Book Review: Money Bona Fide or Non Bona Fide

Title: Money Bona Fide or Non-Bona Fide

Author: Edward E. Popp

Date: 1970

Publisher: Wisconsin Education Fund

ISBN: none

Length: 126 pages

Quote: “While it is appropriate to use the term usury when referring to very high interest rates, we must also remember that demanding low interest rates may be usury as well...if it is physically impossible for the borrower to pay them...also...if the lender loans counterfeit or inflationary money.”

Before Bitcoin, there were small groups of people, disgusted by the antics of the bank and money industry, who got together and worked out schemes to invent their own “money,” valid among members of the group only. It’s legal, legitimate, potentially a useful market corrective, and also severely limited. Given the alternative of being paid in Good Neighbor Coupons or in U.S. dollars...well, actually, for the duration of some very successful Town Festivals, intelligent people do exchange U.S. dollars for Good Neighbor Coupons. But not during the rest of the year.

During the recent Grapefest in the suburb-town of Grapevine, outside Dallas, wine, art, and street fair lovers shelled out the dollars for coupons, with the warning that this year’s coupons would have souvenir value only at the end of this year’s Grapefest. That’s typical. Citizens could send a message to the federal government in an absolutely legal, public-spirited, and probably delicious way. People who’ve tried it have, however, generally been tagged as wingnuts whether “left” or “right,” and alternative money has rarely reached high value even as a souvenir. Grapefest coupons just aren’t considered as exciting a collection piece as Confederate money, old-style printed food stamps, or 1940s ration tickets.

Edward E. Popp and his Wisconsin Education Fund seriously wanted to correct the 1970s’ “recession” with their own Wis-cash. (Insert jokes about cheese and/or snow here.) They wanted others to consider similar correctives: the bigger a protest movement gets, the better.

The result of which was...that Popp wrote a book that’s of historical interest to present-time protesters. The late George Peters had studied this book, while able to see, and his review is worth quoting here:

“This Mr. Popp gets out in left field about page 70.

It won’t work as he says.

Even so it can be done.

But I guess there would be some injustice.”

 Nevertheless, there was considerable appeal in the idea, as expressed on page 29:

“There will not be inflation and deflation...No one will have a monopoly...The price of goods and services will not be able to be raised or lowered by the banking system...People...would know that when the government asked for more taxes, it would be asking for the people to work harder...Government officials, as well as others, who expect the government officials to take something from everyone to give something to all, might—just might—learn the meaning of justice and they just might think about practicing it.”

One of the Islamic world’s great advantages is that, although Islamic banks demand money from customers to sustain the bank operations, they don’t charge interest that compounds into a spiral of debt and inflation. Muslims can be extremely rich or extremely poor; more of them are poor than are rich and the traditions of modesty and generosity don’t completely fix this, but they know how rich or poor they are, year to year. They pay a straightforward, reasonable fee for using a bank if they do, and keep their cash if they prefer not to use the bank, and their countries don’t reach economic conditions where they have to take a wheelbarrow full of money to the store to fill a handbasket with groceries. Some of their countries have been poor, before the oil boom, but money has tended to keep its value. 

Jewish law forbids charging interest on loans to fellow Jews. More recently written corporate law removes individual Jews from the responsibility of owning a corporation that is an out-of-control, amoral money-making machine with no religious identity, so Jewish Americans suffer as much from mortgages and credit cards as everyone else does. The trouble in the United States and Europe is that for a long time Europe allowed businesses to be operated by specific families. Jews were often barred from farming or entering trades, so they specialized in banking. While only the Rothschilds became quite as wealthy as the Rothschilds, the historical fact was that a loophole in the law of Moses allowed Jews to gouge as much interest out of enemy nations as they could get. As bankers they tended to define everyone, even Jews of different nationality, as an enemy. 

The other Europeans, who were nominally Christians and thus claimed to be adoptive heirs to Abraham, might have adopted the law of Moses for themselves and built a modern banking system as good as the Islamic one, but the historical fact was that they chose to treat everyone, even relatives, as an enemy, when it came to charging compound interest on terms limited by what had rallied a mob to run a banker out of town recently. They approached banking the way they perceived the Jews doing it only without even the constraint of kinship. And this fouled-up system, with its roots in intertribal warfare as a primary source of wealth, was what they brought to North America. Europeans learned about banking at a stage in their evolution when they still heard a claim like, “I never worked a day in my life! Every one of those cattle grazing on the hill was won from another man in a fight!”as a boast. And unless and until we start by recognizing the law of Moses, trying to fix our banking system is going to be like trying to bathe a Tar Baby—a glob of tar wrapped up like a baby (or some other object people wanted to pick up) to fool the naïve into getting tar all over their hands and clothes.

Such reforms as we have achieved have been made primarily by religious groups that are willing to be perceived as extreme, fanatical...and puritanical, with bans on all sorts of things manufactured by Unbelievers just because the community’s hoard of money is maintained by members not buying this or that.

Popp’s recommendation for reform started with using coins—“as few Federal Reserve notes as is practical”—and, if “producing or selling goods,” “issue certificates of credit,” and, “if our governmental body is in need of money and is considering borrowing it, advise it not to borrow, but to issue tax credit certificates.”

It’s still workable, Gentle Readers. Making it work will require mindful use of money, frugality, discipline, purchasing things from individuals you respect even if you can get similar things cheaper from the greedhead corporations. The Internet can help mindful communities connect across the miles but, in the long term or on a large scale, it won’t be reliable; the Internet itself is a greedhead corporate scheme and will be made to work against anyone who is using it to beat a monopoly or price-fixing cartel. (Similarly, the federal government will, if regarded as our only defense against the monopolies and cartels, become the biggest monopoly of all.) Then again, since we’re all subject to uncontrollable losses of income these days, those are ideas worth our attention in any case.

If you don’t have much income, it’s much better to live frugally on a small income than it is to have more of some things doled out to you as a welfare cheat.

If you have a decent income, it’s much better to make your own purchasing decisions and reward people who produce good things than it is to peel off money mindlessly for whatever the big-chain stores push at you.

Do you need Popp’s Money for guidance on mindful spending, or would a newer book or one relating to a community that interests you, such as the Mennonites, be more useful? Which should be your first book on mindful use of money is a topic beyond the scope of this review. I recommend Popp’s Money as a book for people who are ready to form an economic community (and not willing to affiliate with a religious one). If that’s not where you are, Money is primarily a book of historical interest. It can help you communicate with “preppers” of a certain vintage, being part of their history. It did not inspire a major economic movement all by itself, and plenty of historians will tell you it was read only by wingnuts and has no historic significance; they are wrong. But it is a short, simple, readable book that may inspire you to connect with others and become an economic community.

This review says nothing about specific attempts to create and use online community money. That is intentional. Popp obviously did not foresee Bitcoin and this web site is observing Bitcoin for a few more years.

Book Review: Whickering Place

Title: Whickering Place

Author: London Clarke

Date: 2019

Publisher: Carfax Abbey

ISBN: 978-1393470373

Quote: "Agoraphobia is hard enough to overcome on its own, but you've made some great strides this past year."

Avery's therapist is encouraging her to move to the house where her father died, Whickering Place. Her father behaved somewhat strangely after moving there; he's thought to have committed suicide. So, maybe Dr. Murphy believes in the flooding technique for overcoming irrational fears? Whatever. Within a few days, Avery won't know whether she's more afraid of leaving her new home or of staying in it.

The place really does, in its fictive reality, whicker. There are thumping and slithering sounds as if a succubus, a massive snake with a woman's head and arms, lives in the attic. There are bats, too. There is an oldfashioned phone that rings and replays creepy voices. There are mysterious toy coins that turn up in the house and around town, frequently before or after a murder. There are evil spirits who take over the narrative at times, who whisper people's names at night just to scare them.

The town is a fictional world's version of Asheville, where, London Clarke assures us, there is no history of a vampire cult in the real world. 

A few trigger warnings are in order. Teenagers can probably handle the squick level in this book, but adults probably won't want to recommend it to them, or seem to recommend it by letting them catch us reading it. (Hello, younger Nephews? You did not see your Auntie Pris reading this book. You can't be sure someone else is not writing this review.) Avery has a gun--before hospitalization for post-traumatic stress, she was training to be a police officer--and, before the story's over, she will shoot homicidal maniacs to save lives. Avery was a virgin, still getting to know her very first boyfriend when they were shot and he didn't survive, and she's not felt like dating anyone else until she meets the two attractive brothers who are renting rooms in Whickering Place. In the course of the book she will marry one of them and enjoy a proper honeymoon. Before the final page she'll be living alone with the other one, not really as a wife but letting people think she is, waiting to find out whether the one she's married is dead, alive, or maybe undead. The dominant visual image throughout this book is blood, some of it shed consensually in vampire cult meetings, much of it spilled during homicides, some of which are committed by sympathetic characters.

If you enjoy that kind of story, you'll love Whickering Place. Please understand that many people who are brave in real life, including doctors (like one of the brothers) who've worked in emergency rooms and seen this kind of gore on a daily basis, just don't enjoy reading a full-length book about it. 

Bonus for some readers: This novel is part of a series that began with Pearse, previously reviewed here, and describes just how the cult are continuing to use and abuse Pearse Gallagher. Avery will taste Pearse's blood in this story. 

Loyal Opposition Obituary for Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter was the first President I ever actually helped campaign against...lol. This was some time after my brother and I had been publicly identified as "little Republicans," when we were just old enough to wonder what that meant. The person who called us that was Dad's second cousin once removed, a Republican Party operative. Dad also had a third cousin who was a Democratic Party boss. Mother and Dad weren't registered party members but they usually voted for Republicans.

The civics teacher said, "Youall are old enough to take an interest in the election! Watch the debate on television, or listen on the radio."

So I sat up to listen to the debate on the radio. So naturally my brother did too. The debate aired around the time we normally went to bed. We were familiar with the candidates' names and some things the newspaper had reported that they'd said, but not with their accents, or with some of the issues they discussed. Fifteen minutes into the debate, we were asleep. This, however, meant that we'd listened to more of it than most of our school friends had.

One issue was of direct interest to us. Senator Mondale had sponsored a bill that, if passed, would have subsidized full school terms for everyone above age two. We had read a bit of the history and knew that subsidized school always meant compulsory school. 

We went back to school, where everyone was wailing about having to go to school between ages six and sixteen, and informed our friends that the candidate Carter, if elected, would make it mandatory for everyone to go to school between ages two and twenty.

Adults actually worried that our campaign rhetoric was getting too strong. "He has a daughter about your age. What would you say to her if you met her?" This was a real possibility, though not a high probability. The Carters didn't drag Amy out to every small town they visited. In fact the students who were taken to wave at them did not meet Amy, and in fact we were not in that group.

"I would say, 'We think your father is a nice man, but he's all wrong about school'."

"Then that's the way to say it to other people. Everybody is wrong about something, sooner or later. There's no need to be hateful about it."

The school had mock elections. Other grades showed a modest R majority, representative of our town before the Ds got lost in Left field. In our classes Ford got  more than 95% of the mock votes.

Unfortunately the nation as a whole did not have the benefit of clear guidance from middle school students, and for the next four years we observed something like a definition of a nice man being all wrong about a number of things. President Carter did not extend the age of mandatory school attendance but he did create a federal Department of Education that reduced the control parents, teachers, and elected school boards had over schools, thus opening the school choice debate. 

He talked a lot about the energy crisis, or energy crunch. He preferred that people associate the energy crisis with President Nixon, a sneaky rhetorical trick that didn't slip past us children unobserved. He advised businesses, though unfortunately not schools, to close early on Wednesday so they could save on heating expenses. 

I don't think President Carter himself did much to bring sweaters back to the height of fashion--he was not exactly the fashion model type--but his administration did. Sweaters, and longish skirts, knee-high boots, velour, corduroy, "the layered look" generally, and lots of autumn-leaf colors that looked good with Mrs. Carter's auburn hair. I was interested in fashion design at that stage of life. I couldn't afford to make human-sized clothes, but made boxes full of doll-sized designs, some only drawings, some actual doll outfits, demonstrating how much better all those blonde blue-eyed dolls looked in candy-mint pastels and white rather than autumn-leaf colors. I did appreciate the return to fashion of the long missing concept of dressing for the weather.

Like the outbound President, Carter presided over a period of inflation. There wasn't even a virus panic to blame it on. In 1974 one of the sentences I'd learned to say in Spanish was "There is always an inflation after a war," but the inflation took a long time to stop after that undeclared war. I learned, though, that this inflation was to be blamed on the Federal Reserve more than on a series of Presidents who belonged to different parties and had little in common. I didn't blame President Carter for the inflation but I thanked President Reagan for stopping it.

The Carters really tried to make frugal and Green choices fashionable. Bicycles for adults, recycling, gardening, cooking and canning your garden's produce, weaving your own fabric and sewing your own clothes, were trendy in the Carter years. People started knitting again. People who weren't Amish were mail-ordering hand tools from Amish stores. I liked that. Jimmy Carter had actually insisted on his right to walk rather than be paraded in a car when he officially moved into the White House. Washington frothed. The guards threatened mutiny. Presidents of the United States forfeit the right to walk down the street like human beings, everyone agreed. The Carter administration failed to make walking to work a dominant trend but did establish that walking and car-pooling were cool things for ordinary people to do, at least among True Greens. Using public transportation also became cool, in some cities. The core of Washington's Metrorail system had been designed before, but it came into actual use during, the Carter years.

Those who talked about foreign policy thought Carter could have taken a tougher line. Considering how much the US had invested in the Panama Canal, some thought he sold the management of it back to Panama too cheap. Some thought he showed too much sympathy to the Arabs, some to the Israelis. If the peace negotiations with which he helped didn't last long, still, anyone who endures public criticism for being too nice to both sides of a dispute has to be doing something right. The Ayatollah (a title I will probably always want to translate as "well-known religious maniac") Ruhollah Khomeini held Americans who had been working in Iran as hostages, ordering that the ones who tried to escape or resist be murdered, the others treated courteously with every effort to convert them to Islam. Some thought Carter should have tried to appease the Ayatollah; some thought he should have declared war. President Truman had famously observed that when Americans were "passing the buck" of blame, "the buck" stopped with the President, and this was certainly seen for President Carter. He was scolded Left and Right. 

Well...what would you have done with the Ayatollah? There is an ancient and honorable tradition of national leaders offering pardons to convicted murderers if they can get people like the Ayatollah off the scene, but not doing that made most of the hostages' experience pleasant and educational; having the Ayatollah murdered might have got the hostages murdered too. I think this was when I learned to say that it was possible that the President had information I didn't have. I've said that about all of them since.

Some of the information the President had that not all of his constituents had was made available even to me as I entered my teens. I knew that our relations with the Arab countries were strained not only by our alliance with Israel but also by market competition among oilmen, some of whom wanted to aggravate hostilities in order to boost their own profits at others' expense. The Gulf War was being set up in the 1970s, perhaps even the 1960s. Some of the things you might have thought of saying to Khomeini would have been unacceptable to some oilmen whose support the President wanted.

Some of the things you might have thought to saying to some other people seem not to have occurred to Jimmy Carter because he was too nice to think about them. The Carters accepted the misleading and superficial information the cult chose to let them see, and spoke favorably about Jim Jones's cult. They spoke diplomatically to Idi Amin, too. Idi Amin represented a lot of people but passing up an opportunity to have Jim Jones locked up might have qualified as too nice.

President Carter was serious about diversity, too, although some saw him as the quintessence of nice-but-wrong even about that. He appointed people as different from the usual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant "President's Men" as Andrew Young, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and, most unusual of all, Billy Carter. They were all roasted thoroughly while living. Then there was the time, a BBC reporter recalled to me, still indignant ten years later, when President Carter looked around the group of White men who were discussing some issue or other, noticed that the reporter was the only one in the room who didn't look like part of a clone, and asked the reporter to pose with the actual discussants just to "add a little color to the picture." We know that the BBC was a better organization in those days than it is now, because a worldwide inquiry into why real Black American voters had not been invited to be in the group was not launched. 

Another passing eddy of tackiness that caught President Carter was told to and retold by another writer, but it's too good to forget...Carter thought it best if his staff were all safely married. One young man was in an open-ended relationship, and it was not his boss's place to nudge him along: "And when do you plan to have the wedding?" The young man muttered something about "when the magnolias are in bloom," possibly with the mental reservation that he was thinking of magnolia trees that hadn't been planted yet. "In Georgia," Carter reportedly said, "the magnolias are in bloom right now!"

And everyone always agreed that, even by US standards, Jimmy Carter smiled too much. 

Well...the Cold War was on. How quickly we forget. The Cold War was a trade war conducted on terms of "coldly" minimizing contact with countries "Behind the Iron Curtain," but in practice it meant that, for forty years (1947-1988; Wikipedia says 1947-1991), everyone had to live with the prospect of an all-out "hot" nuclear war with the Bad Old Soviet Union, any minute. We didn't think "We'll show those Russians that our ideas work better," although that was what we did. We thought "If the Russians drop bombs on..." and "If the President does anything stupid and starts World War III..." Presidents Johnson and Nixon had seemed just about foolish enough to do that. President Carter did not. Considering what we were told about what was going on in several countries where people had reasons to feel annoyed by us as a nation, both Carter and  Ford were appreciated just for staying out of any more wars. Real reconciliation between men who had risked their lives for their pro- or anti-war beliefs, in the 1960s, often took place only in the 1980s but President Carter at least tried to start that, too.

President Carter had written a campaign book called Why Not the Best. The book was less inspirational, more about party politics, than the title sounded. Baby-boomers were, undeniably, attracted to the idea of asking "why not the best" when making any decision. Did we want to keep having new fashion looks every season, all interpreted in nylon and polyester, or to buy some decent cotton and wool clothes and wear them for years? We said "Why not the best?" and bought the decent cotton and wool clothes with classic cuts. Did we want college educations? I didn't, particularly, but "Why not the best?"--the Pell Grant program made it possible for every literate citizen of my age to go to college. Were we going to let a federal Department of Education lower the standards of public schools even below where they'd been? "Why not the best?"--we'd homeschool! And so on! So then in 1980, in the next presidential election, we said "Why not the best?" and elected President Reagan. 

I think the Reagan administration is guaranteed a higher rating than the Carter administration. President Reagan not only stayed out of any real wars but ended the Cold War. If the President's primary duty is to avoid getting into any avoidable wars and win any wars that become unavoidable, Reagan did that, and with flair, and while adjusting to increasing physical disability. However, only some of us get to be Irish. I don't think the Carter administration was a huge success, but it was less bad than several; consider the Bushes' wars, Obama's race treason on the welfare issue, Biden's vaccine mandates, Johnson's war, Nixon's failure either to end or to win the war, Truman's bombs, or FDR's or Wilson's power grabs.

What Carter will be best remembered for is that, having been a relatively young President (though his face didn't show it), he had more time than anyone else has ever had, or is likely to have again, to be an Ex-President. He used that time to show the world how retirement and aging are done in a healthy society. He travelled, socialized, wrote, and continued to teach Sunday School as he'd done before being elected, but mostly he donated real work to a charitable cause. 

Both Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter continued to be describable as nice-but-wrong in several ways throughout their lives. They promoted measles vaccines and other ideas this web site considers to have been mistakes. The houses Jimmy Carter helped to build are small and tend to be packed too closely together. Some lines in the Carters' jointly produced book, Everything to Gain, sound inane--though others are excellent. At least the Carters did work for good causes. They donated their celebrity status to charity, rather than using it to sell patent medicines or bad ideas.

They seemed to stay middle-aged, but more youthful and active than most middle-aged people, for forty years. They literally wrote the book on how to age gracefully. They never avoided talking about either politics or religion; they never seemed divisive or exclusive about anyone else's politics or religion. While Jimmy Carter seemed neurologically to be an introvert, he also lived more modestly, and made himself much easier to meet or talk to, than any other ex-President ever has done.

I never met any of his family. Washington is a city that attracts celebrity hounds; in some social circles any evidence of the most cursory acquaintance with a Famous Person is worth money. If you want to speed up things, from waiting for a table in a restaurant to getting an appointment with a medical specialist, first visit your Congressman and latch on to a souvenir pen, then be sure the desk clerk sees you use the souvenir pen to fill out a form. After that, some Congressmen may be seen as more valuable than others, but in any case the suggestion that you might be either related to or working for a Congressman will speed up matters that run very slowly for an ordinary unconnected person. Do you think that's very nice, either to the individual the clerk is waiting on, or to Congressmen? I do not. I think the Carters' way of expressing contempt for that approach to social life was to make themselves so easy to meet. After the elementary school principal who was also a D party boss, I worked for half a dozen people who knew the Carters socially. It's one thing to meet someone famous by working on the same project or walking a dog in the same park; it's quite another thing to choose a project, a dog park, even a church, on the chance of meeting someone famous there. Quite a lot of people in Washington who were very accessible to fans, constituents, etc., I managed to avoid meeting--not because I didn't think they were interesting, or wouldn't have wanted to work on any project of interest to them, but because I didn't want to be or seem like a celebrity hound. Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter were in that group. 

This is my little testimony in the court of history, as we lay to rest a President who, if not the best President we had, was far from the worst. I believe that, if Heaven has anything remotely like the "pearly gates" scene as we picture it in jokes, a junior angel at the gate will say, "Carter, is it? Why Not the Best, indeed! Why were you not the best President?" 

And St Peter will say, "Because he was the best retiree, and role model and teacher for other retirees. Come in, Brother!"

And some time or other in the course of Eternity, I'll fly from the part of Heaven that looks like Virginia to the part that looks like Florida, to visit my Aunt Dotty. In Heaven no poison sprays ruin the pleasure of birdwatching. We will watch the pelicans. And then Aunt Dotty will say, "There's a young woman I want you to meet," and we'll fly up to the part that looks like Georgia. Landing beside the finest, healthiest peanut patch that ever grew, because in Heaven there is no black rot, we'll walk up to the house and find the Carters there. Aunt Dotty will say, "I always wanted to see you shake hands with Amy Carter."

I won't think I have much to say. Adults don't usually greet new acquaintances with "So, are you going to vote for my father?"

In the special case of Jimmy Carter, however, his daughter might well say, "So, what do you remember about my father?"

I'll say, "I always thought he was a nice man but all wrong about school. Who cares about that any more? Like everyone else up here, he was close enough to being right about Jesus."

Our cartoon image of Heaven is a feeble attempt to imagine what the unimaginable might be like. I pray that it may be something like this.  

Have COVID, Leave Deliveries Beside Road

Status update: I had felt myself fighting off this year's version of COVID so I didn't think twice about visiting someone who wasn't sure whether weakness and a chest cough were reactions to going diabetic, to medication, to flu or to COVID. I didn't even think twice about nibbling chips from the same plate, which was probably a mistake. In my defense I'll say that this person is relatively young, is pure White so far as is known, gets plenty of exercise, and generally should not have to worry about diabetes for another decade at least, so person's being sent home with an insulin kit disturbed my mind considerably. I know how to prepare the kind of meals that reverse diabetes for people like this person. I don't know whether, in today's world of poisoned and gene-spliced vegetable foodoids, the McDougall Diet would do person more good than harm. And I had to (I didn't cry, but I still might) tell person so.

On New Year's Day, I have a deep chest cough and feel just slightly feverish. Could be COVID, could be flu, could be the unholy alliance of both about which we've been warned. Before coming online I've already pretended not to be at home so as to avoid breathing on the first visitor of the new year. Don't visit me. I have provisions, I'm not diabetic, I don't anticipate any real discomfort from COVID this year either, and I've never noticed a difference whether the first visitor was male or female. If the lights go out during the anticipated Big Freeze, I have emergency plans. They do not include underestimating the virus but I don't think I'm glyphosate-damaged enough to need to do anything but stay warm, avoid really heavy overwork or party pig-outs, sit down if I feel faint, and stay away from people who are or might be at any real risk. 

Which youall should do, too, if you notice anything in the way of a chest cough. Coronavirus is still insidious stuff, mutating ahead of whatever vaccines you've had, popping up and turning nasty on people who either think it's a nothingburger or don't even know they've got it. COVID coughs can potentially open hernias or cardiac surgery scars. Multiple vax for other mutations do not put your immune system ahead of the virus, quite the contrary, so I recommend asking a doctor who does not just recommend all the COVID vaccines to everybody, a policy that's breaking very bad news for some doctors who've followed it. If you have a jab, be sure it's relevant to the version of COVID that is actually in your neighborhood. In many places a relevant vaccine won't be available. Just do quarantine as if everyone's life depended on it, is all I can say.

To those who really are in mortal danger from COVID, condolences--vaccines may or may not buy you one more year. Write letters. We all need to stand by our Postal Service.

To the neighborhood odd jobs man, I had to pay a late fee to get the primary address at the bottom of this web page reopened, so can't afford to go shopping, and you should stay as far from me and my relatives, including the Professional Bad Neighbor, as you can get. He'd breathe any kind of virus on you and probably snicker through his twisted mouth while doing it. I would not. Most of my relatives would not knowingly breathe any virus on anybody, but are healthy enough not to know when they have COVID.

To the Bad Neighbor, why don't you come up and say hello to everyone? You can tell who's got COVID by who runs out to give you a handshake, or even a cousinly hug. 

The lights already went out this week. They were restored when The Infernal Grid That Needs To Be Broken Up Before Our Enemies Exploit It was scheduled for restoration. I knew it was The Grid, itself, because the young person sitting in an office in (I think) Ohio said confidently, right away, without finding other reports on the same line or sending anyone to check the line, when my lights would come back on--and they did. Innovative young men deliberately chose to disconnect customers' electricity for more than 24 hours in December. They were working on connecting more local lines to each other, expanding The Grid's power to zap whole cities' and counties' business and create instant emergencies endangering multiple human lives, when they badly needed an order--by federal law if necessary--to keep America resilient by shortening existing connections, with a goal of making every house its own primary source of solar energy. 

Then the lights went off again, right away, for a few more hours while actual workers checked the actual line. They did not inspect the whole line for dead trees, which was probably a bad idea; they had the whole day and the December Thaw weather. The power outage did further damage to the Internet connection, which has been fading in and out ever since. Yes, the company owe me money for this, and no doubt owe lots of other people even more, since most people had a lot more things plugged into the walls when the lights went off. Yes, this winter's legislature needs to establish a firm procedure for collecting that money, as well as a time line for solarization and energy independence that imposes a fine for even whining about building new plants until every house has clean reliable energy for 72 hours after any sort of problem with The Grid. "Treasonous" is not too strong a word to embed in legislation mandating the slow but steady breakdown of The Grid.

If you've sent real mail and it's been returned, please re-send it--the box is open again. I wasn't too far away to have gone into Gate City between Election Day and Holy Innocents Day, but I neglected to do that and thus failed to receive the annual reminder to pay the PO box rent.

If you've sent e-mail and it's been ignored, kindly assume further Internet connection trouble, in which case I'll go to McDonald's again after being symptom-free for a week. 

If you are delivering any bottled water, or belated Boxing Day gifts, or anything else, and don't already know this: Do not touch anything or come inside the yard. Leave it on or behind the block beside the road. You will not see me, but I plan to be sitting up in a place from which I can see the block, throughout quarantine. I will go out when the road is clear of traffic. 

I don't expect this to happen but, if you must leave an animal, please leave a note (in plastic and/or under pebbles, as necessary), go home, wait 24 hours, and then deliver our furry friend, in a box with its blanket, toys, and food treats if possible. Look for a note indicating alternative directions before releasing an animal--there will probably be one. Please be sure any fowl, or adorable tame rodents, are in a secure cage, and tie any dogs to a tree or post with a lead that will hold them. 

If the weather gets bad enough to justify even one more worn-out joke about Al Gore, plans have been made. Otherwise I'll probably be either in the warm room or on the screen porch, probably huddled inside a pile of hand-knitted things. Multiple layers of cheap acrylic yarn will hold body heat longer than anybody wants to find out about at single-digit temperatures. You may buy some and find out after I emerge from quarantine, which should be in time to watch the inaugural festivities on TV. Any knits I may have handled during COVID will be washed with disinfectant before they're shown for sale, if they ever are. The blanket shawl, tabard, and sample-patch blankets that I use are not and have never been offered for sale.

Medical Care 

First a grumpy, fluzly Nag: There's no excuse for these young men failing to type out the words in this video. Expecting people who are able to read to sit through an hour and a half of lazy, self-indulgent talking heads, when there are professional transcription services that could turn it into a nice efficient script that could be read quickly AND kept for reference, when (bleep!) there are (bloop!) computer apps that could deliver a draft transcription in seconds so nobody even has to type the full (dang) script, is just disrespectful to the audience. Youtube does not make it easy to get a transcription (you have to start the video, and find where the button is on your screen, and scroll down to just before the last period highlighting the script), but you can probably force one out of it. The person who posted the video should have done that for you, corrected the robot transcription, and posted it as a nice link to a document in which you can edit the fonts and spacing to suit your eyes.

Nevertheless, I did listen to some of the sound. What I heard was very interesting. I think you might want to watch or listen to this one, too. I think somebody should make a TXT transcription beautiful and e-mail it to everyone in the new presidential administration. (E-mail, plain text, is key. Bulky envelopes scare many people in our federal government. Multiple copies of the same e-mail, otoh, might be read and discussed by multiple interns, which is very good.)

Long story short: the insurance gamble may be morally worse than betting money on card games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMBCkokxTAk&t=5425s

Music 

Since this web site mentioned Kwanzaa, it's received links to a more mainstream video about a Black American holiday celebration--"Christmas in Hollis." (This web site prefers music videos to talk videos because music videos tend to consist of one song, which means it's possible to listen to all the ones this web site receives in one human lifetime.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR07r0ZMFb8&t=241s

Book Review: I Want to Grow Up...

Title: I Want to Grow Hair I Want to Grow Up I Want to Go to Boise

Author: Erma Bombeck

Date: 1989

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-06170-1

Length: 174 pages

Illustrations: color inserts of children’s artwork

Quote: “At the moment they stop being a kid and turn into a child with cancer, the smiles disappear.”

At Wit’s End, Just Wait, I Lost Everything, The Grass Is Always Greener, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, and Aunt Erma’s Cope Book were hilarious. Motherhood and Family were, just slightly, predictable,and after Family Erma Bombeck reached that dreaded point in a comic writer’s career when the writer is asked to write a whole book that’s earnest and sweet. Dave Barry wisely turned down that offer. Bombeck was persuaded that children with cancer wanted a funny book about their shared experience. This is that book.

It’s funny in spots, but...Laughing out loud, life with cats has taught me, is what we humans do instead of purring; it usually expresses a pleasant feeling and, if that pleasant feeling happens to coincide with unpleasant feelings about something else, the acts of laughing or purring work internal muscles and activate biological mechanisms that make us feel better. People recovering from cancer, and their families, need to laugh out loud, long and often. Funny books, records, and movies help. A humorist has a high spiritual calling in this world.

However, the experiences that prompt laughter in real life don’t always work in books. When you are the patient or the family member caring for the patient, then, in the moment, you can laugh out loud about cancer itself. You scrub the patient’s favorite coverlet in the tub, dry it, get it smelling fresh at last, and within half an hour it’s nasty again. Either you or the patient says “Lather. Rinse. Repeat,” and this becomes the funniest joke ever to use this line, funnier than all other jokes that used this line together, and you roll about and paw the air. But this kind of moment is not meant to be shared. Someone else laughing about your illness or your caretaking is not funny. Someone else’s laughing about their illness or their caretaking is a gross-out.

So this was the one of Bombeck’s books that people bought to complete their collections, or encourage a favorite author who already knew she wasn’t going to have a very long life either, or support the cancer research funds in aid of which the book was sold. I’d pick any of Bombeck’s other books over this one for personal pain control.

In this book we meet children. The last thirty pages of this book are a roll call of cancer patients and their siblings who laughed at cancer in ways Bombeck worked into this book. They are painfully adorable children. They wrote in from several countries where Bombeck had a following, including France as well as New Zealand. Some of them did grow hair and grow up. Some of them went to Heaven, and some even went to Boise. Some of them may still be alive today.

They stick their artificial legs out of doors or under tent flaps to make people think a whole person is watching or listening.

They turn their prosthetic feet backward.

They pour fruit juice into specimen cups, then freak out nurses by saying “I think I’ll run it back through” before anyone runs actual lab tests on these “samples” of sick comedy.

They build snowmen with carrots stuck in their back sides for transfusions.

They race wheelchairs.

They joke about their hair falling out, telling inquisitive people “I joined the Marines,” or claiming that then-popular TV tough guy “Kojak is my father.”

They hug their doctors tight, saying “I hope I never see you again.”

One of them, in full remission and growing fast, shows Bombeck around the campus of the university hospital where she went for chemotherapy. Another one affectionately nicknames one of the best university hospitals in the world “Motel Hell.”

Nearly all the ones we meet had survived, and several had gone into remission, during the time the book was written.

They’re still very, very sick, and their parents and doctors are still very, very sad .(Mothers, Bombeck reports, did most of the caretaking and fretting in 1989. Fathers were “rare birds”; in 1989 a lot of younger men had become those “Sensitive New Age Guys” who cried real tears about being turned down for dates or being late for meals, but fathers still felt a need to reframe grief as anger, growling about how “if some guy was harassing your daughter you could rip his throat out, but you can’t do anything about cancer.”)

And research, of course, helps people with cancer live longer. Donations may be made...pick your cancer research fund; you undoubtedly have one.

Bombeck’s focus on the kids who joke about cancer makes this book less unpleasant to read than I may have made it sound but, if you want to shriek and cackle and make your children want to share a full-sized book with you, pick any or all of this writer’s other books.