Politics, Applied
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Monday, September 22, 2025
Butterfly of the Week: Lesser Zebra
This week's butterfly is not rare or thought to be endangered. It doesn't have "swallow tails" on its hind wings, either. In fact it seems to be a mimic of a Brush-Footed Butterfly; it's trying to look more like our Monarchs than like our Swallowtails. Although it's smaller than many of the other Swallowtails with whom it hangs out at puddles, its wingspan is three to four inches--as big as our Monarchs.
Photo by Sebastien Delonglee. In the Asian countries where Graphium macareus lives, it's called the Lesser Zebra because Graphium xenocles is called the Great Zebra. In this photo G. xenocles is on the left, macareus on the right. Delonglee observed that the Great Zebra kept flapping his wings as he drank while the Lesser Zebra was able to hold his wings still for several seconds.
Here are videos showing Graphium macareus and other butterflies at a puddle. None of the Swallowtails shown seems to be very good at holding its wings still. As they fly, some show the hairy scent folds on the inside edges of their hind wings. Butterflies recognize each other by scent; sources don't mention humans noticing the scent of Graphium macareus but to other butterflies the males probably have a strong odor.
"Black form?" Yes. Graphium macareus is, like other Swallowtail species, variable. Some of the variation is regular enough to define regional subspecies; although macareus is considered a common species, some subspecies are rare. Subspecies names identify several subspecies with places. Individuals can look black with white spots and stripes, or white with black spots and stripes. How rounded or pointed the fore wings are also varies considerably.
Not all subspecies have been documented online, but the following subspecies names are found online--some with multiple web pages, some only as names on lists:
albinovanus
burmensis
Photo by Antonio Giudici, Thaibutterflies.com. Museum specimens of burmensis and indochinensis are arranged like a photo essay at Yutaka.it:
dawna (not always recognized; often lumped into indochinensis, though people who recognize dawna say it's found in a different pattern on the map). This subspecies flies at higher altitudes than the others and shows less white on the fore wings and more on the hind wings. It was named for the Dawna Mountains.
indicum or indicus
indochinensis
Photo by Antonio Giudici at Thaibutterflies.com.
lioneli
Photo from WorldFieldGuide.com.
macaristus
Photo by Jamiun.
maccabaeus (now considered the same thing as palawanicola): Ahmet Kocak wrote, "I propose a new name palawanicola (nom. nov.) for maccabaeus Staudinger, which is invalid, as it is junior primary homonym of Papilio maccabaeus Herbst." Judah Maccabee, the war chief whose adventures are printed in some Bibles, had already had a Swallowtail named after him.
mitis
palawanicola: two photos at
Still listed as subspecies maccabaeus at WorldFieldGuide.com although Kocak's paper came out long enough ago to be archived at Funet.fi.
perakensis
Yutaka.it shows the recognizable female form with almost no white spots, one almost completely sable above and below, one marked like the male above but almost solid sable below.
Perakensis is also found in Thailand:
xanthosoma: so called for its yellowish body
And, of course, there's Graphium macareus macareus, first found on Java island.
ButterflyCircle documents the richness of butterflies and other animals at a nature park on Borneo:
Females are a little more likely to fade from black to brown, as do some males. The ones that lay eggs are females. In some subspecies either the females are rare, or the variations that make it obvious to the naked eye that individuals are female are rare.
Regular readers already know how the genus Papilio was split into smaller genera including Graphium and, there being so many different Graphiums with different looks that form distinct species groups, some scientists want to split the genus Graphium into smaller genera including Pathysa.
Males of this species are extremely gregarious. Whatever they smell like to other butterflies, the other butterflies probably like it. At puddles they crowd together with others of their own species or of different species, even with composter insects that aren't butterflies at all, as shown in the video above. Their food plant seems to be abundant enough that they can enjoy the benefits of safety-in-numbers. Females are harder to find; they probably, like many female Swallowtails, spend almost all their time in the woods where they look like shadows.
Even if Liew hadn't asked people not to gank photos from the page above, the collection is too spectacular to split up. You have to see all of the photos. I feel the same way about the page linked below, although most of the butterflies shown aren't Swallowtails--the idea is to give a sample of the rich diversity of species found in the one nature park.
Most of these butterflies fly in March, some appearing in February and some lingering into April, but their life cycle does not always take a full year. In some years, in some places, some individuals fly at other times of year. In some places butterfly watchers say they've only ever seen the one generation of macareus that fly mostly in March.
Macareus, or Macar, was a character in ancient Greek literature. He was identified as the son of Aeolus, but it may always have been unclear whether this referred to the wind god or the king of Tyrrhenia, whether his sad story was historical or mythical. He was found guilty of a sin Greek Pagans considered unpardonable, so he had to kill himself. Christianity did not introduce rules and guilt to people who had been free to do what they liked, but introduced the idea that they could hope to be forgiven. The tradition was that Swallowtails were named after heroes of literature. Maybe Macareus was seen as heroic in accepting the judgment passed on him. Or he was chosen, in spite of his being a bad example rather than a hero in literature, because Graphium ramaceus lives in some of the same places and someone thought the idea of separating ramaceus from macareus sounded amusing.
Butterfly collectors chat about macareus and ramaceus:
The early life of this species has not been well documented. An early German source says, in a rare example of a German sentence I can read without consulting a dictionary and grammar book, "Die Puppe ist gruen."
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Web Log for 9.19-20.25
Business
Office Depot made a big mistake. The best policy for a business is: You don't need to know what your customers are doing with what they buy. If you sell bathtubs, you are not responsible for proactively making sure that you never sell a bathtub to somebody who intends to drown someone in it. If you sell clothing, you are not responsible for proactively making sure that nobody ever uses a garment to strangle somebody. If you sell printed material, you might be responsible for sending copies to the police if you're asked to print things that are clearly criminal, but you are not responsible for sabotaging political or advertising campaigns for a party or product your employees may not support.
At the age where people normally work for Office Depot, everyone should be challenged to think about the fact that it's possible to be too idealistic to live and the probability that they do not, in fact, know what other people are or should be doing. People may be enlightened but it's more likely that they are being insufferably selfrighteous. "I want to do, sell, make, only things I personally believe in," has actually been the cry of people whose fall down from an entry-level job was precipitous. Perhaps more schools should require students to read the stories of such people. "I was offered a full-time job in a law firm, but I didn't want to defend Jehovah's Witnesses' right not to have vaccinations. Then I was offered a job in a property management firm, but I didn't want to mail out the letters to retired people when the boss wanted to raise their rent. Then I was offered a job selling office supplies, but I couldn't keep telling people I was offering them the lowest prices when in some places someone else's prices were lower. Then there was the job raising money for the recycling campaign, but I found out that the organization that was supporting recycling was also supporting a politician I didn't respect. Then I was offered a part-time job in an insurance company, but, well, insurance. Then I was offered a weekly job stuffing ad circulars into newspapers, but the garbage they were advertising...[etc., etc.] Finally I woke up to the fact that worrying too much about these things was making me a burden to my family. I got a job wiring lamps and I don't let myself think about whether it would be ethically better to repair existing lamps. I am just learning all I can about lamps while I save up money to start my own recycled lamp business."
We might even benefit from having a recovery group for selfrighteous nannyism. "I saw someone buying candy for a child in the store, and I shut my mouth right up tight," someone might say, and be commended. "I...just couldn't keep from posting on social media what I felt when I learned that Barack Obama is a smoker," someone might say, and be commiserated with. "Take it one day at a time, Brother. Social media are less intrusive than harassing people in the grocery store but we have to focus on...?" "On complaining only when what other people do harms us, and making sure that what we do is not harming others, the way our megalomania was harming others."
Now let's consider a business practice that is likely to do harm: Some stores are trying to avoid showing the price for their merchandise.
I was in a Dollar General Store last week. I was doing some yard work. What I needed was to launder and put on a pair of jeans; I still own several pairs. But which pair? Glyphosate/glufosinate reactions make it hard to know in advance which pair will fit. During reactions my waist may become convex; after reactions it's concave. Puffing up hurts, and shrinking down itches, too. A pair of jeans that fitted in the morning might become unbearably tight during the day, or might slide all the way down to my ankles. I tried wearing leggings as underwear under a sunsuit. The ones I had were the sturdy pure cotton kind that were occasionally sold as "not a pantsuit, more of a salwar-kamiz look" in the 1990s. As I stretched and bent, the thirty-year-old elastic lost all elasticity. By the end of the day the waist of the leggings was hanging down below the hems of the sunsuit. So I went into this store and saw a display rack of brand-new leggings. Hmm, the fabric was thinner, not likely to last thirty years, but thirty years from now either we'll have a ban on things that change my waist size by half during a single day, or I'll be dead, or maybe both. I decided it was time to replace the leggings I had on. But I didn't see a price tag anywhere on the display rack or the packages of leggings hanging there.
What do good Green people do when we don't see a price tag? We take the item to the checkout counter and check the price. If the price is unreasonable, we put a store employee to the trouble of replacing the item on the shelf.
Why do we do this? Because we want the store management to know that surprising us at the checkout counter DOES NOT PAY. Prices need to be plainly marked on the display. If they're not, we might pick up something for which we didn't agree on the price. The store can't save any money by not paying its employees to put price tags on shelves and packages. "But prices change," some unscrupulous merchants whine, "and we can't afford to keep people changing the price tags." No, but that's not necessary; you can afford to sell things for the original price that was based on what you paid for them, changing the price only as you change the actual merchandise.
Also: because we don't want to allow room for unfair pricing ploys. If small town storekeepers want to have a regular price that is displayed to everybody, and ask for a much lower price from a small select group of people--relatives, or members of their tribe, or local police officers, or people they consider to be the deserving poor, or people they owe favors, whatever--that's their business. We don't want to bring this practice into big chain businesses and institutionalize it. We want the same store to sell the same item for the same price whether the purchaser is rich or poor, young or old, D or R or Independent. We show support for this idea by not carrying a spyphone and insisting on a fixed, regular price that is the same for everybody.
Earlier this summer, US Representative Rashida Tlaib proposed a bill criminalizing the unequal pricing scams that are made possible when people "scan the code." Other US Representatives apparently ignored that bill in the belief that failing to display one price for all customers on the shelf was so obviously such a bad idea that it couldn't possibly spread. They don't realize how eager "multinational" merchants are to introduce the unethical business practices of unchristian cultures into a Christian nation that has condemned these practices for hundreds of years.
Some are now saying that Tlaib, who has admitted some division of loyalty between nations, should step down from Congress. Some are saying she should be deported. I think anyone serving in the US Congress should have undivided loyalty to the United States. That means Tlaib's constituents need a different representative. But I would like to see Tlaib remembered for the good she did. I want single prices displayed for the convenience of cash customers to be the law of the land; since it seems we need a federal law to preserve what used to be common sense, I would like to see that bill preserve Tlaib's name.
Cowardice, Latest Excuses for
"Conservatives" make the case that more concealed firearms might have deterred the murder of Iryna Zarutska. I'm not sure that the murderer's brain was capable of thinking about that, nor am I sure that a shot at him might not have killed Zarutska; I support the right to bear firearms but I think that right is for responsible adults who don't fire them on a crowded train. I am sure that legislation clearly exempting people from any liability for, e.g., creeping up behind the murderer, each one seizing an arm or a leg until all his limbs were accounted for and he was face down on the floor, could have helped--assuming the individuals on that train were fully human beings.
Etiquette, Rs Showing Better than Ds
The second paragraph says it all.
Singapore
This man's views are his own but I think our Singaporean readers, the few legitimate ones that remain since the bots have been shut down, will appreciate his impression...
Book Review: The Bible Story the Book of Beginnings
Book Review: The Bible Story: The Book of Beginnings
Author: Arthur S. Maxwell
Date: 1994
Publisher: Review & Herald
ISBN: 0-8280-0795-0
Length: 96 pages
Illustrations: many full-page color paintings
Quote: “The Bible Story provides the widest coverage of any Bible storybook on the market...all the stories suitable for telling to children, form Genesis to Revelation.”
Arthur S. Maxwell (1896-1970) collected several true, instructive Bedtime Stories for children, and wrote some nonfiction for adults, but his life’s work was The Bible Story. During his lifetime the series was printed in ten volumes, all copiously illustrated with beautiful full-color paintings. These books were bound to stay bound through years of abuse by generations of children—and puppies. The paper was remarkably mildew-resistant; the glossy, colorful covers were peanut-butter-and-jelly-proof. I know of no American book that was a better example of the bookbinder’s craft than the original Bible Story set.
(Maxwell was not American--his life began in England and ended in Australia--but his publishers were US-based. The Bible Story, as a picture book whose high market value owed a lot to the paintings and the binding, could even be classified as a Maryland book since several of the paintings were done in Maryland. Many a pleasant afternoon can be spent finding the real-world versions of Bible Story paintings northeast of Washington.)
In the 1990s, however, some tasteless innovator decided to change a good thing, and so The Bible Story is now being printed in twelve volumes. Although the language has been changed too, the most obvious difference is the quality of the new edition—or the lack of it. The paper is thinner and slicker. The pages are glued, not sewn, so they won’t lie flat and Grandma can’t read aloud while she knits. The covers won’t take much scrubbing. The binding is guaranteed to fall apart the very first time a puppy drags it under the porch to chew on it. It is still a better bound volume than many children’s books on the market today, but this one will not be enjoyed by generation after generation of children.
The innovator wanted to use recent translations of the Bible. “Language that today’s children readily understand”? Not quite. Children do not understand “vegetation” more easily than they understand “herb yielding seed.” Children do not understand “hallowed” at an earlier age than they understand “made holy.” Children learn “serpent” as easily as they learn “snake.” Maxwell wrote histories using King James’ and Queen Elizabeth’s words alternately to help children realize that they were synonyms, but the innovator changed the vocabulary to include only the “modern” words, making Maxwell’s stories sound repetitious and clunky. This may have been a favor to parents who had learned English as a foreign language, but it’s no favor to children like Maxwell as a boy, or like me as a girl, who are fascinated by exotic words and names, who may enjoy the rich strangeness of the King James' Version's language before they’re old enough to understand its content.
The long-term effect of dumbing down biblical or classical language is not to make traditional books more accessible to children; it is to cut off children’s access to older language, and thus to older books, and thus to ideas. Children can learn words like “tilled the earth” and “beast of the field” by seeing them used alternately with “worked the soil” and “farm animals.” Learning is what childhood is all about. By learning obscure phrases, as Maxwell intended them to do, through hearing those phrases alongside their modern equivalents, children were prepared to understand the Bible, and also Shakespeare, Milton, Paine, Jefferson, Adam Smith, and Margaret Cavendish, if they so chose. By being taught that they “can’t” understand the language of older books, children are prepared to be defeated by any opportunity they may get to become educated adults.
There is another effect of using the new translations of the Bible. The Geneva Bible, Authorized Version (KJV), and Revised Standard Version (RSV) are works in the public domain—not copyrighted. The up-to-the-minute translations are copyrighted, and the copyright holders demand credit (and payment). Some readers may believe, as I do, that it is not only tasteless but blasphemous for mortals to claim commercial copyrights on the Bible. The publishers of this travesty of Maxwell’s Bible Story claim to believe that the Bible is the Word of God. How, when, and to whom did God assign the copyright on the Word of God?
It gets worse, Gentle Readers. My review copy of the first volume of the “new” Bible Story was marked “Display Copy,” the one pediatricians and dentists will be offered to store in their waiting rooms, to encourage children to beg their parents to buy the rest of the set. The “display copy” marketing technique worked well during Maxwell’s lifetime. But this particular “display copy” can’t serve its intended purpose very well, because it was so hastily slapped together that not only does it identify itself as “the first of 10 volumes” on the back cover and “the first of 12 volumes” inside, but it also cuts off in mid-sentence on page 96. I am not mean enough to have made this up if I’d sat down and worked at it. Nothing has fallen out or been torn out., The table of contents still promises 187 pages of stories, and the last 90 of those pages have not been glued in.
The Bible Story is global—multilingual and ecumenical. Maxwell had the books vetted by ministers in several denominations, including a probably Messianic Jewish Rabbi, to ensure that they could be used by all the major religious groups. (Maxwell, personally, was a Seventh-Day Adventist.) The stories are available in several other languages as well as English. And they’re still distributed by deserving college students who board with church members, during the summer, and sell the books door to door for tuition money. And you can still call your local S.D.A. church and request that a deserving student bring a complete set of Bible Story books out for your inspection. But you should know that the older editions were much, much better bargains than the new edition. Review & Herald needs to be held to its own standard.
Bad Poetry: Twelve Kittens Bold
This week's excuse for lateness is that Chrome popped up a demand to "Verify it's you" and then crashed. I don't know whether the attacker was an individual criminal or Microsoft.
This week's prompt from the Poets & Storytellers United asked poets and storytellers to post a response to a previous prompt, perhaps (among other suggestions) "What soothes you?"
At a Cat Sanctuary, you know the answer to that has to involve a purring cat.
Over the weekend I was sitting on the porch, holding a purring cat. Drudge is now a young adult cat but still very much a lap kitten who likes to be petted whenever possible. I hadn't been listening to an old English rhyme Steeleye Span used to sing, but I found a sort of parody of it coming to mind...I never did write down the alleged exploits of their "twelve witches bold," but it was easy to think of some possibilities for cats.
Oh there were twelve kittens bold,
They all lived in the North,
And their equals were not seen
On the face of the Earth.
Purr and meow, meow and purr,
Oh the pretty kitty fur.
The first cat, it could catch
Any gnawing rat or mouse.
The second cat kept order:
No odors in the house!
The third cat made its humans laugh
With a roll and a bounce,
And the fourth cat caught a cricket
Whenever it did pounce.
The fifth cat charmed its humans' hearts
With a musical purr,
And the sixth cat had beautiful
Calico fur.
The seventh cat would come
When it heard humans call,
And the eighth cat hardly left
The doorstep at all.
The ninth cat would report
When anyone came nigh,
And the tenth cat could jump
Full three yards high.
The eleventh cat reared kittens
Until they were full grown,
And the twelfth cat, it could leave
Little garden plants alone.
So of these twelve kittens bold,
Who all came from the North,
The equals were not seen
On the face of the Earth.
Drudge seemed to have a general idea that this referred to ideals for him and Serena, but the whole song seemed beyond his vocabulary. He understands a few words. Not many.
I hope this moment of whimsy will help to soothe someone Out There who needs soothing.
If you need FURther soothing, please check here on Tuesday morning for the winners of this web site's photo contest for adorable adoptable cats (and dogs). In honor of Adopt the Least Adoptable Pets Week we'll meet the cats and dogs who have been in shelters longest in places near NYC, DC, and Atlanta, and the photo contest winners of the same physical type. As always, pet photos are for sharing everywhere; this web site assumes that you already live with animals and encourages you to show the photos to people who don't. As always, while many Petfinder animals are living in private "foster homes" so prospective adopters will meet only the one animal at a time, others are in shelters where it's quite likely that other animals, who weren't photographed so well, are even more appealing. All to the
good. The position of this web site is, the more animals out of shelters and in purrmanent homes, the better.
Friday, September 19, 2025
Web Log for 9.18.25
I spent most of the day in the real world, first working and then sleeping. Only one link found by midnight...
Animals
How to fight an alligator, if you must...
Forgiveness, Possibility of, for Leftists
When abusers ask for forgiveness, they typically mean "Let's pretend the abuse didn't happen and put things back exactly as they were until I feel like abusing you again."
I don't think those of us who've been thrown together into Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" should consider that as the kind of sincere repentance from which forgiveness begins.
Yes, "conservatives" generally are, and should be, willing to allow left-wingers to speak without being shot. That's more than some left-wingers have been toward us so it's a generous concession for which the Left should express gratitude.
(It would be helpful if left-wingers had some idea of the enormous breadth of range between the opinions of different people they've called "conservative." Or "deplorable.")
Should left-wingers be able to use social media, or find publishers for things they write? I think censorship is inherently evil. I think it's actually good for those who enforce the law when evildoers are free, even encouraged, to post their evil schemes on social media. However, left-wingers do need to apologize for their tolerance of censorship, call out and disown those who have supported censorship, and publicly support discourse with which they disagree.
Yes. They should be paying for conservative content on their web sites to show that they're not hiding in an echo chamber where they can be brainwashed into supporting murder. They can express their disagreement. This web site has given them examples of how this can be done. They must learn to write and say things like, "Although I've had X number of COVID jabs and don't believe they've done me any harm, I respect this person's well written account of how per son reacted to the vaccine he had." And, "Although I would not have known how to avoid pregnancy if my school hadn't required sex education, after reading I understand why this person thinks it's more than enough for schools to use textbooks that present the facts of life, test the class on the chapter that explains human reproduction, and let anyone who doesn't pass the test talk to the school nurse or counsellor." And, "Although I'd still rather be safe than sorry, I see now that factual evidence does not support the theory of 'global climate change' in which I've believed."
Otherwise, although real conservatives don't censor, leftist voices should find themselves limited to expressing their thoughts on non-paying personal blogs, as distinct from editing newspapers, writing for magazines, or lecturing to paying audiences. They're entitled to freedom of speech and, yes, they should enjoy whatever "freedom of reach" their content can earn on social media. But we shouldn't pay for their stale old ideas.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Web Log for 9.17.25
Just one link. Some days I find a lot, some days a little, some days none...
Politics
John Fetterman has no previous history of political moderation, but he's losing his Loony Left backers:
I think the majority of humankind need a word of caution here.
It's tempting to go full McCarthy. We in these United States do not have a Democratic Party in the sense that Presidents Carter, Kennedy, and Roosevelt had a Democratic Party. Their party included drunks, lunatics, and vote sellers, as did the Republican Party, but it was mostly run by honest and decent people who believed that government ought to try to give people "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want" as well as freedom from abuse. Today's Democratic Party is run by ghouls who want to murder Republicans. The majority of Americans voted against that for good and sufficient reason; the majority have good and sufficient reason to stand against it. This administration has no legitimate opposition party. In this administration a decent person who used to be known as a Democrat, like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy, is in among the Republicans. Why not gather all the leaders of what now calls itself the D Party into one big building and then blow up that building? Why not put all the people calling for more political murders in single-occupant padded cells, lock the doors, and melt down the keys? Why not make it career suicide to admit any connection whatsoever with the D Party?
The two-party system is based on the premise that, every few years, people will want a change and favor the other party. There are legal precedents for censoring inflammatory speech when violent crimes have been committed. That could be done with regard to all D rhetoric, and what would follow? There would be a valid precedent for sending young people to prison any time they used what seems to be the favorite word of some of them, which would be replaced, when the concept has to be mentioned, by "approach the Gates of Life without due reverence," since that violent crime has been committed. There would be a valid precedent for censoring the entire history of the World War, since words that properly refer to our enemy in that war have been misused as incendiary hatespews against the majority party (or coalition). And then, if the majority ceased to be the majority, people who had self-censored while feeling that all this censoring and imprisoning was a crime might well consider that there was a valid precedent for censoring words like "USA," "America," "patriot," "freedom," or "Charlie Kirk."
Censorship does more harm than the lack of censorship, Gentle Readers. Consider how much we're learning from the way the ghouls felt free to exchange social media messages referring to the murder.
I think calls for more murders clearly are promoting violent crime, so there's a valid reason for those who enforce the law to trace the computer from which they were posted, visit the poster, and have long serious talks about what happens to accessories to murder. People who act pleased by murders that have happened should find it difficult to get work or rent apartments but, if they're not calling for more violent crime, they are simply using their right to freedom of speech to advertise what unpleasant people they are--not committing a crime. However tempting it may be to declare that the Constitution is for human beings and does not apply to ghouls, we should take the high road and adhere to the Constitution.
Book Review: Road Scholar
Title: Road Scholar
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Date: 1993
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 1-56282-878-9
Length: 193 pages
Illustrations: black and white photos by David Graham
Quote: “Roger Weisberg…a TV producer…was wondering if I
would beinterested in making a movie about driving through Florida…I told
him…we should…go way beyond Florida’s roadside attractions. We should make a
movie about America.”
So they did. Road
Scholar was the book to go with the movie, in which formerly car-free
Codrescu got a driver’s license and drove across the United States with a video
crew. Photos are thus an important part of the book, although it contains more
pages of text than of pictures.
It’s a very funny book, and also a thoughtful, sometimes
sad, sometimes worried book. Weisberg was, after all, attracted to NPR
broadcasts by and about a surrealist poet writing in English, which was not his
native language, to comic effect. But not the “me no speak English” kind of comedy;
for those who don’t remember, the short funny essays (collected in other books,
like A Craving for Swan
) were teacherly reflections
on the quirks of English language and literature, most specifically on the
international (and multilingual) surrealist poetry of the twentieth century,
with insights from other genres of art and literature around the world.
Surrealism implied goofiness, sometimes inspired by high spirits (and/or booze
and drugs), sometimes by nightmares, grief, bad trips, and concern about the
fate of humankind. Road Scholar is
mostly real, but some episodes, like the send-off party with the image of Jayne
Mansfield’s head wired to complain of a “splitting headache” before splitting
apart, qualify as surreal…and that’s the way in which Road Scholar is funny. It’s humor for educated adults, or at least
college students; it’s meant to promote serious thought as well as laughter.
You’ll laugh. You’ll feel bemused by people, sorry for people; you’ll wonder
what people are doing now.
) were teacherly reflections
on the quirks of English language and literature, most specifically on the
international (and multilingual) surrealist poetry of the twentieth century,
with insights from other genres of art and literature around the world.
Surrealism implied goofiness, sometimes inspired by high spirits (and/or booze
and drugs), sometimes by nightmares, grief, bad trips, and concern about the
fate of humankind. Road Scholar is
mostly real, but some episodes, like the send-off party with the image of Jayne
Mansfield’s head wired to complain of a “splitting headache” before splitting
apart, qualify as surreal…and that’s the way in which Road Scholar is funny. It’s humor for educated adults, or at least
college students; it’s meant to promote serious thought as well as laughter.
You’ll laugh. You’ll feel bemused by people, sorry for people; you’ll wonder
what people are doing now.
Highlights of the trip include:
* A consideration of immigration, the U.S. government, and
immigrants legal and illegal, in New York City.
* A visit to Allen Ginsberg
, and visits to the graves of
earlier writers buried in New York state.
, and visits to the graves of
earlier writers buried in New York state.
* Tours of the Bruderhof and Oneida “intentional
communities” in upstate New York. (Oneida is also where Sarah Vowell
reported
Charles Guiteau being nicknamed “Gitout.”)
reported
Charles Guiteau being nicknamed “Gitout.”)
* A photo of a wall on which is painted “Say nice things
about Detroit.” Codrescu tries; he reminisces about having lived there, briefly,
and dedicates a long poem to the city. We also meet eccentric artists and some
nice working people in Michigan.
* A brief, vegetarian consideration of Chicago, “Meat Packer
to the World” and home of the first McDonald’s restaurant. Another artist, and
a Christian roller-skating group.
* A real, explicit conversation with cattle breeders.
* Shooting lessons with a topless female teacher near Las
Vegas.
* Pueblo people, ancient caves, Sikhs, hippies, and faith
healers in and around Taos and Santa Fe.
* Biosphere 2, an experiment in which people lived in a giant
geodesic dome.
* Geriatric bikers and rockers in Sun City, Arizona.
* Gambling and drive-through weddings in Las Vegas.
* An interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti
in San Francisco.
More immigrants; more thoughts on the experience of legal immigration.
in San Francisco.
More immigrants; more thoughts on the experience of legal immigration.
If that sounds like a road trip you’d enjoy taking, or hearing
the stories about, or seeing the photos from, you’ll enjoy Road Scholar.
Charlie Kirk's Daughter and Conservative Messaging
We interrupt the Blog Roll series to bring you this post. This post outgrew a potential Link Log, but it began with a reaction to a link:
What the trying-to-be-a-comedienne is quoted saying here is free speech, however poorly timed. It's even a healthy, positive statement of her political beliefs, misguided as those are. And it raises a concern for "conservatives" (even for Erika Kirk) who want to carry on Charlie Kirk's mission in life.
What, exactly, are we trying to conserve?
I know what I'm trying to conserve. A short list of things I want to conserve in US public life looks like:
* Freedom of movement, for everybody
* Freedom of speech, for everybody
* Freedom of the press, including the Internet, for everybody
* Freedom of association, for everybody
* Right to work, for everybody
* Right to privacy, for everybody
* Rule of law--natural laws that people intuitively understand and know how to follow
* Strict limits on government support for human-made regulations that are changeable and complicated enough that people are probably violating a few of them and don't know it
* No government budget for ongoing employment in jobs that could be done by private contractors
* Enforcement of individuals' rights to property, including earned wages
A short list of things that used to exist in US public life, that I do NOT want to conserve, looks like this:
* Discriminatory policies, especially against women
* Over-regulation that will always amount to injustice against somebody or other
* Government budgets that aren't gone over closely and thoroughly, by everyone who has the time
* Social pressure against personal choices that don't harm others
* Unwanted pregnancies
* Homelessness caused by inflated "property values"
* Epidemics caused by crowded living conditions, polluted water, etc.
* Epidemics caused by chemical pollution, and tolerance for corporate failure to show responsibility for same
* Mandates on matters of personal choice that don't clearly and directly harm others, including vaccination, school attendance, insurance, use of banks or credit cards, use of property, etc.
* Participation in the mental illness of those who think they have been anointed to make personal decisions for others
Some of Charlie Kirk's published speeches, which have been recirculated so incessantly this week, seem to verge on at least three of those bad things--discrimination against women, social pressure against personal choices, and unwanted pregnancies.
I don't think there's any real excuse for pretending that even the feminist movement of the 1970s limited women to conformity to one of two stereotypes: the "Happy" Housewife who had no job skills and no reason to live after the last baby doctors extracted from her worn-out body went to school, or the grim and probably mannish corporate wage slave who had no family and no reason to live after the value of her work rose above what the company wanted to pay. I was there. I remember. It was about choices other than either of those, both of which impressed most of us as being fairly horrible.
Feminism is simply the belief that women are of equal value with men. There are different "schools of" feminist thought. There were "conservative" feminists who thought full-time mothers ought to be paid, though that line of thought didn't get far due to a consensus that what full-time mothers do is priceless. There were Republican feminists who thought that, as long as the average woman was content to do part-time pink-collar jobs, the average woman's earning lower wages than the average man of similar age and education was not a problem. There are Muslim feminists, like Fatima Mernissi, who think it's liberating for women to have separate schools and hospitals and conceal themselves from most men. In the modern world, believing that women are of at least equal value with men is supported by objective facts, so "feminism" is synonymous with sane perception of one aspect of consensus reality, and does not obligate all feminists to agree on their priorities or even on their specific goals. We don't.
Abortion became identified as a "feminist issue" or a "woman's right" because it was supported by irresponsible men. What women counselling women who are considering abortion report is that abortion is a "choice" usually urged on women by irresponsible men--husbands who don't think they can afford the child, or other people's cheating husbands who don't want their wives to see a "honey" with a child who might look like them. Because Gloria Steinem tried to appease her own guilty conscience by presenting abortion as a "choice" swinging chicks of the 1960s were happy about making--which obviously wasn't altogether true, even for her--I've known people who assumed that any independent woman supported abortion and, if she'd travelled or if she'd gained and lost weight, she'd probably had one.
There are actually local lurkers who've heard quite detailed versions of this slanderous story, whether they've heard and apparently believed that the fetus I supposedly aborted was the product of interracial sex or of incest. If I weren't a feminist I could be deeply hurt by such stories. As things are I laugh at them, because they are ridiculous. The fact is that I was a baby-faced, preposterously sheltered, teenaged princess during the very few years when I might have been able to conceive a baby if I'd worked at it. Around the time I was old enough to vote, I developed polycystic ovarian syndrome. Some people may care enough to pay for an autopsy when I'm dead to prove this, for all I know. I've never had any reason to worry about what to do with a baby. I've never wanted to bring more celiacs into the world, but, even with the celiac gene, I don't believe in wasting babies. But that's my belief, based in the confidence that if I'd had a baby I didn't feel able to keep I could have made decent arrangements for it (not everyone can) and recovered from the horrors of being pregnant while celiac (not every body can do that, either). I don't judge women who've thought they needed abortion. I, personally, never have had any reason to think about it.
The choice responsible, intelligent women make is not to be pregnant unless, and until, they want babies. This is definitely one reason why such women choose late marriage or no marriage at all. If we might have thought we liked men enough to marry them, and then after the engagement was announced and private pleasure was being shared a man started whining "But I want to 'go all the way'," the engagement was over. Making babies is "better" than merely making pleasure if, and because, and insofar as, it celebrates a commitment to be together rearing a child for twenty years. Otherwise, in the deplorable slang my generation used, third base is home. End of discussion.
Should people wait for marriage to have babies? Absolutely. Should they wait for marriage to experience carnal pleasure? Well...if they happen to be HSP, even if that were ideal, it's not going to be possible, but this web site's contract wouldn't let me go there if I wanted to.
Anyway, now that it's been made clear to the young that "feminist" does not mean "person who thinks she should be paying taxes so that irresponsible men can bully the idjits who rut with them into having abortions," let's consider the more serious question of what young women should plan to do with their lives.
There's an assumption, from times when the human-friendly parts of the world were less crowded, that most young people want babies. The good news, considering the conditions in which so many young people live, is that this seems not to be true. There are simply too many people on this planet at this time. We don't need to become extinct but we need negative population growth.
Both of the major political parties are in denial about a fact that ought to have been obvious on the day a movement for homosexuals' rights came to exist. I don't think homosexuals deserve blame for this, any more than people with cancer deserve blame for the cigarette industry, but the fact that enough people are homosexual to generate a movement is an indicator that people are badly overcrowded. That might be true for only a few households, or schools, or at least cities--but the fact that it's true for most cities these days, and that people living in the habitable rural areas don't want to build more or bigger cities where they are, tells us: too many humans. We don't need to start paying to increase the rate of suicide, for Heaven's sake. All we really need is to support young people's righteous choice to have one child or none. That means the existing population level will not continue to replace itself. There will be fewer, healthier, happier humans in a cleaner, safer world, after we're gone, and I personally am all for that.
"But I want babies, plural. I want a house full," some people still say. Cheers to them--that probably means they've been living in healthier conditions where their hormones are still telling them they can afford a house full. Their hormones are wrong. Hormones are not well informed. But they can indulge their hormones by choosing to produce one child of their own and adopt some more. There's no shortage of homeless babies to choose from. I personally would rather make a mutual choice to keep an adoptable foster child who chose to stay with me, but some people think they have to have a "White Newborn," or maybe some other variety of infant. There are enough homeless children that couples with reasonable incomes can make that decision for themselves.
"But, but," both major parties sputter. Shortsighted Democrats think we can pack in more immigrants as second-class citizens who will pay more to support our Social Security "retirement" than they'll get out of it. Shortsighted Republicans think we can wall out immigrants and just breed more babies who will look like us. Both parties want, for selfish and venal reasons, to deny the fact that we can't afford to do either without inflicting chaos and anarchy and probably cannibalism on the next generation. Many people in both parties can afford to want this, in a biological sense at least, because they won't live to see what either of their disastrous policies will do to their children. I'm not too old to anticipate that I may have to share the consequences of whatever we do to The Nephews' generation, so I cannot afford, even in the biological sense, to support either shortsighted Ds or shortsighted Rs. Neither can anyone who is still in the fertile part of a human lifetime.
"Conservatives" are gaining political momentum from life's having handed them, us, two fine-looking poster children this summer. Respect for the lives of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska demands that people not waste that momentum. And it will be wasted if Rs are allowed to twist "conservative" rhetoric away from freedom of speech, which is still sustainable, into a message about making more babies at a time when that's not sustainable.
"So what are young women to do with their lives if they marry late and have only one baby?" Well, I married late and had no babies at all, and I remember my young adult years as highly satisfactory. I was one of those girls who consider only fluffy "humanities" majors in college (in addition to English and psychology I considered "library science," education, music, religion, and radio broadcasting) and then didn't even finish a degree. If I hadn't had that wretched vaccine I would probably have finished a degree but it would not have been for a job that's still paying top salaries today. Y'know what, I don't think I would have minded that. Very likely I would have had my own business in Washington and married a nice well-off diplomat, around age thirty or thirty-five, just the same. And two or three years studying the subjects college girls enjoy didn't do me any harm. It did qualify me to be a Washingtonienne and find a nice well-off diplomat. The main difference not having been in the Michigan Group of survivors of "chronic" mononucleosis might have made is that I might have remained fertile and thus attracted a younger diplomat, also fertile, and had babies. I can't say that dilettante-ing around in fashionable circles, travelling, reading and writing, helping rear and educate my sisters, and then being happily married until cancer did us part, was anything I wouldn't recommend to young women today. Quite the contrary, thank you very much.
But I think women should, absolutely, expect to have "careers." Marriage and children are optional. Life hands those to some of us, not to others. What we all have to plan on doing is earning a living.
It's not really fair to say, as Charlie Kirk infamously said, that when young men (on average, as a survey group) rated family life ahead of professional success and young women (ditto) rated professional success ahead of life, that means that young women are "choosing childlessness and loneliness." For one thing, what people want most is what they don't already have. Large numbers of young men are already earning good money, if only on construction jobs, while young women are more likely to be earning "entry-level wages" and paying off college loans. And also, despite all the effort that's been put into bringing girls up to be fools for love, females are biologically programmed to be more cautious about when, where, and with what they reproduce.
Men imagine they can, as Kirk happened to be able to do, take one look at a pretty girl with a good resume and decide they want to marry her. That's not a righteous act; in fact, although the Bible describes marriages where young men chose their own wives, following their eyeballs, it goes into considerable detail about the problems in those marriages. At best they became entangled with dysfunctional in-laws, like Jacob. At worst they were seduced by their enemies, or at best tools of their enemies, like Samson. Young men need no encouragement to imagine that they can count on having Charlie Kirk's extraordinary good luck. Michael Jordan and Bill Gates and everyone else who had extraordinary success at an early age had extraordinary good luck, as well as extraordinary talent. Their stories can be inspiring but they can't be depended on to predict outcomes for anyone else.
Women know that, if babies are going to be happy and healthy and a source of joy, they have to be born into a well feathered nest. Not all women seem to be able to control themselves well enough to sublimate their energy into preparing a comfortable home for any babies they may have, by birth or adoption, but that behavior is obviously to be encouraged.
The more conservative a woman is by temperament, the more her instincts will tell her to wait, be sure of a husband's adult character, provide a wholesome environment for children, and plan on a good long life after any children she rears are grown up and gone. "Professional foster mother," or adoptive mother, of one child after another is a valid career option but it's not for everyone. Most women do better in skilled professions and that's what they should prepare to do with most of their lives, even if they take time off to have a baby.
As for marrying early...let's say, first of all, that there are a very small percentage of humankind for whom that works, and cheers for them. But we have to consider the majority.
I consider the majority of my acquaintances when we were very young adults...I won't go into all of my friends' stories, but I'll say a bit about myself and the boys I liked in college. I was young enough to have indiscriminate hormone reactions to a lot of different ones; I'll limit this consideration to three boys who were pretty close school friends, who seemed worth watching to see whether they became men I might want to marry.
There was the commitment-phobic. "Fun, and good-looking, when he's around," was a line I remember from a novel that's become cringe-inducing and deserves a decent burial, because it described the first boy I liked in college so well. We were friends who shared secrets, which included a physical attraction. Perfect--for school friends. Now, projecting into the future: He thought he wanted to major in education. It was the early eighties, so not everyone recognized...I have never met anyone who sounded more like the "gay young man" stereotype than he did. It was just an exaggerated, affected version of a Southern Preppy accent and manner, so at the time people could say "Well, he is Southern and he is preppy," but a few years later everyone would recognize a line, and he was across the line. If that boy had settled down, finished a degree, and been hired as a teacher, he would probably have been fired, banned from teaching, and permanently embittered, on suspicion alone--though here I stand to testify that he liked women. Lots of different women, only he was honorable enough to admit it and not be overly intimate with one woman in particular. Wherever he is and whatever he's doing now, I hope he's still enjoying it as much as we all used to enjoy his presence among us in college, I'm sure he's happier than he would have been if he'd tried to marry one woman and settle down in one job. Especially teaching. Even as a dishwasher-and-garage-band-singer he would have done better than that.
Then there was the nice, sober, steady chap so many people thought was so much better for me than the commitment-phobic was. And he was another excellent school friend...until I'd dropped out of university and the busybodies in the church had decided I was no longer good enough for him. I don't know to what extent they were to blame for his being the one who "had to" marry a student on his first teaching job. All I know is that he became the topic of discussion about why the rule against teachers dating their students is not that all students are necessarily children, or even younger than teachers, but that teachers aren't supposed to be much closer to one student in a class than to the others. And he didn't get another teaching job, either. And, fifteen years later, when massage had become one of my odd jobs, my voice mail included a painfully familiar voice. He'd not been referred by any doctor--he was in pretty good condition, actually, just stressed--he was looking for someone who could understand the problems in his marriage--and by the way my recorded voice reminded him of someone he used to know! I'm not proud of this, but I played the message for my husband, shrieking with malicious glee, and then erased it. If I never see him again it'll probably be the best thing.
Then there was the cute boy at university. His student labor job was groundskeeping and he made sure the snow was cleared off the pavement I used, first. We grabbed quick lunches together enough times that, one day when we had time, we had a leisurely, chatty lunch, during which he asked whether I was from Scotland or Ireland. "Your accent, I mean, you speak so clearly." I'm from Virginia, I said. "But you seemed so nice!" Let's just say that it takes more than that kind of attitude to interest anyone in moving to Nova Scotia, which I probably wouldn't have done in any case.
And then...me. Readers don't need to know what a nineteen-year-old mess I used to be, though, rest assured, I was nineteen years old once just like everybody else. Probably messier than the boys were, if they're still alive, and read this, and my admitting to being a mess too makes them feel better. All that needs to be said is that after having the vaccine in order to stay at university, I became ill, dropped out of university anyway, and was asexual and unhealthy and jaundiced and absolutely no fun for anyone to be around for years. I next kept a job longer than three weeks, two full years after the jab. The ability to feel interested in men or sex returned, by fits and starts, starting about two more years after that.
(In the Awesome Eighties the vaccine college kids were required to have was against measles, mumps, and rubella. It was a live-virus vaccine, subject to contamination. Due to political differences five groups of victims of contamination were counted. I think this was a mistake. I suspect the Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, and New York Groups had the same disease, and different doctors gave it different names. The Georgia Group had a different and more serious thing.)
Anyway, that's four people who clearly should not have married early, and thank goodness if three of us had the good fortune to marry late, skip the "first divorce," and have marriages worthy of the name. One poor booby married early and has evidently regretted it.
This story needs to be told, because young people need not to be encouraged to be the poor booby. It's much easier to have one child or none if you wait until you're full-grown and debt-free (at least 25 years old) and, preferably, until you own a house with separate bedrooms for each child you may want to rear. It's also easier to be sure you're marrying a man or woman whose character can withstand the hardships of life. Little Ms. Promising and Mr. Possibility very often don't have even their good looks left by the time they're 25.
And if "conservatives" apply pressure to young people to have those disastrous first marriages, and have surplus babies, just so we can "retire" on the earnings of miserable, oppressed, exploited young people who look like us...then those "conservatives" will indeed deserve to see their children become transgendered Marxists, which are further from salvation than the average Neo-Pagan "Witch." With shaved heads, cocaine noses, and satanic pentagrams dangling from their nose rings. Not because those things are new or fun or attractive, but because they represent rejection of "conservative" parents. By the time the next generation recover from that stage, if they do, those "conservatives" will be dead. And it'll serve'm right.
I get to say this because I'm 60. If you're under age 60, don't even quote me, lest anybody think you said it. I, personally, think able-bodied seniors should not "retire." I think we should give thanks if we're able to quit the 40-to-60-hour-a-week corporate-wage-slave jobs and spend our time doing work we enjoy. Con suerte we might even be able to do work that's not paid in money, being full-time grandparents or new unknown artists. But we should work, because when people don't have work to do they start to decompose. And we should continue to pay into the disability pension fund we need, and should keep. Automatic "retirement" at any age is unsustainable and unhealthy. We should abandon it as a failed idea. If we do, it should be easy to provide decent pensions for those who aren't able to do any kind of work--at whatever age they may be--until they either recover, or die, or get bored enough to find ways to work around their disabilities. Only seniors should talk or think about this. If you're a mere child of 50, forget I mentioned it. Read something else.
By accepting this tweak to the "conservative" ideal of family life, with extended families and entailed property and real communities where people know each other's names and all, I think even those who've always identified as "conservatives" can agree with those of us who actually like "liberal, as distinct from left-wing" better...and focus on the message, which is freedom of speech, and freedom of association, and all that.
(Hmm...that'll do for an end line, but one more thought needs to be expressed...)
You may have been thinking all along, if you've read all along to this point, "What about freedom of religion?" I don't think that's a public issue. Nobody but you and God, as you understand God, can tell you what to believe or how to serve and worship. Nobody else ever really knows. Freedom of religion is truly unalienable. Freedom to talk about what you believe, in groups of people who believe something similar, is what we all need to be eternally vigilant to protect. We can afford to include those who don't like the name "God" as deserving freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Book Review: War Is a Racket
Title: War Is a Racket
Author: Smedley Butler
Date: 1935
Length: 35 pages
Publisher: heritage-history.com (PDF)
Quote: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people."
It's unfortunate that this retired Marine officer's book has been best remembered by left-wingers who, in the Cold War era, seized on the idea that the path to peace lay through falling into the hands of the Soviet Union just as Khrushchev said. What General Butler had to say about the corporate interests behind the wars of his day--and he ought to have known if anyone would, having been more decorated for more overseas military missions than anyone else alive at the time--and the poor compensation of veterans is a valuable historical document. This document has been made available in PDF form.
I recommend everyone read it. Just read it. Draw your own conclusions, from your own historical hindsight. If the computer on which you're reading this does not handle PDF well, e-mail to discuss the format and consequent cost of your printout. If your computer does handle PDF well, click here to read or download the mini-book free of charge.
Authors I Wish More People Knew About
Regular readers of this web site probably do know about them by now. Ten off the top of my head, alphabetical order...unfortunately, although I started raving about these writers while they were alive, in some cases that was a long time ago.
1. Joan Aiken
Conrad Aiken, who was rated high as a poet in his day, was the father of two internationally renowned authors of genre fiction, Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodges. Genre fiction was considered sort of opposite to poetry or "great" fiction, in their century, the twentieth. So, both daughters could write their "frivolous stuff" and get paid for it without competing with their father, and they did. Jane Aiken Hodges did it well. I think Joan Aiken's frivolous fiction is great in its own way. Her superpower was drawing even me into even Regency Romances, at an age when I was not buying or reviewing books for resale and would not normally touch a Regency Romance with a ten-foot pole.
2. K.A. Ashcomb
Nobody else will ever write like Terry Pratchett, and nobody else should try, but this young writer has admittedly studied Pratchett's techniques at length, and uses them to good effect in writing a different kind of stories.
3. Wendell Berry
A lot of people have known about Wendell Berry for a long time. An early contributor to Organic Gardening & Farming, Mother Earth News, etc., he wrote excellent essays, fiction, poetry, and criticism. Berry fans tend to be quiet inconspicuous people who enjoy feeling just a little bit like a revolutionary cell--his work is too Green to be promoted by corporate interests, though also too popular to be completely snubbed by the commercial media, a situation that seemed to amuse Berry and his fans inordinately for an inordinate length of time.
4. Emily Dana Botrous
She's broken out of the Book Funnel. This is a young writer, still pounding out potboilers while raising small children; in another twenty years she may be great. Currently what she writes are romances, but much more thoughtful, insightful, than the average romance. And she writes honestly about the Blue Ridge Mountains as they really are today; though also about other places.
5. Anna Dale
Author of frivolous fantasies for children, but also the author of the statement that Amber-Eyed Silver Tips are "the creme de la creme of witches' cats." So she obviously has things to say about the real world.
6. Suzette Haden Elgin
She wrote about the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, she wrote whimsical science fiction, she basically invented the genre of science fiction poetry, and she had one of the first and best blogs, still available "as a memorial" at ozarque.livejournal.com. Always with wit and charm and a writing "voice" that could only belong to a Southern Lady. In each of the niches to which her writing appealed, her writing quickly formed a small hard core of admirers. I'm one. I even admired her crocheting...and I'm a knitter.
7. Ruth Ozeki
A year of writing documentaries for TV that were sponsored by a cigarette company, and required each episode to show someone smoking the sponsor's cancersticks, too, prompted a debut novel called My Year of Meats, in which a fictional TV documentarian is supposed to give Japanese audiences a better impression of beef, but every show she and her crew work on gives them a worse impression of the beef industry. Pretty frank about the effects of synthetic hormones on humans--the protagonist tries to have a baby (though she's not married) and fails, her boss is impotent and blames his wife, a man she interviews is somewhat "feminized" although a grandfather, a five-year-old girl is suffering premature puberty--but that kind of thing does come up when we study the facts on this topic. When this novel came out I reported to the Friends of the Library that its one fault was that "it does nothing to break up the stereotype of Japanese people being perfectionistic overachievers; it is a perfectionistic overachievement." Enough reviewers made that kind of noises that Ozeki made her other books quite different from My Year of Meats. But still excellent.
8. Laurence J. Peter
Best remembered for the assertion of The Peter Principle (an early book) that everyone is promoted to per level of incompetence. He wrote further books about his further observations of Life.
9. Barb Taub
The only mom-com books that have made me laugh out loud as often as hers did were early Erma Bombeck. I don't know why she's not a super-seller, as Bombeck was. It's not radical political views; she's such a moderate D she's married to an R. She writes within the rules. I think it's just that although mom-com is still madly popular with actual readers, it doesn't fit into the left-wingnut agenda that dominates the conglomerate of what used to be the big publishers.
10. Iris Yang
So far, this living writer's been best known for a series of novels about how to be an excellent human being, in the specific context of the Flying Tigers, a real group of Chinese pilots who teamed up with the US Air Force in the 1940s.
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