Book Review: Where It All Began

Title: Where It All Began 

Author: Fran Thomas

Date: 2021

Publisher: Frances O. Thomas

Quote: "So what if she was the homecoming queen?"

This is one of those short and simple stories that could easily have been written by ChatGPT, then cleaned up by the author. (Who'd be an editor these days? All publishers and editors say "Don't send us anything that was written using any form of 'artificial intelligence'," and then earlier this week one of them said they've started to charge reading fees because it seems to them that 99% of everything they get these days was written by chatbots. Writers have to sound not just correct and readable, but really "voicey," just to convince people they're human.) 

He was intimidated by her popularity. She was intimidated by his intelligence. Actually they're quite a congenial couple, and when he comes back to their old home town, first they take opposite sides on a town council issue, then they reach an agreement, then they kiss. It's a romantic comedy, but not all that romantic and hardly comic at all.

And it all takes place in 1986. This couple were meant to be the unifying factor in a series that happened later in its fictional world, but I've seen no more of the series.

Meh. The author didn't stay in the Book Funnel for long, so I'm guessing she's dropped out of the game, or at least picked a new pen name...I didn't mind reading this e-book as a free Book Funnel promotion, but I would have minded if I'd paid for it.

How Should Food Be Labelled?

This post started out in the web log, and then I thought, "Say, if I can add a few more words, maybe people in the food industry will see it." The personal experience that went into this post owes most to those who distribute canned chili through Wal-Mart: Sam's Choice, Hormel, Southgate, Wolf, Armour, Bush's Beans, and especially the pricier one that starts with C, I forget the name because I didn't bring home any labels on which it was printed...

Would some other format for "food warning labels" help you make better food choices? Eww. Ick. Nanny go home! Who ever assumed that you need to make better food choices? How did they know what your food choices are, or how or why you make them? 

For those who may not already know: If you have enough strength to do what you set out to do, generally feel cheerful--though not necessarily talkative--when you wake up in the morning, and don't feel aware of any specific part of your body, you are probably making good food choices. If not, it's worth exploring other food choices, but don't assume that what works for someone else will necessarily help, or even not hurt, you. Don't try to sell wheat to me because it's a nutritious food for you. Don't go gluten-free because I'm a celiac. Only you can make your own healthy choices about anything.

What would help? The only information that needs to be added to food warning labels is whether GMO or "pesticides" are likely to render the food toxic. The list of food ingredients should be the target, if we want to help adults make better food choices. (This cause is not served by taking any approach that it might occur to us to use when talking to small children.)

Apart from not including toxic chemicals sprayed on soil, plant stems, or actual food, which should be included, existing lists of food ingredients tend to be printed in small type, sometimes hidden in the folds or overlaps of labels, and often in colors other than black and white, all of which make the list impossible for many shoppers to read. Many people actually see better at the middle distance (five to ten feet ahead, as when walking) without the glasses they use for reading, so they don't wear glasses in the store. They may use magnifying glasses to read, especially if New Roundup has been sprayed in the area recently, but they don't carry those to the store, either. 

Personally, my preferred font is still 8-point Times New Roman, comparable in readability to 12-point sans serif fonts but more aesthetically appealing...except after a spray poisoning incident, when 12-point type looks like 8-point to me and 8-point type just blurs through the fog of tears that cover my eyes until rain washes the poison vapors away. There are now days when I need a magnifying glass to read the type I normally read all day. This is not an effect of age. It is a very specific, temporary, recurring reaction to some chemical vapors in the air. Anyway this, plus selling books, has sensitized me to the way other middle-aged and older people shop.

How do they, or we if I've been poisoned during the week before a given shopping trip, know if food contains wheat, soy, corn, milk, or whatever else they need to avoid? They don't. They just assume they can't eat it, and don't buy it, when the product might be safe but they can't see the list of ingredients. 

The best bargain on meat these days is Sam's Choice canned chicken. They label it "white meat" with "may include dark meat" in smaller type, which I think is tacky, but I'm not Jewish. I pick out the bits that show pink for the cats, cook the rest with rice and veg, and try to spoon all the veg into my dish and most or all the meat into the cats' dish. Anyway, it's the best price for the best standard of quality (not that every single can is fit to eat) on the market these days. Word has got about and it's hard for Wal-Mart to keep this simple, relatively healthy, food product on their shelves.

So I considered some alternatives. I liked salmon, before it was genetically modified. I like mackerel when the price is right; in recent years it's been unreasonable. I like a whole natural chicken, or large part of one, if another human is there to share it; otherwise the cats are likely to leave bits on the ground and attract less desirable animals. I like eggs, but transportation and cooking can create problems with buying eggs. I'm not keen on red meat; this is a preference, not a rule of ritual purity, so I don't mind precooked beef. This reminds me that, if I'm looking at canned chili, several brands of chicken and turkey chili are available these days.

So, which brands claim to be beef, chicken, or turkey in the sense of flavor, but actually contain more pork? That's a marketing dodge these days, when so many people don't want to eat pork. Gwaltney-Smithfield now sell "Traditional" chicken sausages--hot dogs, bologna, breakfast sausage--that contain more oink than cluck. Traditional sausage was made from pork, so they have an excuse for besmirching that word. Traditional chili was always and only made from beef, yet several brands of canned chili are made from pork. First I exclude the oink and then, of course, everything has to be wheat-free. 

I don't want to try too many new things in one week, of course. Glyphosate is not listed on the label--as any "pesticide" to which foods have been exposed should certainly be. If I take home a sample of something sold at the price of human food, I eat a teaspoonful of it and watch for the mood swing that indicates a glyphosate reaction. If I suddenly feel irritable, within an hour or so, I take charcoal and give the rest of the food to the possums. Glyphosate probably harms possums too; they just don't live long enough, or get close enough to me, for me to notice. Anyway there's that money wasted on an animal that would have just as short a life expectancy, look just as ugly, and smell just as nasty, on a diet of dung and carrion. So I certainly don't want to take home a can of chili with wheat or pork in it.

Southgate chili is the cheapest brand. There are probably reasons for this that I don't want to know about, but Southgate chili tests safe. 

Sam's Choice chili beans are even cheaper. They contain chili pepper and spices, but no meat. I like them. The cats eat them, but after eating them one of the cats nonverbally told me she could hardly keep them down. Sam's Choice chili "with beans" (and also with meat) is made from pork.

What about all the other brands? A lot of the different flavors on the shelf are Hormel. Hormel prints lists of ingredients in tiny black letters on a red background. When not reacting to chemical vapors I can read those lists, but it takes time for my astigmatic eyes to unfocus from the shelves and other shoppers in the store enough to be able to focus on that tiny print. If I've been exposed to chemical vapors it's hopeless. 

Armour chili used to contain wheat...thirty years ago. They've changed the labels and the flavors available since then. Don't ask me what they've changed to. I'm not inclined to make myself as conspicuous as some shoppers do, standing in the aisle and nattering at a friend, waiting for my eyes to re-focus. Don't ask me about the probably better-quality brands either. I take a few cans of Southgate chili and get out of there, before a knot of two or three other shoppers starts occupying that part of the aisle and talking about their medical test results. Days when I have trouble reading labels always seem to be days when other people have trouble, too, and while they're passing time they don't talk about jobs, children, or football any more; they talk about the way their symptoms of chronic diseases flared up this week. It's hard to believe the way the companies try to gaslight people about this.

What I want to see on those cans of chili: About half the label contains the brand logo and the photographed "serving suggestion." The other half is white paper, on which is printed, in black ink, at least 10-point Times Roman or 16-point sans serif, a list of all ingredients in each can of chili, including all preservatives and "pesticides." 

Monosodium glutamate is a flavor enhancer that makes some people ill. I've never had a noticeable reaction to MSG, but I'd like to see it clearly identified for the benefit of those who do. Because MSG is a chemical not a food, there are lots of different ways it can be "made," or isolated, from any kind of food, from some plant parts that are not used as food, or from kerosene. It is the chemical that makes potatoes savory. It's found in even higher concentrations in a seaweed called ajinomori, which is said to mean "father of flavors" in Japanese. The easiest way to add MSG to food is to grind a bit of dried ajinomori over a dish. Cheaper and more common processes involve burning rejected, usually rotten, foods and cooking the ashes...nobody wants to know. These different processes make it legal for manufacturers to list MSG on labels as things like "hydrolyzed protein" if it's derived from grains or beans, "natural flavors" if from potatoes, "sodium caseinate" if from cheese, or "spices." I think they should be required to list every individual spice used and to specify, after every alternative name used for MSG, "(MSG)". 

What I hope not to see on food labels is any more condescending "eat this not that" directives that ignore the reality that healthy eating is a balance among many different hereditary and environmental factors, so one person's "healthy diet" is toxic to another person. Hello? I am a celiac. I spent thirty years growing sicker and sicker on "health food." Start telling me how much fat or sugar or whatever else you imagine would be "good for me" if you want to see how much ice cream I can sit down outside the store and eat in your face. Even if you were Grandma Bonnie Peters, which you're not. So just don't let what you have in the way of a mind start thinking that way, nanny.  

GBP knew personally, and liked, a good cook whose Seventh-Day Adventist mannerisms affected me like itching powder: Vicki Griffin. She made videos discussing how badly elementary school students did after eating Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast, how they improved when offered whole-wheat toast and an apple instead. Right. Here's how that works in the real world: Mountain Dew is caffeine in a debittered, fruit-flavored form that does not have to be drunk all at once while it's hot. In fact, Mountain Dew tastes better when it's cold. It replaces coffee, not fruit, on the breakfast table and should not be considered as food at all. And nobody ate Fritos for their nutrient content until glyphosate-contaminated produce clogging the supermarkets drove some of us to get most of our nutrition from chickweed, which is low enough in calories that, yes, a person living mainly on chickweed does need the fats and carbs in Fritos. (Though during those years Fritos weren't safe, either, and such nutrients as I didn't get from chickweed I got from peanuts for a year or two.) But, if a person who chooses Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast happened to have found some glyphosate-free vegetables to eat the day before, the Fritos and Mountain Dew would have their intended mechanical effects on the digestive process and allow the person to get the nutrients from the vegetables. Glyphosate in the wheat toast and the apple would, on the other hand, upset the digestive process and prevent the person from getting any nutrients from vegetables, toast, or apple. So, until we get glyphosate out of the food supply, Fritos and Mountain Dew is a better breakfast than whole-wheat toast and an apple...even if people are not celiacs and might thrive on unsprayed wheat. That's not to say that either Fritos and Mountain Dew, or sprayed-wheat toast and a sprayed apple, is a good breakfast. Both of them are extremely low in usable nutrients. But Fritos and Mountain Dew are less immediately toxic than the wheat and the apple. A lot of things that people of Vicki Griffin's and my age learned about nutrition when we were younger, and even found to be true when we were younger, simply are not true for most of America today.

Government needs to move away from any suggestion of endorsement for one-size-fails-to-fit-all diet plans, and JUST make sure that foods are accurately labelled with their actual contents. 

"Ooohhh, ooohhh, but when we just put the estimated amount of various nutrients on food labels people didn't know how much they ought to be getting, and when we just put the minimum daily requirement people thought that was the target level not to be exceeded, and when we just put the average daily amount of each nutrient recommended people thought..."

Well, maybe that's as it should be, because only a nutritionist who has studied the patient's diet, exercise, DNA, bloodwork, medication history, and current condition has any business telling anyone how much of any nutrient they need! People need to listen to their bodies. How much fat interferes with your digestion? How much sodium makes you thirsty, sluggish, or hypertensive? Is cow's milk a food or a poison for you? That kind of information can't be printed on food labels. And, what's more beyond that, the amount of specific nutrients found in raw ingredients varies widely; some carrots are loaded with beta-carotene and some are not. Trying to estimate the beta-carotene content of a package of frozen carrot slices is a total waste of time. All food labels should tell us is what kind of fat, sodium, cow's milk, and whatever else is in the food.

The news about the proposed new labels was reported at washingtonpost.com, which this web site does not recommend because of the paywalls, and is summarized at the bottom of this news roundup:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/bf-rfk-jr-emphasizes-toxins-food-hhs/

Web Log Weekender for 1.31-2.2.25

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Anthropology 

DNA studies suggest that some Anglo-Saxon settlements were matrilineal. Possibly matriarchal. They didn't leave much evidence either way.

Other settlements, more prosperous ones where people were buried, sometimes with possessions, show that both men and women owned property; prosperity and status tended to increase with age.

Is your mind "seeing" what mine "sees"? Today, poverty pockets of our society are sometimes described as de facto matriarchies, but they're not the peaceful, prosperous beehives women might hope matriarchies would be. They're places where men have little to contribute to family life. Men may be encouraged to go somewhere else to hunt for food, fight wars, or take jobs, or they may just be sucked into a parasitic "street culture" where young men's contribution from society ranges from scanty to negative. Women are left to rear their children alone. Being unable to depend on one man, a woman may have multiple open-ended relationships that leave her children not knowing who their fathers are; at this level of social degeneration matings between cousins or even half-siblings may be tolerated or seen as inevitable. The group as a whole is poor, and likely to be in decline. And, when men try to live with their children and those children's mothers, women and children are often abused. "Matriarchs" in these groups may be respected by their own children and grandchildren, but not by men, nor by women who manage to keep a man at home.

History in fact records that Roman Christian missionaries recommended setting up patrilineal, patrilocal, patriarchal social structures in the hope of giving lower-class men some sort of responsibility, and keeping their wives and children from depending on the church for food. Eventually these structures were set up, and better-off women complained bitterly about becoming less able to depend on their own resources without husbands. We're still undoing the damage that discrimination against women has done, but most of it was justified, when it was done, as necessary protection for women who weren't able to succeed on more equal terms. Rather like the ethnically based discrimination built into today's "diversity policies."

https://notesfromtheuk.com/2025/01/31/was-pre-roman-britain-matriarchal/

Computers 

Photo most recently shared by Neithan Hador at the Mirror. Google traces it to somebody on Reddit but doesn't have the person's screen name.

Oh. Oh! Oh, take me back! It was Internet-independent and it worked like a dream. Of course, if connected to the Internet it was slow...but not as slow as certain shiny new laptops are when Microsoft is throwing its "update" fits. Five minutes hardly seems like much of a delay in opening a web page any more. And when disconnected from the Internet, oh, how they ran. I can tell that that's not the one Helene zapped, last fall, in my office, because it's still running Windows 98, which was what the Perfect Toshiba used to run. The good desktop computer always had Windows ME. And I want a federal law requiring Microsoft to stop trying to sabotage those vintage computers. They can always melt down a few Androids for replacement parts. Microsoft never has done anything better than Windows ME, and never will, and should stop wasting people's money even trying to pretend.

I had finally figured out how to transfer files from floppy disks to a stick drive, before Helene, but when I consider the mess Microsoft has deliberately made of this shiny little laptop...oh how I miss the whir of a floppy disk in a computer that was not as shiny, or as versatile, or as fully loaded as the new ones are, but at least it was the best its designers and makers were able to do.

Food 

This article? Meh. I think he could be a little more specific, and less of a starry-eyed optimist, and communicate better with people who raise their own food and people who need encouragement to start. Nevertheless, the article contains links that may connect that audience with people who can offer more specific and realistic advice.

https://non-gmoreport.com/articles/bionutrient-food-association-aims-to-increase-nutrient-density-of-foods/

Politics 

Would Trump "win" (even in terms of partisan political gamesmanship) by letting Gabbard and Kennedy lose? 

https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2025/01/31/would-trump-win-by-letting-bobby-kennedy-and-tulsi-gabbard-lose-n4936537

My answer: No. 

Photo from Euronews.com.

The word that comes to mind is racist, but even my White mother used it, and it does seem peculiarly suitable, considering the way those pale eyes and eyelids almost glow, in some photos, above the shadows painted along the cheekbones. If Trump fails to stand by either Kennedy or Gabbard, in my native dialect the word for what he'd be doing is "white-eye." 

It means to cheat or betray somebody in a way that can be compared to the way the early US government did the Cherokee Nation. It connotes something like "to earn the wrath and curse of God, so fully, so shamelessly, so egregiously, that people will want to be a thousand miles away from you because they expect that at any moment the toilet will drop out of a passing plane and land on your head."

I don't doubt for a minute that, if Trump turns against Kennedy, who brought in the swing votes (like mine) and won the election, Trump will be consumed by something he is probably not capable of consciously recognizing as guilt, but it will destroy his brain, just the same. His new photos make him look much more like Biden than his older ones did. If he turns against Kennedy, he'll find himself very soon looking worse than Biden. And sounding worse than Kennedy. And twitching worse than Muhammad Ali. The chemical pollution he will have dumped Kennedy in order to avoid dealing with may well be the instrument of his vestigial conscience's revenge. 

If he turns against Gabbard, bing go the vestiges of credibility he's built up among women and ethnic minorities. Even if he turns against Patel, who is hated by some, arguably for better reasons, he loses ethnic minorities. Patel is probably the one without whom he can survive, but he'd be extremely unwise to risk losing even Patel. 

Trump has a hard job ahead of him just keeping the diversity of the new fiscally conservative coalition that elected him, and he'd do well not to compromise. Not hiring people as tokens just because they belong to minorities, of ethnicity or gender or opinion or anything else, is a good idea provided that it's backed by not using any excuse not to stand by them. Trump's role model as a President was the King of Tacky because he showed no loyalty to people he hired. Trump seems to benefit in some ways from making tackiness a brand, but he can't afford to be tacky to women and minorities. Including the Irish-American minority.  

I don't think the Republican Party is likely to benefit from Vance inheriting the Oval Office, at this point, either. 

Psychology 

Regrettable truth: Urging people to "forgive" other people who have not repented, "for your own good," really is the psychopath's line. We can release the emotion of anger...but I think we as a society would be better off if we agree: Offenders do not, ever, get to control the process of any forgiveness that may be offered to them. They have to repent. And this does not mean only getting down on their knees, foreheads touching the ground, and begging "Please forgive me. What I did was wrong and I'm in no position ever to judge whatever anyone else did. It was my fault, my most grievous fault." It means physically acting out repentance by doing whatever the victim says will make up for the offense. 

Most offenses can, of course, be atoned for by just saying "I'm sorry," because nobody thinks they were premeditated offenses. Nobody gets up in the morning and says "I'm going to cut three people off in traffic today, close the elevator door on someone's face, misspell the name of the first person to whom I write a letter, drop a stack of file folders on someone else's toe, and spill coffee on another person at lunch." A person who did all that might be referred to a neurologist, but nobody would blame the person, even if the coffee ruined per shirt.

Many, if not most, of the offenses that people brood and anguish over are not even real offenses. People spend many expensive hours talking to psychotherapists in order to bring themselves to confront the truth: 

"He makes me look bad, on the job, merely and entirely by doing better work." 

"I've known and loved her longer than him, but I haaaate that he likes her more than me." 

"Nobody from that demographic group has ever done me any real harm, beyond the 'microaggressions' built into their being different from me, which are in the same category with the offenses-caused-by-carelessness-or-clumsiness. I never even met anyone who'd been a slave, been in a concentration camp, even had their ancestral land stolen--or if I did it wasn't ethnically based. In fact, I know, some people from that group have been helpful to me, or at least friendly, or at least they've tried to be friendly. I just resent that they're the dominant group." 

What these people need, right there in the therapist's office, is to confess their resentment as a way they have harmed themselves, and repent to themselves, and try to forgive themselves. Most of them have done little real harm to anyone else, but a lot of harm to themselves.

Then there are the offenses that have dragged on for years, long-term relationships of abuse, and when they've been real physical offenses the offender needs to expect to spend years repenting. Companies that manufacture poisons shouldn't be able to pay fines and roll on with their business--they should have to sign over shares of stock to the people they've harmed (or their survivors), the upper level employees should have to beg those people for jobs or references daily, all of the employees should know that their pay's been frozen because all profits are going to the people they've harmed. ("And the first condition of your employment, Albert (Bourla), is reenacting the initiation of Kunta Kinte in Roots.") People who've been embezzling money for years shouldn't even presume to ask for forgiveness until they've repaid every penny. 

Readers of young Liv's post are not told exactly what Liv's mother did to her. It doesn't sound like beating, rape, or starvation. It sounds like a habit of verbal abuse that reached an all-time peak when the mother waved her hand and spilled some coffee, once. Once you realize that verbal abuse is a habit, is the only way some people know how to express what may have been good will toward people for whom they feel responsible, the actual offenses fall into that majority category of annoying things people do through carelessness and being too close together. But we know that the mother is unforgivable (at this point) because she's trying to demand forgiveness, and that's not how it works. An offender who tries to control the process of forgiveness is offending all over again.

https://www.livimanuelsen.com/p/you-must-forgive-the-psychopaths

Speaking of envy, poor old Anna Wintour--the arch-yuppie who's been envied by so many for so long--just broke down and spewed a boil-full about Melania Trump.

Marrying a twice-divorced older man for his money is its own punishment and, although it's not a choice I'd recommend to a niece, I'm not sure that anyone needs to add to it. Nobody really asks girls like La Melania to do anything but be gorgeous, but she has done. She's loyal, intelligent, and tough. 

Whereas recent photos chosen and published by Anna Wintour show her to look like some grandma who has little contact with her grandchildren, but a generous financial settlement from the divorce, as seen at beaches in Florida and California, baking their bones and never going near the water. Hard to blame her for feeling envious. But envy's not pretty, Anna, dear.

https://pjmedia.com/sarah-anderson/2025/01/29/major-mag-goes-after-melania-and-its-pretty-brutal-n4936477

Book Review: Love Comes

Title: Love Comes

Author: Drew Beyson

Date: 2023

Quote: "Sarah felt certain that she was meant to be with him."

But love doesn't come to Sarah and Dan. In this "prequel" story, Dan is the ex-boyfriend Sarah dumps before moving to the small town of Moon View and finding a better man. 

Beyson's intention is to show her characters "becoming better versions of themselves," but her hasty writing style doesn't promise very effective descriptions of this. The copy of Love Comes I have was not even edited for verb tense, so a character "is" doing something in one sentence and "was" doing it in the next sentence, in the same scene. It's not one of those novels where a character is probing into the past, so that it makes sense to write things like "While she waits for Jack to come home, Jill curls up with a book on the couch. An old postcard falls out from between the pages: a beachfront hotel in Bermuda. January 1954. 'Jane, wish you were here...Jo & Jim.' Jo married Jim in 1950. They were doing well..." It's just careless writing; when Beyson writes that "when she looked at Judith, there was nothing but genuine concern for Sarah in her eyes. It is one of the reasons they were still besties," she's not even made a decision on the question of whether she's trying to create a trendy effect of "immediacy" with "when Sarah looks at Judith, she sees genuine concern for Sarah in Judith's eyes. It is one of the reasons they are still besties," or a traditional effect of a complete story being told after the fact with "when Sarah looked at Judith, she saw genuine concern for Sarah in Judith's eyes. It was one of the reasons they were still besties." 

Anyway, in college neither Sarah nor Judith is a particularly attractive "version of herself." They're roommates. Sarah drinks wine, Judith drinks beer. They have "boyfriends." Dan is Sarah's. Whether they're having safe sex only, like real people who are worth educating in college, or relying on pills and gadgets to prevent the act of baby-making from making a baby, we're not told. In this story we learn that, although Sarah wanted to believe that what she and Dan had was love, at the time, she's not able to believe that for long.

In Love Comes we're not told exactly whether Sarah is a sensible, wholesome girlfriend, or Dan is a responsible, worthwhile boyfriend--friends whose common interests include enjoying their hormones and finding out how long a physical attraction lasts, without doing what makes babies so that any "relationship counselling" they need can come from elders rather than lawyers. Most young people find the opposite sex interesting. If they can keep the interest in one another as human beings, without trying to rush into the big commitment that ruins the lives of those who go too far too fast, they can enjoy each other's company without setting up a lifetime of regrets.

We do see some danger signals. Sarah blurts out that she thinks she's "in love" when Dan has not said anything about his being "in love." For some men who are not "in love," women who think they're "in love" first are fear triggers the men want to avoid. For others, they're cows that can be milked without having to be fed or sheltered. Dan is in the second category. Sarah is setting herself up for some very unpleasant emotions whenever she has to realize how selfish Dan and his relationship with her have been, all along...but she did ask for that selfish relationship. A girl who wants an unselfish lover who will follow her when she thinks moving to Moon View is a great career move should not tell the nearest cute guy that she's "in love" before she's seen that he's capable of unselfish love. Few young men are.

So, Love Comes is a story that does not fulfill the promise its title makes, in which a shallow, callow chick selfishly grabs for what she wants to call "love" with a shallow, callow fellow who probably privately calls it "benefits." Oh, such a sad, common, really rather tedious little story. Buy it if you want to find out how much more mature and realistic Sarah can grow up to be in the next volume.

Status Update: No Doordash Here

During the COVID panic the luxury of having things delivered, rather than walking through a store on our feet, became a real industry. Want to eat, not to cook? Call Doordash and order a restaurant meal...

That kind of service is not available at the Cat Sanctuary. Even the US Postal Service is afraid to drive up our private road. I like this.

But there are times when some sort of neighborhood-only variation, with snowmobiles or pickup trucks, might be convenient.

I ate the last human-food meal in the house on Saturday. On Sunday, I thought, I would walk to a grocery store and buy more human food. 

Well, Pastel didn't eat her breakfast on Saturday; when I came out with dinner she was waiting on the porch, but then she went down to the sand pit and then, so far as I could tell, she disappeared. Serena and I thought we might have heard a mouse, or maybe it was only a cricket. Serena came inside the office room but wasn't able to determine whether either of those animals was in the office. Giving up, she came to sit on my lap. She coughed and sneezed a few times. Her nose felt warmer than it should have felt. She slept a few feet away from the hot-air fan, showed no interest in going out for breakfast, and continued sleeping in front of the hot-air fan well into the afternoon.

Meanwhile, when I took the junior cats their breakfast on Sunday, Pastel and Drudge were "loafing" side by side on the porch. Drudge leaped up and ran toward food. Pastel didn't move. I picked her up. Her coat was wet, the tip of her tail was muddy, her muscle tone was poor, her face was tear-stained, her nose was warm, and she was shivering. Her breath wheezed and rattled. 

I brought her into the office and parked her near the hot-air fan. Serena didn't even bother acting scornful of anything resembling cuddles; she could tell that this was an emergency, and wrapped herself around Pastel, purring.

I hadn't seen Silver all week. I'd assumed she'd been petnapped, because Trumpkin had cried for her to go back to his home for hours every night when she was at her home. 

But Pastel's lack of appetite for breakfast yesterday had not been a whim.  She'd eaten something--maybe just something that had frozen to death a week or two ago, something that her nose would normally have told her to leave for a possum or vulture to find. Cats usually digest food in less than 24 hours so, presumably, after going to the sand pit, she'd gone back to finish a meal of something she never should have touched.

Maybe it wasn't just a frozen rabbit that had been slowly thawing for days. I still have a Professional Bad Neighbor, although "Long COVID" took a good deal of the wind out of his sociopathic sails. He still employs a man who is neither completely deaf nor completely mute, but close enough that some people give up trying to talk to him and write him off as a deaf-mute. And in December he told this man how he might just drive past the Cat Sanctuary, throw out a chunk of meat, and not have to worry about my cats eating bait on which he hoped to catch a coyote. My cats had not, in fact, been the ones eating the bait--they'd been here for meals, while their visiting friends had been caught in the trap; but I'm the one he's trying hardest to bully off my own property.

Well, a sane person might have observed that the confidence with which cats circulate around the neighborhood, the fact that the coyote trap had repeatedly caught Serena's preferred kitten-daddy who lives a quarter of a mile away, are pretty good indicators that there are no coyotes in the neighborhood--though they've infested some parts of the county, so one might conceivably stray in. However, although I don't think he has a treatable mental illness, the Bad Neighbor certainly is not sane; he's at least a sociopath, if not a psychopath. He wanted to do something nasty to an animal. Probably his sudden transition from "one shot, one prize" to "wasted boxes of bullets and bagged nothing" had something to do with it.

I hadn't seen him during the winter but, last week, on the first day when the temperature crawled above the freezing point even in the shade, he'd sent someone (whose name I know in real life) to spray some New Roundup around the road. So we'd all had a chance to find out how we react to this latest form of legal murder by torture. Apparently glufosinate affects my digestive system in a different way than glyphosate, more painful and more likely to shorten my lifespan, but internal bleeding is still involved. Only more blood. And my eyes were inflamed. And I had no energy all week and took lots of naps. New Roundup needs to be bought back by the government and stored for use as a weapon, though its use probably violates the Geneva Convention.

The cats had been reacting all week, which was why I'd thought nothing of Pastel's bleary eyes. Serena and Silver have the Seralini effect. When not exposed to glyphosate they've had beautiful, healthy kittens. Unfortunately they've been exposed to so much of it that most of their kittens died, or were born dead. Pastel does not show this effect. When she's been exposed to glyphosate, which has been most of her young lifetime, her eyes look watery and bloodshot. Apparently New Roundup affected her the same way. But I was surprised when Serena started coughing and sneezing.

So I spent the day observing my remaining cats sleeping off the fever as best they could, and didn't go to the store, and didn't eat. 

Serena might have tasted something nasty, or picked up some sort of respiratory virus, but mid-afternoon she woke up with some energy and appetite...and in a mean mood. I've never seen her in such a mood before. She's always been a big tough muscular cat who'd rather romp than snuggle. She's never seemed to want to scratch or bite hard enough to hurt anyone; when told that she's done that, she's seemed subdued and penitent, and she's tried to play more carefully the next time. Cats will be cats, just as gardening and carpentry will be what they are. Unblemished hands are overrated. But honestly, although I warn visitors away from Serena, I don't think she'd ever do anyone any real harm--when she's in her right mind. 

Serena was well and truly delirious, and made unsuccessful attempts to attack people and objects, during a previous episode of serious food poisoning. She seemed to see and hear what was going on, if perhaps in that feverish way that makes everything painful, during this episode of whatever it's been.  She didn't really attack anyone; she only threatened to. But she was very, very grumpy--not at all like herself. She deliberately misbehaved, climbing on things she'd been told not to touch, where she is normally a perfect guest in the office. She growled whenever I touched her, growled when Pastel moved against her, screamed death threats and obscenities at herself when she scratched her own ear. She's still in a feverish, irritable mood tonight; she's moved away from Pastel and me as if she knows she's not quite in her right mind yet.

No matter how much time I've spent around cats, most of them do seem, even to me, like "dumb animals." Pillow substitutes. Removing their DNA from the gene pool could only be considered an improvement. Serena is different from those cats. She's not human. She will never have much of the human kind of intelligence. She is definitely a person who not only feels, but thinks, in her own alien way. As a substitute for a baby (how ridiculous!) she's even less satisfactory than a normal cat. As a substitute for a human housemate, she's clean and quiet and has a good Green way of exterminating mice. If I can't ask her to read a manuscript, I can trust her judgments and testimonies about what's going on around our home.

There are people, like the neighbor who dumped out the kitten Inky because he was afraid to tell me he'd run over the cat Ivy, who think I'm just unreasonable about the fact that cats are small animals who have short lives. Piffle. I knew Ivy had formed the bad habit of running out in front of vehicles, as if everyone would always be watching for her and as if she could flag anyone down to solicit a snack or a lift. Ivy's demise made me very sad, but if anyone but Ivy was to be blamed, I was the one. And I can understand how a person who didn't know the cat Graybelle might have thought she was a bobcat; most bobcats are yellow but the ones at the local nature park, that year, were gray, and Graybelle looked about the size of a bobcat, and had a "bobbed" tail. But the thought that someone deliberately killed our Founding Queen, Black Magic, still makes me think that eleven months and twenty-nine days in prison wouldn't have been enough. That man had good reasons for moving out of the neighborhood and having people start a rumor that he was dead. I didn't want to murder him; he didn't deserve a quick, merciful end. I wanted, legally and sadistically and satanically, to ruin him. I feel very much the same way about anyone deliberately harming Serena. 

Or Silver. The idea of Silver having been petnapped by another cat amuses me, but I don't believe Silver intended to be petnapped. She intended to come and go as she pleased, as Trumpkin does. She probably doesn't know that, although she's unhappy when she gives birth to dead or sickly kittens and loses them, doing that is her best chance of surviving until we get a total glyphosate ban--and a ban on malicious use of "pesticides" to harm others, which would be most effectively prevented by either banning all spray "pesticides" altogether, or at least allowing them to be purchased only by licensed professionals who have paid a minimum of a million dollars for a one-year license. (And let's call the law by my Bad Neighbor's name, and let all the farmers know whom they have to thank, during the lean years of transition to organic farming.) Silver would not have expected humans who obviously fed and petted her, at first, to lock her up and, unless the present administration can be goaded into making the ban effective this summer, doom her to a premature, slow, painful death. Silver has always been a good cat, stayed close to home, and thus known only people who respected her personhood. She had no way of imagining that other people would treat her like the kind of dumb animal she's never been.

Shortly after sundown Pastel screamed aloud and started gagging. Nothing solid came up. I gave her the same dose of powdered charcoal in water that cured Serena's, and before that Heather's, severe but natural food poisoning. Well, it seemed to relieve the pain so she could go back to sleep. She's unlikely to feel much better than that until she's able to get a lot of bad stuff out, and from observing her efforts to walk across the floor I'm not sure that she has the strength to do that. I wouldn't be altogether surprised if she's able to eliminate the toxic material, eat, drink, and recover her strength tomorrow. I wouldn't be altogether surprised if she dies, either. She smells like eleven pounds of streptococci wrapped in fur. Neither Serena nor I have ever had much of a reaction to strep infections but some strains of strep bacteria have killed susceptible individuals.

Including humans.

Including Pastel's great-great-grand-aunt Iris. 

When Iris had streptococcal bronchitis she used to wrap her four-pound self right across my neck as I slept, and I woke up and cracked jokes about how if anyone annoyed me I'd breathe on them. They wouldn't like that because strep stinks. (It's the component of the odor that dung and carrion have in common.) Now I'm older and aware that, although strep was just about the only infection that circulated at school that didn't make me sick enough to stay home, it's like COVID--it can kill people who are old or ill or heavily medicated. With hindsight I realize that Iris had an undiagnosed immune deficiency disease. Even after two courses of antibiotics she didn't resume growing, but kept coughing and wheezing and having foul breath. One day, when she hadn't seemed sicker than she'd been for the previous six months, she just lay down and died.

Some chemical poisons, like glyphosate, compromise the immunity of bodies that don't have immune deficiency diseases. Most living bodies are immune carriers of streptococcus bacteria. Pastel smells as if her existing population of semi-friendly bacteria has exploded.

Missing one day's meals won't hurt me and may help me enjoy the sensation of my immune system mopping up the little streppy-bugs. Missing several days' meals is not such a great idea. A few years ago I would have thought, "So what? Just plan the trip to go into Food Lion during that annoying managerette's shift, and breathe on her! What fun!" (Because when the immune system is mopping up an infection that's not serious for the individual, many individuals feel "high," and I'm one.) Now the thought process is more like, "If I go into Food Lion during the day shift I might inadvertently breathe on young A, and he might go home and breathe on his father, who's had open-heart surgery. When people die from strep, like poor little Beth in Little Women, isn't it because the bacteria attack their hearts? Or I might meet young B, who's been so nice to her great-aunt, who's ninety years old..."

I don't want to live in a place where teenyboppers earn extra cash as Doordash drivers. But I would like, very much, for someone to pick up a few provisions for me. Wal-Mart would be the simplest place to pick up ten days' worth of provisions: I can eat store-brand ("Great Value") chili beans, corn, tomatoes, and chicken, in cans, say six cans of each vegetable and two four-packs of chicken, and drink store-brand caffeinated soda pop, say two liters each of GV imitations of Coke, Cherry Coke, Dr Pepper, and Mountain Dew. Monotonous, but we are talking about a quarantine, not a party.

This probably will not happen. I'll probably walk to Food Lion and grab ten days' worth of much less satisfactory provisions there, and breathe on people, and feel guilty, even while knowing that those people will be gossipping about me all day ("She looked terrible and smelled worse. Does that woman own a toothbrush?" I do; at home I use it after every meal. Bacteria infest places where a toothbrush doesn't go.) After all most of us, even if not born with resistance, built up resistance to strep infections as children and think anyone who takes them seriously, as an adult, is a wimp. Most of us need to think longer about this. Most of us are not wimps. Most of us still have some elders who survived COVID and would like to keep them for a few more years, though.

And Serena, not really a very elderly cat at going on eight years old, isn't out of the woods yet; as I was typing this status update she fell off the chair she'd been sleeping on. And then Trumpkin came around, complaining loudly of being lonely at his home...which means Silver may not even have been safely petnapped. 

I had not planned to prosecute anybody for trying to "rescue" Silver as a "stray." I'd thought that, if I found her living with a family nearby, I'd make my best pitch for the family to rescue a shelter cat, but I'd agree to give Silver a free choice where she wanted to live. I have very different ideas about Silver's being harmed--other than by "spoiling" her with a soft life and rich diet, before killing her by destroying her natural ability to excrete toxins through unviable births. That's not what I've ever wanted for Silver but at least it's something people do in the belief that it's the right thing, before seeing for themselves that it's not.

The threat having been heard and witnessed, it would be a good idea for the Bad Neighbor to sign over all real estate and all contents thereof to the living members of the families he's harmed in the neighborhood, now, the half nearest my property to me because he's done me the most harm and I've been the one to find him out, the rest to be divided among the others. Then he should leave with the clothes on his back and sign himself into a mental hospital somewhere very far from here. Just walk into a hospital and say "I am a sociopath and need to be locked up. I killed all but one of my close relatives and then, finding my old home place a bit lonely, I deliberately set out to ruin another neighborhood," and if they don't admit him as a patient, keep trying until he comes to a hospital that will. Then he can spend the rest of his life praying that Serena lives another fifteen years without another little cat cough. Every little possum treat that cat ever kicked sand over was worth more than a Bad Neighbor.

Butterfly of the Week: Malayan Zebra

Graphium delessertii, the Malayan Zebra, does have black and white (or dark drab and white) stripes. It has even more black and white spots. It does not have "swallow tails," but its wings have the general structure of a Swallowtail's, so it is classified in the Swallowtail family. 

Photo by Gancw1. 

For a tropical Swallowtail it's not very big, with a wingspan usually over three but not so much as four inches. (Females, which are rarely found, are larger than males.) Still, it has the classic Swallowtail attitude. See it flying toward a camera at https://ronnieooist56.blogspot.com/2024/12/common-lowland-butterflies-in-november.html . If you check out the monthly photo essays at that blog, you'll see how many butterflies share the black-and-white spots-and-stripes coloring, in this habitat, and begin to wonder which is the most toxic to predators and which are merely getting the benefit of looking like the toxic one.

In flight, black and white wings blur into grey, and this species is often found in places where this effect offers some camouflage benefit against a background of grey stones. Males hang out at puddles, not obsessed with being the only one of their kind in a flock, but more often found in mixed flocks than with other delessertii. 

Visitors from Singapore felt that their time and money were well spent when they visited this delessertii's habitat on Sabah island. They saw one delessertii join a mixed flock at a puddle. He was followed by a Birdwing and a Red Giant Flying Squirrel. And they got nice clear photos of lots of other pretty butterflies, as well.

https://butterflycircle.blogspot.com/2019_04_20_archive.html

Instinctive color-matching may be at work since these flocks often include other fairly large black and white butterflies and smaller yellow ones...the underside of male delessertii's wings show yellow patches.

Photo by Gancw1. 

Photo by Annetteflottwell, showing that at some angles the white color can iridesce blue. (You might need to tilt your screen to see it.)

hoto by Sl_Liew.

Photo by Floatingkittem. Are the yellow butterflies getting some protective benefit from looking like delessertii's spots?

Photo by Gonaturelam. He's not drinking the sweat out of the sock, but would he be if he dared?

Photo by Wbleisch. This one shows a positive interest in a sweaty sock. They also pollinate several kinds of flowers, usually small flowers because they have large heads and short tongues, but in many Swallowtail species males have to ingest some quantity of mineral salts in order to reproduce. 

Males of this species seem not to be overly bold toward humans, but they are easily found at puddles. Females are more elusive and in collections, even photo collections, they can be considered rare. They may resemble males without yellow spots, or have a different black-and-white pattern and look more like another of their look-alike species, Ideopsis gaura, which is not even a Swallowtail. In this pattern the black markings are finer overall and more noticeable toward the edges. 

These look-alike species are sometimes called the rice paper butterflies. They remind me more of Victorian fashion plates, in which society belles who dressed in fashionable respect to other people's mourning would always choose black and white over, e.g., blue and white, but oh, the profusion of black and white frills and flounces! (This would of course have been late Victorian fashions, with bustles rather than hoops. Only in the late Victorian era did black and white become the correct thing to wear to indicate that you were not actively in mourning for a member of your own family, but merely fitting into the generally funereal mood along with those who were. Early Victorians thought the combination of black and white, if not relieved by a bright color somewhere, looked "ghastly.")

Though humans rarely get close enough to be sure they've seen a female of this species, there are enough females to go around. The species as a whole seems not to be endangered. The population on Java island has been threatened by logging and displacement. There seem to be several generations in a year--the photographs above show date stamps in September, December, and April. 

Three subspecies have been identified. Graphium delessertii delessertii, which is found on the Malay peninsula and nearby islands, is distinguishable from G.d. palawanus, which is found in the Philippines, and G.d. hyalinus, which is found only on Nias island. Museum specimens of subspecies delessertii and palawanus are in the gallery of images at

https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/gallery?taxon_key=5141236 .

They look very similar. Nevertheless, this species has had quite a few names. It was recognized early enough to have been registered as Papilio delessertii and also placed in a proposed new genus as Paranticopsis delessertii. The genus name Arisbe has been more recently applied to its group of Graphium. Species names catoris, labienus, sacerdotalis, melanides, and laodocus were proposed by people who didn't recognize delessertii as a species that had already been discovered, or thought a superficial variation in markings might be consistent enough to qualify as a species difference. The name catoris, commemorating a person who caught one, may have been given to a female since its wingspan was reported to be four and a half inches. A species name albinistica may have mistaken a thin-lined, white-looking female for a different species. 

One other proposed species name, dehaani, commemorates a scientist and was popular enough that it's still found on some species lists today, although the butterflies identified as dehaani are now thought to have been ordinary delessertii. De Haan was correct in identifying Graphium dorcus as a distinct species. He was incorrect in thinking two variations in the markings of delessertii from Borneo represented two more species, which he named melanides and laodocus, but then other scientists argued that although those two variations belonged in one species, that was a different species from delessertii. Scientists now say they're all the same animal. 

Merely identifying a Graphium in Malaysia is admittedly a challenge...

https://www.academia.edu/28699015/Towards_resolving_the_identities_of_the_Graphium_butterflies_Lepidoptera_Papilionidae_of_Peninsular_Malaysia

The species was first described, in French, by a naturalist called Adolphe Delessert. He had to describe it so accurately that a person who'd never seen it could recognize it, without any pictures. He deserves no extra points for doing the description in French since that seems to have been his native language, but I think he does deserve to have its name commemorate his feat. 

https://archive.org/details/revuezoologiquep39soci/page/233/mode/1up?view=theater

The cuteness rating of all the rice paper butterflies is high. They've been portrayed on postage; individual severed wings, or photos thereof, have been laminated for use as earrings; they've inspired the usual arts-and-crafts tributes. They have not, however, had their life history documented. Nobody seems to know for sure what they eat or what the early stages look like. The Javanese know that in their forests there are some trees that can be sold for money, which the Javanese want, and unfortunately, whether it's because trees or vines are removed or for whatever other reason, when they cut down and sell their trees they seem to be losing some butterflies, which, though very cute, are not good for a lot of money. Clearly it would be useful to know what the butterflies eat and what are the essentials for their life, just in case there might be a way to harvest a few trees without destroying this species. But nobody seems to be sure...

[Temporary paragraph, to be removed when it's served its purpose.]

...Except a nasty web site called picture-insect.com, which has clearly made it into Google's top hundred search results by paying money to Google. According to picture-insect.com, delessertii "harms plants" because caterpillars eat leaves. The site has no specific information about these butterflies or their caterpillars. Its claim that they eat Aristolochia leaves is probably based on the generalization that a lot of Swallowtail caterpillars eat Aristolochia leaves; if there is a better base than that, the world ought to know. There is a good chance that delessertii do eat Aristolochia leaves--and, if they do, they are completely harmless, because no monophagous caterpillar destroys its host. Aristolochia grow as fast as their symbionts (caterpillars and other creatures that eat their leaves) eat them. Caterpillars that "harm plants," in the sense of making unsightly messes in gardens or affecting crop yields, are well documented; Graphium delessertii clearly is not a garden nuisance, as some Annonaceae-eating Graphiums can be. On no evidence, probably merely by letting "artificial intelligence" generate pages for their site, the producers of picture-insect.com are leading people to believe that a harmless little animal whose economic effect, if any, is favorable (it's a pollinator) is a harmful animal that ought to be killed. The site is so poorly produced overall that I'm more inclined to blame "AI" than a malevolent campaign to reduce sympathy for Graphium delessertii in Java...but, considering all the web sites that Google refuses to show at all, these days, I think picture-insect.com is a prime example of a site Google should refuse to show. An honest, uncensored search engine could simply push picture-insect.com's ranking down to number 58,000 out of 65,000 and bask in the knowledge that it wouldn't be found twice in a hundred years. Google, having become what it now is, should recognize a cheat when it finds one and suppress picture-insect.com from all search results unless, and until, it's required by law to display all search results. Readers' complaints may help with this. 

Book Review: The Trouble with Tulips

Title: The Trouble with Tulips

Author: Emily Dana Botrous

Date: 2020

Publisher: Emily Dana Botrous 

Quote: "Yes, Seattle. You'd be five doors down from me."

Kim's old school friend Dianna doesn't call or write often, but when she calls Kim to describe a job opening in Seattle, Kim sends in an application. She's not sure how to tell anyone in Claywood, Virginia, that her job working for a grouchy old real estate agent is not good enough for her, so she says nothing--to her parents, her devoted brother, her other friends, or even her brother's buddy on whom she's always had a crush. Her mother, who has lupus, was ill when she threw away an envelope from an unknown company that Kim quietly fished out of the trash. It contained the letter notifying her that she'd been selected for the job. 

Meanwhile, Kim's brother's buddy Jake, still mourning for family members who died in a traffic accident, notices that Kim's grown up now. But how can he marry her when he wasn't able to protect his family, or the pets he used to have? 

Kim has thought Jake was more attractive every year they've known each other. But why would he even ask her for a date? She has an ordinary face, what she considers heavy upper legs, and a tiresome allergy to insect venom. How could a man ever fall in love with her?

Kim and Jake are Christians and they need to face their insecurities as the spiritual problems they are. Then they can fall in love and live happily ever after.

This early Claywood novel is not quite as rich as some of the others, but it still has more substance than the average romance. As with the others, all Christians who like wholesome romances will enjoy the story, and everyone from the Point of Virginia should enjoy the fictional town of Claywood. (It's not Gate City, it's not Duffield, it's not Pennington Gap, it's not Clintwood, it's not any of the real small towns from which people drive to shop in Bristol or Abingdon. It's an invented place with a strong resemblance to all of them.)