This post actually started in September. It's hard to do a Link Log when, for days on end, Google holds only thirty pages in memory in between visits to places that have Internet connections. Nevertheless...
Animals
Some parts of North Carolina reported horrific flash floods while Virginia was getting aaaall...that...rain. (That's Drawling as distinct from Yelling. Drawling is something Southern Ladies sometimes do when things, not people, are exasperating. It does not imply that any of you Gentle Readers is less intelligent than other people.) I heard someone on radio blethering about a hundred or so bodies being found stuck in trees, the way one normally sees stray clothes, shoes, shopping bags, and similar clutter after less disastrous floods. So of course animal shelters were not in a good situation, to put it mildly. Some animals were evacuated to shelters on higher ground and suddenly Petfinder is sending out e-mail and refusing to show the pages I usually search for the photo contest. I have to look at the Jonesborough page. There's a conspicuous link to make online monetary donations to North Carolina shelters that need rebuilding. Flood refugees are swelling the cat populations in Jonesborough, Johnson City, and other places in Tennessee. Look carefully--this is two very cute kittens currently stuck in the Johnson City shelter:
One of them is called Scout but the staff were too busy to explain which one. Updates may have been posted at Scout's web page by the time you read this:
Books
Authors Kim Griffin, BR Goodwin, and Hannah Hood Lucero are donating all proceeds from their book sales to hurricane relief for our North Carolina neighbors. Kim Griffin wrote that Starry Night devotional that digs deep into doctrine, not just the usual pleasant thought for the day, reviewed here last winter.
If there's a nondenominational devotional you want to buy in hardcover, Starry Night is probably it. By ordering in October you can not only support hurricane survivors (I mean the ones who are really hurting, not us in Virginia who have merely been inconvenienced) but also be sure of getting the book in time to read it in December.
Censorship
Yop. Ds, you get two options. Either you oppose censorship, or Gina Raimondo's political career is over. If this stupid cow's voice is ever heard in public again, it needs to be saying "Absolute freedom of speech is keeping me out of jail. I support absolute freedom of speech for all people."
Election 2024
Mean Girl O'Dowdypants tells us nothing about fracking, war, censorship, the civil rights of the loyal-opposition party (never mind alternative parties), any attempt to reduce the damage done by chemical pollution of any part of the environment...but she does have things to teach us, here. Her teeth are probably natural, because artificial ones are usually more symmetrical than that, but her mouth really is wide enough to show them as far back as they go; she seems not to have molars. Young children manage to eat without molars so Dowdypants probably doesn't mind. And very very few people look good in purple; Dowdypants is not among them.
Something for Virginia to consider. Remember the Censorship Riot? Remember Mark Warner's tweets during it? Remember that he had the opportunity to let those tweets fade into oblivion, but he chose to write an op-ed amplifying them? Young, strong, healthy-looking man, not even sparing a thought for fellow Senators like Reid, McConnell, Pelosi, Feinstein, just tweeting about how scared he was for his precious self. If you saw the op-ed, didn't you want to fire back... "You're not representing me!" "You call yourself a Virginian?" "Pull yourself together, man! Protect your elders!" I mean, I am glad he was mature enough not to go out and rumble...At the time I tweeted back that I was praying for him, and it was true. Him and every other law-abiding person involved in a riot that could so easily have been so much worse than it was. Afterward, it is hard to respect a big strong man who claims to be so totally intimidated by idiots wielding stolen lamps and yet so unconcerned about those who might need his help.
Europe
This isn't even the worst thing about Europe...it's that they still can't seem to settle their differences without killing each other. And that is where most of our ancestors came from (even if we claim Black or Red ancestors, we still probably have some European DNA). If we sink into their levels of population density, government nannyism, and general hopelessness we could sink back to their level of barbarism.
Hurricane Updates
From Brevard, North Carolina, 10.8.24:
Dolly Parton pledged a million dollars to hurricane survivors generally. Kamala Harris offered them $750 per person, like wow, probably not enough to pay for hotel rooms much less food, but it's vote-buying time right? (To be fair, that was the immediate bailout money from the emergency fund; survivors are eligible for more handouts later, if they still want them.) But the emergency fund had to hand out more than Kamala realized...
President Biden went to Germany for the weekend. Meh...Dad went to Germany once and always gave the impression that anyone would rather go to North Carolina than to Germany, so I'm not sure how bad that is. Maybe our Prez just wants to spare disaster areas the inconvenience of hosting his entourage.
Phenology
Belatedly, butterflies. The majority of these butterflies are found on both sides of the Atlantic, presumably introduced from the UK to the US by travellers. Some are still found only in the UK.
Whereas, afaik, all of the moths are UK-specific.
Pun
Google doesn't like McDonald's connection. I found it at How to Meow in Yiddish.
State of the Net
In any weather-related disaster, the role of new electronic technology is to break down. Our local ISP has finally caught up with the times and started taking reports of outages through their web site, a huge improvement. Two full weeks after the hurricane, I saw a couple of supplementary phone/Internet service trucks at McDonald's, and THIS is what their web site had to say:
"All service out...multiple main fiber breaks near (three roads) in Duffield affecting service on up into Lee County...no estimated time of repair.
"All service out...multiple main fiber breaks near Castlewood and Coeburn affecting service through Russell and Wise Counties...no estimated time of repair.
"All service out...fiber break in Yuma...under investigation."
They're not even listing damage to individual houses or neighborhoods' wiring. What happened in my neighborhood was that at least two big trees fell across power lines, under which phone and Internet wires had been strung. All the lines were broken and one pole had to be replaced. The men repairing the power lines apparently strung all the wires back up, but it remains for the phone/Internet company to reconnect those wires to the actual Internet. (WiFi exists in between ridges, not across them--which is as it should be. For example, on the screen porch where I've been working for the past year-plus, I was using a WiFi connection to a wired connection inside the house...but there's no WiFi connection to, e.g., the business district where everybody was supposed to have free access in town.)
And even McDonald's independent, company-owned, generator-powered Internet connection blinked on and off five times in six hours.
Support This Web Site
It has occurred to me that one reason for the sudden surge of interest in this post...
...may be the link to a Patreon page I used to have. No use. I no longer use e-payment sites that aren't forbidden by law to dip into customers' funds. To support this web site, please send US postal money orders to PO Box 322, Gate City, VA 24251-0322. I currently have no way of accepting non-US payment. Non-US readers are encouraged to support web sites in your country that this web site follows.
If funded, I could do an updated post about the hibiscus caterpillar and the moth it turns into.
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