Status update: Over the weekend the Bad Neighbor, who has been warned to stay away from other people's property but not locked up, was out spraying poison daily. I didn't see him, since he's cleared an old path that bypasses my property, but I definitely smelled the evil wind that carried "Roundup" vapors. I'm having a worse than usual reaction to a higher than usual concentration of New Roundup--whatever's in this month's version--anyway, nausea and vertigo interfered with typing this morning. That's rare for me; typing is my symptom-buster. I ran out of charcoal; I don't maintain big stockpiles of anything as a good prepper should, but you can't really have too much edible charcoal so local lurkers are welcome to drive by and donate bottles if they've been at Wal-Mart lately. (CVS, last time I looked, sold charcoal tablets for a much higher price.) Anyway, at the time of writing I'm sitting up and typing, so on the road to recovery. What will really help is rain. AND A BAN ON SPRAYING ANY CHEMICAL OTHER THAN H2O INTO THE AIR OTHER PEOPLE BREATHE.
I used to think we could trust the legal process to help identify the chemicals that are doing the most damage--to humans, to butterflies, to our pets, to wildlife, to the animals we raise for food. I've learned that we can't. Nothing short of a crackdown will help and I pray that Secretary Kennedy will push one through the legal process soon. We need NO GMO products outside sealed laboratory facilities--I've seen no evidence of harm done by raising GMO plants for fuel and industrial use, but they should not be sold as food--and NO CHEMICAL SPRAYS. If you feel sorry for me feeling too sick to type this morning, please share your thoughts and feelings with your elected representatives.
And this laptop is running low on memory. What an incredibly small part of a computer's memory is taken up by the actual programming we use and the actual data we store; what a lot by spyware and unnecessary "updates." It's a Toshiba. The local wizards can do anything with HP's; with a Toshiba the results of adding memory, etc., can't be guaranteed. How well I'll be able to make the transition to Linux can't be guaranteed either. I know I WILL NOT be getting a "new" computer and I WILL NOT be using any Microsoft products. How well the new-to-me system will work remains to be seen. Let's just say that if I blink out of cyberspace, it's much more likely that the computer's died than that I have.
(By mid-afternoon I was able to walk, slowly, and handle objects without losing balance. I don't expect any long-term damage has taken place. I just wish it would rain.)
Animals
Precious puffins, and an adorable otter:
(Beth Ann Chiles is still doing Comments for a Cause. I think choosing Oxfam shows lack of imagination, but had to comment on those puffins. I really wanted to put them here. No. Youall need to see the whole photo essay.)
Art
California nature scenes you've never seen before and will probably never see anywhere else: Pete Hampton grew up at a unique time in California's history--in between some unusually wet seasons that allowed unusual plant growth, and the urbanization that made it almost impossible to hope that that kind of landscapes will be seen again for a long time, no matter how wet future weather may be. Here's a selection of the paintings from the Lost Era Transcripts book, which is still available online as blog posts if you decide you want to follow the link and see all of them.
Bonus Blog Post, Where to Find
Since I like videos but don't post them here (see below), and since the writer known as Priscilla Ann Bird, whom I've never met in real life, has a blog that's known for videos and especially for videos featuring guitars, I sent her a link-a-rama about Gate City's distinctive contribution to the history of American popular music. Thirty bands are mentioned, although not all of them appear in YouTube videos. PBird has decided to display the article as a series. If you're free to listen to music videos, expect a few classic ones in the main post and literally dozens more in the comment section. I don't think the Meow has ever had a day when nobody's comment on something was a video by Tom Petty, and most days Neil Young, Johnny Cash, John Renbourn, Mark Knopfler, the Beatles, and other guitar players and bands. Often people share different kinds of instruments for variation's sake, and one commenter frequently tries to bring the rest of us up to date with 1980s songs. So by the end of the day there will be a LOT more to this post than my reminiscences about bands that were playing between 1920 and 2010.
Hmmm, decisions decisions...Each day's page at the Meow grows until everyone's bedtime. (When nightwatching I try to respect other people's bedtime.) That means it's complete and most interesting to read passively on the next day. Each day's conversation then moves to the next day's page. That means that if you want to join the conversation you have to come early and watch the page grow.
The part with the Original Carter Family is here:
The part in which Jimmie Rodgers spills over into the bands formed by my parents' generation is here:
Charlie Kirk, Legacy of
First:
Lens refuses to trace the image. I found it on the Mirror.
Kirk's widow's name is Erika. (Spelled differently from Erica-out-there-in-reader-land, which makes it easier for me to keep track.) She's 36 years old and plans to carry on his work.
Her resume suggests that she has the talent, even if she chose her schools for their remote learning programs. A word of warning: Widowhood affects people strangely, especially in the first year. Every time they turn around they think of someone who ought to be there but isn't. This causes weeping and distraction, short-term memory loss, sleep disturbances, and a feeling of "brain fog." If Erika Kirk does the podcasts herself, expect them to be much better done next year than this year.
Not that any effect on her podcasting is likely to matter to young men. She's pretty. A starlet of my generation called Bo Derek once observed that she was hired for her looks; talent wasn't necessary.
Now I have to say this. Conscience demands it. I spent some time on Substack this morning. As all Substackers soon learn, you visit the site to post your content for the week, but the site opens a social page similar to Twitter or Tsu. All the people you follow are there. It's a time sink. Anyway a lot of people were posting expressions of their feelings about Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska. A few were posting feelings about other murder victims who they felt weren't getting their fair share of attention.
(1) Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and Husband
The lower house of the Minnesota state legislature are called Representatives, as in Congress, rather than Delegates. One of them was called Melissa Hortman. She had a husband, Mark. Their colleague in the upper house was State Senator John Hoffman; his wife's name was Yvette, and their daughter's name was Hope. In July an evildoer first shot Senator and Mrs. Hoffman, who were wounded but survived, and tried to shoot at their daughter, whom he missed. He then went after the Hortmans and shot both of them, too. Neither survived.
Both legislators were Democrats and the shooter was known to hold some views that aligned with the Republican Party, but he reportedly insists that he was acting as a professional assassin, hired by a rival Democrat.
Senator Hoffman is 60 years old. Representative Hortman was 55.
(2) Downtown Suites Motel manager Chandra Nagamallaiah
Reportedly Mr. Nagamallaiah, who is described as about 50 years old, told a female employee to warn a customer not to use a broken washing machine at the motel. The customer felt insulted that a man had sent him a message by a woman, which apparently violated his cultural etiquette--so he took out a machete and chopped off Nagamallaiah's head.
This was not a crime of passion. It was premeditated murder. It's possible to whip out a hunting knife that can stab someone fatally without thinking about it, but not a machete.
Why don't the commercial media say more about this? someone posted indignantly on X. Don't Brown lives matter? After reading the story I have an alternative hypothetical explanation. Few English-speaking people want to try to spell or pronounce the name "Nagamallaiah." If the man's name had been Rao or Patel...
We are an interesting species. Many Americans have a cultural taboo against a younger person giving orders to an older person. The taboo can be circumvented by something verging on old-style humble manners--"Please, Sir, Mr. Nagamallaiah wants me to say..."--but the older person retains a traditional right to speak sharply to the younger person, who then feels despised by both a senior and a subordinate and becomes depressed. This is a tradition we might want to reconsider. But neither the subordinate asked to relay the message, nor the person given the message, has any right to cut the message sender's head off. And the machete-swinger might have at least considered the possibility that Mr. Nagamallaiah saw nothing insulting in sending a message by someone who may have spoken English better than he did.
These three murder victims weren't active on behalf of any larger cause at the time, and they were too old to make good "poster children." Along with the general decline of support for the censored media, and a resulting shortage of reporters sent out to investigate live stories, that would account for the lack of attention from the commercial media.
Nevertheless, I regret their families' losses, and hope anyone who may be in a position to help will reach out to those families.
Health News
Long, heavy reading: medical issues associated with "puberty blocker" drugs, especially Lupron.
This is strictly a hypothesis, not a scientific study. It's being linked here because there ought to be a scientific study.
Politics, Practical
Bill Maher's right. That happens sometimes.
Time for "conservatives," now defined as everyone but total left-wingnuts, to own our majority status--even if we don't define ourselves as "conservatives" and think some "conservatives" are, maybe not deplorable, but dreary? Stuffy? No more. Margolis put it well: time to let the left-wingnuts TRY to justify their authoritarian impulses, aka control-freaking, aka megalomania, aka THEY'RE NOT JUST "CRAZY" in the sense of offbeat or funny or "in love," THEY SERIOUSLY NEED HELP. And probably not mere counselling, either.
Virginia Election Stuff
It's not news to those of you who really use the Internet...Time to explain something. This web site was originally meant to be printed out for reading by children who were not allowed to use the Internet on their own. Those people are no longer children. We could explain less and we could link to more adult content, but we don't, because some of them might, any day, have children of their own. So this web site's assumption will continue to be that we're presenting 99% child-safe--maybe boring, but never traumatic--content to people who are occasionally allowed to pull up a chair and watch something on a parent's computer. I have to write, not as if I were reading a bedtime story to a three-year-old, but as if I were chatting with a sister, friend, cousin, etc., in front of the children.
Anyway: I don't post videos here. This web site runs on the earliest, simplest version of Blogspot software so that it would be browser-friendly for people who were, in 2011, using computers from the 1990s. It won't do videos. I do enjoy reading other blogs that can plug YouTube and Rumble videos right into the pages, and often share the video links from those.
But YouTube has recently discovered that, hello, Virginia is having an election in November. As a result, four out of five YouTube videos now open, for me, with reruns of the same, lame, 15-second ad from that blonde called Spamburger--er--Spanberger. She's presenting herself as a Spamburger. I don't know much about her but she is not originally from anywhere in cyberspace. Her use of ad videos and social media may set a world record for ineptitude.
The ideas she seems to be trying to present aren't very exciting, either. Basically they consist of "Vote against Winsome Earle-Sears because, despite her credible record as Lieutenant-Governor, her service as a Marine (!), her character, and her personal charm, SHE DOESN'T HATE TRUMP AS MUCH AS I DO." If you think the ability to rise above hate if one does feel it is, and work with the President of the United States, is a desirable quality in a governor, and many Virginians do think that, then that's about the feeblest of all possible ad messages.
Spanberger does have a face and a political record but she's not using the Internet to attract people to either of those things. Instead of showing us her face she's showing us the Lieutenant-Governor's face, using the most unflattering photos she can find. What those photos show is that (1) naturally curly hair frizzes up and looks messy in damp weather, which is not news to many people if any, and (2) for her age, Winsome Earle-Sears is looking good. Seriously? Eyeroll and giggle.
So then, if you're determined to be fair because in Virginia we try to be fair, you might go to Spanberger's X profile page and ask her and her social media people what she positively stands for. I did that one night, when I was being the nightwatchman and was too sleepy to do serious research or online socializing. And seriously, the content of Spanberger's X profile consisted of claims that the rest of a crowd in which Spanberger was photographed were not racists.
The question had arisen because Spanberger had voted in favor of admitting boys who thought they might be "transitioning" to girls' locker rooms in high school sports. (Hello? At a girls' sports event, a boy who just wanted to change clothes and take a shower would have soooo much more room to do that in the boys' room.) So apparently it was not Spanberger, but a friend of hers, who thought of the following really clever campaign sign (/ sarcasm): "HEY WINSOME, IF TRANSWOMEN CAN'T USE YOUR BATHROOM, BLACK PEOPLE CAN'T USE MY WATER FOUNTAIN."
Say what?
Hey Abigail! (Spanberger's ads do admit that her given name is Abigail.) You and your ghostface friends don't need to use my water fountain, either. Especially not the ones I'm helping to pay for in the Governor's Mansion.
I'm writing this with malice toward none and charity toward all. If anybody out there does honestly support Spanberger, if her campaign staff aren't just paid workers who are putting together this campaign as sabotage, you need to get her off YouTube and put whatever solid, positive content she has onto social media, now. You could start with making sure her X profile conforms to the stereotype in the ancient joke, "If people are from Virginia they'll tell you which town."
Seriously. This woman had an X profile that didn't even celebrate her town!
Fortunately I've seen reasons to like and respect our Lieutenant-Governor anyway. One of which is that she understands that there's no valid reason why a teen athlete who looks like a boy would want to use the girls' locker room.
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