Morgan Griffith's Independence Day Pre-Post

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

A newsletter from 2017 entitled “Independence and Southwest Virginia” was one of my favorites. Many of you have told me over the years it was a favorite of yours too.

Because of redistricting, the Ninth District has added some communities and lost some communities. So, I thought it might be of interest to review locations in the Ninth District named for influential figures during the American Revolution era.

On July 4, we celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of when fifty-six men pledged “[their] Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” by adopting the Declaration of Independence. We honor them on Independence Day, but in Southwest Virginia, their legacies can be found every day. One can simply look at a map to find them.

Three of the counties contained in the Ninth Congressional District are named after signers of the Declaration. Wythe County is named after George Wythe, who taught Thomas Jefferson law. His name appears first among Virginia’s signatures.

Carroll County’s namesake, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, represented Maryland. He was the only Roman Catholic signer and the last survivor among the fifty-six, living until 1832.

In 1785, Virginia gave birth to Franklin County. Honoring one of the most famous Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin was a renowned intellectual respected in the United States and the Western World.

The Declaration was a big step, but some had demanded independence before 1776. One of the boldest was Patrick Henry, who famously declared before the Second Virginia Convention, “Give me liberty or give me death!” He has two county names honoring him: Patrick and Henry. For a time, Henry resided in Leatherwood, Henry County.

To make independence real, it needed more than the Declaration. It needed individuals who were willing to fight and, if necessary, die for the cause. Two such patriots are honored in our area by county names. Richard Montgomery led the invasion of Canada and died at the Battle of Quebec in 1775.

Casimir Pulaski was a Polish count. Like the French-born Marquis de Lafayette and the Prussian Baron von Steuben, Pulaski was a European nobleman who was drawn to the American cause. As he wrote to George Washington, "I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it." Pulaski fell at the Battle of Savannah in 1779.

William Grayson also fought in the war, serving as an aide to Washington and rising to colonel, but he survived the war to become one of Virginia’s first U.S. senators, and now has Grayson County named in his memory.

Furthermore, the City of Martinsville was founded by Brigadier General Joseph Martin who contributed to American Revolutionary battles at Kings Mountain and Cowpens.

Russell County was named for William Russell, but which one, the father or the son? Both were soldiers of the Revolution. The elder Russell’s service included Point Pleasant, when frontiersmen led by Andrew Lewis defeated Shawnee Chief Cornstalk and helped clear the way for Daniel Boone and others to settle beyond the Appalachians.

William Russell’s son was one of the Overmountain Men, frontiersmen who rallied from hundreds of miles away to fight the British. Their victory at Kings Mountain helped turn the tide of the war in the South. The Abingdon Muster Grounds, where 400 of the militiamen began their journey, marks the northern trailhead of the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail.

Then there is Washington County. George Washington led the Continental Army to victory against the powerful British Empire. That victory led to a sense of liberty in the colonies and in 1782, the Village of Liberty (now known as the Town of Bedford) was formed.

Later, Washington served as president of the Constitutional Convention and subsequently as our first president under the new Constitution. After two terms, he returned home. Truly, Washington was:

“First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

That description came from Washington’s colleague Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who, sure enough, is the namesake of Lee County.

In Southwest Virginia, we are proud of our patriotic heritage. The names of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration, the other statesmen who worked for independence, and the soldiers who fought for it hold an honored place in our memory. But their legacy consists of more than names in history books or on maps. It is found in our democratic republic, in the freedoms we enjoy, and the great nation we have become.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

" 

Web Log for 6.27-29.24

Animals

Adoptable polydactyl cat in Louisiana:

https://messymimismeanderings.blogspot.com/2024/06/twinkle-toes-feline-friday-friendly.html

Downsizing 

I'm NOT in favor of "downsizing" in the sense of giving up our homes and "retiring" into tacky little flats as we grow older. I'm in favor of keeping the house and passing it down to the next generation. A society organized along biblical lines does not support the idea of anyone's making real estate sales a career. A society organized with due concern for health and sanitation does not support the idea of blocks of flats.

But, does this ever call for downsizing our junk collections in order to free space for the next generation?

Also, what about the storage space that needs to be cleared out for restoration, or abandoned, because it's too damp and moldy to preserve things stored in it? 

(I'm still trying to clear things out of the barn where my parents stashed them for years, before the barn actually falls down. Lots of stuff has been reintegrated back into the house. Some things I've sold, and some things I may sell. This is in no way to be interpreted as indicating that I plan to sell the house. I plan, eventually, to replace the barn. It was an inspirational structure in its day, but it wasn't built to last, and hasn't lasted.)

Anyway here's a nice, cheerful description of how one blogger cleaned out a damp basement.

https://themarmeladegypsy.blogspot.com/2024/06/lessons-learned-in-basement.html

Memes

This is the picture that was meant to be highlighted in yesterday's post. Joe Jackson gave it a whole post all by itself. I took one look and knew...of all the sunflowers in Kansas, that one is Grandma Bonnie's. Google traces it to somebody called Clifford Romero on Linked In. My finding it at  theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com seems proper and appropriate, because Lady Lake was where Mildred Wolfe retired to and GBP was Mildred Wolfe's niece. 

I put it in today as a test. Yesterday somebody was holding Blogspot's photo capabilities hostage. Google promises to minimize cookies, which is one reason to choose Blogspot over Wordpress or Live Journal, but then tries to get people to opt to allow more cookies on our computers. (Readers' computers are presumably the targets of a separate cookie campaign.) 

Well, I'll tell the world: I never have trusted the Internet to keep private information private. I just don't tell a computer anything that I would really object to putting in the newspaper. So I don't care how much data Google compiles about the sites I visit, the only possible exception being the e-mail addresses of the few real-world friends who have e-mail. But, clunky as Windows 10 has always been with the never-ending "updates" and the cookie conflicts, would anyone ever choose to enable even one more cookie, even one more app, even one more "update" than the wretched computer already has to struggle through? If you would, not I. 

Bloggers tend to be people who know our rights and our alternatives. I looked at the not-so-helpful article about how to recover your blog's audiovisual capabilities by enabling more cookies, and I said to myself, sez I, "1. Reinstall Disqus and post the links and pictures as comments. 2. Post the animal articles on Live Journal and put links to those LJ posts here. 3...4....5..." and toward the end, "Demand that Congress enact a bill addressing this kind of thing, along with the appalling way Google limits search results pretty much to commercially sponsored content and the allegedly unfiltered search engines all merely search Google, and the THEFT OUTRIGHT of paid use of privately owned property created by the 'updates,' and the risk not only to US, Canadian, and Mexican citizens but to our countries, which is to say our continent, when web sites are allowed to store sensitive information like individuals' phone numbers or Social Security numbers: we need an absolute ban on any computer storing any sequence of nine or ten digits linked to an account.."

Evidently a lot of other people had the same reaction, because the picture came up promptly today. Thank you, fellow bloggers. 

Phenology 

In Magaly Guerrero's post, linked below, is a photo of a passionflower. This funny-looking flower was so named because, in some places, it blooms around the time of Easter. Hah. Here, in Virginia, it blooms in June if it blooms at all. I saw two of those flowers along Route 58 last week. In New York City, with warming, in the last week of June.

This is a "different" year for flowers. I'm not sure why. Some of my flowers didn't do well. My late summer, early autumn flowers aren't going to do well, I'm afraid, because some years I have flowers and some years I have kittens; this is a year of kittens. They charge and tackle the flowers, watch the stalks lean over, poke interestedly at the upturned roots... 

Mother's Rose of Sharon or Northern Hibiscus, though, has re-grown after being cut down to the ground a few years ago, and is blooming as it's never bloomed before. Every time I step outside I see another white blossom, and some of them are big, too, almost the size of the "real" tropical hibiscus in Florida. Probably because the moths and their larvae gave up. They'll come back, of course. Lots of Northern Hibiscus in the area. 

Poems

According to Messy Mimi this is the day of the Festival of Terrible Poetry. I don't receive a great deal of that, though those who spend a month celebrating a Deadly Sin can be depended on to collect it in June. (This web site has endorsed a lot of things done by people who identify as LGBTQIA, but this web site does not endorse a month of "I am special because I'm a victim because I'm obsessed with a sexual act or relationship that nobody wants to hear about, and it hurts my feelings that nobody wants to hear about it, so forget about hatecrimes against women or poverty in Pine Ridge and listen to me babbling about my sexual kink!" This web site does not regard that as poetry, nor do we celebrate it; but if you count it as poetry it is undeniably terrible.)

I'd rather celebrate good poetry, like the first mini-poem in Magaly Guerrero's blog post, which seems germane to the yucky presidential debate and other news items...

https://www.magalyguerrero.com/2024/06/scenting-memories.html

The pun as poetic form:

https://stopdraggingthepanda.com/2024/06/27/post-grammatic-stress-a-poem/

 

Politics (Election 2024) 

If you missed THE FIRST PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v-8wJkmwBY

Some comments:

1. When Trump says that "we" did this and that for the economy, he's not being modest, or senile, or referring to any internal parasites. The economy is primarily the responsibility of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who is neither elected by the people nor appointed by anyone who was elected, and serves for twelve years. And the appalling thing about Biden's mismanagement of the economy is that Biden had the same chairman of the Federal Reserve to work with.

Jerome Powell, according to some the most really powerful man in the United States. 

2. Doesn't it feel incongruous when a high tenor voice comes out of a barrel-shaped man? Biden looks like someone who ought to be a tenor. Trump looks like someone who ought to be a bass. Yes, I know that's a frivolous comment. You might as well laugh as cry. (See Poems, above.)

3. Trump talks about how much better off the nation was on the morning of 1.6.24. Bad move: he should've called out the CENSORSHIP that made the riot possible. 

4. Biden replies with outright lies. There is DOCUMENTATION that Trump did what he could do to stop the riot. CENSORSHIP prevented that. CENSORS should go to jail! "The fact is that there was no effort on his part to stop the..." Liar, liar, pants on fire...

5. Trump fails to call Biden out on the outright lies, then talks about quid pro quo and making Biden a convicted felon... Why does Trump not use a point that's his to use with good effect? Because he's not planning to take a firm stand on censorship? Shame!

6. Trump said, twice, "I did nothing wrong." Great. Answering one outright lie with another. Trump's been accused of a lot of frivolous charges motivated by political, er um, cheating, but everybody does things that are wrong...errors and failures, if not active evildoing. 

7. Only in the second part of the debate, Trump finally does mention "what I said on Twitter" in a question about the Censorship Riot. Meh. He's not playing his strengths, anyway.

8. After they've taken a break and come back to make final statement, Biden sounds more tired but his eyes are oddly dark and dilated. What's he on?

9. Trump calls Biden a whiner and then starts whining. Loser strategy! Where's the statement of positive purpose? Grow up, Trump...the election's being thrown at you, if you don't FUMBLE AGAIN.

10. Instead of talking about "space age" medical care both candidates should have talked responsibly about the mess the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations have made of the medical care system. A candidate I could support would be talking about moving back toward a system where most people can pay cash for the treatments they need, where the system emphasizes a personal health care plan that each individual is responsible for making and following, where a large-scale medical insurance industry is not necessary because there's an actual safety net instead of a monstrous bloated boondoggle. 

11. Despite its incongruous pitch, Trump has the closest thing to a presidential-sounding voice of the three candidates. But it's time to put the sane one on the stand. All three of them are old-looking, tired-sounding White men. All three have been credibly accused of abuse of women in the past. All three can be more credibly abused of corruption and money-grubbing in the present. Whether any of the three can survive four years in the White House is anybody's guess. It's a sorry excuse for an election. And Kennedy, who needs a "life insurance" running mate most badly, prematurely offered the position to a supporter who (1) is too young to speak for Glyphosate Awareness, and ought to be considered too young to be sent to Washington at all, (2) is a Loony Leftie, and (3) although certainly qualified as "life insurance" from a right-wing perspective is exactly the opposite from the perspective of the party more likely to be violent and unhinged. And. Still. Even so. Kennedy is still the sanest and most coherent of the three. Ochone!

Book Review: Who Wants Music on Monday?

This post originally appeared here on Blogspot with some links that rotted and needed to be removed. Without those links, it seems timely, so here it is again. What I forgot to put in, while putting in five links none of which is useful any more, was that this was one of my very favorite books in high school. If the high school librarian had done as most of the grade school teachers did and let everyone pick a book off the shelf to keep, this would have been my pick.

Title: Who Wants Music on Monday?

Author: Mary Slattery Stolz

Publisher: Harper & Row

Date: 1963

Length: 267 pages

What a disappointment being a parent must be, Cassie muses, midway through this book. You look forward to your children's being a comfort and a joy, and then you get...a son like Aaron. Or a daughter like Cassie.

Cassie, the skinny introvert artist in the family, is what her older brother calls "absolutely letter-perfect honest about everything in life," and Who Wants Music on Monday is to some extent the story of how she develops enough private feelings to understand the value of tact. Cassie enjoys some immunity to high school crushes because her older brother is the object of her idealistic love--idealistic not in the sense that she thinks he's perfect, but in the sense that she wants to be the perfect, adoring sister. At the beginning of the story boys have yet to notice that Cassie is a girl.

However, in the course of the story, Cassie notices a boy, Aaron, and he notices her, at about the same time...and then Lotta, the fluffy blonde middle child in the family, develops a crush on this boy too. After all, they have things in common: both of them are employed as entertainers at children's parties.

All late bloomers, younger sisters, and girls who've deliberately chosen to hang out with friends who seem more popular or sophisticated, will love what happens next. (If your friend or sister is nicer than Lotta, the story is still a delicious warning to her.)

Let's just say that at the end of the story Cassie has three solid friends outside the family, one of whom is Aaron, and Lotta has some growing up to do. Lotta thought she was popular. And mature.

What's not to love? Well...at fourteen, I remember being disappointed that there's not much music in the book. In 1963 teen novels were selling like hotcakes and publishers were trying to tag each one with a unique, clever title. "Who wants music on Monday?" is a throwaway line uttered when the mother and aunt are eating lunch in a restaurant that advertises live music, but doesn't have a band on Mondays. This is not a book about music or musicians. If anything it's a book about differences.

Mary Slattery Stolz was one of the best authors of the late twentieth century. She specialized in stories about sensitive, introspective young people, partly because they allowed her to call readers' attention to the thoughts and feelings of the adult characters too. Cassie tries to understand why her parents seem to prefer Lotta's way of being a teenager to her way, and why her Irish-American father (who's never actually been in Ireland) is prejudiced against both of her brother's very nice roommates (one's an English expatriate and one's African-American).

Writing about sensitive, socially conscious characters also made Stolz's young adult novels real period pieces. Sometimes the factors that date the books aren't the ones that seem meant to place the books in time. Fluffy pale yellow sweaters have come back in and out of fashion since 1963, and had even, as one Amazon reviewer suggests, been a possible time-stamp for a story set in the 1950s. What's definitely 1963 is the sense of the girls needing work, and only being eligible for gender-specific, lower-paid jobs. (Not to mention Dave's willingness to attend an almost all-White college where he's always conspicuous and sometimes a target...readers already knew about that time-stamp.)

Another time-stamp is the important plot element of Lotta's being an entrepreneur. She and one or more buddies collect small amounts of cash for supervising children's parties. Parents are willing to spend that kind of money on small, home-based birthday parties with only three to six guests. Parents are willing to hire teenyboppers to supervise the parties. One "strange," very rich and trendsetting couple even trust their seven-year-old birthday girl to entertain her little friends, and supervise three teenagers the parents haven't actually met, all by herself..."She doesn't have the sort of childhood babies cry for," one of the girls observes about this child, while another one can't get over the child's not clinging to a parent's hand--is she an alien disguised as a child?

If you want to find the political element in everything, you may enjoy remembering the trade-off. Lotta works harder than Aaron, and collects less money, even as an entrepreneur, and Lotta would definitely be stuck in a pink-collar job--perhaps, like her aunt, working her way up from cashier to floor manager or buyer if she made a "career" of doing student labor in one place all her life. On the other hand, it's ever so much easier for Lotta to open a business of her own, which has the potential of becoming the real career of her dreams, than it would be today.

Peer pressure would definitely be applied to any parent who let three teenagers supervise a party for their birthday child these days, especially if one of the teenagers was a boy. However, there are people, about the age Lotta would be if she'd been real, who still make a business of entertaining at children's parties. (When this review was originally posted, it contained an advertisement for a local couple who did that. Their web site is no longer functional. That's why the post was pulled and reposted.)

What I would like to call to your attention, Gentle Readers, is yet another social change. In 1963 the child who didn't fall to pieces, emotionally, when her parents blew off her birthday party, seemed like an alien freak. I read the book, not for the first time, in 1983 and thought, "By now everybody knows a child like that." By 1993 I'd taken a class where the professor argued that children whose parents left them in day-care-type environments, routinely, could be considered to have been blessed with precocious "social skills." By 2012 I'm afraid that the child character Ella may seem normal to young readers. And I'll bet you can't visualize her as a trim, healthy, active child, either.

When this review originally appeared, some of The Nephews were small children who had a terrible choice: their father thought they needed to be plugged in to all the current electronic fads, at his house; their mother, grandmother, and aunt agreed that they needed a place to unplug at Grandma's house. The kids loved the real world of real, physical interactions with adults, plants, animals, food, swimming pools, and so on. What made them wistful and misty-eyed was the thought of sharing comparable unplugged quality time with Daddy.

Do the children you know feel the same way? I recommend finding out before the birthday bash. Hire the clowns, by all means, and learn from the professionals along with the child. Try clowning around the house. Try baking cake from scratch, too, and playing the real-world games with the child in real time. Children become able to have more fun and remember it better as they grow up, so regularly spending summer vacation time with them almost guarantees that each summer will be the best one they ever had.

Liza the Silly Yellow Wild Cat

This post originally appeared on Blogjob in 2015. If Liza was alive in 2015, she was an old cat, even then. 

(Topic credit: Wendy Welch at https://wendywelchbigstonegap.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/the-naming-of-cats-is-a-difficult-matter/ .)

For a few years after its dedication as a Cat Sanctuary my home was catless. Horrible. My mother thought she could protect the house from mice by leaving rat poison lying about while she spent weeks at a time in town. I came home to a house full of mice. Holding my nose, I said, “We need a cat.”

Another Cat Sanctuary sent me two kittens, Bounce and Pounce. “Their mother is wild as a cat can be, but my granddaughter’s made pets of the kittens.” The kittens ignored cat food, crawled up my legs, and tried to nurse on every exposed patch of skin they found. They were autumn kittens, not more than three months old. They shivered a good deal, more from grief and fear, I thought, than from actual chill, and cried. 

“You don’t want the mother cat. She’s wild, won’t come near the house, won’t catch mice…”

The kittens wanted her, I said. Kittens are meant to wean themselves gradually. over a lactation cycle that can extend for six or seven months; after two months they're normally getting most of their nourishment from solid food, but they continue to get some nourishment from the small amount of milk that remains available until the kittens are almost as big as their mothers are.

Later that week a man unloaded a steel trap into the front yard. A very hostile orange cat erupted out of the trap, up the man’s arm, over his head, leaving a trail of blood as she leaped down to the ground and streaked away into the woods. That cat had not wanted to part with her kittens, nor to be transported across the county in a cage trap, and she intended to make that man pay. Somehow she'd managed to sustain her lactation cycle over days away from the kittens. I did not know this right away; my immediate concern was bringing out cold water and Band-Aids. 

Later that day the kittens persuaded their mother to be reunited with them in the barn, and came in full of milk, purring and content. The feral mother cat would try to sneak bites of leftover food when she thought I wasn’t looking, but would not eat food that was set out for her. “Silly yellow wild cat,” I observed, and, thinking of an old children’s storybook, called her Liza.

In between the arrival of Bounce and Pounce and the arrival of their mother, on a job site I’d met Graybelle, the Third Queen of the Cat Sanctuary, also feral. For the first week or two Liza slapped and scolded Graybelle. Though Graybelle had kitten teeth and was still growing fast, she was already as big as many female cats get. Liza was an impressive “Big Mamma,” usually mistaken by strangers for a tomcat, and not to be impressed by Graybelle’s size. Not yet.

Over the course of the winter, although Liza was mostly dense muscle and solid old bones, and Graybelle was mostly fluff, the size difference gradually reversed. Then Graybelle went on growing, being one of those Manx cats who revert to the full size of their wild ancestors.

Bounce and Pounce were the cuddly pets who did cute things and wanted to be held. Graybelle was gentle but not affectionate. Liza gradually, week by week, let her kittens persuade her to eat with them.

I didn’t try to force Liza to be a pet. I set out food for Bounce, Pounce, and Liza in one bowl, food for Graybelle in another bowl. Bounce and Pounce would eat a bit and then want to play and be petted. It was amusing to watch Liza approach and avoid, approach and avoid, over the winter. She liked kibble and loved fish, just like a normal cat. After a month or two she’d even let me stroke her back while she was eating.

One snowy day I sat on the porch and watched everyone eat, and Liza came close enough for me to pick her up and hold her on my knee. She didn’t scratch or bite; she froze. When rubbed behind the ears she emitted an extraordinary noise. It was a sort of purr, but a high-pitched, more panicky than contented purr. She seemed unable to believe that she was being petted by a human and…liking it? Then a strange voice was heard from the road. Jehovah’s Witnesses were out making themselves tiresome. Liza retreated into the woods again.

She was back in the yard for dinner, though, and now a new social dynamic appeared. Management of the humans is a point of social status for cats. Graybelle had been very dignified and ignored Liza once they were about the same size–but now Graybelle was bigger, with status to maintain, and she didn’t like Liza. If I picked Liza up again, when I set her down Graybelle would slap her.

Liza continued nursing her kittens all winter. People who dislike cats will tell you that if cats aren’t sterilized they’ll have two or three litters every year. Actually I’ve only ever seen oversexed adolescent cats, or cats whose first litter died, have two litters in a year. Mature female cats practice birth control primarily by nursing kittens for six months, which normally inhibits ovulation. Cat breeders cut off this process by selling kittens while the kittens are barely starting to eat solid food, which is sometimes justified as likely to produce an intense, though "neurotic," attachment to their humans. Cold weather also normally inhibits ovulation, so nursing met an emotional need more than a survival need for Liza, Bounce, and Pounce.

By March, Liza had lost her fear of me and acted like a pet when Graybelle wasn’t watching, though she avoided me when Graybelle was watching. Then, since she was still feral, she eloped and I never saw her again. Maybe she moved in with her mate’s family and became Queen. It’s hard to say. A lot of cats look like Liza. All the ones I was close enough to see were male, but who knows?

Liza was one of nine feral-born cats who’ve become pets, even indoor pets, with some encouragement from me. (Only six of them were my pets; Graybelle, Boots, and Muffin were definitely other people’s pets who also recognized me as a friend.) People who listen to the Humane Pet Genocide Society  have heard that feral cats can’t become pets. I say: bosh. Feral cats do not have the neurotic need for human supervision that some pet cats do. They know they can survive on their own, which makes it all the more rewarding that they often will choose to bond with humans who respect them.

Would you love someone who trapped you, kept you in a steel cage, separated you from your home and friends, performed drastic elective surgeries on you, then either held you prisoner or dumped you out on a street corner while you were still bleeding from a major surgical operation? Feral cats don’t love the people who carry out Humane Genocide Society mandates on them, either. That does not mean that feral cats never bond with humans, but it does reduce the chance that a feral cat will ever learn to trust another human.

Would you, on the other hand, love someone who shared food with you, helped you recover when you were in fact sick or injured, helped keep insects from eating you alive, helped baby-sit your children, and protected you from predators? Feral cats often do learn to love the people who help them, too. Be respectful, don’t make a feral cat a prisoner, and it will probably become your friend.

Book Review: House of Ravens

Title: House of Ravens

Author: Jenny Sandiford

Date: 2023

Publisher: Velikor

ISBN: 978-0-6854449-3-3

Quote: "Getting into his father's good books was everything."

There has been an active campaign to encourage writers to write more stories of dysfunctional families and what's been explained as "dark academia," along with "Southern Gothic," to make family, education, and heritage seem like bad things. No points for guessing what other bad ideas lurk where that one came from. 

However, knowing about this campaign makes it possible to enjoy the fantasies of all that real families, schools, and farms are not. 

In the first volume of a series that's definitely written for and about adults, the protagonist, Torin, is a teenager being trained for a career as an assassin. His father is brutal and mean. His mother is dead; Torin believes the patriarch of a rival family killed her. Oh, by the way, although this all seems to be taking place in modern England with flush toilets and blazer jackets and all, the rival crime families have contrasting magical powers. Torin's family, the Dumonts of the House of Ravens, are killers. Torin's father teaches all his assassins-to-be how to use a "sleeping beauty spell" to put people into deep, possibly permanent sleep, which involves among other things drawing a triangle of spirals. When Torin tries it, his hand and mind slip, he draws a crooked backward Z, and anyone his hand or mind is touching dies. 

This is all the effect of the ancient Babylonian gods being alive, as forces of nature and magic, int his alternate world. 

I didn't really enjoy visiting this alternate world. Some people do. Sandiford's world is just on the borderline of dystopian. If you enjoy speculative fiction with a focus on the question of how someone brought up in an amoral religion thinks about moral matters, you'll want to collect the rest of Torin's adventures.

Web Log for 6.24-25.24

Holidays, Hallmark 

"Juneteenth"? Right, it's the title of a book by the late Ralph Ellison. Publicity for good writers is a good thing. 

Why would Republicans celebrate it? Well...although Abraham Lincoln was not alive on the nineteenth of June, 1865, that was when slaves in Texas generally received the news that he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation had not been duly celebrated when issued, due to there being a war on and much debate about its having any legal validity in the States named in the original Proclamation. But in 1865 the Proclamation was recognized everywhere. Hurrah.

Next question: Why would residents of other States celebrate a Texas holiday? 

Some claim the celebration of "Juneteenth" in States where it was not celebrated in 1865 is something the Left are pushing, so the Right should ignore or despise it.

Meh. I'm all in favor of more celebrations of good books. We could celebrate Handmaid's Tale Day, a day of rest for all credit cards when everyone celebrates the value of paying cash. We could celebrate Huckleberry Finn Day, observed on the nearest river. We could celebrate Good Earth Day, when everybody gets to sneer at people who have failed to claim inherited land. 

What we do not need is more government involvement in holidays. In order to be fun a holiday should be celebrated privately by people who want to celebrate something, NOT enforced on everybody as a big public inconvenience.

Music 

I know just enough Hebrew to know that the Hebrew words in this song are not a translation of the English words. As usual, translating songs amounts to writing a new song on the same theme in the other language...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTAqXFOEYPQ&t=260s 

As if it weren't hard enough to gather a paying crowd to listen to folk music, with all the really "authentic" and well known performers in that genre retired or dead...as if it hadn't taken somebody like Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, or Ewan MacColl to draw a crowd for a folk concert at best--the British now worry about "decolonising" the genre. Which is a good idea, from the point of view of documenting folk music; you want the minority traditions, the "Nobody sings those songs but Weird Win who learned them from per grandmother" songs. From the point of view of building careers or selling tickets, it's a terrible idea. Brits who wanted to hear Heather Wood were sufficiently disappointed by Maddy Pryor's versions (though young come-lately foreign barbarians such as moi admire both singers). They'd have to be real folk music nerds to accept Thai or Zimbabwean music in the place where Child Ballads ought to be.

Which makes one consider how much ill will is caused merely by people thinking that other people are in the place where still other people ought to be. Whatever opened up in the place where my favorite (whatever) closed last year, I'm sure it's disgusting...that sort of thing...

https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2024/06/dont-oppress-my-people-with-your-white-ass-folk-music.html

This is not a folk song. It's an art song in the folk style, meaning that we know who wrote it (Catherine Faber) with the intention that it would be easy enough to sing around a campfire that people would go on singing it after they'd forgotten about her, Faber. Who knows? Currently Faber is still alive. 

https://www.hwaet.org/Songbook/MyKindOfHero.html

Book Review: Into the Dark

Title: Into the Dark

Author: A.J. Faris

Date: 2021

Publisher: A.J. Faris

Quote: "Darkness exists everywhere and never ends."

Something is wrong with the protagonist of this novel. She's not able to recognize, or acknowledge the existence of, evil. She confuses it with darkness, and she keeps blindly driving toward it, from page 1 where she's photographing the gruesome details of a murder, to page 71 where the story ends with a cliff-hanger as she meets the man who appears to have orchestrated all the bad things that have happened in the intervening seventy pages.

In theory you might want to watch the apparently innocent, or at least non-criminal, Amelia Carter fight it out with the drug lord Carver (given name still to be disclosed). I did not. I did not find the storyline believable or relatable at all. 

I don't mind a crime story, but I like my crime fighters to be aware that whatever causes people to murder other people is something different from the fact that the earth turns away from the sun for part of every day. Carter never does wake up, in this story. And so I'm not sure why I'd even want her to win. Carver is a sociopath, presumably, but Carter is somewhere on the sociopathic spectrum too.

A Skill I Wish More People Had

A skill I wish more people had is the ability to observe what other people are doing without thinking that they are supposed to do the same thing. "The ability to be outclassed" comes to mind. Do things as well as you think they can or should be done. If someone else does them "better," enjoy that person's success. If someone else does them "wrong," time will tell.

Why conform?

I see so much unhappiness among people who think they're meant to copy someone else, when they are clearly not.

A few years ago there was a lot of talk about the 'Rich Kids of Instagram" who posted pictures of their things and their lives that made it seem to their followers as if they were much richer and much happier than their followers/ 

I did not have a problem with people like that. I thought their blogs weren't very interesting. A young girl invited me to follow her blog. It wasn't even a blog, just a photo study of her clothes. We do not live in the Victorian period when it was possible to tell by looking, at least at women's clothes, which ones were expensive because expensive women's clothes were so elaborate. I saw a girl who had some clothes. Her clothes had a mass-produced, modern, casual look. I supposed, when wailing about the Rich Kids of Instagram became a thing, that they might have been expensive designer-label bits and pieces, but I didn't recognize the labels. To me it looked like a kid letting her parents know she was still at school, though if her parents were like mine, I thought, they must have been disappointed that she wasn't writing anything about what she was studying or learning--only photographing her clothes. 

It never occurred to me that the girl's message to the world was "I can afford this, that, and the other expensive piece of clothing, and you can't." For one thing I used to be an expert on buying $200 outfits for under $10 from charity shops. For another thing the girl didn't look like me, so why would I have wanted to dress like her? 

Then I see and hear people saying things like "I don't want to be in a class, work, hang out, or whatever with that person. Person has sooo much more skill and experience." 

That's precisely the person I would want to know, if I had the opportunity. The person from whom I can learn something is the most interesting person, to me, in any crowd. This has been the way I've felt all my life, and it has led to some unpleasant complications about now. It means that my favorite people have nearly all been older than I am; now they're retiring, aging, and dying, and I'm not ready to think about any of those things. But I have learned a lot from people who were ahead of me on some learning path or other. Would I rather be in a poetry seminar with Margaret Atwood, or with the poor little old lady who sends a garbled gospel song to the weekly poetry page in the newspaper? Atwood, any day.

In college, it seemed obvious that one school friend, especially, was miles ahead of me in every possible way people's talents and achievements could be compared, one year. But she also made a couple of very bad choices I didn't make. The second year I started hearing that people thought I was a match for my brilliant, gifted, beautiful friend. Ten years later there was no question: I'd passed her. She had her way of looking good, and I had mine. She wrote her songs, and I wrote mine. She might have been born with a greater talent, but she spent much of her young adult life struggling with addictions while I was using the talents I had. 

And so? Life's road wound on and on. As a teenager I thought of writing and music as my talents. As a young adult I accepted the fact that my musical talent is amateur quality, carefully stored a dozen or so book manuscripts on the expectation that I'd be able to polish and publish them whenever I felt mature enough, and achieved Success as an entrepreneur. Now, after seventeen years of not replicating that success, who knows, maybe my brilliant addicted friend has passed me again. (I hope so; at least I hope she's more comfortable, financially, than I am, and I still think her songs should have been published at least on a web site.) As a once popular book title said: Success is never ending; failure is never final. We're mortal. We never do know everything.

One early lesson that served me well, though, is not to burden myself by wanting what other people have, or coveting it, or avoiding them because I don't have what they have. Not to cut myself off from the pleasure of working with them, though avoiding direct competition might be a good idea.

A "competition on looks" story comes to mind. 

One of my job descriptions, in my twenties, was "feminist activist." At the time Washington, DC, did not have a rape crisis center, and people felt a need for one. Advertisements for "singers, actresses, and models" all in one ad were a recognized way to recruit sales and fundraising teams without actually saying "Only young and pretty women need apply." In my twenties I found it profitable to bid on those gigs. So a mob of young and pretty women were hired to raise funds to build the rape crisis center, and given a fundraising quota for each day depending on the neighborhood we were canvassing. Every day everyone struggled to make quota...except a girl I'll call Patricia, because her real name was something different.

In a room full of professional pretty girls, Patricia stood out. Blue-eyed redheads aren't supposed to have classic bone structure. Patricia did. Women's hair is supposed to grow far enough to reach some point on our upper backs, and then stop. Patricia's bright red hair had never been cut and grew to about halfway down her thin thighs. Her waist tapered, too. Patricia had been homeschooled and had finished high school at sixteen. She was still sixteen, and had never even had acne. Patricia had been sent to Washington with nice clothes and a nice car. Clearly Patricia was a person destined to go through life being envied, by people who didn't see her as just existing on a different level from normal human beings, which I did.

Inevitably one day I was called in to the manager's office. "You barely made quota two nights last week, and didn't make quota last night. You've been making quota. What's wrong?"

I knew exactly what was wrong. "We've been canvassing a hostile neighborhood." 

"Well, Patricia's been in that neighborhood and she's been well above quota."

How could she? "Patricia is not a normal human being. Patricia is fabulous. People would pay Patricia to stand on their doorsteps and recite the multiplication table. That does not happen to the rest of us."

"Think so? Well, someone you talked to last night just called in to make a donation with a credit card. Quite a large donation. We know for sure it was you because she said she talked to the pretty one with the biggest, brownest eyes..."

It was a nice flattering pep talk. It did not change the facts. All of us were young and pretty. None of us could ever be Patricia except Patricia.

So the manager said, "Well, everyone's numbers are down, so tonight we'll pull them up again. It's Halloween, a special day for some of us, and we are going to Takoma Park." 

At the time I was living in Takoma Park. "Can my sister tag along with me?"

"I suppose so, since it's your neighborhood. Just for tonight."

This sister was the one who really wanted to be the feminist activist, the one who'd been sexually molested when she was eleven years old and looked fifteen. Now she was thirteen and looked old enough to vote. It was a problem. We knew men who were decent enough to try to resist, but we never met a male between the ages of nine and ninety who didn't react visibly to this sister. The other one got tired of being told she was cute, or pretty, or a good model for whatever, but for this one beauty was a real burden to bear, at the age when girls are obsessed with their looks. Anyway everyone in the neighborhood had noticed her; people were interested in her story.

So we walked around our neighborhood. It was not a typical door-to-door fundraising experience. Everyone wanted us to come in and sit down; everyone wanted to hear the sister's testimony. People who chose to live in Takoma Park were stereotypically generous anyway. 

Sister went to bed at her normal bedtime, it being a school night, and I went back downtown with the mob for what I considered the total waste of time where we all counted and re-counted everyone's take. 

Quota for Takoma Park was higher than usual: two hundred dollars. Nevertheless, nobody seemed to have had any trouble making quota. Patricia had as usual brought in several hundred dollars over quota. So, that night, had I.

"Well, somebody was listening to what I said this morning! Priscilla, tell us what you did!"

"I was with my sister. She wants this job. I vote we hire her."

I had not yet researched the implications for the group's liability insurance in allowing even Patricia, much less my sister, to run around the city talking to strangerrs about sexual assault every night. The manager clearly expected that I would. (Fun fact: one of the ways my odd jobs service kept costs low was that, as independent contractors, none of us bothered about insurance.) All I could think about, at the moment, was that something unique in the history of the world had happened. An ordinary human being had achieved a fundraising feat comparable with Patricia's. God had dropped a gift into the group's hands, and they were fumbling.

And Patricia's perfectly beautiful face curled into a, yes, an ugly sneer. "Tell your housemate we don't do baby-sitting." Could it be? It was. Phenomenal Patricia envied my sister.

I had to quit that gig next week, anyway, because typing was picking up. I expected to hear more of Patricia in a few years but, somewhat to my surprise, she has not become a movie star and I never did hear what she chose to do with her life.

I hope she saw the futility, as well as the evil, of envy.

The Bible doesn't say that it's anyone's duty to be or seem happy. The Bible writers presuppose that people want to feel happy, and often tell us things we can reasonably feel happy about, but it never says that happiness is a duty. Happiness is a pleasure. The Bible does command that people control one "feeling." That feeling is not lust--the Bible never tells single people not to enjoy sex fantasies for all they're worth, although that is partly because the Bible was written in a culture that allowed very few young people to stay single. It is not depression--the Bible never tells us to be like Jacob, who said "I will go to my grave mourning for my son," or not to be like Jacob; it leaves that up to us. It is not even fear--the Bible writers admit that there are things reasonable people want to avoid, although they also tell us we don't need to be afraid of Hell. The emotion the Bible commands us to avoid is envy. Bible writers note here and there that people have reasons to be sad, mad, or glad. And Hebrew words for those emotional states are active verbs; though understood to mean things like "(You will) be happy (about this)," they literally tell people "Rejoice! Sing! Shout! Dance!" Hebrew is a very lively language. "Weep! Wail! Tear your clothes with grief!" the Bible writers also advise people to do, in passng reactions to less pleasant news. But "Thou shalt not covet" is a commandment. Indulging in envious thoughts is a sin like lying or blaspheming, like adultery or murder. 

If we really think that what other people have are good things, we are never commanded not to work for similar things for ourselves. This applies to material things and also to talents and experience. Trying to be "smarter than" or "prettier than" someone else is a waste of time. Trying to use whatever talents we have, in their own right, without fretting about what other people have, is the ideal. 

This is starting to sound like a Sunday post, and it's not Sunday...but there's my answer to the Long & Short Reviews question. I wish for you, Gentle Readers, this happiness that I've found...from learning to enjoy, not envy, what others have.