What we're learning this week: Your Auntie Pris can monitor her e-mail, at the current rate of volume, or maintain this blog, but not both. I've spent most of the week begging Book Funnel writers to edit their "newsletters" and condense them down to a manageable rate of one per week (or month) per writer, but some seem to want to continue just rubber-stamping the spam. Some of these people are cranking out multiple pieces of spam back-to-back--not only one or two e-mails a day, but two e-mails back to back.
This is not newslettering. Real newsletters are put together by an individual who collects bits of news for a week, a month, two or three months, and edits it all down into one envelope's worth of mail. We cannot all be John Holt, who got his quarterly newsletters, often with lists of a hundred or more books, down to four or eight pages of tiny print--but we should all be inspired by his good example. It's like the difference between "I'd like to get to know this person" and "Person is texting me every five minutes."
Book Funnel is unintentionally "helping" writers to present themselves as cheap, thoughtless, and desperate people nobody would want to know. That's not the way writers are but it is the way an algorithm-driven, computer-based marketing system is making some otherwise good writers sound.
And it's now officially spring. I have spring cleaning and gardening to do. I have writing gigs to do. I have a book manuscript to work on. I have a criminal to catch, so I'm doing as much of it as possible at night. And, at a Cat Sanctuary, there are likely to be kittens. Even reviewers can't sit at the computer all day.
Starting in April, much as I wanted to read Book Funnel writers' newsletters, I'm going to have a new rule: The second automated e-mail in one week from one writer gets that writer blocked. I'll miss the real hand-typed news scattered through these automated "newsletters," but I've not been seeing much of it, anyway, for all the verbiage people have been cranking out by pasting whole book blurbs into their e-mails.
Animals
My husband and I used to walk in different nature parks in Maryland, on sunny days. (On rainy days we walked through supermarkets or shopping malls.) Maryland is a very watery State. Almost every nature park has a body of water as its focal point, and most of those bodies of water attract resident flocks of Canada geese, and during the years we observed those geese every flock had one or maybe two geese of a different species that had joined the flock and stayed.
We observed that geese are normally monogamous. Flocks break up in spring as each couple raises their own eggs. When geese are overcrowded they'll watch for a chance to break up unattended nests, keeping other geese's goslings from hatching. Parent geese seem to expect this behavior and, though they'll hiss and chase visiting geese away from their eggs, they don't seem to blame the other geese later, when the goslings grow up and all the birds merge back into a big flock. Canada geese, especially the large subspecies, are the dominant species and form the majority in a flock but seem to tolerate even barnyard geese if they can keep up with the rest of the flock. From what we saw, these minority-species geese join flocks of Canada geese as couples or after losing their mates. They don't crossbreed with Canada geese but we did see more than one case where a minority-type goose attached itself to a pair of Canada geese as a nest helper. There was a couple of China geese, who are not built for long migrations but are strong swimmers, who lived in a flock of Canada geese the whole time we were together; the female died first, and after a few years alone we thought the male formed a sentimental attachment to a female Canada gosling, who then insisted that her mate accept him as part of their family when they produced goslings of their own. We saw bigger greylag geese and a smaller blue goose who lived among Canada geese, too. In winter ducks of all sizes joined the flock, too, as did swans.
Alana Mautone and friends think this smaller white goose is the minority form of blue goose known as a snow goose.
Butterfly porn? These British Brimstone butterflies, a peculiar species that hibernate as adults in winter, mate early in spring, and this couple used their wings to protect whatever butterflies have in the way of modesty. (Actually, butterflies who cover their tail ends with their wings while mating may get a survival advantage: predators don't usually want to eat wings, so when they see less appetizing parts of the butterfly they may feel inclined to look for something more palatable.)
ICYMI (in case you missed it)
Prayers for Princess Kate..
https://pjmedia.com/gregbyrnes/2024/03/22/kate-middleton-riddle-solved-as-she-reveals-she-has-cancer
Immigration
(I started typing this paragraph in Spanish. Then I thought it more prudent to write in English--Google will translate it, and offensive word choices can then be blamed on the computer. Some words have similar definitions but different connotations in different times and places.)
To those who want to immigrate, with love. Although you may be good people, quiet, hardworking, clean, honest, probably very "conservative" in matters of morality, the places where it is easy to live in North America are overcrowded. For that reason you are hated in those places--not hated for being bad people, but hated for wanting to crowd into places where there is no room for you. There is an insane conflict between those who want to bring in more young people, to be second-class citizens and keep our dysfunctional Ponzi scheme of Social Security going just a little longer with an even harder crash for the next generation, and those who want to save such jobs and land as may become available for the grandchildren they want to have. Both positions seem to me selfish and arrogant. Never mind them., The fact is that the United States is now extremely low on hospitality for youall. Canada, which has historically been more hospitable because the climate keeps immigration down in any case, is no longer very hospitable either. Stay where you are. You have a vocation from God to make your own countries great.
If anyone tells you that you can have a better life in the United States, be sure that person is prepared to adopt you as his or her own children. That is the only way person can make such a promise. I think the comments on this news story are jokes, but the jokes are being made with a serious intention of discouraging any more immigration. There is no room.
Last winter someone wrote to me, claiming to be a rich Syrian businessman with a teenaged daughter he wanted to educate here. My default reaction was, of course, "Scam alert!" but I didn't want to close off all possibility of legitimate help for a legitimate need. Years ago, before my poor little mother had thrown away all the family's wealth in the belief that God would reward her business for doing so, may God have pity on her, I said that any Syrian or other refugees who were being persecuted for being Christians could stay with me. Well, so they can, although the bureaucracy is currently making it exceedingly difficult and dangerous for Syrians, specifically, to come here. But do they want to be here? Well, considering the question of the girl's education...the local public school is still a fairly good one, but people aren't used to foreigners; the high school experience would probably be unnecessarily painful. There's a decent Christian boarding school a few hours away; it costs only about two thousand dollars a term, clothes and pocket money extra. The girls there do expect one another to dress well and spend freely or be taunted, or even pitied...I e-mailed State. I've not been in Washington for fifteen years now. Nobody remembered me. Nobody e-mailed back. What I, personally, could offer anyone in need is still in the "floor space to sleep on" category. "The economy" has bitten most families I know. As long as we have homes and land we can't be called really poor, and anyone who gives that up is a fool, but we're not necessarily eating well and as our nice things wear out they may not be replaceable.
Land Management
Relevant to Wednesday's thoughts on "developers":
Poems
This could almost be about homelessness as an effect of tolerance for "developers"...but it's not. It's about men who don't choose to be sober, hardworking, or law-abiding, and can be said to deserve what they get. People who are homeless because inflated property values make their rent higher than their wages, or because they have brain damage and can't look after themselves, or because they can't get work, deserve sympathy and help--but it's not society's responsibility to prevent people choosing to go feral. I happened to think the poem and song were funny.
Politics
Justin Trudeau said something intelligent--that's good news.
Now he needs to add some follow-up observations that also show intelligence, like,
"This distrust is directly caused by censorship, most conspicuously the censorship of Donald Trump that helped troublemakers turn a rally into a riot on January 6, 2021, and the censorship of accurate safety warnings about profitable products such as Prozac, glyphosate, Merck's live-virus measles vaccines, and most recently the COVID vaccines, now also known as 'clot-shots' from their association with abnormal blood clotting in some patients not previously diagnosed with cardiac disease."
"We must firmly oppose all censorship, even of tacky Tik Tok."
"We must block access to the Internet from countries that tolerate censorship."
"And we must stop funding what has ceased to function as a mediation service, no doubt because it has supported the megalomaniac fantasies of people who actually think they could 'rule the world,' instead of referring them to the psychiatric help they so obviously need. In order to receive the funding the UN has no doubt anticipated, the UN must purge its ranks of anyone who lacks a solid record of support for national sovereignty and individual civil liberties."
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