Bonus Post: Climate or War?

"Climate or War: the bigger problem" sounds to me like a prompt for a post about how these "problems" have historically been used as pretexts for schemes of global tyranny. I think there is some basis for thinking of climate as a major problem...but, unless people wake up and take responsibility for the real problem of local warming, climate will either turn out not to be a major problem or to be an unsolvable one. So long as people keep yapping about bigger or global government being the only solution to the problem of global warming etc. etc., people will keep arguing that the facts don't even support the perception of global warming as all that much of a problem...right up until the facts prove either that global warming isn't happening, that it's not a problem, or that it's out of control and going to destroy us all. Whichever the case may turn out to be. It'll take at least fifty years to find out and, this close to the end of my aging-as-a-cyberspace-entity-by-decades as being fifty years old, I don't expect I'll ever know. 

Whereas war certainly is a major problem, but people who are not personally affected by it are quite capable of cheering it on. After all, the repertoire of potential human behavior does include mass violence of a kind that seems to demand mass violence as a consequence. Israel might have the technical ability to track down the Simchat Torah attackers, by ones, and allow their widows and orphans the chance to live at peace in Gaza if they curse the attackers, defile their graves, and pledge allegiance to Israel--or peaceably emigrate to wherever they can get permission to immigrate on the grounds of their families having been disgraced beyond endurance; whichever. That would be modern and enlightened and humane. But, as we've all seen, at least in the short term it's simply more human to want to flatten the whole dang strip of desert where the vile little cowards are hiding. Burn the towns over their heads, including the nursing homes and the kindergartens, because nits make lice and God will sort them out...it's an ugly reaction, but it's human. Accepting tyranny as an end to war has worked, locally, for short periods of time, but it's not human and it's never worked for even one generation of humans--because tyranny does not end war, any more than it would end global warming.

Can we just agree that tyranny, or "global governance" or whatever the latest name may be, is not a valid solution, and move on from there? At least that way the discussion of what is possible, within the repertoire of behavior for our species, could be intelligently human.

Meanwhile the less than inspirational thought of how humans seem, generally, to think of climate and war suggests at least a snarky poem for NaPoWriMo:

"Though War destroys poor people's children trapped within its net,

Climate," he huffed, "would ruin my day by causing me to sweat!"

Image by Craiyon.com.

 

New Book Review: Housemates With My Billionaire Boss

Title: Housemates with My Billionaire Boss 

Author: Lila Marlow

Date: 2024

Publisher; Lila Marlow

Quote: "If I hired her, she would spend most of her time on the property."

Yes, this is one of those alternating-first-person romances where chapters seem to be taken from each character's diary in turn. It's also a mystery. Callum hires Glorietta, who has a master's degree in linguistics, to catalogue the Waltons (not Walton) family library. How old are the old books they find in a secret closet, and who hit Glorietta on the head when she found the closet behind a false barrier? In the course of solving the mystery and finishing the job, the young people share a house, chaperoned only by Callum's genuine concern for Glorietta's concussed condition, and decide sharing a house is fun.

Fair disclosure: I once committed to share a house for a whole summer with someone with whom I'd enjoyed sharing another house for weekends. It turned me completely off the house, the person, and the other four housemates by whom we were chaperoned--not that I expect any of them shed any tears when I moved out, either. My point here is that mileage varies. Being unexpected housemates is not as reliable a way to find True Romance as some novelists seem to think.

Anyway it's a sweet romance, so the only suspense is solving the mystery of the secret room in the library. Readers who enjoy sweet romances will enjoy this one. Well, no, it's not Joan Aiken, nor is it Eugenia Price. Nobody else is Joan Aiken or Eugenia Price, and these Book Funnel romances are up to the standards of the six-romances-per-month clubs.

Butterfly ofthe Week: Dolicaon, the Thin-Tailed Kite

This week's butterfly species is one of those whose status in the world of entomology is uncertain. It is currently recognized as a species with six subspecies, but some question whether it's really the same thing as Eurytides iphitas, perhaps a variant form influenced by weather conditions. (Some butterflies look completely different if they matured in different weather conditions; we'll soon come to Eurytides or Protographium marcellus, which, when I was in school, was believed to be three distinct species.) 

Photo by Ackruger, in Brazil, in December. They occasionally fan their wings out, as shown above, to catch the sun, but more often hold their wings upright. The upright wings are hard to see from most angles, and catch less heat. When butterflies spread their wings wide they are warming themselves, a behavior often observed in the Northern States and Canada. 

Photo by Karsten_S, Peru, July. 

All subspecies of dolicaon have rhat bent bar of dark color across the leading edge of the forewings. The rest of the pattern differs slightly among subspecies. Photos of all subspecies were not available, but here is Eurytides dolicaon deicoon: 

Photo by Felipi Andrade, September, Brazil.

E.d. deileon: 

Photo by Karsten Schoenherr, September, Peru.

Museum specimens from Butterflies Of America: E.d. septentrionalis: 

E.d. hebreus or hebrus: 

E.d. tromes: 

No positively identified photo of E.d. cauraensis or cauras has been posted online. It should be noted that color is not a reliable guide to subspecies. Some individuals are more faded than others. The generalization that males are more vividly colored than females is not made about this species. (In the few specimens he studied, Rothschild found the females to be just noticeably larger than the males. Other authors don't mention this. The best way to tell the sex of a butterfly is to see whether it lays eggs, and so far that seems not to have been done with regard to dolicaon.)The predominant color for all butterflies in this species is thought to be a creamy white that can look yellow, in some individuals, in some lights, or green, in others. 

This butterfly is found in rainforests, at altitudes up to 1300 feet above sea level. 

Eurytides dolicaon was named early enough (in 1775) to be named for a character in ancient literature, a minor character in Vergil whose name is usually spelled with an H (Dolichaon). It has no really common name in English since it's not found in English-speaking countries, but it is sometimes called Dolicaon and sometimes the Thin-Tailed Kite.

In Pedromariposa's charming, slow-motion video you can make out dolicaon's distinctive wing markings on one of the butterflies flitting in and out of the mixed group shown...or just watch the flock "puddling," as a way to relax.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=63xBF5ZLzfc

Not altogether peaceable, as the butterflies are occasionally pestered by predators, but they do form a peaceful little group with one another. This is the way most Swallowtail butterflies are most often seen and, unfortunately, about the only way some of these butterflies have been documented even today. We also see how, although dolicaon and the other Kite Swallowtails are considered "large butterflies," they're not nearly so large as some of the other tropical Swallowtails. Dolicaon has a wingspan usually a little over 3 inches. 

Like some other Kites, dolicaon seems to be solitary. Butterflies that have only one host plant tend to like to be the only one of their sex and species in a neighborhood. However, nobody seems to be positive about what dolicaon eat, or what the early forms of the butterfly look like. "According to Hancock the larva is smooth," and can eat leaves from some plants in the families Annonaceae and Lauraceae--but nobody else seems to have confirmed this. There is thought to be one generation in a month between August and April, with individuls that pupate in April "overwintering" and eclosing as adult butterflies in August. There is still time for people who want to make contributions to science to try rearing these butterflies, or watching them grow up, and find out whether Hancock was correct.

In fact, scientists aren't even positive about what the females look like--whether the two butterflies above are a couple, e.g. If their behavior pattern is like our Zebra Swallowtails', they don't seem to humans to have an odor, but they can smell one another--and look for places where they can't smell one another. Females want to be the only females laying eggs on the trees where they lay their eggs, and males want to be their potential mates' first and thus only partners. In that case the two sipping water together, or the pair photographed sticking together in a multi-photo sequence at INaturalist, would be courting couples; but nobody knows for sure. Lubomir Klatil thinks it may be typical for females to have wider dark borders on each wing than males have; it remains for others to confirm to what extent this is true. 

Photo by Rkostecke, in Panama, in June. Do both sexes pollinate? Do males compost? Nobody seems certain. This individual is pollinating. 

It is sparse but not terribly rare. Photos show one or two, not three, dolicaon in a group with several other species. It's popular; Franco Giuseppe Rodolfo Po even composed a tune for it in 2022:

https://www.boomplay.com/songs/97151931

And many of the links for this species on the Internet show that it has inspired arts and crafts pieces. But the South American Kites have yet to be the focus of much scientific study. 

Web Log for 4.26-27.24

One rant (yes, it contains a link) and lots of links:

Animals 

Several clear photos of herons, egrets, and geese:

https://themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com/2024/04/catar-action-and-its-triplets.html

Celebrity Gossip

How accurate is this and how long will it last? I hope it's true for a good long time. It reminds me of a story my brother wrote at age twelve...there were G-men, and there were B-men (he was identifying with his older friend who became the neighborhood beekeeper). The difference is that the world needs more B-men. Anyway, political pronouncements apart, I've liked Morgan Freeman since "The Electric Company."

Etiquette, Differences in

Of late the Kingsport Times-News has been indulging people in long personal essays in the places where obituaries are supposed to be.

I don't think that's the right place. For one thing the memoirs that really do justice to our memories of those who have gone before us take longer to write than an obituary notice demands. For another thing obituaries are official historical documents, not opportunities for various relatives to chip in THEIR bids to publish THEIR memories THEIR way, etc. etc. The personal stories, I think, belong in family scrapbooks, blogs, personal journals. Some of them fit into newspapers or magazines. Perhaps some day they can be collected into books. But an obituary notice, as a legal document, should state when and where someone was born, when and where the person died, the names of the person's immediate family, and maybe some reference to a public career as also being a matter of public record--whether the deceased John Doe was the same John Doe who used to edit the newspaper, say. 

So, a few years back, a relative of mine did what people in their nineties so often do, and some person, probably a great-grandchild, wrote one of those long personal essays that seem so likely to embarrass the other people named. Well, the man had had a long and interesting life, but telling the story in the obituary seems, I don't know, like calling attention to how much less of a life most people have had. 

I think that's the crux of the matter. Everyone dies. People who've had long adventurous lives or short miserable ones all fit into the same coffins. The obituary page in a newspaper is the last place where we need to see boasts, "My grandfather was rich and famous," "My grandfather was neither rich nor famous but he knew how to live well, for a good long time," and miserable confessions, "My grandfather was a shabby excuse for a man who had no friends, whom my grandmother left after three weeks of marriage, who died "old" at an early age." Now that they're gone, it seems enough for the world to know at what age they died and whether they were closely related to any acquaintances of ours. 

When the deceased is somebody like the non-contributing members this web site has lost, everyone wants to share their recollections. This is normally done in conversations with one another. No personal essay can tell the story that comes out off all the conversations all the mourners are going to have for the next year or two. "This is the way I remember Grandma Bonnie Peters best..." She made the effort to learn a new language at age sixty. She supplied stores with frozen foods and restaurants with fresh-cooked soup. She was the pioneer of school choice in Virginia. She was a La Leche Leader. The only time she adopted a dog, she deliberately chose one that had been badly injured, and kept it alive for a year, trying to help it get well. (She once adopted some kittens from me, in order to demonstrate the benefits of adding pumpkinseed meal to their tinned Friskies treats. She didn't keep them long.) She had a screen name--how many people born in the 1930s had screen names? She led the soprano sections in two church choirs. If she was the sort of person who says "Let's have a blog!" and never sits down and finishes a single blog post on her shiny new computer, she had better excuses than most of that sort of people have. There may literally be no end to the stories people who loved her can tell about GBP, and it's proper that those people share their stories with one another, while all the newspapers had to report were the dates and the names. Why make other grandmothers look inadequate?

I had a grandmother who was inadequate, in every way, if you set down the story of her life next to the story of Grandma Bonnie's life, or of my other grandmother's for that matter. There was Texas Ruby, and then there was Dad's mother, who didn't live as long or do anything particularly interesting while living. She was not a good cook, but Mother was the one who tried to use the rancid nutritional yeast and concocted a dish so awful the chickens rejected it. She was not a favorite with her in-laws, but someone else was the in-law after whom someone named an animal with the intention of killing it. Visits to her house were not the highlights of a day in town for my brother and me, but they were preferable to school. She developed a boring sort of disease in her last years, atherosclerosis; it made her conversation boring, full of complaints, unrelieved even by comments on the news (reading made her head ache). She meant well. She was just another old woman whose only way to stand out in a crowd was to wear then-fashionable polyester pantsuits in colors that made other people's heads ache. Funnily enough, because she was the youngest grandparent I had and survived several years after the others were gone, she was the grandparent I knew best. I loved her. I felt loyal and protective about her--enough that, to this day, I still feel that the newspapers did not need to report how much "less than" she and her life had been. She was my Grandma, anyway. We are not all meant to be legends in our own time. 

So this cousin, not one of the achievers in the family, neither rich nor famous, was just...memorable, to a lot of people, in a lot of ways. An interesting person to know. A mind awake. Reading a story full of tidbits about his interestingness relieved the newspaper editor's feeling that the obituary page was depressing. (And stories like that one are good to include in souvenir books, biographies, histories...where the focus is not on the common end of all life, but on the contribution one person made to the family's or neighborhood's history...they belonged in Vince Staten's Times-News column, and we still link to them on his web site; they're just a different thing from newspaper obituaries.)

Pull yourselves together, editors. Obituaries are sad. Obituaries need an editor who is not prone to depression, who can check the facts of ten or twenty deaths and move on to think about the lives of the living...

But the editor has spoken, and who sets the rules of etiquette for a newspaper? The editor does. If the editor is prone to emotional reactions to the obituary page, and wants obituaries to be "enlivened," then it becomes proper that...

Well not mine. If I die, you Nephews may add to the dates, places, and names the obituary requires that I was the writer known as Priscilla King. That should be quite enough. The only fodder a newspaper obituary should offer for competitiveness is the lengths of the different lives that ended that week.

But you may write any other obituaries that duty may require you to write, as you choose. It is officially acceptable to put personal memories into obituaries in the Kingsport Times-News, if not in other newspapers where tradition may prevail. It is officially acceptable to attempt to make an obituary "go viral," as taught at 

https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/how-write-perfect-obituary-according-professional-writers-ncna1055996

The Times-News likes obituaries written this way. I will try, henceforward, to suppress the words "mawkish," "vulgar," and "tacky."

Green 

It's the news from Iceland (by way of Britain): A woman claiming an English family name, a Siberian personal origin story, and Icelandic citizenship, is running for office as a proxy for a glacier. She says that in Siberian tradition natural objects are thought of as persons, and she hopes that the opportunity to elect a glacier represented by her will draw attention to climate change. But is she talking about the facts of local warming, which can be changed, or the crazy fantasy that global socialism could possibly have a good effect on climate change or on anything else?

https://notesfromtheuk.com/2024/04/26/as-if-running-a-marathon-wasnt-hard-enough-its-the-news-from-britain/

Phenology

Beautiful yellow things:

http://ramblinwitham.blogspot.com/2024/04/xanthic-atozchallenge.html

Book Review: Oceans of Mercy

Title: Oceans of Mercy 

Author: Malory Ford

Date: 2022

Publisher: Malory Ford

Quote: “We had a deal, Knox. You don’t comment on my dating life, and I won’t comment on yours.”

This is another one of those deplorable e-books that are sent out free containing only a chapter, or chapters, enough to meet Amazon's minimum word count, with the hope that you'll pay for the complete book. Bah humbug. It's a sweet romance. Allie the Shark Girl and Knox the tour boat captain are old friends who have never liked each other's admirers. Physical attraction is partly a matter of pheromones that signal genetic compatibility between fertile individuals, or mutual sterility between sterile ones, which is why it fluctuates as hormones cycle. Sometimes cross-gender friendship between teenagers "blossoms into love," sometimes it blossoms into real friendship for life, and sometimes it just dies. Because this is a Sweet Christian Romance we know that Knox and Allie are going to feel attracted to each other at last, in the course of the story, and they will at least mention being Christians, too. Neither of those things happens in the sample chapter I received, but everyone knows they will happen. There is no suspense.

Allie dives deep in the relatively shallow water near the beach and finds a souvenir of her brother's failed romance. Suspense? None. The story wouldn't be sweet if that couple didn't get a happily-ever-after ending too, though their wedding might be saved for a sequel.

No matter how much money I had, I wouldn't buy a book that was marketed this way. Amazon blocks ratings from people who received free books, just to protect authors who try this marketing gimmick, but let's just say those authors aren't getting any star points anywhere else. If you don't send the entire book, you don't get stars.

Some people may still want to read a Christian romance about a Shark Girl. Allie really does study sharks as a job. Recalling a news story to which this web site linked, many years ago, she's even named a shark after her mother, who didn't like the idea at first but has accepted it now. Fun facts about sharks would definitely distinguish this book from other Sweet Christian Romances in your collection, and might compensate for misguided marketing in some readers' opinions. Whether there's an afterword identifying sources of the fun facts, at the end of the complete book, I unfortunately can't say.

Sunday Poem: Reality vs. Doomscrolling

Health.com proposes a new mental health problem into which the Internet is allowing people to fall: 

"

Doomscrolling is when a person actively seeks out saddening or negative material to read or scroll through on social media or news media outlets. The idea behind doomscrolling is attempting to get access to all the information you need to keep yourself protected from what's dangerous around you.

"

Wikipedia adds that the word can also be used to describe a superficially similar, but different behavior of scrolling through many short videos, sometimes with the intention of losing track of time and forgetting responsibilities, sometimes only with that effect.

If the virus doesn't get them, the bacteria surely will.

They still have an old bomb shelter, and they line it with each pill

They have heard prescribed for anything when they were or weren't ill,

For they're sure to get it when S. H. T. F.

To provide for a week or two without access to electric power

Is a prudent course of action, and will pass a pleasant hour.

To remember how to live without transmissions from the tower

Gives them nightmares about the day S.H.T.F.

I'm a prepper. Every week or two I do without some thing

The past century's technology to modern lands did bring.

It's called a power outage. Be prepared for it, I sing,

But lose no sleep to fear of when S.H.T.F.

An alliance with the neighbors has more chance to serve you well

Than plans to kill them off as life becomes like Dante's Hell,

And most changes in life come by ones. It may be hard to tell

Exactly on which day the S.H.T.F.

God Who calmed the raging ocean, God Who waters parching land,

Who has promised to preserve through all a little remnant band,

Discipline us preppers, I pray, with a mild and loving hand:

Give us some way to know just when S.H.T.F.

(For those new to cyberspace...Preppers are people who try to be prepared for situations that would otherwise call for emergency help, such as extreme weather, power failures, Internet failures, shortages of gasoline or commercial food or other commodities, or a war fought on our soil for a change. There's a realistic level of prepping--stockpiling food, maintaining lower-tech alternatives to tools that may fail to work, keeping first-aid kits and blankets and emergency lights in the car--and an "extremist" or "doomsday" level, known to exist mostly in preppers' jokes, that envisions surviving a nuclear explosion and needing ammunition, not even to hunt, but to fight with neighbors over stockpiled food and drugs. Extremists focus on the day the bomb is dropped as "when stuff hits the fan," or S.H.T.F. Ruder explanations of S.H.T.F., and alcohol-fuelled interchanges in which this phrase seems to get confused with S.T.F.U., are found on web sites not owned by aunts.)

 

Bonus Post: Conflict

We affirm that God is One;

In some Pagans' "creed outworn"

It seemed plain that God was Two

Sons (who had a Mother, too),

And they quarrelled in the daytime, and they quarrelled in the night,

Till at last their quarrels grew into a bitter bloody fight,

And the outcome of their quarrel was the turning of the light

Towards summer with its green or towards winter with its white.

Summer and sunshine exist,

And winter, cold antagonist.

Abraham directed eyes

To where Truth above both lies;

As they quarrel through the autumn, as they quarrel through the spring,

Farther far they dwell beneath than any beggar any king

In relation to That Which is above and beyond each thing.

Conflict below, and unity above, we see and sing.

But a narrow road we walk,

And how easily our talk,

Missing ditch on left, at night,

Runs us into cliff on right.

For though unity's beyond, a thing is not another thing,

And indeed it may be better, or may be worse, see and sing!

Talk of unity need not provoke us common sense to fling

Away; we still feel winter's blast, and still prefer the spring.

 

Web Log for 4.24-25.24

I wasn't online for most of Wednesday, and when I came online, this time it was Google STEALING the paid computer time. We need a law about this. We need back payments. Gentle Readers, if you're online from a privately owned computer and/or a privately owned Internet service account, I seriously recommend you start keeping a log of all the time you lose to "updates" and browser glitches. Someone--possibly you--is paying for 24/7 access to the Internet. If yours is blocked by some arrogant corporation's "need" to "update' the spyware you never actually told them to run, they owe you money. 

Etiquette

Can the swastika be saved? Many cultures have seen it as an innocent symbol of symmetry, balance, good luck, the wheel of time, yada yada...I think it's too soon. As long as people who remember the 1940s are alive, the swastika will be a symbol of The Enemy. In the year 2045 swastikas may start to be cool again.

Gardening

UK edition of the general idea of working with, not against, nature in a garden. Chemical-based "high-input, high-yield" methods are unsustainable and don't even produce food fit to eat. Natural is the way to go. I've not heard that US hoverflies are so helpful in a garden--other lifeforms pollinate our strawberries--but our hoverflies are certainly less harmful than chemical sprays. (Local readers know local hoverflies as "news bees" because they hover a foot or two away from you, buzzing, as if "telling the news." Some find their inanity amusing.)

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/nonviolence/hoverfly-heaven

Glyphosate Awareness

FOR US CITIZENS ONLY...Chemical company lobbyists are trying to sneak protection for Bayer, and if possible for other corporations that produce poisonous "pesticides," into various agriculture-related bills pending in Congress. I've been notified about US HR 4288:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4288/cosponsors

and HR 4417:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/4417/cosponsors

There will be others next year. The strategy is to claim that Bayer provided adequate warning about glyphosate's role in cancer, which Bayer is still actively denying the existence of while trying to censor any discussion of the issue online. I've linked to the lists of co-sponsors so you can see whether you need to call your people in Washington about this. If not, go to this useful page to find a form letter you can customize--the text varies depending on your State.

https://toxinfreeusa.org/the-bayer-monsanto-protection-act-on-steroids-is-rolling-out-across-the-country-is-your-state-passing-the-legislation/

INTERNATIONAL READERS: It's considered cheating even for us to write to other US citizens' congressmen! Representing their own constituents is supposed to take the full attention of each Senator and Representative, so we hardly even know the ones who don't represent us. Please support your own campaigns, in your own country, your own way.

Green

Synecdoche: the problem in a nutshell:

https://writinginnorthnorfolk.com/2024/04/22/plastic-earth/

Politics

Well for one thing the out-of-touch, limo-lefty D party bosses keep handing Kennedy all the lines...

https://www.theblaze.com/news/rfk-jr-bidens-real-problem

But actually that's only one of Biden's real problems. Another one, a big one, is that he's done nothing about glyphosate. Another one is that he's done nothing about censorship. Another one is that he's done nothing about the "transhumanist" and globalist messes. That brings up the one about there having been a time when the meaning of "Democrat" could include "a decent, reasonably intelligent American who identifies with the less wealthy, opposes war, and thinks about the concerns of the young; e.g. Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, or Rick Boucher," and a lot of nice people used to vote for Democrats. For at least twenty years now those people have not had anybody to vote for, and now they have Kennedy. 

Mr. President. Please. With all due respect. Your presidential administration is dead. Please go home now. 

Psychology 

For those who consider themselves "depressed"...

This web site claims fair use of Stephan Pastis' cartoon, which this web site, we should mention, has loved for a long time. I've carried around clipped "Pearls" to show to people since 2002. 

Virginia History

Some whiny misfit was whining on Reddit about living near an historic battlefield that attracts tourists. Tourism being a big part of the town's economy, the battlefield is advertised with great big battle flags, and ooohhh, it hurts per widdle fee-wings. Honeychild. Have you never heard the saying "Shut up before you get something to whine about"? Y'might try moving to a big city up North where real racism is undead and virulent. (In Baltimore, does the response to an emergency call still include "Is the patient Black or White?")

Now, if this person had wanted to reenact a battle and been told "You can't, because you're not a White man," I would have a problem with that. It would be petty and mean-spirited, and also it would be un-historical. Both armies in the Civil War were officially made up of White men, with the exception of a few special "Colored Regiments" on the Union side and Watie's Cherokee army on the Confederate side. Nevertheless, both armies were desperate enough that volunteers of both sexes and all colors are known to have fought on both sides. 

And why were Black people Confederates? That'd be a good topic for a book. ("Think of how stupid the average human is, and then remember that half of them are more stupid even than that..."--it was a  stupid war.) In general terms, some were taken to war as property, as horses were, and donated to the Cause; some were promised freedom; some wanted to defend their homes and families, as did White men who didn't own slaves. Confederate Army policy did not arm Black or female volunteers, and Union Army policy armed only a small minority of Black volunteers. That suited some of them who wanted to help their Cause in other ways--scouting, spying, nursing. But several volunteers armed themselves--as did most regular soldiers.

We can't change history but we can learn from it. I don't like the fact that women couldn't vote, let alone couldn't vote for one another, before the War...but I like learning about the ways women got around that and other forms of discrimination, and did what they wanted to do with their lives. I'm guessing that the whiny misfit is Black. I'd like to see that person do some research about the ways Black people coped with prejudice and discrimination in the 1860s. 

Am I saying that the cure for feeling hurt by the facts of history is more history, digging up more empowering facts? Why yes, I believe I am. Try it.

In the same general category, some readers may be interested in Ellis Elliott's free-verse portrait of a Union soldier on the Virginia-Kentucky border:

https://glintjournal.wordpress.com/glint-14-poetry-ellis-elliott/

Zazzle

Zazzle recommends name plates as end-of-term gifts for teachers, so they're on sale now (in order to be delivered in the first week of May). They also, of course, make any-time gifts for anyone who works at a desk. 

https://www.zazzle.com/save_the_butterflies_name_plate-256554319638004626

I didn't even know they made printable name plates with built-in, working clocks...

https://www.zazzle.com/gold_butterfly_custom_professional_desk_name_plate-256654842168582305

...so there needs to be one with a "Save the Butterflies" motif...

https://www.zazzle.com/save_the_butterflies_name_plate_clock-256758570076640309

Zazzle has also introduced jean jackets, in women's sizes only.

https://www.zazzle.com/save_the_butterflies_denim_jean_jacket-256472084750001667

Someone else designed this one using the same method I use.

https://www.zazzle.com/october_monarch_denim_jacket-256534856715049525

Does everyone already know how Zazzle works? People put our own designs up for other people to buy, but you are your own designer. If you want to support the campaign to protect Monarch butterfly habitat but want a different image, you can pop one in. If you don't like the way the person's name looks in the Dellarobbia font, which is the "Save the Butterflies" trademark font because of the butterfly-watching character Dellarobbia in Flight Behavior, you can change the font, and the colors, and whatever else you want to change. As long as you're "customizing" an object displayed as part of the Save the Butterflies Collection, profits will go to the cause. And Zazzle's "commissions" (when customers use links people have posted to buy other people's designs) are higher than their "royalties" (when customers use links people have posted to buy those people's own designs), so if you are a fellow Zazzler and want me to promote your stuff, please send links to your pages...and, of course, promote my stuff for your own profit, heh-heh! 

Book Review: The Hanging Tree

Title: The Hanging Tree

Author: Joseph J. Dowling

Date: 2023

Publisher: Littlest Hobo

ISBN: 978-1-7394035-2-2

Quote: "We've got three bodies. Hope you haven't eaten breakfast yet."

If this tale of gory horror has any redeeming social value, it's to help readers feel sorry for police detectives. What Detectives Staley and Cornell see is enough to drive Staley insane. Watching Staley's mind go is what does it for Cornell.

In real life, homicide-suicides may babble about some person or persons "making" them do what they do, or about philosophical, political, or religious motives, or (more often) about revenge for what they claim has been done to them, but (unlike ordinary murderers) they nearly always act under the influence of certain kinds of drugs. Some of those drugs happen to have become popular psychiatric medications since the 1980s. 

In this piece of fiction, they're acting under the influence of an evil spirit that seems to present itself in relation to a woman hanged for witchcraft by men the spirit seems to have possessed first. Local history reveals that people who lived in Cooper House, or Cooper Hall (US house names aren't officially registered, so informants differ), came to gruesome ends. The story opens with Staley and Cornell finding a man who's cut up and mutilated his wife and children, then himself. He finishes killing himself in the hospital. But this time, it seems, the spirit can't wait for the house to be resold. Staley dreams about killing his wife and child, wakes up sleepwalking toward their bedrooms, and finally starts cutting them up, but Cornell finds them in time that their lives may be saved. To him it seems that the oak tree near the house, on which the accused witch was hanged, is the creepiest thing at the house.

Cornell's family have separated from him, on friendly terms. He knows where they live. He starts dreaming about killing them. He goes out to Cooper House to saw down the tree. But, if the tree embodies a demon that powerful, will it let him saw it down? On what terms, if it does?

This one is strictly a test of toughness for people who've led short, sheltered lives. If reality has given you better tests, and you've passed, why bother. If you feel a need for works of fiction that don't even try for terror or horror but are primarily about the gross-out, this fictional bloodbath may appeal to you. I think horror fiction should lay its ghosts to rest, but some serious fans of the genre don't agree.

Bad Poetry: The Death of Social Media?

"Anyone can talk to anyone,"

We said, when Twitter used to flourish.

"Each one decides what to welcome or to shun."

Such rules could nourish

Conversations lively, conversations lame,

Mere vulgarisms,

The comfort of greetings every day the same,

Loyalties or schisms,

Insults exchanged with giggles or with tears

By children learning

The rules of conversation with their peers,

Effect discerning,

And messages from distant friends,

Soldier or student,

Flirtations, or friendships, or quarrels, too,

Foolish or prudent.

People were free to be themselves,

And for a writer,

Hundreds of people being themselves--

What prospect's brighter?

Much could be learned of politics

By politicians;

Of marketing, and even public health,

By statisticians.

But censorship threw up its ugly head;

Foreigners, greedy

For profits gained from the worst kind of fraud,

Claimed they were needy

Of censorship to pamper feelings of 

Snowflakes so special

That they were hurt by any word or none

Of all things racial.

Now no one talks to anyone

On censored Twitter;

For only the corporations' speech,

Strident and bitter,

Has opportunities to reach

Those who would follow

Friends, kin, writers or politicians,

The deep, the shallow.

And corporate messages are nothing new;

With scorn, derision,

We note that we had heard them all before

On television.

The corporations pay to own the airwaves,

Drool on lips glistening;

How long before they notice that

Nobody's listening?

 

Bill Busting 102: Cheap Hot Water

Every man can be his own plumber, and every woman can be hers, if they're willing to do the work. If you happen to own property that includes water rights to a natural spring, all you have to do is get some pipe, put one end in the spring, put a filter over that end to keep out sand, cover it while working, bury it deep enough that it won't freeze, and attach the other end to a faucet. Before opening the end of the pipe at the spring, set the faucet in place above the sink, tub, trough, whatever you want the water to run into, and set up a drain pipe to carry water away from the house. Ideally this pipe empties into a small pond a few yards above the spring branch, so that your used water does not drain into a stream others use. Give natural processes a chance to filter your germs, soap, dirt, etc., out of the water first. And, of course, as a regular reader of this web site, you already know that you don't want a water-flush toilet; spring water is for drinking and washing, only. Now your water needs are taken care of, if you have the use of a natural spring.

"Golly, that sounds easy if you say it fast. How do I..." I'm not going to try to explain the details here, because I don't have faith that I am that good a writer and because you probably need to comply with local regulations anyway. If you did not inherit a simple system that runs spring water through your home and learn how to maintain it from your elders, and you have not done enough plumbing work to know how much of what to put where, consult a local expert.

What if you don't have access to a spring? First of all, does everyone already know how to get cheap water?

The easy way is to live in a well-watered part of the world, where you can collect water from springs or during rain storms. Very little of this water will be fit to drink, but filtering and boiling are relatively cheap ways to make it as good as city tap water. Arguably it may be better if you get enough fluorine in your diet and don't want excessive fluoride from your water.

The more complicated way is to spread non-porous objects over the ground at night and collect water as water vapor in the air condenses on cooling. A sheet of black plastic will work. 

City water grids save enough time and labor that most people set a high priority on keeping their homes connected. If you can't afford to stay on the water grid, however, you can survive without it. 

To get the benefit of hot water for washing grease off dishes, hair, etc., you need a large glass or metal container for each person in the household, and a window or windows facing southwest. This will provide hot showers on warm sunny days, tepid water on wet or cold days, and cold but not frozen water on most (but not necessarily all) winter nights. Park the containers in front of the windows. Water can be drawn out from a simple tap, or connected to faucets and shower heads in the house, depending on what you need.

A basic renovation everyone can make that will save money, even while they're connected to the city water grid, is to think of the hot water tank as the first and probably the best of those water containers in your new solar water heating system. Brother Sun will save wear and tear on the electrical heating elements, or save gas, as willingly as he will heat the water in a plain container. The hot water tank that came with the house contains a thermostat that turns on the electricity or gas when the water temperature drops below a certain point. Placing the hot water tank in front of the southwest window drastically reduces the amount of non-solar energy you need to maintain the preferred temperature.

Heating water by solar power alone won't provide the sensory pleasure of a hot bath or shower when temperatures are below freezing. In order to give patients hydrotherapy treatments, nineteenth century practitioners used to heat water on a wood, coal, or kerosene stove. Someone would carry a gallon or two of hot water to the tub and pour it over the patient. The treatment worked for some people but it cost more than most Victorians considered reasonable, because of all the labor involved. 

More modern ways to heat water are barely past the experimental stage. Having a lot of people dependent on water, electrical, and gas grids is profitable for a lot of people and, if they can add the Internet as yet another grid into which everybody can be forced to pour monthly payments, many people would be even happier. This is not a sustainable plan for all those billions of surplus humans who, we're told, will be making every livable part of the world as crowded as New York City if we continue having babies and most of those babies continue to enjoy long healthy lives. No nation can afford to have its economy dependent on a vulnerable central grid. Each house and each office block needs to be what the grid owners call, with a shudder in their voice, an "energy island." But corporations aren't in any hurry to fund the development and commercial production of devices that take people off the grid. They are less concerned about how human lives will survive an emergency than about how they can suck in more revenues each month.

In theory, your solar collector and/or your exercise bike could store energy in a battery you could connect to a device in the wall behind the sink, or even in a faucet or shower head, over which water flows. When turned on, this device would use a small amount of electricity to heat up a heating element like the ones inside a conventional water heater. The water flowing out of the faucet could be heated to 140 degrees Fahrenheit if you wanted it to be. From time to time, since the 1960s, people have patented such devices and marketed them by direct mail to small groups of friends, or in "alternative" newspapers and magazines, but they're not likely to be in Wal-Mart for a few more years. 

If perfected the hand-held "hot water on demand" type of heater would have revolutionary effects. For one thing, it would remove all need for chemical herbicides: hot water is the perfect herbicide, reliably wilting the plants you don't want while promoting growth of the ones you do. 

Meanwhile...carrying buckets of hot water to warm a bathtub of water the sun has heated to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, on a winter day, will at least rev up your metabolism and make a tepid tub comfortable.

Book Review: Rogue

Title: Rogue 

Author: Mike Winter

Date: 2017

Publisher: DN Publishing

Quote: "Hamilton talks you up, says you're the best young agent they've ever had. Maybe he's right, but make no mistake, son, this mission will make or break you."

In the world of espionage, where cold-blooded murder is all in a day's work, people's emotional balance has to be very unusual to allow them to survive. I don't read a lot of spy novels but I've never read one that emphasizes the edge of insanity on which they take place so much as this one does. 

It's a short, simple story that would print out to a slim paperback, so that's as much of the plot as can be revealed without spoiling anything. People who like spy novels may like it; I didn't guess the ending, though they might. 

Most people don't like spy novels. This one does show why. Even names...Black, Winter, Wood...I like a little spring at the end of my winters and a little new growth on my wood. That is why I don't get into novels that are all about lying, sneaking, double-crossing, and killing. But some people find such things stimulate their minds and relieve their post-traumatic stress. It's not Winter, it's me.

Bill Busting 103: Cheap Cooling

No cheap method of cooling is as reliable as expensive, unsustainable air-conditioning. If you need to control the climate for your electronic devices...

...you're not living as frugally as you might be. If you need to save serious amounts of money, you don't plug in electronic devices. There are good reasons to maintain a Net-free home anyway, and you would never have believed how much cooler an office is when you do the math in your head, with a pencil, and the writing on a manual typewriter.

(Actually, when Frank B. Gilbreth proclaimed the death of the traditional pencil, as in those good ol' school-bus-yellow Ticonderogas, he was advertising the so-called mechanical pencil, which really was superior. Mechanical pencils replace the wasted wood around the graphite stick with a more durable metal shaft you can refill with plain graphite sticks. Mechanical pencils can be considered both Green and an upgrade, if you have a convenient source of plain "leads" to refill them.)

The other frugal way to reduce cooling cost is to get out of the city. If you're not employed in a city full-time, see if you can telecommute from a small town or even a farm. Look up the towns from which people are posting comments on the Internet like "What population problem?" There are reasons why those towns are not crowded, but local warming effects from too much pavement, too many cars, too many air conditioners, too many TVs, and too many computers, are not among them. Some places really are underpopulated because, the last time realtors tried to market properties there in US cities, the concern on people's mind was how much wheat they could raise on their land. If you don't want to raise wheat, you might actually like living in a place where wheat did not grow well. In theory all you'd need to do would be to keep those places leafy and sparsely populated...many of them have only very short hot seasons. In practice, you'd want to be sure your home in Saskatchewan was cheap and efficient to heat.

Seriously, people survived summers in muggy Mississippi before air conditioning was invented. They even survived without being able to store ice. 

The secret: Even when sweat is not evaporating efficiently enough that you feel the cooling effect, air blowing over wet skin reduces the temperature enough to prevent heat damage, most of the time. 

1. Your own home may already be clothing-optional. This is a good way to reduce cooling costs since it also reduces laundry expenses. When you need to wear clothes, your options are cotton, linen, and hemp. Linen and hemp become comfortable to wear when they've been aged to the very brink of natural decomposition, but you can spend the winter getting them there. In addition to reducing the extent of human suffering from heat, keeping the plastic off our skins reduces the inconvenience and discomfort many people endure from fungus infections. 

2. Don't fear sweat. Sweat does need to be washed out of clothes before bacteria get into them and start fermenting. That Sick Green laundry-hamper aroma comes from bacteria that can put a drain on the human immune system. However, when people maintain a good healthy interpersonal distance, fresh sweat doesn't smell bad. At a healthy distance most people don't notice it, and those who do continually tell pollsters that fresh sweat is, if anything, an attractive odor. So let your body cool itself. (If you like the way underarm deodorants interact with your personal fragrance, they're cheap enough, but avoid the "antiperspirant" kind--they can be toxic.)

3. Use water liberally. Keep cool water in a foot bath under the desk. Apply cool water to your wrists, face, and scalp as needed. On very hot days, you might want to wear wet clothes. (Cushions and upholstery need to be replaced, if they can't be laundered, every year or two anyway.)

4. Eat lightly in hot weather. Nibble on small amounts of cool, juicy things like fruit and raw green leaves. Toward the goal of reducing malnutrition we all learned in primary school to construct menus that included foods from every nutritional group at every meal. Actually it turns out that, as a daily rule, that means more protein than the human body needs. If you consumed meat, milk, fish, eggs, cheese, or even mixtures of a grain and a legume, every day all winter, you can safely live on raw fruit and vegetables through a summer heat wave. Of course, a little grilling is part of the summer tradition, but it's easiest to stay cool if you light the fire around sundown, when mosquitoes start to fly. 

5. Drink lots of water in hot weather. Dehydration is more of a threat than heat itself. 

6. Adjust your behavior to the weather. Get up early and do physical work while the heat and humidity are relatively low. Sit down with a cool drink and a fan during the heat of the day. 

7. Wear closed-toe shoes or boots while working with heavy machinery or large animals, since they reduce the risk of breaking or amputating toes. Don't wear the same shoes or boots in the house. Change footwear at the door. Avoid reusing a pair of socks unless they've been laundered and dried between wearings--always put on fresh dry ones. 

8. If you're in the habit of using a computer or cell phone, and you're not being paid to do that, break the habit. Write down a list of what you want to do with those devices in between trips to a public-access computer center in town. While there, don't waste time surfing. Get your news from printed papers. Public libraries often keep a selection of newspapers available. Neighbors often agree to leave the newspapers they buy at a cafe, too, to reduce the number of subscriptions anyone needs to pay for.

9. Use a fan. When just waving a hand-held fan around your face is not enough, you may feel that it's worth the expense to run an electric fan. Another alternative is to rig up a device that activates a fan when you move your feet or rock a rocking chair. Another tradition, which may add enough general entertainment value to offset its inefficiency, is to spend hot afternoons with a friend and take turns fanning each other. (Actually, the desire to make the other person do all the fanning may account for the origin of slavery, but that's now illegal in all but a few...very hot...countries.)

10. Maintain a clean environment. Don't "just learn to live with" the odor of fungi or bacteria that thrive in a warm, damp environment. They cause "summer colds" and "allergies." Kill the fungi and bacteria before they attack humans. Oldfashioned "natural" cleaning agents like baking soda, borax, lemon, alcohol, and vinegar will eliminate most odors. I've been known to escalate to bleach and Listerine. No aerosol spray is necessary, or even very helpful, in eliminating odor-causing fungi and bacteria. Scrubbing solid surfaces, and sloshing porous substances through moving water, are good hot-weather exercise and very frugal ways to eliminate pathogens from the house.

Bad Poetry: Woman in a War Zone

An Interview with Scarlett O'Hara About the Scene That Makes Modern Readers Hate Her

"I know Prissy needed that slap, Mrs. Butler," I said,

Time-travelling, waving the fan that popped into my hand,

"But in my home century, the lack of apologies, hugs,

And bonding when it was all over, we can't understand."

"Imagine, if you can," she said, "giving birth to a baby

While the doctors, all of them male, were caught by demand

To catch what we now know were fatal infections from soldiers

And carry them home to the mothers all over the land.

But on that day, all of them were still out there with the army,

And even a full-grown woman's help was hard to get,

And if things had gone wrong with the birth--thank Heaven they didn't--

Any woman's surviving would have put long odds on a bet.

Apologies? To little Prissy? I know what you mean.

It's easy to think about these things, after the crisis.

She was just a foolish child. What was she--fifteen?

Thinking they know more than they do is one of the vices

Of children that age. And I wasn't much older, myself.

I was in no condition to play the impartial judge!

Melanie could have bled to death out there on that road

And it would have been the fault of that lying little drudge.

Well, she was well and truly punished that day

For pretending to be an adult, when she was no such.

Either one of my sisters would have been punished that way.

Even Prissy knows that--and you know she still doesn't know much!

People who scream, rage, cry, giggle, tremble, give vent to emotions

All jumbled together, what we call hysterical fits,

Can damage themselves. Every girl learns that one must slap those people

To help preserve what they may have, in the way of wits.

In your century Black people--how rude that phrase sounds, even now!--

Make use of good educations; in mine they do not,

But some, like my Mammy, have profound innate intelligence.

Intelligence is a thing that Prissy never has got.

She's married, now. Some poor young man's stupid as she.

Their whole neighborhood laugh at the idiot things that they do.

Stupid people can't bear to remember their stupidity.

I think that's why they never learn better ways. You know. Don't you?

Stupid people really are better off when they have keepers.

Don't say "racist." I know some stupid people are White.

Whatever they look like, turning them out on their own,

Even in their own neighborhoods, only makes pockets of blight.

But even if Prissy had had any sense, here's the thing.

Is your doctor your friend? If he were, would he not refuse

To see you as a patient? Like us, you must have boundaries

Among different forms of intimacy. Is that news?

If my maid or my cook were my friends, I could never endure

To live with them as maid or as cook. They would know far too much.

Your time's dropped all pretense that even young ladies are 'pure,'

Yet you'd never permit your dentist any other kind of touch."

 

Web Log for 4.23.24

Mostly graphics...I had some things to do in the real world yesterday. Today, too.

Animals

British butterflies, and a couple of helpful tachinid flies. Pieris rapae and P. brassicae are garden pests and have crossed the Atlantic. The other spring butterflies are similar to the ones we see in Virginia but not the same.

https://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2024/04/spring-butterflies-emerge.html

Censorship

Pbird shared this one, years ago.

Pun

From Messy Mimi:

From Pointman_12 on Michelle's Mirror...seems like a useful phobia to develop if you want to lose weight...

Book Review: It's Only Make-Believe

Title: It's Only Make-Believe 

Author: Susan Mellon

Date: 2020

Publisher: Susan Mellon

Quote: "It was supposed to be a simple answer. One word. Yes."

But Zoey, a runaway bride, says no, bolts out in her wedding gown, and hijacks a taxi in which a young man is leaving a wedding scene in a tuxedo. Zoey doesn't want to go home and Mark, a doctor, wants to find out more about the lovely lunatic who's plopped into the seat beside him, so they ride around town for a few hours (Mark can afford it already--he must not be all that young). Then they go to a hotel, make some show of trying to explain that they're not married to each other, and share a honeymoon suite but not the actual bed. Mark's ability to sleep on the couch impresses Zoey. This is a sweet romance so you know it will end with Zoey saying yes to something. Another wedding, or just a normal date? That's about all the suspense this book has.

If you believe that young people should not be allowed outdoors off a leash, but you want to imagine being one, this book is for you. I would not let children see it. It contains no age-inappropriate sex but it might communicate low expectations.

Anyway, I laughed.

History Will Be the Judge of Songs That Confuse Children

Mixing two prompts, just because it can, this web site considers the way the folk process has actually enshrined some of the best mondegreens--the ways people reinterpret unfamiliar or unexpected words in song lyrics they hear "wrong."

A song that simply confused me when I was a child was a popular song of Young Romance: "I'll build you a castle at the end of the rainbow."

Clearly derived from this song by Bing Crosby:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPoHlXbOAKA

--which is what Google offers for the song title, what I heard was actually 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpewDtRYMuM

I heard it on an old record around the same time I first read Alice in Wonderland--I must have been about four years old, too young to make much sense even of that nonsense novel. Alice, you may remember, used the phrase "fly into a passion" where we might say "throw a tantrum." I'd heard the word "passion" before--something to do with churches we did not attend, and a word found in popular songs. I thought that song was one of them. That was what increased my confusion to the point where I asked an adult what a passion was, exactly, and was told it was a word four-year-olds didn't need to know. Or "Maybe you meant 'passing'?" my mother suggested, and led me off into a discussion of the ways "passing" can be used in English, which was useful. At some point I asked what the singer was promising to build in the song "As Long as I'm Dreaming," and some adult explained the word "mansion," which was also useful. I had to figure out the different, though related, meanings of "passion" for myself.

And the adult who assumed I'd heard "mansion" was confused, too, because in the digital stereo version the word is, unmistakably, "castle." But in the 1960s I listened to the record several times; the record wasn't new, and it did sound more like "mansion" or "passion." My family also heard Porter Wagoner as singing "But dreaming of bluebirds will wake you each morning; the garden of roses will wither in June," lamenting the disappointment of waking up from his happy dream...

Nobody was building a passion as a sort of nest for someone to fly into, but consider the history of an old popular song that was originally titled "The Pale Aronatus." It would not have been the song the little girl had learned to sing in Jane Eyre. It probably was a derivative; "Maud Irving," the author of "Pale Aronatus," seems to have been a derivative songwriter, specializing in singable doggerel versions of songs from the less-than-classical opera of Jane Eyre's time.

Scientists never called this "blue-eyed tulip" Aronatus, but florists who wanted to sound educated might have done. Maud Irving, who might have been nicknamed "Maud the Fraud" by anyone who guessed what he was using as a pen name, might have thought that was a classy name for it. Anyway his song portrayed the girl with now fashionable ringlets of raven-black hair loading her head with roses, lilies, myrtle, and tulips. Maybe people would be so busy marvelling at this walking--or, she at least daydreamed, dancing!--flower show that they wouldn't even notice her bloodshot eyes. 

More about Maud Irving, aronatus, and other things related to "The Wildwood Flower": 

https://www.ergo-sum.net/music/MaudIrving.html

The folk process did lots of different things with this song. Few if any people knew what an aronatus was, or how to pronounce the accented vowel. The flower became an amaranthus or an amaryllis, or, apparently by someone's mis-hearing "amaryllis," "lyder." (What was a lyder--pronounced like "leader"? Google lists it as a man's name, with possible origins including herr as "boss" or even "leader," or a variant form of a German word related to "lout" and meaning something like "good-for-nothing." It seems never to have been recorded as the name used for any flower. A.P. Carter wrote it down, and his wife and sister-in-law sang it, in good faith that somebody Out There thought it was a kind of flower.) "Pale" is recorded as an original variant form of "pole," as in "palings" or "palisades," but people seem to have accepted it as either a description of the lyder, whatever that was, or a reference to some other pale-colored flower. In any case, when the Carters wrote down "the pale and the lyder" as other things the girl was planning to stick in her hair, they added a recognizable flower to make some sense out of the line: "the pale and the lyder, and iris light blue."

Roses, lilies, myrtle, two unknown wild wood flowers for which she'd made up her own names, and an iris? Even if her raven-black hair is the thick, strong kind sometimes called Cherokee, which is difficult but not impossible to force to form ringlets, nobody could load all of those flowers onto one head, nor do they all bloom at one time. So she's looking forward to a long, busy party season in which she'll decorate her hair with all the different flowers in the garden, as they bloom, one after another. Now we have a good mental image of the girl and can move on to her plans to party.

Myrtle, by the way, could have been understood to mean vincas, the most popular varieties of which are light blue. 

And another version that might very easily have come between "pale amaryllis" and "the pale and the lyder" might have given the girl a traditional English name, which was in use where the Carters lived: she might have been "Poor pale Amaleta with eyes of light blue." Old name dictionaries list many variants of Amalie, Emily, and Amelia that were used about a hundred years ago--Amalina, Amelinda, Amelita, and my home town had a real local character whose name was Amaleta, whom the Carters might even have met. The real-world Amaleta was born around 1920, when this name was no longer trendy, so she might have been named in honor of some older person, or from the song as it might have been sung around 1920. If A.P. Carter's source heard and sang the song as calling the girl "pale Amaleta," that would explain how the Carters got to "the pale and the lyder." People at https://groups.google.com/g/rec.music.folk/c/KceW6M1LHoo?pli=1 seemed to want to hear "amanita," which was not (often, if ever!) used as a name, but some form of "Amaleta" is a solid possibility.

Or maybe someone heard the song as calling her "pale Angelita." Spanish language and culture were considered romantic in the early twentieth century, and the Carters weren't purists about preserving only British folk songs.

Or, possibly, "amorita," "little love," which I've not found in local use. I suspect locals would have associated this name with the Amorites in the Bible--barbarian enemies--but it was used in other places where English was spoken in the nineteenth century. 

Various Googlers also propose "paling althea," "pale amaretto," and "pale angelica" (if pronounced by Italian phonetic rules, though the English pronunciation was better known), if you read through the discussion linked above. I suspect the trail of mondegreens leads from "aronatus" through "amaranthus," "amaryllis," and either "Amaleta" or "Angelita."

Someone in that group speculated that future generations may sing the line as "the pale enchilada, and rice is taboo"--so on the way to the dance the girl stops at the local Mexican restaurant? O-kay...Anyway that's a nice lead-in to another song that had my whole family confused. You may recall that we were the family who liked Jim Reeves because he pronounced every word of every song so clearly that they could be understood even on early monaural recordings. With one exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH1Y5E-XmDg

How exactly do the untold memories fade? We used to debate whether it sounded more like "fade, taboo" or "fade from view." We never thought of "fade to blue," which is what Google now offers. I still can't make up my mind, but I like "fade to blue."

Now we should all be confused enough for a lyrical nonsense poem:

You put me here in prison, and no doubt you're going to kill me.

You have driven me completely, even violently insane.

I went to eat an amanita, hoping it would fill me 

And distract me from your fickleness, which causes me such pain,

Or perhaps would be a deadly one and horribly would kill me--

But I ate some other mushroom, and it has destroyed my brain,

And I never will admit remembering how the choice did thrill me,

For then I'd lose my defense and be re-tried as being sane. 

(Who cares what the speaker did to whom? Has he not raved enough?)