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.
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.
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.
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
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