Animals
Somewhere someone likes to look at bears. Here are some very clear photos of bears.
Books
Jamie Wilson's list of nice books to give girls, for back-to-school or birthdays or Christmas or whatever, is a good list. Just one caveat: If a girl is really into books, it can probably be assumed that she's read all the ones that are age-appropriate, or even one age-group-bracket ahead of her. This web site recommends that gift shoppers talk to their nieces and granddaughters and find out what they already have before buying them yet another...Marie Curie and Helen Keller were admirable women but, in grade five or six, I remember feeling tired of reading about them.
Charlie Kirk
Glenn Beck says he should be called a civil rights leader. Has a nice ring, doesn't it?
I think this may explain why, although an Independent, I've been leaning to the R side lately. I don't know that Jasmine Crockett, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, or any of their "squad" need to be in Congress. I know that it's very hard for any human being to respect any group that lets itself be represented by David Hogg. But "laughing hysterically and celebrating" is not what I'd be likely to do if they died. I'd think more about how young they were, and the possibility that their heads might have straightened out if they'd lived another thirty years. The D glee, the tweets like "Can we do Ben Shapiro next?", just aren't relatable.
Somewhere that little braying jackass has a mother who thinks young Devon is pretty, despite that unfortunate hair. If somebody hit Devon in the teeth with something their possum refused to eat that had once been a tomato, that would be funny. If Devon choked on the foul residue of the tomato and died, I'd feel sorry for her mother. And that is why, although I used to like and fit in with Ds my age, I just don't feel that I fit in with that party any more. Ds my age are human beings, mostly decent ones I've always thought. Today's young crop of Ds appear to be ghouls.
No glee from, e.g., Bernie Sanders.
MAHA
Should Trump have...? I'm feeling ambivalent here. On the one hand, Scott Pinsker is right, Trump is a freaking savant, even a savant freak. He can't be Ronald Reagan, and he knows it. He can be Donald Trump, loud, tacky, orange, and able to count and count on the reactions he'll get from people who think he's beaten Bill Clinton's record of tackiness. What we've been seeing all year is that if Trump says a thing, a predictable number of people will say "Oh no you don't, you can't, that's too tacky," and if the number is high enough Trump will let them have that point while quietly scoring some other point on some other topic. What some of his supporters seem to find surprising is that a lot of things they really wanted, things I wouldn't mind seeing happen, are in that category of things Trump never actually expected to make happen. "Tariffs will replace all income tax"? It might be nice, but did anyone seriously believe that Trump seriously meant that as more than a throwaway line? Anyway, if he says "Meh, maybe Gates is right, maybe we should mandate polio vaccines," that instantly pushes some people to support Secretary Kennedy and all rightminded people: If a vaccine is effective, it never needs to be mandated.
On the other hand, mandating polio vaccines is just wrong. It pushes people who might need the vaccine to reject it, pushes people who've had it to blame it for everything else that goes wrong with the rest of their lives. ("And then I fell out of the boat and a shark bit off my leg, and it's aaallll because I had that horrible polio vaccine thirty years ago!") It's one thing for Trump to use psychology to get out of those awkward campaign promises about slashing the federal budget and cutting taxes, which are points on which reasonable minds differ. It's another thing for anybody, even Trump, to uphold arguments that are obviously not based in reality; e.g., that people who don't want to be vaccinated present any danger to people who have been vaccinated if the vaccine is at al effective.
And Gates's transhumanism is not something either Christians or Humanists need even to pretend to take seriously.
Math
This X-post may help somebody, somewhere...
Like most people my age, I learned in primary school to write down two-digit numbers, one above the other, and add up the ones column, carry any multiples of ten to the tens column, add up the tens, carry any multiples of 100 to the hundreds column, etc. That is an efficient and reliable way to do addition, subtraction, and multiplication when you have a pencil and paper in hand. It's the way most parents were taught, and the way many objected bitterly to "Common Core" math not being taught.
Sometimes you don't have a pencil and paper. These days, if you are smart, you don't have a spyphone (aka smartphone, aka stupidphone) either; if you own one, it lives at the back of a drawer until YOU want to make a call, at which time the battery is probably dead, but at least all the evildoers know about you is that you own socks or silverware or whatever. Anyway it would have "updated" since the last time you had used the calculator so you wouldn't know how to unlock the calculator function. So you would still need a pencil and paper, unless the numbers are small enough (two or three two-or-three-digit numbers) that you can keep track of them in your head.
So in grade four, when Mr. Ed. sent home a note saying I had to learn the multiplication tables (it had been optional in the two preceding years), and Mother said "We're going to the swimming pool. You can come along when you've learned the multiplication table," and Dad stayed around to make sure I didn't get any creative ideas for revenge, Dad explained how to add or multiply large messy numbers without the pencil and paper.
You read the numbers the opposite way than you learned in New Math, the way you might have learned in Common Core. Begin at the left side. Round to the nearest multiple of ten for each number.
49 is 50 minus 1.
29 is 30 minus 1.
You can remember 80. Now subtract the two 1's, and there you are with the correct answer: 78.
You can do this with larger numbers, up to a point. Most people will lose track of the numbers if there are more than nine numerals altogether. Why? Because seven, plus or minus two, is the number of items a normal person can retain in short-term memory. This is also why, if the baby cries or the computer beeps, you'll probably forget the whole equation.
Anyway, to use large numbers, say the dates (CE) when official historians say the two main "modern" English-speaking nations were organized:
1066 is 1000 plus 66
1776 is 1700 plus 76
You can remember 2700.
66 is 60 plus 6
76 is 70 plus 6
You can remember 130. Add that to 2700.
6 plus 6 is 12
You can remember 12. Add that to 2830 and get 2842.
This is tricky, especially if you are a typical multitasking responsible woman at home where the 5 to 9 items in your short-term memory already include the clock, the oven, the children, the computer, the animals, and that before you started listening supportively to someone nattering on about numbers you were going to remind that person to do an errand tomorrow, and consequently you are likely to have forgotten the 2830. Women may be carriers of the math gene but it seems to be fully expressed only in men, who are biologically disposable so they're given brains with room for that kind of thing. But IF the children are grown up and gone and the animals are doing their own thing outdoors, women seem to add 1066 and 1776 about as efficiently as men do.
Every home should maintain a good stock of pencils and paper, so that people don't have to rely on having enough uninterrupted time to add up numbers in their heads. Very few people can keep track of large numbers, though you might try, just for fun, adding up things like a grocery shopping list, two numbers at a time...$6 for that $5 package of meat, $6 for that $1 dozen eggs and they're not even from organically raised hens, $6 for that $2 box of Cheerios...Older people sometimes balk at doing this because we find it so annoying. I find it useful to feel the annoyance and get over it before I go into the store and am further annoyed by having to put things back or go over budget at the actual counter, but your mileage may vary.
Still, this trick does make it easy to figure out how much cash to take into the store, and suchlike.
Poetry
Fans of Elizabeth Barrette, who blogs as Ysabetwordsmith on Live Journal and Dreamwidth, know that she does a monthly Poetry Fishbowl Day in which people get to propose topics and forms and she writes poems while they wait, online. People can buy these poems and have them posted online, or she will keep them and try selling them to magazines. Many of them are short stories in free verse form, priced not by the word but by the (short) line. That is...
she
doesn't
charge
for
one-or-
two-word
lines
but does break up sentences
into phrases,
in picture book style.
This can have the effect
of making a story easier
for people with some disabilities
to read.
Many of these poems and stories celebrate human diversity, talents, and the superpower of working through or around disabilities. Most months, a Poetry Fishbowl Day leaves EB with poems to market to magazines. This month, she celebrated selling them all. She still has several poems to sell, some forming serial stories about characters and plot lines that become readers' favorites. Her friendly community of supervillains seems to be the most popular overall. I liked the "Monster House." Then of course there are the more traditional poems. There's a series, of which only a few poems have been published so far, of poems about our fifty States in which Virginia is finally represented by the Point rather than the Hump! If you like quirky, accessible poetry, you can buy some here:
Politics, Philosophy of
Snarky funny stories of what happens when people try to legislate nice ideas that aren't covered in the Bible or the Constitution:
Weird, News of the
Worthy of Chuck Shepherd's column: In Stillwater, Minnesota, a man received a ticket for driving a car with a loud muffler. The car is all electric. It has no muffler.
Writing
As regular readers know, Stephen King is not discernibly related to me, but any honest writer has to admit a certain admiration of his work. Even if you believe that God does not want us to read about zombie cats and demon-possessed cars and teenaged misfits with the power to destroy the school, who but Big Steve has the almost equally magical power to make people buy millions of copies of novels a thousand pages long?
Sometimes less is more.
This just may be the best, and the most challenging, thing Stephen King ever wrote:
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