachings of the Bible. I don't really want to take sides in this kind of dispute. I really believe that this is one of the questions to which our mortal minds aren't able to receive the answer. Quarrelling about whether someone can be in Heaven while helplessly watching us suffer, now, or is sleeping until the Judgment Day, is like quarrelling about how all those little people fit inside the radio. Maybe those who have entered Eternity are able to look back into time--I wouldn't know, nor would you.
I certainly want, after a good long active life with few if any changes in my daily schedule (such as my mother enjoyed), to be well prepared for what seems like a sudden death, then wake up in what seems like the next moment to be told "Well done, good and faithful servant! Enter into the joy of the Lord." By which time the world we knew, and its time, have probably faded out of existence. I try to live in a way that leads toward that kind of end.
But, just to play with the popular myth of Halloween-type ghosts who scare people because they come to lead someone else out of the land of the living...This pleasant fancy goes out to my Bad Neighbor, who's fantasized about outliving me. Young people have a right to fantasize about outliving their elders, but people who fantasize about outliving people who are younger than they are, and healthier, deserve to imagine that they'd be haunted if they did.
The only way to catch up on those butterfly stories is going to be posting more than one butterfly story in a week...I need a break between butterflies. Today we are going to have a Link Log. It's time I caught up with other people's blogs and e-mail, too.
Animals
Larger social cats. (One female feline could have seven or eight babies in one litter, but it's rare, especially for a wild lion who'd have to find a tremendous amount of food and water to rear them to this age. Lionesses form prides, though, in which cubs from two or three litters might be in the custody of one mother lion for several hours.)
No, of course it's not "ridiculous" to grieve for departed animals. Nor is it even necessary to claim that they're "therapy" animals. Our animal friends are part of our lives, just as our human friends are. In C.S. Lewis's taxonomy of love, we may love (some of our dearest) human friends with Philia while we can love animals (and, well, extroverts) only with Storge; either way, their absence from our lives leaves big painful emotional wounds.
Caring about animals does not reduce our ability to care about fellow humans. In fact, caring about our fellow humans requires us to care about the animals they love. Consider the geriatric patients who are being forced to put the last close friends they'll ever have into animal shelters--or choosing to be homeless, instead.
I consider this dear little face. It's a good-mood trigger for me. Queen Cat Serena started out as an undersized, slightly premature kitten, the sole survivor in a litter of four preemies. Her mother and I feared for her survival for the first month or so. No worries! Serena had all the milk and all the attention nature had intended her mother to divide among four babies. By the age of three months she was already, as this snapshot suggests, quite self-assured, not to say full of herself, or bossy...Well, she is, a bit. She also likes fast, rough games and will slap or otherwise annoy people if there's any hope it will get them to chase her. She's not posed for another picture since this kitten picture--she thinks phones and cameras are toys! She also has an understanding of words, and an ability to carry out and communicate to other animals what I've told her, that's beyond rational comprehension; she grew up in my office room and tends to know what I'm thinking. Cats are often decorative objects or amiable nuisances; animals whose humans describe them as friends and working partners are usually either dogs or horses, but then there's Serena. Manx loyalty, Siamese cleverness, American common sense: the best of all three breeds. Lewis said that in real life the different kinds of love mingle. What I feel for Serena borders on Philia.
Would I live in the cave, which is deep enough for a human and several other things to lie down in but not big enough for a human to stand up in, rather than put Serena in a shelter? Would a bear do what bears do in the woods?
Maybe, instead of whining about whether people prefer humans or animals, we need to recognize that nature always intended for humans to live among other animals and bond with other animals. Maybe we need to admit that "planning" to pack humans into all-human (or human-and-rat-and-roach) slums is a pathological aberration that ought to get the "planners" pensioned off with referrals to psychiatrists. Maybe we need to understand that geriatric patients may have to give up climbing stairs or driving cars, but they need to be in the houses where they remember where things are, with their animals and their gardens, as long as there is any evidence of consciousness.
Climate Change
This one is especially for e-friends who've got into "climate blogging"...and who refuse to face the facts: "Global climate change" may be real, human-influenced, and undesirable, but it is unproven and won't be provable until it's happened. Local climate change--like the weather station having consistently logged temperatures 2-3 degrees warmer than the Cat Sanctuary and 5-10 degrees cooler than downtown Kingsport in the 1970s, now consistently 5-6 degrees warmer than the Cat Sanctuary and 15 or more degrees cooler than downtown Kingsport--is unmistakable and undeniable. But local climate change, a.k.a the greenhouse effect, has served its political purposes and no longer interests those who are really interested in global tyranny. So we see people wailing and anguishing about supposed global climate change, always embracing some theoretical model with a predictable shelf-life of two years, while completely ignoring local cliamte change and anything they or their neighbors can do about it.
Very important: We all need to work together to build environmental awareness. We all need to be aware, too, that, moves that consolidate power and wealth--whether into the hands of "private" corporations or of governments--are not True Green. People who don't live on and work with land in some way, if only as hunting grounds, have an extremely poor record of doing anything to conserve the quality of that land. Big governments, as in China, will happily strip-mine their great natural tourist attractions for short-term profit, telling the people choking on coal dust in the former tourist town that "one does not avoid eating for fear of choking." So, whatever the ecological problem may be, bigger government is not a serviceable solution--once people set up the bigger government structure, they mysteriously lose any government "leaders" who want to conserve natural resources. There's a reason why Moses, having the opportunity to claim a divine right to own all the land for himself and heirs, was guided to divide it among families as family farms and restrict the right of private property owners to sell their land. Permanent responsibility for land promotes, well, responsibility, to the extent that people understand their responsibility. Whereas a government monopoly, even if it starts out with a True Green leader to attract popular support, will have an oil refinery on Lake Tahoe and be stripping Mount Mitchell in another twenty years.
Too many Greens want too much to believe that if we just elect the right people a big totalitarian government will work. Big mistake. Human lives are short. Power doesn't always corrupt every single person beyond repair; there are people like George Washington who don't want excessive power and people like the late Elizabeth II who can surrender excessive power with grace, but (1) the minimally corrupted are rare and (2) upon the passing of the minimally corrupted, there will be a power gap, which will attract the maximally corruptible. Sustainable plans have to focus on equal distribution of power--not technically populism, but libertarianism--tolerating minimal interference with the choices of anyone but oneself.
Health & Wellness
Profound wisdom from howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com:
Quote: "This weekend, we'd laid Grandma Des to rest."
And one of the relatives who've gathered steals Grandma Des's favorite cookbook. Grandma Des was a baker who displayed lots of cookbooks, but only used one for the recipes that kept locals coming back. She chose a relative to leave that book to...but another one wants it. In this short novel, the cookbook is restored to its rightful heir.
This cozy, wholesome mystery introduces a series that will include murders. As the term "cozy" presupposes, though, it's about following the clues to find out whodunit more than the sensational details and life-and-death danger of a "hard-boiled" murder story.
I didn't get into this mystery. Maybe I've been reading too much fiction lately. Maybe it's the fact that I read a PDF copy that hadn't been properly formatted. Maybe it's the Morrison Farms Lentils I ate. The fact remains that when I've failed to love other books and known I was in poor physical condition, I've reread them when I was feeling better; when other books were formatted in a way I found really ugly, I've retyped them. So why don't I want to invest that extra effort in liking this book?
I don't even feel that the mystery was too tame, or too easily solved. Cozy mysteries are allowed to be tame. As long as there's a logical solution reached by ruling out alternatives, the solution can be that something was "stolen" by a child or an animal or misplaced by a distracted owner. I usually approve of such wholesome solutions.
Maybe it's that I didn't feel that I'd solved the mystery so much as that, as in Nancy Drew, one character just seemed to be waving a little flag that read "Idunit," but I'm not even sure why I thought so. Anyway I'd guessed whodunit and didn't feel that I'd been further informed or entertained by following the false leads along with the characters.
Your mileage may vary, though. Somebody Out There will probably love this book.
Quote: "Tommy...always seemed to be on the verge of making fun of her."
This short mystery story really is suitable for sharing with the kids. It's a vignette from the fictional childhood of the detective in a full-length, grown-up detective novel. Here we meet Molly as a teenager working in her grandparents' plant shop, solving the mystery of who took the twenty-dollar bills out of the cash register.
If you want a long, complex puzzle to challenge your mind, skip this one. If you want a short, wholesome, family-friendly story like an update of Encyclopedia Brown, get Terra Cotta Theft.
Last week we just missed setting a new record for overnight low temperatures. Today we just set an all-time record for afternoon high temperatures. The Weather Station logged a balmy 65 degrees. It wasn't quite that warm at the Cat Sanctuary, but felt even warmer in the sunshine. From what's usually the coldest freeze of the year, early January, to the January thaw usually takes longer than 48 hours. I did not hear anyone complaining. It was nice to watch the snow melt.
I still have a lot of catching up to do so here, without more wordage, are this week's cat photo contest winners. Today we consider older cats.
The main trouble with Mush is that his human gave birth to an Utterly Unwashed and Unsaved Northerner. The guy did at least come in to help his old, sick mother, who probably has money in the bank, but he threw Mush out in the cold. Mush was brought to a shelter where he demonstrated that he likes to curl up on humans' laps and keep them warm. He's said to be polite about taking a daily heart pill and very good about using a litter box. He's just about eleven years old.
Well, isn't she? Sadly, she was arrested and locked up for being a cat, doing her best to help Prince Georges County control its rat problem. She may be a lost pet. She's just an old lady cat who needs a safe place to spend her sunset years.
She didn't even make the mistake of taking her love to town. She was just abandoned by her humans with a wonderful package of food, toys, and her own cat tree to climb and claw on, all ready to go to her Purrmanent Home. If you want a Siamese-looking cat, run don't walk.
Quote: "'You've served your purpose, Walter,' his partner said."
Breaking into the glassblower's shop to steal the money the glassblower owes him, Walter Whittle is murdered by "his unlikely partner in crime." Only Whittle knows who that partner is, and the rest of this book tells how the glassblower found out.
Henry the glassblower is helped by a nice woman, Rebecca, and not helped by an eager but apparently stupid one, Susan, through a series of wacky amateur-detective adventures that make Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown look sophisticated. As murder mysteries go, this is a cozy one: only one murder is committed, though several are threatened.
This short novel reads more like a farce than like a classic detective story. If you like comedy in a mystery, you'll like A Shard of Evidence.
I was online for more than twelve hours on 1.23.24. I spent that time gathering facts for the huge butterfly article forthcoming, and am now officially slope-eyed, which is a condition traditionally produced by scanning the slopes for mushrooms or other quarry until your eyes stop focussing. It can be produced by web searching, too. Anyway the search sent me to X, where someone did send me one link, which those who were really interested in the topic have probably already received, but it deserved to go up somewhere. Of Bill Clinton's assistants, Dick Morris may have had the lowest popularity rating. Vince Foster was pitiable; George Stephanopoulos was young; Webb Hubbell confessed embezzlement in a lovable way; Robert Reich was disarmingly frank about the Federal Reserve; Janet Reno was tragic; Joycelyn Elders was sympathetic; Hillary Clinton was positively admirable in some ways...and Rahm Emanuel had enough sense to maintain a low profile. Morris didn't care what people said about him, as was shown by the name he chose to use. Some people let that fact lead their minds all the way into the gutter.
Celebrity Gossip
Some people were snarking about Dick Morris, the political "spin doctor," having a scantily dressed man walking through a room where he was doing an interview. I posted a comment along the lines of "At least he has an undershirt. That's more than some people's out-of-town guests bring to Washington." So I think it's only fair to share Morris's explanation of the man in the tank top and shorts:
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Context: Eileen McGann, the wife of Dick Morris, had a stroke 3 years ago and has been incapacitated since. The man seen walking by is her full-time caretaker who lives with the couple.
Since I've already missed the first few questions, I'm making no commitments to do the Long & Short Reviews link-ups this year...but this week's topic is so easy.
"What language(s) are you learning this year?"
1. I'm still learning English, although I've spoken English for fifty years.
2. I'm still learning Spanish, although my parents did all that they could, short of being able to speak Spanish themselves, to get me speaking Spanish for fifty years too. Doing today's butterfly post, I listened to a few video presentations in forms of Spanish that diverged slightly from standard Ciudad de Mexico and was reminded that I don't have real native fluency, and never will. I can talk to or translate for people who speak only Spanish, but I speak slowly, with an accent, and have to ask people whose accents are at all unfamiliar to say one word at a time.
3. And I'm still learning French, although the'rents wanted me to speak French, too, and started me on "Hear-Repeat-Speak" records in primary school. Je lis mais je ne parle pas. Asking me to talk to or translate for a traveller who spoke only French would be inhumane. Enjoying French literature is about all I can do in the way of international good will.
I have vocabulary lists and recognize words in a couple dozen other languages...which is a very different thing from speaking or even reading those languages. Being able to tell when people are speaking Hausa or Malay or Serbian in no way implies knowing what those people are saying.
Click here to see which languages other bloggers are learning:
As luck would have it, the second butterfly species we're studying behind schedule is another madly popular species. Battus polydamas, the Polydamas or Gold-Rim Swallowtail, is popular because it's eye-catching and because it has a wide range. It's found around the southern edge of the United States and in Mexico, some Caribbean islands, Central America, and South America as far as Chile. Lots of places can claim it as a native species.
Photo donated to Wikipedia by Hectonichus. This individual butterfly came from the Niagara Falls Conservatory. Polydanas don't fly outdoors as far north as Niagara Falls, so it was probably reared indoors, probably on the Aristolochia vine which it's perching.
And Google aggravated this post. Everyone knows that commercial web sites want to be at the top of a Google search page. The goal is to deliver just enough information, often recycling information that is already widely known, to be classified as offering informative content along with the sales pitch or spyware "cookie." Serious researchers like the author of this unprecedented fact-packed post, therefore, want to scroll through lots of search results and read the handful of scientists' studies that have been published on the topic as well as the Wikipedia page, the "first articles" about the topic, and the pages dedicated to selling products related to the topic in some way. (For butterflies, that includes dead bodies and artistic renderings.) Advertisers have pleaded with Google to slow down the scrolling, to "force traffic" to the top-ranked sites. When I started researching this butterfly, Google seized up, refused to scroll smoothly through the first few pages at least, stuck on the second screen full of heavily advertised links with the pages for polydamas-inspired junk jewelry, and thereby drove me to finish the search on Yahoo. Yahoo's search algorithm proved to be less corrupted, delivering fewer duplicate links and more scientific studies/ Well...a manipulative web site is a dead web site. I expect Google to recover quickly after showing the advertisers how much traffic the effort to "force traffic" will cost them, but then again it's hard to overestimate the stupidity of people who want to be "gatekeepers" to human thought.
Google advertisers need to face reality. When people want information about butterflies, or anything else, we are not especially interested in junk jewelry. A blog post like this one might note as a sign of the butterfly's popularity that people do make and sell polydamas-inspired jewelry, but we're not going to buy or sell it. So, advertisers, kindly move your little pushcarts out of the way while we gather the fun facts that might conceivably make some reader, somewhere, recognize polydamas when person sees your junk jewelry in a store.
From a Google search...some butterflies are very obscure, and there may be only a handful of search results with two or three worthwhile links. For popular, well documented species like this one, from Google I'd expect about 200 results, 50 to 100 of which would be multiple links to the same few pages. From Yahoo I got 400 results with only about 20 duplicate links. Lots more links, photos, and videos to encourage butterfly enthusiasts and torture insect-phobics. More writing time, of course, also.
Of course, some of the links on which I clicked aren't scientific. One that's strictly for entertainment solemnly informs people that, if you see a black butterfly, you will have a sleepless night, probably because you're under stress, probably about money. Say what? I knew and loved black butterflies before I knew what money was, and the correlation between my seeing the black Swallowtails (and their mimics the Red-Spotted Purples) and my working at night is either zero or negative, I'm not sure which. The writer goes on to suggest that black butterflies might be a good omen of reconciliation among family members (a little push in the direction of niceness can't hurt, right?), or a sign that you're handling aging well (a "Barnum interpretation" if ever one was--I suppose, actually, four- and five-year-old children do handle aging well).
Black butterflies aren't usually the ones that alight on people, and if they do, although a few black butterflies are males who like the taste of human sweat, what it's most likely to mean is that you've got something sweet and fruity on your clothes. If you cut off half-rounds of melon and eat them out of your hands, you're likely to attract black butterflies, along with less lovable animals such as ants. If you try eating a sweet tree-ripened Florida orange out of your hand, the way you might have learned to eat drier gas-ripened oranges shipped further north, that's another way to find any black butterflies who might be in the neighborhood. The general rule about Swallowtails is that females are pollinators who leave only flower pollen on your hand, while males are composters who may leave anything. How can you tell the males from the females? Black butterflies are more likely to be females, in many places, but in species like polydamas the males are black too. When a butterfly of any color alights on your hands, lets you admire its beauty for a few seconds, and then flits off, this is a sign that it's time to wash your hands.
Battus polydamas is so popular it's appeared on postage:
Linnaeus and his contemporaries liked naming species after heroes of ancient literature. Depending on which genre of ancient literature you prefer, Battus commemorates either an ancient king, from history, or a shepherd boy who basically did what employees are usually advised to do today and found that the ancient Greeks didn't appreciate the same pattern of behavior that modern employers do, from mythology.
What about Polydamas? The name is one of those two-part inventions that were popular in much of ancient Europe, from poly, many, and damas, to tame animals, or tame animals, or specifically cattle. In the Iliad Polydamas was a Trojan officer who urged his people not to attack Greece, but they did, and he fought bravely anyway--sort of like General Lee, except that Polydamas was killed in the battle. Another Polydamas in Greek literature was a legendary strongman, like Samson, said to have killed a lion with his bare hands, lifted a bull, and died trying to stop a rolling boulder.
Digitized image of Linnaeus' words from Lepiforum.org.
Battus polydamas was first described by Carolus Linnaeus himself. It's a large tropical butterfly, wingspan three to five inches. Though part of the Swallowtail "family" of butterfly species, it has no "swallowtails" on its hind wings. Males and females look alike; females are larger than males, on average, but individuals vary. Generally eggs are yellower, and caterpillars have fatter bodies and smaller tubercles, than philenor.
Polydamas is a low-altitude species, usually found near its host plants. Some of the Aristolochias it eats grow on relatively open land; others climb up tall trees, but polydamas is generally found in more "open" forests rather than dark, dense growth. Females spend most of their adult lives flying around vines, looking for the best places to lay eggs.
There are considered to be 22 subspecies--some common, some rare, some possibly extinct. The individual butterflies don't flit through their entire range; they tend to stay put and evolve distinct characteristics in each of their habitats. Some of the subspecies are, of course, better documented than others. They have different patterns of spots on the undersides of their wings; the subspecies lucayus, found in Florida and south Georgia, has similar markings on the upper and lower sides of its wings.. Wikipedia filled in photos for two of the subspecies below; I found a few more, but at least one subspecies, antiquus, never has been photographed, and probably never will be.
That antiquus ever existed is believed entirely upon the credibility of Dru Drury, an eighteenth century Englishman who drew clearly colored pictures of it. The thinking is that Drury drew pictures only of what he'd really seen, so if he drew a picture of a polydamas that didn't quite match any living butterfly since his time, there must once have been a subspecies that looked just like what Drury drew, and it must have gone extinct.
Photo donated to Inaturalist.org by Sebastianvanzulli, who notes that it was taken in Chile in November.
B. p. renani Lamas, 1998 – Peru
Badly faded museum piece photographed by Gerardo Lamas for Bufferflies of America.
B. p. streckerianus (Honrath, 1884) – Peru
Photo by Dbeadle, who holds a copyright and wants payment if his photo is used for payment. Many of the fair-use photos here are subject to copyright if used in paid work. That's why the cost of publishing this series as a printed book would be prohibitive and why I've opted for "personal use" on my personal blog, primarily for the benefit of The Nephews, instead. You may print off your own copies, but don't sell them.
Although some subspecies have probably gone extinct, the species as a whole is considered to be "of least concern." The distinctive mutations that produce subspecies may or may not recur.
Trying to attract polydamas to the garden will generate controversy if you're guided by the video linked below. The young man proudly points out dozens of eggs and tiny caterpillars on the exotic pipevine, Aristolochia grandiflora. It has a much larger and stronger-smelling flower than the native Aristolochias the other butterflies in the Troidini group can eat. As the man observes, the big, dark red flower on grandiflora smells like carrion. It looks like dead meat, too; to my eyes it's not beautiful at all. He doesn't find any of the full-sized caterpillars. That may be because the cool weather he mentions has simply encouraged all those eggs and baby caterpillars to hatch a week later than he expected. However, exotic Aristolochias will attract other insects (not all of them Swallowtail butterflies) that eat native Aristolochias, and this confusion may lead to sick or dead native insects.
Members of the pipevine family, such as the strange pelican flower vine, are too toxic for some Battus species to consume as larvae, but not so for rugged caterpillars of the Polydamas swallowtail.
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The member of the pipevine family that's too toxic for the other Troidini is A. elegans, which looks similar to A. grandiflora. Battus polydamas' various subspecies eat a wide variety of Aristolochias and can live on species that aren't harmful to Battus philenor or other native wildlife.
This post explains (in Portuguese; thanks to the pan-Europeanism of scientific jargon, it can be read as if it were Spanish) how the Aristolochias depend on Swallowtails as pollinators:
Aristolochic acid is not the caterpillars' only defense. Although it's toxic, at least three caterpillar-eating animals--carpenter ants, assassin bugs, and domestic chickens--do not immediately notice its toxicity and will eat things contaminated with aristolochic acid that otherwise taste good to them. Chickens and carpenter ants will eat another young, small polydamas caterpillar after having eaten one, but not another full-sized one. Other biochemicals make the older caterpillars even more disgusting, such that chickens and carpenter ants will leave them alone. Assassin bugs will go after even full-sized caterpillars. No lifeform's natural defense is perfect.
Although it's usually bigger and looks completely different from the typical United States specimen of Battus philenor, some of the South American subspecies of philenor are larger and can look more like polydamas, and crossbreeding is possible, though very rare, The "Coeruloaureus" butterfly ("sky-blue-and-gold") is one of the few hybrid animals known to occur in nature without human help. If you see one, snap photos and save them to show your grandchildren. Somebody offered a dead crossbreed for sale, claiming that it was "probably unique." This web site, of course, recommends never paying for dead butterflies or parts thereof. We should not encourage desperate students to contribute to local population or subspecies extinction.
In Chile, for reasons that continue to baffle scientists, the subspecies archidamas and/or psittacus and their host plant, Aristolochia chilensis, go through regular population irruptions. When the population reaches a critical density, every few years, the butterflies apparently attempt to migrate across the ocean. This migration is doomed. Though individual butterflies may be bigger than some Monarch or Mourning Cloak butterflies, they are still only Swallowtails. They fly a short distance out to sea, then collapse into the water and may wash up on beaches if the tide is coming in. While this lemming-like behavior clearly functions to regulate population, humans will probably never know whether the butterflies' last thoughts are that better food is available elsewhere or that they're escaping predators...
People who had heard that some of the Aristolochias are used as medicine, but observed that the tropical species in this plant genus tend to be too toxic for medical use, have tried extracting the medicinal properties of aristolochic acid from the caterpillars. The caterpillars were pickled in rum, which was then given to patients. The brew was sold under the name "Chiniy." However, its use and sale is now banned as likely to do more harm than good. In addition to its unpleasantly overstimulating immediate side effects, which range from heart palpitations and nausea to spontaneous abortion with hemorrhaging, aristolochic acid is known to damage the kidneys and believed to contribute to the growth of cancer in humans.
Researchers have found it possible to rear and breed these butterflies on synthetic food. The caterpillars do seem to have some biochemical ability to "detoxify" aristolochic acid, although this study emphasizes that much remains to be learned about whether this process will ever be useful to humans:
Other studies of the biochemistry of Troidine digestion and metabolism have been done. Some are old enough to be available online free of charge; some are new enough that only abstracts or first pages are available free of charge. Nothing of great importance to medical science has been learned yet, but it's a topic medical students might want to follow.
A detailed study of the life cycle of Battus polydamas cubensis is free for the downloading from
This quick study shows how to tell polydamas from philenor. Briefly: eggs and caterpillars are easy to distinguish, pupae are not, adult butterflies are hard to confuse.
Like many other Swallowtails, these butterflies catch the eye by being active and moving fast as well as by being large and colorful. Males show off their energy by trying to fly higher and faster than one another or than females they are trying to impress. Fortunately for the males, egg-loaded females seem easily impressed. They mate back to back, but sometimes one butterfly gently enfolds the other's wings between its own. In available photos, the female seems to embrace the male, which may serve the purpose of checking his scent-releasing behavior. While flying around the female to show off, the male polydamas releases the distinctive odor of his species. His scent folds are only about a millimeter across. That's enough to prove his species identity. Female polydamas like Aristolochia and Lantana flowers, which also smell rather off-putting to humans, and they probably like their mates too--but enough is enough of anything.
Although the size difference is not necessarily great, butterflies are light. If a couple are disturbed during their moments together, the female can carry the male to a more private place. One of the few things these butterflies do that stop them fanning and fluttering their wings is snogging, sometimes for hours.
Eggs are often laid in small groups. While many large caterpillars need a whole plant to themselves, in the tropics Aristolochia vines grow fast enough to survive having their leaves stripped by a family of very hungry caterpillars. Females seem to be in a hurry to lay their eggs, and can afford to drop ten or fifteen in the same place, a luxury many Swallowtails don't share. They look for tiny, fresh, new leaves and stem ends. By the time the caterpillars hatch, the fast-growing leaves will be big enough to hold them and still soft enough for baby caterpillars to digest.
The butterflies have an imperfect instinctive sense of which host plants are best for their young. As noted above, this is not the most survival-intelligent animal on Earth. Probably feeling some urgency to unload fast-developing eggs, they may place eggs on species of Aristolochia that will not adequately feed their caterpillars. They do recognize and prefer the optimal species, but so do the caterpillars. One can imagine a butterfly rationalizing to herself--if butterflies think so far ahead--that the caterpillars can live on an inferior host plant long enough to recognize its inferiority and crawl off to find better food...Such, of course, is not always or even often the case. A malnourished caterpillar's chance of finding better food is even lower than a healthy one's. Older caterpillars do, however, move out on their own and sometimes find better host plants than they left.
Like other eggs of butterflies in this genus, the eggs look like little round beads, textured with drops of aristolochic acid that discourage predators. The eggs shown below were about to hatch.
Photo donated to Inaturalist.org by Jan Dauphin, who also photographed hatching caterpillars:
The Dauphins' photo essay shows the life of an individual butterfly, probably Battus polydamas polydamas, reared in captivity near the Rio Grande:
Although they eat their own shed skins, they seem to hatch with enough social instinct not to try to eat their siblings' skins. While they're small enough to share leaves, they are one of several butterfly species in which the caterpillars instinctively line up in a row. Touching sides may feel pleasant to the caterpillars; it also increases the chance that predators may mistake them for something harder to eat. As they grow bigger, they separate so that each one can eat a leaf of its own. Like all Aristolochia eaters, these caterpillars have three other defenses: they are toxic and apparently taste nasty to most creatures that eat them, they are creatively ugly, and they smell like their host plants' flowers. Swallowtail caterpillars can aggressively release a whiff of carrion by displaying their osmeteria, the "stink horns" at the back of the head that come out when the caterpillars feel threatened.
The chemicals in the odors have been analyzed, and this species' osmeterium has been dissected under an electron microscope.
Caterpillars in groups are more likely to evert the osmeterium and merely stink at researchers who pester them. Caterpillars feeding alone are more likely to thrash their heads about in a threat display (they can't bite humans hard enough to do more than vent their emotions), during which the osmeterium may also be everted. See Week 1's joke about the benefits and costs of being en entomologist.
Photo donated anonymously to butterflyidentification.com, which states that these caterpillars mature through only four instars (changes of skin) and spend about three weeks being caterpillars. Other sources mention that while some caterpillars can pupate after four larval instars, others go through five, six, or even seven caterpillar skins before pupating. In sexually dimorphic moth and butterfly species, where the female is larger or only the male has wings, caterpillars of one sex may take an extra instar to develop, but the purpose of polydamas' range of variation is unclear. Since each additional instar lasts five or six more days, and siblings thus pupate and eclose ("hatch" from the pupa as adults) at different times, there may be an overall survival advantage in allowing some individuals to pupate through periods of less favorable weather, or allowing generations to overlap may promote genetic diversity.
Cisternas, Rios, et al., studying these caterpillars, suggest that longer juvenile lives may be normal for the species, and touch may speed up their development. As with philenor, the mother butterfly may lay her first few eggs in bunches, later eggs by ones and twos. Caterpillars who grow up alone and are undisturbed may mature through more instars, while those who grow up in groups and/or are disturbed may find themselves rushing through adolescence to reproduce earlier. The size of pupae did not seem much affected by the time the caterpillars took to reach pupation. If pupating within three weeks after hatching, going through only four instars, is normal for the species, then more instars and another week or two as caterpillars seem to add nothing to species survival. If, on the other hand, spending five or six weeks as caterpillars is normal for polydamas, the ability to reach "mature caterpillar" size and pupate as early as eighteen days after hatching is a remarkable adaptation. Passing through more vulnerable life stages more quickly would presumably allow more individuals to mature and reproduce. The entire life cycle can be over in forty days or fewer, or can last for several months if the individual matures slowly and pupates through a cool season.(It does not survive in places where temperatures drop below freezing.)
However, being closer to one another increases vulnerability to internal parasites. Battus polydamas can be parasitized by microorganisms in the genus Perissocentrus. So, a mix of faster-maturing, "chummy" caterpillars and slower-maturing, solitary caterpillars may provide the optimal balance for species survival. Interestingly, both "good touch," the presumably reassuring sensation of being close to siblings, and "bad touch," being harassed by potential predators (from the caterpillars' point of view, humans fondling their soft little horns undoubtedly seem like predators), seem to stimulate accelerated growth.
The caterpillars' ability to speed up their growing time depends partly on diet; this study found that, between caterpillars reared on only one of the Aristolochia vines that grow in Chile and caterpillars given a choice of both food species, the caterpillars given a choice pupated earlier, were more likely to survive, and also--for whatever this may be worth to them--had larger heads.
All this may have something to do with one of the anomalous facts about these butterflies. The usual rule is that the length of the caterpillar is close to the wingspan of the butterfly or moth, but several species are exceptions. Polydamas is one; while adults' wingspans are almost always over three inches, the stubby little caterpillars grow only a little over two inches long.
Diet shapes the caterpillars' development but its precise effects remain unclear. They can eat flowers as well as leaves of their host plant; they tend to strip plants, which then grow back quickly.
Photo donated to ButterfliesAndMoths.org by Deb Peterson.
Pinto, Troncoso, et al. found that a diet higher in aristolochic acids consistently produced bigger caterpillars with a lower mortality rate. They mention their research subjects' sixth instars but did not study whether extra instars are promoted by a richer diet, or how or whether extra instars may benefit individuals or the species.
Gonzalez-/Tauber et al. speculate that overall climate warming might benefit Battus polydamas archidamas:
In the fourth instar the tubercles (warts) behind the head grow longer and look like little horns, but don't become tentacles the caterpillar can use to find the freshest part of a leaf, as philenor does. Polydamas caterpillars grow bigger than philenor and have shorter "horns." The horns can be moved and can be turned down but are not tapped along the surface as the animals walk.
In addition to the "horns" one pair of tubercles on the side, toward the end of the caterpillar, grow long enough to be moved independently. This video shows these tubercles twitching aimlessly, apparently as part of the caterpillar's body movements as it nibbles off the end of the plant. Do they help the caterpillar find tender leaves by tapping the surface on which it walks, as philenor's tentacles do?
As the caterpillar crawls over the researcher's hand in this video, it lifts its head and looks about every few steps, while the extended tubercles toward the rear tap the surface of the hand.
Caterpillars' colors can vary. In lucayus most caterpillars are black with orange-tipped warts, and the lighter-colored caterpillars are lighter brown rather than bright red. However, they have a pattern of striation, which can be hard to see on dark brown or black individuals. This individual from Costa Rica is purple, white, and gold.:
A white morph is documented in Peru in this study (written in Spanish only): It can be cream-colored with beautiful, subtle streaks of reddish brown, or even pink with streaks of red.
Ecos del Bosque notes that this purple-white-and-gold individual was found on a citrus tree not far from an Aristolochia vine. They can't live on citrus leaves but may, like philenor, intentionally leave the plants on which they are feeding and rest somewhere else, where they think predators won't look for them. Like the adults, fourth-instar and older caterpillars can find their way back to their food plants by scent.
The pupa can be greenish or brownish and looks as if it might be a dead leaf, at least until the butterfly inside starts to show through. Pupation often lasts less than three weeks.
Photo by Pedrova (Pedro Vargas) at inaturalist.org.
Photo donated anonymously to butterflyidentification.com.
Natural selection favors pupae of different colors in different climate conditions, as the green ones are better camouflaged against green plants, the brown ones against dry ground. This creates another balance of benefits between traits for Chilean polydamas, whose host plants live in places that become desertlike for part of the year.
Adult butterflies are usually thought to fly for two weeks or less, though some sources think they may occasionally live longer. At the ends of its range, this species has two or three distinct generations each year--April to November in the United States, September to March in Chile. Near the equator it is active all year, with overlapping generations.
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