More global warming sifts gently down. It's too cold for the kind of big fluffy flakes that break down trees and power lines, but who knows how long the Internet connection can last. When electronic technology could be really useful what it generally does is break down...
Animals, Resident
Serena undoubtedly thanks those who have been praying, purring, or sending good thoughts for her. (She does have ways of expressing what appear to me to be thanks...others might not agree that they are. She might plop her considerable weight on you, or nibble on your hand. You might prefer to let the thought count, from miles away.)
She is still sniffly but much healthier than she was a week ago. She thinks she's getting well, and even wanted to go out and talk to a visiting tomcat about spring kittens.
Silver...went off with Trumpkin, sniffly, and didn't come back with him on his next visit. I don't know whether his humans read this web site, or what, if anything, else. Nor do I know whether Silver has eaten enough poisoned meat to allow her to have either panleukopenia or a strep infection. So I don't know what her chances are. Silver has had exactly two sick days in her life--as a baby kitten, with enteritis, which would in theory have immunized her to any natural form of panleukopenia. She didn't inherit a large frame, and is smaller and thinner than Serena is or Pastel was, but she's a sturdy little thing. She might be very ill by now, and survive with a decent quality of life if given lots of water, some charcoal solution, and a little fish or chicken or at least the broth if she seems to be cramping. She might have thrown off the symptoms she had. She might be dead. It might be beneficial for other cat owners to know.
I should mention that, although Drudge is not really a resident, he's still here, and he's relevant data. If my cats had succumbed to a natural virus, Drudge has not had enteritis before, and both of his parents have reached the end of their short lives. If it were a natural virus Drudge would probably have had it first, or at least died first. Drudge is trying to act like a tomcat, i.e. annoying, but he is still a kitten who didn't go off into the woods and expose himself to poisoned meat. He is doing fine.
He's lonely, though, with Pastel dead, Silver spending most of the time with Trumpkin, and Serena spending most of the time in the office. He has a cozy cellar to curl up in but he's accustomed to curling up in a heap with five other cats. Now he has nobody to share it with but, presumably, a hibernating possum--if she's still alive. At least Jimmy Skunk seems to have picked another den for this winter. In any case Drudge has been crying a lot.
Books
Yesss! Carl Hiaasen has a new "mystery" coming out and I'm supposed to be getting a review copy! I get to write a blurb for Hiaasen! For a bookworm with no disposable income, reviewing is where it's at! The trouble I have with Hiaasen's novels of suspense is that I forget all about solving the mystery because I'm laughing too hard. Maybe if I can get Serena to hold one knee in a position that's become uncomfortable...?
Censorship, Opposition to
I'm not saying that everybody should follow Diamond's weather reports. He has some very unusual, controversial ideas about geology, seismology, meteorology, and climatology. Some I think may be right, some I think are probably wrong, and some I don't understand well enough to have any opinion about. He has a deliberately abrasive voice. He sells stuff, including heirloom seeds, which you might want to buy, and shirts with deliberately provocative tag lines from his videos, which I wouldn't wear. However, he was in Glyphosate Awareness before I took over the hashtag, and he was "demonetized" on Youtube for explaining scientific theories with which richer 'Tubers disagree, so if you can stand to listen to his videos, following him on Rumble might be a nice way to show what you think of politicized, money-motivated censorship of science. That can be done here.
Disasters
Photo from Forbes.com. Fair use.
Once again, somewhere near us got the disaster; we got rain. While I was feeling bothered by the Internet connection fading in and out, mostly out, Kentucky was getting flash floods that washed cars off roads. Seven inches of rain in one weekend, according to Fox. (No link; major news channels update frequently, so links to them rot quickly, and those who don't mind listening to Major News Channels style videos already know where to find them.) Now the Internet's reporting more than a dozen fatalities from those flash floods, mostly just across the border but some as far away as Louisville.
The Cat Sanctuary saw snow, too, yesterday, but nothing like the foot of snow that fell a little further north. The ground wasn't covered. Patches where individual particles of snow and sleet cohered and formed a layer of white weren't even half an inch thick. Lots of snow fell but most of it melted into the rain-soaked earth.
But the February blast of winter is here now (just before this post goes live, 2.19.25) and the frozen ground is pretty well covered in powdery snow. More precipitation does not sound like good news for Kentucky.
Education (and Literary Criticism)
If we inflate grades so that everyone gets an A and puff up reviews so that every novel sounds like The Great American (or wherever else's) Novel, in the end everyone loses. Nevertheless. I do tend to go lightly on amateurish writing, because I imagine it being written by amateurs, students, language learners, and I think, "Hey, I'm getting some meaning out of this. Person is writing something in English that makes sense. That rates a B. Writing original thoughts in beautiful English will come later."
It only looks inconsistent if I give some unknown Lupe Lopez (who may have grown up in the US and speak English without an accent, for all I know, but the name sounds Mexican to me) four stars for a primary school level "We went to a neighborhood restaurant. I had the chicken. It was good" sort of story, because it takes courage to publish something in your second or third language, and then give a publishable book three stars because "This author's last comedy was funnier." If you're a bilingual high school freshman, your work deserves to be judged as an exercise in writing your second language and graded high for correct spelling, correct grammar, and intelligibility. If you are (or are claiming to be) a renowned author, your work deserves to be judged against the works that won that author renown.
Glyphosate Awareness
While stalling on actual payments to those who've been awarded compensation for glyphosate-related cancer, pressuring editors to suppress glyphosate-related news items from the commercial media, and
publishing confidential information about people in Glyphosate Awareness, Bayer is now leaning on state attorneys-general to support laws that grant big corporations immunity from having to pay for the damage profitable products may do. Don't let it happen. Lean on your state attorney general to support laws that require corporations that stall on paying damages to pay more! (This petition is merely negative, but editing the words of the petition is encouraged.)
Interracial Romance
The Thompson Blog excoriates a White guy looking for a non-White girlfriend...
I was happily married to someone whose skin color didn't match mine...and I say don't. Or, in this confused young man's case, DON'T!!!
Can interracial romance last? Maybe. The odds are against it. For every long-married couple you know who say they're still "in love" and they'd do it again, you probably know three who say they've learned to put up with having each other around the house. If you honestly think of marriage as something you are obliged to do to show respect for your parents' choice of a son- or daughter-in-law, or as something you chose to endure in order to have children of your own, and you prefer to be married to someone who spends most of the day somewhere else and may sleep in a separate room, you are definitely out of the US mainstream but you might have a marriage that would be satisfactory to you with almost anybody. If you belong to different ethnic "races" that look similar and have not recently been at war with each other, that might boost your odds up close to average.
Some things that worked in favor of my marriage are not there to help most mixed couples. Both of us had grown up in a religious tradition that encouraged nonconformity. Both had further alienated ourselves from the mainstream by earning top grades at big-name schools. Neither had biological children; both had been foster parents. Both had come to terms with the fact that we were multiracial, ourselves. Both of us had diverse-looking extended families and circles of friends. We met around the time High Sensory Perceptivity was recognized by psychologists and neurologists, instantly recognized ourselves as HSP, and recognized that HSP was the hereditary trait that did define our social circles--not race. Our ethnic backgrounds did not include the sort of history that could be used to give one person any sort of moral "upper hand" over the other.
Also, on an even more deep-rooted emotional level...I'm top-heavy. He had a classic British aristocrat's face with melanistic skin; if people had a guess where his ancestors had come from, they guessed Ethiopia, not a Captain Blood sort of British West Indian mix. Anyway being stared at was nothing new to either of us. Everyone likes to think that "looks don't matter if people like each other" but, in fact, studies have shown that when one half of a couple attracts eyeballs more than the other does, those couples tend to break up. They think they don't mind one of them being fat or bald or whatever, but then the one who is fat or bald or whatever knows that people are muttering "What could she possibly see in him?" or "She must have a lot of money." Rarely does this awareness build the kind of confidence that allows the fat, bald, or whatever person to think "Hey, I may be bald, but I am Steve Harvey." More often the fat, bald, or whatever person succumbs to emotional complexes that make person really ugly, inside and out; person treats the "pretty" partner badly, and the couple break up.
But then...Black American men in relationships with White American women may be in for the hardest time. My husband, who was not a Black American but could be mistaken for one, didn't want to stand close to me when we were travelling through small towns, because there are still a few old people who actually remember times when a Black man and a White woman might have been murdered for being seen as a couple. It's not just the "Why would he like her?"--"Why would she like him?" sort of thing that relatively civilized people say of, and to, mixed couples out loud. Neither of us minded saying to rude people, "We're both part 'Indian'." Neither of us wanted to be shot in the back, either.
Women of color (other than Black American) who date men of pallor face less violence but, if anything, more fear of being dumped at the end of the summer. That's the big turn-off about the idjit boy whose personal ad Thompson holds up for ridicule. He sounds so much like that horrible type of young man who really wants to be a summer friend, only he wants the benefits of marriage within what he knows is going to be a summer friendship. That kind of sick puppy needs to be put down...at least with a chorus of flat refusals even to eat lunch with him in the school cafeteria.
I don't think it's unreasonable that young people are curious about schoolmates or co-workers from different backgrounds. I think that's a good thing. Be curious. Be friends. Hang out in one of those loose, flexible groups of singles. Talk about your different experiences and home towns at lunch, on breaks, on school outings. Find out if things you do or say create misunderstanding (those "microaggressions"). If there's a mutual attraction you might even get the urge to touch other kinds of skin or hair out of your system, though I'll always feel glad that I had the chance to practice combing and grooming curly hair as a babysitter and at least spared my Black school friends that. But have the sort of dates that end with a friendly handshake or elbow bump. Don't marry someone radically different from you as long as it's possible for you or the other person to imagine choosing to marry someone who "fits in" with your family. Curiosity is a good base for work or study projects; it's not to be confused with True Love.
Or: your beshert may have a different skin color or eyelid shape or whatever, relative to your family, but you can't really know that before you have made enough conversation, worked on enough jobs, eaten enough lunches, with enough different people--mostly same-sex friends--of that physical type, and also seen enough of your beshert, that you know for sure that you're attracted to the character of a Partner for Life and not just an interestingly different look. Often, for young people, especially the Black American boy and the White American girl, the attraction is all about rebelling against peer pressure, or even about "Hey, wow, somebody wants to date me! I'm finally growing up!" This doesn't last, and the relationships often end horribly, because "All the hassles I've gone through to be with this person and now I don't even like this person any more..."
Every difference between people is another potential source of conflict, of an eventual claim that the people can't bear to live in the same house another day. Differences between male and female, logical and intuitive thought, early and late rising, spawn enough conflict without adding differences of language, nationality, etc., to the mix.
That said, Nephews...A legally White cousin married a Black man who's been nice to her and the children, so we accept him. Two legally White cousins married into the Melungeon tribe, and they had long marriages and healthy children, so we accept them. A legally White cousin who'd been abandoned by an ex-husband brought home a younger, really White woman who was good with the children, so we accept her, with no need to claim that the White chick ever was "only the nanny." (She wasn't.) If you want attention and drama, from some other relatives you might get it by dating someone demographically unexpected, but not from me. Aunts are traditionally the ones who maintain detachment from the family dramas anyway.
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