It's only powder snow but there's a lot of it, so it's covering the frozen ground fast. No noticeable wind means snow is starting to settle on tree branches. Is it presumptuous to expect that the Internet connection, or the electricity, will last through the snow?
(The connection went out around 10:30 p.m. Will it come back? Will I be able to post this tomorrow, even from McDonald's? Who knows? I think the powder is still sprinkling down.)
Disaster
Written more for psychological relief than for publication, this student's writing project explains why people leave urbanized Southern California...
Music
Thanks to Pbird for sharing this link to sweet traditional songs sung in harmony by nine well-preserved women of grandmother age. The first album is traditional Christmas Season songs, the second album is Yiddish songs, and the third is a mix of European and early American songs for all seasons.
I've been reading the collected works of a popular rapper--never mind which one--and now I know why so many editors are so vigilant about hateful stereotypes of Black people. It's because these Black rap stars hold a copyright on them. Every one of this guy's songs seems to contain all of them: Black people are violent, foul-mouthed, promiscuous, dirty, nasty, hateful, involved in the illegal drug trade; the men don't respect the women or provide for the children, and are really on a quest, if not to rape at least to exploit and defile, everything and everybody on Earth, not even only women; the women are all about taking money from men, the more the better, and the men's primary task in relationships is to reverse the natural direction of this cash flow, so all the women are prostitutes and all the men are...keeping within the terms of our contract here...exploiters-of-prostitutes. (The position of this web site is that if all the exploiters-of-prostitutes were put on a spaceship programmed to crash on Uranus, this would be a better world.) All of their highest goal in life is to be seen in expensive cars and clothes...so the website that lovingly curates every self-hating racist rant this man has ever spewed is loaded with ads for cars, clothes, lipsticks, jewelry, and don't forget the strictly confidential drug and disease treatment specialists. The man can turn a phrase ("run this town like feet") but most of the time he doesn't bother to do anything but spew out rude words, four or five F's and N's to a line. And he probably prefers to be perceived, on stage, as a "guy" or "dude," mental age seventeen, max, but hello, in real life he's close to grandfather age, and his face shows it I might add. Black skin usually ages slowly but this rapper's face shows years of abuse....looks as if he's really done maybe one-tenth of the drugs and crimes he raps about. Nobody could have done all that stuff and lived.
Mercy. I've heard raps I like, not even exclusively the cleaned-up ones middle grade students are allowed to perform at PTA meetings ("If you want to get in trouble at the -- School, just mess around and goof off too"). The genre has an aggressive sound, but that's not inherently demeaning to those who perform and those who listen to it. There are contexts in which rapping out angry words fits. But how is it possible that Black Americans enjoy wallowing in raps that demean them and their culture with these hateful stereotypes? Why are guys like this one raking in more money for their performances than Run-DMC or Queen Latifah? And how are White audiences supposed to think of Black Americans in non-stereotypical ways when their favorite entertainers feed them these hateful stereotypes?
I say, go ahead and feed money to these rappers, some of them need it to keep all of their various babies and baby-mommies in the style to which they are accustomed, but their fans might encourage them to start rapping about the real world in which their own children live. Presumably this rapper's children are more concerned with getting into big-name universities or signing with big labels than they are with cooking crack or selling kinky sex. He should be working his brand, keeping it fresh, keeping it real!
I started reading the raps because an e-friend dared readers to find material for an opera in them. Well, one can. What's Romeo and Juliet all about? Infatuation, rebellion, street fights in which dudes actually kill each other, teenagers taking drugs, lying to and abandoning parents, and at the end one kid OD's and the other commits suicide. That story's considered one of the world's greatest stage plays and a passable opera. The never-mind-which rapper could make an album out of that. I've never been wild about operas either. When the subject of operatic-style musical compositions is anything decent people want to think about, the compositions are known as oratorios.
Talking of stereotypes, here's Kyle Petty, aging gracefully, trying to sing like a hillbilly (which was originally a member of the working class who didn't work, but the style spread to people who do) about being a member of the working class (which he is not and has never been)...Foreign readers: Kyle Petty is the grandson of one of the founders, and the son of "The King," of stock car racing. Millions of dollars and literally lots of fancy cars. He probably wouldn't have been allowed to work at anything but being rich and famous if he'd wanted to. As a celebrity son he didn't embarrass his father as badly as many. However, because he wasn't famous for a look that hid the aging process, in his thirties he started to look "older" than his father did.
Tackiness, Astonishing, Blood-Boiling, Needs Trigger Warning
The position of this web site is that modern civilization has gone far enough with restricting the right of either vaccine or censorship victims to demand Albert Bourla's heirs as slaves. He has no right to demand that litigants leave the shirt on his back, anyway. If they want to push him down, pull off his shoes, and auction them as souvenirs toward a pathetic effort to compensate some fraction of the number of people he owes money, he should be grateful that that's so nonviolent.
Weather (Is Not Global)
Cold temperature records could break, Accuweather warns. (No link to Accuweather.com; their reports change as often as the weather does. If you want to see what Accuweather is saying by the time this post goes live, "accuweather.com" is easy to type.) Life-threatening cold in the Central Plains States is a possibility...as it is every year. I'm not saying another Big Freeze won't threaten some lives (my silly Johnny Wren's e.g.) but I am reminding people that both hot and cold temperature records are usually definable as "modern technology has yet to record THIS temperature on the TWENTIETH day of this month, although the NINETEENTH was hotter/colder in the year..." It's not "global" anything. It does not prove or disprove any "climate change theory." It is weather. Weather is, as it always has been, too hot, too cold, too wet, and too dry to suit somebody in some part of the world on any day of any year. Though I'm sitting in between two warm computers and a hot-air fan and the wind across the screen porch is making my hands feel cold, at the moment. I could use a tiny bit of warming. I would probably accept an invitation to pack up Serena, my knitting, a clean dress and a toothbrush, and spend a night or two in locally-warming Kingsport.
At the time of posting, about 9 a.m., it's 18 degrees Fahrenheit on the Cat Sanctuary's porch. I doubt that that's a record for this particular day, although it might be. In any case we've had much lower temperatures in February, if not on the twentieth. Four inches of powdery snow, with drifts up to six inches, could also be a record for this specific day but we've had bigger snows in February before. That the Internet connection came back, after going down around 10:30 last night, seems miraculous but even that is a rarity not a "record."
I'm chilly, not freezing, having gone out in it despite no longer having another child to whom to shout, "First track rights!"
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