After I prodded Google about our foreign readership, the said foreign readership deflated. Did it ever deflate. Total page views dropped by ninety percent. Nine out of ten readers of this web site were bots or hackers? Well, never mind, it's good to have real humans in the audience.
Animals
Video of the songbird called a dipper. The dipper is unique. It's been called a kind of wren or thrush, because it has some features in common with wrens and with thrushes, but it's the only North American songbird that swims and it really isn't much like anything but a dipper. It is usually found in the West but I used to watch one at a park in Wheaton, Maryland.
Books
US readers who have been unable to find copies of Tom Cox's novel Everything Will Swallow You, rejoice! As a temporary promotion this UK store can ship copies to the US with no international shipping charges! Link to order, and first chapter of the novel:
Music
Traffic...Really youall can read the Meow for yourselves. (Howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com is always a good source of music.) I'll try at least to alternate between a music link from that site and one from some other site.
Ella Roberts.
Tom Petty.
Van McCoy.
The Kinks.
Priscilla Block.
Steve Miller Band.
Bobby Horton. This is one of the earliest American songs, thought to have been sung during the Revolutionary War and now beloved of renactors everywhere. At the time rifles were a technological innovation. The British thought heavier muskets would have to work better. History has been the judge.
Robin Trower.
,
Harry Chapin.
Grand Funk Railroad.
Karunesh.
Donovan.
Charli Xcx. (This link was shared by someone who didn't mind its pushing limits, but used it as an example of how stretched out the limits of how much eroticism the industry demands from young women singers these days. May offend viewers; not recommended for viewing at home, work, school, or anywhere where others might see and hear.)
The Cars.
Tears for Fears.
Buddy Holly.
The Police.
Three Dog Night.
Stryper.
Neil Young.
The Troggs.
Queen.
Writing
Although this piece of Bad Poetry is fiction, and seemed like nonsense when I wrote it...
...I suppose it may be worth mentioning that it only becomes "dark humor" rather than "ironic satire" when the characters involved are male. Women have been "suffering to be beautiful," having functional teeth removed and functional fingers broken and functional breasts chopped up to conform to the current idea of what looks good, for a long time.
That novel is also comedie noire, but serious studies of the cosmetic surgery industry have been being made (and ignored by those marketing cosmetic surgery) throughout my lifetime. People are seriously told--by their employers, if they're in movies or television!--that their work will be more valuable if men have "hair implants" or nose reductions, if women have "face lifts" or liposuction. There's no real end to it; as a child in California in the 1970s I remember noticing a woman who had the tiniest tapered waist I'd ever seen, hearing her tell my mother that she was getting pressure about centimeters of flab her waist had supposedly added after childbirth. I was small and skinny at nine years old and this woman was shortening her last year's jeans so they'd fit me. And she was getting that "You'd be more valuable to some people if you were even thinner" routine.
To imagine guys doing this kind of thing I had to imagine that at least the corrective operation was supposed to relieve pain. Crooked teeth can be painful when impacted molars grow in.
Then there was a vlog...I forget now whether it was on the Meow or the Mirror or somewhere else, because I didn't originally intend to link to it...about how much the talking heads on TV look alike, "and it's scary," because the combination of "lifted" and Botox-stiffened skin, exaggerated North Asian type cheekbones, straight European type noses, and full African type lips are not only hard to tell apart but unlike any natural human you're likely to know if you look at them closely. Have we achieved an ideal of beauty, especially but not exclusively female beauty, that can be achieved only through cosmetic surgery?
If so, how do we go about rejecting it?!
I don't watch enough television to know, or care, whether the talking heads look like siblings or really are siblings. Only in an abstract and theoretical way do I think it would be better if the talking heads looked like the United Nations with a full range of heights, hairstyles, nose shapes, complexions, and ages represented. (And cheers to all those 60-year-olds who look healthier than their 30- and 40-year-old children, but y'know, "The Golden Girls" were not the last women on Earth who looked good and were funny when their hair really was white.) It's for those who watch television to encourage the industry to show us real faces, aging naturally.
Zazzle
Gentle Readers, do youall believe that Zazzle should continue to be a distinctive site that sells quirky, even one-off, individuals' designs rather than just being another outlet for commercial designs?
Before blinking out of cyberspace entirely I would like to try adding a Zazzle Store page to this web site. I am not asking anyone to put any bank card information online. No. You probably already know someone who already does that, perhaps a storekeeper whose e-purchases are in a store building a good healthy distance from per home with locks and lights and alarms and insurance and all. You should bribe that person to buy Zazzle merchandise for you...give that person the full price and a loaf of homemade bread, or a foot massage, a free seat in a car pool the person wants to join, whatever kind of treats you like to give to friends. And support some deserving artists
Zazzle now pays designers considerably more for marketing our own designs than for marketing other people's designs.I hate that they changed what used to be one of the site's most endearing features. In the interests of preserving the classic Zazzle atmosphere (and perhaps bringing back the classic rule of double payments when Zazzlers marketed one another's stuff), I'll still share some other people's designs.
Zazzle works a bit like Zulily and other online marketers. Since the merchandise is printed on demand it doesn't disappear (from the store, to become bales of waste) after the sale day, which is a MAJOR advantage of Zazzle over Zulily, but your chance of getting anything at anything resembling a reasonable price is one day only. Buy it now or pay more another day.
The site has hidden a lot of my merchandise because they weren't selling it. Well, what could they expect when they were spamming customers with ads for Disney merchandise and saying nothing about individual designers. What you need to know is that Zazzle is set up to allow you to be your own designer, anyway. Any design you see on a mug? They'll probably automatically show you how the design would look on napkins, coasters, pillows, wall clocks... You can click around and apply the public-domain images I've used to anything Zazzle will print. I'm known for designing plain shirts with just a few words over one shoulder in front and a big picture behind, for all the women Out There who want to encourage people to aim their eyeballs a little further up, but you can put the picture on the front if you want to.
You can also request a design if you don't see it there. (Zazzle will print adult-content cards and suchlike, though the closest I get is a clingy pink shirt with the words or picture right over the bustline.) Readers have done this and, while one reader's idea for a girly shirt with person's URL on the bustline didn't go anywhere, another reader's suggestion for the "I'm the Mother Not the Maid" shirt actually sold. You can set up your own Zazzle store, or you can save your online time and send me ideas.
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