Web Log for 10.1.25

I thought I was going to have a lot of time for link hunting today. I had almost none. But that's a good thing.

Disaster 

Joe Jackson has video:

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-beach-nice-place-to-visit-but.html

Technically the Carolina coast didn't even get the hurricane. This is only an Edge. 

Music 

Some pop singer has released a new, I think lacklustre, I might even say whiny, song that begins with the classic lines, "Oh, when shall I see Jesus, and reign with Him above, and shall hear the trumpet sound in that morning?" Originally those words opened one of the great shape-note songs from the early, Methodist-dominated camp meetings, preserved in current hymnals by Seventh-Day Adventists. The thing about the early camp meetings is that historians agree that people from different denominations, who debated doctrine vigorously at other times of year, set up adjacent camps where they politely ignored each other's lectures during their own, but learned each other's songs and exchanged those traditional recipes for "Baptist Pie" and "Methodist Pie." James White (who started out as a Baptist preacher) reportedly used to open SDA meetings by walking up the aisle, singing these words to this tune, beating time on a hymnal. Here is an Adventist prep school choir's version. Canadian Content. Beautiful BC video if you can see it.

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

Book Review: Easy Bazaar Crafts

Book Review: Easy Bazaar Crafts

Author: Better Homes & Gardens magazine staff

Date: 1981

Publisher: Meredith Corporation

ISBN: 0-696-00665-0

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: photos, diagrams, graphics

Quote: “If you’re planning a money-making bazaar, stock up here on ideas.”

The patterns in this book include dolls, pincushions, scarves, purses, pillows, oven mitts, decorative flowers, puzzles, place mats, napkins, napkin rings, key racks, trivets, letter sorters, and more. Templates for an extension of traditional dollhouse furniture (one inch to one foot) can be used with felt, cardboard, pipe cleaners, and fabric as well as wood, or enlarged for dolls built on a scale of two inches to one foot (like Barbie) or even three inches to one foot (like the American Girls). Several patterns for hand knitting, crocheting, sewing, appliqué, embroidery, and quilting are included. There’s also a selection of clever things kids can make with cones and seed pods, and an extensive collection of bread, cookie, and candy recipes.

The editors mean “easy” when they say “easy.” What they call an “intricate pattern” for a baby sweater is what Barbara Walker might have called “barely enough pattern to keep the knitter awake.” Even after having made a few elaborate Aran or fairisle masterpieces, most knitters still find room in our knitting lives for “mindless, instant-gratification, quickie holiday gift” knitting too, and this book contains some. Most projects in each craft category would be encouraging first or second projects for beginners. Most of the recipes are suitable for kindergarten children to use (with adult supervision, of course).

Easy Bazaar Crafts is recommended to anyone in search of quick, fun projects to sell for fundraisers and stuff into stockings. 

Meet the Blogroll: Adios Barbie

Adios Barbie was the name of a book about pop culture's ideas of beauty. Then it was the name of a website featuring articles on that topic. 

In the past articles posted at AdiosBarbie.com showed up in my blog feed. In recent years, format changes have caused these articles not to show up in the blog feed. The site is now formatted to feed into e-mail. Don't bother adding this site to your blog feed if you want to follow it.

Anyway, this site invites first-person articles from lots of different women on the general theme of how we relate to pop culture's ideas of beauty. The quality of these articles naturally varies. I've liked some of them, not liked others. Generally I agree with the overall idea that we should try to keep our bodies healthy and let that optimize our looks, rather than worrying too much about who likes our look or prefers a different look.

How far should advertisers go in the direction of celebrating good health and self-esteem, rather than always looking for models who look like the images that were in the news recently--Sydney Sweeney, Candace Owens, et al.? Ideology isn't always helpful. What we see in a picture does not always communicate itself to less informed eyes. 

In the 1990s when hand-knitted sweaters were the height of fashion, I put together a portfolio of satisfied customers modelling things I'd knitted. It showed the diversity of age, size, gender, and color that is found among my close friends and relatives. They were all pretty or handsome in different ways. And then there was a cousin who was in her forties at the time. Her sister had been in some of my classes at school. Both of them had beautiful faces. I thought of them in biblical terms, a Rachel-type and a Leah-type. "Leah" (not to be confused with a younger relative whose actual real-world name was Leah) was more interesting, at the time; Rachel had gone into baby-making mode. Leah had cerebral palsy. She wore thick corrective glasses, and her face had a habit of twitching into alarming grimaces that made no emotional sense. I was used to Leah, liked her, and thought her photo modelling her hand-knitted sweater was excellent; it showed one of her versions of a smile. But nobody else ever came to that picture and said, intelligently, "Oh, that's a satisfied customer who has cerebral palsy." They said, "Oh, my." They said, "Oh, dear."

I thought any intelligent person ought to be able to accept Leah not only as a model but as a friend, a hostess, a church lady, a writer, a teacher...but a lot of people who knew our parents, and us, never really were. They said they couldn't afford to make more buildings more wheelchair-friendly. They didn't say that they also didn't know what to say or do, and felt panicky, in the presence of an intelligent person whose facial expressions and tone of voice really were "crazy." And I could hardly say while Leah was living, "Look, I'm phobic about people who have autism or dementia or schizophrenia too. The fact that I like this woman ought to tell you that all she has is cerebral palsy. Relax! Include her! On an equal basis, except of course when someone needs to help load the wheelchair in and out of cars." 

I didn't want to take Leah's photo out of my portfolio...but when I got a good-quality photo of my boyfriend doing a lot for his hand-knitted sweater, I did. The portfolio looked more effective all right, one conventionally attractive smile after another, no smiles distorted by spastic facial muscles. Urk.

That's the sort of thing people lament at AdiosBarbie.com. If you want to stretch your consciousness of how other people cope with social life as an unannounced beauty contest, that site may help. If you think that that kind of stories have served their purpose and people really need to be reminded that there's nothing wrong with looking like, or looking at, Sydney Sweeney...well, that's where your head's at. Cheers. I think there are too many stories on the theme of "Why don't more people celebrate how healthy and pretty I feel about being only 40 pounds overweight, when I used to be 140 pounds overweight," myself. Then I note that thought as an indication that I need more reminders about this particular kind of eye-judgment.

Web Log for 9.29-30.25

Animals 

Digital image splicing hardly qualifies as "artificial intelligence" but it does have its uses: None of the cute kittens were harmed by the production of a digital video in which they're dressed like a rock band and sing a clever parody of one of the band's songs. If the producer used per own kitten pictures and wrote per own song lyrics, rather than using plagiarism software, then I'd call this video well done. I still think we need human intelligence to ensure that any splicing of anyone else's content into computer-generated content must be approved by the original content producer and paid, say 50c per picture or a penny a word, adjusted upward in case of inflation. Anyway it's likely to make pet owners giggle. If our pets could play drums and guitars and dance on our pillows when they want to be fed and walked at night, this is how they'd sound...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-yTF_n7CjU&t=181s

Disaster

This time it's the other side of North Carolina...where more of Mother's relatives actually live.

 

Apologies to those who think Diamond sounds more gleefully vindicated when disasters fit his model better than someone else's, rather than concerned about the people involved. He does but he spent years perfecting that sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c88DuTfxPLY

Peace 

I think this writer may be talking about Trump--and I'm delighted if person is. People who aren't Trump fans need to focus on peace.

https://booknvolume.com/2025/09/23/27995/

Book Review: Right Where We Belong

Title: Right Where We Belong

Author: Farrah Penn

Date: 2025

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: 978 05935 28334

Quote: "I do not want Sumner Winchel thinking I've intentionally sought him out."

Delaney is, of course, in love with Sumner. They're keeping it age-appropriate, during their last year of high school, with the focus on academic and intramural rivalries. They have to work together, though, when they find a lost English boy who seems to have stepped out of the nineteenth century wandering around their New York State prep school campus. He's not hard to integrate into their school life, but there's a problem. He really has time-travelled from the nineteenth century. He's the founder of the school. If he didn't stumble into a future America he might not have founded the school. If he doesn't go back to his own time in time, the whole school, including second- and third-generation students like Delaney and Sumner, could blink out of existence.

Lots of science fiction fun and games help Delaney through the late stages of grief (her father, who used to teach at her school, died last year). Age-appropriate flirting with Lord William also seems to help her relationship with Sumner. She has to think about her studies, too, of course, and fundraising...read the book.

If you believe that being "in love" in grade twelve is a happy way for a story to end, you'll enjoy this young-adult romance with a spice of geophysics. Delaney is pretty and romantic, and she also has a life of her own, which puts her romance well above average.

(Fair disclosure: I'm writing this review in July, having received a draft copy, or "galley proof," to read in order for reviews to appear when the book appears in stores. It's expected to reach your local bookstore some time in October. If you don't see it in a store today, pre-ordering books is always encouraging to writers.)

Books I Would Reread, and Why

This week Long & Short Reviews links up posts about the books reviewers would or wouldn't review, and why.

This question seems to invite generalizations.

Books I would reread, or at least re-skim? That would be most books I've read. I skim-read fast enough not to mind the time it takes if someone asks which volume in a series had a particular minor character in it, or whether a quote attributed to the author online sounds like even a rephrasing of anything the author said in...A day will probably come when I'm not able to do this any more, but it's true for now.

Books I would not reread? Not just the ones I've deleted from Kindle or Book Funnel to save space. If the blog says I enjoyed a book, or even that I didn't like it much but you might, it's probably not one that I want to keep and reread every year, but it's one that I'd skim-read if, say, I was reading a volume that came later in the series and wanted to remind myself of the story about how the characters met. The ones I would not reread are the ones that seemed to be completely dishonest, like a horrible novel that claimed to be Christian in which a family seemed impossibly nice and cheerful and sweet because they were all on drugs, or like the genre fiction that never even shows a seam where the author actually wrote a single scene without help from a chatbot, or like the bestseller of bygone years where the twelve-year-old seduced the grown-up. That's not merely bad; it's worse.

(Though of course everyone's definition of the very worst in books is subjective, and subject to cultural influence. Because my culture values the growing-and-learning time of life in ways most human cultures never did, I think fiction should not mention any sexuality characters might have before they're sixteen. This may seem arbitrary to some people...deal with it.)

Most books that are identified as classics are generally worth rereading but, for a change, let's encourage new writers with a list of ten recent books that are currently in my Kindle, that I intend to keep there until I get printed copies, because I'm likely to want to reread...

(This list is arbitrarily discriminating against new books that I received in formats other than Kindle. That's because I'm offline, and Kindle is working better than Book Funnel or PDF at the moment. If that's not the best reason why your book's not on the list, at least it helps me narrow the selection down to ten. These have all been reviewed at this web site recently, and should be in your favorite bookstore. They were selected by looking down the list of titles in the "recently accessed" view in the Kindle app.)

Isabel Allende, My Name is Emilia del Valle

Emily Dana Botrous, With Love Melody

London Clarke, The Neighbor

Sallie Cochren, Let the Purring Begin

Channelle Desamours, Needy Little Things

Carl Hiaasen, Fever Beach

Robert Malone, Lies My Govt Told Me

Neal Shusterman, All Better Now

Sharon Srock, For Mercie's Sake

Barbara Wright, Anny in Love