I spent Monday at McDonald's, sipping Coca-Cola because it is cheaper and thinking coffee thoughts about how much I'd rather be on the screen porch, or better yet in the cafe, or best of all in that lovely brick-and-mortar store I've been working toward all these years...Anyway, came home, did not even try to connect, but plugged in the laptop. About one a.m. I inadvertently clicked on the Chrome icon. Lo and behold, it showed a weak connection! Out to the screen porch and, yes, there was a good strong steady connection. Huzza! Now I'm only about a month behind. It feels as if I've spent the whole calendar year in catch-up mode at this web site. No sooner do I get caught up with online reading and writing--poorly paid writing, I might add, because where else are you going to get the amount of research I put into those insect posts for five dollars and only one reader even paid the five dollars--than the connection goes awry and there's another month of neglected web site chores to catch up with...
(Google traces this meme to Nancy Wisniewski on Piinterest. I got it from Messy Mimi.}
If you are an author waiting impatiently for a book post, once again, your e-book is undoubtedly in the computer somewhere, but Microsoft likes to foul up Chrome every so often and lose all the tabs, so it will probably take a while for me to find your book and find my place in it. But that will happen.
Links:
Election 2024
Yet another plagiarism story about Mean Girl O'Dowdypants. I'm starting to wonder about plagiarism on this scale.
Ellen Gould Harmon White, the nineteenth century author, missionary, and "prophet" of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, became famous for having healing visions. It was obvious to all observers that these visions were mystical experiences of great power. Half-grown Ellen, whose raspy whispers could hardly be heard by family members sitting beside her bed, would shout "Glory! Glory! Glory!" and sink back in a trance, her lungs spontaneously collapsing, her breath hardly clouding a mirror. Then she'd sit up and preach, often reading Bible verses from a Bible she held out to observers, pointing to texts she herself could not see. These visions reversed the course of what was probably tuberculosis. The child who had been kept home from school due to illness since grade four described her visions in words that could have come from the scholarly works in a minister's study...
Because they had. As a homebound elementary school student little Ellen had been a precocious reader who asked for serious grown-up books. As a visionary she quoted entire sentences, even paragraphs, and described scenes from those books as if she'd been reading from the books. In fact she had read them, not necessarily in the same year when she quoted them. Ellen had a true photographic memory. She always felt that other people could put things better than she could--as most of her readers would always agree. As an adult, when her fame sold enough books that she could afford a secretary, she'd tell her secretary to quote a paragraph or a page, sometimes putting quotation marks around her long quotes but never a proper attribution. Victorian authors did that; it was not considered plagiarism. But the writer who grew up to incorporate big chunks of other people's books into her own, consciously and deliberately, started out as a little girl who "heard" words and "saw" scenes, in a trance state, almost exactly as she had found them in a book she might have read three years before. She did not know where these words and images were coming from, at the time. Her unconscious mind stored clear, unfading pictures of other people's books, on which the spirit that guided her visions drew.
A child moved to preach in a visionary trance, in 1843, could hardly be blamed for reading the words she saw in her vision as if they were her own, or came from an angel. An adult, educated at schools that taught people how to attribute quotations, ought to be expected to add reference notes when she pastes chunks of Wikipedia articles into a manuscript...and pay the other writers and speakers whose words reappear in her speeches, The popular Democratic Party pundits whose TV acts were recycled into Tackypants' speeches might feel flattered, and not demand payment, but Dowdypants' use of other people's words now seems to be a long-term serious problem.
Does she have a photographic memory in which other people's words pop up without any memory of where to accredit them to? At sixty, in apparently ecellent health, does Dowdypants' mind work the way Ellen White's worked at thirteen, while wrestling with tuberculosis? Keep in mind that, by the time she became Mrs. White, Ellen White had outgrown the visionary trances and become a normal Bible teacher, though her career certainly coasted on her childhood fame as a "prophet."
But Ellen White never stooped to this kind of thing. This is pure undiluted Mean Girl.
Will women vote for Tackypants? Would you vote for the Queen Bee Bully-ette from your sixth grade class? If you know a Mean Girl when you smell one, and you're thinking that all politicians have sex scandals in their pasts and a call girl is better than a molester, consider Bill Ackman's Top 33 List of reasons to vote against Dowdypants:
History of Pop Culture and Decor
Alarm clocks...Joe Jackson thinks every family had one of these in the 1980s. I think mine managed not to have one until I inherited my husband's, but at least two roommates had this clock or a later clone (black rather than woodgrain).
Actually, when I was little my parents' alarm clock was a then-new-and-stylish electric model with a really jarring buzz sound. Similar, though not identical, to this...I think it was a GE clock but a different year's version, because the numbers were in a different font and the case was a dingier shade of dirty-straw-beige. Ugly little thing, but I've kept it for years, from nostalgia and sentimentality.
Then as my brother and I grew older and wanted our own alarm clocks, first I got something like this from the local Goodwill store...I liked it because it looked so retro. And the alarm tone was more like a loud bell rather than that horrid buzz. I was sloppy about winding it, though, on nights when I didn't think I'd need to get up ahead of everyone else, so it spent most of its life gathering dust and not ticking.
Later in the year my brother got a newer, cooler alarm clock on some sort of special mail-order sale. It had luminous numbers and hands, and ran on a battery. It was similar in size and shape to a lot of little square battery-powered clocks shown on Amazon, Ebay, etc., only the face under the plastic outer case, and the plastic back and sides, were flat black and the hands and numbers were pale green.
My husband left me both the classic GE digital alarm clock and the classic round wall clock as seen in schools, hospitals, etc. You'll find them easily if you search, but I'd pick either the wind-up clock or the battery-powered clock as things to keep on hand if you need to be on time during an extended power outage. I don't recommend this one, although my husband left me one of them, too, and it is cute:
Totally unreliable. It may keep time and alarm on time over one night, but will lose time and run down fast after that--you have to let it run completely down in between windings. And it never was guaranteed to keep time over one night. I suspect it was invented as a prank, possibly aimed at retailers who sold these things as real clocks and then had to pay refunds. This was also the era of the collapsible plastic drinking glass that fitted into any pocket and collapsed if it touched a lip.
History Being Made
I missed this...but Pbird saved the video.
Hurricane Aftermath
Helene, of course, need anyone ask? I do know that Florida had another vicious one, but they're Florida, they get hurricanes all the time, they can cope. North Carolina reached a saturation point with some kinds of donations. You can still send money. Beth Ann Chiles shares a list of the first hurricane zones to bounce back and reopen for leaf peeping...
Actually Gate City should still have some good leaf peeping, too, since even walnut leaves mostly hung on until the hurricane passed. My walnut tree is now close to bare. Some other trees are yellow, and several are still bright green, waiting for frost. Everybody is back in business, you don't need to bring your groceries, and if anything we may love visitors more than usual this year.
Mold Remediation--Unpaid Ad
I take Norb Leahy's recommendation seriously enough that, if I ever find this stuff on sale, I'll try it. I've cleaned books with bleach, and it gets rid of most mold spots and odors fast, for a good long time, but it does age the paper fast. Original formula Listerine contains specific natural antifungal oils, but (1) you don't want oils in things like paper or fabric, and (2) it'd be awfully expensive to scrub down the whole house with Listerine. Will Shockwave be found to be as toxic to humans as Adobe Shockwave Flash is to browsers? Who knows--bleach is pretty toxic if you're exposed to much of it at a time, and Listerine would be toxic if you drank it the way some "bottomless" alcoholics do. It's hard for us humans to poison other lifeforms without risk to ourselves. It's probably meant to be that way.
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