Web Log for 7.7.25

First the apology. A comment on last week's poem, which linked to the Petfinder post, was that it took far too long to get to the pet pictures. Well, it does. I thought it was long even while writing it; the comment has convinced me that it's unconscionably long. I was trying to write two posts at the same time, and it showed. It should have been two separate posts. It is not as if this web site has no down time to make up for with extra posts on the same day. Point taken. I'm sorry, and will try not to do it again.

Now the links:

Disasters 

Google has loads of links to what we can hope will remain the big weather disaster story of the season. Browse "Texas flood updates" to find the latest ones. Beth Ann Chiles, writing from Brevard, shared this post where Sean Dietrich speaks for most of us...Trigger warning: you will probably cry. 

https://seandietrich.substack.com/p/prayer-for-texas

A comment from Steve From Rockwood at smalldeadanimals:

"

As the spokesperson on the radio said yesterday, you need a warning system, you need people to hear the warning system and you need an evacuation plan that doesn’t put people at risk. Much of flash flood alley doesn’t have cell phone reception and some of the people who died were trapped while trying to flee. It’s a complicated problem. And the next tragedy won’t be a flood. It will be an earthquake, tornado or hurricane. And the region (wherever it happens) won’t be ready for that either.

"

We already have an Emergency Broadcasting System, for what it's worth. It seems to me that connecting it to high-water sensors ought to be within oilmen's budgets, but I've not actually done the job, so what do I know. 

What we can know is that life is uncertain. There'll always be a first time for a natural disaster that's never happened in the place before. (Flash floods on the Guadaloupe River last reached serious proportions about fifty years ago.) It's possible to say "In the future, we'll have [whatever seems relevant] to reduce the chance of this happening again." It's not possible to say "It's all [name of person]'s fault for not having done something to prevent this before it happened." 

There are newspapers that, if President Trump walked on water, would report it as "Trump can't swim"; some people seem to enjoy the partisan mudslinging, it doesn't seem to bother Trump, and it's tedious to people who think about the issues on a survivable level. But if people want to blame Trump for not having foreseen that something nobody was talking about even last week might have saved a life somewhere, they need to think ahead. Are they going to blame their politician if whatever-it-is turned out not to save someone else's life, some other year?

Misogyny Resurfaces 

It's funny because he's going so far out of his way, and missing an important point...Jordan Peterson tries to reclaim the misogynist element in "Snow White." Men are nice to young women, older women are the enemy, and especially older women who tell young women not to have babies at fifteen...and although it's a silly old story, not the Bible, that's not even the point the story makes. The three points Peterson misses:

1. It's not that all older women envy Snow White and wish her ill. She had a loving mother who died young. Why did so many medieval monarchs die so young? They hadn't yet inbred to the point where dying young was euthanasia for many of them. They died young partly because they were in a Dark Age of medical ignorance, and partly because, when power is inherited and thought to be bestowed on the heir at birth by God, the easiest way to remove people from power is murder. Right after the good mother dies, the wicked queen becomes the stepmother. This might be construed as a symbol of the way left-wing feminists make more noise than the more conservative ones who actually get things done, but for the German peasant who first told the story it was probably a more general symbol of the fallen moral condition of humankind. Even before they were Christians German people had a very clear sense of the moral imperfection of this world. (They thought that bad people spend the afterlife in a place of endless damp and boredom.) Anyway, good older women exist, but their influence may be undermined by bad ones.

2. The dwarfs don't represent patriarchal power; they represent ordinary decent working people, as Peterson says, but they don't wield power. They are miners, not no-hopers who are overworked and underpaid to make the mine owner rich, but co-owners who work in their own mine. Like some real  miners, they prefer cleanliness to dirt and spend their after-work time scrubbing themselves and their home clean. They live together as brothers. None of them has a mate. None of them dares to aspire to marry Snow White, even when she's working for room and board in their tidy little house, because she's a princess and they are commoners. They might even be said to represent good men properly subordinated to superior women, though again, that's probably not what a German peasant intended. The first teller of this tale probably just accepted that the natural order of things was that some people were royal and others were subjects. Anyway the dwarfs have accepted that they don't have enough power in society to act on what, if they're normal young men, was on all of their minds every time they looked at Snow White but suppressed by awareness that their brothers would punish any of them who even mentioned it. (Unlike some other species of "little people" in folklore, German dwarfs are normal humans with at least one mutant gene, for short stature, and sometimes others that are more dysfunctional. The seven brothers seem healthy enough that Snow White could have married one of her housemates and possibly even had a normal-sized, good-looking child. But that would have been considered a sin against God, Who had given a princess special, royal blood.)

3. In the original story it's not even the prince who saves Snow White. It's the servants, more ordinary working people, who give her glass coffin a good shake and dislodge the poisoned apple. (We think of a Red Delicious apple as sold in US supermarkets and can't imagine an apple stuck in a person's mouth not being obvious to anyone looking at the person. Medieval apple consumers were less finicky. They ate medlars and crabapples. This apple wouldn't have been much bigger than a crabapple.) Disney removed the wedding because modern sensibilities didn't want Snow White to wake up from a coma and go "Oh, you're a prince? Well, I'm a princess, so we must marry each other at once." The original storyteller didn't do that either. But again--when the dwarfs, lower-status working people, couldn't revive Snow White, it was higher-pay-grade working people who did. It wasn't sex, or Romantic Love, at all. It was actually carelessness as opposed to the excessive veneration of the beautiful princess in the beautiful magical coma (so much less messy than the real kind). Shaking might even have represented a socially acceptable kind of punishment as a corrective for the worship-like treatment that was not reviving the woman. If the apple represented education, and the coma represented an ivory tower sort of job for which a young woman might be respected but avoided by people who don't feel fit to make conversation with her, the shaking-up that saves  her might represent harsh reviews. And, in any case, although we may imagine that after all this time Snow White wanted a baby and got one, the focus of the story is on the time she spent working and learning life lessons before she even let herself be kissed. 

But Peterson's analysis of "Snow White" is funny, and insightful...if we accept that our species of primates has reproduced too successfully and we all need to limit our reproductive activity, and the easiest way to limit the number of babies born and also provide better homes for those babies is for people to postpone making babies until they can afford houses with a separate room and garden for each one. Older people who say this are not opposed to grandchildren. We simply observe that cousins who get together once or twice a week can fill a house with childish laughter more efficiently than overcrowded siblings can, with fewer childish tears. And, if people genuinely enjoy the company of children, enough to consider adopting the ones who are not "White Newborns," there's unlikely to be any shortage of children to adopt after having our one-or-none. We want the human population to decrease in every generation until it gets back down to optimum levels. Breeding fewer and healthier babies is much nicer than the alternative the male mind tends to favor--having as many babies as possible and letting the surplus be killed by war or diseases. We want there never again to be "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Every child deserves to breathe free. 

The bottom line is that nature has given males a pathetically brief role in the reproductive process--they're disposable, their whole biological role lasts five minutes--and their irrational, hormone-driven thinking has always led them to think that this means they need to make multiple babies. Rationality, supplied to them by women because the female reproductive act lasts at least ten years, tells men, no, they must beget one baby or none and then justify their existence by working to feed that child. And how the male mind kicks and screams against this self-evident truth! It is hard for them to kick against the goad. They have to grow up and listen to the help, in the sense of guidance, God deemed meet for them in the Garden of Eden. Lower their eyes and listen to the words. That's the only way they'll ever stop acting like poor dumb animals and become the sort of legitimate patriarchs people want them to be. As Lewis put it, God may have given every husband two crowns, but one's made of paper and the other of thorns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t427pYWgef4

(Failing to make a clean, printable transcript of his video speech is yet another way Dr. Peterson reveals how, though brilliant, his mind is still limited by testosterone damage. He thinks everyone ought to have time to sit through a video speech, when God has given us the ability to read printed words and given the less disposable half of the species even the ability to enjoy it.)

Testosterone Poisoning 

Trump and Musk have so little in common, it's surprising that they got along for as long as they did, but they need to put their hormonal feelings aside and cooperate like responsible adults. It might help Musk to bear in mind that Trump is old. It might help Trump to bear in mind that Musk is young. Anyway, as an aid to the President's memory, someone needs to remind Trump of his own threat to become a "third party" candidate if Republicans insisted on nominating a candidate who was actually a Republican. After that they can remind Musk that what he's threatening is a bit of "monkey see, monkey do."

https://ncrenegade.com/a-message-from-trump/

Book Review: Knitter's Stash

Title: Knitter’s Stash

Author: Barbara Albright

Date: 2001

Publisher: Interweave

ISBN: 1-883010-89-6

Length: 174 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos by Joe Coca

Quote: “This book is meant to take you on an intimate armchair tour of thirty-three of America’s premier stores.”

That’s what’s not to like about this book. It’s a great knitting pattern book, but it’s mistitled. This is not a book about using up the skein of this yarn and half-skein of that yarn that make up a “knitter’s stash.” Some, not all, of the patterns could be reworked with odd yarns from a knitter’s stash. The writing is about wool shops; the patterns are things storekeepers have designed to market what was in their stashes. By the time the book was printed some of the yarn these patterns were designed to market had already ceased to exist. Many of the patterns use more of one kind of yarn than knitters are likely to have left over from other projects. You may use up some of your stash but this book will send you back to the store.

The table of contents titles sections (mostly four pages each) by wool shop. “Great Yarns, Inc., Outer Banks Throw. Knitting By the Sea, Graduated Ribbed Top,” and so on.

Turn to page two. One page contains a short description of the shop by that name in Raleigh, North Carolina, with a photo and contact information. Page three is the photograph of the afghan as it was made in stripes of the novelty yarns of the season, “from greens to peaches and then to off-whites.” Page four contains the instructions for copying Linda Pratt’s afghan, which are simple: take some expensive multicolor yarns and knit them on big needles in stripes. Page five fills in with some general knitting tips. This one would be easy to do with whatever’s in your stash.

Page six describes a shop called Knitting By the Sea in Carmel, California,again with a photo and contact information. Page seven shows the finished sweater. Pages eight and nine contain the instructions for a basic rib-stitch pullover, with a chart for a distinctive way of increasing as you knit your way up the sleeves. You could knit it in the cotton yarns that are available everywhere, every year, working tightly and probably having to redo the sleeves, or a lighter-weight cotton if you were lucky enough to find some; you would have to have overpurchased wildly to have that much cotton in your own stash.

And so on. The next (eight-page) chapter introduces the Pennsylvania shop of Kathy Zimmerman and her latest design, a pullover in “Age of Aquarius” cables (heart shapes for love, rope shapes for peace), and a matching hat and pair of heavy socks, all worked in a bulky, fluffy llama-wool yarn. (“Montera” yarn [] was on the market for many seasons, and was fun to handle—but I knitted my “Age of Aquarius” set in cotton. I used Lion Brand Kitchen Cotton,which Michaels no longer sells.It was interchangeable with Sugar’n’Cream and Peaches & Creme.) Only a wool shop, I suspect, ever has enough yarn to make a cabled sweater (cables use up more yarn) and hat and socks, also cabled, all matching each other, in a “stash.”

Most wool shops are owned and operated by expert knitters. In addition to Zimmerman, a few other designers’ names were familiar to people who read knitting book and magazines in 2001: Ron Schweitzer, who designed new American patterns using the nine natural colors into which Shetland sheep’s coats are classified; Melissa Matthay, who published a book of her own sweater patterns a few years later; Judy Dercum, one of the design team  for La Lana; Tara-Jon Manning, author of several books; Beryl Hiatt and Lindy Phelps, joint authors of two books.

More of the designers featured here were just storekeepers, though knitters may have remembered visits to their stores as particular treats. I always thought Yarns International was worth the extra bus ride—from Bethesda Station and the wonderful wool shop there, even.

Shops and yarns have changed, but knitting has not. In addition to the first three designs, readers get patterns for one basic poncho, two far from basic shawls,two lightweight long-sleeved sweaters, three sleeveless sweaters, a rug, eight thick warm cardigans (including baby sizes),a scarf, two pillow covers, a cowl, a set of eight washcloths, four stuffed animals, three more thick winter pullovers, a tea cozy,two more hats, a baby-size pair of socks, a bag, a baby-size sleeveless smock, one blanket-thick pullover with buttons opening down to the waist for relief from the heat while wearing it, and a pair of mittens. Making them up in this year’s yarns will make them this year’s knitwear, although one cardigan definitely preserves the memory of 2001’s fad for super-bulky sweaters, which was a fad all active and healthy sweater wearers were glad to put behind us.

Top-heavy sweater wearers were also glad to see the fad for sweaters and shirts divided in the middle, like the Marie Louise Lace Sweater in this book, passing its peak in the 1990s. Of course we knew in 2001 that there’s no reason why a person not trying to look bigger would actually have knitted lace up to the bustline and ribbing above. The sweater could easily be made flattering to everybody by knitting just one row of lace ripples around the bottom (if that) and eyelet ribbing all the way up. If you couldn’t find Berroco Linet yarn, which wasn’t imported for very long, you could always knit this sweater in good old Speed-Cro-Sheen cotton, which had the advantage of being available in white and black instead of “wild mushroom” color.

It’s also light enough to knit as a winter garment in Shetland wool, and might look particularly pretty in undyed wool from naturally “blue” (grey) or “red” (red-brown) sheep. When wool is groomed out of a sheep’s coat rather than cut, washed in clear water, and spun without being dyed, it feels nothing like the scratchy, acid-soaked “washable wools” to which many people are allergic. Ron Schweitzer’s nine-color undyed sweaters feel more like cashmere than like what many people think of as wool.

My own must-knit-nows in this book, in addition to the Age of Aquarius set, were the Celtic Cardigan (using up four congenial leftovers of wool from my stash), Cardigan with Garter Stitch Trim (sold the second day it was displayed), and Lace Ribs Pullover...and all those small projects that really will use up yarn from your stash, if you have one, or from another knitter’s stash, if you don’t have one.

To use up a large stash fast, the final “Opulent Evening Shawl” was designed to use up some not very knitter-friendly yarn from Italy, which you probably would have had enough sense to avoid in 2001. It will use up all your lovely ends of Sugar’n’Cream, Peaches & Creme, Red Heart, Decor, Berella, Philosophers Wool, Montera, Lion Brand “Homespun,” Mountain Colors, 1824, Cherry Tree Hill, Tahki, Cleckheaton, and similar blanket-weight yarns in a gorgeous rainbow of elaborate color mixes and plain stitching. If you have lighter-weight scraps, you can strand two or three together to put them into this shawl too. Heavier? The rainbow idea could also be applied to that blanket at the beginning of the book, and by the way, although a one-person afghan or “throw” can be only three or four feet long, there’s nothing to stop you knitting it as a full-sized blanket, seven feet long.

But of course Albright and her storekeeper friends were hoping that you’d notice the one-color sweaters—oh, the lightness of the Marie Louise Lace Sweater! the mathematical precision of the Lace Ribs Pullover! the almost Brownie-Scouts-project simplicity of the Cardigan with Garter Stitch Trim!—and think “Must knit now,” and go out and buy another bag of yarn, knit through it, and add some more leftovers to your stash. Serious stash knitters go into a yarn store and make a beeline for the stash of odd balls left over at the end of their seasons. Maybe you didn’t want to make a whole sweater or blanket in a fashionable shade of hot pink or dirt-color or “wild mushroom,” but one or two skeins will be a great addition to your stash. You might want to knit a little brown bunny with black eyes into a child’s sweater, or use a strand of bright orange to add depth and complexity to a shades-of-brown afghan...

(Fair disclosure: I think stash knitting is great, not only because it satisfies my bargain-hunting and pattern-tweaking instincts, but because, best of all, it yanks the chains of the “Everybody should ‘declutter’ and not own more than they can carry on their backs, so they can waste all their money nomadding about until they reach retirement age and can be packed into nursing homes where they’ll die faster” crowd. Hello...I would never want to interfere with your living like birds, or hobos, or whatever your role models for life may be, but I maintain that humans are better off when they live in separate houses, insulated with things they enjoy owning, and leave both houses and contents to those of their relatives who can appreciate them. Knitters should build wool rooms onto our houses in order to “declutter” the tossers out of our lives.)

Web Log for Independence Day Weekend

In the expectation of minimal online time over the weekend, without ruling out the possibility of finding lots of links in minimal time...Link hunting is like beachcombing, anyway. Some days you could do it all day and all you'd get would be the exercise. Some days you find something worth picking up in the first five minutes.

Unfortunately these days a good half of my online time seems to be taken up by harassment from Microsoft. 

They're trying to sell everybody games. I think life's too short. Even if playing computer games helps people become better combat pilots, the Army has better sense than to want me flying any planes, even drones.

They're trying to sell everybody on using Microsoft Edge instead of Chrome or Firefox. For about a year we had a deal where a sister used Edge and I used Chrome. I had more fun with the computer than she had. I don't know that Edge was to blame for this. I know that Chrome has my history and passwords while Edge has hers, so I could do without Edge altogether. And, the way Microsoft has been pushing the matter, I'd rather. Nothing I'd want to use would ever need to be pushed.

They're trying to sell everybody a whole new computer. This year. Microsoft has some bills coming due and needs to sell new computers with software people rent rather than buy. I don't rent. 

I don't support toxic electronic waste, either. Here comes Karma, Microsoft: you wanted to whip people into a froth about plastic waste to distract them from glyphosate, and what's the biggest source of plastic waste? Electronics are. What's the biggest source of toxic mineral waste? Electronics are that, too. 

I mean, if I walk into Wal-Mart and see one of those Wang word processors we used back in the 1980s, completely refurbished so that it'll run the original Wang word processing package and also do basic calculator functions, that I might buy. To keep it out of a landfill. Screaming-new future toxic waste, I don't buy. 

Microsoft needs to shift its focus toward repairs and maintenance rather than sales of any more computers. Most people who use computers at all seem to have collections already. 

Microsoft is the textbook example of corporate hubris. They think they're too big to need to do what customers want. Hahaha! How did that work for General Motors, Microsoft? How did it work for IBM? What about Pfizer? 

No matter how many stockholder a corporation has or how many of them vote to cheat the customers, a corporation's primary reason for existence is still to serve its customers. If it's not doing that, it may cease to exist. Microsoft is close enough to a monopoly that it might take the whole Internet with it when it goes. 

I made a policy decision this weekend that I recommend to anyone who would prefer to keep the Internet going:

(1) While your "older" computer--you know, however shiny-new it is, Microsoft wants you to think of it as "old" the week after it was bought--is connecting to the Internet, complain every single time Microsoft harasses you. This includes but is not limited to

(a) "updates" that interfere with your work (or games, or movies--what you define as your computer's proper work is your business) 

(b) randomly changing the size, color, orientation, etc., of your screen display

(c) anything that causes your computer, or certain programs, to run very very slowly

(d) anything that causes your browser to crash, or interferes with recovery if you cause it to crash

(e) anything that allows your mouse to react to shadows as if they were touches

(f) and probably several other things that you might think were caused by a virus or mechanical failure, but they're not--they're caused by Microsoft. Overheating, for example. Today's computers really are likely to overheat if the temperature in the office is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but if a computer built after 1990 overheats when you're comfortable, either its little fan is broken, the wiring in your building is about to ignite, or an Internet connection is sending you programming that is causing your computer to overheat. Or "losing" your settings--automatically resetting your computer to jump into the view you hate, restyle your documents into Ugly Wasteful Web Format, or restart programs you've disabled.

Microsoft wants to pretend that nobody complains about these things, only about how to load on more "updates" and games. Microsoft needs to receive a bombardment. Microsoft needs a loud, clear message that every minute of your computer time--while a client is waiting, while people at the computer center need to get home to their families, while you're paying for connection time, whatever--is yours not theirs. And that interruptions to your work will cost them money. 

(2) Demand that Microsoft disavow its stated intentions to make the Internet unavailable to computers using Windows 10 or Windows 7 and, instead, work toward the goal of making it accessible to computers using MS-DOS circa 1985. The goal needs to be one computer per lifetime and no wasted computers or parts. 

(3) Be prepared to do without Internet connections if Microsoft makes any further attempts to force any sales of anything. Remember how much more money you were making before the Internet, anyway. Let Microsoft know that it will learn to do business in our frugal, Green way, and communicate in our logical and mutually respectful way, or not at all.

(4) Let your elected officials know that, if the "tech giants" don't obey their customers, they will no longer be "giants." Microsoft, and likewise Google, Amazon, Facebook, and X, can easily become tech has-beens...like Wang. Insist on legislation that preserves your anonymity, protects your investment, discourages censorship, punishes spying as the crime it is, and affirms complete freedom of expression.

(5) It's better to have to work with Linux for a few years than it is to let Microsoft continue in the misbelief that Microsoft can decide when we buy computers or programs. Seriously? The way Microsoft is dragging, some days, it's more efficient to work with a manual typewriter. 

Fashion 

For those who can listen to the music, it's recommended, but this comment is mostly about the outfit: Whyyyyy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XU-5mVRc_4

Again, it's not that her whole life history and character can be accurately inferred from the shorts that look as if she'd just outgrown them and not been able to afford new ones, poor little thing. (Though in the case of Haley Reinhart this effect was probably planned by an agent. She could afford shorts that fit.) It's that, considered purely as a fashion statement, those short shorts make her legs look pasty and puffy. 

So once again I asked Google for some casual heat wave wear--bearing in mind that sunburnt thighs feel even worse than swampy-sweaty thighs, and that a decent skirt does a great deal to cool and fan the legs and prevent that swampy-sweaty feeling. 

Still shows a lot of leg, but it doesn't really scream and point to the flab on the upper thighs. Everyone has a little flab up there. When it's not obvious, that's because most women know better than to call attention to it.

Positively pretty.

Wearing white bottom pieces always seems a bit like tempting fate to me, but if you don't mind not sitting on the grass, not eating, not picking up a pen, dodging your pets, being a fussbudget who wipes off every seat you sit on, and still having your skirt ruined by a passing child with a lollipop...

The bare leg thing does not appeal to me. I never consciously plan to stay indoors or on freshly mown lawns all day. Anyway, places where lawns are mown usually have sewers where mosquitoes breed. I like a little protection, myself. But if you're tall and want to look shorter, and want to show off that your legs have not yet been scratched up by venturing away from mown lawns, why not?

It's knit fabric, so it'll probably stretch, but it would be fun to wear.

The good news for us "Winter" types who look sickly in pretty pastel colors is that the pastel colors don't make us look nearly so bad on a skirt (or slacks) as they do on a shirt. Though bottom pieces that are lighter in color than top pieces have to be carefully chosen not to make us look more bottom-heavy than we are. 

If we're not bottom-heavy at all, this look can work.

Short slacks might reasonably be considered more "modest" than short skirts. They don't have to accentuate rolls of fat. They can gracefully hide them.

They can even be part of that parody-of-a-man's-suit look Reinhart was rocking. 

They can even be bright-colored, for those who want that effect.

So...maybe Reinhart was opening for an older singer and wanted to make her a source of relief to the eyes, I don't know. Would it kill fashion critics to be charitable in interpreting the "message" sent by fashion mistakes? 

Food 

Blood and fat in meat are the usual suspects in cases of food poisoning. Pork is also especially likely to be a source of food poisoning. Kosher and halal meats are prepared by different people who recite different prayers, to the One God Christians also worship and unbelievers doubt, but the relevant point is that they're prepared by minimizing the blood and fat and not using pork. It's not a sin for Christians to eat kosher or halal meat. So it seems to me that unless the kosher and halal meat cost a great deal more, either kosher or halal or both should be the default option 

https://medforth.biz/despite-parents-protest-german-daycare-centre-offers-children-only-halal-sausage/

Gender

Scientifically, I think Brian Yapko's long rant is inaccurate. Ninety-nine point something in a hundred humans are either male or female, not both--at birth. Then there's the fraction of one percent who have mixed DNA, a physical condition, not "in the mind" or subject to change; then there are the unfortunate males who may be physically "feminized" by a toxic combination of endocrine-disrupting pollutant drugs and estrogen-fattened meat. And then there are the poor souls who have been so badly miseducated about what their gender identity means, probably most often girls who have been molested if not raped, that they think they need to change their sex to be happy.

But then, oh then, there's the cult of "transhumanists" who want to play God, to tinker with the sexes and all the other body functions of humankind. Some of the more "conservative" types Out There always suspected as much. Like the foot binders and neck stretchers and other body mutilators throughout history, they want to control even the physical shapes of their fellow humans. In their sick fantasies they'll be the potters and the rest of humankind will be the clay. Peter Thiel publicly admitted this. They want to sell people on the possible benefits of "change," any and all change, in the bodies God gave them and never mind the more probable damage...they really are capable of thinking "What a cute little curvature of the spine, I'd like to see more children like that." Or "What a sheepish sort of face--why can't he be made to grow wool all over?" They'll do it, too, if we let them. In the past their spiritual ancestors bound feet, stretched necks, scarred skin, chopped off sensitive parts, deliberately deformed children's limbs and necks so that they'd grow up with disabilities that made them more effective beggars...In The Prince and the Pauper Edward is supplied with a deliberately induced skin ulcer for begging purposes. In real life it might have been an arm or leg, deliberately broken, set in a crooked position for life.

It's too bad if the people with mixed DNA think more public attention to their condition will help others see them as human beings rather than freaks--now. It may be a blessing in disguise if the physically feminized men get a solid message from the rest of society, "Stop spraying chemicals outdoors forever, and don't eat any kind of meat until your hormones re-balance and you feel more male than female again," instead of being told how cool and trendy they are. Human beings should not tolerate the "transhumanists" and, if that means expressions of attitudes like Brian Yapko's hurt some people's little fee-wings, those people just need to get over it. 

Our bodies are the temples of our Creator. We are the living Body of Christ. We are responsible for maintaining the miracles that are human bodies in the way God designed them, and, if people want to say that that means no tattoos, no transplants, no face lifts, no false eyelashes, not even any lipstick, I think that should be easier for everyone to tolerate than this insanity of inflicting "change for its own sake" on other people's bodies.

As a good lower-case-l liberal I ask people just one thing: If we want the young to learn to love the bodies God gave them, that must include the physically gender-confused bodies. If Jack is a boy and Jill is a girl and they need to deal with that, well then Jazz is a DNA chimera and everyone else needs to deal with that, too. Whatever shape it takes. And people who know Jazz personally need to find ways to integrate per probably asexual, which does not mean autistic, personality into social life that's not defined by gender alone.

https://classicalpoets.org/2025/06/on-the-existence-of-two-genders-a-poem-by-brian-yapko/

Homelessness 

This guy's analysis nails it, I can vouch for some of his tips and tricks working for people who are frugal not homeless, so I'm willing to trust him about the actual homelessness.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O_ChwbIu5X8

Hurricane Helene 

Young Tennessee singer wrote this song about the town of Erwin, Tennessee, which was almost washed away, not quite. I've heard some things about Erwin...well, people have heard some things about Gate City. Anyway, "Whiskey Revival" is about imperfect people who have faith. The footage of Erwin is pretty because it is a pretty place. And damaged.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYCWkJ33LU

Independence Day as Celebrated by the Contrary Burro 

Unfortunately, left-wingers' "declaration of interdependence," and celebrations thereof, are more insidious than the Babylon Bee imagined, but this 2020 post was too good not to quote:

"

While Americans celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, barbecues, and merrymaking, Democrats celebrate Dependence Day by staying inside and weeping over all the freedom going on outside. The celebrations conclude with the reading of the Communist Manifesto and the singing of "Imagine".

"

Music 

LOL at Google for posting the question, "What's so special about Mark Knopfler?" and answering that he picks his guitar with his bare, undoubtedly cow-heel-textured fingertips instead of using a pick. I suppose that's the most objective answer, but the correct answer at least also includes that, though generally classified as a rock singer, he has a voice that's actually pleasant to listen to. Most rock singers tend to scream in the general direction of a tune and, if a tune can be identified and they make enough noise, they've sold a record...

I've always liked Dave Barry's description of a recent rock concert (in Florida, of course) as men stomping around and screaming angrily because someone has stolen their shirts. Take it from a classic rock connoisseur--Barry's even performed classic rock. Elvis Presley could sing, despite distracting people by dancing at the same time. The Beatles could sing. Jim Morrison could sing. Janis Joplin could sing, when she wasn't yelling. Madonna Ceccone can sing, when she's not caterwauling. Gordon Lightfoot could sing, in his nasal way. Stevie Nicks could sing. Simon & Garfunkel could sing. There is a reason why we remember their names. Even when the great rock singers were making their legendary records, a majority of rock singers could not sing. It's not that the new crop are so much worse--it's that few records by people who couldn't sing have lasted since the 1960s.

Anyway no worries, kids, this is not rock music, this is educational. This is history. This is one of the multitude of reasons, apart from the food, why (1) sharing a meal at McDonald's is not considered a date and (2) so many people who have alternatives never go into McDonald's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sYK2RwH5E8

Weather 

In addition to US Independence Day, the Fourth of July deserves to be remembered as a day that can be remarkably hot or cold. In the same decade. Demonstrating, once again, that weather quirks don't add up to "global climate change." Though cities that are a great deal hotter than surrounding rural areas can add up to dangerous levels of local warming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_Eastern_North_America_heat_wave

...whereas in 1920, it was cold enough that some parts of the US saw snow. None of the oldtimers who remembered this event claimed that the snow stuck on the ground--only that it was a cold wet day when some of the precipitation took the form of sleet and/or snow. (Google now turns up a photo showing about four inches of snow on a street in Colorado, which is not confirmed to have fallen in July.) 

Windows 

(The real thing, not merely Microsoft...)

Hardly even news by now, but...this is "The Legacy Traditional School," where fifth-graders planned to murder a classmate and might actually have done it if one kid hadn't panicked and told an adult. (That was a good, brave kid. Even if another kid was correct in suspecting that the plot was to play at murder rather than commit it, even if the would-be slayer intended to drive a knife into the wall beside the intended victim, that still would probably have led to a fight in which someone would have been hurt. An adult should always be nearby when a game requires somebody to play dead.) 

Hmm. I have no idea how many times my brother and I, and occasionally other friends, "killed" each other in games. I don't think it ever even occurred to us to open a real pocket knife, which we carried, to lend realism to a murder scene, or tie even a shoelace around a neck. It was pure fantasy. After a chase ended with the Escaping Prisoner being caught, the Prisoner might be shot or hanged or beheaded, but that part was pantomimed without props. Possibly because we were good and tired from the chase, which was the interesting part of that game. 

"Boyfriends and girlfriends" was another game that's not new to many schools, if any. I had a "boy friend" who bought snacks for me, and one who bought trinkets, in primary school; their parents gave them the pocket change the game required. One of the sisters was even formally challenged to fight a smaller, younger sixth grade girl whose "boy friend" had been looking at my sister. (Sister took a mental health day, teachers were warned, and the fight never happened.) My brother had a different "girl friend" each year; one year it was twins. We took it as seriously as other kinds of school friendship, which wasn't very. Kissing is not the interesting part of a second grade romance. I felt so badly betrayed by a fourth grade "boy friend" that I didn't admit any charitable feelings toward any other boys up into grade eleven, but  that too was part of playing the game. The interesting part: seeing what people outside your immediate family will put up with. Provided that people hear their friends telling you which boys liiike you and you advising those boys to go jump in the lake, not having a boyfriend can be more empowering than having one.

So what's wrong with kids who would even think seriously about stabbing a straying fifth grade "boy friend"? Well, for one thing, the girls lacked a healthy sense of Southern Belledom. You don't stab a straying boyfriend; you replace him. You don't want a boyfriend dead; you want him grovelling and promising never to look at another female again. You show him what he's missing. You have a good time with your second choice. You might even let him do things you never let your first choice do--which, in grade five, might mean playing with those expensive art pencils you weren't supposed to bring to school. A mere male could beat him up but only you can make him buy you a chocolate bar every single day.

But also...what's wrong with that picture of their schoolroom? No windows. No trees. Well, it's Arizona, you might argue; they don't have trees, they may not even have saguaros. That might be part of the problem. Are human beings meant to grow up without trees? 

https://pjmedia.com/gregbyrnes/2025/07/01/5th-grade-murder-plot-uncovered-n4941340

Book Review: The China I Knew and My Several Worlds

Title: The China I Knew (condensed from My Several Worlds)

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Date: 1954

Publisher: John Day Co.

ISBN: none

Quote: “[T]his is not a complete autobiography. My private life has been uneventfully happy.”

The question is whether you can be content with the condensed version of Pearl Buck’s memoir, or must have the long one. I’ve read both. If you have the luxury of time to read a long book, get My Several Worlds; Buck had enough memories to make it worth reading. If you’re not sure how much time you want to spend with one of the most remarkable women of her generation, The China I Knew is a good short read.

Briefly, as a missionary child Buck was allowed more contact with Chinese people than many missionary children, remaining in Asia even after the revolution. She studied Chinese with native teachers; apparently she was the sort of borderline child prodigy who finds adults more interesting than children until they’re old enough to tutor or baby-sit, and her friends were mostly Chinese women. She understood the things people said about “the foreign devils,” and often heard instances of kindness, as when people not exactly ready to be baptized listened to her father’s evangelical sermons: “He is making a pilgrimage in our country so that he may acquire merit in Heaven. Let us help him to save his soul!” a Chinese elderwoman shushed the restless audience. Among themselves she often heard Chinese people laughing at foreigners, but “more often than not” someone would “say tolerantly” that “these Christians...do their best and we must not blame them for what they do not know. After all, they were not born Chinese.”

She describes Chinese cooking, child care, footbinding (already on the way out of fashion) and men’s “pigtails” (ditto), but of the things Buck saw in old China, perhaps the most relevant to new China is the way “the Manchu invasion of 1644 was success­ful in a military sense...the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese per­suaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves...Since the Manchus were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of government were soon performed by Chinese...The Manchus were like pet cats.”

I don’t do foreign policy so I’ll stop there.

Buck knew children who were sold as slaves, who had no recourse against abuse but, as a status symbol, were often well treated. (The ones she knew were probably overworked and underfed, and complained about as much as well-off teenagers do.) She knew people who didn’t know how to walk up and down stairs. She met a woman who asked wistfully, “Is it true your husband speaks to you in the presence of other people? Not shameful?” (It was “shameful” for him to talk to his wife instead of his parents during family time, rude for her to talk to his female relatives unless she was spoken to—“This rigorousness of family decorum was of course not to be found except in the...most conservative Chinese families.”) As China briefly considered gradual change rather than revolution, another friend said to Buck, of daughters, “Small feet or education she must have, one or the other” (in order to marry well and maintain social status).

The longer version of Buck’s autobiography contains more personal stories, notably the one about why the second child in The Good Earth had brain damage: Buck had a brain-damaged child and became an advocate for those with cognitive impairments. The short one contains most, not all, the vignettes of Old China.

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Illyris

This week's butterfly does not seem to be endangered, but it's obscure. Graphium illyris is found intropical Africa, where it has to compete for attention with many larger animals--even larger butterflies.

Photo by Petomikula, taken in November in Cameroon.

It is not, however, a very small butterfly. This individual's faded, semitransparent wings spanned more than 8cm.

To see the rest of the photo essay (trigger warning: the elderly butterfly was so unconcerned about the researcher touching its wing because it was dying, and in some photos it's shown dead):

https://www.papillon-poitou-charentes.org/Papilioninae-a-determiner-1.html

Its English name is Cream-banded Swordtail. Science sites give little information about it. This early published description uses a lot of French words to tell us what the photo above tells us, plus a description of the cream-to-yellow and dull red-to-orange spots on the underside of the hind wings:

https://www.persee.fr/doc/bsef_0037-928x_1978_num_83_3_21636

Countries where it's found include Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Zaire.

There are subspecies. The list of subspecies names has changed over time. The distinctions among subspecies are subtle; sites like Inaturalist don't even bother.

The subspecies name flavisparvus literally means "the little yellow kind," or at least "yellow-small," and its Cream Bands can show a good deal of butter in the cream. It's considered rare, while the other subspecies are merely uncommon. This drawing used on postage shows a very yellow band:

To buy this stamp and others in the same series: https://solbery.com/catalog/stamps?country=Liberia&series=Butterflies+%281996+-+2nd+series%29&nominal=25+c&sort=oldest

Other subspecies listed recently are girardaui and hamatus as well as, of course, illyris. In the newest material girardaui and hamatus are lumped together as girardaui. Subspecies names addenda and stictica have been out of use for many years.

Photo by Deboas, taken in Liberia in February. This Cream-Banded Swordtail is drinking with a buddy of a different species, smaller and stripier. 

As in many Swallowtail species, both sexes are primarily pollinators, but the reproductive cycle requires males to do some composting. Males have to ingest mineral salts in order to become able to mate. Females absorb minerals from contact with males, and can afford to flit around sipping nectar and choosing leaves for their larvae to eat, while males sip from polluted puddles. Researchers note that male illyris are attracted to dead fish, as well as sweaty shirts.

Some females look more brown-and-cream rather than black-and-white. How consistently this rule allows the sexes to be distinguished is unknown. Both sexes usually stay in rain forests where they're not often seen by humans. Males are more likely to look for polluted puddles on forest roads. 

Which flowers they prefer, or what the caterpillars eat, is not known. Apparently nobody has confirmed even what the early stages of this butterfly look like. 

Book Review: The Time of Our Lives

Title: The Time of Our Lives

Author: Rita F. Snowden

Date: 1966

Publisher: Abingdon

ISBN: none

Length: 198 pages

Quote: “Noise...kills not only cockroaches and their kind in the insect world but a great deal that is fine ad sensitive in our human world...It is never easy to be quiet in spirit, but it is essential if we are not to die inch by inch.”

These short Christian essays, a little longer than the one-page “daily devotional” genre, are suitable to reading before breakfast.

I find The Time of Our Lives better written than many books of its genre and period. There are a few instances of a clever thought labored too hard, dragged out into a story when it ought to have been pared down to an epigram...

“I spent an hour one morning with ten prisoners, and as we separated, I said to myself very firmly, ‘Never again!’ Our meeting was not behind barred walls as you might suppose, but in a suburban vestry; nor were we under guard—each of us was as free as the air to come and go. But all ten, nevertheless, were prisoners—prisoners of the unimportant.”

If I caught myself writing that way, I would remind myself that, although audiences that put up with Free Verse and Advice Columns “Written” by Animals are obviously tolerant, there are limits to everything.

“It was a beautiful morning—perfect weather for gardening, or for that wheelchair cruise through the park Sister Smith, Granny Jones, and Brother Brown have been pining for. Sister Jackson and Brother Johnson spent it looking at the ceiling in the hospital. The Millers’ leaky roof was not mended, nor was a home located for the cousins who have been staying with the Robinsons ever since their house burned down. The topic of discussion was whether black, brown, or burgundy-colored bindings for the hymnals would look best against the backs of the wooden benches. On the way out I heard Deacon Brown tell young Johnny Jones that none of us had time to pray with him about his feelings upon having learned that he inherited the gene for rheumatoid arthritis from his grandmother. It occurred to me that we were being held prisoner by the unimportant.”

That’s not from The Time of Our Lives; it’s from memory. One can imagine the churches in which the cutesy-wutesy belaboring of the cliché would actually be preferred to a statement of the situation that suggests, shudderquake, changes.

Snowden, to her credit, doesn’t indulge herself in cutesy-wutesy belaboring of clichés often. After the example quoted she moves on to an epigram, an historical fact, a Bible reference, an original epigram of her own (“It is so easy to be concerned about temperance in strong drink and never notice one’s intemperance in speech”), and two lines of contemporary poetry. Readers’ tolerance may vary, but Snowden snaps out of her then-expected, and unfortunately still tolerated in many churches, tedious moods before exhausting my patience. Churches may profit by her example.

Why I Don't Expect Some People to Be in Heaven

This is, obviously, a metaphor. What I personally believe about the Judgment and the afterlife is that my mortal brain is not able to imagine it. All I can imagine are mortal ideals of what is good, and right, and beautiful in this life, and try to keep as close as I can to those. Many people do not enjoy the company of people who try to be and do good. Therefore...

I dreamed a wicked man was raised

to Heaven--Kindness' self be praised!

Toward righteous men his course he set,

and heard them speak: "How every debt

we owed on Earth was paid before

we came here, is our topic for

this evening..." "Errr...if you don't mind,

some other company I'll find,"

he said, and turned toward some youth.

"How one can always tell the truth..."

When resurrection changed his heart

renew'd was every other part,

and so the conscience he had seared

in its full strength had reappeared.

"Perhaps rough veterans may be

good company for the likes of me,"

he said; approaching, heard one say:

"I was too scared to run away!"

He recognized the face of one

he'd left behind him as he'd run.

"With those old grey heads I may find

no memories to grieve my mind."

He heard one ancient say to another,

"May I present my great-grandmother,

who I now wish could have relied

on me for help, before she died,

though I now see she has the grace

of sight and strength, healed, in this place."

He seemed to hear a voice sigh low,

"The door, at least, lock when you go."

The door swung open wide as he

rushed out, from pity to run free.

He turned again. Children at play

he sought as goal of getaway.

"My Daddy loves me, I can tell.

He shows me how to do things well!"

one squeaked, as once again our man

rethought his latest action plan,

looked upward, and the truth did tell:

"I'd fit in better down in Hell.

Was I 'once saved, and always saved,'

when my whole life was so depraved?"

The Comforter to him drew near

and murmured softly in his ear:

"Once saved, and always saved, indeed,

were some who thought that love might need

to save souls even such as you.

What you did here's preserved to view

by those who may ask where you are.

You may go down, now, and go far!"

He moved a pebble, showed a hole.

Into it dived the guilty soul,

and as he sank, they heard him yell,

"Land of eternal shame, farewell!

Perpetual rest among the good,

I wish I'd sooner understood,

is only torment,  now, to me.

O flames! can ever I be free?"

Into the flames now disappearing,

he left the Blest no longer hearing

his voice mar Heaven's harmony.

Then one struck up a melody:

"Praise to the Mercy ever sure,

Reserving Heaven for the pure!"

Web Log for 7.3.25

Blogspot reports the site's lost a few thousand readers this week. Apparently they were regular, and now they're gone. Has this happened to your site, too? Has a specific country been involved? I don't think it was anything I said; I'm pretty sure somebody's either cracked down on some hackers, or shut down one of the foreign editions of Blogspot.

(I'm in favor of shutting down all the non-English editions, actually. French and Spanish might be all right if I could at least read what I've been translated into saying, but Google doesn't enable that. I don't trust robots to translate my writings into languages I can't even read.)

Books 

Does the Cat Sanctuary still have a skunk called Jimmy in residence? I don't know. I've not seen him this year, and he might easily have eaten the poisoned bait intentionally set out for the neighborhood cats, but skunks like to keep to themselves. Anyway, here's a review of the book from which our Jimmy Skunk got his name. It started to seem babyish to me around age seven, but tiny tots liked the very loosely fact-based stories Thornton W. Burgess used to write.

https://blbooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/66-adventures-of-jimmy-skunk.html

COVID Panic, Surviving 

The number of people who felt moved to comment on this, on X, amazed me. I wouldn't have believed a long, yet civil, debate on any topic was still possible there.

I posted a few replies to comments on X, partly to see how many of the commenters replied like human beings rather than a private bot army...Long story short: I think we as The People need to move forward, learning from the COVID panic that government is the wrong place to raise health or even medical questions. That doesn't mean that some people don't need to be sued; it means that lawsuits are of interest to, at most, the "class" of people injured by a specific batch of vaccine, and reclaiming our own health care from government or insurance companies or even doctors is something we all need to do for survival purposes.

https://ncrenegade.com/how-did-we-let-this-happen/

Music 

In one way, at least, baby-boomers refuse to grow up just like our parents and grandparents...E-friends who blog about being seventy years old also blog about cranking up the stereo and blasting the neighborhood with rock'n'roll. My preference for soft, clear, pure tones and interesting harmonies was very unusual for people my age and used to be called an affectation...

There's always been a lot of ambivalence about the "band" formed by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Their voices harmonized so well. Their personalities apparently clashed--or was that an act intended to point up what they were all about? They sang about the lack of connection people were feeling with one another, which seemed only aggravated by all the well meant efforts to "draw out" the "lonely" people so that they could "fit in." Their old record company now maintains a database of all their classic songs. It's worth revisiting...How many of their songs expressed the confusion introverts felt when society was screaming at us that extroversion was normal? Was that the theme of all of their songs that weren't about Teen Romance, or also of some of the ones that were?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFOi0pfroiU

I don't know this young fellow in real life, but the Kingsport Times-News says he's local so I looked him up. The accent's real, the background could be ten or fifteen miles from where I'm typing, and he's speaking for a lot of local young men. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqWfAm80uEg

Poetry 

Here, for your Fourth of July delight, is a bit of light verse from the Mossy Creek neighborhood of Jefferson City, Tennessee. Tennessee readers, do you consider that local? Anyway, it's on grilling:

https://classicalpoets.org/2025/07/summer-family-cookout-a-poem-by-doug-stoiber/

Seasonal Nag 

Serena was too busy to do anything cute with this theme, but an e-friend kindly shared this dog. In the original GIF the dog was slurping up as much cold water as possible, then lying down with his muzzle in the dish as shown. This web site will never inflict GIF on you. 

 

 

One more nag: Most animals don't enjoy fireworks. It would be nice to make arrangements for them to stay somewhere they feel safe, with someone they trust, while they wonder whether those reminders of past battles mean you or they are being shot at. Serena seems pretty comfortable with the idea that people occasionally shoot at deer in the woods and she's safe as long as she keeps out of their way. Your pet...well, I wouldn't take Serena close enough to a fireworks display to get a good view. 

Have a safe and Glorious Fourth! 

Book Review: Missing Presumed Unwed

Title: Missing Presumed Unwed

Author: Claire Gardner

Date: 2020

Quote: "You can't hear this. I could go into a detailed rundown...and...all you'd hear is 'cheep chirp cheep.'"

Terry Triplett, who aspired to be a detective, has died and come back as a parakeet. His adventures start when his wife finally hears his voice speaking through the cheeps and chirps. As the family pet, he's been renamed Seymour by his children. He can't eat his favorite foods, which his wife still cooks for the kids. And all he can do when the children talk to strangers is peck and squawk.

I think this plot device is revenge porn with a sense of humor, but this cozy mystery is a fun read. Nobody but Terry's human form is dead. Somebody's missing. The children will find the missing person but Seymour will get his chances to squeak for himself, feeding his wife the "zingers" she wants to hurl at a verbal abuser. 

Most women have known, however briefly, a man who would have been much more fun to live with if he'd been a parakeet. Therefore most women should be able to chortle over this book. 

Limerick for Drudge and Serena

Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans! This limerick was prompted by Poets & Storytellers United. Status update is below; adoptable cat and dog photos, for sharing, are below the rant linked here.

With the baby cat's growing and nibbling,

Climbing, scampering, there is no quibbling,

But his moods of inaction

Drive us to distraction.

How we wish that he still had a sibling!

As regular readers know, Serena is the Queen of the Cat Sanctuary. She solved a local crime mystery, last winter, at the risk of her life--solved it by getting people to see what I'd been telling them was there for some time. A crime mystery is not only "who done it" but also "what's done about it." Serena did more to solve that than anyone else did. After exposure to toxins (primarily glyphosate vapors in the air) she has a history of giving birth to kittens who didn't show the Manx gene but either didn't live, or didn't survive their first whiff of glyphosate. 

"So why not have her spayed and spare the drama?" Because the way the Seralini Effect works is that females who inherit this trait survive by eliminating toxins through defective offspring. There are women who say they'd rather shorten their own lives than give birth to babies who can't survive. I can't make that decision for Serena and see absolutely no reason to imagine she'd make it for herself. She loves the kittens she chooses to rear but she wastes no effort on the ones she considers non-viable. In fact I've argued with her and persuaded her to feed a few kittens, including Drudge's late mother Pastel, who Serena initially thought weren't worth feeding.

So last winter I was sure that, if she had kittens, they'd be doomed Seralini kittens. She had three. She tried to keep all three alive, but two just didn't come into this world to stay. If the smallest one lived three months, I said, his name would be recorded as "Miracle."

So far he has yet to claim anything he's been called--Baby Cat, Little One, etc.--as a name. I think he may be waiting to earn the name of Miracle. I'm pretty sure he's going to be a large, perhaps oversized, black "Tuxie" tomcat with a half-tail folded under into something like a rabbit's tail. The tail moves independently from side to side, easily enough, and can be raised or lowered, but can't be straightened.

The kitten does bounce and pounce and climb on things, now and then. Serena thinks he needs more activity. She's cuddled other kittens while they were nursing, in the usual way. With this one she sits down, lets him begin nursing, then jumps up and runs around the office, then sits down and lets him begin nursing again somewhere else, then runs around the office again, and so on. He gets full meals in four or five sittings each. 

Drudge, who is this kitten's nephew, is really too big to play with kittens. Though he was patient and gentle when he was the biggest kitten in the litter, and he's been very patient and gentle with his little uncle, the size difference seems too much to allow them to play as kittens do. Drudge is still growing , even skinny under his fur, but is already longer and taller than all the other cats currently living in the neighborhood--except the baby's father.

The baby's father, whom I call Tarbaby, was visiting the Cat Sanctuary regularly. He wasn't hungry; he was looking for a fight. He inflicted several skin wounds on Drudge before Serena took a stand, for the baby's sake. Serena weighs ten to twelve pounds. Tarbaby weighs, I would guess, fifteen to eighteen pounds, and he didn't obey Serena without a fight, as a tomcat should do. 

"Did Tarbaby do that?" I exclaimed, seeing a skin wound on Serena. "He's going to be neutered."

"Never mind," Serena nonverbally said. "He tried to fight. That's all. I won."

Web Log for 6.29.25 to 7.2.25

No excuses. The computer and I have been riding out the heat wave, taking lots of siestas, but mostly I've just been doing other things than link hunting. Or checking e-mail, in case anyone's tried to send me any actual hand-typed e-mail that's been lost behind the bombardment of automatically generated "bacon." I've opened Outlook a few times, had a look, thought "Lot of bacon," and closed the tab. It's always possible that I'm missing a message from a human being when I just don't feel like fighting the obnoxious ads to get a closer look at the bacon...

Fashion

A wedding guest should do all in her power to avoid looking sexier than the bride. I'm guessing Kim Kardashian's choice of an outfit for Jeff Bezos' party was based on overestimating how much prettier than the bride she is, and trying to make herself look like a hideous old hag who comes on strong enough to redirect a nineteen-year-old boy's mind toward his computer science homework. Nevertheless: tacky. A 44-year-old woman should revel in this kind of outfit if she enjoys it...with her husband...at home. 

No link to the site whence I ganked the photos. Their criticisms of the Kimster went too far. Men saying an outfit is tacky is okay; leaping from there to remarks about a woman's whole life and character is, well, tacky.

June should be Modesty Month, anyway, for those whose employers don't demand that they celebrate a Deadly Sin. So here are some summer party styles that appeal to me...at least if they're made of real cotton or real silk. Even for tights, nylon is always deeply tacky. And don't insult me by displaying anything that's even seen polyester--sustainable clothes should last thirty years, yes, but we want to enjoy wearing them all those years. No shopping links; this is a photo essay only, though if someone Out There just has to have a dress Google Lens will probably locate a store.

Actually marketed as the "mother of the bride or groom" dress.

Generally for the fair-skinned and blue-eyed, though a few of the rest of us can wear these pale colors...

For the rest of us.

I think these pale blues are so pretty...I wasted a lot of time and money, in college, trying to wear them and not look sickly. On one of my sisters they look perfect.

For those who look summery, not grimy, in white.

It'd be nice if there'd been a deep rose or sapphire blue for those of us who look sickly in pastels, and not only greens, but I like the greens.

Pretty enough for the bride. Actually the store that posted the photo was marketing it for the bride.

Meh. Maybe the print is on the chintzy side. I'd wear it, anyway. I like the colors.

I'd wear this one.

Or this one.

I like this one.

On about ten percent of womankind this shade of green looks good. They know who they are. I had a sage green dress once--sage, not celadon as shown. I acquired it when I had mono and looked ghastly in any case. After I started looking healthier I noticed that I still looked ill in the sage green dress, and donated it to a charity store. But it was cotton, with a proper, swishy skirt, not unlike the dress shown except at the waistline, and fun to wear.

Music

I'm not sure why the tune is called "Close Your Eyes"--it sounds more like a reference to praying than to sleeping--but everything about this music video is lovely, especially the girls with their faces as clean as the boys'. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlO_um6AIG4&t=228s 

This is definitely not church music, but when I discovered The Kinks' web site I was surprised by how many of these "rebellious rockers'" songs have Christian themes...this one seems to be expressing a Christian viewpoint in contrast to a transhumanist one. Lovely. The sound most of my elders used to hate and a message they might have liked if they'd heard the words, which, at the time, with those monaural transistor radios with their dying batteries, or monaural car radios bouncing over the potholes, it's hard to believe anyone did. So, now they have a web site. You can look up the words, though in some cases even the Kinks seem uncertain exactly what they were singing or whether both brothers were singing the same words, and see what serious, public-spirited, even religious lads they were underneath. It would have ruined their image in the States if we'd noticed, at the time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G10yAmbCiq0

Weather 

Heat wave meme:

Ganked from MOTUS. Google says it's a painting by the nineteenth century Spanish artist Ramon Casas i Carbo.