Animals
This is the time of year when the possums give me a chance to miss them. They love peaches, pawpaws, and persimmons. They fall behind on the garbage processing job. But they did leave me a few Feral Elberta peaches this year...the biggest, softest ones on the tree, at that.
Ganked from Pbird. I miss when Google Lens worked; it'd be nice to trace this one back to its origin.
Possums are an awesome part of Creation. They literally wallow in disease germs, because they are the point where the disease germs just give up and die. Possums are warm-blooded but not warm enough that the disease germs that harm the rest of us can survive in their blood. That's how they can afford to eat dung and carrion and ticks and roaches and not only never come down with any of the diseases we'd get if we tried that, but almost never spread the diseases to the rest of us. But that's partly because possums are not cuddly pets. They don't want to be touched, and most of us can tell that by looking and never want to touch them.
They can be friendly, though. Possums generally seem so asocial, such dumb animals, that it's always a memorable moment when they show that they know and like anyone. Most of ours don't seem to take any notice of how lickable tin cans and edible peelings come to be where the possums can snack on them. Snacks happen. Life is good. A few possums do notice that these snacks are supplied by humans. I'll never forget the night big Alfred Possum met me on the road as I was coming home late and walked at my heel like an unusually quiet, patient terrier, or the night Ms. Poketana showed me two little possum-pups, smaller than the one in the picture, following her around the hedge.
Poetry
This butterfly poem does have a form; it's a version of an old French-English form called a quatern.
Wikipedia
The position of this web site is that, although Wikipedia is of foreign origin and open to editing by politically biased people and not to be treated like a Real Encyclopedia, it is the default repository for facts on the Internet. It should, therefore, have good thorough articles about all plant and animal species. Those articles should be written by Real Scientists who have studied the species in question at some length; they should be references for dilettante writers like me, not subject to our criticism and correction.
That's the world as it should be. In the real world as it is, a lot of Wikipedia pages could be improved by people like me, or like you if you take enough interest in, say, a snail to read all the informative articles about it that Google or Yahoo pull up.
So I came to a Wikipedia page that began with the announcement, "This article is a stub. You can improve it by translating the article on this topic from Deutsche Wikipedia..."
How far can you trust a web site that assumes that the general "you" is qualified to translate German? German is truly an awful language to translate into English because one German word can have twenty or thirty recognized translations into English. The words Schlag and Zug are not just random words that mean anything that comes to mind, as they seem to be to language learners, but they do mean enough different, unrelated, things in English that you have to know the context to have any idea how to translate them. So here is Wikipedia, throwing out an invitation to all the world to translate a German article into English. Well, that ought to help us all maintain a healthy skepticism of everything on the Internet.
Then I considered the article, which was indeed a stub--one line defining the word, and an index--and thought that I probably could do better than that, with a little help from Google Translate. Science articles translate easily and by now I am familiar with the context for an article about the Hemileucas. So I activated Google Translate, corrected the predictably mistranslated words (Google Translate knows that German has one word for "moth" and "'butterfly," and does not yet know that, although uninstructed people often do count the Hemileucas as butterflies since they fly in the daytime, in a science article they're called moths), imported the link that would import and threw in a few more to replace the one that wouldn't. This article, as of today, is my translation:
It shouldn't be my translation for long. In the wiki tradition, people are supposed to improve what other people have written. The article I translated was beginning to fall out of date anyway--a major link was broken. It was not as well written as it might have been, either; my mandate was to translate not to write. Lots of people can improve that article, and I say the sooner the better.
Women's Issues
Do women favor more gender-based hiring quotas? Y'know, in an ideal world, I would favor...not gender-based quotas, but a few gender-based policies, yes.
E.g.: a male with comparable qualifications and achievements should have access to positions that offer equal pay with females, but no male should ever be in a position where he might be seen as supervising a female, and groups of males should not be in a position where they can form exclusive cliques either. So a male employee's office should have room for him and his computer.
But that's not to say that it's ever necessary to hire or promote someone who's totally unqualified just because that person is female. The group "women" is too big. If the qualifications for the job can in fact be achieved by mortals, there's a qualified woman out there somewhere.
So, for example, there's no need to vote for Mean Girl McTackypants. If the Ds had policy ideas that are worth considering for a presidential nominee, they would have found a woman who seems a little bit more presidential than Rasheeda Moore. A woman who can take questions and do interviews. A woman who sounds sober when she's talking about sober, solemn policy matters. A woman who has the confidence to wear shoes in which she won't need to clutch at other people's husbands to stay on her feet. Tackypants fails so many minimum competency tests that she can't be considered as a presidential candidate. She's the sort of woman who will speak and act on really bad ideas, which seems to be what the D party bosses want, but there's no earthly reason why it should be what women voters want. We can write in the name of our favorite tough but fair middle school teachers, or we can vote for the viable candidate who's likely to do the world the least damage. Which gives us a choice between two old White men...
Meh. I listened to the one who's being auto-rejected by an alarming number of States. He's probably lost his D base. At this point he's a spoiler. The two old White men left in the race need either to make a formal commitment to work as a team, in which case they'll win and we can all look forward to four years of their bickering but at least they'll do a better job than Tackypants, or to go home and let Tackypants have the election, in which case...well...the old White men just have to commit to working as a team. Both names will be on the ballots in some States so their votes need to be added together, and the electorate need to understand that before they vote.
Not that it wouldn't be good to see a three-way race in which Tackypants and all that she represents--the locked-down economy, inflation, unemployment, mandatory participation in medical experiments, pollution, war, women being "liberated" to be streetcorner girls, the fundamental statement that the US presidential race doesn't matter because the D Party bosses have decided we should be vassal states of a global tyranny anyway--finished dead last. Not that it wouldn't be good to see "Harris got two votes fewer than Lyndon LaRouche, one more than mashed rutabagas" in a newspaper.
But in spite of all that he's thrown away in his wasted rich-brat youth, I think my candidate does still have something. If you're an ear thinker with a full set of mirror neurons, listening to his voice is painful. I think it was worth gritting my teeth through this interview. I think he and Trump need to run as a team, and win.
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