Happy Monday, Gentle Readers.
I hope nobody saw that on the breakfast table this morning. I found it at Golch Central; Lens traces it to Steampunk Mildura on Pinterest.
Amazon
When we started, this web site had Amazon affiliate links. There were years when Amazon generated its own ads, which I thought tended to be annoying and irrelevant. There were years when Amazon used "i-frame" coding, which were so intrusive the resulting links were banned by law in some States, so I didn't even see the Amazon links. There were years when I was dutifully choosing an Amazon ad for each post and readers weren't buying that exact product, so even when readers clicked through, they were finding a better price on that specific day and I wasn't getting any money. Amazon's policy was to pay affiliates whenever we'd raised $100 worth of commissions. One fine day in 2020, when everybody needed the money and Amazon owed a lot of people, like me, $30 or so, Amazon just dumped the whole affiliate program and broke our links in order to avoid paying us.
We need laws. With teeth in them. We need laws to the effect that if people are earning thousands of dollars online, they can wait for paperwork to be processed, but if midday on Friday finds you owing $30 or $3 or $0.03 to some very small online business, YOU WILL PAY THAT DEBT ON THAT FRIDAY IF YOU WANT YOUR BUSINESS TO OPEN ON THE MONDAY. So many people have been cheated out of so many amounts of money that seem too small to be worth a lawsuit...it shouldn't take a lawsuit. Private content, like e-mail, should be kept private. Accounts payable should not be private. Businesses should have to pay their accounts payable to anyone who's working for less than $100 a week, to get access to their accounts receivable.
But meanwhile, though most of my e-friends who used to be Amazon affiliates just aren't any more, Joe Jackson is still an Amazon affiliate. So, if you're shopping on Amazon, please go to
and click on an Amazon ad. Any Amazon ad, though if you scroll around you might find something you want to buy. Apparently they now track which affiliated steered you to Amazon, so if you just buy what you intended to buy regardless of what JJ put in the link, he gets a commission. As so many of us never did. At least you can make Amazon pay some of their affiliates.
Animals
English moths, including a Hebrew Character:
This poem refers directly to the old belief that departed souls took the forms of moths or butterflies--the ones flitting happily about in the sunshine being blessed souls on the way to Heaven, the ones that seemed to want to fly into candles being lost souls on the way to eternal flames. The Hebrew Character moth was named later, by scientists, for the markings on its wings...but the poem makes an uneasy indirect reference to the oppressive way Christian monarchs used to interfere with Jews' owning land and settling in one particular country for many generations, too. Even in the US people who had read little European history used to say, and may still say, that someone is "just wandering about like a lost soul."
Comma butterfly:
What do you think? Do the verses here need a verse about the butterflies called Commas? (Different species in this genus are found all over the Northern Hemisphere. Canada has a half-dozen kinds of Commas, some of which sometimes venture into the northern and mountainous States. When scientists say "Comma," in English, they're talking about the Eurasian species photographed at Kim M. Russell's post, but when they say "Polygonia comma," in Latin, they're talking about the North American species called the Eastern Comma in English--are we confused yet? Then there's the species in the genus with which more of the United States are more familiar, which have larger comma-shaped markings and are known as Question Marks. I am not making this up.) Should this whole subject wait till our butterfly series gets to the Commas?
Photo of an Eastern Comma from Wikipedia. In this picture you need to know where to look for the comma-shaped mark (middle of the hind wings, between the darker brown spots). In bright light the comma iridesces bright silver-white. The upper wings, often visible as the butterfly fans them out while at rest, are bright orange with brown spots, similar to the British butterfly flaunting its colors at Kim M. Russell's post.
Careers
When The Nephews were small, some of them used to walk with me to a Wal-Mart store that sold kid-size T-shirts with the message (complete with cartoon graphic) "Girls go to college to get more knowledge. Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider." Funny...and true, considering that girls tend to do better in elementary school and be more interested in college...but, considering the main interest of most people in the 18-25 age bracket, not a very good advertisement for college is it? Given a choice, most girls prefer to go to colleges that also admit boys. The social life people rave over requires a reasonably even mix of male and female students. So there we are.
So, how to pay for college? Getting in and staying in should be no problem for The Nephews. You do have to spend more time studying than you did in high school. The studying is easy. Paying all those inflated fees is the part that may kill you. You need a grown-up job to pay for the courses you're taking to qualify for your grown-up career. It's not fair, it's not right, and it's not necessary, but here's a way some clever lads cope:
They travel around the country in all kinds of weather, ford floods and fend off fanged beasts and hack your way through jungles and have all kinds of adventures...turning people on. Everybody loves a lineman. It takes relatively little training (3 to 6 months of trade school, then a few years' work as an apprentice paid only about $25 per hour), and they're earning enough to pay for college.
Fashion
Whatever you think of her politics, her accent, her taste in men, her past, and/or the fact that when she's been dead three days she'll still look better than most of us...this rainy Easter, Melania Trump makes a trench coat a fashion statement.
Found on the Mirror. Lens thinks IMDB posted the photo first.
History
One of the misperceptions about people who write about living with animal companions can be traced directly to our own writing. We do know fellow humans. Our social lives do include humans as well as animals. Some of us even live with mates and young. But in order to live with or even talk with people who see that we live with computers, we've all promised, "I'll never write about you."
So let's just say that I spent part of the holiday weekend among humans. (Away from the cats. "When I get home," I worried to another human, "the young tomcat will probably be like 'I'm staaaarving! Where have you been?!' The grandmother cat will be like 'Have we met?' And that little lost-and-found cat may be lost again." When I got home, the cats had killed at least two mice and a squirrel on the doorstep, and didn't try to pretend they'd been hungry. Serena did, still, give me the "Have we met?" attitude.)
I watched the breaking of day on the Easter Sunday morning.
I watched a game of basketball played the way people dream of playing basketball, only in real life, by the Michigan Wolverines.
And I watched a fictional TV drama in which the doctor in a frontier town rents out his practice to a visiting doctor from Back East in order to leave town for a vacation. On the way into town, the visiting doctor passes through a settlement of poor people where a baby is about to be born. Delivering the baby, the doctor also finds time to care for the older child's dog, who is having puppies. "Three healthy babies, one human," the doctor laughs, are born but two is not a very healthy number of puppies and they don't stay healthy long. "It could be a lot of things," the doctor says, "even...the plague." Both doctors look at each other, declare a state of quarantine, and take well-off patients from town into the settlement, where they die. It really is bubonic plague! The visiting doctor dies! But they've contained the disease, so the regular doctor will be back at his regular work, and the town will be back to business as usual, next week!
I said to myself, "Could anything like that possibly have happened? Louis L'Amour took a lot of his plots from old news reports, but that story just doesn't sound like one of them. An outbreak of bubonic plague could hardly have been contained in a week!"
I Googled. I found this:
There were no reports of bubonic plague in North America in the nineteenth century but there was an outbreak in 1904. It was not contained in a week, nor in a year.
In theory bubonic plague can be spread by cats as well as by dogs and humans; it's transmitted primarily by rat fleas, who can't live on other animals' blood but do not necessarily know this, but it can be carried by dog, cat, or human fleas too. In fact, once the disease gets going, cats are horribly vulnerable. But in practice, communities that have healthy free-range cats have tended to survive the plague, because the disease develops in dense rat populations.
War
The position of this web site is that war is never a good thing. War is something only males ever want, which is sufficient evidence of the inferiority of males. But people who hope Iran wins this one...are not Americans. I don't know whose child or grandchild they want the Iranians to kill. Nor do I care. I want them packed up and set out in Iran. They get to tell the Iranian government whose side they are on and that the United States does not particularly care whether they live or die, but is not taking them back. Iranians are Muslims. Muslims value loyalty. So these pro-Iranian ex-Americans will probably get killed and buried in some ritually demeaning way. They'll never be missed.
Lens traces the graphic to a F******k group called Soldiers' Angels. General MacArthur's words are the important part of it.
Support our troops. Support bringing them home to peace and victory. If you don't support them, go to Iran.
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