Web Log for 12.19.24

It's a law of nature...if I talk about something I'm going to do, I don't get it done? I told people to wait for this Log at midday, then fell asleep without having clicked the "publish" button...

Activism 

What I find hard to believe is that without drugs an educated, connected young man would have thought of murder as a way to make the point he supposedly wanted to make. I see two possibilities: (1) Mangione was on drugs, or (2) Mangione saw what taking a bullet did for Donald Trump and wanted to do something similar, whether for Brian Thompson, for the United Health Care company, or for the insurance scam industry generally.

\Why would anyone want to make his enemy a victim whom everyone pities, instead of recognizing how wrong his ideas were?

Why would anyone want to risk allowing his enemy to be seen as brave?

If we hate the ideas people promote and enact, don't we want those people to be seen as fools and failures?

https://pjmedia.com/athena-thorne/2024/12/11/the-top-4-ways-the-assassin-couldve-drawn-attention-to-a-problem-without-murdering-anyone-n4935027

Etiquette

The skit writer has a point...

https://ncrenegade.com/if-the-twilight-zone-was-southern/

Nevertheless, even in the South, it is rude to have long conversations about personal matters in public. It is rude to chatter if anyone else is waiting. It is not only rude, but unchristian, because it always turns out to be based on the assumption that some people are "more important" than other people. I'm not saying that there aren't slow-moving stores that people visit just to have a good long chat with their friend the bored storekeeper, but when my parents were having a good visit with the storekeeper and other customers came in, they shut it off, stepped away from the counter, and either went home, or walked around while the other customers traded.

Hurricane 

Let's hope the taxes on hurricane-destroyed houses reflect the current value of the property, not the value it had last year...People could, of course, organize a fund to pay the land taxes for badly damaged property. 

https://ncrenegade.com/asheville-3/

Poem 

https://whatrhymeswithstanza.com/2024/07/08/boxed-in/

Rants, Not Mine

Made me laugh:

https://pjmedia.com/caskeet/2024/12/19/little-boys-with-obnoxious-toys-n4935261

Songs

Should "creative" people fear that getting a job like everybody else will destroy us like everybody else? I don't think. I think we're hard-wired to have talents, and no-talents are hard-wired not to have talents; this won't change. The jobs didn't destroy the no-talents and won't harm our talents at all. I think doing jobs just like the no-talents will inform our creative work, build empathy and compassion, etc., etc., and also pay for a lot of paint or amplifiers or Internet time. 

But it needs to be understood that we are not like everybody else. No-talents can tell. They resent us. If they have any mechanism for making us feel unappreciated on the job or making us be unappreciated on the job, they'll do it. I think it's a crucial survival skill that we think of anything that's paid by the hour, day, or week as an odd job. Because, if we don't give employers reasons to fire us, it'll only be "We hired you to work on this project, but we've decided not to do this project," or "The workforce has to be reduced," or "You've earned a promotion we can't afford to offer, so if you resign we'll give you a glowing reference." (Of course, if you do resign, it will then be "You're qualified for a more prestigious and/or better paid job, so what's WRONG with you that you wanted this one? Next!")

And understand: if anybody says anything about "rapport" or "collegiality" or "how you fit in with other team members," no-talents are actively working to push you out and your best move is to stand up, say "I don't want to hang around where I'm not appreciated," and start walking, because nothing is ever going to make rapport or collegiality or fitting in with hostile team members possible. I have never seen or heard of a case where that kind of situation ever got better. Hostile team members can be told, "Well, X is doing good work, so it's up to you to fit in with X if you want to keep this job." That works. Otherwise, X's good work is making them look bad and clinging to their resentment gives them a chance to avoid looking bad, so if you had a chance to pull them out of icy water, they'd hate you more than ever. I have seen cases where the resented people left and submarined the company that listened to the resentful people. What was awesome about the Eighties, whatever your opinion of that decade's pop culture may be, was that resented people submarining resentful companies became a cliche in the Eighties.

Business owners who want not to be submarined could dismiss everything they've learned from the Harvard Business School of Perpetuating Discrimination, hire only self-accepting introverts to work on office jobs, score Green points for having everyone work from home nine days out of ten, keep the more talented people, and fire anyone who whines about someone else "not fitting in." But that could cause pain in their bloated, brittle egos, so more of them prefer to rely on public policies that discourage newer, more competitive businesses from competing with bigger, more stagnant ones...primarily by adding expenses with costly licensing fees, inspection fees, organization membership fees, insurance requirements, inflated property values and lease fees, and whatever other expense they can think of. 

One way government  can avoid the hazards of unchecked capitalism by downsizing to the point where it doesn't depend on income from those added expenses. Maybe we should think of the experience of starting a business with an initial investment below $100 as an essential qualification for elective office, just to keep the system clean. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFkYoT5Gezo

Book Review: In the Face of Adversity

Title: In the Face of Adversity

Author: Peter Martin

Quote: "His little sister's death had hit him hard."

This is literary fiction, not genre fiction. Literary fiction is allowed to be tragic, to have characters who are as un-dynamic and indecisive as real people and whose stories reach the same discouraging ends as those real people's stories do. 

After Billy's sister dies he's sent home from school for being sick. Walking into his home, he finds his mother in bed with a female friend. She then moves out with her girlfriend. Billy's father is an alcoholic and loses jobs, loses houses, loses furnished rooms. At last he decides to take Billy and move in with his wife and her girlfriend. By morning Billy has lost both parents and his innocence. He never finds his self-esteem again. There may be some hope for Billy, at the end, but he never does become anything remotely like a hero. 

Billy seems to me like today's man all right. Denatured. Sad. Passive. Jealous of a girlfriend, he picks a fight with the other boy at the table with her; he doesn't even see the blow coming as the other boy knocks him down with a broken nose. Feeling hurt when his wife deserts him, he expresses his feelings by getting himself fired from his job. He doesn't talk about his feelings; he is all about his feelings. He only lets himself express anger, but at his angriest he hurts himself more than anyone else. He feels terrible about the fact that nobody loves him. It does not occur to him that this might be because he doesn't love anybody. 

I'll stop before I give away the plot, such as it is. This book is really a novel-length character sketch. It lacks what some consider the essential core of a plot--that a character wants something, sets out to achieve that thing, and, by per own choices, gets or loses what person wants. Billy wants love but, if his waiting for women to make their moves can be called a way of pursuing love, then this story is all about how he fails with no hint of a possibility that he might ever succeed.

There are too many men like Billy in this world. Perhaps reading about him may help women avoid dating them and men avoid being them.

Feline Friday: Day of the Horse Was Last Week

The only prize this web site can afford to give our photo contest winners is sharing the pictures, so please share them everywhere where you think they might interest someone in adopting a shelter pet! Most weeks we do only cats and dogs. This week we have three cats, three dogs, and three horses.

I had planned to do a special Petfinder post for the Day of the Horse, and then another idea came along and I, well, didn't. So. Take Two. Let's find out how the Day of the Horse affected Petfinder's horse rescue page. But first, of course, the cats, and then the dogs. 

For the cats...we've not had a Manx photo contest lately.

The position of this web site is that nobody should encourage the breeding of Manx cats, but once the actual cats have been born, yes, they do make good pets. The birth defects that make up the Manx look are caused by a lethal gene. There are three degrees of mutation with which cats can survive; "Rumpies" have no tails, "Stumpies" have obviously incomplete tails, and the cats that can reproduce successfully have complete but short tails, fore and hind legs about the same length, and broad British-type body frames. (Our Queen Cat Serena, her father, and her grandmother, had the complete tails and broad frames--they can look like big fat cats, from a distance, when they're actually underweight. Serena's great-grandfather had a stump of a tail.) The lethal gene can also cause kittens not to be born at all, not to be born alive...or to be born alive and die painfully, as a result of having incomplete vital organs, when they're a few weeks old. Sometimes they survive with disabilities like blindness, or incontinence. The position of this web site is that breeding Manx cats is somewhere in between deliberately breeding humans with cystic fibrosis and deliberately breeding humans with Downs Syndrome.  

But the cats, the ones who survive, can be quite nice. They tend to have calm, reserved, stereotypically British temperaments and to bond with one human for life. Some don't climb well; some do. Some enjoy chasing thrown toys so much that they can be trained to retrieve their toys and bring them to you for more throwing and chasing. The retrieving and the "one-man cat" behavior cause some to call them "dog cats," or cats for dog people. The out-of-proportion legs, especially when the cats climb, cause others to call them "bear cats." People who adopt Manx cats generally love them. Although they have many little ways of making it clear that they love one person, Manx cats are generally friendly and even-tempered, and some are sociable enough with humans to be good visiting/therapy cats.

Proper Manx cats have short, but very thick and soft, coats that benefit from daily grooming. Crossbreeds can have extra-thick, extra-long hair. Graybelle, the long-haired Manx mix who was our Third Queen, used to "meow" for her coat to be brushed once or twice a day. Even with care that super-dense fur can become messy in the house and inside the cat. If you like the look of a huge mound of fur that you will have to brush every day, however, this could be the cat for you. 

With our usual disclaimers about the pet photo contests being about the pictures and the probability that you might prefer a different animal at the actual shelter, here are our picks of the most adorable photos of adoptable Manx cats in three Eastern States.

Zipcode 10101: Tippy from Nutley

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/tippy-48809141/nj/nutley/care-and-treatment-of-strays-nj168/

Despite her very "typical" Manx look, Tippy is a crossbreed with a Siamese way of "talking" at humans. She likes to play. She's not social, tolerates other cats but "thinks she's a dog" and wants to own her own human. She is two years old, probably as big as she's going to get (Manx is one of the breeds that often revert to their ancestral size). 

Zipcode 20202: Mira (and Micah) from Flint Hill 

Her web age: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/mira-73370339/va/flint-hill/rappcats-va508/

Mira is the pretty-faced, long-haired Stumpie shown above. Micah, at least her half brother, is the buddy she likes to hide behind. Both of them have super-sized coats that make them look much fatter than they are, but it doesn't sound as if they're underfed. They must be adopted as a pair. Born in 2022, they were house pets until their human died. Then they were feral for ten months. They are wary about new humans. I'd take some time to get to know them before offering to adopt them. They might decide they love you, if you proceed slowly and respectfully.

Zipcode 30303: Ozmerelda and Ozadora from Powder Springs

Ozadora's web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/ozadora-74101744/ga/powder-springs/georgia-homeless-pets-ga697/

These sisters were the result of crossbreeding a Manx with the other breed that shares a similar mutation, a Japanese Bobtail. However, Ozadora has a short tail and Ozmerelda has a complete one. They're not show quality. Isn't that just a pity and a bleepin' shame. Shelter staff are willing to separate them but it sounds as if Ozadora is accustomed to letting Ozmerelda go first and check out new things and people, and might panic on her own. Both cats have gorgeous glossy black coats; visit their web pages to see them under different lights. 

This web site has often prodded the Georgia shelter photographers about putting homeless animals' best sides forward...well, if you visit the page for all the adoptable Manx cats at the zipcode 30303, you are in for a treat. Nine beautiful cat photos!

Now for the dogs...We've not done poodles lately, either. A poodle person visited the Cat Sanctuary this morning; why not a poodle photo contest? 

Be warned, though: Homeless poodles don't have the cute haircuts of poodles appliqued onto various clothing items during various twentieth century fads. Their curly coats grow long, stringy, and matted. The fancy cuts evolved from the need to cut out hopelessly matted patches. Whether you cut a poodle's hair short all over, cut fancy patterns, or prefer a long-haired shaggy dog, dogs need daily grooming with a fine-toothed flea comb. For a true poodle person this is a great way to relax.

Zipcode 10101: Popular from Brooklyn 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/popular-74341338/ny/brooklyn/hearts-bones-rescue-ny-ny1463/

...says he is indeed popular, and so will you be, if you lead this dog home. French Poodles are a medium-size breed. Their American descendants have crossbred with big and small breeds--poodle hair comes on bodies of all sizes. Popular is at the large end of the spectrum, 58 pounds (his other ancestors are thought to have been retrievers). Apart from looks, he's popular because he doesn't bark, walks nicely on a leash, is crate trained and housebroken, makes friends with other dogs, and seems happiest when snuggled up beside a human. Maybe I should have picked a runner-up. This dog doesn't sound likely to spend much time looking for a home.

Zipcode 20202: Sriracha from Chestertown 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/sriracha-74169238/md/chestertown/humane-society-of-kent-county-maryland-md09/

Yes. The photo contest winner comes from a horrible HSUS shelter. There are some close runners-up on the general page for poodle-mix dogs near DC. Anyway, Sriracha is said to weigh just twelve pounds--mostly fur. She's one year old and will probably grow a little bigger, but she'll always be a small dog with a quirky mix of poodle and beagle traits. She is full of energy, described as a dog that will wear you out and then snuggle up beside you. 

Zipcode 30303: Lulu from Social Circle 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/lulu-74409383/ga/social-circle/pound-puppies-n-kittens-incorporated-ga163/

Her other ancestors are thought to include Shih Tzus. Lulu is a very small poodle mix who likes to snuggle and be held, and even models a pink knitted sweater. If you want the complete spoiled lap dog, Lulu is for you. There's a fantastic mix of poodle-mix dogs on Petfinder's Atlanta page, including some big ones crossbred with retrievers and Irish setters.

And now...horses! Yes, Petfinder still has several horses looking for homes.

Zipcode 10101: Spirit from Quakertown 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/horse/spirit-74368400/pa/quakertown/last-chance-ranch-animal-rescue-pa105/

All kinds of horses get into rescue situations. There are some race horses and show horses at Petfinder too, but the photo contest winner is an old mare who's not recommended for serious riding. She's recommended as a companion animal for someone who has a field and barn where she can roam around and hang out with you. Horses are social. Spirit is accustomed to hanging out with other mares and geldings (neutered males).

Zipcode 20202: Elle from Waldorf 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/horse/elle-71815518/md/waldorf/last-chance-animal-rescue-md105/

This one can be ridden. She's a Thoroughbred, only sixteen years old and in good physical condition. 

Zipcode 30303: Chance from Ellenboro 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/horse/chance-74373742/nc/ellenboro/dream-equine-therapy-center-sc346/

Granted, Ellenboro is a long road up from Atlanta, but Petfinder's Atlanta page failed to load, and I wanted to show you one Tennessee Walking Horse in any case. Tennessee Walking Horses are a special breed. They have a gait called the "running walk" that looks like a goose step, but the horse is absorbing all the shock; the human in the saddle always says it's quite comfortable. People who wanted to show off have sipped drinks while riding a horse who was running-walking around a show ring. Chance is said to be a friendly, trustworthy horse who behaved well when rented out by the hour for children to ride. His adoption fee is high because money could still be made by hiring him out that way. The organization also has a mare who's recommended for a companion more than for serious riding, for one-fifth of the cost. 

Can you believe it? Only one more Petfinder post this year! Then we'll go into review mode. Share these pictures far and wide so we can find new ones next year.

Web Log for 12.18.24

Why have I been writing so slowly, even for me? I've been slightly sluggish, somewhat grumpy, so slow-moving that another normally fast-walking trail buddy abandoned me and went out for pizza last week (I am not making this up), irregular and bleary-eyed. Does a food item need to be removed from the still short "safe" list? No, Pastel-cat has been bleary-eyed, too. It's hard to be positive at a time of year when plants are not growing, but the cats tell me that our Bad Neighbor has been spraying poison with purely evil intentions even after Thanksgiving. Now COVID is circulating again. People have been doing quarantine, and I woke up this morning with no cough, no fever, but telltale hypertension. Wouldn't it be lovely if this year's version of COVID keeps this fool out of circulation all year. He's fat enough that an overnight blood pressure spike could trigger a disabling stroke...

Local people, including the police, appear to think people ought to be able to enforce the law for themselves at night. "If you could set up a camera and get some evidence," the dozy policemen have whined. I have set up a camera, set up a computer that can scan the photo chips on which it stores images, and got some beautiful videos of my House Wrens in action, but only one night photo of a humanlike shape waving a flashlight at the camera. Considering the expense and inconvenience of these cameras, I think the police ought to set them up for any citizen who has trouble with trespassers--humans, or nuisance animals. 

We need a law banning all outdoor spraying of anything the person doing the spraying is not willing to drink.

Animals

If the Feline Friday link-up requires cats to come first every week, here's a cute dog to balance things. This was the Scotch Terrier who inspired thescottiechronicles.blogspot.com:

Photo from https://scottiechronicles.com/2024/12/12/throwback-thursday-the-very-first-post/

Possibly a distant relative of the Mop, who is less hysterical than it used to be but will still follow me across the yard if it's outside when I walk past, bouncing and yipping. 

Hoots

I saw a hilarious You Tube commercial for something called #ProLifeMen. It's 

Songs

If a gym teacher says "Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet" to a sluggish student, is he homophobic, or has he been listening to too many of the no-Christian-content "Christmas" carols today's DJs demand?

https://www.tumblr.com/mostly-funnytwittertweets/769306812804694016 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyEAX7Cd3OE

Seriously, both "Jingle Horse" and "Jingle Bus" have been used as names for missions' and food banks' winter collection drive gimmicks. 

Book Review: The Pryce of Delusion

Title: The Pryce of Delusion

Author: Kari Bovee

Date: 2023

Publisher: Bosque

ISBN: 978-1-947905-22-1

Quote: "The gold, heart-shaped ring...never let me down, and I was never without it."

Arabella Pryce is a successful actress. She gives the credit to a lucky ring her missing father sent her as a souvenir. People have told her she'd be just as good an actress without it; Arabella doesn't want to believe them. 

Then her ring is stolen...and someone threatens her husband. A police detective seems helpful, finding clues that her mother-and-manager stole the ring, but the pieces don't quite fit...

If you like a mystery where nobody dies, you'll like this one. People are in danger but they escape. Even the ring will be found at the end, before Arabella and her husband go out to their next adventure. There's a series about these characters. 

Hemileuca Stonei

Hemileuca stonei is the Hemileuca most likely to look brown, as distinct from drab or reddish, and to have significant amounts of bare chitin uncovered with fur on its body. It is considered closely related to H. grotei and H. (grotei) diana, but has consistent visible differences.

Photo from Flickr.

Living in the desert along the border between Arizona and Sonora, H, stonei has received little attention from humans. Its caterpillars eat leaves of a few Mexican varieties of oak trees. It has no economic significance. It is only occasionally a nuisance.

Photo from Southwestdesertflora.com. Even the host plant of the caterpillars is prickly. This is Quercus emoryi, Emory's oak; young H. stonei also eat Q. oblongifolia, Mexican oak.

Mature caterpillars are blackish gray and may have a conspicuous blue or purple undertone. Younger caterpillars were probably black. Young Hemileuca caterpillars have relatively long, thin, sometimes simple bristles that contain relatively little venom, and try as much as possible to live in a cluster of caterpillars with a sibling on either side. Older caterpillars, who leave the family group as they get too big to feed side by side on one leaf, and eat whole leaves by themselves, have shorter bristles with branching brittle tips. Each tip contains about as much venom as a bee sting and may stick in the skin, oozing venom into the skin, for days. The final caterpillar skin has flattened rosette-shaped bristles on the back, allowing more bristle tips to irritate the skin.

Photo from Rtphill1. 

Most Hemileucas hatch when leaves of their host plant are relatively new and tender, but stonei hatch when oaks are blooming, so their first few meals are oak blossoms (which can look a bit like caterpillars). As the caterpillars grow bigger and tougher they find fewer blossoms and have to gnaw on oak leaves.

Photo by Tom Van Devender. A "mature" stonei caterpillar is smaller than most stingingworms, but it can still sting. The bristles sting mechanically, with no conscious action necessary on the part of the caterpillar. The caterpillars instinctively curl up with all their bristles facing out when they fall, but it's not clear whether their primary motive is to drop onto something and sting it, or just to let their bristles absorb landing shock. All stingingworms are so easy to hate that it's hard for humans to imagine what the animals feel or think, whether they have any idea how nasty they seem to everyone but themselves. 

They spend the hottest part of the year pupating in the fallen leaves under the host trees, where the caterpillars usually place what is described as a loose cocoon, or the foundation for a cocoon, on a few leaves they pull together for shade before they pupate. For silk moths, all the Hemileucas produce very little silk.

Adult moths are most recognizable when they have a dark brown color, but their color can be olive.

Photo by Jmbearce.

Others are charcoal gray:

Photo by Blisowsky.

Though less furry than some Hemileucas, with their little flat heads seldom covered by long hair on the thorax, the bodies often show small patches of bright red, yellow, or orange hair. Males have plumy antennae; females have smooth hairlike ones. (Males apparently use the extra nerve endings on their plumy antennae to trace the subtle scents of females, which humans can't smell.)

Males average a little smaller than females and are more likely to have lighter-colored wings and a tuft of bright-colored fur on the rear end. Females are more likely to be described as black and have black fur on the rear end. Males can be blackish, too, and the tips of their tail ends aren't always much more colorful; the antennae are the reliable sex characteristic. Wingspans are usually more than two inches but not known to be all of three inches.

At https://mothphotographersgroup.msstate.edu/species.php?hodges=7744.5 , Ken Osborne has photos of a typical pair. The female's wings are darker and her wingspan is 62 mm; the male's wingspan is 45 mm. The male's wings are rounder, though, and his body is much longer. After laying her eggs the female's abdominal section, which is used almost entirely for holding eggs, is still broader than the male's but much shorter. 

Like other silk moths, they don't eat or drink after pupating. They fly just long enough to reproduce before they die. Hemileucas spend most of a year, or years, in wingless forms. They can fly for more than a week, but most probably live only a day or two after they get their wings. And when stonei do fly, it's in autumn--September to November, after the hottest weather in their range is over.

So, when the adult moths crawl out of their pupal shells, even as they stretch and expand their crumpled new wings the males are sniffing the air and the females are pumping out their scent. Males fly in the daytime and are often mistaken for butterflies. They fly fast, somewhat erratically, following scents on the wind. Females are uncomfortably full of eggs when they eclose; they may prefer young unmated males, but it's all about unloading eggs and, once a male arrives and offers to help with that task, they don't wait for a better offer. 

The process of preparing eggs for unloading is, however, leisurely for Hemileucas. They send some time snuggling and caressing before and after fertilizing the eggs, and often mate face to face. 

Photo by Ksacco, proving that this pair were so focussed on each other that they didn't even seem to mind that a human hand was curving around them to document how small these members of the "giant" silk moth family really are. Possibly their sensitivity to pheromone scents gave them a clue that they were going to be included in a selfie rather than crushed and eaten. Chemical analysis has not been done for all the Hemileucas, but several Hemileuca scents include traces of fragrances used in soaps and hand lotions...is it possible that Ksacco's hand smelled good to these moths? About half the photos of living stonei online document that, if not positively attracted to humans, these moths can easily be persuaded to perch on at least some humans' hands.

("Do people really spend their time and money analyzing the scents of insects humans don't even smell?" Of course they do. For the bigger Hemileucas that live closer to humans, there has been considerable interest in synthesizing their scents in order either to lure them into traps or to guide them to mate and reproduce as far from humans as possible. But stonei naturally do live in places where few humans choose to be, so we've shown less interest in them.)

After spending about an hour with their mates, females usually spend a quarter to a half hour flying about, even if they had time to find a suitable place to lay eggs before coupling. They lay eggs by ones,  taking time to place each one, usually placing them close together in a roughly ring-shaped cluster around a twig that seems likely to produce the right kind of leaves for their caterpillars. 

Bad Poetry: Holiday Anxieties

At Poets & Storytellers United, the prompt was to write about holiday anxieties. 

I never had many. Frugal holidays attract few relatives, and the ones who do show up tend to behave well.

Nevertheless:

"Snow," said Merlin

(who had decided he disapproved of America).

The Internet went out.

"Snow harder," said Merlin.

The electricity followed the Internet.

"Oh dear," said I,

"there's no way to warn The Nephews.

 Nor even Lisiwayu,"

as I packed a bag, pulled on boots,

and walked out to her house.

It was lighted by candles and fireplace only.

The Nephews arrived late

and rented a room in Kingsport.

On the way to my house 

they found me walking beside the road.

"Do you have lights at the hotel?" I said.

"Off and on," they said.

"Better than nothing," I said

so we packed up a laptop

and spent the whole holiday week

breathing each other's stale breath

in a two-bed hotel room

with six sleeping bags.

On the way home they said

"We can't risk THAT again!"

and they never came back.

This was not so, it is not so,

and God grant it never will be so.

Poem: A Penalty for Sarcasm

This one wasn't finished in time to be timely, but it may have some ongoing relevance. I hope. 

Peace to that Prince of the auspicious name,

Mohammed Bin Salman! Long may his fame

Of pleasant tidings bring the world a feast,

As "Who spread God's peace in the Middle East."

May Arabs see each Arab as a brother

And scorn all vain disputes with one another;

May even Israel be reconciled,

As Isaac was, to his father's firstborn child. 

May all good Muslims in all disputes know

The joy of having mercy on a foe.

May all remember Israel's great King David,

Whose sins were great, and yet The Merciful sav-ed

Him from destruction he had surely earned

Because the ways of mercy he had learned.

For as a child he was told he'd be king;

And to his innocence that meant one thing,

To go to court and please the monarch so

That with the princes he might be let go

To war, and show himself as brave as they,

Become a royal son-in-law that way,

And, being younger than the princes, wait

The fourth-in-order-of-succession's fate.

The whole world knows the story. He defieth

The rules, at seventeen, and kills Goliath.

The firstborn princess thinks herself above him,

But what of that? The younger one can love him.

And then, for his sins, the poor old king's brain

Begins to fail; and sometimes, quite insane,

He thinks his sons, his daughters, even David

(Who more than once his forfeit life hath saved)

Are out to kill him; he must kill them first.

For years, while the king's mania's at its worst,

David among the enemies must dwell,

Yet never raise his hand against Israel.

The old king leads the princes into war,

And in one battle they are killed all four.

Now surely David will sing and rejoice?

No such! In anguish he lifts up his voice,

Recalls the joy his royal wedding brought,

Says loyalty to the prince with whom he fought

Surpassed the love of his young ardent bride,

And kills the man who eagerly did ride

To tell him where that prince now fallen lies;

For smiling when a king weeps is unwise.

So in deep mourning David claims the throne,

And treats the prince's young son as his own.

A house of worship he desires to build,

Buys rare materials, chooses workmen skilled.

Yet he is told, "That honor's not for you.

Though there's no blame for what you had to do

In times of war, the House of the Divine

Must be built by a man of peace: a sign

That God prefers that people live in peace." 

All David's dreams of building temples cease,

And "Man of Peace," Absalom, is the name

He gives the son whose merits all acclaim.

Absalom grows up handsome, and so charming

A father born a king would find alarming;

He kills his own half-brother, for good reasons.

He's banished from the palace a few seasons.

Of time with common folk his use is wise,

And soon some offer with him to uprise

Against King David, who cannot believe

What the lad's idle grumbling might achieve.

To parley with his son the king did ride,

And out there flew against him from the side

A little old man, cramped and crabbed with bile,

Hurling at David accusations vile

Of treason against the good friends of his youth,

And things even worse, if they had any truth.

A murmur ran through David's entourage:

"What kind of king endures such a barrage?

Why does not David kill this unbeliever?

Is our great monarch suffering from a fever?"

This wretched man pursued them as they rode,

Flung at them clods and litter from the road.

A senior courtier his colleagues led.

"Sire, shall I go and take off this man's head?"

But David, looking forward to surcease

In counselling his headstrong son to peace,

Looked on the man who wished him loss and worse,

And said with kingly mercy: "Let him curse!"

If father's love could save sons from their fate,

King Absalom's fame would by now be great.

Alas! No king called Absalom ever reigned.

King David named as heir, when his life waned,

Another son called "Peaceful," Solomon,

Who strove always to be a worthy son.

To David's story Solomon made the sequel;

At boosting nation's wealth he's had no equal.

The stories of these two kings men still tell,

And name sons "Salman," modern style, as well.

And so, O Prince Bin Salman, came my way

News of another Salman in our day--

That tiresome one, of whom you've heard enough,

Alodah, who thinks he's such clever stuff.

Consider David, hasty in his youth,

Rebuked for punishing unwelcome truth;

Consider David, wiser with his years,

Pitying the poor old burden on his ears.

If all God's given men to do is curse,

Send them where their words leave you none the worse;

Imagine Alodah in Germany:

No princes there to blame for burdens he

Now feels, let him rail ever with impunity

About the weather, which complete immunity

Grants mortals still. Let persecution cease;

Let Alodah go on his way in peace.

Web Log for 12.17.24

Only minutes behind schedule! 

Communication 

He has a semantic point: Should being treated with common courtesy be called a right, rather than a privilege?

https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2024/12/16/very-respectfully-white-privilege-is-a-steaming-load-of-crap-n4935170

Holidays, Celebrating, with Relatives, Growl

This story may need a little introduction. It's part of a whimsical fantasy story about a magical part of the woods where forest creatures do things that might be good for some humans to do, too. Ralph and Ramona are Sasquatches; Twigg and Cherry are their young. Thaga and Ooog are cave-dwelling humans. Maeve is a raven with human-level intelligence. Other animals and humans interact with them in other stories. The author is in real life a conservative grandmother of some liberal and left-wing grandchildren.

https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2024/12/deep-in-drear-december.html

Book Review: Marry Me Melody

Title: Marry Me Melody

Author: Emily Dana Botrous

Date: 2023

Quote: "She couldn't do this. She couldn't marry TJ."

This is one of those short stories the Internet allows people to circulate as separate e-books, where a traditional publisher would have bound them together with other things. It's an epilogue to a novel called With Love, Melody. I think the quote gives a good idea of what happens in the story.

Readers will probably find Melody and TJ more interesting if they've read the novel, but here I stand to testify that it's possible to care about them if you read the short story first. This is not a thing I normally say about short stories. Botrous is good.

Web Log for 12.16.24

Adult Entertainment 

It's not explicit enough to attract Bad Things to a computer--I hope!--but it is too clearly "adult content" to be posted here. What David B. Clear drew today. If you're not on his Substack list, if you get on it now and ask for the cartoon about "why my wife gets upset," you'll probably get it because he's a nice guy, and you will laugh.

Decorating 

If you have all the ornaments, do you need a tree? 

Photo shared by Joe Jackson at TheViewFromLadyLake; Google credits a foreign YouTube account.

The advantage would be that the cats could still pull down individual ornaments, or tangle the fishing line holding them up, but they couldn't knock a tree down onto anything smaller. Also you could claim to be doing something novel, maybe trendy, in the event that something happened to the tree. It would be more festive than claiming a last-minute conversion to the literal reading of that text in the book of Isaiah that advises, "Learn not the ways of the heathen...for the customs of the people are vain; for one cutteth a tree..." 

Unless, of course, you actually believe either that (a) decorating a Christmas tree is a sinful piece of extravagance, which on my budget it certainly is, or (b) your evergreen tree should be left standing and decorated for the birds. This web site respects both of those positions.

Pharmaceutical Concerns 

If you watch wholesome family-oriented TV channels or shows, the TV industry guesses that you're probably a grandparent, and blares ads for patent medications at you every six minutes or so. So even if you don't own a TV, you can probably sing the tunes for O-zemmmm-pic and WE-GO-VY!!! For those outside the US, then, these are currently popular patent medications intended to treat diabetes but now madly popular as weight loss drugs. In fact, while the Ozempic commercial stays within the bounds of suggesting that diabetic patients ask their doctors about the drug, the Wegovy commercial tries to lure all kinds of overweight people into what appears to be a parade through the streets celebrating the drug.

In both formulas the active ingredient is semaglutide. Semaglutide is toxic. So I was dismayed to read that an e-acquaintance is going on Ozempic for weight loss. It may be a little safer than amphetamine, but not a lot.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ozempic-semaglutide-vision-loss-study-side-effects/

Dang, Gentle Readers. We can do better than this. Michael Moore tried to do it, but failed. Youall are very quiet on this site, but I know some of you are less quiet elsewhere. I'm not as fat as Moore is, nor as famous, so I'll try it. We can do daily walks and post our mileage, sights seen, and any weight loss or other measurable benefits...here, or on Bluesky. If you are already on Bluesky and would like the hashtag to be "WalkWith(your name)", skeet that hashtag to me. (Skeeting is to Bluesky as tweeting was to Twitter.)

Scams

Clickbait headline: "Reverse neuropathic pain by squatting in this position..." I don't know whether the spammer is using my e-mail address for all targets, or is using a program that inserts the recipient's e-mail address where the sender's address ought to be. Whatever. In any case, I didn't send it. I don't do spam. Click that "Report" button and report it to your e-mail host if you get any such garbage purporting to be from me, or from yourself.

Social Media 

It's stopped raining so I'm not sure why the Internet was still fading in and out. I suspect it had something to do with those obnoxious Microsoft "updates" to programs nobody wants. Anyway, here's a short rant about the current state of social media, which may or may not have posted as a comment on someone's blog post about leaving F******k.

"

Instagram is even worse. Last (spring? summer?) I saw an article in the newspaper about a cat rescue I might have been able to help. Person's only contact information was Instagram so I set up a quick temporary account and sent a DM inviting person to e-mail me. Within hours Instagram was screaming that this was some horrible violation of their rules. I had looked at the rules and seen nothing about not sharing your own e-mail address. They didn't say which rules I'd broken, for how long I was banned from Instagram, or whether it had anything to do with some other account with a similar name, or WHAT was going on. Just screeching hate, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT, YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID, YOU HORRIBLE PERSON! Let's just say, I want nothing to do with Instagram, now. Not ever. And using it is not a point in anybody's favor. I never had any respect for F******k, always warned people not to use it; I'd warn people not to use Instagram too.

X isn't bad--it just doesn't work as anything but a place to consume the content of its paying customers, which I rarely want to do. I don't mind seeing a little more of the rich and famous, now and then, but what Twitter was really good for had been fast communication about weather and road conditions. In some people's minds phones could replace that function but, as we know, when anything needs to be said about weather and road conditions phones don't work. Even before Verizon killed phones.

MeWe seemed nice but I never figured out how it works, if it does.

Bluesky was started by Jack Dorsey to replace the original Twitter, and seems to have a chance of doing that, but it's not there yet. But it has landscape and pet pictures, and John Scalzi, Barb Taub, and other cool kids use it.

"

Grandmother's Kitchen, and Mother's, and Biscuits

Someone wanted "poems" on the topic of "Grandmother's Kitchen," with particular attention to biscuits. I didn't think my memories were what they wanted. The standard Southern biscuit made with selfrising flour and, yes, buttermilk if you have any, as imitated by fast-food restaurants, is made from recipes printed on flour bags. It's palatable enough, and my mother and grandmothers knew how to do it; I think all Southern women do. But, for their own various reasons, they almost never did it. Mother's reason was that she baked whole-wheat biscuits.

Grandmother really lost 

her kitchen with her leg.

Grandfather and Aunt Dotty

cooked after their own

uninspired fashion

until Mother, who had

the talent for cooking,

climbed on a chair to

show them what could be done.

At five my mother

cooked for the family

and summer laborers.

And washed up afterward.

Grandmother sewed and

raised foster children,

twenty-nine, all told,

all from a wheelchair...

Usually Granma

did not discuss food

but one day, when Mother

was late in town, she

offered us biscuits.

Even at age ten

I could do better

biscuits, like Mother’s,

no sour old buttermilk,

not too much butter,

wheat flour with bran in

(the trick to which was

grinding it minutes

before you baked it).

I put more salt in

biscuits than Mother did.

Call them Yankee biscuits,

make the most of it;

relatives ate them.

I surreptitiously

checked out my Granma’s

kitchen. It was bare.

Like Mother Hubbard’s.

Even the Bisquick

and buttemilk, used up.

No wheat, no grinder,

no baking powder,

no jar of fresh milk,

no bowl of butter;

even a box of salt

Granma did not keep.

Adults could choose to

do whatever they liked,

even to have a

pitiful, bare kitchen.

I knew that Granma had

plenty of money

but hated cooking

and did it badly.

Her biscuits were sour

and burnt on the bottoms.

No worries, she said,

no rules like Mother’s.

If we didn’t like

the world’s worst biscuits

Granma would as soon

serve children candy

instead.

THE RECIPE

Mother and I enjoyed making these “health food” biscuits before we realized that we were celiacs who should never have eaten them. Here is the recipe in case non-celiacs can enjoy it:

INGREDIENTS

Milk: About 1 to 1-1/2 cups milk, which you have obtained from your Jersey cow earlier in the morning and shoved into the refrigerator, in screw-top glass quart jars, as soon as you got back from the barn. Homogenize by shaking the jar before you pour out milk. Pasteurizing is for town dwellers. (It was not a concern for us, but might be one for you, that some nasty diseases can be spread between cows and people who drink raw milk. The reason why selling raw milk is subject to legal questions is that it's possible for cows to be carriers of tuberculosis. Ours weren't. We were lucky.)

Butter: No more than 2 tablespoons butter, which you have obtained by churning milk earlier in the week. This is fresh, unsalted butter. If you don’t have any, you’ll have to churn some. This is done by screwing the lid on a glass quart jar of milk as tight as it will go and shaking the jar for about an hour. Margarine would work, but it costs money.

Salt: Mother used a scant ½ teaspoon salt. I used a full teaspoon.

Baking powder: 1 level teaspoon. We used a lot of Clabber Girl, because that was what was in the store, but Mother always bought Rumford’s when she could.

Flour: Whole wheat flour goes stale and bitter fast and should be bought only as a last resort. If you grind the wheat right before using the flour, it will be as bland as the awful denatured white stuff in the stores. Grind about 3 cups. Sift out large pieces of bran.

METHOD:

Heat oven to 350-425 degrees Fahrenheit. This takes a while, with a wood stove; you started preheating the oven before you milked the cow. Scoop out butter and rub enough to leave a thin film over the baking sheet. Put the rest in the bowl, the colder the better. Sift in flour, salt, and baking powder. Stir briskly and lightly, scraping the bowl rather than crushing the flour against it, just to let the butter and wheat-germ oil (in the flour) mingle. Stir in 1 cup cold milk, then enough to make a stiff dough. Do not roll this dough. Pat it out ¼ to ½” thick on the baking sheet. Cut biscuit shapes in the dough but leave them and the cut-out shapes where they are in the pan. Bake15-25 minutes depending on how hot you’ve been able to get the oven. Biscuits will be flaky and tender if baked fast, heavier if baked slowly. Biscuits can be spread with butter, honey, or molasses, but are yummiest if eaten fresh out of the oven, a bite of hot biscuit alternating with a sip of cold milk. After everyone has had one regular biscuit, people who don’t want a second whole biscuit will ask for one of the cut-out shapes.

Jersey cows are special. Traditionally small, slim, pale yellow cows with enormous dark eyes and dark-shadowed eyelids, they produce very creamy milk. When you skim the milk to drink it cold out of a glass you skim almost half of it away, but when you cook with this milk all that cream saves most of the time needed to combine cold butter with flour. So, traditionally, people would keep a Hereford cow and a Jersey cow. The Hereford might have any name and probably answered to none; the Jersey probably answered to “Jers.” You drank the milk from the Hereford cow and used the milk from the Jersey cow to make biscuits.

TRADITIONAL VARIATION:

If you substitute corn for wheat and bake it in an iron skillet rather than on a sheet, you have a traditional Southern cornbread.

GRANOLA GREEN VARIATIONS:

If you substitute other grains for wheat you’ll get a variety of interesting flavors. Try oats, rye, barley, buckwheat, brown rice, and millet, alone or in combination. Corn, oats, rice, and millet are naturally gluten-free grains, which means they’ll make very crumbly breads.

If you grind a few nuts or seeds with the grain you’ll get a high-protein flour. Pumpkin and other cucurbit seeds, sunflower seeds, and sesame seeds are nice. Beans, peas, and lentils will make usable flours, but they’ll be heavy flours that need a longer cooking time, definitely not ideal for biscuits.

The reason why biscuits and cornbread were not traditionally sweetened was that sweet doughs burn easily. If you want to bake bread quickly at a high temperature, leave the dough bland or salted. Save the sweeteners to spread on the baked bread at the table.

Book Review: Traitor

Title: Traitor

Author: Krista D. Ball

Date: 2017

Quote: "They'd want her to talk about what she'd done, how she'd turned herself in. A collaborator. A traitor."

In an alternate world, similar enough to our own to have had a President Barack Obama in 2012, humanoid aliens were found on Earth and, in 2017, aliens had started a war. In this war the appeals to philosophical ideals relate vaguely to transhumanism. The bottom line is, as usual, Us vs. Them. 

Rebecca had a vague philosophical alignment with the Us when, during a lovers' quarrel, she "betrayed" her girlfriend Katherine. Believing Kat was dead and her parents were still alive, she surrendered to the Them side and accepted a low-level position in Their military service, hoarding her money to buy her way out. Then she finds out that her parents are dead and Kat is alive. 

Rebecca's sexual identity is still evolving. At the alien spaceport where she works, women can and do rape men, and one thing that nudges Rebecca toward overt identification with the Us side is witnessing some Them threaten to torture a man with rape-by-a-woman, but Rebecca still appreciates muscular male arms and shoulders. She's been dating a man for lack of anything better to do. He's easily discarded but, before any possible future reconciliation with Kat, she's also attracted to a male prisoner of war. To find out whom she chooses readers will have to read further volumes in this series.

This is not my genre of fantasy, but some people will look forward to the movie. There's lots of alien swearing rendered by Rebecca's translation device as references to male bodies, lots of violence, and some things blowing up. The movie might even sell.

Web Log for 12.11-15.24

In spite of Microsoft malware, I did find a few links worth sharing...

Christmas 

If party plans are getting to you, Sherry Marr understands.

https://stardreamingwithsherrybluesky.blogspot.com/2010/12/night-before-christmas-at-my-house.html

Economy, The

Do your members of Congress deserve a pay raise? The position of this web site is no, across the board: All Congressmen are already paid enough to live on, and none of them should ask for a raise until inflation has been reversed to the degree that wages and prices are where they were in 1825. (Things that were invented in the last 200 years are luxuries, so sellers might ask as much for new ones as they did when the inventions were new, and buyers could bring prices down.) Student labor might pay less than a dollar a day; then again, a week's groceries might cost less than a dollar per person. This would help the very young understand that stable wages and prices serve them better than raising the minimum hourly wage and watching all the prices jump up, so that, a year after a raise in the minimum hourly wage, minimum wage workers can afford less than they could before. 

In 1825 Congressmen were still earning six dollars a day, which has been estimated to be the equivalent of $160 per day in inflated money, and if mine helped shrink wages and prices back to where they started I'd gladly vote him a raise as high as $6.50. This would be a merit raise, which, being awarded to one or two individuals at a time, does not damage the economy and make everyone poorer in the end, the way raising the wage standard always does. 

Meanwhile, turning down pay raises is the most patriotic and public-spirited thing a Congressman can do, and is recommended to any Congressman who wants another term.

https://www.hillfaith.org/hill-staff-views/hill-staff-views-slightly-less-than-half-of-staffers-think-their-boss-deserves-a-raise/

Music

At Berea College we practiced Spanish grammar by playing those childish substitution games where kids practice the rules for putting different words into sentences. Each student picked something person liked, and for the rest of the term we linked that student's name with what person liked in sentences. "Joe would have liked to have been eating shrimp." "Jane would have liked to have been swimming." And one young man's favorite thing was listening to Mariah Carey. This meme's for him.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kKH2xVcM6bYx26k1pBkZwYdA7gNBzxDac

At the time she was just another pretty girl with an unusually wide vocal range, but over the years, so many of the other pretty little songbirds have washed up on the rocks...I've forgotten the young man's name by now, but he picked the one with staying power.

Politics

It's the sign on the wall behind the photo. For anyone whose device fails to enlarge the photo enough that they can read the sign: "Libertarians--Diligently Plotting to Take Over the World and Leave You Alone."

The position of this web site is in favor of finding points of agreement and triangulating toward what everyone can agree is the general direction of the Highest Good for All...when possible. People who have built long, largely successful careers on bad ideas may be beyond hope. Your roommate probably is not. Malice toward none, charity toward  all...relatively few people are either child molesters or warmongering psychopaths, etc.

Google traces the image to somebody called SaintChristian7 at a site called Memedroid. I saw it in a belated addition to the latest post at the Mirror, from a Disqussant called Grumpy Rabbit.

Road, Rules of the

Another vintage link from Blogspot...I think I can make his first point clearer. Roads were invented for everybody. Motor vehicle registration and licensing came later. Those fees don't give the person the right to use the road; they give the person the right to put the vehicle on the road. Only motor vehicles need to be registered and licensed because only motor vehicles (incorrectly operated) kill human beings daily. It's the pedestrians', bicyclists', and horses' road. They let motorists use it if the motorists behave nicely.

I seriously think we need laws providing that after an incident of reckless or aggressive driving, any road should be closed to motor traffic for a year unless the driver self-reports and pays for all damages. Let other motorists go after the offending driver.

https://thebarefoot.wordpress.com/2017/06/17/common-comments-on-the-topic-of-cycling/