Animals
In some places one does see butterflies at this time of year. I discovered these blogs by looking up the Graphiums we've been seeing on Mondays; there are more Graphiums at the links below, all new photos.
Art
This is supposed to be St. Paul?
Painting by Claude Vignon, who had apparently heard of the tradition that Paul had reddish hair, but not the rest of it. Young Saul of Tarsus might have had thick auburn hair. St. Paul, the author of the Epistles into whom Saul of Tarsus matured, was older than most people in the Roman Empire ever lived to be; his reddish hair was thinning, his voice was cracked, his back was crooked, and his watery blue eyes had cataracts, according to people who claimed to be contemporaries who had seen him. Unfortunately it's traditional not to trust those people too much. However, Paul himself wrote that audiences said "his bodily presence is contemptible," and dictated most of his epistles to other people, noting the "large letters I write with my own hand," so the part about the watery eyes and cataracts is almost certainly true. That 25-year-old model in the painting? Paul might have wished for a grandson who looked like that.
Artists can't help it. When we admire what people did and stood for, we can't help imagining them as having attractive faces. And nobody ever said Paul did not have great cheekbones or a nice symmetrical jawline, as many people who live to become old do...but he looked old and "contemptible," or kinder audiences might have said pathetic, anyway.
Crime & Punishment
Can we just agree that, even if the reason for trespass is innocent senile dementia, a trespasser's life is not equally as valuable as the home owner's? Everything in this world does not have equal value. Human lives, specifically, have value according to what humans choose to do with the gift of life. A trespasser's life might be equally as valuable as a roach's life, though this is debatable since it's not clear that a roach is capable of having evil intentions.
And, male trespasser + female homeowner = valid assumption of evil intentions. We need to become a world where little boys' lives are still perceived as valuable, partly because all little boys are trained from birth to leap away at any hint of discouragement from any female. Don't talk back. Don't even think of blaming her. LEAP. I say this because I love those of The Nephews who are in fact nephews, and want them to find good women whose Yes means Yes and whose No means No...who will take their time making sure my nephews deserve them, of course, and then eventually work their way round to "Yes, yes, yes! Oh, please hurry home!"
Irony
The way some people's attitude toward Elon Musk flipflopped when he agreed to work with Trump. He's young! He's foreign! He's geeky! He might have been equally willing to work with and for Ds in the future, if today's Ds weren't so encouraging toward shortsighted haters. They're not even giving the lad a chance. They're going to make him a flaming McCarthyite.
Cartoon shared on the Mirror. Google traces the cartoon with these two guys facing each other to so many social media sites, with so many different lines, that there's no hope of finding their source. I don't know...in the real world Romans and Vikings were not invariably better looking than twentieth century denaturati. Many of our fairy tale creatures were probably inspired by the physical defects with which babies are born when their mothers didn't eat regularly, and the diseases some people develop when they don't. But denaturati are profoundly unattractive, even if good maternal health and early nutrition allowed them to develop classic cheekbones, pretty teeth, and smooth black hair, so I suppose the cartoonist is justified...
Local Business
Apropos of something or other, I forget what, I Googled this local business. It's still online! It's growing! Readers visiting from the Meow may remember the letters to the advice column some of us wrote on behalf of public figures. On behalf of "J.B. from Delaware" I wrote something like "Some people say I doomed my son by naming him 'Hunter.' Nevertheless, the blogger known as Priscilla King claims to have a friend who named her son 'Hunter.' He struggled for a few years but is now doing clean stand-up comedy and artisanal soap. Is there any chance that my son can ever rise to the level of stand-up comedy and soap?" Priscilla Bird didn't think there was! Anyway, this is the "Hunter" I held up as a good example for H. Biden.
Local Warming
Gentle Readers, it was warm this afternoon, but I felt chilly around the time people who don't have to be their own nightwatchman go to sleep. I had been out doing errands, on the driver's schedule not mine, when we came to an outdoor thermometer. "Did that say 53 or 33 degrees?" The temperature at the weather station in Kingsport was 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Along the state line it was 33. Up on the mountainside, at the Cat Sanctuary, it was just below the freezing point; the ground hadn't started to freeze yet when I came in. I feel a bit less of a wimp for rushing to turn on that hot-air fan, now.
But yes, even after dark, even a small city is now running almost ten degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the natural temperature for the rural area outside. Even now that most of the factories have stopped polluting. It may not be "global," so many readers of this web site can continue laughing at Al Gore--either the real man, or Diamond's hypothetical tame groundhog--and some people in Kingsport may feel that 40 degrees Fahrenheit is preferable to 31 degrees Fahrenheit, but it is a significant change from the natural pattern, a serious problem. A global dictatorship can do absolutely nothing to help solve this problem. You and I can do something, together, if we put our backs where our mouths are.
Not driving, or letting others drive for us, one yard further than we can walk. I'm not saying the planet can't afford a few energy-efficient cars hauling a few people with bona fide disabilities, or even a few Great American Road Trips, but we all need to stop driving out to the convenience store to pick up a loaf of bread just to show that we own cars.
Not allowing people to live in stack-and-pack "housing." Americans can still live at a decent population density in the US if people spread back out into the Midwest and demand their right to telecommute while they rebuild the economic infrastructure of the ghost towns out there. Those midwestern towns became ghost towns for reasons but it can't be worse than living in slums, and living in places that naturally ought to be ghost towns should at least remind the young to have one child or none.
Not running those heat pumps. Yes, they are more efficient than heaters and window fans if people were determined to control the climate of whole houses at one time. We have to stop doing that and let the climate get back down to its normal range naturally. We have to heat one room and cool our own individual bodies, not heat or cool the house. There is no reason to waste heat pumps, there may be times when it's efficient to pack lots of people into the house and let heat pumps do what their body heat alone fails to do, but they need to be set to 35 degrees Fahrenheit in winter and 95 in summer.
And the more pavement we can allow to break up, the more native plants and trees we can encourage to shade out the "devil grass" (bermudagrass), the better. Friends don't let friends use unfiltered gas-powered mowers, much less that atrazine that causes "feminization" in male bodies, to maintain imitation Astroturf "lawns." White clover loves a flat sunny "lawn" and never needs mowing. We need more white clover.
Shopping
Some people might want to buy a few individual-size pie tins now, to save for Pi(e) Day next year... Actually the sine of pi works out to 0.05..., but for all practical purposes that reads as zero.
Also found at the Mirror. Google traced the pie photo to RicettaSprint.it.
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