Web Log for 9.11.25

About today's Big News Story...I can't claim to have been even a fan of Charlie Kirk's, and I'm not going to try. I hear videos (don't even try to watch them) that happen to be shared by friends who want to discuss them. His weren't the ones. He was by all reports a decent man. He died far too young. Thoughts, prayers, and respect go out to those who knew him. These links are for people for whom this is a work day, though we respect those who are mourning.

I'll say this, though. Though Mrs. Kirk has long blonde hair, the photos of the family remind me strangely of the Kennedy family in 1961.

Animals 

Something to look for when doing tourist duty in North Carolina. Elk would be less likely to be seen on the Tennessee side, but you never know. The Tennessee side of the border is a little less "touristy," I think, a little more "real."

Photo ganked from a very pleasant blog to follow--lots of photos, jokes, and music videos: 

https://curiousasacathy.com/peacefully-sitting/

Economy, Global Indicators of 

All I said was, when a photo of Stacey Dash popped up on X (finally, I've only followed her for I think four years since I last saw anything from her there), that some people look good with curls. I think Dash does. Within hours two cute girls from India, who might be sisters, who probably shouldn't be using the Internet without parental supervision, were DM'ing me for help publishing photos of themselves as models. Either they have a scam going and send these things to everyone in the US they find, or there's a shortage of modelling opportunities in India for cute girls with long curly hair. 

Men's Issues 

Is hating men considered cute and trendy these days? Really hating men, as distinct from wisecracking about them? It may be...in the social circles of women who've been harmed by men. Biology does not predispose women to homicidal competition for competition's sake--that's a male thing--but we do have the same capacity for vindictiveness that men have, and easy access to SSRI drugs makes it easy for some women to act on their vindictive thoughts. 

We must not blame women as a group (although we can blame individuals who commit violent crimes). We must accept that women have valid reasons to be angry, and work on helping women address those reasons rather than directing their anger toward innocent people who seem like safer targets. 

I was what (a biologist describing the way some male insects bite into the females' shells while mating, quoted by May Berenbaum) called "a minimally damaged female." My father was strict, rigid, oldfashioned, quick-tempered, verbally abusive, and widely considered impossible to talk to, but he affirmed that he would have died for any of his children and I never doubted that. My brother was my best buddy. I remember all but one of my ex-boyfriends with good will; I remember even that one with pity. Whether my business has been booming or bust, the best long-term relationships with clients have been about 2/3 female, but the vast majority of clients have been male. I've liked and learned from most of the men I've known. And yes, I still feel angry about the fact that girls and young women are harassed and molested  and yes, even today, sometimes even raped, wherever they go, even in their parents' or eventually their husbands' homes. 

I "get" the motive for rape--males who know they're not Real Men and never will be probably do like the idea that the most sensitive and vulnerable parts of their bodies can be used to injure somebody, if only easily intimidated females--but for the life of me I can't understand why we're allowing girls to grow up feeling too squeamish to go for those sensitive parts if these guys presume so far as to need to be told "Back off." Why are we not teaching little boys that, if another person does not hold eye contact and smile, they need to lower their eyes and move briskly along, not saying a word?!

It's easy to understand why women who were abused or abandoned by their male relatives, raped by their ex-boyfriends, beaten by their ex-husbands, etc., do feel a tremendous amount of anger. It's certainly appropriate for men to feel very cautious about exposing their sensitive parts. Pushy behavior from males may cause them to be mistaken for rapists and yes, THANK GOD, that no longer means they're likely to "score"--or even necessarily survive. It's unfortunate, though, that a woman who has had bones broken by an ex-husband is likely to avoid him and dump her anger on a nice, patient, gentle man who wants to be a father-substitute for her children--or on the children themselves. Women are socialized to deny their anger and this causes that anger to come out in some very sick ways. 

The writer of the article linked below may turn out to be another paid gender traitor, but I'm sharing the article for the observation that "Real women...lament the shortage of strong partners." It is so true. Women who had decent fathers living in the homes of their childhood do not want father-figures. We don't have a lot of tolerance for condescending assumptions about our not being able to take care of ourselves. But is it too much to ask that men, even at age sixty, be able to pull their own weight? 

I lament the shortage of men my age who want more out of our remaining years than to flop down in front of a television set and rot. I was really attracted to a man who was still working construction, when he was the age I am now, but I'd happily settle for one who was content to settle down and keep a store. I have no time to waste on the ones who just want to flop and grope, whining "I've worked for forty years and now I want to retire," and "If it's too late to have babies why should we wait for marriage?", and "Why not just sell the house and the land and the business and move into a nice little flat in the city." I don't know a single man my age (I do know just a few married ones) who is "strong" enough, if not to run his own business, at least to be a competent helpmate and housekeeper while I run mine.

https://pjmedia.com/gilda-carle/2025/09/10/rx-for-mens-mental-health-dump-mean-girls-and-choose-real-women-n4943517

I suspect, from her use of "dogwhistle" words, that Gilda Carle's next article will encourage men to choose the variety of women I call man traps. They don't mean their men any harm. They may be kind and even indulgent wives, if they've waited long enough that they are real women and not little girls in women's bodies. They are, however, a bit...Golgafrinchan. If men don't get bored and leave them first, they are the ones who will lie on the couch and decompose beside the sort of men who are single at sixty. 

Considering the Real Women I've observed, beside whom a man whose brain is still active would want to live beyond age sixty...I feel an article coming on. But not today.

Meanwhile, from North Carolina comes this:

[Photo from the railcar surveillance video. Comment from someone called Pixie on X.]

What can men do? People look at the small, scared Black guy cringing against the wall and the older man trying to stay out of it, and they see that hulking thug in the two men who were obviously scared of him. Is this fair? Is this right? 

It's not, but men have to make it change. The woman might have been able to change what happened on that video, in the rest of which the big Black guy battered and stabbed the little blonde. The men, especially the two of them together, would have had a better chance. 

The story is told of the karate master who was riding a train with one of his students when a drunk boarded the train. The drunk wasn't murderous--yet--but he was mean. He shoved and stepped on people, snarled angrily when someone complained. The student expected the karate master to rise up and knock the breath out of the drunk. Instead the karate master spoke to the drunk in a friendly way. "What have you been drinking? Sake? I like sake, too. I used to drink sake with some friends back in..." They got into a conversation about drinking, and friends, and home towns. The karate master deftly steered the drunk's mind into a sentimental mood...and the drunk apologized to everyone he had shoved and stepped on.

Not all of us are that good. 

Nevertheless...looking at that scene, just before the murder, I do think: Four to one? We can take him, no trouble. If the other three people are willing to do their bit. Four people can subdue one person, usually without touching him, when the one person sees the four pairs of eyes looking at him.

Say, "Hey." 

Say, "Hey man, what's up? Why are you hitting that chick?"

Chances are good that he'd say "I'm not hitting anybody."

Say, "We all saw you hit her. You, both of you, need to sit back down and wait for the Metrocops," or whatever they call the Charlotte equivalent of Metrocops. 

Or he might say, lying through his teeth, "Cos she's my [rude word for a prostitute] and she's been [rude words for doing worse things than that]." 

Say, "Well, you need some help with that. You can't just beat up a person who is that much smaller than you are. Just sit tight. Help is on the way." 

There are not a lot of men who will become violent if all four of the other people are watching them. He would probably have sat down and gone quietly. Even when they're stoned, most people remember that four people are just enough to immobilize their two hands and two feet.

There are Black men who could do more in a scene like this. Christian, Rastafarian, Muslim, even Buddhist men could get spiritual. Even a Humanist who doesn't believe in the Great Spirit could appeal to public spirit. "What'you trying to do? Start a race war? Brother, you better leave that girl alone. .. She's some White man's problem. Let him deal with her."

Some men (or women) might say, "I can't do that. Even on a work team with people I know, I'm just not a leader." They could learn the skills, but other forms of distraction might serve their needs even better. 

"I'm sicker/crazier than you are" has been known to work as a distraction. No direct challenge to a violent person is necessary to distract him enough to allow a prospective victim to run away. Anyone can start a loud, lively conversation with an imaginary friend--about sports or music, not about the immediate situation. Some people have the ability to faint, vomit, etc., when they're frightened; this can be useful. It's also worth the trouble to memorize a song you can belt out; I like "Jesus Saviour Pilot Me." A person who liked to live dangerously might touch the violent man's sleeve, smile, and say something bizarre--"Could I have your autograph please? You are Marshawn Lynch, aren't you?" or "My friend over there, you can't see him, he's from outer space, anyway he says..." 

"But that's dangerous! He might decide to kill me instead of her!" He might. All kinds of things might happen. The train might explode. The city might be demolished by a stray asteroid sucked into Earth's gravity field. The violent man might have a heart attack. The question is whether you did all you were able to do. You are the whatever-your-name-is of wherever-you're-from..."No, that's my father, or the Metrocops, or the government. They are supposed to take care of things." Maybe, but if they are not there, you're what is there in their place. You are there for a reason. 

Because the short guy (a teenager?) and the woman (his mother? grandmother?) got up and walked away, and the older man did nothing, scumbag felt empowered to commit murder. 

Don't let things like that happen, men. Even if you are Black. Even if you hate your local police...four to one! What are they going to do? 

It was because people didn't stand up to violent criminals that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, according to the prophet Ezekiel. Homosexual rape is an abomination but there has never been and will never be a city where anything like a majority of the population are tempted to it. If the gang who threatened the angels in the shape of young men had been Sodom's worst sinners, the angels could have dealt with them and the rest of the city would probably not have missed them. Because Sodom and Gomorrah were places where people let poor people starve, let young men be raped, and let other bad things happen, they were destroyed. 

I once ignored a cry for help, telling myself it was just another stupid freshman goofing around. The word "sodomy" means something else because the word "cowardice" had already been invented to describe the real sin of Sodom.

Painters, Opportunities for 

The young woman who was murdered in Charlotte was called Iryna Zarutska. She had a pretty face and some rich men have created a fund to award $1000 grants to painters who think they can paint a likeness of that face into a mural in "prominent locations" in their cities.

A better memorial to this poster girl for hatecrimes against women might be a year-long curfew on males in Charlotte, requiring all men and boys over age two to stay in their homes unless escorted by a responsible woman. Women would be the first to complain, but they'd benefit. 

Anyway, if you're good at drawing faces, e-mail: katie@eoghan.com .

Poetry 

Elegy for Charlie Kirk:

 

https://classicalpoets.org/2025/09/on-charlie-kirk-and-his-assassins-a-poem-by-brian-yapko/

Meet the Blog Roll: Crescent Dragonwagon

I told the computer to publish this one on Thursday. I'm not sure how, during the seizures Microsoft "updates" were inflicting on it all day on Thursday, the computer managed to schedule it for a Saturday instead. Anyway, here it is...

I first heard of the author with the unforgettable name during the 1980-81 winter holidays, when someone who wanted to encourage me to be a precocious writer sent me a Writer's Digest annual directory of book publishers. Before the Internet these were big fat hardcover books, information up to date for up to one quarter of the year for which they were published. Anyway publishers usually named a few recent or forthcoming books and Harper Collins was promoting, for 1981, a young adult novel big-name author Paul Zindel had co-authored with picture book author Crescent Dragonwagon, called To Take a Dare.  

I was a young adult reader. I liked Zindel's witticisms, if not all of his advice to teenagers. I had to read To Take a Dare. It wasn't just your typical "go get counselling" story, though it did start out with the teenage girl narrator catching gonorrhea and leaving her parents' broken, dysfunctional home. (This was before the fad for "child sexual abuse." The protagonist's father was the one whose distrust had been her excuse for sleeping around with boys, not the source of the gonorrhea. This made her seem much more realistic than so many other fictional characters who lost their virginity before age eighteen in the 1980s and 1990s.) She was old enough to get jobs and rent rooms, under existing laws, and led a reasonably responsible life after putting a thousand miles or so between herself and her parents. Then, especially since she could no longer have children of her own, she wanted to adopt a younger runaway whose street name was Dare, and the story was about her trying not to make the same mistakes rearing him that she thought her parents had made rearing her.

It was edgy. It was plausible in the early 1980s, when social workers hadn't yet succeeded in cutting off all teenagers' hopes of independent, legitimate lives outside of dysfunctional families and/or schools. It was thought-provoking. I liked To Take a Dare very much.

Later in the 1980s Dragonwagon, whose parents had made fairly unusual European names famous in literary circles, so she'd chosen an even more unusual name and set out to make it famous in its own right, wrote her other novel. The Year It Rained was even edgier and more contemporary. The big medical news story of the period was that some cases of schizophrenia seemed to be completely cured by overdoses of vitamins and minerals. Well, some psychotic conditions that seemed to doctors like schizophrenia were turning out to have nothing to do with classic schizophrenia, but the cases that were responding to "megavitamin therapy" really were classic schizophrenia. 

"People don't usually notice medical news unless they have, or are concerned about having, a condition themselves. You obviously don't have classic schizophrenia so did you have one of those other conditions that look like it?" Someone to whom I mentioned this book actually asked.

The answer is no. In the early twentieth century people used to fear that being imaginative, reading and writing fiction and especially speculative fiction, was likely to lead to schizophrenia. I'd been warned. And the celiac trait happens to be associated with one of the complex of ten or fifteen genes that, in combination, seem to be involved in classic schizophrenia. The full set of those genes does not run in my family. The celiac gene does. By the time I was born the bulk of the medical evidence was telling my parents and me not to worry too much about older, misleading ideas about what my imagination and my celiac disease might have been leading up to. They weren't, anyway. Though my life did overlap for a few years with the life of a cousin who'd been a noted, not really famous, psychologist in the most fear-ridden and Freudian way, who thought the whole family of "gifted" achievers were repressing and overcompensating and generally at risk, and from time to time a visit with him seemed to motivate one of the active adults in the family to "go on a kick" of pushing me to read less and spend more time outdoors with other children...I don't remember ever spending any time with this cousin, but my life became noticeably smoother and easier when he died.

But in fact I was a writer, my mother was a nurse, and I did pay attention to medical news about conditions that I was at no risk of having, myself, but might have been at some risk of having to live with in Mother's patients. As a teenager I was also interested in Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease and diabetes and epilepsy and, most of all, cardiovascular disease, the one for which Mother was performing "miracle cures." If schizophrenia had turned out to be fully curable we might have had patients with that disease, too, living in our house, or spent time living in their houses, and I might have inherited the ability and the duty to perform "miracle cures" of that too...

But it didn't. Classic schizophrenia is more horrible than that. Over-supplementing with nutrients, to compensate for the nutrients the schizophrenic patient loses the ability to absorb, turned out to buy patients just a few more years of "normal" life. Since classic schizophrenia appears in late adolescence, that might have been enough for a patient like the protagonist of The Year It Rained to get married and have a baby, only to have to be locked up away from the baby.

Anyway, The Year It Rained is a very hopeful novel. The protagonist stops hearing voices and starts writing and even feels physically normal enough to have mind-blowing, fully hormone-enriched sex--with a boy she doesn't really like much, because nobody could possibly like him--and thus experience "normal" adolescent heartache and confusion. She's happy. She wants to help her friends from the psychiatric hospital. If only more people understood how much better megavitamin therapy was than all the other "therapies" that have been tried, and have failed.

But megavitamin therapy would turn out, a few years later, to fail the people on whom the protagonist of The Year It Rained was based. We now know how a sequel to The Year It Rained would go. As a typical classic schizophrenic the protagonist, Elizabeth, would become asexual again. Would start hearing voices that seemed like those of the dead, calling her to come and join them. Would become dangerous to herself and, gentle though she was when sane, to others. A best-case scenario might have left her living with some degree of brain damage, still hearing voices but able to dismiss them as symptoms and lead a fairly normal life. She'd still be ace. She'd still seem strange, though not necessarily dangerous, to other people. Her life might not be altogether miserable, though classic schizophrenics always report feeling bad; her life would always be marked by a rare, incurable disease, of which our understanding has progressed enough that we now recognize the disease as having a physical origin, but not enough that we can really do much about it for very long. At best Elizabeth might have good, pain-free, energetic, capable days in her adult life, in among the days she'd have to suffer through. 

Perhaps the most ironic part of the story of classic schizophrenia, so far, is that that best-case outcome is more typical of untreated patients--or of patients treated only with diet!--than of patients who had some of the other "therapies" that were tried in the twentieth century. The hope in The Year It Rained was not entirely unfounded. Elizabeth does get a little more pleasure and less pain out of the short time she has before the disease comes back, and is less likely to be disabled by additional brain damage done in the hope of shutting down the damaged part of the brain (which is still a scattershot approach, at best). 

Meanwhile, though classic schizophrenia remains a dramatic, frightening, mysterious disease, it's not as common or as dangerous as the one that threatens our society today--megalomania, the unrealistic belief that other people can't manage their own affairs and need the patient to be their nanny or "gatekeeper" or "planner." Though the United Nations clearly would attract people suffering from megalomania and might simply need better protocols for recognizing and excluding such people, it would be premature to rule out a hypothesis that something about the UN causes or aggravates megalomania...

Right. Back to the books. Dragonwagon's two novels were still a rare thing in their time: novels about young women that were not romances. In the Roosevelt era some social workers had decided that the best way to reduce teen pregnancy was to sell the young the idea of Romantic Love. Talk about an idea that would have come from a crowd recruited from the bottom halves of their classes. Pop culture in the mid-twentieth century was then dominated by the idea that everything sold better with a hint of sex in it. Hello? Sex is all very well in its way, but women, at least, spend more time off heat than on. Women my age at least wanted to reject the idea that people need to be coupled to be happy. I wanted more stories about young women whose adventures ended with them happily single, even before mononucleosis produced my own ace phase. I saw that in real life quite a lot of young women's adventures do have satisfactory resolutions other than romance, and I thought that, in fiction, a better way to market the ideal of Romantic Love might have been more novels about married couples sharing adventures  other than cheating and divorce. So Dragonwagon's novels were the kind of thing I was looking for. I liked them.

I particularly liked that the author of these two non-romances was happily married. I think one reason why women haven't written more novels about the adventures of happily monogamous couples is that our husbands don't want us to write about them and, while we're living with them, it is hard to write about men who don't resemble ours in some recognizable way. Easier to write about single women, even if the reason why they're single is that they're sixteen, who accomplish things on their own and don't need men to make them or their stories complete. 

Years passed. Dragonwagon stuck to her niches of picture books, for which she'd chosen her name, and cookbooks; she didn't write another novel. There were enough novels to read. As an adult I did, just as the most anti-imagination influences of my youth might have hoped, find less time to read fiction and more things to do in the real world every year. 

When I started blogging, Dragonwagon's blog, "Nothing Is Wasted on the Writer," oddly formatted with quotation marks, was one of the first I wanted to follow. Right around the time I started following her earlier blog, which is still on my Blogspot blog list, she abandoned it and set up a different one. I don't follow Dragonwagon.com because it's set up to be followed via Mailchimp, and I've had some gruesome online experiences with people sabotaging Mailchimp. The author still blogs there, though, and I still visit from time to time.

Her blog is more personal than most writers' friends and relatives like our blogs to be. Having spent years conscientiously typing "An older person said" whether I mean "some random person I overheard in the hallway of a hospital," or "a celebrity for whom I used to work," or "my Great-Aunt -- --," I flinch a bit at posts where Dragonwagon mentions the real names of her living friends and relatives, but apparently they don't mind. Maybe it's the quality of her writing...I have asked my friends and relatives to dump an ice bucket over my head if I use the phrase "luminous prose."

It's the computer screen that's "luminous," whatever is typed on it, but the blog's worth visiting for philosophical reflections and recipes, and examples of how to tell a personal story if you really want to tell one. 

Web Log for 9.10.25

Only one link, and arguably an aunt shouldn't like or recommend it, but I did.

The snarky, funny link goes out to all who feel overwhelmed by memories of personal losses on this day 24 years ago and by the murder of Charlie Kirk. Cry if you feel like crying. Yell and swear if you feel like doing that--blaming murderers, not your co-workers, your children, or the dog. Then, when you feel ready to remember that life goes on and people are a funny lot and stupidity constantly swirls around the planet, enjoy the skewering of the stupidity that prompted people to publish poems as unfinished as these...

In the course of serious professional research about the rather fine line between Bad Poetry (TM) and ordinary, generic, mundane bad poetry, I came across this blog of caustic snarky criticism of the worst poems at Poetry.com. I laughed until tears dropped on my lap. Well, yes, some slimebag, probably with a name that sounds like Poltroon, had sprayed New Roundup somewhere. Partly it was the conjunctivitis. But the tears were a great improvement.

Content warning: if you're a child and adults let you follow this link, they will have some awkward explaining to do, and if you're not reasonably well educated and well versed in pop culture, you'll have some web searches to do in order to understand the jokes.

https://reallybadpoetry.livejournal.com/27900.html 

There should be a link for this, but I don't want to make the time to dig for it: While burning the trash yesterday, I thought about places where this has not been a super-soaker summer, where trash has not formed a backlog--at rural homes or at landfills--because, on the majority of days, trash would burn. (Only on a minority of this summer's days has it been possible to burn anything.) And I thought about my scratchy throat and conjunctivitis. 

Joe Sixpack does not know the chemical explanation for why burning something relieves symptoms of his reactions to airborne chemical poisoning. People who do know that explanation have been financially carrot-and-sticked into avoiding any quantification or publication of it. Nevertheless the fastest way to reduce the level of many toxic chemical vapors that may be hovering in the air and making people feel bad is to burn something. 

This web site would never recommend that anyone in fire-prone country risk destroying entire forests or city neighborhoods just to get some relief from your reaction to New Roundup or whatever else the slimebags in your part of the world have been allowed to use to torture you. It's better to hunt down the slimebags and make them drink whatever they've been spraying, or enough of it that they cry, beg, kiss your feet, sign over all real property with its contents to you, walk to the nearest institution for the care of the violently insane, and say: "I've injured and killed my neighbors for no valid reason. I have no right or reason to live. If you want to keep me alive, please lock me up now." Not that this web site officially endorses the practice of forcing sprayer nozzles into slimebags' throats, which can be messy. This web site likes the rule of law. This web site merely observes that, of the two... 

Anyway, sometimes it's good to burn something, but please choose safe ways to do it. Briquets in a nice metal grill on a nice brick platform are nice, and will also cook a meal. Plain unscented candles in a metal container are also good. We need no more wildfires.

Book Review: Lights Camera Murder at the Castle

Title: Lights Camera Murder at the Castle

Author: Avery Kent

Date: 2025

Quote: "[A] whole two weeks of filming here! With a complete takeover of the castle..."

The fictional Castle Frobisher has been rented to the cast and crew of a TV series. Producer Don, or Donald, or Donahue, Sullivan, or Sully, is a certifiable bunghole. Everyone else has reasons to hate him so the only questions are when someone will write him permanently out of the show and how Kitty McCray and the other castle residents will prove whodunit. 

If you think a good mystery novel needs a murder, but a good detective ought to be able to solve one murder without waiting for the murderer to make it a series, then this and the other planned and actual "Castle mysteries" ought to be precisely your cup of tea. 

My review copy contained a few things that may have been cleared up in the final published copy. (The same character is described as "tall" in one scene and "small" in another. I used to know a gifted actress, and that was how people described her, so this gave me a vivid impression of the character. Still, when the victim has been stabbed in the back it might be relevant to the plot to know whether a character is 5'2" and good at towering over people or 5'10" and good at looking up to them, or maybe 5'6" and capable of both.) 

It's an entertaining story, in any case. I think my favorite scene is the one where the characters agree that, though shocked by the murder, they're all glad that Don's gone. Then there's the one where Lord Frobisher, who as an aristocrat can afford to flout any and all stereotypes, starts reminiscing about the traditional cross-dressing comedies his and Kitty's schools used to stage and decided to cross-dress again for old times' sake. He's not trying to cheer up the TV people; he's ignoring them and behaving like himself in his own home. And there's the cat shown on the cover, and also a dog, who gambol through the scenes and occasionally call attention to a clue...

Web Log for 9.9.25

One link:

Voting, Be Sure You're Registered for 

Fellow Virginians, we are faced with a choice between an incumbent who has been Winsome for all these years, and a challenger with a name that sounds like Spammer who has been spamming every dang video on Youtube with a meaningless ad hominem attack and no positive statement of what she'd like to do if elected. I tried to get the Friends of Spanberger to tell me one reason to vote for her, other than that she's a German-American blonde and Winsome Earle-Sears is not. They told me nothing. In fact, on X what they showed me was a horrible sign saying "...Black people can't use my water fountain." 

Seriously. Photos of a crowd where everyone was White except for a male nurse holding on to an old White man's wheelchair, and that. On X. In this day and age.

Well, admittedly, the sentence began with a dependent clause, but many may think the dependent clause made it worse. I don't remember the exact words but it was something like "If boys who identify as transgender can't use the girls' restroom at school..." 

We all know what sort of political circles count that as virtue-signalling rather than an undiluted hatespew, so if you're a reasonable, moderate D, you might want to think like our current presidential administration and let yourself be mistaken for a R. I mean to say...grandstanding aside, Trump started out as a moderate D and he's never changed. While making outrageous far-right gestures that even a R-dominated Congress and a Supreme Court he stacked in his favor are overruling, he's quietly accomplishing moderate-D goals. Likewise all the key members of his team. 

Let us all vote that the Spammer's ghostface friends can't use the water fountain in the Governor's Mansion. 

"If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, it won't be because I didn't leave clawmarks along the walls on the way down."

Book Review: Busman's Honeymoon

Title: Busman’s Honeymoon

Author: Dorothy Sayers

Date: 1937

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: 0-06-080823-3

Length: 370 pages

Quote: “Peter Wimsey is married—yes, actually married—to that extraordinary young woman...Peter must be forty-five if he’s a day.”

A “busman’s holiday” was a leisure trip in the bus. In this volume of their adventures Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey find themselves solving a murder mystery on their honeymoon.

Sayers had already explained the rule under which, upon marriage to Lord Peter, Harriet Vane acquired the title “Lady Peter” rather than, more logically, Lady Harriet. Possibly the off-putting sound of this title has something to do with the fact that she remains plain Harriet to herself and her friends.

Anyway, she’d helped Lord Peter solve a few other cases since he proved her innocent of the murder of her ex-boyfriend, and now they’re full partners in crime—solving them, that is. Those who’ve found Partners-for-Life will appreciate this fictional rendition of something rare and wonderful. This couple’s passion for each other is matched only by their passion for solving murder mysteries. If it makes them the most eccentric aristocrats in England, it may make them the happiest. The joy they feel at this time in their lives would probably have sustained them if their first detective adventure as a married couple had involved gruesome murders, but, perhaps out of compassion for readers, Sayers gives them a case distinguished by its cleanness.

Sayers, a Christian, never gave Lord Peter Wimsey the emotional comfort of religion. (He’s had a Christian education, has clergymen as friends, and goes around quoting Christian literature, but he lost any faith in a “personal” God in the trenches in the 1914 war.) In her mind the only really religious, as distinct from cultural, Christian element in her detective stories was that she refused to “cheapen life” by inventing unlovable stick figures who exist only to be murdered. In her novels Lord Peter’s whimsical mind, always dredging up quotes and fun facts, always guarantees a Comedy element; his empathy for the victims always guarantees a Tragedy element; and his relationship with unaccountably coy Harriet—who didn’t want to be accused of marrying him for his money, but in this volume we learn that her ex-boyfriend had also conditioned her not to like sex—added a Romance. 

We have here, therefore, a Tragedy, a Comedy, a Romance, and a Mystery, all in one volume, and the last thing Sayers would have wanted was for anyone to mistake this four-genre triumph for a Christian Novel as well. She thought of her detective stories as potboilers that subsidized the relatively smaller stack of religious writing she found time to do. Nevertheless she worked them out with all the joy of duty and pleasure that she described in The Mind of the Maker, and that she gives to Peter and Harriet—and it shows. If you like novels at all, you just about have to like Busman’s Honeymoon.

What's Your Superpower?

Long & Short Reviews asked. I don't think it's a very nice question, since any answer that's not sarcastic is going to sound like bragging, but yes, in fact, I have one. 

I am an Irish-American celiac. 

The celiac gene sometimes travels in company with even nastier genes and fails to become a superpower, but in our family, for as far back as we've gone, it is literally a flipping superpower. It works like this: 

As an undiagnosed celiac you eat wheat, which is your Kryptonite, and appear to be a very weak person in every way. (I lost two jobs literally for fainting on the job site, was warned I was likely to lose two more for showing cold symptoms badly enough to scare away customers. My own mother didn't know when I had mononucleosis, although I was in her home at the time, because my "normal" always had looked a lot like a healthy person with mononucleosis.) Everything you do feels as if you're doing it uphill, backward... 

Actually, however, the rest of your DNA is pretty solid. Your health habits are reasonably good. You have a lot of strength; you just use most of it dragging yourself through life with a chronic disease condition. So when you get the wheat out of your system, it's like Clark Kent popping out of the oldfashioned phone booth in his Superman underwear. You can lift more than your own weight. You don't think twice about doing things people don't believe anyone of your size ought to be able to do. 

During my first year of gluten-freedom Mother, who was living somewhere else, came to my house for Thanksgiving. She'd lost some weight, looked better without it, and was chuffed. I'd gained a little, but it was solid muscle. Mother still weighed twenty pounds more than I did. As we stood up to clear the table I forget which joke was being cracked, exactly, but I said "I could just pick her up and carry her around," leaned over, and did it. What I remember is being surprised how easy it was to lift Mother up by the waist, throw her over my shoulder, and carry her around the house. 

Mother then went gluten-free and had a lovely time, between ages 60 and 80, moving faster than women half her age, telling younger men who wanted to be our stepfathers that they ought to be dating my sister or me. 

Eventually the day came when I was using my superpower to lift my husband. The less I think about that time, the better I like it. Anyway. I've stayed with other patients who were bigger than he. Mother wouldn't stay with a male patient unless Dad did too. I don't discriminate, myself. People who need home nurses aren't likely to hurt us in any way except being heavy and hard to lift, breathing on us, damaging our reputations, or feeding us the special food treats their relatives bring for them. I learned in the city that a woman who really doesn't want to be harassed by men can advertise that she does home nursing or massage for "Ladies Only," but then all her clients will be lesbians. So I figure I can walk away if patients harass me, whether they are men or lesbians. Most of my patients were ladies and behaved accordingly.

Staying strong and tough for a good long time runs on both sides of the family, too. I never wanted to bring any more celiacs into the world but I think even my celiac relatives have better DNA than most of humankind. 

I still have days, after spray poisoning episodes, when it feels like all I can do to drag my weary bones outside and stand up long enough to feed the cats. Days when I'm pretty sure a cat could beat me in a fair fight. But most days I can still make people remember that three of Dad's first cousins were bigger than he was, that he was the-little-fellow-who-had-been-ill-and-stopped-growing for years, and that he could beat any of the three oversized cousins in any contest of strength they could think of. Easily. (Dad claimed that as boys they used to test their relative strength by fighting, but as men they always challenged each other on strength, speed, and precision on jobs.) The celiac gene is not found in his family but that other Irish gene that flips a weakness into a superpower is.

Even in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, even the British armed forces knew they didn't want to mess with the Irish. We beat our own messed-up genes every day, so bleep do mere humans think they are!

Web Log for 9.8.25

What there is of it...

Censorship 

No longer news, but worth adding to your information file:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/three-justices-dissented-landmark-censorship-case-what-they-said-why-it-matters/

Poetry 

Even the web page on which it's been reposted has been around a while. I had no problems with the page and don't expect you will...it's just in the older format.

http://holyjoe.org/poetry/malloch.htm

Book Review: Dead and Buried

Title: Dead and Buried

Author: E.G. Ellory

Date: 2025

Quote: "A convicted killer had been released after thirty-eight years behind bars."

And he's coming back to Fenburne--the place he knows, of course, and also the place where the older people know him. Where several people want him dead, and some would quite enjoy beating him to death. Where his role in some unsolved murders, and the whereabouts of the bodies, remain to be discovered from the secrets people thought were long dead and buried. 

This is volume three in the Fenburne murder mystery series. Readers are likely to know Sam Hyatt, who is officially retired (and who helped, early in his career, to imprison the serial murderer), and his buddy Jodie Walsh, who's spent two volumes first coming to terms with her attraction to Hannah and then making sure that Hannah is a lesbian too. Will they ever become a couple? What brought Hannah to Fenburne, anyway? Is she someone Walsh wants to get involved with? Will Hyatt's married daughter, who is about Jodie's age, be in danger? What about Hyatt's contemporaries, a few of whom are still on the police force? We're told that the serial murderer wants not to kill again, although he's planning to take advantage of some harmless retired people for money; will he have killed, be killed, or neither, when the first recent murder brings Hyatt and Walsh into action as detectives?

I find Ellory's type of mysteries more satisfactory than the grim and gory "hard-boiled" subgenre or the bland and often too easy "cozies," Because the atmosphere of this series is the kind of thing Arthur Conan Doyle, or Dorothy Sayers, or early Agatha Christie used to write, perhaps, what I like about the book also drew my attention to what I didn't like so much. Writers are often advised to "show not tell" when writing fiction. The proportion of showing to telling in this novel is high--and I kept thinking that Doyle or Sayers or Christie might have jotted down all that author's voice stuff in their outline-and-suchlike or even their first drafts, but they would have thought of a way to show the information via action or at least conversation when they sent their manuscripts to the publisher. Is it worth picking at this, when Ellory has a following of fans who don't mind it? Yes. I think Ellory is one of the self-published authors who are worth encouraging to develop their talent, to write as well as the masters of their genres. 

Petfinder Post and Status Update

If I'm not very active online this month, Gentle Readers, please understand that it's for good reasons. After more than thirteen months I've finally reunited with the primary tool of my trade, the "good," Internet-free desktop computer. Time to catch up with several personal projects, and the difficulty is reminding myself I can't do them all at once. They include the "big" nonfiction book of the kind my mother always wished I'd write.

Now, on to the animal photo contest. For new readers, this is a weekly feature where I pick three of the most adorable photos of adoptable animals on Petfinder. Three obvious things need to be reiterated:

1. I generally try to avoid fancy breeds that cost more than the usual mixed breed dogs and American Shorthair cats. That does not mean that fancy breeds, even with pedigrees to prove that they're the "irregulars" from registered breeders, never turn up in shelters. It means that shelters are likely to charge as much money as breeders charge for animals that are officially defined as "unwanted" and can be euthanized in a few months. I don't like to support this practice. People whose hearts are set on a fancy breed can find the look they want on Petfinder, though...it just takes time, and I recommend they adopt a more typical shelter animal in the meantime. Most dogs and cats do better in homes where there's another member of their species. They may seem to spend all their time avoiding each other, but even that gives them some mental exercise.

2. Picking the cutest animal photos in a category is all about the photography. If you visit the actual shelter you may find that an animal who wasn't photographed, or whose photo came out blurry or funny-looking, on Petfinder is much more appealing in real life than the one whose "pic" I picked. 

3. Most people who read and write blogs about animals already live with an animal, or animals, and can't adopt them all. This is fine. These photos are for sharing with catless and dogless people. Posting them to social media is highly recommended. There is no commission system; if you visit an animal's Petfinder page you'll usually get the option of sharing one or more other photos, even videos if you use social media platforms that support those, and Petfinder will offer a generic computer-generated text to go with the pictures. The benefit to you, like the benefit to me, will be being able to check next year and see whether the animal has found a home. If you do not actually live in New York, Washington, or Atlanta, Petfinder will also try to nudge you in the direction of shelters closer to where you are, where you'll find different animals. This is good. The more animals we can "picture home," the better. Petfinder tends to get suspicious of people who jump from page to page more than ten or fifteen or so times, but if you want to search for adoptable pets on the West Coast and share their links, that would be pawsome.

This week's theme is pets who've been given unusual names...not that they've necessarily been in the shelter long enough to have figured out that those are supposed to be their names. 

Zipcode 10101: Cronut from NYC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/cronut-78079858/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/

And it's recommended that Cronut be adopted together with his remaining sibling, Cruffin: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/cruffin-78079831/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/

The fluffy white kitten in the cage with Cruffin was called Croissant. Croissant has already found a home. Kittens need other kittens to play with. These two spring kittens are described as typical cute, lovable tabby fluffballs. 

Zipcode 20202: Peary in DC 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/peary-78111771/dc/washington/humane-rescue-alliance-foster-homes-dc03/

Peary is already in a foster home. You can e-mail the foster family directly from Peary's web page to find out about her siblings. Adopt one and get a 50% discount on the other. Again, spring kittens, so not much is known about their purrsonalities yet.

Zipcode 30303: Peep from Tennessee by way of Atlanta 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/peep-77271146/ga/atlanta/your-local-fur-mama-tn1052/

Peep has medium hair--not long enough to be super-messy, but long enough to feel super-soft and caressable. She is another spring kitten. There is also a cat called Marshmallow on the Petfinder page but he has a contagious disease and should not be physically adopted into the same home as Peep.

Zipcode 10101: Hula from NYC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/hula-76359887/ny/new-york/the-good-life-dog-rescue-ny993/

This seven-year-old, nine-pound Chihuahua mix could live another seven years or more. He's not had the opportunity to be a real pet, first kept by an "overwhelmed" owner who didn't have time for him and then placed in a crowded shelter, but they say he's learning fast. 

Zipcode 20202: Noodle or Noodles from Texas by way of DC 

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/noodles-78098991/dc/washington/gracies-project-tx2503/

Homeless for almost half of his probable lifespan, Noodle(s) was a street dog, rescued after being hit by a motor vehicle and having a leg broken in 2023. The leg has healed and he's considered healthy and adoptable. He will be delivered to DC if you don't want to take a road trip.

Zipcode 30303: Tallahassee from Tennessee by way of Atlanta 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/tallahassee-77865177/ga/atlanta/your-local-fur-mama-tn1052/

Shows that nobody really knows anything about her yet. She's a spring puppy. They think she's mostly retriever, though the white spots show she's a fair bit of something else as well. 

Web Log for 9.5-7.25

Corporate interests have declared war on Robert Kennedy. This web site recommends everyone support him in every way you can think of. 

Health Tips, or Do I Mean Guy-Watching 

Other people's husbands should not allow themselves to be photographed looking as good as RFK (last winter):

https://x.com/SmuldersStefan/status/1870103362890543133

Music 

Just for fun...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cCed7exA1w&t=19s

Poetry 

With some lovely close-up photos of mushrooms.

https://jjjinteractivebooks.com/2025/09/05/fungi-network/

SSRI Dementia 

Years ago a lot of cases were women with "postpartum depression" who became "Killer Moms." Many have been teenagers; some have been people who kept boring jobs for easy money, but hated their jobs, or their lack of success at other things that would have empowered them to quit the jobs. Now a disproportionate number are "gay" or transgender. Those are red herrings. What these people had to feel depressed about is not a common factor in 99% of all homicide-suicides throughout history.  What they commit homicide-suicide with is not a common factor either, although they're less deadly when they have access to guns than when they use bombs or motor vehicles. The majority of all homicide-suicides in history have occurred when the killer had been using SSRI depressants. (Before the SSRI were invented, the majority were prisoners of war, like Samson, and, if we choose to count those, defeated warlords like Hitler.) Salgado's facts are accurate, and should be a warning to anyone who wants to "talk to someone" about "gender dysphoria" or homosexuality...but the implicit suggestion of the article is wrong. It is despicable beyond words when Big Pharma tries to blame groups of people who have admitted being unhappy for what Big Pharma has done to those people.

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2025/09/04/outlet-says-over-a-third-of-school-shooters-were-trans-since-2020-n4943348

And this is so, so deeply wrong. It's a foot in the door for gun bans for all private people, of course, but it works through a hypothesis that is not supported by the available facts.

http://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/09/04/check-out-the-gun-ban-democrats-will-never-support-n4943354

Tax Dollars, Use of 

We wanted Chelsea Clinton to have a nice wedding, didn't we? We knew her social circle wouldn't be satisfied with a Wal-Mart wedding, though that would have been a rather splendid tribute to Arkansas. We knew that even if many of her parents' friends normally preferred Busch Beer, they expected to toast Chelsea's wedding in champagne, because tradition is tradition. We knew a big-mouthed extrovert like Bill Clinton would have called so many people his "friends" and led them to expect invitations to Chelsea's wedding that there'd be no way even one out of ten of them would get a chance to wish Chelsea well, face to face. Well, the Clintons could afford to feast a few thousand of Bill's very best buddies, right? 

Maybe they could, but they didn't. We did. (Though not as much as some sources tried to claim.) Out of a fund designated for international poverty and disaster relief. Let's see, the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding took place in July of 2010. That was the year of the big earthquake in Haiti. In the spring of 2010, did you console yourself, as you mailed your cheque, with a mental picture of that money going to rebuild a bridge or a school in Haiti? No such. The good news is that the Clintons' political enemies have been able to prove only 14 million dollars of USAID relief funding was diverted to the Mezvinskys' expenses, and really, most of it was spent on their house, only 3 million dollars of it on the wedding. That is better than the 84 million dollars some accused the Clintons of spending to get the young couple into a home of their own.

Still, it makes one wonder how much we spent on prezzies for the Clintons' three grandchildren.

https://x.com/TuckerCNews/status/1963653176370102666

Book Review: For the Many

Title: For the Many

Author: "Not Applicable"

Date: 2025

Quote: "Living as plural is often a paradox. You are never alone, yet the experience can be profoundly isolating...Take what works. Leave the rest." 

I think this is the most unusual book I've read this year. My generation learned about what's now called dissociative identity disorder, because after all "multiple personalities" could just mean the way other people see us when we're bored or interested or informed or uninformed or whatever, from sensationalized stories like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve. Most people never know anyone who actually experiences "life as plural," who not only dramatizes emotional conflicts as "part of me wants to do this, and part wants to do that" but really does both "this" and "that" while experiencing perself as two different people, using different parts of the brain, one personality not remembering what the other one did or wanted or why. The assumption was that, in order for the brain to organize itself in this way, someone who started out with one consistent "normal" personality and brain like everyone else must have been horribly traumatized in some way, the person's story would have to be a melodrama, at least one aspect of the person would have to be "tortured," and the person would be "healed" and terribly grateful if those personalities could meld back together into something "normal." This turned out not necessarily to be true. Brains, we learned around the turn of the century, react to physical conditions as well as to the emotions of love and fear. What we now know about DID is that we don't know and never did know much.

Here, however, is the first guidebook for fellow "systems" written by a person who feels capable of accepting perself as "a system" in which three "persons," Ann, Wheel, and Echo, occupy the same body. The three coexist like roommates. They have had the experience of fusing together and dissociating again. Fusing the "alters" together is not a solution to every difficulty, they warn. Nor is it harmful to any of the personalities. The compartmentalized brain works in its own way. If one aspect of the person dumps out food that another aspect wanted to eat, now and then, the whole system seems to have learned to cope with that. Probably Ann, Wheel, and Echo are all perceived as unusual by the other people they know, but they cope. Therapists and therapy techniques have helped them maintain calm, patient acceptance of one another. They warn readers, though, that it may be best not to disclose to people who have some kind of authority over you if you experience yourself as a "system." "System" people may be able to function on their own in society more effectively when others may suspect, but don't know, how far from typical their consciousness really is.

How many readers will ever find a use for this book in real life? Who knows? It's free for the downloading from https://beingmany.net. It's an interesting, strange read. Anyone might meet a person with DID some day so who knows when, or to whom, or how much, this book may be useful.

Butterfly of the Week: Yellow Lady

Graphium levassori could reasonably be called Levassor's Graphium, but since the tailless, pale-colored African Graphiums had been nicknamed the Ladies and this one is more likely to look yellowish than others are, its English name is Yellow Lady. Its French name is Flambee de Levasseur. (It was named after a Monsieur Legros-Levassor. Why the spelling was changed I don't know.) Some people, looking at the specimens they have seen, prefer Ivory Lady, which is possible, or White Lady, which is taken.

Photo from Insect Net Archive Forum.

In many ways it resembles Graphium leonidas.

Its life history is unknown. It may fly all year. It has been seen most often in April, the beginning of the rainy season. 

It is found only on the Comoros islands. It's not exactly common even there. So any ventures in the direction of "modernizing" the islands, clearing away native plants, building, paving, spraying, etc., are a threat to the species' survival. It is listed as an endangered species. 

Map from https://www.sbbt.org.uk/top-ten-threatened-species/ .

Worse than that, it looks as if it could become a pest on custard-apples. Seventy or eighty thousand people are trying to live on the island called Grande Comor. Most of them are poor farmers. Custard-apples, which are  "related to" pawpaws in the sense that apples are "related to" pears, will grow on the island; the fruit don't travel well but humans who live where they grow like to eat them. And this butterfly species increased dramatically in numbers after custard-apples were planted on the island.

Though some Swallowtail caterpillars can get very large and hungry (Graphium levassori is not a very large member of this butterfly family), no Swallowtail is a serious pest. The caterpillars eat leaves, and some are definitely attracted to leaves that have been damaged by something else. Finding an ugly caterpillar crawling on a branch with all its leaves damaged or gone tends to trigger an ugly defensive reaction in farmers. The caterpillar is not to blame but all the circumstantial evidence is pointing to it. The farmer wants to kill the caterpillar before it grows up and multiplies. 

In fact, although Graphium levassori is not one of the known symbiotic species, many Swallowtail butterflies live in complete symbiosis with their host plants; they may be the host plant's only pollinator and its only predator. Nature keeps populations balanced in such a way that, although Swallowtail caterpillars that eat low-growing plants may seem to gnaw their host plants down to the ground, the plants grow fast enough to survive the caterpillars' predation. In several species, the plants depend on the butterflies for pollination, and thus for survival. There can't be pawpaws without Zebra Swallowtails. On the mainland of Africa other Swallowtails pollinate custard-apple trees, but on the Comoros islands Graphium levassori may do the trees more good than harm. Nobody claims to know this for certain...but the growth in levassori population was not followed by any loss of custard-apples.

As Swallowtails go, the Yellow Lady is not especially pretty, but it is rare. Scientists have seriously proposed encouraging Comorian farmers to try rearing this butterfly on custard-apple trees. This web site considers, e.g., the lovely Luna moth or the not rare but interesting Manduca genus, and imagines the reactions of Virginia hill farmers if County Extension agents advised them to try rearing those. ("He said I ought to try REARING TOMATO WORMS!") More likely to encourage poor farmers, this web site imagines, would be offering scholarships to Comorian students who were willing to learn how to study what these butterflies naturally eat and how they can coexist with humans. All Graphium caterpillars are creatively ugly. Overcoming the prejudice humans naturally tend to have against them is likely to take serious money.  

General eco-tourism might be cheaper at the start. The Comoros islands claim at least a dozen more unique species of butterflies and moths, each island claims its own peculiar species of owl, and the islands are also the homes of birds and other small animals not known to exist anywhere else in the world. If it were made profitable for Comorian people to preserve the natural habitats of species that became tourist attractions, they'd probably do it. Their species list is impressive, suggesting a potential for eco-tourism comparable with Madagascar or the Galapagos.

http://lntreasures.com/comoros.html

BJ Book Review: Welcome Holy Spirit

Title: Welcome Holy Spirit

        
Author: Garrie Fraser Williams

        
Date: 1994

        
Publisher: Review & Herald Publishing Association

        
ISBN: 0-8280-0852-3

        
Length: 365 one-page devotions, 6-page scripture index

        
Quote: “Spend a year studying everything in the Bible on the Holy Spirit.”

        
More than 365 Bible passages mention the Holy Spirit. Williams has considered some verses that appear close together as one passage, and some as more than one, to get 365 one-page commentaries. The passages appear in the same order they appear in the Bible. Like most writers who choose Revierw & Herald Publishing, Williams is a Seventh-Day Adventist minister writing primarily for other Seventh-Day Adventists, to whom this orderly sequence will be natural and easy to follow.

        
He doesn’t try to address all denominations impartially. There’s what might be called a mainstream view of the Holy Spirit, and what might be called the charismatic view. Adventists take the mainstream view, and Williams writes within that view throughout his book. He does, however, refer to the history and literature of other Christian denominations.

       
He also makes some typically S.D.A. mistakes. On page 54 Williams cites, as an example of “satanic attack,” the following incident: “A pastor who became depressed was asked, ‘Why don’t you practice what you preach?’” It’s not unusual, Williams continues, for Christian people to find themselves, “for no fault of their own, the objects of insult, suspicion, and ridicule.” It is not unusual for those people, later, to ask their verbal abusers why they don’t practice what they preach. It is unusual in mainstream society, yet quintessentially typical of verbally abusive Adventists, for verbal abusers to call this natural consequence of their actions a “satanic attack.”

        
Further internal evidence suggests to me that Williams may have been the pastor who received that particular “satanic attack,” or prophetic message, depending on how we look at it. On page 87 William shares what “a pastor” learned from a bout with depression as a symptom of a physical disease. “‘I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit; but the hand of the Lord was strong upon me.’—Ezekiel 3:14, NKJV. God’s Spirit does not operate in our lives on the basis of our feelings but rather in response to our willingness.”

        
There speaks a man who has found the same Great Key Principle I've found in depression-as-symptom: Fix facts first; feelings follow. If Williams has never cured or recovered from a depressing disease, and watched the depression, which Positive Thinking never helped, just melt away, he has at least learned something from someone who has.

        
This book is recommended to mature Christians who know how to read the religious writings of our fellow mortals, comparing each idea against reason and revelation, taking the good ones and leaving the bad ones. Welcome Holy Spirit is the earnest effort of an ordinary fallible mortal. He has taken the trouble to assemble 365 Bible texts that are worth reading comparatively, as a set, whether you bother to read his commentary or not. If you read only the Scripture at the top of each page, this will be an enlightening book for any Christian.

More Bad Poetry: Something Good

At Poets & Storytellers United, a poet who's had to take time off to deal with a multi-person mess invited everyone to "tell her something good. At DVerse another poet invited everyone to play with series of cinquains. 

[Fair use of one of Kate St John's gallery of hummingbird and jewelweed pictures. The series is at

https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2015/08/24/on-time-for-jewelweed/ .]

Good light;

weather's mellow;

hills are still viridian;

everblooming roses still red;

Earth's good.

Sun's bright,

jewelweed yellow

more than orange, bidding

hummingbirds to hover till fed;

bright sun

slants north;

autumn's welcome;

peaches are reddening;

"Seasons not twice the same"--well said.

North light,

stable,

tempers shadow;

little bay mare's kidding

with goat and dog friends, well bred

stable

friends are

such a pleasure

to see, to be; well fed

(not stuffed!) humans go out riding,

are friends.

(This is just a sketch of feel-good fluff from my neighborhood. The bay mare lives behind one house, the ever-blooming rose beside another house. The hummingbirds and orange jewelweeds are mine, and the Feral Elberta peaches. The yellow jewelweeds further uphill are really outdoing themselves this year. Wherever you are, Gentle Reader, if whatever your weather is doing is not a source of joy and peace of mind, you're welcome to a bit of mine.) 

Web Log for 9.4.25

Animals 

English moths--some "closely related" to North American species, none really bi-continental. The camouflage effects on some of these moths, and the blogger's ability to photograph them clearly, have to be seen to be believed.

http://eastsussexwanderer.blogspot.com/2025/09/some-moths-during-august.html 

A foul-mouthed person using the screen name Cheezburger has video showing that a cat family have adopted a mouse. The mouse's willingness to be adopted by cats, some commenters have pointed out, may be a symptom of toxoplasmosis, which seems to affect humans only if they're pregnant females. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O814PrdEJec

Housing 

There are theoretical benefits to packing more people into stack-and-pack "apartment towers." Most particularly, crowding reduces fertility while, if not relieved by a decreasing birth rate, it also raises the death rate. If we value human life, we need to encourage the young to have one child or none when they have a decent house to rear a child in, and ban all construction of new "towers." 

Encouraging the young to have half a dozen babies, in conditions where those babies will not be able to thrive, does not express reverence for life. It expresses that evil old European view that poor people reproduce like fleas and are equally disposable. Reverence for life teaches us to make sure every procreative act really invites a new life into a world where that life will be cherished. There are all kinds of ways to express love; just to yank the guys' chains I'll suggest cleaning the bathroom floor as a good one, but the way that makes babies should be reserved for times when it really is about love for the potential babies.

https://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2025/09/home-ownership-9-1-25.html

Landscaping 

When people didn't get something they wanted, sometimes they attach themselves senselessly to some other thing that seems easier to get. Governor Ron DeSantis, being unable either to rally as much popular support as Trump or form an alliance with Trump, seems to be showing a reaction that suggests he might not have been a better President than Trump after all. He's wasting paint to paint over the decorative displays people have put inside crosswalks. I've never liked the homosexual lobby's grab at the rainbow as a symbol and sometimes wished the creationists would reclaim it, but the whole kerfuffle seems less about any cultural values, of any kind, than about a defeated man's emotional feeling that "This is something I can control." Bickering with fourth grade students about painting hearts on pavement in memory of a child who died of heart disease? Grow up, Governor. Please.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/florida-crosswalks-ron-desantis-lgbtq

Men, Picking On 

When this web site picks on men it's always in a lighthearted, jocular way. Seriously, I like men. In real life I've enjoyed working with men. I do not actually want those of The Nephews who are, literally, nephews to be put at an automatic disadvantage relative to the ones who are nieces. Nevertheless. Facts are facts. So far as it's possible to tell, female followers of this web site vastly outnumber male. All people who've bought books from this web site have had female names. All purchases of my Zazzle merchandise have been made in female names. All long-term writing contract clients have had female names. And all the men at this web site have been related to at least one of the women by blood or marriage. Obviously a lot of the men in cyberspace are only here to watch movies, play games, or sell tips on how to get rich quick, but men are also more likely to be, even at sites that identify as "communities," the ones squealing "Me, me, me, read me!--I don't have TIME to read anybody else but ME-e-e-e-e!"

I had not given this much thought until I read a Substack by someone using a female name who, if "she" was really female, certainly seemed to be making an effort to play up to male readers at female readers' expense. Is that really what it takes? Do men read women's articles and blog posts only when the topic is how much those women hate older women? I didn't think all those working relationships with men were based entirely on the look of a body that's not visible in cyberspace...well, at least one of those men was blind...Let's just say that although I've found abundant reasons to like men in real life, I've found little reason to like the majority of those who identify as male in cyberspace.

One easy way men could boost their ratings here would be to become more noticeably supportive readers and followers. Not only of my work, either. Of women's work generally--nor would I think less of them if they were more supportive of one another. 

North Carolina Update 

No word is available on the lady who talked to WCYB-TV last week. Best case, she's living with relatives and doesn't want to embarrass them by going on TV again. Some other people were evicted for valid reasons--confirmed to be involved in drug trade--but that one was evicted because, allegedly, she "wasn't doing enough to find another place." I remember once having to leave a sublease before the primary tenant moved out, thinking there wasn't a room left in town, and the very last person in town knew someone who did have an unadvertised room I rented for three months. I hope the WCYB-TV correspondent had similar good luck.

However, there are reported to be people who qualified for FEMA flats but have yet to be able to move into one. Some of them have been living in hotels, on disability pensions and credit cards, for a year now. Best case, they (or some of them) can move into the places the dopers are moving out of. I'm still waiting for status updates on them.

Weather 

When I looked up the official list of hurricane names, before closing the tab I had to scroll down through the list of retired names and associated statistics. 

You've heard that "more severe hurricanes are being caused by climate change"? That might be true, but if so, it's a slower pattern of climate change than the globalists know about.

Obviously the costs of hurricanes, in lives and money, depend on the specific places they hit. Some measurements of damage reflect how unprepared people were, or how much money had been spent on human activity in a particular place, rather than how much wind, rain, and lightning were observed. The "category" system of measuring the meteorological intensity of hurricanes does not correlate particularly well with the amount of damage they do. Hurricanes have tended to grow steadily more expensive because people have spent more money on things hurricanes can damage, and prices have inflated, so replacing the same thing cost more in 2020 than it did in 1950. 

But if we look at the actual weather record...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retired_Atlantic_hurricane_names

...the proportions of melodramatic storms to relatively less dramatic storms (that still managed to do a lot of damage) haven't changed much over the years. The most furious winds that ever whirled over our continent, so far as humans have been able to measure and record these things, whirled in 1980. The 1950s saw two hurricanes about as deadly as Katrina; in 1998 Hurricane Mitch racked up a higher death toll than any half-dozen other hurricanes you remember, together. The overall incidence of dramatic storms is similar from 1950 to 2025. The incidence of very high wind speeds and very heavy rain is similar too. There have been individual years when more storms reached sizes and wind speeds that put them in the "hurricane" category than in other years; notice how many more names beginning with A through M have been retired relative to names beginning with N through Z. There have in fact been records for Weather Awfulness that were set before hurricanes were given human-type names, that remain (thank goodness) unbroken. There was in fact an unusually high number of hurricanes that reached the Northeastern States in the 1950s. Some of the reasons for these weatherquirks may be related to human activity, but we don't really know how.

Women's Issues 

If you disagree with anything J.K. Rowling said in this post, you may be a feminist, and you may even be female, but yours is not a viable form of feminist thought. 

https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1962462273496023476

Focus on women's concerns does not mean lack of sympathy for the concerns of any other demographic group. Women can and should sympathize with truly gender-confused genetic chimeras and with people whose probably chemical-induced hormone imbalances are making them feel gender-confused. We can and should sympathize with men. And children. And gerbils. And left-handed Chinese sweatshop laborers who can't get lefthanded machinery into their factories. We don't think about only women's issues all the time. Whenever and wherever we hear or read complaints that make us think "I would not like to be in this person's situation, and even more I would not want to be the person whose abuse this person is complaining of," we should sympathize with our fellow lifeforms. It is not OK when people start talking about "trans shooters" as if trans people with "Prozac Dementia" behaved differently from gender-typical men and women with "Prozac Dementia" (they have not). But their concerns are not women's concerns. People who don't have enough XX chromosomes to have developed female body parts may share some concerns with women but they don't need to be telling actual women how to do feminism, any more than women need to be telling them how to address whatever their own specific issues may be.