When I have been online, I've been "Wrapped up in Books"--e-books--and once again, advance review copies, so another review of an older book pops out of the can for Friday. I've not spent a full day online all weekend long. The Internet's been here. I've been out. And of course, ignoring all the hours when "updates" could have been run without anyone noticing, Microsoft has to hijack the computer when it's in use. I mean, who cares who paid for the computer, who pays for the office, who pays for the electricity, who pays for the connections, or who pays the computer operator? Those are mere mortals! Microsoft is a god!--Microsoft's boyboss thinks. Microsoft is flying too close to the sun and needs to melt, molt, plummet, and drown.
Animals
Honeybees were endangered. Then they were putting native bee species in danger, out-competing the native bees due to the help they get from humans. Now, in North Carolina, they're endangered again, this time by the yellow-legged hornet.
The yellow-legs are smaller than European hornets--about the size of our White-Faced Hornets. If they "invade" my neighborhood, I expect Jimmy Skunk will enjoy them.
Five minutes of puffins just being cute in Maine:
There are still large puffin colonies on the coast of Maine, though their populations have declined in reactions to various threats, including human-caused warming of their water and resultant changes in their food supply, over the years.
Why bears should be walled into nature preserves well away from tourists, with room to breed and forage only in places humans don't go. Live video does not actually show blood.
Glyphosate Awareness
Remember, most females of all species do not show the Seralini Effect, in which the female does not show reactions to glyphosate or various other toxins herself if, and because, her body can store those toxins in a placenta and produce defective offspring. (Women who show this trait think it's horrible and there's no reason to imagine that females of other species feel differently.) In a random sample of the US population it's not really surprising that a large study found a strong correlation between glyphosate and premature birth generally, but not between glyphosate and premature birth caused by major birth defects or between glyphosate and premature birth early enough in pregnancy to amount to abortion. In most of the cases studied the babies were at least born alive; the study didn't follow how many of them lived even one full year.
I live with Seralini cats, so I tend to forget that not all pregnancies always become tragedies when females are exposed to glyphosate and not all females need those tragedies as protection from even worse things. For some females, a baby who survives glyphosate exposure long enough to start eating solid food may not seem like a total blue-eyed Wonder. Serena's kitten ate his first solid meal on Sunday. (With his much older sister and nephew, who, being social cats, had been waiting to show how fond and protective they'd be since he was born.) If he survives this month, Wonder will be his name.
He does seem to have a good chance of surviving. He seems to be having no trouble digesting solid food. He bounces, he pounces, his favorite thing this week is biting everyone but I think he'll outgrow it. When allowed to go out and meet Drudge and Silver, although Silver had obviously been wanting to help nurse him from the day he was born, he and Drudge bonded on sight.
Meanwhile, although I observe that smoke is easier to avoid and less immediately toxic to me than glyphosate vapors in the air, and think of each day's trash fire as relief for the cats and me, some ask whether large-scale wildfires are breaking down glyphosate residues or spreading the poison from Canada to the US...I will say this. Even for good True Greens who have lived for fifty or sixty or seventy years with a sense of guilt about what our pollution's been doing to Canada's forests, there is a verifiable sense that it's payback time.
Should parents of "transgender" offspring be blamed for the anguish these young people endure? Or should the blame go to those who make "endocrine disruptor" chemicals and spray them recklessly into the air? Secretary Kennedy has been saying it's the chemicals for a long time. I agree. Not that there may not be the occasional parent who deserves blame for telling children garbage like "If you don't want to play football and/or fight in a war, you might as well be a girl" or "If you want to accomplish anything in life beyond having babies, you might as well be a boy." But in the absence of these chemicals even parents like that, even teachers and psychologists like that, even whole communities spouting that kind of mental toxic waste, have historically produced very few "transgender" offspring. Hearing stupid talk is not what makes teenaged boys grow breasts...and lactate.
History
Vince Staten reminisces, briefly considering all the history involved, about the centennial of Kingsport's main high school. (When Gate City wants serious competition, this is where the competitors look.)
Music
Belle & Sebastian.
Don Dixon.
Irene Cara. (How is it possible that the girl who sang this song of teenaged energy is dead already?)
Billy Joel.
John McCutcheon.
Boy George.
Cranberries.
Politics, as Practiced by People Who Should Have Gone into a Different Line of Work
After her public pronouncements on the benefits of living among other Black people, Kamala Harris moves into a typical California almost-all-White neighborhood:
Writing, Contests for
Anyone can enter this contest, free of charge, but it is the Society of Classical Poets and they are strict about classical forms. Classical haiku did not always meet the strict syllable count, mention a season, or "make life" if only a brief life (butterfly, cherry blossom, I mentioned a fungus); haiku submitted to this competition have a better chance if they do all of those things. Odds are against even the members of the Society winning the prize. The goal is a beautiful collection of classical haiku.
Note that the senryu, which is about humans, is a separate form. In a classical haiku readers usually don't see humans at all, or at most we see humans as a mass of movement and color seen from a distance, colorful robes, stately movement of a procession. And in traditional haiku, which of course were Japanese, there are traditional lists of words for each of Japan's twenty-some traditional weather phases; non-Japanese poets have a choice whether to use translations of these words, or do the best we can with words that pinpoint seasons in our weather cycles. (Apparently Japanese poets weren't content with "spring, summer, autumn, winter"; their lists were more like "the main heat wave in July, the somewhat cooling storm system in July, the next heat wave toward the end of July, the first chilly nights of August, the heat wave of late August...")
I didn't know these things when I started this web site. Some online poets had the benefit of a free haiku course taught online at the Carpe Diem site around 2012-13. I didn't; I'm passing on what I've learned from them, especially Kim M. Russell, whose notes on her poems so consistently summarize what she had learned and was trying to use in each poem.
This is neither a haiku nor a senryu, though it has seventeen syllables. It just came to me when I was writing the haiku for the contest...
Hard to get feet
out the door
when writing pleasing
haiku--just one more!
Writing, Ethics of
Megadittos.
No comments:
Post a Comment