How philosophical are you about the natural system of predation? For me it depends on whether I've bonded with the prey animal. Cooper's Hawks can eat sparrows, for all I care, or starlings, but not my cardinals.
https://rothpoetry.wordpress.com/2025/03/31/beauty-or-beast/
These early-flying British butterflies have close relatives in the US:
http://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2025/04/along-woodland-edge-in-march.html
Books
Most novels contain characters you wouldn't want to know in real life. In many novels that might be said for all the characters. In making my list of ten I remembered from childhood, I consciously thought "Well, obviously the villains, because they are villains." In most of the books I read as a child there was an effort to keep the moral conflicts child-size, to limit the "villainy" to bad manners, bad taste, or bad ideas. Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp is a kind woman; she just badly misunderstands dogs. Rob McLaughlin in My Friend Flicka is a fine man; he just embodies, and teaches to his sons, a version of masculinity that's repulsive to right-minded women and physically harmful to the men who buy into it. I thought it was more interesting to consider the off-putting qualities in characters who might not even have been cast as antagonists, rather than just list all the villains. A lot of novels contain characters who are villains because they make immoral choices. No, you don't want to know any of the characters who are only in a story so that the detective character can prove that they stole the diamonds or murdered the victim. Do they even count?
Lydia Schoch obviously was not deterred by any consideration of "Well nobody would want to meet Hannibal Lecter, at least not in the book; in the movie, where his murders and cannibalism were obviously fiction and he was played by a charismatic movie star, lots of people would, and that's part of what made Silence of the Lambs a great movie." She and several other reviewers included Hannibal the Cannibal on their lists. If my list hadn't filled up with characters from books I read before 1980, he might have been on it; a very bad man who helps the good characters hunt down an even worse one is more interesting than the average baddie.
The other one of her picks that qualified for a spot on my list, but came along too late, is the taking boy from The Giving Tree. That little picture book was meant to be a tribute to all the benefit humankind get from trees, but it's easy to read as a story about a selfish, thankless man.
https://lydiaschoch.com/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-characters-i-never-want-to-meet-2/
Country Life
People who live in big cities have been sneering at smaller cities and towns for a long time.
https://toolsofrenewal.com/?p=21227
I'll say this, though. The downtown areas in "God's country" may be uninspired collections of midrange or down-market chain stores and restaurants. And why is that? It's because, hello, nobody actually lives there People put their creative energy into their own, private, rural homes. Town is just where you have to go every few months to take care of tiresome business. Chain restaurants are good enough for people for whom the only attractions restaurants can have is that they're convenient occasional alternatives to packing a snack or waiting till you get back home to eat. Try to impress tourists from places where people eat in restaurants more than twice in the same year? Meh. Can anyone actually see the said tourists? Who's going to sink a lot of money in a fancy restaurant to impress potential tourists?
In the South the big city types who deride small towns might be called, in terms that don't violate this web site's contract, Unwashed & Unsaved Northerners. I don't know how many other things they're called in other parts of the country. They are not exempt from snarky stereotypes. Northerners were stereotyped as "unwashed" because their winters were so cold that supposedly they all had long underwear sewn up tight around their arms, legs, and necks in September and didn't snip the threads till Memorial Day. As Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta have become urbanized, this stereotype no longer applies to all clueless city people. There are new ones. Rappers are actively perpetuating them.
Disasters
It's annoying not to be able to post a comment on this blog when, for once, the post is substantial. (Mostly it's feel-good fluff.) From the part of North Carolina that's survived both floods and fires, this winter:
https://itsjustlife.me/ten-things-i-learned-during-a-crisis/
Glyphosate Awareness
It's encouraging to see the TV ads for class action suits against Bayer. If you used "Roundup" and now have a case of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the family, call 800-919-9229 to talk to an attorney about joining a class action suit that...probably won't pay you very much, but will make a statement about glyphosate. I'd say do it. We only need to start the lawsuits for the chronic disease conditions that are not cancer. Almost everybody has a valid claim for glyphosate damages.
Health News
What this guy doesn't get is that flavored water, with or without ice, with or without caffeine, is a way people stave off hunger. A Slurpee or a soda may not be the best nutritional choice. In the hypothetical ideal world where people dream up diet plans, it might not be the best choice for anybody. In the real world where there may not be time to prepare ideal meals and there may even be pressure to eat or drink something rather than take a lunch break at the desk, a Slurpee or a soda may actually be the least bad of the choices available to some people. Because the fruity-tasting sweet drink is so far from being the "natural" fruit juice its flavoring is meant to suggest, it's likely to contain less toxic glyphosate and be a healthier choice than a piece of sprayed fruit would be
"Do you seriously mean to suggest that a Coke is healthier than an apple?" If that apple was "ripened" with glyphosate, then yes, a Coke absolutely is healthier than an apple. There's an urge to think that, because the apple tastes so much better and contains so many nutrients, it still ought to be a better choice--maybe some nutrients are absorbed before the glyphosate destroys the lining of the digestive tract, say. Grandma Bonnie Peters thought that. Grandma Bonnie Peters developed liver cancer.
And there's another consideration I remember well, firsthand. Office managers just love to tell storekeepers that they're helping each other because "all of our employees have to eat lunch you know." Not all employees necessarily want to eat lunch. If I eat breakfast, I'm good till dinnertime, thank you. But when temporary typists were being dispatched around the city every day, I remember bitterly resenting the pressure to add unwanted meals from unknown sources to the expenses of bus, train, and taxi fare, nice clothes, shoes, and tights. "Go out and buy lunch! (You have thirty minutes.)" Probably no supplier of food I liked and trusted was within a fifteen-minute walk. DC's northwest quadrant was well supplied with lovely Giant soup and salad bars; the other quadrants, where the money was in being willing to go, not so much. High-traffic street corners had snack vendors I wanted to support; other street corners had none. If I bought anything, in a lot of places where I worked, it was going to be liquid and cheap. Secretary Kennedy might not understand.
We must fight against any urge to tell any other person what to eat. Even if people want to know what works for us, a diet that works for us may not work for someone else.
https://pjmedia.com/victor-joecks/2025/04/01/snap-shouldnt-subsidize-slurpees-n4938469
The way sugar affects our blood sugar levels has been likened to a fast-acting addictive drug for a long time. It's not a "nutty" novelty; it's a cliche. However, I think Milloy's right:
https://junkscience.com/2025/03/maha-gets-nuttier-rfk-jr-likens-sugar-to-crack/
History
Neil Young just hasn't lived here long enough to know what he is talking about. A lot of people who thought they had easy, well-paid jobs for life currently hate Trump; that's understandable. When it comes to awfulness, though...I think some recent Presidents did the nation more damage. W Bush's legitimizing cyber-snooping, paving the way for censorship, was very bad. LBJ's getting us into the Vietnam War was very bad. A case could be made that Lincoln's fighting the Civil War, instead of treating violent anti-federal demonstrations as crimes, was bad; Buchanan's escalating anti-federal hostility was very bad. What's hard to dispute is that Van Buren's declared civil war on the Cherokee Nation, most specifically the Trail of Tears, was one of the worst government policies in the history of human civilization. Van Buren's success in escalating what had been individual acts of hostility between people who were mostly learning to get along with each other, into a long, expensive, bloody, genocidal war, was literally an inspiration to Hitler. So no, Neil Young, Trump is nowhere near being our worst President. May Van Buren's vileness remain unmatched.
Can he ever be our best President? In any category? The flow of historical events has not given Trump much chance of peacefully ending even a "Cold War," like Reagan, or of presiding while defying what lesser men would call a disability and launching the successful search for a cure for the disease that caused it, like FDR, or of giving young men an example of how to succeed in life by being perceived as nice, like Carter. Though German is not currently the most popular ethnic identity and Trump is peacefully defying some racist hate, his ability to ignore the "Nazi" stereotype is still not in the same class with Obama's peaceful defiance of all those anti-Black, anti-White, anti-Asian, and anti-mixed-breed stereotypes. Nobody really wants Trump to be remembered as a martyr, like President Kennedy. He seems to be going for a record of fiscal success despite furious controversy, like Andrew Jackson, and at that he may well succeed. If he doesn't lay the foundation for an utterly immoral war, as Jackson also did, Trump may well be remembered as doing "Jacksonian Democracy" better than Jackson did.
It would be un-American to ban or jail Neil Young. He has the right to sit in Lafayette Park chanting "President Trump is an idiot" if he has nothing better to do. It's not un-American or even hateful, however, to note that he has something better. The US has been guilty of too much "brain drain" from Canada already; Canada will need every brain it can muster to recover from the Junior Trudeau administration; public-spirited people in the US actually respect successful Canadians who choose to go home and make their own country great again. Your native land needs you as a unifying influence, Neil Young. We will never forget your impassioned and high-stamina guitar playing. Some of the songs you've written may become folk songs. An unaccountable number of us even voluntarily listen to your voice. We will continue to buy your records. Go home.
Parents, Enjoying While We Can, and Political Note
From Merril D. Smith:
https://merrildsmith.org/2025/03/31/haibun-a-time-machine-dream-1940/
But she's a D in more than middle name. Seriously, Ds. If you're bothered by the parallels between the 2020s here and the 1920s in Germany, youall could be a little less eager to cast Rs as scapegoats. Attacking Tesla owners? I'm sure that's a thing Merril D. Smith never has done or will do, and yet I wonder whether her blithe, blind assumption of anything resembling a consensus in favor of the Left is feeding into Loony Left frustration, agitation, and violence.
Bad enough if they only make young, semi-Independent Elon Musk a McCarthyite. If the Left don't quiet their attack dogs, we might have--and need--another McCarthy Era. Which is not a thing real Rs want. Probably they, or their grandparents, didn't want the original McCarthy Era either.
Plants
I suspect this claim is overstated. However, dandelion has strong astringent properties. You can apply these "weeds" to skin and remove most kinds of warts.
https://ncrenegade.com/dandelion-root/
Poetry
I'm still trying to figure out the difference between free verse and prose. If it's "a good solid simple (piece of writing)" that sounds just like ordinary conversation, unconstrained by form, uncluttered by unusual sentence structure or unusual comparisons or unusual repetitions, and containing only words people say every day, I'm sorry, it may be good prose, but it's prose not poetry.
I call what I write "Bad Poetry (TM)" because I have no earthly idea what "the prestigious poetry journals" want or whether anyone else likes it. If it appeals to my inner four-year-old, it's probably not what appeals to "the prestigious poetry journals." However, going by this web site's statistics, it probably does appeal to a few hundred readers, or a few thousand, who will soon have the opportunity to pay for a physical book of it.
I am doing NaPoWriMo again this year. I'm taking the loss of Internet connectivity as a sign that it's time to publish this year's poems, along with some older ones that aren't on the blog, in a book readers can buy to support this web site. The Internet indicates that the last butterfly post here got 20,000 views. Right. I always suspect a good half of page views come from bots and hackers, but I know some of you can afford to feed the butterflies. (Butterflies will flutter in the book, though it won't have photos.)
https://classicalpoets.org/2025/04/the-wedding-dress-and-other-poems-by-russel-winick/
Political Gossip
Hard to believe this blogger seems to admire Don Trump Jr's command of language that sounds downright Nixonian. I don't like Nixonian. If this guy wants to be President, let's see how he does with longer and more obscure words, nuances, understatement, and a bland but deadly effective approach to the clinching point.
Stupidity
If my sister was out there hating on Tesla cars with clueless, groundless...if you want to hate on a White South African you don't call him Hitler, you call him Botha, but BLEEP you want to hate on them for anyway? They've paid the price for Botha...anyway, I would not smack her at all. I would reminisce about what a horrible time she had with scarlet fever and how her neurological damage from surviving that strain of steroidal streppy-bugs, that year, without antibiotics, is like and different from the damage Heather Whitestone McCallum sustained from the same germs, the same year, with antibiotics. Hey, if my hard-of-hearing, depressive, klutzy sister had to have neurological damage from a silly little strep infection, at least she shared it with A LEGEND! And she'd probably hit me, because the infection left her very quiet, due to hearing loss, but it did nothing to lengthen her brain stem; she is not the cool, reflective lady she appears to be. And it'd be worth being hit, because a boycott is a good way to protest, but stupid signage and violence undermine the value of the boycott.
https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/03/i-am-not-promoting-violence-in-any-way.html
Women's Issues
It may not be the quality that Melania Trump most immediately calls to mind, but yes, she is a "Woman of Courage." Marrying a man who's been divorced twice is not an act of intelligence or even of faith, but of presumption. But she's paying for that presumption with fortitude like nobody's business, with courage to match her talents and even her beauty.
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