Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Petfinder Post: Homeless Animal Day

(This post is late...I don't pre-schedule the Petfinder posts. I want the featured photos to be of animals that are available for adoption on the day they're posted. And it was a rainy day, and the Internet faded in and out.)

Saturday is St Roch's Day.

"Rocks day?"

Roch, or Rock, or Rocco, was a fourteenth century European Catholic priest. France, Italy, and Majorca island off the coast of Spain all claim him; he travelled a good deal. A lot has been written about his life--much of it contradictory and improbable. He might have been born in the year 1295 or the year 1348 or some other year; the written stories disagree even on that. Some say he was born with a cross-shaped birthmark, which was taken as a sign that he was to be dedicated to priesthood. 

As a baby Roch was said to observe two partial fasts every week, taking his mother's milk only once on the days when she was restricting her food intake. This may have contributed to his becoming the sort of mixed-up kid who could find sympathetic adults, after his mother died, only in a monastery in those days. His father wanted to prepare him for the political career for which his hereditary place in the feudal hierarchy predestined him; his mother wanted him to be a priest. In any case his parents died while he was a teenager. His father left him a plummy political appointment but young Roch gave away all his worldly goods and joined a monastic order. 

As a priest he was the "confessor," the kind, weary gentleman who listens as good people enumerate their boring little shortcomings, impure or uncharitable thoughts, petty lies like "I'm glad to see you," overeating..."There is no need to linger on the details of sins already repented. Say ten extra prayers, buy two more candles for the church, and you shall be forgiven." He went to Rome during an epidemic of some sort of disease, where he nursed, as well as hearing the confessions of, people who seemed to be dying and was credited with healing some of them. When he himself became ill, he retreated into the woods, set up a shelter of broken tree branches, and lay down to recover or die. A friendly dog came and licked him in a sympathetic way, then led its human, the highest ranking local aristocrat, to discover Roch and care for him as he recovered. The dog is said to have been a greyhound, or at least some sort of hound. The disease is said to have been a "plague," meaning an epidemic. It probably was not bubonic plague, from which very few people recovered.

According to the stories, Roch then wanted to go back to his home town. Possibly because he had offended people by rejecting political office, he travelled incognito. Priests and monks were generally respected; Roch didn't even identify himself as a priest. He was arrested for espionage because he wouldn't tell anyone his name and kept in jail for five years. Since he was obviously a gentleman no one thought of lifting his shirt to check for identifying marks until he had died in jail, when people recognized his birthmark. He had had a nice shirt when arrested and, apparently by a miracle, it lasted him five years during which nobody saw him take it off. Well, if the medieval writers believed that was the sort of thing that would have happened, I'll take their word. Medieval writers unquestioningly accepted a lot of stories that sound preposterous today. When what is hard to believe is the way people behaved, I can only imagine that the medieval writers understood how people back then behaved better than I do.

Nobody knows what Roch looked like. According to his story, even while he was living people weren't too sure of anything but that he'd left town when he was very young; nobody could even guess how he was likely to have grown up. There is some disagreement about how long he lived and how old he was when he was arrested This did not stop medieval artists reaching a consensus of what he should have looked like. He was drawn with brown hair of any shade from pale sand to black coffee, but never gray; wearing a wide-brimmed hat and long tunic, often raising the hem to expose a lump (understood to be an incipient bubo, as if he had had bubonic plague) on his upper leg, and accompanied by a dog carrying a loaf of bread in its mouth. 

Why do we remember this unverifiable story of a very dubious saint? Because Roch was remembered for kindness to animals. A dog had helped him find shelter while recovering from illness, and he helped dogs find shelter and recover from illness. He became the patron saint of homeless animals and animal rescuers. People who are not Catholic may observe St Roch's Day as Homeless Animal Day. Guess how it is traditionally celebrated.

Right. Today's photo contests are for grey cats, and greyhounds, or at least hounds, that are up for adoption. The cats selected are also known to be cool with dogs, and the dogs to be cool with cats.

Zipcode 10101: Mix and Match from Pleasantville 


These "brother" cats lost a good home when their human died. Mix, who looks bigger in the picture, is twelve years old and has some minor, age-related, chronic health issues. Match, who really is bigger, was not quite seven years old when the web page was set up and needs to lose a few pounds. They seem to be clinging to each other as the last souvenirs of their happy home life together, and must be adopted together. 

Zipcode 20202: Furginia from Herndon 


I've known older people, with some known German ancestry, who actually said they'd grown up in "Furginia." In this Maine Coon crossbreed kitten's case, the name refers to her fluffy fur, some of which is actually creating a health problem on her eyelids. She is expected to be recovering from the first of two corrective operations by now. Her vision seems adequate, though. Her age is not known. Maine Coon cats are typically bigger and furrier than most domestic cats. She is described as a typical kitten who likes to bounce around, play with toys, and snuggle. They don't say she must be adopted with one of the siblings shown behind her, but they do say there must be another kitten in the home. If you're not adopting her as a playmate for a lonely only kitten, you might as well inquire about her siblings. They want $250 as an adoption fee, which is not reasonable for a crossbreed but undoubtedly includes a rather high vet bill she's already run up. But you can "foster" her and make sure she's worth it to your family before you have to pay. I'd consider "fostering" all three siblings to find out which one I was willing to part with.

She's good with children, but as a general principle the shelter tries to avoid placing kittens in homes with very young children--under age six--if they're not already living with cats who have taught them good manners.

Zipcode 30303: Princess Leia from Warner-Robins 


They don't show her siblings on the web page, but they know she's going to be a Queen Cat because she's the alpha kitten in the litter. She will probably grow into those ears. $150 just for her includes her vet bill. They don't say you will need to adopt one of the siblings unless you're adopting her as a companion for a lonely only kitten, but you will. (Our Queen Cat Serena, who spent part of her kittenhood alone with a devoted mother and doting human, says kittens MUST have other kittens to play with.) 

Bonus: Westley & Neo from Clyde 


The web page doesn't say which one has been given which name. These two brother kittens are available on a "foster to adopt" basis. You pay a deposit to take them home, which seems like a perversion of the "foster" concept to me but this is one of the hurricane-hit towns we want to help to recover, and the shelter says nothing about free kibble during the "foster" period, but you get the choice of returning them or finalizing the adoption by paying for them to be neutered when old enough.  

Zipcode 10101: Bella from Texas via Brooklyn 


Sorry. She's not a hound. This photo distracted me.

You may know someone who's always wanted a Pomeranian. If so, e-mail quickly--the web page makes it sound as if she won't be up for adoption long. This ten-year-old, seven-pound fluffball likes to bounce around and play, but those little legs can't keep up with a human for very long at one time, so she comes with her own carrying bag. She's used to going where her human goes, being scooped up and carried when she gets tired of running at heel. Her foster humans have carried her on the New York subway (where Mayor Koch once said even his guards wouldn't go) and into the laundry room in a New York apartment building, and can testify that she's brave and quiet. Pomeranians can live to age fifteen or beyond.

Now, seriously, about the hounds...There aren't actually a lot of greyhounds up for adoption. With dog races being shut down, few of this breed are being bred any more. Too bad. A friend adopted a retired racing greyhound, once. They really are wonderful pets, once persuaded that they don't have to race any more and can be pets. Sweet, patient, quiet, gentle, they don't even need much grooming. They do need a lot of food and a lot of space to run in, and they can easily run even athletic humans off their feet--they need a big fenced yard where they can run all out, just for exercise, before going for jogs with us slower lifeforms. So they're not what contemporary couch potatoes would call an easy breed to live with. Even smaller hounds tend to be easy to love and unlikely to end up in shelters, but...it's hard to pick the cutest photo because they're all cute. In the absence of real greyhounds I looked for hounds with some gray color, which makes it easier, because most hounds are black, tan, white, or some combination of those colors.

Zipcode 10101: California from Manhattan


His web page was set up in March, when he weighed just five pounds. He's bigger by now. He is expected to weigh about forty pounds as an adult dog. Although he was sent to Brooklyn as "overflow" from a crowded shelter (they say "in Tennessee and St Thomas (island)"), shelter staff think he has potential and want him to be educated up to that potential. They prefer that he be adopted by someone who either has trained hound puppies before, or is willing to work with a professional trainer. He could be just a good city pet, or he could be a serious working dog. He is available to "foster-to adopt," so you can get to know him before making a final commitment. Where does California come into this, anyway? Apparently some people just think it's a cool dog name. "Here, Cal! Cal-iiii!" 

Zipcode 20202: Daisy May from West Virginia via Fairfax 


Daisy May is described as a real hillbilly hound who's happy with just about any kind of home as long as she gets some sort of food and some attention from her humans. Cool with other animals, she likes to patrol a fenced yard and keep out intruders, like mice. She is six years old and could easily live another six years. She's not been seriously trained--they're still working on the basics of city dog life.

Zipcode 30303: Cassi from Ball Ground 


Her web page is incomplete but, at full size, this was the cutest picture of a hound with any grey color and a history of peaceful coexistence with cats.  

Bonus: Holly from Mountain City


This terrier-hound mix is nice to other animals but likes to cling to a human and feel that she's a favorite. She is said to cuddle and clown and make treating her like a favorite very easy. 

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Book Review: All in the Past

Title: All in the Past

Author: Betsy Hayes

Date: 2022

Quote: "As much as she didn't want to hear about Mr. Graffen, she hated the sound of Jacob's name."

The Graffens were the super-rich family for whom Lucy's father worked. During the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, she formed a crush on their son Jacob. When the Graffen parents caught the young couple in what was probably an experimental kiss for Jacob, they cut off Lucy's scholarship and separated the two. It might have been the very nastiness of Mrs. Graffen's remarks about Lucy "getting your gold-digging claws into my son" that have kept them thinking of a summer crush as the One True Love of Their Lives...

There's no suspense about this romance, there's no character development, and I can't feel very optimistic about the couple's prospects. This is just the basic fantasy of everyone who's ever wanted to marry money and not done it. If that's your favorite fantasy, you'll enjoy this mini-book.  
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Monday, August 11, 2025

Book Review: Council of the Dead

Title: Council of the Dead

Author: K.A. Ashcomb

Date: 2024

Publisher: Liquid Hare

Length: 494 pages

ISBN: 978-952-69026-8-5

Quote: "Like a curse, they were doomed to roam the land in search of meaning."

The Council of the Dead is volume five in the series that included Mechanics of the Past. I have only the two volumes. This is one series that I want to collect. It's not at all like Xanth or Discworld but it is, like those series, a silly enough fantasy to keep me giggling while its deep philosophical undercurrents keep me awake. 

How often do I actually like fiction? I mean, beyond noting its good and bad points and who is likely to like it. How many novels would I pay money to own after I'd read the PDF version? Not many. This is one. If you feel that your mind is similar to mine, run don't walk to the bookstore to order all five of the volumes available so far. 

That said, I should mention that this is a grimmer, punkier story than Mechanics of the Past. It takes place almost entirely in, or in a cave deep under, Necropolis. None of the characters is fully human; they've all mutated into occult-type fantasy fiction characters. They live in the darksome land of postmodern, post-Christian concepts of life and death where there are no real gods and there is no real morality, and so they search for meaning for their bleak atheistic lives, some worshipping false gods like Death and the Kraken, others infatuated with the magical powers their city offers some of its citizens.

This is the home of Otis, who recreated the Finnish sampo as a machine powered by the vital force of dead people, thereby depriving their chance to be re-embodied even as ghouls, which they felt as a heinous wrong. Otis is in prison, awaiting sentencing. His fate depends partly on whether or not he can in fact make another machine like the one that's been destroyed. 

Meanwhile the city, with its various sectors and factions--witches, ghouls, vampires, necromancers, ghosts, imps, zombies, and bureaucrats, which may be the worst of all--act out a gloomy yet insightful study of practical politics. Will mitigating the fundamental evil of Necropolis destroy one of the nicer witches? What is it like to be banished to the underground city of the cave-dwelling, corpse-eating ghouls? Will the Kraken accept the deification some Necropolitans want to give him? 

This plot may sound too noir for some readers. They should read something else. If you don't go into satanic panic or depression when this kind of monsters are mentioned, but recognize them as metaphors for different approaches to applied politics, you will like this book. If you're a Christian, it will make you feel sorry for, and perhaps help you understand, the mental plight of unbelievers. If not, I don't know what you'll make of the ideas in the book, but you'll probably enjoy it.
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Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Kosii

In a small, tangential way this week's butterfly is part of a political controversy. Graphium kosii has been usually, but not always, accepted as a distinct species from Graphium weiskei since 2006. (It had been described by Mueller in 1999.) Both species live on the islands known as New Guinea. G. kosii lives only on the island called New Ireland. G. weiskei is a little more widely distributed. They look very similar to each other, and to G. stresemanni. If kosii is a species, though, it's a rare and probably threatened species whose existence would justify turning its whole native island into a nature preserve.


This museum specimen, ganked from Wikipedia, is the only clear photo of Graphium kosii I found. 

Personally, I'm not opposed to nature preserves on one condition, but where that condition has been offered it has generally been violated. Nature preserves must not be owned by governments; when that happens, what's to stop somebody like Sarah Palin from strip-mining them. They should be owned by families who agree to live sustainably on the land and tolerate a certain amount of tourism. 

But shouldn't governments "own" places like the Appalachian Trail in order to protect endangered species from extinction, someone will say. What has person read about the number of endangered species, or subspecies, known to have gone extinct along the Appalachian Trail, lately?

Right. This post is about butterflies in New Guinea. Anyway, the unsuspecting butterflies we're studying this week have been pressed into the service of an unholy, antichristian religious cult. The cult calls itself Globalism. It preaches, irrationally but with religious fervor, that a tyrannical global government--with the power to enforce things like vaccine mandates, medically assisted suicide, population increase or decrease quotas, mass migrations, military conscription, etc., worldwide--is necessary to prevent war or global warming, whichever the population most fear. It refuses, with religious zeal, to consider that a tyrannical global government would have no such effect. It treats land grabs as a religious ritual.

New Guinea didn't need Graphium kosii to have extremely attractive land. It's the home of several unique island plants and animals. Its rich green mountains are what are called a tropical paradise. Its indigenous population have been isolated and illiterate, subjecting themselves to the irrational taboos and superstitions people tend to believe when they have no other idea how to reduce the danger they face every day, for hundreds or thousands of years; nobody knows how long. They have not had the means to exploit the land in the way greedy Asians and Europeans would like to do; nor have they reached a level of cultural enlightenment at which they appreciate the land for its own sake. The land and  the creatures who live on it are indeed in danger.

Through this situation flit rather pretty butterflies, small by comparison to New Guinea's Birdwing butterflies and Atlas moths, only about the size of what North Americans call our large butterflies: Graphium kosii kosii, Graphium weiskei weiskei, Graphium kosii gigantor...

Cleveland Amory, a wonderful old curmudgeon I used to want to work for, bequeathed control of his World Wildlife Fund to Globalists. The beautiful e-book linked below is an evangelical tract published by a Globalist cult--but if you read these butterfly articles, you'll want to read it, anyway, for the gorgeous wildlife photos.


Graphium weiskei, the Purple-Spotted Swallowtail, and its look-alikes are very colorful and attractive butterflies. Their wings iridesce, and also contain some color pigments that produce a pattern that often looks purple, green, blue, and black. The wingspan is usually less than three inches. G.k. gigantor, found more recently on the nearby island called New Britain, may be larger than G.k. kosii.


Graphium kosii live at rather high altitudes and are seldom seen by humans. Though not even close to being the rarest Swallowtails, they are among the rarest in collections. People who recognize kosii as a species usually don't have a clear photo of one.

Nobody seems to know anything about the early stages of this butterfly's life.
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Web Log for 8.8-9.25

This should have gone live on 8.10.25, too.

Animals 

Sunday is "Spoil Your Dog Day," according to some person in charge of making up new holidays to celebrate on the Internet. 


Why not? It'll be easier to remove fleas and ticks with just a comb, no special shampoos or powders required. The dog will be cooler during the last hot days of summer. The coat will start growing back before cold weather arrives...well, that depends a bit on where you are. Where I am, Shaggy will be fairly shaggy again by the first frost, if he's neatly clipped today. 
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Bad Poetry: Step On Back

Step forward
Step back
Back down
Back off
Off with the volume
Off with the hands
Hands in your pockets
Hands down
Down the pressure
Down the scale
Scale back 
Scale exercise
Exercise good will
Exercise patience
Patience is a virtue
Patience will prevail
Prevail over impulse
Prevail over emotion
Emotion misplaced is
Emotion wasted
Wasted time
Wasted effort
Effort to impress
Effort to please
Please sit down
Please remain calm
Calm your heart rate
Calm your ego
Ego locks horns
Ego fouls up
Up to Heaven
Up to you
You were too close
You step away now
Now you can be seen
Now you can be heard
Heard speaking your truth
Heard making sense
Sense of boundaries
Sense of respect
Respect for self
Respect for the other
Other created to be
Other than you are
Are not offending
Are stepping back
Back off from conflict
Back with a quick step
Step
Back

On Friday the Poets & Storytellers United posted a good prompt; I just kept not thinking of poems to write about it. When this happens, one way to shake something out of the writing brain is...

"
The Blitz Poem, a poetry form created by Robert Keim.

This form of poetry is a stream of short phrases and images with repetition and rapid flow.

Begin with one short phrase, it can be a cliché. Begin the next line with another phrase that begins with the same first word as line 1. The first 48 lines should be short, but at least two words.

The third and fourth lines are phrases that begin with the last word of the 2nd phrase, the 5th and 6th lines begin with the last word of the 4th line, and so on, continuing, with each subsequent pair beginning with the last word of the line above them, which establishes a pattern of repetition.

Continue for 48 total lines with this pattern, And then the last two lines repeat the last word of line 48, then the last word of line 47.

The title must be only three words, with some sort of preposition or conjunction joining the first word from the third line to the first word from the 47th line, in that order.

There should be no punctuation. When reading a BLITZ, it is read very quickly, pausing only to breathe.
"

Sometimes the most important step we can take is a step back. A support-group-for-extroverts culture may have taught us to stand too close, ask too many questions, push too hard. Living/working with cats is a good corrective: When you feel as if you're meeting resistance, back off and give the cat time to think things over. This can help resolve conflicts with humans, too.
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Book Review: Living in God's Love

Apologies for this post not going live sooner...

Title: Living in God's Love

Author: Billy Graham

Illustrations: black and white photos

Publisher: Putnam / Penguin

Date: 2005


Length: 125 pages

Quote: “You have been born into a human family, but when you are born again, you are born into God's family. I'm asking you tonight to come and be born into God's family.”

This is a souvenir book, containing the text of sermons preached during the Billy Graham Crusade in New York City, June 2005. The late Billy Graham had been evangelizing New York City since 1957 and had been persuaded to admit that the 2005 Crusade would probably be his last one.

Apart from that...Living in God's Love contains the basic evangelical Christian message. God is perfect. Sinful humanity is separated from God by our moral imperfection. God so loved the world that God became incarnate as Jesus, the only sinless man who ever lived, and died as a sacrifice for our sins. If we repent and ask God's forgiveness, our sins can be forgiven.

This is not all that Billy Graham said to the world for fifty years, nor was he the only one saying it, but it is the message for which Graham has been best known.

The 2005 Crusade was indeed a memorable event. Not only did Billy Graham preach “probably the last” of forty-eight years of sermons; George Beverly Shea sang “probably the last” of forty-eight years of gospel songs (at least in New York City). Anyone who was impressed by the sheer longevity of these gentlemen would have wanted to be there—if only “by way of radio, television, or the Internet,” as a local minister said while introducing Graham's Friday night sermon. For those who weren't there, this book would be an excellent gift.

Is there anyone to whom I would not recommend this book, aside of course from the people who already own copies? Yes. Please don't use this book to needle Christian-phobics. It's too good a book to be used that way. I recommend a different strategy to Christians who are concerned about the souls of Christian-phobics. Christian-phobics tend to be people who have known more hypocrites than real Christians. Give them the experience of knowing a real Christian. It just might “blow their minds,” and then as their minds slowly reassembled themselves they just might lose their phobias and ask for copies of memorable Christian books.
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Sunday, August 10, 2025

Web Log Weekender: 8.8-9.05

First of all, this web site's Top Slow Steady Seller post has been brought fully up to date at last.


Animals 

More stunning photos of Malay butterflies. These are smaller species than the ones in his previous post (it'll take us years to get to them!), but no less unusual looking. 


Marketing 

Among the silliest gimmicks of all time...but it worked.


Men, My Age, the Main Problem With

It's not just that their baby-making days are over--that's a good thing. It's the hang-ups they have about that fact of life and the way they become obsessed with trying. If their efforts weren't doomed, they might be able to be reconciled with their wives and be fit for anyone else to be around, again.


North Carolina Update 

Seems this company came in to repair a railroad track and saw an opportunity to strip-mine a steep mountainside directly above a river. 


Vegetables 


Luck to you, Gentle Readers. Lens doesn't know where it originated. I saw it posted on Tumblr by someone called Dearmrbean whom I don't know or follow.

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Friday, August 8, 2025

Web Log for 8.7.25

Computers 

If you ask a plagiarism-bot the right questions, it will plagiarize existing content to "confess" it's serving Satan. Seriously.


Food (Yum) 

If you have these vegetables in your unsprayed garden, what fun to play with food like this! Eat zose delicious, nutritious little "bug" salads!


Found on the Mirror. Lens says 

Mobility 

Citizens of the United States have a right to live in whichever State they fancy, but if they're fleeing the bad effects of leftist policies on "blue" cities and States and trying to move into "red" ones, they may find themselves unwelcome. Longish video rant, a bit repetitious, but worth sharing.


Music 

So it's 2:18 a.m. I am my own nightwatchman. I'm out here on the screen porch, enjoying the good old prevailing wind from the north after last week's windless humid heat. I'm adding geographical tags to the Butterfly of the Week posts, since some people are avidly reading the ones about Asian butterflies, and listening to some of that backlog of stuff people post as audiovisual content merely because they're too lazy to type the words...and I finally come to an actual song that needed to be on Youtube. It's a good song for a Bad Neighbor who's causing my neighborhood to need nightwatchmen, which has never happened before. Hello Wrymouth, disgrace to the family, disgrace to humanity? Johnny Cash didn't know you, but he was singing about you.


Personality Test, Not Very Scientific 

This is a seventy-year-old test designed to test your receptivity to fascist ideas. The web site that hosts the digital version admits it's not very scientific. I will go further. I think it's not well designed. Fwiw, according to the test I'm a little less sympathetic to fascist ideas than the average American. To people who've read what I'd call a reasonable amount of European history for an American high school graduate, the design of the test is dead obvious. Anyway, conservatives can use this test to avoid sounding like fascists online...

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Book Review: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Title: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Author: Anna Catherine Field

Quote: "You'd think at nearly thirty, he'd come up with something better to do with this time."

Could this e-book ever have benefitted from developmental editing. The book title Rescuing the Bad Boy and series title Last Chance at Love made me think it was going to be about a desperate older woman convincing herself that she's "in love" with one of those juvenile delinquents shuffling around in fifty-year-old bodies. It's not that, but, as the line quoted shows, it's not been professionally edited either.

Gabrielle is a social worker who's been managing a halfway house for juvenile delinquents in adult bodies, like the one referred to above. He's mostly harmless; he just hasn't learned, from Gabrielle's kind of approach, that it's wrong to steal other people's cars to go "joy riding." He is, once again, locked up for test-driving another neighbor's car. And really, as long as the consequences of test-driving neighbors' cars instead of going to a used car lot and talking to the dealer are limited to free meals and rent in what's probably a reasonably clean jail, followed by free meals and rent at Gabrielle's place with a few pep talks about self-esteem, he's likely to keep "joy riding" until he's ninety years old, unless he dies first. As long as the federal grants keep rolling, Gabrielle will keep exercising her maternal instincts on him and his kind.

In one of those coincidences that happen in cornball romance novels, "Chance" happens to be the name of the judge, who doesn't want to tell Gabrielle her approach to crime is wasting taxpayers' money. What he wants is to ask her for a date, as he did in high school, but since they quarrelled in high school the judge has yet to reach a decision on what to say. Right.

When the federal grant money is cut off, however, Chance and Gabrielle have a chance to talk. This story does not end with "happily ever after." Field is not that amateurish. There will be a short series of longer novels about other couples who get married and live happily ever after, and then Chance and Gabrielle will be ready to affirm that they do.


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Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth: Belated Post for 8.7.25

A contributor to a blog I follow felt that some presidential policy moves he does not support show that "Trump has failed" and, if even populist Trump was not aligned with his views, he "was done."

Well, that was during the heat wave. Exhaustion was a very natural and logical feeling to have. 

A reaction from a stouter heart followed, here:


Can I think of more specific encouragement for, specifically, Glyphosate Awareness people, and, more generally, all who support more individual rights including the right to make our own health-supporting decisions, especially in choosing minimally contaminated food and water? Of course I can!

What follows started as replies to specific comments and questions from people discussing the "I'm done" post. (No link to that post; having been encouraged and taunted by that community, the author concluded that he wasn't trying to leave the country or give up activism altogether, just scaling back his activity to a more balanced and weather-appropriate program, so there's no need to take up any more of his energy.) I've tried to organize them into a logical order. That is why they are late.

I'd like to call out Dave DiGerolamo's post because I think doing so highlights something we do at this web site. We don't dictate or demand. We form alliances with people who are working toward a common goal, even if we and they have other goals that may be different. 

Glyphosate Awareness is not and should not be the story of anybody's life. It's important to all people who prefer being healthy to being sick and/or prefer being alive to being dead, whether or not they realize how important it is...but it's not even an ongoing organization. It's not going to become anybody's full-time paid job. We agree that poisoning people for profit is evil and must be stopped. 

We want a ban. Secretary Kennedy has done an heroic job of getting people to agree to things voluntarily without a formal ban. That's also good. In the case of poison sprays we may need a formal ban, but it's certainly best to begin by encouraging farmers who sincerely want to raise good food to take their first fearful steps voluntarily, if that can be done.

Technically, a ban on glyphosate will be the official end of Glyphosate Awareness. I've come to feel that, because the corporations have shown such lack of concern about human lives at even a slight risk to profit, we need to be fighting for a ban on all outdoor use of poison sprays. Whether we're fighting for a ban on one specific chemical that harms us personally, or on all outdoor spraying, once we get that ban, we disperse. Whether you have one more idea in common with Bernie Sanders, or with me, or with anyone else who's helped to spread Glyphosate Awareness, or not, is up to you. We are not a cult. We are a diverse group of people who've managed to agree on one thing. 

But, in a more general sense, we are all activists. We are all committed, in whatever way we understand it, to doing what we've been called to do to resist evil in this world.

DiGerolamo begins with "civil disobedience." I especially like the examples he gives. Many of the things we're opposing are neither laws nor politicians nor political systems. Evil often operates through peer pressure--specifically, market pressure. 

"I just sold my first load of early corn. When do you expect to sell your first load out of that unsprayed, mixed-crop field of yours? You'll never make a profit on that field. Taxes are going to eat you up if you don't start farming the modern way. Plant bioengineered corn that can resist it and then drown your field in pesticides!"

"It's cruel to take the chance of letting children develop natural immunity to measles! Do you want your children to suffer? Do you want them to grow up blind?"

"It's crazy to try to live without a car in this world! It's dangerous, walking in traffic! It's career suicide because people aren't going to hire someone who doesn't have reliable transportation to the job, even if you say that your feet are reliable transportation to a job one mile away. Think of what you're doing to your children..."

Etc. etc. etc. I've only been hearing it for sixty years. I'm not saying I was old enough to understand it for all of those years, but I was certainly hearing it. My parents disobeyed the social mandate to become dependent on motor transportation everywhere. It cost them jobs; it cost them some people's approval. I grew up. I learned how to drive a car. I drove a few cars other people owned. I owned a couple of cars other people drove. Finally I both owned and drove the same car all by myself like a person with no consciousness of the reasons not to join the car culture, for about six weeks. Since then I've disobeyed the social mandate to depend on motor transportation, and I'm likely to walk in situations where my parents would have used a taxi service.

Not that I am nagging anyone else to choose a car-free life. Not that I think motor vehicles are altogether evil. It's our overuse of them that is evil. By walking when it's feasible we can reduce pollution, improve our health, and avoid the kind of local warming that provides the pretext for left-wingnuts to scream about global warming calling for global dictatorship to save the planet.

But everyone feels called to resist evil in this world according to a different set of priorities. This is probably an indicator of what we're best qualified to do. I'd like to try to avoid quarrelling with others in the broader movement about priorities. Some things Robert Malone has said recently have offended people who liked his book. Some people see gene splicing itself as a bigger hazard than "pesticide" spraying. When dropping facts on an anti-vaxxer didn't convince her immediately that glyphosate is more dangerous to the public than vaccines are, I understood the feelings people express. We want to shake or slap the ignorance out of some people. We feel as if they were the enemy. These feelings are not helpful. Balkanization, being divided and conquered, is one of the aspects of evil we need to resist. If we abandon our mutual goal and fight against each other, there's no chance of reaching the goal.

(Why is glyphosate more dangerous to the public than vaccines? I mean the vaccines that everyone can agree have done more harm than good...Still, it's possible to avoid vaccines. It might have cost some people their careers, but we could say no to the jab. It's not possible to avoid glyphosate. If your reactions are disabling, you can give up social eating, give up most of your favorite foods, give up open-air exercise, become a total agoraphobic crank, and still spend a lot of days being sick. This should not be possible, of course. That's what we're fighting against.)

I try to respect everyone's differing priorities, and I'd like to encourage everyone else to do that. People usually have reasons for their priorities. If you live in a place where the climate is naturally hot and you know people who won't survive if it gets hotter, climate is probably your priority, you may even listen to those calling for global dictatorship, and you probably aren't even reading this web site regularly because you think we're insensitive to the dangers of climate change. This kind of thing is annoying but inevitable. We have to work through it, to reach our goals.

So, as someone asked in the comments, who will lead and guide us? 

Only the Great Spirit will. Only the Great Spirit can. If we place our faith in a fellow mortal, even if that person never disappoints us, that person is mortal and will grow old and die. 

Speaking of which, many of us are already pretty old. This is not all bad. Old people can be fearless. We can say:

If I live another fifty years, I'll still have a long list of things I want to do.

If I die tomorrow, I'll still have had a longer and better life than most humans have ever had.

I am not afraid of Hell.

But where does that leave the young? Sometimes I count how few of the previous generation in my extended family are still alive, and I wring my hands and pray--"God, she's eighty-five years old now, he's ninety--oh please let them stay active for another fifteen years!" This is true even for two cousins I've never met who don't feel rich because they're not in the top one percent of America's richest, but they are in the top five, and it's not inconceivable that they might remember that their mother's wealth came from dividing some land in a way that cost my grandmother money while it made their mother rich, and consider leaving some money to me. Just as fellow celiacs who want to support Celiactivism, the larger and much more pleasant cause that will remain after Glyphosate Awareness is over, they might consider leaving some money to me. I could use the money. I'd still prefer that they remain alive. I hope the young feel the same way about us...but, regardless of how anyone feels, we will not always remain alive. My generation, who identified as "the young" for so long, are becoming "the old." 

I don't recommend that the young be publicly identified as leaders in Glyphosate Awareness because the corporations who embody our enemy are so evil. People who are or might become parents of young children should not do things that might deprive those children of parents. I recommend that the young practice leadership skills with their children and in "safer" organizations like neighborhood watch and PTA-type groups.

I don't share, and don't think we should feed attention to, the perception that the young are unfit to survive after the old. It has always seemed to people who've lived long enough to have read all the books in their large personal libraries, and been tested by adventures, and developed craggy faces with interesting scars, and come to understand how many things are of more enduring interest than sex, that the young are uninformed, weak, pasty-faced, hormone-addled blobs of glup. What the young are is young. They will outgrow it. Some people don't seem to have revisited their high school or even college yearbooks lately. Young people I see remind me very much of the ones who were young along with me, back in the day. ("Aaaack!") I don't know that we should slack off in order to make room for them to grow. I think there's still room for them to grow and mature on their own. Still, a little reminiscing about our own experience of being clueless and pasty-faced ought to reduce any distress we feel about leaving the world in the hands of the young. They will mature. Younger generations always have matured, and always will.

The young will, eventually, lead the resistance against evil. Trump won't be here. Kennedy won't be here. We the technorati, the early adopters of privately owned computers, the bloggers and social media networkers, won't be here. They will have to be led by the Great Spirit, just as we do.

In questions like "Who will lead..." I hear the disparity between what might fairly be called a fascist, or at least authoritarian, way of thinking and a more democratic, or American, or biblical, way of thinking. People will have a king if they want one. Some people do. But God's perfect will was that people receive orders directly from God, and not feel a need for kings.

For literal, physical combat, of course, strategies and drills are useful. Strategies for physical combat often do rely on members  of a team to lead a multi-person strategic move. "When A sees X happening, A gives the cue to B to..." This web site recognizes a place for combat in this world but this web site is utterly unqualified to organize or even encourage physical that could become violent. We are all about nonviolent strategies that are best implemented by individuals, usually acting as individuals. A March Against Monsanto may be fun for its season but it's when individuals stop buying Monsanto-Bayer and similar products that the corporation has to take notice. 

For purposes this web site has anything to do with, therefore, the little personal choices are the important ones. Why organize anti-glyphosate rallies, where we're likely to be deliberately sprayed or worse and where we do the corporations' profits no harm at all, when just not buying things actually hurts the corporations that have poisoned  us? Don't buy things made by corporations that also make glyphosate--or other "pesticides." 

We should all be raising as much of our own food as we can. How much land we have, and what it will produce, naturally determines how much that is. Corn and beans need a certain amount of sunshine to grow. Chickweed and violets need less. The commercial food industry have taught us that we need the standard commercially grown vegetables that need a lot of sunshine. Corn and beans and tomatoes and suchlike are very good, but if your glyphosate reactions indicate that most of the commercial produce is still marinated in glyphosate or some other chemical that makes you ill, and most of your favorite fruits and vegetables are never going to grow on your property, you may be amazed to discover how nutritious and how tasty chickweed and violets can be. Actually, most of the native "weeds" we pick out of our gardens are nutritious, and taste good, too, when eaten in the right season and quantity. 

We do need to keep voting. There may be slots on the ballot where writing in the name of a famous dead person, a cartoon character, or a vegetable makes sense--if it won't get the election done over, at the very least the Lesser Evil will know how many people voted against him. Generally it's good to vote for the least of the available evils, or against the greater ones. Elections have been decided bmuch y one vote in one precinct. Why waste yours?

We need to add talking and writing to voting. We are the technorati. We have to educate the people who didn't form a habit of reading at school. Personal relationships with these people are not always part of communicating with them. We can run for local office, and write letters to local papers, like good traditional activists. Those things boost our signals. So does being a good customer, when we can. So does talking with people at church dinners, or drinking coffee (or beer) with them when we meet them in town. Doing some sort of useful community service is very good, and might become important in an emergency,  too.

Everything we do does not have to be serious and goal-oriented. That can be a formula for burnout. When I was doing the Twitter Live Chats, which required much advance reading, quick learning, quick thinking, even in languages I can't properly be said to speak, so each one was a real workout for the brain, I found refreshment in reading, re-posting, and writing the sort of light content I call "the fluff." So did my followers. After a heavy chat we'd head for Twitter pages that specialized in pretty nature photos, cute pets, cartoons, and short light poems. So this web site, now that it's sponsored to do so, features butterfly pictures on Mondays, adorable adoptable pets on Tuesdays, and poems on Fridays. I try (don't always manage) to make time to read the Meow and Messy Mimi blogs daily, the Mirror and Barkley and Poets & Storytellers blogs whenever there's a new post. Refreshment is encouragement, too. If your refreshment consists of painting landscape pictures or piecing beautiful quilt tops or polishing and cutting stones, you're not letting the side down; you're lifting some of us up. "The fluff" is important too; it reminds us of what we're fighting for.

Left-wingnuts call everyone else fascists because that is what they say when they feel frustrated, but are we fascists? Then we should try to avoid talking like them. Historically, fascists liked to classify people as strong or weak, winners or losers, and look for what they saw as strong, winning leaders. Like Mussolini--oh right. If we want to be or to follow better leaders than Mussolini, it may help to reflect on St Paul's meditations in 2 Corinthians. We all have strong and weak points, strong and weak moments, and it may even be true in activism as it is in spirituality, "When I am weak, then I am strong." 

Surely the "weakest" thing an activist could do would be to die in an accident mid-struggle...wouldn't it? Yet there are laws in force today that bear the names of people in whose memory they were, more or less, enacted. There are "Amber Alerts" because the previous system failed to save a child called Amber. Martyrs have tremendous posthumous power. Of course people who are clearly willing to be martyrs, but survive, have even more. That is why we have a President Trump and Secretaries Kennedy and Gabbard. Like them or not, everyone can see that they're not afraid of becoming martyrs. 

Many people in cyberspace have had the privilege of education that gave us "strong" voices. Oh, we're so privileged. Most of us had a lot of help toward getting our educations. Anyway, other people merely lurk and never post a comment because they don't think they're able to type anything that would be up to our standard. They merely do their blue-collar or pink-collar jobs. I have seen plumbers, mechanics, and hairdressers reach people who wouldn't listen to us overeducated computer nerds and geeks  Lurkers can be doing more good than bloggers know. (Of course, some lurkers are also hackers and spammers, but maybe a little information rubs off even on them.) 

A couple of local lurkers have come forward to tell me they're dyslexic. (So am I but the kind of dyslexia that runs in my family interferes with speaking more than it does with reading.) When the instructions for something they want to do are written down, they have no trouble, but they don't want to try to read whole books. They used to be called functional illiterates. I call them intelligent people who cope well with physical obstacles to learning. They are called to teach their own audiences. They are old enough to know who those are.

Whoever is reading this...you're only one person. No other person is going to stand with you every time you have to take a stand in life. You may be the only one saying something at a particular place and time, but if what you're saying is true, then you are not alone--the Truth is with you. Deal with the fact of our existential solitude as human beings, and then appreciate the fact that we can connect. We can relay information--by writing letters on paper, or by word of mouth, if the Internet fails. I've looked at the statistics shown on the inside of this web site and thought, as bloggers do for the first few years, "And how many of those twenty-nine readers even vote in Virginia?" Then I've also posted "Print this article to claim a freebie/discount at a sponsor's business" and had tourists come in, all the way from Australia, carrying their printouts. You never know whom you may be reaching. 

Some things can be known. For example: real, honest "conservatives" may hold grudges against people who did something to them, but otherwise they're not haters. That "conservatives are racists" routine the Left love is an example of what, in the slang of my youth, we called weaselling--loudly denouncing someone else for doing something by way of distracting attention from the fact that you are doing the same thing, often to a greater degree. (("You shut your blank-blank bleeping foul mouth and stop using that kind of blanking blinking language!") Hating large groups of people is stupid. Most conservatives are not stupid, or at least not all that stupid. I'm still mentally processing Margaret Roberts' research-based bombshell: Timothy McVeigh, who was clearly able to work with people from different backgrounds, made all that noise about his White Supremacism and promoted a novel about people who murder their neighbors apparently just for being Jewish, because he was being paid to make concern about the Waco disaster look bad? It's worth a second look at anyone who posts racist garbage on a "conservative" page. 

In theory even White Supremacists have bodies that react badly to glyphosate, so they can benefit from Glyphosate Awareness too, but I personally want nothing to do with anyone who does not appreciate those of The Nephews who are legally Black as much as those who are legally White. In fact hateful remarks about any ethnic group that includes a friend or relative of mine, which includes most of the ethnic groups on Earth, tend to bring out my Inner Mama Bear. 

We need to shun hateful or violent people. (We can pity them and pray for them if we like.) We should practice good will toward everyone else. To the extent that it's possible, without compromising ourselves by supporting things we really can't support, it is desirable for activists to make ourselves known for kindness, loyalty, and generosity. 
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Thursday, August 7, 2025

Web Log for 8.6.25

So today I found links. More heavy than light ones I'm afraid.

Animals 

Moths in England:


Censorship 

As long as web sites are privately owned they do have a right to censor content, actually. This web site censors content. I'll post links to your site, and even write a product-supportive post to stick them under, only if we approve of your site. No "but it's legal now" marijuana products. No religious-about-being-atheist literature. So, fine, let F******k censor political content, let Youtube censor videos that tell the truth about vaccines that anyone who'd taken a single course in freshman-level health science should have known would be useless and dangerous for them at the time they were marketed, let X say it doesn't censor while it sneakily extinguishes all human conversation on its site. But where are the uncensored social media sites that offer what those sites used to offer, that should have caused all three sites to wither up and die by now? Well, actually, for people who want to sit through "vlogs" instead of reading blogs, Rumble and Discord are competing to replace Youtube; it'll happen. For people who want to post photos, Pinterest, Instagram, and Reddit aren't really uncensored, they're only smaller than F******k, but they are competing to replace The Filthy Eight-Letter F-Word. But where's the "Tweetie" site that works like the original Twitter? 

One suggestion as to why Tsu and Truth Social didn't compete with the original Twitter, and why Bluesky isn't crumbling X faster: Part of what the original Twitter was, in addition to being a super-efficient way to connect with e-friends everywhere, was short. No long essays or big splashy pictures--only links to them. The middle column of Twitter fitted a good half-dozen tweets on a computer screen. I like long wordy blog posts, but Twitter was for scanning messages from everybody and finding the urgent ones fast. The 128-character limit per tweet, with the option of linking tweets into long threads, was a good thing. 

Another suggestion: The world needs no more echo chambers. A real replacement for Twitter has to be hospitable to the full political spectrum, leaving it entirely up to individuals to decide whether they want to huddle in a personal echo chamber they set up for themselves, or get the benefit of reading both sides. 

Another suggestion: "AI" is a cute name for the ayayai of totalitarian government by spying and censoring. It's also a cute name for the tacky plagiarism-bots that people who don't deserve to be called hacks are using to crank out really bad writing, music, and art, at the moment, but nobody's pouring millions of dollars into those things or suggesting that they need to be fed on ten times the amount of electricity the human population of a city are using. A sustainable replacement for Twitter may not be 100% bot-free, but it should encourage people to flag accounts that don't post recognizably human content, and delete those accounts. 


Climate 

Coming at the end of a heat wave...I think most people should be able to see through all the hype about the profitability of "energy," ask what that "energy" is needed to do, and remember that local warming is a very clear and present danger to our safety. We don't need more "energy" to fuel more local warming. We might do better to allow the Internet to work only in winter than to expand the Internet into the Orwellian vehicle of totalitarian government that Trump, poor old out-of-touch rich man, is being set up to enable.


Politics 

Right-wingers vindicated? Tucker Carlson interviews a slow-talking researcher (I mean like annoyingly slow; you'll want to speed up the video until TC sounds like a Chipmunk) who makes the case that Timothy McVeigh was actually a federal agent, paid to stage a violent crime that would make the Right look bad and justify suppressing news coverage of the House investigation into the Waco disaster. It would be hard to prove her case, after thirty years during which almost all the principals in the case have died (many by violence), but her claim does put together the multitude of missing pieces that made me say in the 1990s "We can't do a FacTape on this--not yet--the story is too horrible and too weird--too many questions are still open." There's a possibility that people will believe the story Margaret Robert tells as if it were facts, just because it offers answers to all those nasty unanswered questions and people want closure. It's not facts; it's a case for the prosecution. Nevertheless.

Is it possible that leftists in our government, frustrated by the reality that most "conservatives" are not violent or even racist, are creating the legendary "alt-right" to meet their own needs for a violent enemy they need to suppress? It is indisputable. What's controversial is this claim that they went so far as to blow up a federal employees' day care center. I would urge readers to be very cautious about accusing even the Clinton administration of anything that bad. Though I can picture an undocumented conversation along the lines of "I said a small bomb!"--"They trained me to drop bombs, not build'em."


Safety 

Meme from Joe Jackson:


These laws need to be reversed. Video recordings of private citizens should be limited to the private property of the person recording. Video recordings of government employees at work should be legal for their rightful supervisors, the taxpayers. A completed 1040 should authorize anyone to film anything a government employee does on paid time.

Women's Issues, Various 

More than any other of her posts this one seems to explain why Mona Andrei is a popular "mommy blogger," even though her children are grown up and many of her posts can be read while eating or drinking. Not all single mothers are as successful as she was, but who doesn't like a success story?


Meanwhile, a teenage girl not unreasonably refuses to buy underwear in a store where customers are pestered by a pushy salesperson, who in this case is one of those men who identify as women for the purpose of intruding into women's space. Her mother and various local celebrities make her complaint a Cause. 

I understand the girl's feelings. At the same time I wonder whether some men got this idea from incidents that started in the 1970s where businesses that provided rather personal services, from fitting clothes to urological surgery, would be p.c. and hire women and try to shame men who felt that their modesty was being violated if they were served by these women. ("What kind of woman would even want to be a urologist?!") Those men had a valid case, too.


Next link that turns up: a woman plays the part of Jesus in a musical. Unburdened by any sense of historical authenticity, of course. Respect for the audience's knowledge about the time and place she's trying to reenact would dictate that in solo scenes where she might be portraying Jesus in prayer, she'd be wearing a longish tunic with full-length sleeves, a sort of shawl over that, and an elaborate head scarf. as worn in slightly different styles by men and women. Her costume is what only the twentieth century, when fabric became cheap, would ever let anyone call formal costume; throughout most of history such a dress would have been recognized as rags and tatters, and we are specifically told that Jesus' followers made sure He never had to be seen in such disgraceful attire--at least not until He was stripped and scourged. So the costuming is all wrong. And we're not told that Jesus was left alone between the scourging and the pronouncement that He was dead. And if He screamed like that during that time, it would have been only natural, but we're not told about it. Whatever that woman thought she was enacting with that performance, it's no part of the story of Jesus.

"Demonic"? She can't help being skinny, which Jesus may well have been; the body wrapped in the Shroud of Turin was tall and gaunt. She could nowadays have watched video of her performance in rehearsals and seen how much her hunching, reaching, and shrieking resembled traditional portrayals of ghouls, rather than a suffering Savior. For that she's much to blame. She's not, of course, trying to drag anyone into deep water or drink anyone's blood, but surely it's possible for her to strain for high notes without gesturing as if she is.

Credible? No ordinary human ever has played or will played the part of Jesus credibly. The best Passion Play I ever saw recognizes that fact and requires the actors to mime around Him; most theatre groups can't pull it off, but when it's done it's awesome. The best actors can do in ordinary reenactments of the Crucifixion, I think, is to walk through the role of Jesus without really trying to convince the audience that that's who they really are; merely reminding the audience what He said, and how terribly He was hated for it.

Is her lifestyle Christian? How many Christians have asked that question about men who've  played the role of Jesus? Has anyone ever been told "You cheated on land deals, you cheated on your wife, you drink till you fall down in the road, you're fifty years old and still have unpaid student debts, you have such an uncontrolled bad temper you can't even keep a dog, or whatever, so you can't carry the Cross in the Passion Play"? It's a bit late to start sniffing at the crotch of a woman playing that role, isn't it?

In legitimate theater tradition anybody can play anything. Race and sex don't matter. And we're not specifically told that Jesus had fair skin, though we are told that His ancestor David was distinguished by a "blond" or "ruddy" complexion; a prophecy that might or might not have described Him mentions curly hair. If we with our current sense of "race" saw Jesus, we might not agree on whether to call Him Black or White. So yes, I'd say that a Black woman could play the part of Jesus, but I'd expect her to play it in a better informed, more respectful way than that one did. 

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Book Review: Midnight Prince

Title: Midnight Prince

Author: Aisha Urooj

Date: 2021

Quote: "She was upset with the faerie king. But I became her hapless victim."

Prince Milos has been turned into a frog by the witch Agnes, who wants a special favor from King Eldas. Agnes might change him back. Or Princess Kitty, whom Eldas wants to marry to Milos anyway, might change Milos by kissing him in frog form. She has another idea, about leaving the frog in the swamp.

This retelling of the Frog Prince fairytale is at least funnier than the original, though the e-copy I received could have used some editing on points like verb tenses and the noun form of "invite" being "invitation" and suchlike. 
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Lateness

Today's essay will be late. Today's book review and link log will appear on schedule. I am caught up in blog-housekeeping and real-world chores. However, the essay I promised at another blog will be here, probably some time today... 
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Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Web Log for 8.4-5.25

One link...seems pitiful. I spent a lot of 8.5.25 learning my way around Substack.

Music 

Did you know John Scalzi was also a composer? 

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Books I Read in School and Didn't Like

Today's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks about books we read at school and didn't like. Long lists!

Textbooks, generally, tend to be written in a tedious committee-type voice. This is such a widespread shortcoming that the individual books seldom even come to mind. Well, one does, actually. I wasn't required to read it but it had been popular enough that homes, libraries, and classrooms used to have copies, and by the time I came along it had been challenged on several cut-and-dried historical facts the author got wrong. The Development of America by Fremont P. Wirth was readable, being mostly the work of one author, but often inaccurate. 

No, older schoolbooks were not consistently better or worse than the new ones. Some books were better than others. Several books my school used were pathetic. One that stands out in memory was apparently dragged out by Mrs. Ratfink for some sort of review. We'd finally plodded through "Jump, Janet, jump" and made it into a real reader, with sentences formatted in paragraphs and arranged in actual stories, and then Mrs. Ratfink threw us back into a tedious tale about how "Dan and Ann can wax the van." Not even "their" van. It might have been someone else's van. 

Mrs. Ratfink also used a set of dreary little paperback stories, whose big asset was that each person was reading one at a time so the school had to buy only two sets for each classroom. They were written by a committee whose initials were S.R.A.; when everyone finally plodded through those at Mrs. Ratfink's glacial pace, a song spontaneously composed by several seven- and eight-year-olds at once had the refrain "Yay, hooray, we're done with SRA!" 

Things were stranger at the schools I visited on a few of my family's last road trips. At one school in California, one of the younger reading teachers thought it was important that we learn to appreciate the fantasy genre most older teachers thought people ought to have outgrown by age six, so she used The Phantom Tollbooth instead of the regular fourth grade reader. I liked her, but not everyone did. 

At another school in California, where the children were less obnoxious but the adults in the neighborhood were much creepier, we used a Seventh-Day Adventist "health science" book that began with a unit on "Vital Force," a phrase that had fallen out of use as more specific information about things like vitamins and calories became available; Adventists still thought it was important for children to understand about Vital Force because Ellen White and Jethro Kloss, like their contemporaries, used that phrase. 

 Then there was Mr. Ed. --, who probably never taught anyone anything else but math (and hating school), but he certainly did drill that math into all thirty-five of us, bright or dull. Mr. Ed. had no problem with spending four hours on the math lesson in the book if that was how long it took people to solve a page of problems, but he liked to make up his own problems and interrupt whatever else was going on with "I'm about to fall asleep! I need to do some math! If you know the answer, shout it out." I don't think anybody liked Mr. Ed. I didn't. I don't think most of us liked math, but after a year of shouting in unison, we all knew rules like "Divide, multiply, subtract, bring down" and "Volume equals length times width times height." 

But presumably everyone already knows that textbooks are a genre so tedious as to be beneath consideration. Which of the books that were sold in ordinary bookstores, circulated in public libraries, generally available to people who were not at my school in that particular year, did I not like? There weren't many--probably because my teachers were wary about assigning specific books, other than textbooks. 

What they did was march each classroom full of students at a different time, each week, into the school library, where each child had to choose one book to read during the next week, and every six weeks or so we were supposed to write a report on one of these books. If we had a free choice from the small selection available, in theory, we wouldn't hate reading books so much. The selection included bestsellers of that time! We could read Matt Christopher or Betty Cavanna! There were, however, books that were recommended that I think shouldn't have been. 

1. The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

The story struck me as too rough for a children's book, though of course that's what some boys like about it. Jack London's life and work are nothing I'd want to recommend to children, though of course that's what some teachers liked about it--JL was a socialist and an atheist, and also an alcoholic, and generally not a person most parents would want their children to know. 

Better: Red Fox by Charles Roberts was about a real wild animal. White Fang is still Jack London and still atrocious writing, but at least the dog, which is not a natural wild animal and does not improve when allowed to live like one, is reclaimed as a domestic dog. 

2. Peter Pan by James M. Barrie 

Disney was promoting the living daylights out of their movie version with tie-ins, and they were dreadful, too. What Barrie wrote was a syrupy confection based on dream-logic; the story might have been intentionally left weak. Disney was promoting some contemporary woman's adaptation, which tried to patch the more obvious holes and excise the worst effusions of sentimentality, and which seemed weaker to me than Barrie's original version. The story wasn't done anything resembling justice--and it needed mercy!--until Dave Barry came along, in the present century, and made a real story out of it. 

Better: Peter and the Star Catchers by Dave Barry 

3. The All of a Kind Family and its endless sequels by Sydney Taylor 

Bleep ever wanted to read about people who lived in New York City, had too many children, and dressed them all alike? 

Better: Amy and Laura by Marilyn Sachs. The family are poor and live in New York City, but at least the two children can be told apart. There was a whole series about them, too, or at least people who went to their school. I don't think Amy and Laura were Jewish, which I suspect was the only attraction of the All of a Kind Family, "representation," but at least one of their friends was. Though it seemed to me that Sachs's point may have been that New Yorkers are more like other New Yorkers than like other believers in whatever faith tradition they do or don't claim. 

4. Dibs in Search of Self by Virginia Axline 

Lamest, most misguided, most sentimental study of a hopeless autistic child ever. Who wanted to read about hopeless autistic children anyway? In any case Dibs is not in search of himself. He is all tangled up in self. What he needs so badly that he doesn't even search for it is a way to communicate with other people.

Better: Anything by Temple Grandin or Donna Williams...at least until worthwhile scientific studies of what autism looks like on a brain scan are available. There may be permanent physical differences between the sort of autism that makes people seem "high-functioning" as kids, that becomes an eccentricity rather than a disability as they grow up--and the kind that disabled "Dibs."

5. Sea Wolf by Jack London 

To be fair, I don't think this was actually recommended at school. I think the boys who didn't mind Call of the Wild had noticed that The Sea Wolf is so called because the character is called Wolf Larsen, and one of them happened to be called Larsen, so they called him Wolf, too, and read the book to find other witty things to say to him. Anyway my brother brought home The Sea Wolf and neither the parents nor I could figure out who the BLEEP would have recommended that book to a fourth grade student. 

6. Are You There God It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume 

Quite possibly the worst book for middle school girls I've ever read, though it spawned a few imitations that might have been considered equally bad, or maybe worse because derivative. At some point in between ages ten and fifteen most teenagers do notice that growing up includes a few extras beyond just growing bigger and stronger. They notice, but most of them do not become obsessed with the process of puberty the way Judy Blume's characters do. 

And some of them do, in fact, develop spirituality while other parts of their brains and bodies are still growing, although I don't think I did. When C.S. Lewis had a wise elder advise a young woman, "You will have no more dreams. Have children instead," Lewis could at least point to evidence that he'd intended readers to understand that this was specific advice to a character who's met half a dozen older women who were capable of doing anything more than having children. Judy Blume basically said in this horrible novel that all teenaged girls are fit to do is stare into mirrors and think about their progress toward becoming breeding stock. 

To be fair, no teacher or textbook specifically recommended this one either. It was new, and a publisher's "book fair" representative did the recommending. But it was in the school library and it was disgusting.) 

7. To Teach to Love by Jesse Stuart 

The ickiest part of this icky, sentimental story is that I've read other novels by Jesse Stuart, and all of them were even worse. As one of Dave Barry's correspondents said about a songwriter, Stuart never figured out that he could have bored a hole in himself and let some of that sap drip out. 

Better: Christy by Catherine Marshall.

8. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 

I don't remember whether I read this one, in grade nine, on the recommendation of a teacher or of a publisher. I know it's not a good novel for grade nine. If adults want to sit around in a book club and discuss the historical reasons why young people like Howard Roark and Dominique had to pretend that what they had was rape, when it was clearly consensual fornication, that's different. Teenagers do not need confusion on this point, however historically accurate it was. 

Better: If students want to read Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Reader condenses her wordy fiction down to Anthem and the "Who Is John Galt?" story. Those are appropriate for teenagers. If they lead teenagers to discover The Fountainhead at the public library, at least it ought to be in the adult collection, so everyone has had fair warning. 

(There are a lot of books that are on even elementary school reading lists, these days, that I don't think need to be in school libraries. They should be in the adult collection in public libraries, where teenagers who are ready to discover them can do so. That list includes The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye, A Confederacy of Dunces, Woman on the Edge of Time, Stranger in a Strange Land, and many more. I think college students and adults absolutely should read these books; I think some teenagers are ready to read them; I don't think they need to be stored in places where they can confuse or disturb other teenagers.)

9. My Darling My Hamburger by Paul Zindel 

Give the poor drip points for trying to write about the way things were: A crowd of teenaged baby-boomers hang out together and discuss, among other things, the inadequacy of a lecture about sex in which a pathetic teacher told the girls to deal with the boys' demands for sex by suggesting that they go out for hamburgers. The thinking really was that teenaged boys generally are interested in hamburgers. When they are trying to crawl inside teenaged girls' clothes this generality may be less applicable. 

Anyway, the plot consists of two of these teenagers postponing the hamburgers until they've started a baby. Then they talk endlessly about why all of the alternatives now available to them are so bad. Then before the pregnancy becomes obvious the pregnant girl has an abortion, after which her remaining line is "I'm bleeding. Oh god, I'm bleeding." This kind of thing did happen, and still does, but it was not a pleasant read. 

Especially not during the years when I knew very well that (1) no normal man wanted to be seen talking to a baby-face like me, and (2) I knew to jump back if anyone--male or female--touched any part of my body, including hands, because we don't touch people in town, that was the part of my ancestral culture that got us through the tuberculosis epidemic, and (3) if in some unimaginably distant future I did get close enough to a man to conceive a baby, we were the kind of family who don't waste babies. I would have been given a bus ticket, directions to the home of relatives a good long way from my home, copies of Thank You Dr Lamaze and Let's Have Healthy Children and the La Leche League guide to breastfeeding, and possibly advice on changing my name. The ideal name for a single mother to be using at the time of birth comes from a family that is not represented in any town near hers, in which a young man died of stupidity during the months before the birth. 

Better: Why not the books about the physical, emotional, and financial costs of being a parent? I don't know of a better book about the reality of abortion for teenagers...I bless a teacher who recommended Jurgen, though. Teenagers need some hint that there are alternatives to makng babies that are equally satisfactory in the moment.

10. The serious male fiction writers of the early twentieth century: Faulkner, Hemingway, Miller, Mailer, and their admirers and imitators

Just...blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. With booze-reeking puddles. Some good writing in English was done by men in the early twentieth century, and not all of them even hung out with C.S. Lewis, but they were the ones who didn't take themselves so seriously. Some short pieces the early twentieth century's version of a literary establishment produced might be compared with some things written by Kerouac or Ogden Nash or Farley Mowat, but turn those guys loose in a full-length novel and they became disgusting. Without spirituality, the human condition is disgusting.

Better: Nash. Mowat. Tolkien. Charles Williams. Dorothy Sayers. Pearl S. Buck. Selma Lagerlof. Rose Wilder Lane. Willa Cather. Harriette Simpson Arnow. Della Thompson Lutes. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. George Bernard Shaw. Even Don Marquis would be preferable to the pompous male literary clique of this period.
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