Since all we know about the weather for the next two weeks is that it's all but guaranteed to be cold enough to freeze limbs off trees, and since I just posted that I'm doing quarantine, here's what I'll do: This post will go live on the first day I go online from McDonald's OR have been symptom-free long enough that I could if I had to. It will contain however many links I've found during however much screen porch time I've had. If it's extra-long, or followed by a Part 2, that will indicate yet another year when COVID symptoms lasted for a day or less and I've stayed in quarantine purely out of public spirit.
Now on to more pleasant things:
Animals
Drab little Noctuids all look alike to some people. Others really look at them and notice how varied, subtle, and rich their colors are. One of these British species is actually called a Beauty...and, to moth people, it is.
Some readers are worried that listing Monarch butterflies as an endangered species, which they are, would present an unreasonable burden to humans since almost all of the United States can be considered Monarch habitat. There is a way to prevent this. Monarchs are loved partly because they are so congenial with humans. In some places their populations have increased as humans cleared forest land for pastures and crop fields where their food plant can grow. They've been flitting through our gardens and even flying along our roadways for years with no effect on their numbers. Their decline just happens to correlate with the period of gross abuse of glyphosate, but it doesn't seem to be specifically caused by glyphosate so much as increased use of "pesticides" generally. If we stop spraying poison on the land, Monarch populations will probably rebound.
Weigh in on this topic at
If you want to see, endorse, or dispute my comment, it's at:
m5g-2m2n-2965 .
Climate Change
Steve Milloy shares a lovely PDF:
Day by Day with COVID, if the Internet Holds Up
New Year's Day: A deep breath, a deep cough. All muscles stiff and weak. More sleepy time than waking time.
1.2.25: Similar, only I was awake more of the time and more aware of what a bore the virus was being. Perceptions blurred; no smell, not much taste, and sounds all sounded faint and far away. I could tell whether I was sipping water or soda pop, but that was about all. I could not smell a difference among the disinfectants I use. Things looked pretty much as they usually look, but eyes felt very weak, tearing easily, more sensitive to light, less vision in dimness. Solid food? Don't even...the body wasn't up for that kind of work.
During the night I heard the Professional Bad Neighbor drive up and park just outside my property line. I did not go out and give chase. When I heard anything near the house, whether it was a trespasser or a cat, I called out as loudly and cheerfully as I was able (which wasn't very)--"Hello, cousin, how do you do! Come in and share the COVID!" I had done that last week with the gratifying result of hearing a scalawag, apparently some yards from the house but on my property, skedaddle. All I heard this time were cats, presumably asking one another whether I was delirious. Apparently the Bad Neighbor was harassing an older relative of ours.
1.3.25: Some smell and taste returned. I could definitely tell when I ate a garlic clove. Mood peevish and fluzly. First steps outdoors! The Internet was not running well. Every time I clicked on Libre to paste a document into Word for printing, Libre balked. Task Manager reported that this was due to Microsoft persistently running "ApplicationFrameHost.exe" and "backgroundTaskHost.exe." The Internet is also fading in and out. Apparently the weather damage is both between here and the local tower, and between the tower and other towers. The laptop now annoyingly shows a strong connection to the local tower when no connection to the Internet is being made. With at least two areas of mechanical damage, the last thing anybody needs is this garbageware constantly interfering with any use of our computers. Having to click over and end those programs felt like having to pick a whole nest of wasps out of my hair. I used some un-auntly language. Out loud. At the computer. Tried to read another novel someone was nice enough to send me, but for hours on end, although or because other sites were working, Kindle-in-the-Cloud wouldn't turn a page.
Memories of appetite returned but the garlic clove satisfied the appetite I had. Memories of having enough energy to sit up and write about something more interesting than my symptoms also began to return. Mid-afternoon, however, I felt the unmistakable prodrome of a glyphosate reaction. I wouldn't have smelled anything if a whole family of skunks had spent the night on the porch but, apparently, whatever the Bad Neighbor was doing on our relative's land had included spraying poison. Talk about kicking a person who is down.
I went into the warm room, set the hot-air fan right next to my bench, dug into the pile of blankets on the bench, and lay down. I could feel the now familiar COVID symptom of my blood pressure surging up as I lay down. Why does it do that, and why hadn't I noticed it doing that during the previous two days? Could I have been hypertensive for two days and too ill to notice? I could. Brr-rr-rr.
After about an hour of meditation on how to get different body parts closest to the hot spot in the blankets, I did not feel as if I'd lost ground. In fact I was noticing more different smells. I felt guilty about not wanting to be close to the cats and, given that I wanted not to be close to them, about having touched them at all.
1.4.25: I felt hollow from not eating and, at the same time, bloated from the glyphosate reaction. My waistline was convex. Apart from that, the fever was gone, the hypertension was gone, the senses of sound and taste were back. The senses of sight and smell were still compromised, not by COVID but by chemical reactions. My sinuses were carrying out their usual defense against poison sprays by draining all the liquid in my body out at the nose. It was hard to get much of anything else done due to the constant need to mop the nose, and hard to read with sore, swollen, teary eyes. The sensations of COVID were giving way to the more unpleasant, familiar ones of having measles and mono and food poisoning, all at once.
Once again I spent more of the day asleep than awake. Every time I woke up I could feel muscles that had been fever-stiff and painfully sore becoming flexible, and only pleasantly sore, as from too much of the wrong kind of exercise, which they had certainly had.
Having a vivid memory of how the New Year's Day bean soup I'd planned would taste, I put it together; sipped the broth for breakfast, ate about half the solids for dinner. It tasted good. The cats liked their larger than usual portion, too.
1.5.25: Wake up when the hot-air fan stops. A power outage? Do I have to go to McDonald's? It will soon be too cold even for me, even if I'd been building up resistance to cold all week instead of sweating-out, to do anything but burrow into a pile of blankets. I have not been symptom-free for a week. In fact, I still have a deep cough, although it's the residual kind that lasts for days or weeks after a virus is gone, and I still feel stiffness and soreness in some muscles, although it's the good kind that starts after the fever is gone. But am I public-spirited enough to spend however many hours in bed?
I am having a mild post-traumatic stress reaction. The light comes on when I press the switch. The hot-air fan switched itself off because it had been running for more than 24 hours. The real use of caffeine is to allow people to deal with mornings like that by saying "I needed coffee."
Occasional cough, while the sinuses continued their efforts to siphon every drop of liquid out of me all day. Snow began to fall. Sinus symptoms were a nuisance all day, though not so much as the day before because I was pretty well dehydrated. The worst thing was thinking about Silver, whom I've not seen this calendar year.
1.6.25: Snow falls. Nose gushes. Spent the day frantically imbibing as much liquid as my shrunken stomach could hold. Mouth still felt dry, lips cracked and sore.
The computer spent the day insisting it had a good strong connection whether it had one or none, then switched over about 9 p.m. to saying it has no connection whether it has one or none. It's had a weak, patchy connection, either way.
1.7.25: Snow seems less efficient than rain, or maybe it's more about the amount of poison sprayed and the wind direction and so on, I don't know. Anyway, the poison seems finally to have washed out of the air. Sinuses settle down. Body begins actually flushing out glyphosate, a process that involves a lot of feeling that lying down is safer than sitting up, interspersed with running to the bathroom, but it's all basically building up to the feeling of having returned to this life.
The week's cat drama will be its own post.
1.8.25: No COVID symptoms for a week. If the weather stays cold and dry I might go to McDonald's tomorrow. Still have a chest cough but no chest inflammation. Walking in the cold dry air might produce inflammation. We shall see.
Fashion
As usual I'm always hoping to scrape up the money to lease a store and display these shirts in it. Meanwhile, please feel free to order them from Joy Mayfield:
Food
Why tomatoes bioengineered to kill whiteflies aren't likely to go on sale any time soon, why that's a good thing, and (in the comments) what actually controls whiteflies.
Trust CNN to go after an untested herbal ingredient in a product sponsored by Black women, rather than untested GMO in products from companies whose upper levels are still all White and all male. I do recommend reading about the hazards of tara flour, and, while you read, THINKING PEAS. I have not suddenly "become allergic to peas." You will not suddenly "become allergic to peas." Your child was not born "allergic to peas." Human beings have unpleasant reactions to the latest unnatural thing the big corporations have thought of doing to peas.
Perceptual Filters
The first time I saw The Sound of Music I was aware that it's loosely based on history, Hollywooded-up...I wasn't told specifically how, except for the part about the real Maria having fallen in love with the children rather than Captain von Trapp. Well, back then the real Maria's books hadn't fallen apart from overuse yet, and were still in libraries. Briefly: The movie doesn't specify how Maria came to grow up in a convent; we imagine that her parents died; in historical fact, one died, the other went insane, and Maria was removed from his custody for safety. The real Maria never, even as a teenager, looked like Julie Andrews. She believed singing was a form of worship but she was not a musician. The real Maria was hired as a tutor, but in historical fact Captain von Trapp was not bound by stuffy traditions about its being beneath his family's dignity to perform music in public, hired a music teacher for them, and might have prepared the older children to bring Maria along with her study of music. The movie denied that Captain von Trapp had any sense of humor (the real Maria said he had) and shocked, even annoyed, the real Maria by making the character based on her "far more ladylike" than the real Maria ever tried to be. For that Julie Andrews' ineffably ladylike manner was probably to blame, but in fact, although the real Trapps were supposed to have been "extras" in the movie and were left in one street scene, the real Maria quarrelled with the movie producer so often that the real family were put off the set and seats weren't even saved for them at the premiere. In historical fact the von Trapps sang real folk songs, not parodies of them like "The Lonely Goatherd," to which some real people in Austria took offense. In historical fact the von Trapps toured Europe for some years before planning their escape to America, came here as refugees--there's a good bit about their poverty and language troubles in the books!--and worked hard to buy a lovely abandoned hill farm and build their palatial estate in Vermont. And then...the real Captain died, the real children were grown up and did their own musical thing, and the real Maria went off to warmer climates as a missionary. And in historical fact Captain von Trapp's eldest child was a boy and none of his children had anything going on with a Hitler Youth.
So why did Hollywood mangle the story as they did? Given that Christopher Plummer was a stiff, not consciously funny actor and Julie Andrews would probably have brought a ladylike manner to the role if cast as Erszebet Bathory, so the movie took their personalities into consideration...Hollywood wanted stories about Romantic Love, as distinct from the motherly kind. Hollywood wanted kissing scenes, which were supposed to start with "You may kiss the bride" in the 1930s. Hollywood wanted aristocrats to be stuffy and hidebound even when, in historical fact, they were progressive. Cast Captain von Trapp as using his popularity (he'd been a war hero) to lead Maria into modern ways like performing on stage? They could as easily imagine...why...doing the whole movie in German (with subtitles) and showing the Trapps learning English, with difficulty, as they came to America! Whatever language people really spoke, only in the present century has Hollywood allowed us to imagine it as anything but perfect English! Perceptual filters...To me, a movie about Austrians at home would be more credible if it showed them speaking German. I might need subtitles, but I'd believe that I was watching Austrian people at home. But to the movie producers, the very furthest it was possible to go, in the direction of making a movie about people who were not American, was to have them speaking BBC rather than NBC English.
So, in this video the young narrator adds her own spin. What exactly is "darker" about the real story of Maria von Trapp than about The Sound of Music? The real story isn't grimmer or sadder; it's simply different, apart from the detail about the real Maria's father being insane. Nor is it more obscure--the books were published before the movie was made, sold well, and can still be found in secondhand stores now and then. Nor is it more difficult to understand. The young woman just likes using the word "dark" to mean anything but what it does mean: The real Maria's hair photographed darker than Julie Andrews' did. The real story isn't darker in any sense, but the real woman was.
Philosophy
From a forum participant called Lady Bikki on the Mirror. What the Internet connection will do is minimal, so I'm not trying to run Lens. Anyway, the relevance of this meme is that when I'm healthy I'm one of the world's more annoying day-seizers. I sleep six hours and then I'm full of energy and focussed on tasks, mine, not yet worn down enough to take much interest in other people. When I show any interest in ideas like approaching the day calmly without making eye contact, you know I'm showing serious glyphosate damage.
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