The e-mail address at the bottom of the page is still being held hostage. Microsoft is phishing for a phone number, which they will claim they didn't sell, but which will be bombarded with automated phishing messages purporting to sell insurance for months afterward. I have faced the temptation to use Serena's cheerful deliveryman, who is required to keep a stupidphone in his truck, and resisted. No one should be subjected to the phishing harassment campaign while driving. I think the Grouch, whose favorite thing is shooting down blips on computer screens, might enjoy thwarting phishing calls, but as he is driving less--and needs to be!--and there have been so many sudden rain storms lately, I don't like to take the laptop out as far as his house. Any local lurker who has a cheap burner phone they don't keep paid up and intend to recycle, if anyone does that any more, is welcome to volunteer.
Cell phones up here used to be a great way to block unwanted calls. I still have a dear little Motorola flip phone that was given to me for that purpose. While stored here it would just kill nearly all signals. Once in a while, when I wanted to call someone and walked to a place that picked up a stronger signal, it would light up with the message that one of the bill collectors had tried to call the original owner, blah blah. I would say, "Good luck to you, bill collector! Line up behind me," and make my call. The Motorola was useless for personal security but it would do for routine business calls and the occasional long chat with a relative.
Fortunately most of my living relatives have switched to e-mail now.
Now, about Serena. She didn't go far; she just lurked in the orchard until it rained hard enough that she came back to the house. She is still avoiding her grandkittens and acting out extreme grumpiness. She does not seem feverish, eats and drinks normally, and although she's never seriously clawed me, she tore the loose fabric of my sleeve when asked if she was sick enough to see the vet. I don't know.
There is a possibility that she was listening to a Diamond video an e-friend shared. For those who don't know, Diamond is a guy with a loud raspy voice, which I find unpleasant to listen to, who mostly reports on volcanoes and weather disasters and is prone to the kind of inane riming some novelists use to characterize people with brain damage, but he's part of "the larger movement" against serious pollution, the True Greens the commercial media prefer to ignore while fawning on Poison Greens. He worked on the "per-fluoro-" chemical group, the set of PFO and PFA chemicals used to make things waterproof and oilproof. They are known carcinogens and may have more immediate adverse effects depending on exposure.
Now, in a relative sense...during his years in remission from cancer, one of my husband's odd job specialties was "re-treating" trench coats for people like me who loved the way a trench coat works for almost all the weather conditions that exist in Washington apart from the summer heat wave, but weren't keen on not being able to launder the thing. You never see smoke coming out of a chimney in the city but somehow walls, pavements, and benches acquire coats of gray grime just the same. Wearing a trench coat with big grey smudges used to be a thing. It made one look like an "insider," but one had to ask "Inside what kind of group? I'm not inside any particular group, and if I have to look grimy to be inside one, would I want to be?" So my husband, who was proud of his Indian heritage, which included Creative Tightwaddery, used to say to these people, "Go ahead and wash your trench coat if you want to. I will waterproof it for you," for a dollar or two a coat. All those years in remission from cancer he was exposed to Zepel, pretty much pure volatile per-fluoro-cancer-in-a-bottle, and people didn't notice, or believe when told, that he was older than I was. Then he got tired of trimming the edges of the lawn, listened to advice, sprayed glyphosate--once--and that week he started feeling depressed; within the year he was dead. That may be a coincidence, or it may tell us something about the relative toxicity of PFOs/PFAs and glyphosate. I don't know. I hope nobody ever does any real scientific study. We already know they kill people and should need no further research.
Creative Tightwaddery does tend to protect people who don't live in an industry-blighted town from exposure to the per-fluoro-nasties. Teflon and Zepel and Goretex and microwave-in-the-box food just seem too pricey to a Real Tightwad. Why pay more for pre-packaged microwaveable food when we still have Great-Grandma's old cast-iron popper to hold in the fireplace and Grandma's stainless steel kettles to cook beans, beef brisket, homemade soup stock, and other cheap slow-cooking foods Tightwads learn to love. I mean to say, if we buy anything with a bone in it, it will be winter and we will be simmering all the minerals out of that bone...on or in front of a room heater if possible, because why buy a slow-cooker or pay to run an electric stove for three days. We do not pay for the convenience of microwave cookery.
Diamond talked to someone, on his video, who wondered whether the whole idea of low-fat cooking was invented to sell Teflon. Anyone who knew a Creative Tightwad like our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters would have known better. If you heat a cooking pot or pan to the right temperature before you put in the food, you do not need to film the pan with oil as a lubricant. If you want to rev up your thyroid metabolic rate you eat low-fat food. So you cook in cast-iron skillets and stainless steel pans, and learn to recognize the right temperature to put in the food. You can coat the pan with water and wait for it to boil dry, or drop in water and see if it bounces up and then slides across the pan. For cornbread the drop of water should dance all the way across the pan until it evaporates. For sweetened or yeasty breads it should bounce once and slide, Then after eating the food you soak the pan for a half-hour or so, and any crust that has stuck to the pan washes right off. Who needs Teflon?
Are PFO/PFA chemicals causing the increase in colitis or in gastrointestinal diseases generally? Very doubtful, in most of the world. Compare statistics for g.i. disease, glyphosate use, and PFO/PFA sales on a numerical chart. One of the three lines is not like the others. In places where PFO/PFA chemicals were manufactured, used, or dumped daily the chart for gastrointestinal diseases may resemble the chart for PFO/PFA. In most places it will resemble the chart for glyphosate. If you can get reliable statistics for your specific city, which you probably can't, it would be helpful to publish these charts.
As for the new "combination" version of Roundup...I'm pretty sure some fool sprayed it again, not so near the Cat Sanctuary, Tuesday night. I caught a whiff of that odor last night--not at the Cat Sanctuary, out on the road--and my eyes are starting to burn and water again. At least some of those chemicals are known to float around in the air for days, covering miles, before they break down.
How are the cats holding up? The three adult cats and three oversized kittens seem to be surviving pretty well. The large-side-of-normal-sized kitten, who looks like such a miniature among her siblings, is not doing well. None of them had shown symptoms of intestinal worms. Most cats have intestinal worms, as do most dogs and most cat and dog people, but not very many or for very long. A healthy immune system does not create a hospitable environment for parasites. Even the possums who live here, who eat most of the excreted dead worms whose eggs can become an infestation causing diseases in individuals with weak immunity, have long healthy lives for possums. An outdoor possum normally lives less than two years, and the ones who've made themselves recognizable to me have lived two years or more. (In captivity a few possums have lived five years, but, like those pet hens who lived ten years or longer, those individuals were statistical outliers.) But this poisoning visibly took a toll on all the kittens, and on the adult cats and humans who've been exposed...and little Dora is starting to look, and feel in the hand into which she snuggles, like a sickly, wormy kitten instead of the healthy, fast-growing one she was.
The part of the Diamond video Serena might have heard, which might account for her mood these days, was about the "Seralini" phenomenon. Serena, like the animals in the Seralini experiments, shows no glyphosate reaction herself but then gives birth to stillborn or defective kittens after exposure. Some animals and humans consistently show this effect. It may be a gene, possibly concentrated in southwestern Europe but found worldwide. Some female bodies eliminate toxic chemicals by giving birth to non-viable offspring. A woman who worked for one of the chemical companies suffered a spontaneous abortion while working with PFO/PFA-nasties. The one woman who was quoted knew others who had had that experience. In male bodies these chemicals build up to fatal levels, but in some--not all--women, during pregnancy the body transfers the chemicals into the placenta, sacrificing the fetus but saving the woman's health. "And I knew that I had done that," the woman said. Women who show this effect are literally "saved" from cancer "through childbearing." Only...it's not merely autistic children. It may be children without heads.
Serena has done that, many times, and it's not beyond belief that she could have understood enough of the report to have realized that that's what being "Serena-Seralina" means. That the kittens she worked so hard to seduce Borowiec into giving her aren't going to live. I can't imagine her having any reference point for words like "PFAs," which she's not heard used n conversation, but she knows words like "lost a baby" and it wouldn't surprise me if she knew the word "placenta." She can be coldhearted about abandoning or even smothering kittens if she doesn't think they'll survive, but part of being an intelligent social cat is that she mourns when kittens who seemed to have a chance don't live. She did mind losing her last few kittens. She has tried not to blame Pastel for having such beautiful ones, while she's had none...
I had bought some unsalted pepitas the last time I went to the store. Tuesday night, as Dora completed the climb onto my knee, settled into the cuddle she had earned, and unloosed a terrible long rasping rattling cough like a kitten whose vital organs are being attacked by worms or poison or both, I thought I had better grind them up for the cats' breakfast. Then, "The Lazies" being part of the effect of the poison in the air, I slept all the way through the cats' breakfast. Dora was still living. She was born strong and healthy, and it takes worms a few days to kill a kitten. But it's hard to do much to help a kitten who is still only nibbling at solid food, living mostly on milk. Anything the mother's antibodies don't kill is likely to kill the kitten.
The loss will be mine, of course. I never had any intentions of parting with Dora.
Blog Housekeeping
Wow. Readership had dropped when I stopped posting link logs. Then I posted that I was going to be pulling down some old posts that consisted of comments on links to things that no longer exist in cyberspace. I had traced a few dead links to one-time magazine sites or social media accounts that had been taken over by scammy-looking sites, before, but when I saw one of the scammiest set up in the name of "Congress Man Tom Tancredo," who blogged at congressmantomtancredo dot com for a few years after retirement, I didn't want to be the citation that prompted scammers to take the dear man's name in vain any more.
So the next thing was...? Page views reached their all-time high, with particular interest, not in the expired links, but in the poems. Most readers wanted to be sure to save copies of the Bad Poetry here! I'm delighted. The Bad Poetry may in fact be pulled down, if a publisher wants to publish a book of Bad Poetry old and new, but it was not the primary target of the impending purge. Old news reports were.
There was also another wave of readership from the loyal fans of Shiva Ayyadurai. Child prodigies need to stick together. I'm not qualified to judge any legal cases, nor do I ever expect to have a vote for Ayyadurai now that he's gone into politics, but, as the broken links come down, let the record stand: This web site officially pronounces it cool that a teenager invented the word, and at least one of the first viable programs, for e-mail.
Food and Music Link
Pepitas are the edible inner seeds of pumpkins. They are better appreciated in Mexico than in the US and Canada, which is why they are called by a Spanish name. They were, however, appreciated as food by most indigenous Americans. Early European immigrants thought of them as starvation rations. (They have a peculiar flavor, similar to pistachios, an acquired taste for most.) They are safe to eat, very nutritious, packed with protein and minerals, and a nice way for most of us to reconnect with any indigenous ancestors we may have.
Humans have traditionally munched pepitas whole, and raw, though some people prefer the flavor when they are roasted and salted. They can be nibbled out of the hand like peanuts or sunflower seeds, or tossed in salads, or scattered over (or baked into) breads and cakes. If you think a child, cat, or dog might have picked up a worm, but the child, cat, or dog is not sick enough to justify dosing with a chemical formula that may taste and feel very nasty to the patient, my first move would be to try to sell the child, cat, or dog on the idea of eating some yummy pepitas as a crunchy snack. Munch a few, looking enthusiastic--this gets easier as you acquire the taste--and loudly remarking that these pepitas are too good not to share. "You can have this many," say one seed per full year of age, "because I like you so much. These pepitas are mine." Then, in the case of a child, the next time the child goes shopping you might say "Would you like some pepitas for your treat?" and if you've prudently visited the right section of the store first, so that visions of candy and Sugar Puffs are not dancing in the child's head, the answer is likely to be affirmative.
If this fails--and it often does, because most cats and dogs have no instinct to bite into plant seeds and most modern children have been indulged in a belief that everything should taste like sugar--it might be time for stealth and artifice. For a kitten the size of Dora, one crushed pumpkinseed would be an ample meal's worth of solid food. Crush and grind the pepitas to a coarse meal, and make them into s sweet pumpkin-spice-enhanced seedcake for a child, fish loaf for a cat, meat loaf for a dog. This will probably be devoured. If your little friend did contain a worm, most (not all) worms will immediately die of a magnesium overdose. Persistent symptoms of worms may still need to be checked by the doctor or vet, but, most of the time, there won't be any.
If you happened to go to school in California in the late sixties to early seventies, the Years of Instructional Movie Reels in the Classrooms, you may remember that indigenous Californians woke up to the rhythmic thump of earlier risers grinding debittered acorns and other nuts, seeds, and grains in their metate stones/ My ancestors were not Californians but they ate things, up to and including black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, and chestnuts, that had to be whacked even harder against something solid. I grew up cracking black walnuts on a chunk of wood, into which dents would be worn in a few months, with a nine-pound steel hammer. Traditionally many White Americans did not have nine-pound steel hammers and used to crack hard-shelled nuts between rocks, which was less precise and had to be done outdoors, But I ground the pepitas this morning between tin cans. They are soft, and need less weight and closer containment. A blender would work for a person who owned one. Rocks would feel traditional, but unless you have already pounded a nice deep metate shape into a rock, with pepitas you'd be likely to end up with a slightly oily rock and no meal.
For non-blender owners, music to grind pepitas by might be in order. The individual songs to the beat of which I ground those pepitas, this morning, were good old English songs about beer, wine, and premarital sex, to which links are probably forbidden under this web site's contract. Here are some less controversial songs, by the same band, with similar rhythms and attitudes.
Not everyone's cup of tea, I grant, but these Brits have been rocking for fifty-five years and holding. They have only improved with age.
How to Be Scolded by Something the Size of the Letter "l" in Heading Type
I just took a lucky swat at a gnat that was about to start parading up and down the computer screen, using the light and heat and perhaps the electronic radiation to broadcast its scent to prospective mates, as they do. I hate reading a screen through specks and flecks of congealed insect "honey." The gnat's tiny remains merged in with the fibres of a thick, absorbent paper towel. How nice.
Well, it's May. I am sharing the office with a couple of thread-waisted wasps. The female keeps to herself well enough that I'm not sure whose heir she is, whether she's a Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter, a Grass Carrier, or another of the species that look similar from a distance. The male is tiny. Transparent wings longer than his body might be a half-inch long, but he looks more like a centimeter to me. This family of wasps are generally considered solitary, but I'm convinced that couples share territory. Other years it's seemed as if the female checked out the office and brought in her mate. This year it seemed as if the male found the office first and the female came to join him. As in many wasp species, the female carries her mate around as easily as women carry babies, but most of the time he seems busy hunting and gathering his own tiny meals.
The gnat, being about the size of a thin apostrophe in a heading typefont, was about the right size for the male wasp's meal, and the little fellow flew up and down in front of my face for a few seconds. I'm convinced he was scolding me. You didn't even eat my dinner, you thieving giant ogre, he might have been saying.
Then another little gnat started flying in wild zigzags in front of the screen. The gnat had a mate! The male wasp forgot about scolding me, or trying to find some shred of his intended dinner, and pursued the gnat into the shadows, away from the computer.
My eyes, which were on the way back to functioning normally last night, are bleary again. I don't plan to spend much time on the screen porch. The office is not airtight but filters out a considerable amount of the poison that is once again hanging in the air outdoors.
I just wanted to share my wonderment at this phenological tidbit. That wasp could be crushed in between the ends of my finger and fingernail and leave room for a good bit of soap. Wasps have good enough vision that it's likely that he's able to see humans as complete living things, and see how much bigger I am. Is he intelligent enough to know that, though likely to kill him by accident, I would never hurt him on purpose? Or is he not intelligent enough to think that other animals might attack him? I have no idea.
Male insects are usually considered disposable and the thread-waisted wasps aren't usually credited with any sense of family, but it seems to me that this little guy's mate likes having him around. If he hadn't found the office to be a sheltered place where he's welcome to any gnats he can catch, I think she might have brought him in and visited him from time to time.
