Animals
Butterflies in Malaysia. One of them, Dryas iulia ("The Julia"), is native to the Americas and found in scattered small groups all over our continents. It reached Malaysia "accidentally" and thrives there too.
Books
I went back and reread Neena Viel's I'll Watch Your Baby, reviewed here:
...to decide whether I want to keep it or not. I do. At a time when book manuscripts are being automatically rejected because they sound as if they might have been written by plagiarism-bots, this one is "voicey" with a vengeance. The freshness of Viel's writing voice is worthy of Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston at their best. The nuances in the character Lottie's semi-reliable narrative are richly ironic: Lottie is certainly not making herself sound good, so what she says she's done is probably fictive fact, but we all know the "spirits" that cause tubercular coughing, weakness, and fever are the kind that look like little sticks under a microscope riiiight?--but in fictive fact they may be ghosts after all..and so on, and on. Horror stories that take ghosts seriously aren't Great Literature--are they? What about Hamlet? What I left out of that early review is that this book belongs in libraries. (Public libraries' adult collections where teenagers are allowed but not told to browse; not school libraries.) I think posterity will decide that it's first-rate subliterature, on the level of Dracula and Beloved, but who knows. It may transcend its genre, like Frankenstein or "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
History
Ages ago, I bought, read, and sold a biography of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland. He was noted for several things before the colonies declared their independence. What stands out in memory was that he disapproved of frivolity and apologized if anything beguiled him into a chuckle; but he tried to be a fine gentleman, according to his understanding, and others thought he succeeded.
"Old" Carrollton was a farm rather than a town, and quietly fell apart before anyone thought about preserving it. New Carrollton, however, is a town, probably best known for being the transfer point between DC Metro and Maryland commuter trains.
Music
Jefferson Airplane.
Tom Petty.
Deep Purple.
Stevie Ray Vaughan.
War.
Wilson Pickett.
Loggins & Messina.
The Beatles.
Pentatonix.
Peter Frampton.
Writing Whose Author Is Tired of Having It Called Whimsy Although That Is Its Most Immediately Obvious and Endearing Quality
So, when you click you also see the full-sized photo by Tom Cox.
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