Animals
The First Snow in Virginia has melted by now. Further north it wasn't the First Snow. Happy First Snow to those where it stuck, anyway.
I've never actually seen little ghos-t-s sitting on pos-t-s, and let's not even get into the buttered toas-t-s, but here are eight little sparrows sitting on posts. I ganked them from the Meow. Lens traces them to Bettye Gilliam on Pinterest.
Books
Well, I will defend Lewis's only referring to Caspian's future bride as "Ramandu's daughter" and not talking about their relationship. He did that because he was writing for children. Though Edmund and Lucy had had some experience of being young adults in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and might have understood Caspian's feelings better than most ten-year-olds would, what really happens when people fall in love is that they drift away from their younger siblings. Nobody blames them for this. Nor does anybody blame the younger siblings for saying things like "Well, I liked Ramandu well enough, but his disgusting daughter stole the brain right out of Caspian's head." "Ramandu's daughter" is analogous to Opus's calling a woman who gets onto kissing terms with John "tonsil-sucker" in Bloom County.
I am afraid Narnia has some things from European folklore and fantasy that should never have got into a children's story, like ghouls, like nymphs and satyrs (as something other than butterflies), and like the idea that it showed special respect to women to ignore their real names (or to what they might have said) and only call them by titles indicating which men and/or real estate they owned, but "Ramandu's daughter" is something Edmund, Lucy, and Eustace would have been likely to call the character in real life, anyway. For that summer, the less they heard about the relationship, the better. They would have accepted her as a Queen of Narnia, the way Digory and Polly accepted Helen, later on.
Censorship
Hardly news, by now, but I don't think I linked it when it was news, and I think it ought to be linked.
Glyphosate Awareness
Disappointment with Trump's EPA...To be effective Trump must keep his promises (a Peace Presidency), and must carry out the mandate that got him elected (a total glyphosate ban and significant progress toward ending all open-air chemical spraying).
It's official: Glyphosate may cause cancer. The primary cause of cancer may not be knowable, but we know that oxidative stress is a contributing factor, and glyphosate causes oxidative stress. We've known this, if we thought about it, for a long time. The opposing argument has been that three supposedly independent researchers found evidence that glyphosate does not cause cancer. Guess what's happened?
And this...A study shows that reported cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which regular readers recognize as the form of cancer most often linked to glyphosate exposure, declined wonderfully in 2020 (when glyphosate was off the market) and then shot up after 2021 (when it came back into use). Was this due to glyphosate alone, or, as some wanted to prove, to the COVID vaccine? Silly question. There's no separating the two factors. When vaccines harm or kill people, it's usually because the individual batch of vax are contaminated. Glyphosate is a very common contaminant in vaccines. Lists of recently reported vaccine reactions often resemble lists of glyphosate reactions in their bewildering variety...and they include non-Hodgkin's lymphoma...and chronic internal bleeding...and damage to the kidneys, brain, liver...
Politics
Why even Democrats shouldn't vote for Gavin Newsom:
Psychology
This is quite an entertaining list of psychological characteristics that may by now be typical of baby-boomers...because they weren't always. These were habits of thinking and acting that our elders tried very hard to pound into us, in defiance of pop culture and peer pressure. They certainly weren't typical of all of us in 1975 or in 1990. If they're typical of us now, that's because they are habits that promote long active lives...that are typical of surviving baby-boomers. Those of us who got lost in "me-me-me-and-my-widdle-fee-wings" either outgrew it, or are no longer on the scene.
Reports, Confusing
Trump spoke very bluntly to some reporters. On a recording he clearly seems to be telling them "Quiet, Piggy." According to some credible sources, he was addressing a reporter whose given name was Peggy. (Nobody's called a daughter that since the slang use of "pegging" became something people talked about, but that leaves a few Peggies who are only about fifty years old.) According to others, her name was Catherine. How important is it to know whether he was addressing Peggy, or Catherine, or whether he was still speaking to Peggy after Catherine started speaking, or whether his memory for name-and-face combinations is finally filling up and he mistook Catherine for Peggy, or whether he knows Catherine personally well enough to know that calling her "Peggy" is the most hurtful, hateful thing to say to her, or whether he was saying "Piggy" with Deliverance in mind?
My answer: Not very important. Trump likes attention and doesn't mind intimidating people. He doesn't even seem to care whether insulting reporters motivates them to print nastier stuff about him. But though he's certainly saying some nasty New York City sort of things that offend Washingtonians--which is something he's done for a long time, Washingtonians should be accustomed to it by now--he's not actually ordering executions or nuclear bombs. He's annoying people and thereby showing the world he's still got game...his game, at least. The position of this web site is that the best way to improve Trump's manners is to ignore him when he's rude and praise him when he's polite.
Sexual Politics
How many "sexual partners" has this or that person had? We don't want to know. The men discussing this topic make some valid points. They overlook some more:
* A lot of people have reproduced, or tried to reproduce, with only one other person or none, all their lives. That really is the norm.
* But that's not all we've done. There are a lot of fine lines on what count as sexual acts and who count as partners. For example, a man who got drunk and grabbed someone else's date at a party may remember the experience as sexual, because he had sexual feelings about it (though he passed out in time that the only stains on her dress came from drooled alcohol). The woman, who did not have sexual feelings about the experience, probably remembers it in a different mental category altogether. It might be filed under "gross-outs" or "violence."
* Men often pick up, from "guy culture," the idea that "inside" is a critical part of the definition of what makes a sexual experience "real." (Others might have assured the drunk who grabbed someone else's date that "nothing really happened," though the bruise on the woman's arm and the stains on her dress were real.) In practice, however, men don't always know whether even that actually happened. It can feel to them as if they're inside when they're outside. If women accept this male definition of "a sexual act," then quite a few men honestly think they've had more "real" sexual experiences than women know they've had. Though you can't trust a person who kisses and tells, so no one will ever know for sure which men those are.
* Whereas, if women define "a sexual act" as one that gives us a few seconds of overwhelming pleasure, there are mothers of fifteen children who could truthfully say they've had no sexual experience at all.
* And if we define "a sexual act" as the complete act of reproduction, there are quite a few hardened sexual sinners out there who may have shared a different bed with a different body every night, in their twenties, and have the financial records to prove it, but have never had a complete sexual experience and never will.
* Moreover, because marriage can be defined as a business contract or as an emotional experience, and a lot of people who have had legally validated marriages have never even tried to reproduce, somewhere out there is a person who's gone through seven weddings, lived with all seven spouses, and still managed to remain a virgin.
* There are those who would classify married couples who take birth control seriously as technical virgins. Even after fifty years of committed monogamous tickling and pillow fighting.
Anyway, in real life, if we know the person, we know better than to ask.
No comments:
Post a Comment