Butterfly of the Week: Giant Swordtail

This week's butterfly is known mostly by names that make sense: Graphium androcles, the Giant Swordtail.

Photo from Fachrynurmallojr.

Graphium ia the genus of African and Asian butterflies that have long tails on their hind wings, or else have little or no tails but have the same wing shape as the ones with the long tails. Graphium androcles is said to have the longest tails of all Swallowtail species; the tails project from the wings at an unusual angle, making them even more conspicuous. The upper side looks black, or faded black, and white; the underside shows a small yellow-orange spot, a patch of yellow-green, and sometimes, depending on the light, a smaller patch of blue-green or sky blue. 

Photo by Iwank. This behavior, spreading out wings to catch the sun's warmth, is more often observed in cool climates than in the tropics where this species lives.

Androcles was a hero from ancient literature. Most people who read English know his story, but, for those who don't: Supposedly Androcles removed a thorn from the paw of a lion he met in the North African desert. Later he was sentenced to fight a lion in the Roman arena, where a crowd of people who had lost human feeling from living in crowded conditions gathered to watch the lions tear convicts to pieces. Androcles was shoved out in front of the lion he had helped before, and the lion recognized him and did not try to hurt him. 

Swordtails are butterflies with long tails on their hind wings, and Graphium androcles is bigger than some of the other species in this group. Wingspans range from 3 to 4.7 inches, females being larger than males. Because of its greater size and calmer manner it's been called the King of Swordtails. Here is a video of how one individual seemed to earn this name:

https://www.facebook.com/BabulNP/videos/graphium-androcles-androcles-boisduval-1836/105857135749729

Photo by Zicky, making a similar point.

Like other Graphiums, Graphium androcles was at first placed in the genus Papilio with all the Swallowtails. In the nneteenth century scientists started breaking up the overcrowded list of Papilio species with new genus names like Graphium. Some people now think Graphium is overcrowded and includes too many disparate species, too, and want to classify androcles in the proposed genus Pathysa. 

Considered an endangered species, Giant Swordtails are most often found in Indonesia, sometimes in southern India and on other islands. They are protected as an attraction in the Bantimurung-Bulusaraung national park. They have always been especially associated with Sulawesi island.

Both sexes pollinate. Male Swallowtails tend to do more compositing than females; in any case, researchers bait this butterfly with soapy water, urine, and carrion including dead butterflies. Such liquids contain mineral salts. Both sexes need their minerals but females usually prefer to absorb theirs from the spermatophore, after mating, rather than drink their own mineral-rich liquids. Composter species may be especially at risk when their sources of mineral salts include new mixes of chemicals, but a research paper attempting to identify causes of population decline in this species did not consider this possibility.

Indonesians have complained that this butterfly is becoming difficult to find. One reason is the antiquated and rather ghoulish custom of "collecting" butterfly carcasses, which still goes on today, when almost anyone can afford a more modern and enjoyable collection of digital photos. Half the links for this species name on Google go to pages that claim to traffic in carcasses. It's possible to collect butterfly bodies after the butterflies are dead, or even rear butterflies for the purpose of killing a few "perfect" specimens, without affecting the species population, but when a species is threatned to an unknown extent by human activity, habitat disturbance, local warming, "pesticide" spraying, etc., and people who may feel a great need for money are able to sell butterfly carcasses, the idea of collecting carcasses ought to disgust everyone. We should never pay for dead butterflies.

It would be better to pay for photos and videos of butterflies in their natural habitat, along with other beautiful living things, like this short video posted free of charge to advertise the park:

https://www.facebook.com/100063594789984/videos/graphium-androclesbila-makhluk-indah-ini-terbang-ekornya-yang-panjang-berwarna-p/778046012759902/?_rdr

Monophagous butterflies are unlikely to form great flocks in any case. Since their existence is tied to the population of their hot plant, they often avoid places where their fantastic sense of smell tells them that another butterfly of their species and gender has recently been. Photos of Graphium androcles often show this "king" species, like our Monarchs, alone at a puddle, surrounded by flocks of smaller butterfly species. Some photos show pairs, often in different shades of color, suggesting that this may be one of the species where higher-contrast colors identify males.

Photo by Jesl. So, are these two a courting couple? 

Photo by Nisa13. Is this museum piece an example of gender confusion? For almost every butterfly species in which male and female look different, somebody has found an individual with the male pattern on one side and the female pattern on the other. Larger animals, including humans like the Twit known as Yizz the Unifier, can have this pattern too. Their gender may be determinable because the male side develops more completely than the female side or vice versa; in any case they're likely to be sterile. Knowing that this can happen to insects should help people understand that it is happening to an increasing number of humans, these days, aggravated by a crowded and polluted environment. There is no reason to blame these people or treat them like freaks. They didn't choose gener confusion, any more than the butterflies did, and their acceptance of it is a sign of good mental health.But we should recognize this natural phenomenon as part of nature's tendency to correct overpopulation. In animal populations, when an increasing number of "alternative sexualities" fails to correct overpopulation fast enough, it is followed by violent antisocial behavior and by plagues. 

It should also be noted that at least one image of a Graphium androcles whose wings don't match has, admittedly, been skilfully digitized to show the upper wing pattern on one side and the under wing pattern on the other side. For this species that means more faded black and brighter yellow on the underside of the fore wing, and more spots on the underside of the hnd wing.

This photo By Accassidy - Kalugaringon nga buhat, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45626040  is Art not Nature.

Males of this species are said to have well developed scent folds on the hind wings. This feature is hard to illustrate in photographs, especially when the butterfly rarely spreads its wings out flat.

Subspecies cleomenes, latilinea, and pelengensis have been documented, but if that documentation has been digitized Google is suppressing most of it. An old book that's been digitally photographed says that latilinea was "Distinguished by the narrower white bands and the heavier submarginal line on the fore wing." Newer descriptions have dropped the name latilinea and most don't mention the other subspecies either. Funet lists cleomenes and pelengensis but gives no information about them.

Only in 2016-2017 did Harlina et al. publish a formal study of this species' life cycle, which they observed in caged individuals in the park. 

https://www.aloki.hu/pdf/1503_881890.pdf

They found that the butterflies matured in seven to ten weeks. In order to keep track of the young butterflies, the scientists confined all caterpillars to a wooden cage, about 1 x 2 meters, covered in thin fabric. "Ant chalk" was placed on the ground around the cage. 

Eggs hatched in five to nine days. About 40% of the eggs in the scientists' care hatched. into caterpillars. The threats to egg survival the scientist found were parasites and fungi.

Caterpillars ate their way through five skins in 23 to 30 days, and nine out of ten of the caterpillars the scientists reared lived long enough to pupate. The ones who were lost were parasitized during the fourth instar. Drab at all stages, the caterpillars grew from imitation bird droppings with dark skins splotched with white, into slim, only slightly hunchbacked, medium-gray caterpillars with a distinct narrow "waist" and wasp-shaped "tail" section on the abdominal section. They ate the leaves of Uvaria rufa exclusively.

Pupation lasted for 20 to 25 days. Seven out of ten pupae completed eclosion and lived to fly.Pupae were dull green and had a withered-leaf shape. A few turned black from fungus infection. The scientists believed that checking the cage daily and reoving any moldy pupae was crucial to their high success rate. 

The linked paper contains photos of eggs, caterpillars, and pupae, in a PDF format that does not allow copying. If any other web site has photos of immature Graphium androcles, it's being suppressed. 

Book Review: Falling for the Bostonian

Title: Falling for the Bostonian

Author: Emily Dana Botrous

Date: 2020

Quote: "She'd...[h]ad no thoughts of finding a man in a big city."

Last year this web site raved over The Miracle of Mistletoe, in which a married couple resolve their conflicts and fall in love all over again. Should a romance be about how a couple get married in the first place? I think romances where the couple are already married are nice, but the question gives writers ideas. Here is the short novel, first published as three short stories, of how Marcy went to Boston to forget her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend Tyler (who harasses her in Mistletoe) and met a great gorgeous hunk of exotic DNA who was a Christian, too. 

It's a sweet novel, explicit about how Colt and Marcy force themselves to stop at kissing until they're legally married and how Marcy wants that body so much she doesn't even hold out for a wedding her friends and relatives can attend, but those details imply passion and, yes, there's some explicit mention of passion too. 

I like it; I'd expect that most romance readers will like it.

Web Log for 9.24-26.24

It's rained, more or less heavily but continuously as far as I can tell, for 36 hours. Because of the rain I felt free to sleep in my own little bed last night. I was up at dawn, and so far, between dawn and full daylight, the electricity has blinked three times and the Internet connection twice. I don't expect to get in a full day's work online, though I plan to try. I don't know whether connectivity will be restored next week either. Let us hope for the best. I have a lot of advance review copies of books to read.

Butterflies 

Synchronicity, Gentle Readers. I was working ahead of schedule on the post about Graphium angolanus, the Angolan White Lady Swallowtail, or Swordtail--whichever category you prefer; it has the general kind of wing structure for that family, but if it has tails at all they'd be nail-scissors-tails. Anyway it's a pretty thing...and it's on display, now, for a limited time only, at the Florida Museum. (It's one of those species that can be too friendly with humans; I would assume the museum will protect the butterflies by preventing them from licking visitors' sweat off their faces.) The museum can't give precise dates because they have one brood of butterflies now and they don't know how long those butterflies will live. Anyway, the museum closed due to edge-of-hurricane weather on Wednesday and won't be open on Thursday, but if you want to see this butterfly alive in the USA, they are in Gainesville. The museum still has a phone though I'd expect it only plays a recording. Call 352-846-2000 to find out when it reopens.

Documentation of excessive friendliness? Here's a video. This butterfly is resting on a leaf, minding its business, and a human comes up and sticks a finger in front of it. Even our Eastern Tiger Swallowtails would fly away if we did that. Likely most Angolans would too, but this one says to itself, "Hmm...soap. Mmmh...sweat," and climbs onto the finger and crawls around, licking.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1074014744357122

For the first week of October, I have prepared for you the best, most informative, most complete, most fully and beautifully illustrated, article about Graphium angolanus in cyberspace. How is that possible? Because I've read all the others, of course, and patched together the information they had. But Google will not find this article. It'll find my summary of what information the Internet had about the Hemileucas fifteen years ago, but not the up-to-date summaries of what the Internet has now. However, once you've found this web site, which is hosted by Google, once you're here the search feature works very well. We need a search engine that does so well for the whole Internet. 

 

Censorship

Physical bookstores traditionally observe Banned Book Week. Bookshop.org is extending the bargains and promotions for a whole month! But beware. A lot of the books they are promoting have been banned from physical bookstores, before the general public ever heard of them, because (a) they're about controversial topics and (b) they're not that great; publishers are losing money on them and want to sell them fast. Meh. Buy them if you want them. Meanwhile, sneaky censorship is going on right at Bookshop.org: you can still buy what claim to be the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, but if you look closely they're by Wilder "et al." and they've been revised to remove the parts that were too historically accurate to suit some people who want to rewrite history. The Little House books would have been on my list if Bookstore had had the fortitude to sell them the way they were written. So would early Dr. Seuss books like And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in which a child walks to school alone, comes in late, and tells preposterous stories about what he saw. I was able to find unedited books by Roald Dahl, because people protested their being butchered into p.c.-ism, but you have to pay attention if you're looking for them. 

Me? I want vintage books just as they are. It was good enough then, so it's good enough now. I want to keep a lot of books that preserve what people said about the state of race and gender relations in their time. While standing firm on Huckleberry Finn the literary world has let a lot of other valuable books be suppressed or censored. We should not do this. We should keep them all. I'm not pleased by some things Tennyson said about women and some things Martin Luther said about Jews, but those things are part of the record. If I want to appreciate Tennyson or Luther I need to appreciate them as they were, flawed and fallible, saying brilliant and beautiful words sometimes and obnoxious words other times.

I want little girls, when they're old enough to have a sense of history, to know that Laura Ingalls Wilder sewed her own clothes and pulled her corset strings tight as they'd go (though not so tight that she had to hold onto something and beg someone else to pull them tighter, as one of her aunts did), and was taught to fear indigenous people because they did raid homes like hers, and lived in a hole in the ground, and grew up quite normal apart from having a gift of storytelling, too. I want them to know that that's possible. I want them to know that in other times and places, nobody would ever imagine a woman with plastic-covered legs, painful shoes, something that pretends to be a skirt but isn't even half of one, and a mask of unconvincing lust painted onto her face, could possibly be feeling "liberated" or good about herself, either, although all those TV talking heads do...at least when they start the job. 

Anyway, here' are some books you can buy from my Bookshop store. I get a commission if you buy any of them. The picture books for tots about transgenderism won't be in my Bookshop long, but I'm not censoring Bookshop's lists--I merely posted one of my own.

https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-books-for-adults-priscilla-king

https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-books-for-young-adults

https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-books-for-children

https://bookshop.org/lists/banned-books-i-love-priscilla-king

Election 2024 

Trump walks into a grocery store for a photo-op, leans over a grocery buyer's shoulder, and pays half her bill. "This is f'th' White House, right?" F' as in "for"? F' as in "from"? He's f'Noo Yawk so who knows. It's a souvenir of his time in the White House, for which he was well paid. It might or might not be considered a bribe to get him back there. He did not say "You can have it only if you vote for me."

If there's a law against doing that once, that law needs to be repealed, but if Trump plans on doing it again he needs to understand that it's the wrong move. It's paternalistic. It's what Dowdypants' voters want, an indulgent grandma who gives them treats till the money runs out and we're all freezing in the dark. If a random person in the store did it, it would be embarrassing. 

What I'd like to see Trump do would be to read blogs and social media, identify people who could use some money (Hello! Over here!), and hire those people as consultants. Frugality consultants, say. As a frugality consultant I'd give Trump the following advice free of charge: "Frugality consultants are worth $100 per consultation, but there's a 50% discount for clients over age 80." 

What nobody should even think of doing any more is "holding a food drive or something"...something big and complicated and boondoggle-ish and "need-based," rewarding people who sit around whining "needy-needy-needy" instead of people who are doing what they can for themselves. Maybe we could use some federal assistance, but not in the form of handouts. Try "No license fees for the first five years for any new businesses owned by one or two people." Well, maybe there should be exceptions for medical clinics, but not for stores, restaurants, theatres, barbershops, taxi stands...there could still be state inspections to make sure the new restaurants were clean and the new stores were collecting sales tax, but not enough to raise any existing fees and taxes for anyone else. Better yet, by fines on huge corporations that have exploited laws, especially those temporary quarantine and lockdown regulations, to put locally owned start-up businesses out of operation. Not just higher taxes they can pass on to customers; fines that put real sticks in their wheels. Sort of like fining corporations that make or sell glyphosate products enough that the only way they can pay the damages due to celiacs is to put three-fourths of the stock in the hands of celiacs. No penalty for merely growing, but if a company grows by doing harm to others, punitive payment is due to those specific others. 

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/09/24/trumps-act-of-kindness-at-grocery-store-sends-liberals-into-a-frenzy-n4932787

Events

If you're going to be in or near DC this weekend, check out the CHD gathering planned for this weekend. It'll be outdoors, rain or shine, they say. Bring umbrellas! I would add...prepare for saboteurs to have sprayed glyphosate nearby. If your usual reaction builds up over, typically, 48 hours, which is common, you may want to pick a day. Saturday is the walk-in movie, Sunday is the social gathering. And if anybody tries to tell you to follow a goofy whim like everybody barging into a building in a mob rather than going in normal-sized, socially distanced groups, laugh in his face and go home. Even if your part of the movement could use a martyr, that's not the way to be one...and if your focus is COVID vaccines, it already has too many martyrs. Pick one, don't add more.

• Website: JoinTheResistance.org
• X/Twitter: @RescueRepublic
• Instagram: @WeRescueTheRepublic
• Gab: @RescueTheRepublic
• GETTR: @RescueTheRepublic
• TruthSocial: @RescueTheRepublic

Morgan Griffith on Zelenskyy

Editor's Note: From what I've read, Zelenskyy doesn't sound like a man most Americans would want to meet, in any case. Does not bother me that he didn't visit Virginia or Maryland. He can't keep out of a war, and he can't win it. I don't think people should be blown up or shot for having elected him; I think they should be asking themselves why.

And why is the US allowing people who demand censorship to be here? Wouldn't making them sit in a customs office, while their colleagues who understand that censorship is something that belongs in backward, war-ravaged nations rather than vibrant, prosperous ones are free to tour the US?

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

"

During the last week of September, the United National General Assembly welcomed several high-profile heads of state.

President Biden, Brazilian President Lula Da Silva, and Argentinian President Javier Milei were among the speakers who addressed the UN body.

Also in the speaker lineup was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. For his speech, Zelenskyy encouraged Western powers to continue their support of Ukraine as they battle Russia’s invasion.

Zelenskyy was not only in the news for his United Nations address, however.

On Sunday, September 22, the Ukrainian leader visited a Pennsylvania ammunition factory in Scranton. According to AP News, the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant is one of the few plants in the United States to manufacture 155 mm artillery shells. These shells, used in howitzer systems that strike targets up to 15-20 miles away, have been used by Ukrainian forces.

But Zelenskyy’s decision to visit the ammunition plant came under fishy circumstances.

September 22, 2024, marks 44 days before the United States presidential election. The state of Pennsylvania is seen as a swing state, going to President Trump in the 2016 presidential election before he lost the state in 2020 to President Biden.

The tour of the Scranton factory was accompanied by the state’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, a top surrogate for Vice President Harris’ campaign, as well as Democratic Senator Bob Casey and Democratic Congressman Matt Cartwright, who are both running for re-election this year. And both Senator Casey and Congressman Cartwright face stiff opposition.

Were any Republican Congressman invited to attend the event? Were any invited to speak?

Why at this point in time did they visit the largest swing state, when they could have had their meeting at a facility in New York?

Since Zelenskyy is such a student of military history, perhaps he should have gone to West Point to discuss the Russian-Ukraine war with cadets.

During the trip, Zelenskyy was interviewed by The New Yorker magazine.

One of the topics that came up involved the Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee, JD Vance. He called Vance “too radical” on his stances with regards to Ukraine. “Let Mr. Vance read up on the history of the Second World War, when a country was forced to give part of its territory to one particular person,” Zelenskyy quipped.

Such comments by a foreign leader on American soil just ahead of the 2024 election raised eyebrows.

Zelenskyy is on the record saying Ukrainians have tried to avoid “being captured by American domestic politics” and “influencing the choices of the American people” ahead of the November election.

Unfortunately, Zelenskyy’s recent actions at the Scranton plant totally discredit his past statements and suggest an interest in interfering in the American election process.

House Republicans are hoping to get answers as they investigate this potential campaign event.

Kentucky Congressman James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has opened an investigation into the Biden-Harris Administration using taxpayer funded resources to fly Zelenskyy to Pennsylvania to campaign for Vice President Harris ahead of the 2024 election.

Comer writes: “The Committee seeks to determine whether the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to use a foreign leader to benefit Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign and, if so, necessarily committed an abuse of power.”

Speaker Johnson has called for Zelenskyy to immediately fire Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova. Markarova is said to have organized the tour of the Scranton plant.

This potential foreign election interference comes on the heels of Congressional action.

House Republicans put a measure on the House Floor just prior to Zelenskyy’s visit related to foreign election interference. I voted for H.R. 8314, the No Foreign Election Interference Act, which imposes penalties with respect to contributions to political committees from organizations that receive contributions from foreign nationals.

However, 181 Democrats voted against it!

After Trump’s election in 2016, many Democrats dismissed his election as illegitimate due to Russian interference.

Yet, when given the chance, Democrats and the media failed to call out Zelenskyy for his trip, and Democrats voted down a foreign election interference bill in the House.

What is clear is that Russia and Iran are engaged in operations to influence our presidential elections. United States intelligence officials recently confirmed that Iran hacked the Trump campaign and attempted to provide the stolen information to the Biden campaign before Biden dropped out of the presidential race.

We are living in turbulent times. President Trump has faced two assassination attempts. Iran is making threats on Trump’s life. This is important context.

I recommend Zelenskyy read up on this history.

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.

" 

Belated Post for 9.25.24: Sense of Humor

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asked reviewers to describe our senses of humo(u)r. (I'm American, so mine is a sense of humor.) 

I think we did that before, and maybe the best way to define my sense of humor is to give some examples of things at which I've laughed, by way of explaining where I've been for the last couple of days. Not blogging much, not reading e-mail much...Partly it was weather. The wind is picking up, this morning. Both Internet and electricity are blinking on and off. I expect both to fail today.

Well...I started reading a novel. Most of the writers who have kindly sent me review copies, which are piling up a bit this week, may relax. It's not your novel. It's like a novel for boys, only the protagonist is a mature woman, and it's like action-adventure, only the adventure moves at the pace of an adventure story planned to be a five- or ten-volume series. It's not my kind of thing at all. It's not bad, for the kind of thing it is. It just leaves me cold. Female veteran fights giant space alien, ought by rights to die from the injuries she incurs, but the aliens are benign and fix her right up so in the next chapter she's good for another round, because the alien is teaching her alien martial arts Er. Um.

The idea that these space aliens might be some sort of metaphor for what Trump flatters with the name of "immigrants," which is what they'd like to be, no doubt, but they're not immigrants in the sense that my husband was an immigrant...anyway, whatever they are, that wasn't good for so much as a snicker, either. 

Then an Edge started to appear. My little town is fortuitously nestled in among some good-sized hills, which we like to call mountains, though a person needs no special equipment to climb up and down the highest one in a day. Anyway they keep off most of the bad weather. Weather maps always show some sort of weather melodrama taking pace a few hundred miles away, and explain that what we are getting is the edge of it. If the TV did not tell us that these things were Edges, we'd think they were plain old rain, as our elders used to call them. This Edge had a nasty dark yellow look and a lot of thunder about it. A few minutes after the thunder began to be heard, the lights went out. 

The idea that the weather wanted me to take a break from all these fight scenes, which didn't sound to me as if they'd be teaching a US Army veteran anything new, was good for a laugh. I curled up with a real printed book and listened to the rain on the roof. The printed book was a snarky comedy-romance-mystery-adventure novel about an advertising agency who make up ridiculous ads for ridiculous products. I laughed. 

The electricity came back before it got too dark to read. I read some e-mail. Robert Reich was wallowing in the unpardonable sin of impenitence. Hatespews about Trump, he said, are all right because Trump is so hateful. 

Well, he's wrong. Trump is very easy to dislike; almost as easy to dislike as his old buddy Bill Clinton. Murder is even easier to dislike. Let's all face the fact that most D voters don't support the party bosses' agenda, and are if anything more bigoted than R voters, but they vote for the party that offers them handouts. The disability pension vote is a solid D bloc. Many of those disability pensions are going to people with mental illness. Some of those people are using psychotropic medications known to cause hallucinations and delusions; some are taking /SSRI antidepressants known to cause pseudomemories and homicide-suicide thinking. This is not an audience that need to hear blather about "eliminating Trump" or comparisons between Trump and Hitler. This audience need to hear "We respectfully disagree with Trump." If you don't respect Trump for any other reason you should have some respect for his being able to stand up and make speeches while being eighty years old. D pundits need to stop saying anything their audience might hear as encouragement to murder. R poliicians have demonstrated too much willingness to think about keeping censorship around, and using it to pay Ds back, when what we all need to be agreeing on is that censorship harms people and enables crime. And D pundits need to demonstrate intelligence by learning to disagree without screaming hate and calling for violence. They could study many R writers and web sites for good examples. 

They could study this web site. This web site hated a lot of the policies of all three of the presidential administrations it has survived, but it has not called for violence or for hate of persons. When it has considered our Presidents as people, it has found either lighthearted chaff or positive encouragement for each one. If only because the members of this web site don't think the bad ideas of any of the three deserved the boost in popularity a martyr gives to an idea, we like to think of politicians who endorse bad ideas just being turned out to pasture, not being murdered.

The idea of D pundits putting a lid on their selfrighteousness, learning to say "We respectfully disagree" and "The weak point in this plan is..." instead of "Rs are evil, or alien, 'weird,' or in any way more 'deplorable' than e.g. Hunter Biden," was good for a laugh. If some of these people had to talk civilly or not talk at all, they really might never be able to talk at all. Picture some Ds who obviously did not learn from the good examples of Art Buchwald, Pete Hamill, Mike Royko, or even Michael Moore, getting on their TV shows or their podcasts, saying, "Trump makes me so angry I can't even talk about him without expressing my violent anger. I don't want to promote violence so..." Then they line up a collection of newspapers and printouts and suchlike, and a big roll of duct tape. Then they put the duct tape across their mouths. For the rest of the show they hold up headlines and point. That could be funny.

Anyway a visitor came up the road, and we ran to and fro, and knowledge was very little increased. I did have an opportunity to observe how to tell which neighborhood out here on the Virginia-Tennessee border people come from. If their home is a farm they say, ritualistically, that the rain is good for crops, even if their actual crops are drowning and going moldy, because that is what they say. If they live in Gate City proper they worry about leaks and mold. If they live in Weber City, which extends from the downhill side of Moccasin Creek to the Holston River floodplain, they worry about floods. Their concerns aren't funny, but the ritual in which they air them without variation, year after year, every time we catch one of these Edges, struck me as funny. Though not so funny that I laughed at people's worries. At least, not until I got home.

Then on Wednesday I was researching another butterfly story, and my attention was drawn to the vagaries of Google's algorithms. I tested the latest one by doing a search for a popular post at this web site. If you want to find a post at this web site, Google has decided, you need to open the web site and then search for the post. If you type into the search field, say, "rice biscuit bread," or "Grandma Bonnie Peters' rice biscuit bread," you will be steered to corporate recipe pages for, say, "Russian Honey Cookies." Well, the R, I, C, and E are in there somewhere, although of course any recipe identified as Russian is going to use the wheat, rye, or barley that grow in Russia; how not? But Google really wants to make sure you see links, probably more than one link if you search through more than one page of results, for those corporate commercial sites and do not see any links to any private people's or small, non-paying businesses' sites. That's not funny. I laughed, though. We might as easily laugh as cry and, having seen documentation of Google's selling out, we should probably laugh at anything that is still "top rated on Google." Definitely students should not be allowed to use search engines when writing term papers. (Bing is worse than Google about this and Yahoo is not much better. Several other search engines claim that they don't sell your search history to spammers, which may be a gain, but what they search is Google so if you want to see that other ninety percent of the search results they're useless.)

There's nothing funny about our great howling need for a new, impartial, objective, and complete search engine, but seeing Russian cookie recipes in the place where GBP's Rice Biscuit Bread ought to be was funny. I think she would probably have laughed. And she might have tried to work out a gluten-free version of those cookies.

Then the butterfly story was done and I went into town again and learned that this particular hurricane's Edge, which was still pouring rain, had generated a Real Tornado with a confirmed funnel cloud in Tennessee. The eastern third of Tennessee gets very few tornadoes and this is the very first one they've ever recorded in September. This is absolutely not funny. The tornado was far enough away that it's not draining local food banks and shelters, but we know that funnel cloud is going to be used to funnel our tax dollars into the towns that saw it. Well, that's a better use for tax dollars than most.

In town someone wanted to celebrate someone's birthday. I think that's sort of funny, for birthdays after number 25. Most people don't like to tell you exactly how much more than 25 years old they are, so why celebrate the day? A television just happened to be blaring the answer to that question. According to some game show's opinion poll, American adults think a birthday is an occasion to eat cake. Urgh. Ick. The first rule of survival, once you find out that you are not lazy, stupid, crazy, a liar, or a hypochondriac, but simply a celiac, is NO SOCIAL EATING. NOT EVER. As a celiac you have to learn what you can and can't eat, and prepare what you can eat for yourself.. You can not allow other people to feed you what they eat, because the majority of it will lead to more of that usually minor illness with symptoms you don't even want to talk about but you can't pull your weight on a job just the same. If you know people who need to be told more than twice that "celiac" means "person who does ALL of per own cooking," you just have to stop talking to them. And especially you need to stay away from birthdays. Because cake.

"You could still eat the frosting," the baker used to say when I was hanging out in the cafe. It was a BAKERY and cafe, so bleep was a celiac even doing there? Every really good cafe contains at least one underpaid, adorably scruffy writer who hangs out all day, nursing a drink and writing. What I used to be doing there was drinking coffee. When I could scrape the money together I bought their gluten-free menu offerings, and, due to glyphosate being sprayed right on food during those years, some of them made me sicker than natural wheat would have done, but I gave the baker points for trying. But although celiacs are known for eating things that are normally eaten with wheat bread by spoonfuls, and nobody thinks twice about eating a fork-load of frosting when eating a slice of thickly frosted cake, I always drew the line at ordering a dish of cake frosting.

But this cake was baked in a big-chain store and, no, I could not eat the frosting. Celiacs have to read labels. Labels are normally printed in tiny illegible type so we have to dig out a magnifying glass and read the label before eating, say, a spoonful of cake frosting. The box in which this cake came was typical. It had FOOD CITY printed all over it in large multicolor type and the ingredients printed in 6-point sans-serif type that ran right over the FOOD CITY logo. Somebody didn't want too much attention paid to what was in the cake.

And I very soon saw why not. Under the magnifying glass, the label revealed that the cake was made with, among other vile substances, propylene glycol in the frosting.

What's propylene glycol? some educated adults will ask. It's not food. You never see it even in the spice section at a store. Propylene glycol is a chemical that apparently tastes sweet and creamy, so when a no-account bakery, like the ones in some big-chain stores, wants to maximize profits they substitute propylene glycol for some of the cream, butter, and eggs. Propylene glycol is usually sold as antifreeze. The kind you're warned to keep away from pets or children, because even animals who don't like sugar have been known to lap up enough antifreeze to kill them. One or two slurps will kill a dog. 

Apparently the FDA now allows despicable people to put propylene glycol in food. When we get a competent person in charge of the FDA again, anyone known to have put propylene glycol in food will get twenty years of solitary confinement, food and water to be provided when and as relatives deliver them, and I'm not sure why their cells would need to be more than 5'x5'x5' either. 

Never buy or eat cakes from Food City. They are made with antifreeze. 

If I'd eaten that cake "just to be sociable" it's unlikely that I would have been able to chop through a healthy maple tree that was blocking the road, a bit later. A bigger, older, dead tree had fallen on top of this maple tree. Parts of the old dead tree and the whole trunk of the maple were lying right across the road. When I came home it was wet; I scrambled around the fallen tree and waited and hoped someone would drive up in a truck that had a chain saw in the back and saw up the dead tree, some time on Thursday. No one did. Finally during the last hour of daylight I went out and gave the tree twenty whacks with an axe, twenty strokes with a hand saw, repeat, and I was more than three-quarters of the way through it when a larger person finally drove up, contained his laughter--well I thought my axemanship was funny--and used his weight to break through what was left of the tree. There would have been a lot of food-grade maple sap in that tree. There is still enough good wood that a seriously frugal and Green person could make a chair out of it. It'd be a pretty chair. 

If you are not a little old lady, yourself, you should probably wait for permission to laugh, or otherwise admit that you think the image of a little old lady whacking away at a tree trunk in the rain is funny. I hereby officially state that it is. It was a warm evening and the rain felt like taking a nice shower, not having to wait till after work, but right there on the work site. You may laugh. 

So then I came home to watch the You Tube videos commemorating Candidate Harris's interview with a sympathetic TV news station. I'd been primed to expect to be laughing out loud just as she does. She thinks, or she thinks we think, that heavier taxes on the big corporations are going to fund all the handouts she wants to give the young and desperate! She thinks that's going to offset all that Bidenflation they have to deal with! She thinks those corporations aren't going to take that money right back out of the people who pay for their products! For boosters of a vaccine already associated with overnight blood clots and heart attacks, for "lawn care" that gives people a sort of simulation of a bad case of measles, for cakes made with propylene glycol instead of cream or egg, Mean Girl Tackypants thinks that taxes on big corporations don't mean that Joe Sixpack would soon be paying double the price, again? Or does she only think Joe Sixpack thinks that? Tackypants is a mean girl and what her friends have tried to excuse as a nervous giggle is in fact a mean laugh. She does not care what Joe Sixpack thinks. All she thinks about what we the electorate think is that she doesn't want to hear it. She blocks us from our web site. She wants us censored out of the social media, and the news media too. She wants to be the first Black-under-the-One-Drop-Rule female President, and the Devil take the country.

What would be a real hoot? Everybody votes against Mean Girl. If you want to show that race and sex have nothing to do with your vote, write in "Condoleezza Rice" or "Stacey Dash." If you want to make a political statement, write in the name of a politician associated with an idea you like, say "Andrew Jackson" if you want to get rid of the national debt and cut the budget tight enough to keep the nation out of debt in the future, or "James Monroe" if you want to stay out of foreign wars, or maybe "Franklin D. Roosevelt" if you think dropping a bomb on Davos might help. If you do not in fact hate Trump, or you want to vote for Kennedy, vote for Trump. If you want to express profound disgust with the whole election, you could always write in "Broccoli." In any case, let Little Miss "Buy their votes with doubletalk, then let the corporations treat them like dirt and owe them money worse than ever, apres moi le deluge!" watch the election results show her votes trailing somewhere between Richard Nixon (if you think her bright idea for stopping inflation was better planned the first time around) and broccoli. Watch that some-of-her-ancestors-may-have-been-possums grin disappear. Now that will be seriously funny. 

But no violence, of course. There is no reason why Tackypants' nieces and nephews should be deprived of an aunt. Maybe she'll be a better aunt after losing the election. Hahaha!