I'm still testing the system. Would this laptop work better if I trusted the History feature and didn't try to keep all the tabs open until I'd finished with them, even the ones I've been keeping open while not-really-listening-to a half-dozen half-hour or hour-long podcast lectures? Well, last night its performance was unbelievably bad, but then someone told me about the cyclones that passed by, just thirty miles away, while my town was enjoying a warm, breezy, mellow afternoon. We shall see. The computer did run better after the cyclones.
Activism
Important point for those planning protests. How disruptive do protests need to be? Of what? What is the point? I think good protests disrupt only what needs to be disrupted, like a boycott that disrupts a company's profits on unsatisfactory goods, or a strike that disrupts the exploitation of mistreated workers. I'm sympathetic to ideas like "Women deserve sooo much better than abortion 'rights'" and "Please try to give birth to a healthy baby, because I want to adopt a baby who looks like you, who people might believe looks like one of us!" so I was surprised by how hostile I felt when large groups of large messy families invaded Washington on "pro-life demonstrations." Disrupting ordinary people's ordinary life and work is likely to hurt, not help, the cause.
Books
I'm not in this link-up, but isn't the topic fun? Which ten fictional characters would you want (or least mind) sharing a vacation trip with? If you decide to blog about this, please post a link in the comments section. If you can imagine different kinds of vacations with different characters, the more the merrier.
Music
If youall are interested, I could easily expand my comment on Mona Andrei's observation into a full-length link-a-rama. She says country songs by men are about living in the country, while country songs by women are about revenge...I say that's true for the current top forty, perhaps because revenge songs are less intimidating when a cute little chick sings them. We just know that little girl couldn't do all the violent stuff she's singing about. She's fantasizing. If Blake Shelton were singing "I shot the sheriff" or "I fought the law," or "They laughed at me, and then I shot'm and hid their cheating, scheming bones in Miller's Cave," that would be scary. But when it's a soprano who looks barely big enough or old enough to be in grade nine, toddling around a stage in high-heeled shoes, squeaking about wrecking his truck and the next time he cheats she'll wreck him, that's sort of funny. We know that what she really did was sing.
Anyway, even before Dolly Parton, Cindy Walker had written a lot of country music hits...I remember her name because I remember looking at my parents' Jim Reeves records and thinking she seemed to have written a plurality, if not a majority, of the songs he sang. The Carters were genuine folk singers who specialized in songs A.P. Carter learned from other Scott County residents' grandparents, but they wrote some of their own songs, too. And that's just off the top of my head. I could do some research and find more.
So there are a lot of songs about living in the country that were written, and some were sung, by women, and a lot of songs about revenge that were written and sung by men...and that's another topic for another post (or two) that would be fun to research and write, if anyone wants to fund it. Computer potatoes who get up (or at least sit up) and dance when we come to music would have a lively afternoon.
Walker's biography:
Phenology
Monarch butterflies are back from Mexico. We usually see them in April, too.
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