Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Web Log for 5.11.26

Animals 

Yes, it's an animal. I've never seen one, but it exists in my part of the world; it's the sort of thing that could become a serious nuisance if people tried to "control insect pests" with poison sprays. Apparently our Slug Caterpillars, which are mauve-taupe in color, have a cousin species that are colorless and semitransparent, called, for obvious reasons, Spun Glass Caterpillars. This one has, obviously, been photographed crawling on a mirror for its fullest dramatic effect.


The fleshy tentacles that mimic the stitched ribs of a cushion are covered in venomous spines; more spines stick out along the bottom edge of the body. It doesn't really have legs with clawed feet; more like suckers for feet, attached directly to the body. So there's no airspace between feet and bristle and, unlike stingingworms, this one can't crawl onto your hand without stinging. Stingingworms will eventually sting if they walk over your skin very far because they waddle and roll when they walk, but this baby leaves traces of venom wherever it goes.

It does show some color, in most light--a faint icy blue in the shadows, and icy green along the center of the body. The body is transparent enough that you can actually see leaves in the digestive tract as a greenish dorsal stripe.

More information is where the photo came from: 


Now, a more appealing kind of animal...While working out of McDonald's, earlier this week, I saw lots of cars come and go in the parking lot below the trees. And during a slow period in the evening I saw a large, apparently well kept, tailless calico cat walking around the picnic tables. A stray foraging for scraps? Maybe--but it wasn't interested in scraps. It was looking at the parking spaces. It went around the parking lot as if looking for a specific car. Then, not finding the car, it ran off in the direction cars take leaving the parking lot, as fast as it could go. 

Had it been dumped? Animal dumpers do sometimes dump animals behind stores and restaurants, in order to sneak away while the animals check out food waste. 

That cat looked capable of finding a home for itself if ever a cat could; tailless Manx-mix with an appealing three-colored face. It did not look likely to want to move into Serena's territory, or be allowed to. (She's nice to kittens and to polite, respectful males, but the last time she saw another calico Queen Cat, the other cat suddenly remembered an urgent appointment in Pittsburgh.) I went out into the parking lot and called "Kitty, kitty, kitty," in case the cat wanted help; it didn't. So it's not my problem. I hope whoever's found it can appreciate it. I hope it's a spayed female, and I hope it's still able to bond with you.

Charm Course 

This meme was on the Meow a few years ago, and it still makes me laugh every time...

"

"I've shaved half my head, and dyed the rest of my hair green. I'm up to thirty five tattoos, and fifteen piercings. I've changed my pronouns three times now, and still the boys won't give me a second glance. What could possibly be wrong?

(AI anxiety coach)
You're obviously a victim of the sexist patriarchy. Have you considered joining antifa?

"

For those of The Nephews who are in literal fact nieces...Lack of male attention has never been a problem for any of the women in our family. It might conceivably be seen as a problem by a baby-faced girl, in which case the solution would be to age a little; I started looking old enough to vote, drive, or date grown-up men, around age 25. I think there were benefits in starting dating at 25 actually. At 25 a man has reached his full height and is finally starting to develop emotional maturity. Before that you don't even know what they're going to look like when they grow up.

For those who want to attract a specific man, or woman for that matter...years ago a book sold with a money-back guarantee was called How to Marry the Man of Your Choice. Its instructions were simple: First pick a man you want to marry, because it's cruel to use this technique if you don't. Then, get him talking, and really listen. As I recall, the contract under which the book was sold said that women had to use it for two years. We were young then, believe it or not, and had short attention spans just like the young people of whom we now complain, so the question was raised whether anyone ever did write to the publisher and demand that refund. I just checked that for you. Google says used book sellers on Amazon and EBay do offer refunds if the physical condition of the book isn't satisfactory, within two weeks...but nobody's ever publicly claimed the two-year refund.

Did I try it? you may ask. I did not. That is, I did listen to my husband, and to my Significant Other, and to my official boyfriend, and to my parents, friends, relatives, and customers, because what they had to say was (generally) interesting. I did not set out to marry anybody. Listening is also a valuable technique for keeping a relationship together once it's happened. More relevant to our family's needs, listening is a way to turn the off-putting label "smart" (with its undertones of "selfish and conceited") into nicer labels for intelligence like "deep" and "understanding." 

For the nephew with special talents for math and computers, listening is the difference between the math-head as old-school drill sergeant who couldn't keep students or employees, and the math-head as expert teacher everyone wants to work for and learn from. You have the ability. The world is yours.

Education 

I am not a mother. I don't have a mother. So when Mothers Day posts popped up in my blog feed yesterday I thought, "No need to open those!" Joe Jackson put a lot of other good things under the Mothers Day cartoon rerun, though. What I wanted to call attention to was the one about how the cost of education has gone up. How do we get it down again? What administrative flab do colleges need to trim?


Gossip, Local

I let myself be seen while in Puffball Mode last week. Sure enough, word trickled back around that local idjits thought I was pregnant. I think I'll try to be seen cuddling someone else's baby (no, it does not make us baby-free adults want to give birth), some time this summer, just to see how badly idjits can confuse themselves. Maybe a year-old baby would make the idjits most ridiculous; and definitely a White-looking one. According to Mendel there would have been a 25% chance that, if I'd married a blue-eyed blond, I might have given birth to a blue-eyed blond baby--if there'd been a baby at all. Many undiagnosed celiacs' pregnancies end before they produce a recognizable baby.

Anyway I told the person who relayed that information that person looked old, and after 48 hours we were on speaking terms again. I take this to mean that old is approximately as undesirable a way to look as fat. Though I would look old, as well as fat, if glyphosate poisoning weren't making my white hairs fall out again.

Music

4 Non Blondes.


Linkin Park.


Salt N Pepa.


The Animals.


John Baldry.


Politics 

Strange idea of "democracy" in the Democratic Party these days.


Religion 

The position of this web site is, as regular readers know, that our President violated his covenant with those who elected him, first by encouraging more production and use of glyphosate, then by declaring war. Is he capable of sincere repentance? Was he capable of sincere faith in the first place?! I'm glad I'm not the Judge. 

However, possibly as a gesture of loyalty to our Israeli allies, as we leave them to deal with Hamas while we hold off Iran, Trump has taken it upon himself to proclaim a National Sabbath--not the traditional day of prayer, but the Sabbath as observed by Jews and by whole-Bible Christians. He has made this an invitation, not a command. He has left it to the individual to decide which set of Sabbath rules, if any, the individual may choose to follow.

(Orthodox Jews don't use the telephone or other electronic communication devices on the Sabbath. Some un-Orthodox Jews, like Andrei Codrescu, blog primarily or only on the Sabbath. I generally abstain from blogging on the Sabbath, though I'm not fanatical about it and will make up for lost time if I have to. Then there's the question of whether Sabbath dinner is to be cooked fresh from the garden right after church, or left simmering in an earthen pot through the night and the temple services...and so on. The Bible gives pretty specific guidelines for keeping the Sabbath but leaves quite a few of these details up to the believer's conscience.)

Bradley Burnham expresses the Seventh-Day Adventist reaction:

Petfinder Post: Beagles and Two-Color Cats

Next on the list of dog breeds the Busybodies of Britain want to render extinct: the beagle.

Americans love beagles. They're by far the most popular breed in the "hounds" category; some surveys put them on the top ten list of popular breeds in all categories. They rate high on most of the traits Americans are likely to want in a canine companion. Beagles typically:

* Live long enough to grow up with children
* Don't run up big vet bills
* Don't need a lot of care
* Love to walk, jog, or run with their humans
* Don't need to go farther or faster than most humans can walk, jog, or run
* Like to be close to their humans
* Don't need much grooming
* Are smart, sensitive, and loyal
* Can track and dig out rabbits if that's what you want them to do, but don't mind not doing that
* Announce visitors or intruders loudly enough to get your attention
* Don't actually bite anyone
* Behave pretty well even without being formally trained
* Behave well with children and other pets
* Seem calm and well adjusted
* Don't shed hair very much or for very long
* Greet their humans enthusiastically, but aren't big enough to knock most people down
* Don't eat a lot, or cost a lot to keep, or take up a lot of space
* Can be identified as one family member's dog while being polite to all family members
* Are almost always up for any kind of game their humans enjoy

Standing a foot to a foot and a half high at the shoulder, less than knee-high to most adult humans, Beagles live about as long as cats and sometimes land in shelters because they've outlived their humans--or their humans have gone away to school. Before adopting what sounds like the perfect first dog for a child, adults should make sure they can care for the dog while that near-adult child is not at home. It's not unusual for Beagles to live fifteen years or even longer.

There is a wide range of coat colors, including "blue" and "blue tick," and some real Beagles are black and white like Snoopy, but the most common patterns are light brown and white or light brown, white, and black. 

While Bassets are basically big dogs on dwarf legs, Beagles are simply small dogs. Hereditary disease conditions are occasionally found in this breed but are much fewer and less common than in Bassets. Perhaps the worst disease condition Beagles inherit is epilepsy, often controllable by medication. A few also tend to develop eye or thyroid disorders, often preventable by mindful care. Hip dysplasia is sometimes found in Beagles but is much less common than bone and joint problems in Bassets. 

Healthy Beagles usually weigh 30 pounds or less. They're easy to carry when it becomes necessary; they usually like a hug. They shed noticeable quantities of their short hair for a week or two in spring, and may drop a hair here and there throughout the year. Weekly brushing is recommended, and their nails need to be trimmed, but these are generally low-maintenance dogs. Most of the time their humans spend with them can be spent just hanging out and having fun.

Beagles do need a good bit of exercise and play time. They usually enjoy being kept in packs and amusing each other with their own games. If you keep only one Beagle you wil need to spend enough time running and playing with him to fill in the gap. Bored Beagles may dig their way under fences and get lost, or burn off their surplus energy chewing and tearing up things. It is their humans' responsibility to be intelligent enough to think of ways to stimulate these cheerful, clever dogs' minds.

Beagles can be stubborn and benefit from kind, firm training from an early age. Instincts tell them that being dirty makes a dog smell more interesting, that their humans ought to follow them wherever anything that smells like food may have gone, and that they can sing. Their opinions on these subjects don't really change but they usually are motivated to behave like Good Dogs, so they can--eventually--learn to behave according to their humans' unreasonable opinions rather than their own.

Why would anyone want such lovable pets to become extinct? For the same reasons they've given with regard to other breeds. Small, short dogs are hard to see in traffic. (Do you let your dogs run around in traffic?) Floppy ears can foster infections. (Don't you lift those floppy ears when you pet the dog?) And then there's always plain old jealous envy. Beagles are lovable. Busybodies are not.

Though popular, Beagles aren't always easy to find in shelters. People don't usually give them up and, when Beagles are in shelters, they tend to be adopted fast. Sometimes shelters list dogs as Beagles without knowing their actual ancestry, if the dogs are small but well proportioned, have floppy ears, and seem easy to like. While these shelter dogs may actually be mixes of other breeds with or without any pedigreed Beagle ancestors, they are likely to be satisfactory pets.

Zipcode 10101: Ringo from Madison 


Not much is known about Ringo except that he's a calm, friendly mixed breed who gets along well with other dogs.

Meadow & Spots from NYC 



They were found outdoors, crying to be fed and taken back indoors. The experience of abandonment seems to have left them desperately clingy. Described as "Velcro cats" who want to be close to their human all the time, they are a bonded pair and would probably prefer to be adopted together, though they've been given separate web pages.

Zipcode 20202: Frodo from DC


Though believed to be about ten years old, Frodo still likes plenty of walks. He's mellow and calm, though, and likes to lie beside his human too. He needs a good reliable human to lie beside. He is said to get along beautifully with other dogs.

Jinn from DC 


Jinn had a home and a human of her own for more than eight years before her human decided person was unable to care for Jinn. Shelter staff's emphasis on Jinn's distress suggests that you should be prepared for her to be slow to settle in or bond. She's grieving. But she's polite.

Zipcode 30303: Fish Stick from Peachtree City 


Fish Stick has not been in the shelter long. They insist that he must have a fenced yard. He looks like the type to dig his way out under the fence if he had nothing better to do. 

Mackerel & Anchovy from Atlanta 


They like fish. They like cardboard boxes. They like being together. Mackerel and Anchovy are mother and daughter. The shelter recommends you adopt both together. Mackerel is described as a majestic, mesmerizing Queen Cat who will sit beside you but not on you--let's not get carried away. Anchovy is the docile, dutiful daughter.

Monday, May 11, 2026

Web Log for 5.10.26

In which the blogger attempts to pull herself together...Last Wednesday's post is long and will be out of sequence. Other posts? I'll focus on the new book reviews first because some people are waiting eagerly. Barring further cyberattacks, this Monday's butterfly study, Tuesday's Petfinder post, and Wednesday's book reviewer chat should be right on schedule.

Animals 

Behold our Official Icon of Those Who Want More Babies Now:


Tent caterpillars, all ten to thirty species of them worldwide (there's debate about their classification too), have some features in common: They're furry, and (to some eyes) cute. They're very social; in fact they depend on regular grooming by siblings to survive their furry juvenile days. They spin threads of silk almost constantly, usually building multilayered shelters in which they spend their first four caterpillar phases, always building at least temporary carpets and sunroofs, and congregating in these "tents." They use the threads to communicate--silk produced just after chewing up fresh healthy leaves smells appetizing and makes a trail for other caterpillars to follow--as well as to make tents and lower themselves cautiously from high branches to lower branches or the ground. They move faster, and seem more perceptive and curious about the world than most caterpillars do. They're peaceable, inclined to act on the theory that whatever is touching them is a friend and return its caress, which is actually an effective strategy to stop (most) tachinid flies from parasitizing them as well as to form some sort of bond with siblings. As if those features didn't give them enough survival advantages, most species are also naturally adapted to eat toxic leaves. 

(The ones shown here are Forest Tent Caterpillars, photographed by Carly Brooke, so full of cyanide their skins form blue spots. Though harmless to touch, they'd definitely make you sick if you ate them--so nature has conveniently provided humans with instincts that tell nearly all of us that we'd prefer not even to look at them while eating.) 

So tent caterpillars have very few natural predators and their populations just grow and grow. About every ten years it seems as if they're about to take over the world. They strip their host trees bare and cover the trunks with silk as they prowl about looking for one last leaf to eat, then start laying silken trails across the ground as they look for a new tree. This migration causes many caterpillars to separate from their families before they're ready and eat poorer quality food, resulting in unusual behavior like resting on walls instead of tree branches...(See photos documenting the behavior at Carly Brooke's post:


...and in fungus infections, diseases, and death. The caterpillar plague years are distressing to watch even for species, like humans, that don't care much about the caterpillars and, if we do, want to see fewer of them. They keep the caterpillars from becoming serious pests, but at a horrific price.

Many humans find these individual caterpillars cute. You can actually pick them up and stroke them and, if you have a steady hand and gentle touch, they like being stroked. They are pets. (Though they don't have any instinct to stay near you; after enjoying being pets for ten or twenty minutes they'll wander away.) Nobody, however, finds a mass of overcrowded tent caterpillars cute. (Probably the heightened crawling, scratching, and squirming behavior in the clump is motivated by hungry caterpillars sniffing at siblings to see whether anybody has found food yet.) If you're not fond of caterpillars, the mass is disgusting. If you are, you can see the little animals' distress, which makes a ball of squirming tent caterpillars even harder to look at than it is if you see them as something to throw into the nearest trash fire.

This much has to be said for tent caterpillars: They do show an increase in violent behavior, within the limits of their species' abilities, in plague years. They're just not capable of being very violent. A tent caterpillar dying miserably from fungus infection may bite, but, as it can't bite through human skin, only the caterpillar's body language shows a difference between its biting behavior and its friendly grooming behavior. Anyway tent caterpillars don't progress into sexual aberrations, domestic violence, cannibalism, or war. They just lie down and die young.

If we rush to start having more babies, to keep a Social Security system working forever in the way it can only work when there are a lot more workers than retirees, or just to feed the toxic greed some people seem to feel for grandchildren, then we're no more intelligent than tent caterpillars. So let's use images of overpopulated tent caterpillars whenever and wherever we come to "more babies now" whines in cyberspace. 

(If you're in a place where tent caterpillars are "swarming" in a plague season this year, please remind yourself and neighbors that the local population is in the process of CRASHING. It's just nature's way of reminding us not to have too many babies.)

History 

No link because I did not like the bloke's condescending tone, but something on the Mirror does bring the legend of Mansa Musa, the Richest Man in the World, into historical perspective...

Mali was not a kingdom in the sense that England, France, or Poland were kingdoms. It was like, well, Western Africa. People lived very simply on the land, cultivated food, slept in simple shelters (not rondavels, they had simple houses for the whole extended family group), and didn't have a lot of things to spend money on. They did, however, have so much gold in the ground that the stuff frequently washed up in streams, as in California in the 1850s. So they didn't bother to mine gold but some of them had noticed that, if they held on to a few nuggets long enough, eventually they might find someone who would take their gold in trade for something useful.

So, Mansa Musa was the "king" of a small tribe of people who literally had gold they didn't know what to do with. He enthusiastically embraced Islam and donated gold to start schools, but he did not personally preside over those schools and, if they lasted through his lifetime, most of them closed when the gold was gone. Other tribal "kings" who saw the benefits in gold and trade made alliances with him; those also lasted about as long as he did. Toward the end of his life Mansa Musa did load up gold on as many of his loyal subjects and their animals as he could muster (actual numbers are hard to substantiate, but there really was quite a parade) and go to Mecca, taking all the gold they'd been hoarding and splashing it about like people who were glad to get rid of the shiny rocks that, although pretty in the light, were heavy to carry across the desert. And then they all went back to cultivating their gardens all day and sleeping in their shacks all night, even if they did adopt the ideas of wearing clothes and studying the Koran. "I'm an honest man! Work's all I know!" might have been their theme song.

This accounts for the sudden disappearance of Mansa Musa's "empire" after the dear old man was laid to rest. Still, the story is nothing to sneer at. If Musa was more of a patriarch than a monarch as we use those terms, he was still a great one. The story does teach us that wealth is relative.

Information That May Be Helpful 

Someone Out There needed to know...


Posted by Pointman 12 Deplorable Garbage on the Mirror. Lens traces it to Carla Brown on Facebook.

Music 

"Green Onions."

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Stratocles

Graphium stratocles is mentioned abundantly on the Internet, and most of those mentions come from sites that traffic in butterfly carcasses. This web site does not recommend paying for dead butterflies. 

There are three subspecies: Graphium stratocles stratocles, G.s. senectus, and G.s. stratonices. All were named early enough to be part of the tradition of naming Swallowtails after characters in literature. Stratocles was the name of two ancient Greek politicians. Stratonices is a masculine form of Stratonice or Stratonica, a Greek queen of Syria. (She was remembered for having married King Seleucus, who was older than she, and getting him to divorce her and let her marry his son instead after she had met the son, Antiochus.) Senectus was the Roman spirit of Old Age, a gloomy mythological figure said to hang around graves--the Graphiums are not notoriously attracted to carrion, but male Swallowtails do crave salt. More recent sources also list subspecies dodongi and pingi, as described by Page and Treadaway only in the present century.

Each subspecies is associated with some of the "thousand islands":

Graphium stratocles dodongi is found on Palawan.

G.s. pingi is found on Busuanga.

G.s. senectus is found on Luzon and Marinduque.

G.s. stratocles is found on Mindoro.

G.s. stratonices is found on Bohol, Dinagat, Leyte, Mindanao, Panaon, and Samar.

None of these subspecies seems to be uncommon or particularly endangered in its habitat. Photographs are scarce online, perhaps because this species mimics the look of some other butterflies who share its habitat, whose wing structure is quite different. 


Santibiologist, who posted this photo to Inaturalist, spent some time confirming its identity with other lepidopterists. 

There is little discussion, but a nice clear photo of the upper wings, of this species in 


Perhaps because other butterflies in the area are even more eye-catching, little is known about this species. From the fact that Rothschild claimed to have female carcasses and didn't describe any differences between them and the males, I infer that the wings of both sexes look alike. Rothschild also found the species so rare on Mindanao, in the 1890s, that he questioned whether reports of their being found on that island were accurate. 

Sunday, May 10, 2026

Morgan Griffith on COVID Hearings

Breaking news from US Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

“Powerful cabal of scientists from within NIH helped draft anti lab-leak narrative.”

That headline about the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was the headline that Co-Conspirator 1, generally believed to be EcoHealth Alliance’s former President Dr. Peter Daszak, feared would happen related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

EcoHealth Alliance is the company that got a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study bat coronaviruses. EcoHealth then gave some of the money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China to study bat coronaviruses.

Now, we know they feared the headline because it was at least in part true!

While every man is entitled to his defense in court, former senior adviser at NIAID, Dr. David Morens, was recently indicted for the concealment of documents that were supposed to be kept under the Federal Records Act and/or available under the Freedom of Information Act.

Allegations include Morens editing, making suggestions and in part ghost-writing articles to lead the world into believing COVID-19 came from nature, not from a lab leak. In my opinion, this was done in an attempt to help EcoHealth deflect criticism of its involvement with WIV.

So perhaps, it was not a cabal of leading scientists inside the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But there was at least one scientist within NIH, and others outside of NIH, who were involved. You can’t have a conspiracy with just one person.

In the 118th Congress, I served as Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee as well as one of the lead Energy and Commerce Committee members involved with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

During this time, I grilled key figures involved with coronavirus lab research in Wuhan.

Daszak was one of the officials I questioned in an official hearing.

When I pressed Daszak on EcoHealth’s reports, he lied to me! It was evident that he was not being completely transparent with Congress.

Shortly after that, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) formally debarred Daszak and EcoHealth!

I believe that my findings and investigations helped influence this HHS decision.

Now, the jury is out for Morens. Not only did Morens serve as a senior adviser to former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, but he also worked closely with Daszak.

Emails show that Morens claimed he was a conduit between Fauci and Daszak.

In the indictment, Morens is listed as working with Co-Conspirator 1, who is generally presumed to be Daszak.

According to the indictment, behind the scenes, Morens worked with Daszak to restore a terminated federal grant and advise how to combat the theory that COVID-19 resulted from a lab leak.

To maintain the secrecy of their sensitive conversations, Morens used his own personal gmail account! He instructed Daszak to send all email replies to Morens’ personal email.

Morens’ personal gmail was used to disclose non-public information and evade or delay compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

Federal records that Morens created, transferred and exchanged on his personal email seemingly included those concerning my oversight work of NIH and its grants related to COVID-19.

The private email also helped Morens “back-channel” information to Senior NIAID Official 1.

Who is Senior NIAID Official 1?

It is generally assumed to be Dr. Fauci.

If you dig deeper, the emails are even more alarming.

In one, Morens asks Daszak:

“…do I get a kickback?? Too much [expletive] money. Do you deserve it all? Let’s discuss…”

Daszak responded:

“of course there’s a kickback.”

Were these comments in jest? Perhaps.

Let me be clear. Bribery is not a listed charge in the Morens indictment.

Or maybe, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) is dangling this email in front of Morens to persuade him to testify against Senior NIAID Official 1, who is generally presumed to be Fauci.

I do not know.

What I do know is that concealing information from Congress is a crime.

Additionally, encouraging people to tell Congress that COVID-19 was from a wet market in Wuhan, even when it was likely that the virus’ origins traced back to WIV thanks to research funded by the American taxpayer, is unconscionable!

Again, everyone is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty.

While these texts and emails are damning, it is for a jury to decide if the indictments hold water.

But it is enough information to say the above headline was at least partly true.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at https://morgangriffith.house.gov/.


Gentle Readers, the reason why you've not been seeing more of Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletters reposted here is that they come in the e-mail. I have a terrible time getting to anything in my e-mail, these days, that does not boil down to "Please buy my book" or "Please sell my book" or, in some cases, both. Too many people who should have stuck to their nine-to-five jobs decided to become writers during the COVID fiasco and most of them are still working on it. I remember years when I felt that leaving the city was keeping me from reading new books, and sigh.