With the emphasis on the night of 10.11, because I already know, opening a new blog post veru early in the morning of 10.10.25, that if things go as planned I'll be away from the computer until approximately time to disconnect it tonight. It's a chilly night, possibly the night of the first frost, and I am sitting up with the computer, being my own nightwatchman, seeing how long I can feel cozy in a hand-knitted tabard without turning on any heating device.
Active and healthy people in the Eastern States? Prepare now to save money on your heating bills! Add layers as needed, and exercise until you can peel off the layers and feel comfortable at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. 50 degrees, or 55 if that's as low as the thing goes, is a good temperature at which to leave your thermostat all year.
Animals
This is the mix of species I saw last August--very pretty, but it made me wonder where all the male Tiger Swallowtails were. Females, most young and impatient to mate, some old and still unmated, were positively lekking rather than flying about, laying eggs, as they normally do. Seeing photos of the same phenomenon in a different place makes me wonder...has New Roundup had some special effect on male Tiger Swallowtails?
Some English moths.
And let's let a cat (person) find something good to say, and remember, about Gavin Newsom...
Architecture
Since a reader expressed an interest in the history of my home town...After the factories that slapped up the simple foursquare-ball-court-shaped houses with the ill-advised four-hole chimneys set in the middle, the next big house-building trend was this guy's designs. Within its corporate limits Gate City had been fairly well filled by that time, but Gustafson house plans can be found in the area. I think Mother's house in Upper Sevier Terrace, Kingsport, was one of them. I know for sure Dad's "rich" uncle's house in Clinchport was; the uncle kept the advertisement for his home's layout in the house, all his life. Gustafson houses varied in size and exterior detailing but they were solid, prosperous-looking houses, some likely to be standing a hundred years from now, with hardwood floors, spacious rooms that just missed being wheelchair-accessible (often at least one floor was accessible once the wheelchair was inside), and all-electric central heating.
A brief outline of major architectural trends in my part of the world:
Prior to 1840: Very few people tried to settle and build houses in what became Scott County, Virginia, before 1840. The mountains formed a natural border between different indigenous groups' territory. What became Gate City was the northeastern border of Cherokee territory and had a trading site that was visited by adventurous members of other groups. Often single people came to the trading site in search of someone to marry--but their permanent homes, if their culture built permanent homes, would be somewhere other than here. The first European immigrants who tried building homes and farms here were frontiersmen who risked having their homes destroyed, and being killed or enslaved, by war parties from one indigenous group or another.
1840-1890: Scott County was now part of Virginia but was sparsely populated. The "old" families lived on large farms, which were self-sustaining but not very profitable, and built big comfortable farmhouses as they were able to afford them. Into and beyond the 1860s many families were still living in the sort of "little cabins" one man was able to put up for himself. Surviving houses from this period, though well built (they had to be well built to have lasted this long), surprise visitors with their small size. Early settlers camped in buildings that would later be described as sheds, once they built farmhouses. A whole family could pack into one room at night or huddle in it during bad weather, because they spent most of their time outdoors. They saw themselves as pioneers rather than poor people but most families' worldly possessions were few. A disproportionate number of these people belonged to various English or German Protestant religious groups that set relatively low value on worldly goods.
(Slavery was legal, and slaves were sold at the Netherland Inn in Kingsport, but big plantations that depended on large numbers of slaves were further south; if local families had slaves they had one or two "domestic servants" at a time. The numbers and names of these people were not constant from census to census. A slave who had worked for a local family for a few years had the survival skills to go on to Kansas or Canada if person chose.)
1890-1950: An economic boom built Gate City and other small towns up, then gave way to an economic bust that was aggravated by epidemic diseases. At this period many of the big comfortable farmhouses were built, though many of them were destroyed in the next hundred years by chimney fires. Moderately large, comfortable houses in town, with innovations like indoor plumbing and garages, also date to this period. Also built in this period, still abundant in Gate City, are the factory laborers' "little houses" consisting of four rooms laid out in a square, with one square chimney set at an oblique angle at the center of the square. These houses were slapped up quickly, often all wood with a metal roof, no finished basements or attics. Sometimes they sat on stilts above a crawl space. Roofs had to have a steep slope for drainage; this could mean a simple chevron-shaped roof that might later be raised up over a finished attic, with windows, or it might mean a pyramid-shaped roof. Though neither imaginative nor comfortable to live in (they did not originally have bathrooms) and set on small lots, these houses were durable, and many have been built up into decent houses with bathrooms, garages, porches, basements, attics or even livable upper storeys, insulation in the walls, and other amenities. the factory laborers had to do without
Builders of houses other than the laborers' "shacks" included memorable local characters. My neighborhood was the home of a brilliant self-taught architect who might have gone far if he hadn't been an alcoholic. He was alive, though old and ill, when I was a small child. He built quirky houses that suited his and his clients' purposes. I lived in two of his houses, one that my parents rented for $25 per month, from him and his wife, across the road from their house, and one that he had built for a family who bought a small lot from my grandparents below their home. The one that was on the builder's own property had been built by him on a sort of dare bet when he was young and wanted to show what he could do. It perched on the side of a steep hill, with one side almost touching the ground and one side perched on 15-foot stilts. The one his clients sold back to my family was more conventional and comfortable, and became the Cat Sanctuary.
1950-2000: During this period several families made the transition from living in a nineteenth century "cabin," usually built of boards rather than logs and often not painted or maintained since the day it was built while the residents hoped to replace or leave it, to living in a "modern" suburban-style house, as built by Gustafson and others. Houses of unpainted boards, usually black with mold, as photographed in coal towns in the 1940s, were embarrassments to many of my schoolmates who were now recognizably poorer than other people. By 2000 such houses, if they still stood, were unoccupied--the mere sheds or outbuildings behind the nicer, bigger, better finished houses the builders of the "cabins" had always hoped their heirs would have. However, newer houses, though "up to code" on matters like eight-foot ceilings (older houses often had seven-foot or even lower ceilings) and electrical outlets, are often built only "to code" without imagination, charm, or room for improvement, with small rooms and on small lots.
The poor man's alternative to this conformism was our ubiquitous trailer houses. For as long as a building was recognizable as having once been towable on the back of a truck, it could sit on private property, have running water and electric lights, and still be taxed only as a trailer. Trailers aren't built for long-term living and need to be rebuilt into houses if they are to be used as houses, but visitors will see many houses whose owners would rather live with cheap, shabby building materials that seem to be crying for replacement than pay a little more in property tax.
2000-present: Local government's failure to oppose "Agenda 21" in a strong, solid way has put a damper on new construction or improvement of existing buildings. It's obvious that some people want to remove small towns, which don't fit into the socialist narrative as easily as cities do, from the American scene. "Tiny houses," which are smaller and tackier even than trailers, are being touted because they put Americans into less spacious, less comfortable living conditions that arouse less envy from the slums of backward feudal-and-or-socialist nations. Bah. We don't need to mandate that, say, someone who owns a 50-acre farm on which the nice old house needs a new roof and walls, who has recently been nudged into a "tiny house," must restore a two-storey house with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a full basement, walk-in closets, fireplaces, and balconies. Person may be content in a "tiny house" if person's child and grandchildren move into the original house-sized house. But we do need to mandate that any "zoning" or other building regulations that have the effect of pushing people off farms or into smaller, more crowded housing be made unenforceable. We don't need to criminalize, but we do need to frown on, having more children than bedrooms, building rooms less than ten feet square, selling lots smaller than an acre, packing more than one family into one building, building houses so close together that people fret about how their neighbors' houses look, or anything else that resembles slum living conditions. We need to focus on teaching the backward residents of slum areas how to prevent births so that their heirs, at least, can live in conditions that are spacious enough to allow people to live in peace with one another.
Real progress would begin with, when anyone starts flapping his mouth about how anyone else's house looks or how other people use their property and their time, and cannot show that the other people's activities are doing measurable material harm to him, a cultural mandate that that person move to a house where he can't see any neighbors' houses. Virginia is not for bears or elk. It is for people who want to live decently and are willing to do the work toward that end.
(Yes, I could do this as a photo essay for the Meow, if anyone really wanted to see it.)
Christian
Wendy Welch has insights to share with Democrats or "mainstream," not-Trump-fans, Republicans:
Crime
That out-of-season fire that did so much damage in California last winter? Seems it was intentionally set. The report didn't mention what drugs the young man had been taking when he set fire to a Bible he had with him, tossed it into dry vegetation, then watched what he had done. I'm not sure how "creepily," or how much out of remorse, he volunteered to try to help fire fighters, but by that time the fire was out of control and they told him to go away.
Sometimes these people just die, and I'm not saying demonic activity is not involved. Not long ago this web site reflected on the case of a senile man who went to the door, when a child approached the door, and shot the kid...fatally. Why did his family leave such a man alone with deadly weapons? The man died before the case went to trial.
Election 2025
The in-your-face awfulness of Angry Abbylab Spambucket's campaign, or spampaign, continues. She doesn't have positive talking points. Apparently there is no reason why anyone would vote for her, unless it might be a man who has a Real Thing for long blonde hair.
I thought her latest ad was going to turn up a positive point at last when a man in a police uniform said the Spambucket used to be a police officer too. What would you expect? "She's brave, hardworking, reliable, fun to know, and great with kids! Vote for my old friend Abby!" I think everyone who's been paying attention to the campaign must be a solid Sears supporter by now but the support of a co-worker is always nice.
But no. Officer Sellout had nothing good to say about the Spammer. The theme of angry, ugly spamming continued on. "We police officers don't LIKE people who don't support ONE OF OURS." Nothing about Angry being competent, lovable, or goodhearted. Just a threat. Vote for Angry if you want anyone to come out the next time you call the police.
For Ds, it must be borne in mind, this is what now passes for a moderate point of view. Real left-wingnuts want to replace American police with UN "peacekeeping forces." Europe really, really wants to be wealthy through colonization again. Angry's saying she doesn't want to sell out to the UN as dictator. Whether even that is true remains to be seen, but at least, in her angry, ugly way, she's saying it.
But her way of saying it just oozes corruption. If Future Governor Sears were to resign in order to be a full-time grandmother it would still be incumbent on all subsequent governors to establish a policy that known Rs only ever get warnings and known Ds always get taken to the police station, just to show that Spamberger-related corruption is not being allowed...unless, of course, the Spambag loses by enough of a 99-1 humiliation to clear Ds of suspicion of having supported a campaign based on corruption.
Obituary
Diane Keaton...I always think of her face as it was in the 1970s. I'm only just seeing how much Mrs. Roberts, who used to run the cafe where I used to run this web site, and stil runs the AirBNB, looks like her.
Poetry
Well, free verse anyway...Barry Casey used to teach at that church college I used to attend. He was tagged as the resident hippie after publicly praying at an anti-nuclear prayer vigil. He led groups to cook soup at the Community for Creative Non-Violence homeless shelter. He taught a seminar called "Christian Living in the World" which, one term, included me and also the guy who grew up to become the shyster lawyer who filed bogus claims to collect tuition bills alumni had paid long ago.
Anyway I hadn't thought of looking for people who were teaching in 1980 on the Internet, but it was nice to find Barry Casey still writing free verse. I hope he reads this because, whatever it failed to do for some people, the ideas we discussed in that seminar in Christian Living were in fact formative influences on my life. The teenybopper I was, sitting in that seminar, hardly knew from week to week whether I was still trying to be a Christian or not. Both the beliefs and the discipline associated with them often seemed impossible. As my bones solidified and my hormones settled down, being a radical Christian solidified and settled too; much that seemed impossible became easy.
(Those who remember that I've mentioned a student labor supervisor who was a German-American Zwerg might look at that cell phone photo and wonder... Barry Casey was an ordinary-looking teacher. The lady who wasn't five feet tall, but had cultivated the ability to "tower over" people who were six feet tall, was a librarian.)
