Animals
The Red Admiral butterfly was known as a British species before it was known as an American species; it has a British name. What may be changing is its ability to winter in England. It's a migratory species. Individual butterflies may lay eggs in places where overnight lows drop below freezing, but those eggs apparently don't hatch; butterflies reappear in the North as individuals that hatched in the South fly northward in spring. This species' ability to overwinter in England would be evidence of dramatic warming, the kind that's likely to be local not global.
Book
Alice Walker's daughter's:
What a cute cover! It's a picture book. To some extent we can judge a picture book by its cover.
Education
I'd like to see Religious Right types read this. If they let their children take the brain-rest courses, why complain that what's taught in those courses is second-rate?
Is this web site still being read at public high schools? Hard to tell; as the page view numbers rise, the correlation between readership and school schedules is obscured. Anyway, if you are a public high school student reading this web site, my concern is not with your exposure to opinions you might not agree with, but with your lack of exposure to material that big-name universities want you to have. Once people are thirteen or fourteen years old they should be able to deal with the fact that somewhere two boys have kissed each other. If your teacher is kissing boys in your class, now that would be a problem. My question is whether you're learning algebra, history, geography, languages and literature, some sort of job skill each term and some sort of creative art. You should not have time for courses with "relationships" in the title, in high school. If somebody tries to push you into such a course, don't fight back with the whine that it's going to "groom" you for toxic relationships to see the kind of relationships other people have. That's like sending your parents into the principal's office to say "Our kid is stupid." Fight back with a reasonable assertion like "There's only time for six classes in a day and I want Algebra, HTML, Literature, Biology, Japanese, and Classical Orchestra, not this twaddle about 'relationships'." If all you want to do at school is doze off and let left-wingnuts indoctrinate you, don't blame them for trying it.
High school is the place to take courses that are fun, that appeal to lots of young people, that you could not do at home or church. My husband used to chide me for slacking off and taking courses in Spanish at school. Anybody can learn Spanish on the street--at school one should take a language that's not spoken on the street. He took German! Then I'd chide him back because he never read or talked German and had forgotten most of what he'd learned. I say some of you Nephews had a brief exposure to Cantonese as children, and I'd like to see you keep up with it. If that means you have to seek out Chinese-American friends? You could do worse. All I'll say about taking Spanish in high school is that at the time that seemed the only way to keep that language in my mind, in Gate City, and I missed it. But some of you live in cities and can take courses from educated native speakers of Russian or Korean or who knows what-all, and I would like it if you became fluent in languages that I can't speak. Neither high school nor college should be wasted. Take Marching Band. Take ROTC. Take Golf, if your school offers it. Opportunities aren't likely to come again. Talking about relationships? You can do that for free when you reach the room-renting stage and have housemates.
Hurricane
Appalachian Voices, best known as a printed news magazine, is really trying to make this web site a central hub for post-hurricane relief efforts. Some shelters are now overstocked with water! Others are not, and they're still looking for the big, expensive, important donations like generators as well as little things like personal hygiene supplies.
Political discrimination? The sort of un-American political discrimination that's typical of the backward European and Asian countries that want to tell us how to do things? Here's a good point for swamp drainage: For any position in the federal government that puts employees in direct contact with taxpayers, if Republicans have not spontaneously recommended an employee for giving good service to taxpayers regardless of their known (or guessed) political positions, that employee can have no public-contact position in the federal government ever again. Positions that involve no decision-making and minimal interaction with the public, such as groundkeepers', building maintenance staff's, cafeteria cooks' and dishwashers', machine repair staff's, and nightwatchmen's jobs, deserve more respect (and better pay) than they have often had. What better way to boost the status of these necessary jobs than by filling them with former office managers. Meanwhile those federal employees who do have contact with the public should recite daily, befoire sitting down in their offices, "I am especially responsible for pleasing those taxpayers who believe my position should not exist. My job is to convince those people that I deserve to have a job."
Knitting
Butterflies are the pretty face of Glyphosate Awareness. Here's a way to knit a band of butterflies around your winter cap. You can order a winter cap, with butterflies or some other motif, from this web site for $10 plus shipping ($5 in the US, per package; four to six caps will usually fit into a package).
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