Thursday, October 31, 2024

Web Log for 10.28-30.24

There's no real reason for running three days' links together. I just forgot to publish them one day at a time. First the horrific Halloween meme...


Christianity, Fads in

Seriously: For my generation, the virtues of modesty and frugality were often attacked in the name of the virtue of tolerance. Now, Jake Meador says, the virtue of tolerance is being attacked in the name of other things--apparently, in the case of support for certain ideas that aren't even good for those in whose behalf they're advocated, in the name of tolerance. So the trend-victims don't say "tolerance"...


Election 2024

No, Rick Moran. Hillary Clinton doesn't have the crown for the worst presidential candidate. Some think Lyndon LaRouche took it, some think Warren G. Harding borrowed it, but it truly belongs to John C. Calhoun, who campaigned on the virtues and benefits of slavery. Even in Georgia people could see through that.

Mean Girl O'Dowdypants doesn't have a claim on the title to Worst Vice-President With Worst President, although people who've not read much history might think it's hers. Breckenridge and Buchanan may or may not have been boyfriends but they precipitated the Civil War. 



This was the year I wanted to vote for a D who had a platform, too. Blast. Platform summary ganked from MichellesMirror.com. 

Trump endorsed by one of the last survivors of that dead lunatic Tackypants just can't stop comparing Trump to, shared by Small Dead Animals: 


Glyphosate Awareness

Wouldn't you like to know what this "private" website is telling chemical corporations to use to discredit and potentially harass you? If you have young children living at home, Glyphosate Awareness needs for you to maintain a low profile about encouraging our government to ban glyphosate, altogether, forever, also ban other "pesticides" known to be toxic, ban ALL pesticide spraying, and limit the use of chemical oils or powders applied directly to crops. We think it's safe for everyone to (1) promote more awareness of the benefits of eating the "weeds" from a kitchen garden, and (2) call for more research and development of boiling water as a genuinely safe way to kill "weeds." But the real scandal is that the US government has been implicated in supporting this nefarious "doxing" campaign that promotes attacks on the credibility, and potentially on the homes, families, and persons, of people who want you to know how much healthier you could easily be by making the food you love, and regard as "healthy," actually safe and healthy for use as food. 

KAMALA HARRIS AND HER "CENSORSHIP PARTY" ARE PART OF THIS ABUSE. VOTE AGAINST HARRIS, IF YOU HAVE TO WRITE IN "BROCCOLI."



No, paraquat is not the answer. We have to accept that spraying poisons is not, ever, a real answer. Some chemicals may be less ridiculously far from "safe and effective" than others. No chemical will ever be "safe and effective" for very many years in a row. We have to kill the lifeforms we want to kill by ones, in ways that don't affect other lifeforms. Never, never, never spray anything on plants you want to get rid of. Cut, dig, if necessary burn plants--or, in some cases, you might just want to apply lots of rich compost to feed other plants, which will kill some "weeds" with kindness, or at least make them send their rhizomes somewhere else. You can even kill plants with boiling water, which, when it soaks into the soil, stops boiling and promotes growth for plants you don't want to boil. "Gramoxone" harms people even faster than "Roundup" does. We already knew this. Glyphosate Awareness never needed to tell informed people not to turn back to paraquat. This article explains how long we've known that PARaquat causes PARkinson's Disease.


Some may think, "Fruit flies will never be missed." Well, they would, by students preparing for a career in genetic science. But, for those who wonder why they're seeing fewer butterflies...yes. Virginia's butterfly populations are struggling to recover from efforts to slow the spread of spongey moths, but they're struggling with more than the natural caterpillar diseases from which their populations are expected to rebound.


Hurricane

"Love is a road."


"Asheville needs tourists." This person is saying it's okay to be a disaster tourist! Things to pack: flour, cooking oil, non-perishable proteins like canned meat and cheese, baking supplies, cleaning supplies, new bed linens, space heaters, shiny new toys for children, and lots of garbage bags. While strolling in parks you may still find enough trash to fill bags. and people you visit may want some. No need to overburden vehicles--call local businesses, see what you can buy locally. People are buying some things as far north as Virginia but the word is that you can find a lot in North Carolina now.


Does anyone Out There have a trailer for sale or rent? Someone was griping about the FEMA trailers growing mold post-Katrina. After a major mold-boosting event like a flood, all trailers will grow mold.  So will houses, schools, churches, museums, libraries, stores, and office blocks. Spores will be in the air whenever it's not actually freezing. I'd be interested in comparing results with that stuff Norb Leahy recommends versus bleach. Trailers are not built to survive much scrubbing. Well, they lose value every year anyway; might as well let'm go down where they can be useful.


If visiting friends I'd try to take some clean fresh fruit. In a normal year they have plenty, but this year anything that was still in a garden was marinated in badly polluted water.

The cheerful deliveryman who supplies Serena with her favorite brand of bottled water, Pure Life, came up on Sunday evening and said, "We can't keep those bottles of water in the store. People keep buying them to take to North Carolina." He offered me a lift to a bigger store to see if they had any acceptable alternative. They didn't, really. All they had left were rip-off packs of baby-sized bottles that cost as much as the full pint size. I bought some of those, anyway. The cats don't know what things cost, and humans in North Carolina need pints or litres of good water. 

Phenology

Photo essay from Illinois documents that their autumn is proceeding just a day or two ahead of the Cat Sanctuary's, which is a day or two or three ahead of the town in the narrow valley below. 




Poetry

I'd expect that translation software will make this one reasonably accessible to those who don't read French. All North Americans ought to read French, anyway.


Women's Issues

On another forum I watched Melania Trump discussing her new book.Melania's a little different from the other Republican First Ladies. Younger. Foreign. Not afraid of the word "feminist." She presents herself as an intelligent liberal feminist. As such she's pro-choice, and she says, regretfully, that she thinks this has cost her "sisterhood." 

Not with me, it's not.She's about the age of my sisters. She can be another sister if she wants to.

DANG she's good. How many native speakers of English can speak it so well for so long?!

I'll go first. I'm with her on women's right to choice, with the caveat that I think we should choose responsibly. The time to choose not to have a baby is before we make a date. It's not my place to judge women who feel that it's come to the fetus's life against theirs, which can happen. It is my place to say that people shouldn't take chances with unwanted babies. If she's not ready to give up being a model, or he wants to be free to travel, they should not deceive themselves about what that means they need not to do.

Can "conservative" women agree with that?

Can Melania find "sisterhood" after all?


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Book Review: Dead Witch on a Bridge

Title: Dead Witch on a Bridge

Author: Gretchen Galway

Date: 2019

Publisher: EtonField

ISBN: 978-1-939872-19-7

Quote: "As soon as I saw the body in the middle fo the bridge, I knew I was too late."

Alma Bellrose arrived too late to save an older man with whom she once had a "short fling," whose daughter ("Birdie" Crow) is now the closest thing she has to a friend.  Apparently he died before a careless driver ran over his body. The coroner clears Alma of suspicion, but someone was driving Birdie's car...

Alma has to solve the mystery. Not in the usual way, because this is not a real suburb of San francisco. It's a suburb of a San Francisco in an alternate world where fairies, gnomes, demons, and witches are real. In fact, Alma, her ex-boyfriend, and most of the people she knows are witches--not in the sense of practicing an alternative religion, but in the classic TV-movie sense of having inherited magical powers and studied how to use them. Even awkward half-grown Birdie has inherited unsuspected magical powers. And the dog who adopts Alma is not a natural dog, either. 

All who enjoy this kind of silliness are in for a treat. Galway mixes hilarious fairy-tale tropes with the rules of a good, clean mystery story: only one murder, some danger to adults who can defend themselves, no harm done to children or animals, no explicit sex or even Formerly Unprintable Words. I laughed out loud more than once. 

There is a series. One or more of these books would make a nice Halloween present to someone who's outgrown all interest in sacks of candy.
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A Superstition I Secretly Believe In (Belated Wednesday Post)

Guess what? Summarizing the information that's available about an animal that's been the subject of intensive scientific study takes longer than summarizing the information that's available about an animal that is so pretty everyone wants to snap a photo of it. I spent so much time with the horrid Hemileuca oliviae yesterday, I didn't have time to look up this week's Long & Short Reviews prompt. And I have yet to pick a new spooky e-book for those who celebrate Halloween.Oh dear oh dear it will be late.

But the prompt is an easy one: Is there a superstition you secretly believe in?

Some old superstitions did have a base in the real world. I don't know if the person who asked the question thinks those count. Here are five superstitions it's reasonable to believe in...sort of. As far as they go.

"Evening red and morning gray
Sees the traveller on his way!
Evening gray and morning red
Brings rain on the traveller's head."

It's not 100% accurate, but the way the light shines through clouds and dust in the air does correlate with the humidity in the air, which, combined with heating and cooling patterns, does tend to indicate the likelihood of sunshine or rain. Not that we in the Blue Ridge Mountains get to see a lot of red sunrises. Our mornings are usually foggy, and on rainy days it's usually already raining when the sun would have appeared behind the mountain if rain clouds weren't in the way. A red sunrise is a lovely sight, though rare--and it is sometimes seen in a dry season, not followed by rain. As for sunsets, we learn quickly that there's a shade of red that usually does promise a sunny day, and another shade that usually indicates a storm is near. So it's not settled science, but the pretty colors of the sky are worth looking at in any case. 

"Night air is bad air."

The air is fine. What our ancestors noticed about people who went out in the night air was that they were vulnerable to diseases carried by night-flying mosquitoes. 

"If you see a four-leafed clover, a pin, or a penny, and pick it up, it brings good luck."

If you see any of those things, you already have the blessing of clear short-range vision. So you have good luck. If you see a four-leafed clover, you also have a lot of clover, which is even better. If you pick up a pin, you will probably find a place to put it where nobody will step on it, which is good luck for everybody. And if you pick up pennies, you can pay for things with exact change, which is also good. So it's true enough that all of these objects are lucky, although picking them up does not mean that you'll meet your beshert or win the lottery or even have the good luck of the afternoon commuter bus meeting its connection on time. The secret to enjoying this superstition is to have reasonable expectations.

Does failing to pick up the lucky object bring bad luck? Well, obviously, failing to pick up a pin means that someone is likely to sit or step on it. Failing to pick up a penny indicates that you aren't very frugal, which is likely to lead to seriously bad luck. I've never heard of anything unlucky happening to anyone who chose to leave a four-leafed clover alone.

"Black cats bring good luck of other kinds, and three-colored cats attract money."

Three-colored male cats were worth money in the recent past, when people were trying to find a three-colored breeding male cat. Three-colored females were likely to give birth to a three-colored male kitten. Now that we know the genetic reason why three-colored tomcats are sterile and usually unhealthy as well, nobody's offering big prices for them. However, both black and three-colored cats make excellent pets. Isn't having a good pet lucky?

"When you see a car with only one headlight working, shouting 'Padiddle!' brings good luck."

It does, it really does, if the driver pays attention and gets that light replaced before receiving a ticket. I don't know why "padiddle" was chosen as the code word. Possibly because it's a really easy word to lip-read when the car windows are rolled up and you don't hear conversation outside the car.
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Hemileuca Oliviae

In the genus Hemileuca, the "half-white" moths that are so easy for humans to hate, the species oliviae may be the most hated. The caterpillars eat grass. When inadvertently ingested by grazing animals they may make cows and sheep sick. On contact with human skin, which they don't particularly try to avoid, they raise an unpleasant rash. And the moths aren't even pretty.


Photo by Arturoc.

Google has a lot of material about this moth. Unfortunately for those who like the pretty photo essays, the majority of what Google is willing to show is about the history of humans' efforts to kill it. This is the Hemileuca that was officially ruled a pest. Its population surge about a hundred years ago may have been a direct consequence of early efforts to spray it to death; spraying poisons that eliminate most of the target species, the first year, always breeds more resistant individuals in the target species faster than it breeds resistant predators. This moth has taught us a lot about the importance of working with natural predators rather than trying to poison lifeforms we don't like. Nature and public spirit may still tell us to apply a stout stick to any specimens of this species we meet, like good natural predators, fully reintegrating the body into the soil, but we do owe them thanks for the lesson they have taught.

In fact, the irruption of this species in the early twentieth century may have been caused by a temporary decline in populations of the microscopic parasite species, Anastatus semiflavidus: 


A full-grown Anastatus semiflavidus looks, under a microscope, like a sort of four-winged wasp, except that the largest known individual reached a length of a quarter of a centimeter. It lays its eggs inside the eggs of H. oliviae and ensures that most of them will not hatch. Humans aren't likely to see these little animals. Other tiny wasps and flies parasitize caterpillars and pupae. Some larger animals were also observed to eat these caterpillars when they were abundant, with skunks, which normally pig out on ground-nesting wasps, ingesting heroic numbers of caterpillars. All we need to do is avoid spraying any kind of "pesticides" anywhere ("herbicides" do indeed kill insects), and allow Anastatus to follow its natural food source....

...Well...the other natural predators also help. So, in addition to the stick method outlined above, does catching caterpillars in a narrow, relatively high-walled container and pouring in boiling water or alcohol to cover. Then there's always collecting the moths: If you find a young female and enclose her in a box covered in fine mesh, you may be able to catch a dozen or more male moths. Each one pinned to a board soon means fifty or a hundred fewer in June...

How many fewer, exactly? Nobody seems to be rearing the moths to count how many eggs each female lays, but one study determined that, of 100 eggs, fewer than 40 caterpillars would live long enough to shed their third caterpillar skins. Most wild animals die young. Though stingingworms seem underpredated to normal humans whose ideal population count would be zero, the odds are against any individual egg becoming a moth, just as they are for luna moths and monarch butterflies. 

Why oliviae? It means "of the olives," but olives aren't its food plant, nor are they a major crop in New Mexico, the species' home base. Many of the Hemileucas were named after goddesses, but Olivia seems to have been the name of real women, but not of a major goddess, in ancient Rome. This could be because olives were important enough that prayers and offerings for their success were offered, not at a special temple for Juno of the Olives, but at the main temples of Juno and Jupiter. Anyway Hemileuca oliviae was probably named in honor of some nineteenth century American. 

They are one of the few species that have English names other than "stingingworm," though their names also describe only the caterpillars. They are Range Caterpillars or Grassworms in much of their habitat (New Mexico, contiguous States in the US and Mexico, and they have been found in western Oklahoma).

The problem the Range Caterpillars were presenting was vividly stated, indeed overstated, by V.L. Wildermuth in a 1916 US Government pamphlet on The New Mexico Range Caterpillar and Its Control. Wildermuth and his young assistant, D.J. Caffrey, who went on to write more scientific studies of this species and described some things he and Widlermuth said in the pamphlet as "harmful" errors, estimated that in much of New Mexico's grassland the overpopulated Range Caterpillars reached a population density of thirty million to a square mile. The caterpillars were obviously overpopulating their food supply and may actually have tried eating "wheat, oats, barley...corn and alfalfa," none of which they normally eat. During this period when they became a positive plague, they may also have left behind enough cast-off skins to "poison the plants" they didn't eat. Pastures may well have looked like mown lawns, in which the caterpillars then died of starvation after eating all the grass. The caterpillars may have been active from June through September, and the caterpillars may well have been "greedy" and "wasteful eaters," gnawing on plants they could not digest and leaving the rest of the plants on the ground, excreting great quantities of undigested wasted grass. Dusting with arsenic, as Wildermuth recommended, may have seemed necessary to panicky ranchers who had already given up trying to feed cattle. Obviously, dusting any usable crop or pasture land with arsenic would have bene a Very Bad Idea.

Over time, as the ecology returned to a more nearly normal balance, the caterpillars have become a less serious problem, though like all stingingworms they are still a considerable nuisance. By 1987 a population count recorded a maximum of 24 or 25 caterpillars to 100 square meters, or 250/km, or 400 to a square mile. They reduce the amount of grass available for cows and sheep. They can eat lawn grass, and may infest lawns, where contact with humans can make lawn work a real pain.


Some people are determined to make lemonade out of every "lemon" they encounter. Range Caterpillar eggs on grass may upset cows' digestion because they contain protease inhibitors, which interfere with enzymes breaking down proteins. Protease inhibitors can also interfere with the activity of disease virus. Extracts of biochemicals from these moths' eggs have been tested, but so far not used, as possible ingredients for a cure for cancer. I am not making this up.


In the same spirit, some authors note that native woodland mice will eat the caterpillars. Apparently mice in the genus Peromyscus are immune to the toxic biochemicals the caterpillars seem to be made of. 

Others observe that the moths lay their eggs on stems of grasses the caterpillars can eat. They normally lay eggs about eight or ten inches above the ground. If there's no long grass in your neighborhood and you keep your grass well mown, you might be able to have a grassy lawn without attracting these vermin. If there is any possibility that a grass stem within a mile of you will be allowed to grow more than four or five inches above the ground, maintaining a grass-free desert garden might be a good idea within this species' range. Other stingingworms can and do eat other native plants but oliviae must have grass.

Are there people who might find them pretty? Well, they are pale, uninteresting Hemileucas. Like the rest of the genus they have very thick thoraxes, in which they store most of the body fat on which they live, and little flat button heads; they can look headless. They do have heads but, since all their heads have room for are eyes and antennae, no mouths, their heads are very small. The fur on the thorax is longer and shaggier than the fur on most Hemileucas, hanging over the little black eyes. The most obvious difference between oliviae and hualapai is that hualapai have faces while oliviae have antennae sticking out of a mop of hair.


Photo by Jcook91. In the shadows behind all that fur, it does have eyes.


Photo by Smellyturkey. This is one of the species most likely to have wings so pale that it takes a second look to see the standard Hemileuca wing markings, although they are there. (Tilt the screen if you don't see it.) The off-white scales can fray off the wings, too; the wings can become translucent, with patches that can be transparent.

It's not hard to entice a silk moth to climb onto your hand, or a more suitable object for moving it, if you want to move one. Place the target object against its foot while it's resting, and the moth will probably climb sleepily onto the object and wait to find out what the object was when it feels livelier. Silk moths don't eat so they need to save their energy for their one purpose in life: mating. However, while people say it's "safe" to handle other Hemileuca moths, who look "cuddly" to some eyes, there are complaints that even the shed hairs and scales of the adult oliviae can be irritating!


Photo by Deeanne.

Freshly eclosed moths have thick capes of fur covering the thorax; older moths tend to lose hair and may show bare brown chitin. 


Photo from BugGuide.net, showing a faded and worn individual.

The pluminess of the antennae, on the other hand, indicates gender. Males have feathery antennae all their lives, and females have simple flat antennae.The pluminess of the antennae is thought to give the male moth a fantastic ability to recognize and track scents. The scent of greatest interet to these moths is the odor released by newly eclosed female moths, who are full of eggs and eager to get those eggs fertilized and placed on twigs. 

People have tried to identify how the caterpillars choose the grass they eat. Their findings were not conclusive. One problem for Westerners is that stingingworms don't spend all their time on their food plants, anyway. They like blue grama grass, but when the ground gets hot, stingingworms crawl up whatever plants they find, and may be found anywhere. They need fields of grass to live on, but if mice and other woodland animals wouldn't eat them they'd take their siestas in the shade of trees.


While most Hemileucas fly in the daytime and some fly at night, oliviae is most active toward the end of the day. They don't fly a great deal. Male moths are a bit more active, but one study found that most female moths lay their eggs within ten yards from where they pupated, 


Richard S. Peigler compared the behavior of Agapema dyari, which is another big silk moth that doesn't look much like Hemileuca dyari, with the behavior of Hemileuca oliviae, which does look similar to H. dyari. He observed that oliviae caterpillars eat relatively short grass in the morning. As the sun rises higher and the ground gets hotter, the caterpillars climb up higher plants. They seem to feel cooler when hanging out on higher plants with their heads downward, as if preparing to crawl back down to the plants they actually eat. 


Photo by Gracefli. Later in the day, the caterpillars do indeed crawl back down to eat more grass.

This species normally flies at dusk and mates after dark, which partly explains the absence of photos of couples online. Another part of the explanation is that silk moths like to enjoy mating, taking it slowly with lots of cuddle time, and humans who know what these moths are know what that means an opportunity to do.\

Nobody seems to have bothered photographing eggs, either. According to drawings, they are placed around a grass stem in rings like other Hemileuca eggs, except that the smaller size of the host plant produces more smaller rings in a longer, thinner cluster.

Hatchling caterpillars are about a quarter-inch long, already prickly, and black or sable in color. Though they hatch from eggs laid on grass stems rather than tree branches, and the egg clusters form unusually thick ring shapes, the caterpillars manage to live in clusters on grass stems at first. Their color gradually lightens with more whitish and yellow spots and hairs replacing brown or black on each new skin. Like other Hemileucas, the caterpillars typically grow about two inches long but can get closer to three inches. 

The caterpillar has some branching bristles, but more of its venomous bristles grow in a flat rosette shape that puts more bristle tips in contact with your skin if it happens to touch you, delivering more venom for a more painful sting. 


Photo by Meganbunker.H. oliviae is different from other stingingworms in ways that are not yet fully understood. Athough our stingingworms and their venom are obviously similar ("related"!) to Brazil's Lonomia genus, whose venom is known to have killed human adults, ours usually cause only "minor" stinging rashes; venom does continue to seep slowly out of any bristle tips that remain in skin for several days, and does have anticoagulant properties preventing these tiny surface wounds healng until the bristle tips are removed. Repeated exposure to other stingingworms' venom tends to build a sort of resistance to the venom, but repeated exposure to oliviae and to brown-tail moth venom tends to aggravate sensitivity, making each reaction nastier than the one before. Nevertheless, hospitalization from anaphylactic reactions to Hemileucas are rare. 


Photo by Willjaremkowright.The caterpillars are very vulnerable to fungus infections if the weather is not very dry, and they can also be killed by hailstorms. 

Normally there are five caterpillar skins. Reportedly oliviae is one of the species that can go through seven caterpillar skins, and some say more, but nobody has confirmed more than seven molts or identified factors that cause extra molts. 

When pupating, these caterpillars look for a few leaves and stems that are close together and use silk to bind them together into a lttle tent in which to morph. As with other Hemileucas, the pupa manages to wriggle out of the caterpillar skin, then lies down and tries to look like a pebble. The moth probably emerges in autumn, but nobody seems positive about whether this species can pupate for a full year and eclose next year.


Photo by Miguel1958.
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Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Book Review: Bones of the Witch

Title: Bones of the Witch

Author: A.L. Knorr

Date: 2019

Publisher; Intellectually Promiscuous Press

Quote: "The gorund is alive, it's full of magic, and we need it more than it needs us."

Georjayna is an Earth Wise, a mortal with some magical powers, in a series of stories that interlink Water, Fire, Air, and Earth magic. She's appeared in another character's story; this is the first of a series where she's the protagonist. 

When Georjie goes to the fictional town of Blackmouth in Scotland, she's impressed by a magical rosebush near a ruined building local people are demolishing. They find a mummified body in the walls. Georjie's magic tells her that the body belonged to a woman who was buried alive in the stone wall of the building as a witch. Georjie assumes the woman was an innocent victim of haters.

Then her friend Evelyn goes into a coma. Georjie realizes that the mummy was buried in the wall because, as a living witch, she had foretold that she'd recover her powers whenever her bones touched the Earth again. And the witch has used her powers to drain the life energy from Evelyn. In order to heal Evelyn Georjie has to fight a magic duel and defeat the witch. 

For those who want a spooky story for Halloween, this professionally crafted novel is a fresh new one, 

 
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Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Petfinder Post in Which Serena Purrs

As regular readers know, Serena, who asserted herself as Queen of the Cat Sanctuary when she was three months old, is not a cuddly pet. She's very comfortable and confident about humans; she was born in my office, /She's not a mean cat, though she is in charge and has been known to enforce rules by slapping and nipping. I'm used to her; I think she's a very loving and lovable animal, capable of demonstrating good will in ways you wouldn't expect a cat could. She stepped in and taught a younger cat how to nurse and rear kittens. She can purr--not as loudly or as long as many cats, but there's nothing wrong with her purr-box. It's just that she does not, normally, purr, and she does not, normally cuddle. She seems to think those things are beneath the dignity of an adult cat. She is currently in the process of training her silky-coated grandsons, who've been encouraged to purr and cuddle all summer, to think they're too big for that sort of soppy stuff too. I pick them up, marvellng that at not-quite-six-months-old they're already too big for more than one to snuggle on my lap at one time, and Serena looks at them intently, and they sit up and nonverbally say, "Right, that was nice--now I have things to do." 

She didn't do this with a previous litter of grandkittens, and one male kitten who lingered at the Cat Sanctuary past the six months I'm usually willing to put up with tomkittens decided that he wanted to be the dominant cat and Serena was not allowed to receive the limited amount of petting she accepts from me. Since then she's made sure all kittens know that I belong to her and they're not supposed to solicit attention from me. 

Going into their sixth month, the tomkittens are being prepared to detach from the Cat Sanctuary and move into their Purrmanent Homes. They are Serena's grandsons. Serena herself, although unaltered, has not had kittens this year. She gave birth to some but they didn't live long.

But yesterday I reached out a hand for Serena to sniff, which is generally her idea of a grown-up, non-soppy greeting, and she rubbed her head against my hand. I stroked her back. Her coat felt softer and fluffier than usual. She arched and stretched, encouraging more stroking. And she trilled happily, "Purrup!" It used to be a familiar sound--many cats make it when they solicit a stroke down their backs as their idea of a proper greeting--but it's not a sound Serena uses. 

Clearly it was time for a Cat Sanctuary Interview, which is the way an animal's behavior translates into words in my mind, based on observation and best guesses about what animals mean by their nonverbal communication.

PK: "Well, to what do I owe this honor? Have I done something right?"

Serena: "You do some things right every day but you're old enough to know what those things are and not need to be rewarded for them constantly. No, this is not about you. It's about me. I'm not feeling so good today. You remember the evil wind that blew our way last week."

PK: "Yes. We still have a Professional Bad Neighbor who wants to make people think they want to move out of our neighborhood so he can buy our land cheap. He's not doing anything at all with the land he owns, this year. He has made himself too ill. He blames his age and COVID, but none of the rest of our generation in our family notice those things as problems. He has made himself vulnerable to pain from his age and COVID by spraying poison on the land. So he's spent a lot of time at home in bed, and only done a little drive-by nastiness like putting the ants' eggs in the mailboxes down on the highway. But as the storms from the Edge of Hurricane Helene cleared the air, he felt a bit stronger, and last week he came out to spray poison again."

Serena: "Why do humans spray poison, anyway?"

PK: "Some humans believe that poison sprays control the plants and trees in their gardens. You see me pulling up and cutting back plants that grow too big or in the wrong way. Some people are too lazy to control their gardens, themselves, so they want to believe that poisons will do it. They are wrong. When people try to use the chemical our Bad Neighbor has been spraying to kill plants they don't want, maybe wild cherry trees in a cow pasture where the cows might eat the cherry trees and be sick, after a few years their land turns into what are called kudzu graveyards. Everything is so smothered in kudzu that not even the kudzu survives. Because, the more we use poisons to try to get rid of a nuisance plant or animal, the more of the nuisance species we have.:

Serena: "Are humans so stupid as that? You're not. None of the other neighbors is."

PK: "Even the Bad Neighbor is not really that stupid. Unfortunately many people live in towns and are incredibly stupid about the land. The Bad Neighbor sprays poison for only one reason, which is to harm the rest of us. He knows these poisons harm people. He has been thinking that he could spray poison on land near us, where it would harm us, and then go back to his house and be out of its range. But the prevailing wind blows from our neighborhood toward his home, and he has had to stand out in the field spraying all that poison. It's catching up with him."

Serena: "You think that's a good thing?"

PK: "Yes, actually I do. I think people who use poisons to invade and injure other people's bodies deserve to suffer if anyone ever does, and I like seeing the Bad Neighbor moving like a sick, bloated, miserable old man, knowing that nature intended him to look and move like the rest of our generation in the family, and because of his own stupidity he probably never will again. We have been blessed with the kind of genes that used to cause people to say that even his deformed mouth looked cute. Well, those days have gone to come no more. Some of our cousins still have black lamee hair at eighty, and he, not yet seventy, has no hair left at all. The next to oldest man in the neighborhood cleared the dead trees out of the road after the hurricane, at eighty, and this Bad Neighbor can hardly get waddle out of his fancy farm truck to walk the fences on his farmland. I think it's appropriate and educational to call attention to his suffering. I think it would be a good thing if people pointed at him on the streets and said 'There goes that poison sprayer. Doesn't he look like death warmed over!'" 

Serena: "Can't any of you just beat him up and make him go away?!"

PK: "Hah. I wonder whether the Bad Neighbor will try hunting again, after it gets cold enough. I look forward to seeing it. He was a marksman. He might have been good enough to compete with my father and grandmother when they were young. I respect skill in a sport, and I've seen our Bad Neighbor use deadly weapons against nuisance animals in ways I had to applaud. And then there was last year's fiasco. Hoot! He'll replace me as the person you only ever invite to shoot if you want to make your own scores look good, or less bad. You think I should go out shooting with him and see who could report the 'tragic accident' first?"

Serena: "Oh, not shooting! Shooting scares me  Humans don't have very good teeth for the purpose but when cats misbehave, other cats bite off their ears. Or if they behave worse than that we just tear strips off them. Cats hardly ever behave as badly as that but this cousin of yours..."

PK: "Actually, in sober and literal fact, the word humans use for his behavior is 'psychopathic' and what we do about it, after gathering enough evidence that their closer relatives can't object, is lock them up]. I'd rather see that happen to the Bad Neighbor even than see him roll his truck and fall out under it,, because he deserves to suffer! Or better yet, the whole neighborhood--all of us who are still living, and the heirs of the others--should make a list of all the bad things this Bad Neighbor has done, and everything he owns, down to his shoes if any of the other men wears that size. We could let the Bad Neighbor pay all of us with everything he has, starting with acres of land, then cars and trucks, computers, work tools, and so on down to the kind of screws and nails and planks he's stolen from us just for spite, down to his shirt. Then when he's standing there in his shorts we all give him a good whack with an axe handle or a plank or whatever we've taken, put him on a Greyhound bus, and tell him to stay in the place we've agreed to send him to--I vote for New Orleans--as a homeless beggar. I believe in restitution for property crimes, and this wretch ought to make restitution before strangers, all by themselves, lock him up and fill him full of experimental drugs."

Serena: "Whatever you like, so long as he doesn't spray any more poison. Because I was going to have kittens again. Beautiful Borowiec kittens like my daughter's. Cats don't really mind sharing a mate if he gives us good healthy kittens. I know you felt bad when my granddaughter Dora died and I was looking forward to showing you a calico kitten even cuter than Dora. And after the evil wind blew, I felt those kittens die inside me. You can feel them if you like.. Or keep stroking my back; it helps start the contractions, which is why I so often tell humans not to do it. Humans don't usually realize when I'm pregnant and want to give the kittens a fair start in life."

PK: "Well, being wider-framed than most cats in this part of the world, you don't show when you're pregnant as clearly as they do. Nobody'd guess you were pregnant now."

Serena: "I won't be pregnant long. I know my grandsons still like milk. I'm just about ready to start lactation, which will get rid of these poor dead kittens. Gather round, grandsons. You could use your human hands to pour me a drink of Pure Life water Is that Pure Life water? The bottles look different."

PK: "It's Pure Life water inside. Your deliveryman said people were buying up all the regular pint bottles for the hurricane survivors in North Carolina, because their water's still foul. He and I went to look in other stores, and the best we could do was these baby-size bottles."

Serena: "It's all good. The water tastes good, anyway, even if there's less left for you in the bottle. Humans seem to think the way to show good will is always to stroke a person's back, which might cause the person's kittens to be born prematurely, Actually, the way cats recognize good will is when you share something you eat or drink with us. Of course no cat would want to touch some of the stuff you eat, even if it doesn't seem to kill you. But seeing you crack the cap on a bottle and pour out drinks for us and for you shows that you;re trying to share food, even if the only thing on the table that we can share is water." ''

PK: "It's an understandable mistake. For most humans, including me, there's no chance of our being pregnant and a high probability that we could use a back rub."

Serena: "Well, if the Creator had wanted us all to be the same, we'd all be the same."

PK: "I'm glad we're not. Serena, if humans had purr-boxes, I's puee wcwey rimw I look at you. As you well know."

Serena: "Anyone would. That's why I'm a Queen Cat."

PK: "What happened in North Carolina was that a dam broke. It wasn't a matter of humans being able to load their cats and dogs into a car and drive away from the rising water. They were hearing the wind and rain roar, and then they might or might not have heard another note in the roaring, and then a wall of water hit them, maybe smashed their house over their heads, sucked them away in a blast of polluted water. The only question was which ones drowned first, and which ones were injured by collisions with other objects before they drowned. Then there were the ones off on the side of that blast of water. They had some chance to escape from the flood before it reached them, but the water was rising so fast that they might not have had time to get the animals into the car. There's already one story of people who thought their cat had drowned in the rising water, but the cat survived and found his way home, not long after the humans did. I don't know whether Petfinder will make any more stories like that happen, but I hope it can. I'd like for this web site to be part of that. Wouldn't you, Serena?"

Serena: "Whatever. If it involves your Lap Pooper, don't bother me about it."

Serena never has liked anything electronic. I think she sees her reflection in screens, doesn't recognize it, and thinks something like "Whoever that arrogant cat is, I'll run her off my land," but she may be sensitive to the radiation these things emit--who knows? 

Anyway, it's a dog week, and this is the day to tell you that I've decided to try moving the Petfinder posts to Friday in order to join a link-up. #TortieTuesday was on Twitter, and Twitter's dead. 

Here are the last Tuesday dog photo contest winners, the most appealing pictures of adoptable dogs on Petfinder. Hmmm...the last web page I visited was a long forum page where people post aobut many things; the last post I read that mentioned animals mentioned pug dogs. Pug dogs can be pricey if they ever are listed on Petfinder, but Petfinder just happened to have some adorable "Chugs" (Chihuahua-pug crossbreeds). So, today's category is Chugs.

1, Susu and Lulu from Candler, North Carolina


Their hurricane story: They were not actually in Asheville or at the shelter that's handling their Petfinder page.

Susu and Lulu are described as a bonded pair--mother and daughter. They lost their human suddenly and don't need any more bereavement, so they must be adopted together. They are described as healthy, calm, and well behaved. Their human was old and sedentary, and they're said to be very good at sitting on the couch beside a human, watching television, though Lulu is apt to zoom around the room for a break now and then.

2. Captain from Kinsey, Alabama 


His hurricane story: He was already in a shelter out of the disaster area.

Captain is described as a sweet, affectionate couch dog. He's another Chug with a puggy face. He is known to be seven years old. Beyond that he doesn't seem to have much of a story. He has been vetted, though, and warranted healthy.

3. Prissy from Austell, Georgia 


Her hurricane story: She was in a shelter out of the disaster area. 

More pug than Chihuahua, Prissy is described as shy with new people but friendly and cuddly when she gets to know people. She is rated good with dogs, cats, and children and fully housebroken. She's known to be five years old. 
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Book Review: Anxiety Hacks

Title: Anxiety Hacks

Author: Kate Hudson-Hall

Date: 2022

ISBN: 978-1-8382381-8-6

Quote: "[Y]ou are anxious all the time, and out of nowhere, your anxiety bursts like a volcano erupting, stopping you from leading that 'normal' life like everyone else."

This book is a keeper.

I personally do not have an anxiety disorder. This is a blog, so some insights I do have into anxiety may help blog readers who feel interested in the book. 

I'm pretty sure that, if I'd been able to communicate what I was feeling at the time, I would have been diagnosed as having an anxiety as a child. I "don't scare easy" as an adult. I did as a child. I attached irrational fears to all sorts of triggers that weren't real dangers, like the ugly-looking pictures in some of my picture books, or the look of public toilets. Fear of filthy seats or backed-up pipes in public toilets are rational, but I extrapolated from that into a fear of just looking at the fixtures. Probably the best thing about these childish fears was that I was also afraid of talking about them, so nobody tried to "help." This meant that eventually I could just tell myself that these phobias were pretty silly for a great big ten-year-old to have, and outgrow them, just like that. Consciously outgrowing fears is very empowering. The "help" available for anxiety in the 1960s was not empowering at all. 

Why did I even form those phobias? I felt deep emotional distress, and still do, during some chemical reactions I have. As an adult I feel the emotion as anger, because the basic sensation is a sense of evil and as an adult I'm responsible for doing something about it. I've even learned to give thanks when an anger attack tells me to find and clean up mold in the house.

I knew, though, that my anxiety attacks weren't typical when I had one...in a subway tunnel, where Hudson-Hall says she had hers and some of her patients had theirs. 

I was reacting to black mold blowing out of the heating-cooling vent in a pylon. Suddenly the pylon seemed like an evil alien in a science fiction movie. I moved away. I was waiting to change trains on Rosslyn Station, in Arlington, Virginia, so I walked about and explored a bit. From the train I'd noticed the glass-walled elevator in between the escalators and recognized it as one of those features of Washington's Metrorail system that are oddly fascinating, exciting, fun for some people because they trigger panic, vertigo, even seizures in other people. I walked toward the gate and saw that the escalators were among several sets of super-sized escalators that often cause vertigo and panic. Yes, I was physically ill enough that day that looking up the row of escalators gave me vertigo. Washingtonians quickly become accustomed to seeing tourists react to super-sized escalators and other neurological triggers in the Metrorail system. Since most Washingtonians used, in those days when the city was less crowded, to adore helping tourists, some goodhearted older woman tried to lead me out of the station. "No! I was only looking!I'm waiting for another train!" I'm not sure the woman believed me but, in those days, trains ran every six minutes, so the one I wanted came in and I ran for it. I felt anxiety, though I didn't show it, all the way to the job I was doing and told myself that the anxiety was "really" about starting a new long-term job. 

It wasn't. That sensation would return a few more times when I was riding Metro. It felt less like fear and more like anger as I grew older. It was completely irrational. It was all about the mold. From time to time the human drama that plays out on commuter trains gave me cause for righteous indignation, as when I saw a stationmaster built like Henry VIII threatening a couple of scrawny, sickly-looking tourists who were trying to explain that both of them had been advised to try to walk as far as they could and use a wheelchair when they needed to. What I felt as anger, that day, had a different emotiona quality than what I sometimes felt in reaction to a blast of live Stachybotrys. Both emotions were in the general category of anger, ,but they felt like completely different kinds of anger. 

Here's the difference, though, between my subway anxiety and Hudson-Hall's: When my anxiety attack happened, and later when the anger attacks happened, I felt the emotions. Anyone who'd been paying attention to me, as polite people usually don't do on Metrorail, would have noticed that I looked and sounded anxious, or angry, or some mixture of the two. Then I got off the train and the emotions went away. I didn't stay stuck in them. I didn't have nightmares about the subway all night. I didn't wake up thinking "What if I have another anxiety attack on the subway?" I knew that, if I did, it wouldn't make a bit of difference on my job. (Luckily, I liked the job.) The fact that the quirky architecture of Metrorail sometimes delighted me and sometimes intimidated me piqued my attention. I observed it with scientific detachment and concluded that what made the difference was the amount and activity of mold in the system. Living, growing mold is a threat to human health; though almost never successful, mold spores do attack the human body. I learned: garlic helps. When I ate a lot of garlic people thought I was Italian. Not a problem.

So why is it so hard for people who have not merely anxiety attacks, but anxiety disorders, to deal with the experience? What gets them stuck in anxiety> Nobody knows. Many don't want to know. It's possible to suppress the symptoms of anxiety. Alcohol, as Hudson-Hall explains at some length, is a temporary symptom-buster that quickly becomes part of the problem. Hudson-Hall does not discuss more specific medications that are prescribed for anxiety, but the same thing can happen with them. For her, she says, it's been enough to apply the principles of Positive Thinking, self-hypnosis, and very simple massage techniques, to be able to calm herself by massaging spots on her head and shoulders. 

Can these techniques help you, or an anxiety sufferer you know? Possibly. If they don't help, at least they can't hurt. If anxiety becomes a "chronic disorder" when it's caused by continual exposure to black mold or glyphosate or some other chemical trigger, these techniques can help while the person identifies and eliminates the physical cause of the disorder. If anxiety has become a habit because the person enjoys others' efforts to help, this book may distract the patient while others take a long-needed break from trying to help the patient. 

Hudson-Hall delivers a set of eight "hacksters." Each is a self-soothing technique combined with thought exercises about what the patient might do to replace anxiety-dsorder behaviors with brave behaviors. 

Full-length self-help books used to be padded with chapterson specific types of, say, anxiety if that was the topic. The idea was that readers would the benefit of any special experience the author had with, zy  anxiety about exams as distinct from anxiety about public speaking. Those specific chapters are notin this book. Applying Hudson-Halkl's advice to an individual's anxiety has to be done by the individual. A set of additional worksheets is available for the reader ysubg tgus book to reduce anxiety. 

If you are not the person for whom this book was written you may think its advice is trite, a mixture of general common sense and psychological boilerplate. That's probably just an indication that you don't have the disease Hudson-Hall has learned to treat. 


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Monday, October 28, 2024

Weekender Web Log for 10.24-26.24

I counted my online to-do list last week. It had 1900 items on it, and that was counting e-mail as one item! Now it's down into the 1500s...well, 1583. But yes, these link logs are on the list.

Books

Regular readers of HowToMeowInYiddish.blogspot.com already know...it's actually been over a year since a series of science fiction stories, featuring hostile alien robots that were caught and reprogrammed, appeared on that site. They're still in the blog archive if you dig back. They were clever, warning but not too scary, featuring likable young characters. Well, now the stories have been polished up into a book, In the Tenth Year of the Pandemonium. It's easygoing, whimsical, thought-provoking. fresh--OZ and ZO aren't like R2D2 and C3PO, they're memorable in their own way--and meant to see readers through lots of morning commutes, with food for thought all day for those who want it. It is currently FREE to subscribers to Kindle Unlimited.


See also under "Health News," below.

Communication, Bad Examples of

Abortion is, in statistical fact, something that (1) Loony Left weenies think their girlfriends can always get because they're sooo not ready to get married and be fathers, (2) social workers want teenagers to do when the teenagers' intention was to quit school, and (3) Rush Limbaugh used to claim about twenty women on Earth thought was "liberating," but I don't think he ever supplied names. I could be wrong about the names. Anyway, if you want to reduce the incidence of abortion, here's what not to do: Make it painfully obvious that you're just really upset with God having ordained that all males start out as little blobs of ickiness, similar to tumors, growing inside women, that all males owe their existence to women, and that no male ever gets a turn to be the arbiter of life and death for a fetus, WAAAHHH! Greg Byrnes could have made this point a little more succinctly if he'd just lain down in front of a video camera and kicked and screamed.


What to do? Try building a culture where having the baby won't be an obstacle to moving forward in the woman's career later, where having a good guilt-free life rearing any babies a woman has conceived is seen as more of an achievement than having all the newest stuff, where DNA tests are used to identify and neuter the fathers of aborted fetuses. Or just put your energy into adopting one or two unwanted babies. 

Communication, Generally 

I try to begin where at least one intended reader is. That guarantees some content is going to be beyond some people's level of understanding. Actually I don't worry about it, but...


...and Candidate Dowdypants looks as if she watches television while she's too drunk to remember whose show she's plagiarizing.

Election 2024


Archetypal cat lady painted by Lucy Almey Bird. Put a computer on the table and books on the shelves, substitute a long flat bench for the vintage chair, and you'd have a recognizable caricature of the office room at the Cat Sanctuary with the stacks of papers tidied away. And last night on the screen porch, listening to J.D. Vance talk about reuniting the population, this cat lady sat up and applauded. 

Glyphosate Awareness

Bayer rolls out an even newer and deadlier version of "Roundup." They had to; nobody would use this year's "Roundup" twice on their own property, though I have a neighbor who, last week, sprayed it a half-mile away from home and drove back fast. This time they've taken out the glyphosate, to which "weeds" are rapidly evolving immunity while trees and humans die from cumulative effects, and replaced it with four more chemicals all known to be toxic to humans. This time someone's tried to quantify how much worse the new formula is.

What bewilders me is the writer's clueless whine about "developing safer chemicals." That's totally barking up the wrong tree. If chemical "pesticides" seem to be "safer" this year, they'll be less safe and less effective every year thereafter, because that is the nature of chemical "pesticides." Some lose their safety and effectiveness ratings faster than others, but nothing that you can spray on plants to kill them, even the amount and concentration of saltwater that would be needed to spray a field, is really safe for humans and there's not yet been a confirmed case of chemicals rendering a "pest" species extinct, either. What Bayer needs to do, while it still has a little money left, is develop safer ALTERNATIVES TO SPRAYING CHEMICALS. Portable water boilers are probably the best idea. I liked the idea of building cute insect-sized robots, small enough to run through wheat fields, that could sense specific weeds and "eat" them; those would be great fun to design and build and also to deploy, but boiling water would be much cheaper to maintain.


Health News

If you're a typical baby-boomer, you don't know much about whooping cough. "Didn't that use to be, like, a childhood disease, and wasn't it wiped out by the miracles of vaccine and Herd Immunity?"

Well, no. It was the childhood disease we didn't have. Measles, mumps, and chickenpox were part of our childhood. Whooping cough wasn't. Whooping cough seemed to have been defeated by the DPT vaccine, which so many of us had without any unwanted effects, Denial existed back then, too. Some people had seizures. Some people died. In the late 1980s the CDC finally admitted that the effects of the DPT vaccine on a small minority of baby-boomers, probably nobody you knew, had been as bad as the effects of having the three diseases, together. But whooping cough was not eradicated from the Earth. Pediatricians started giving children a different vaccine against the same diseases...and whooping cough quietly came back.

Once again school districts are trying to demonize parents who don't want their children to have a vaccine that most of them have already had, so don't need. 

(Should children just be left to build immunity to this disease in the good oldfashioned way? Diphtheria and tetanus were deadly diseases, but people used to live with a peculiar kind of cough for about a month, usually in childhood, and be immunized to whooping cough by having it. I don't know. I think I could respect a child's right to choose in this matter, but I'm not sure I could get through a month of listening to a child cough for a month. I don't think most of today's parents can do that.)

Here a doctor who's not in collusion with Pfizer discusses why the new DTAP vax, which has replaced the DTP vax we had, is less effective and not necessarily even safer. Long story short, it doesn't touch the actual bacteria; it actually sabotages the immune system so that nobody has to listen to the children "whoop." 


The position of this web site is, if a so-called vaccine does nothing about the pathogens, save your money. 

Here's another way young parents should probably save their money:


I just ordered this e-book, haven't seen it yet, to update all the stuff I remember from a different time. With age and experience we absorb useful information about lots of things. Some of that information, on topics like the vaccines currently recommended for children, the inflation of tuition fees and debt incurred by students, etc., has become about as useful as the television schedule for the summer of 1974. Aunts and grandmothers need to stay in touch with what the younger generation are actually dealing with this year. So, here is a summary. 


Candidate Dowdypants claimed to have worked in McDonald's once. People expressed doubts about this. Candidate Graying Orange went into a McDonald's and was allowed into the frying area. 


He looks as if he sooo needs more fried food. Anyway, yes, I believe this probably is the next chapter in the story...no proof, but the Mean Girl's fans are serious haters. We've already seen that. It's reaching the point where even No-Drama Obama, that gracious gentleman, should probably protect his image from being seen with those awful people.


History

There is a book of paintings that document unusually rainy, green weather in California before the awful over-development and smog. I've raved about it here before. There are local people who would like to buy it. There is an heir to the painter's estate who is interfering with its publication due to greed and thickheadedness. He does not realize what an achievement it is to add some awareness of the rest of the world to Virginia's legally mandated Virginia-centric view of history. (Virginia high schools used not to count history courses taken in other States toward high school graduation.) He thinks art books are written by just stacking up paintings and scanning them into a computer. He thinks conscience-karma won't come out and GET people who exploit writers. I hope this web site can help him with that. The writer he is failing to compensate is not young--nor is he.

Meanwhile, a little more broadening of our historical consciousness: What went on in Canada in between Wolfe-the-dauntless-hero and the Fenian idjits? (It would be pleasant if more schools in the US taught Canada's history and geography as extensively as their "good" schools teach  ours.)


Hurricane

The Petty Family Foundation has decided to raise funds for Christmas treats for North Carolina survivors. They've not really got their web site up yet, but you can sign up to receive notification when they do. 


Video of a drive around Asheville:


What becomes of Asheville as a scenic and historic city should only happen to Washington and New York, as scenic and historic cities, next. Local people want to rebuild? Burro-crats should clean out their bank accounts. Their turn will come.
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Book Review: Girlgoyle

Title: Girlgoyle

Author: Evan Ramspott

Date: 2015

Publisher: Storyteller

Quote: "Tffany didn't believe in ghosts...But they were always watching her."

You might, as I did, think that a "Girlgoyle" would be part of a "Better Heroes" collection because she overcame her obsession with her really strange-looking face and did something heroic to help someone else. You would be disappointed, as I was. This full-length novel is coherent and well written in its way but it's not what you expected, and may not be anything you'll enjoy. 

In the reality of this fictive world, gargoyles are alive. They are something humans may become in the afterlife, though no rule is given for determining who becomes a gargoyle. They live in a bare stone tower on a bare stone mountain, their skins are stone-colored, their emotions become a bit stony too, but they have big batlike wings, quite a nuisance for them t learn to drag about, on which they can fly. Their purpose in life is to subdue rebellious ghosts. They live in barracks, not unlike boot camp, and practice until they're good enough at flight and fight to go out and beat ghosts into submission.

Tiffany was a near-normal little girl, not all that strange-looking, just a bit like an anime character. (For some strange reason, although it's not a graphic novel, the book is generously illustrated with anime-style drawings.) Body hardly big enough to support a head that's not oversized, maybe taking a break from the hard work of growing up, maybe not growing up because it's not healthy. Tiffany was subject to anxieties and nightmares, and was never very strong, until one night she felt herself being crushed to death and woke up a pretty-faced, scrawny gargoyle with wings. After a little training in the use of her wings and the magical light energy ghosts and gargoyles wield, she finds the ghost who pushed her into the afterlife and leads her friends, even her teachers, out to destroy him. 

There is internal logic to this book. I totally did not get into it, but you might. The author has skills, and there's been a series of sequels that apparently appealed to people who are less turned off by the gargoyle world premises than I am.  
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