Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Author: Mark Haddon

Publisher: Doubleday

Date: 2005W

ISBN: 0-585-51210-4

Length: 226 pages

Quote: “My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057.”

But of course, being fifteen, Christopher J.F. Boone doesn’t know a lot of other things. Being autistic, he’s reached an age where his own parents are somewhat afraid of him, and the stress that living with him has put on their marriage is one thing Christopher learns more about in the course of this novel. (Christopher has an academic understanding that people “do sex” but he’s not yet reached a level of hormone activity at which he can understand why.)

The dog belonged to one of his neighbors. Christopher had often petted it before but this time he realized it was dead. He was holding the dog when its owner accused Christopher of killing the dog and called the police. Christopher hit the officer who tried to hasten him, but he’s not usually violent; he just doesn’t like being touched.

Then, for a school writing assignment, he decides to write a mystery novel about how he played detective and found out who did kill the dog. What he learns blows his mind and impels him to do the bravest thing he’s ever done—braver than insisting on being allowed to take the “A level in mathematics” test, although it becomes obvious that most of the children in his “special” school aren’t even going to pass the O levels.

In the British system, students and their teachers get a choice about how many of which of these exams teenagers take; which tests, in what subject, and how they score on each test, determines which university and trade school courses they’ll be allowed to take. “Ordinary levels” are good enough for some things but a student who wants to be an astronaut (or an astrophysicist), as Christopher does, needs “Advanced levels” in math and science. Christopher’s teachers warn him that they’ve not prepared him for A levels and nobody from his school has ever passed these tests before. Christopher convinces them that he’ll pass the exam, easily.

On the other hand, a simple commuter train ride is a real challenge for Christopher, and with a little extra time for covering his ears and groaning he convinces himself that he can do that, too.

Many readers who were in school after 2005 have already read this book; it nudged titles like The Red Badge of Courage off many school reading lists. Several adults bought it in 2005 because it was a bestseller. If you’ve refused to spend your money on a bestseller, and held out for a secondhand copy, well I have one. It’s worth having waited for. Haddon’s ability to sustain a fictive voice, writing the way some "high-functioning autistic" people talk, is what everyone admires; the precision with which he brings scenes and characters to life is delicious, too.

Book Review: Too Many Ponies

 Title: Too Many Ponies (Pony Pals #6)

Author: Jeanne Betancourt

Date: 1995

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-25245-3

Length: 86 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Paul Bachem

Quote: "Too many apples will make you sick."

Somehow I'm reading that as an oblique reference to Scholastic's "Little Apple" trademark for very very short, simple, bland books, the kind that would have appealed to me when I was four or five years old, about characters who are obviously closer to twelve years old. Adults can enjoy even infant-type picture books where the pictures are printed on fabric and bound together with cords, but too many of them, as when that's all the school's "book club" offers for an entire middle school grade...

Anyway: Pam, who has been riding ponies for five years, is blessed. She loves ponies, her mother is a riding instructor, and Pam gets to train new ponies before other children can pay to spend time with them. It's a grown-up-sized responsibility, for someone whose story can be told on what I hope is still considered a second grade reading level, and it brings a grown-up-sized problem. People become jealous of Pam. Her friends resent that she doesn't have time for longer trail rides with them on "her" pony, and "her" pony resents that she's bringing out three apples and giving two to those other two ponies.

There's an obvious answer, but complications set in when the children aren't sure how to interpret Pam's main ride's behavior. Why won't the pony let children come into her stall? Is she all that jealous, even when she's the center of attention...or could there be some other reason? Could it have anything to do with the pregnant stray cat Pam's family have adopted? Can the way others treat us really NOT be all about us? Can people, even when they're looking at wonderful us, actually have other things on their minds? Yes! 

If a middle school student liked the pony stories and pictures enough not to mind that the story is made accessible to kindergarteners, it might be a good writing prompt: "Write about a time when someone seemed impatient or unfriendly to you, and you waited patiently and learned what was really on that person's mind."

If it's helped even one child not to grow up like the whiny young retail employees who think shoppers' stressed-out, hung-over, financially distressed moods are all about them and the shoppers are responsible for making their jobs fun, this book would be worth much more than $5.

Book Review: Treestand Strategies and Techniques

(Note to alert readers: You are very much welcome here. It seems ironic that, when I was a professional typist with high scores on speed and accuracy, the early Toshiba Satellite laptops demonstrated conclusively how much even I could benefit from having the right sort of keyboard...and now I have a new Toshiba Satellite, with two keyboards, a built-in one that makes accurate typing impossible for me and a plug-in one that makes it very difficult. Google automatically checks for spelling and grammar. No computer program catches everything. If you spot a typo, please mention it in the comments. You will be thanked and your blog will be visited.)

Title: Treestand Strategies and Techniques

Author: Gene & Barry Wensel

Date: 1997

Publisher; North American Hunting Club

ISBN: 0-91-4697-92-7

Length: 180 pages plus 7-page index

Illustrations: full-color photos

Quote: “If there’s anything that will test your patience and your convictions about your own hunting abilities, it’s sitting ina cramped, uncomfortable, possibly cold, possibly buggy treestand. Yet if your goal is to take a buck, a really big buck, then no other hunting technique turns the odds in your favor like stand hunting.”

The thing this book does not tell me about deer hunting is why. It’s full of credible “how,” but not “why.” In fact it’s sort of self-defeating. (I got several of my books from other people, yes.) When I look at gorgeous close-up pictures of deer, I’m not a sentimental little girl from the city. I know I’m looking at animals who are more panic-prone than they are “gentle,” who don’t eat meat but who can easily slice your skin and break your bones with their cute little hooves, and they will, too, in defense of their “right” to eat all the low-growing fruit and new wood in your orchard, if you don’t make them run from you. If you get close enough to see a big buck deer (an adult male) in this detail, in real life, something is wrong. Deer can get rabies; they can get chronic wasting disease, which is similar to mad cow disease. If they let you look into their big brown eyes, in real life, at best they’re somebody’s spoiled pets who may want to fight for the title to the orchard; more likely they have some sort of horrible disease, no longer care what happens to them, and can spread that disease to you. Also they carry the kind of ticks that carry Lyme Disease. Deer are bad news and if you normally see them bounding away when you shout at them, it’s easy to keep this fact in mind. But when I look at the pictures in this book, I think, oh dear, deer are such cute, lovable-looking animals. In pictures, they are.

Deer are normally deathly afraid of humans. This is as it should be. If they weren’t afraid of humans they’d be likely to trample our children and grandmothers. They’re wary of fire, which is a good reason to light one every day or two. They think we, and our clothes, and our hair, smell disgusting, which is a good reason to hang laundry to dry on the fence around the orchard and scatter hair clippings around the boundary.

Or if you get angry enough at these pests you can just shoot them. It’s legal to shoot adult male deer in autumn. Population counts determine the length of buck hunting season and may determine the amount of deer you can legally “harvest” from year to year. People who are old enough to rationalize that chronic wasting disease takes several years to develop say that deer taste good when they’re cooked the right way. So I can see why people might want to shoot deer...but not why they’d want to shoot deer after reading a book full of pictures of the biggest, fastest, sassiest deer.

Male White-Tailed Deer, the species that are native to most of North America, are called bucks. They’re smart, tough, bold, wiry, and fast. I’ve seen cases of pure, dumb buck luck, as when one amoral man moved into a law-abiding neighborhood, where the big buck would still run away if you stamped and shouted at him but would stand and watch you pass by on the road, ten yards away, while he grazed in the woods. As an old (by deer standards) “trophy” buck, he knew he could be as annoying as he wanted to be up to the second week of November, when he would lead the way to what are locally called “the higher elevations.” One day the amoral man saw the big buck watching the man’s truck roll by. He stepped on the foot brake and shot out the window. By the time he’d opened the door the buck had rolled down the hillside, dead, and was lying right at his door. But that kind of thing happens once in a neighborhood in a generation. Female deer, the does, don’t stick close to the males or have any reason to miss them, but in some way they warn their sons. Deer don’t stand in the woods and watch people pass by any more.

Buck hunters go to all sorts of ridiculous lengths to shoot a buck with a particularly attractive “rack” of antlers. There are competitions for the biggest buck and the most interesting antlers. Hunters get to keep and eat the venison, give it to people they owe favors, or donate it to local food banks. So otherwise rational men spend days freezing or sweating, hiding behind trees, sometimes avoiding human company and soaking their boots in bottled deer urine to disguise their human odor, clutching rifles or bows, watching for another chance to kill a wary buck.

In their eagerness they often shoot does, and have been known to shoot stray cows, or dogs, or one another, by mistake. They couldn’t get a proper look but they shot in the direction of a good-sized animal crunching through the leaves and hoped it was a deer. “Wear loud colors, and talk or sing as you walk, so as not to be mistaken for deer,” Dad used to warn my brother and me. Orange, chartreuse, and cobalt blue are considered the best loud colors to wear for this purpose, as many hunters don’t see red as a bright color. Somewhere my brother got hold of a construction worker’s orange hard hat, a useful thing to wear in the woods just in case a careless hunter, fleeing deer, or gust of wind sends a dead tree limb in your direction. Many people resent needing to wear such ugly things in the woods, and therefore resent hunters, and carry on about what a bad thing hunting is.

The trouble with those people is that I suspect, if they ever became hungry, most of them would be the first to crave red meat and the first to pound on the door of anyone who had preserved any primitive hunting skills, demanding a share of his venison. 

So, for those who want to preserve primitive hunting skills, here is a book by two brothers who have devoted a lot of time to the most attractive kind of primitive hunting, watching for deer in “stands” ten or fifteen feet up a tree. Their inner children of the past were ten-year-olds whose “wound” was not getting to spend enough time in tree forts. (To that part I can relate.) The Wensels admit that “there is no big secret,” that “how you hunt...isn’t nearly so important as where you hunt,” but they’ve shot a lot of bucks and had a lot of fun in their adult-sized movable tree forts.

They give tips on what to look for as evidence of deer activity, where deer ret at night, browse for food, hide from the humans they expect will be hunting them. The successful hunter lurks in places where the deer don’t expect him to be, which is where the treestands come in. The Wensels describe different kinds of treestands. Their preference is for movable types that do relatively little damage to trees. Though outdoor gear adds bulk that makes skinny guys look fat, the brothers admit that at least one of them has some experience hanging and climbing ladders while being fat: “Without spare platforms to stand on while erecting a stand, fat guys need about three more hands,” but they’ve worked out a system that makes setting up their stands efficient for them.

Some “nudging” of the quarry is considered ethical in many hunt clubs. The brothers describe tricks like moving brush to make it easier for deer to follow the path to water that passes below the treestand, or adding strands of cheap material to fences to make it look easier for deer to jump a fence at the desired point.

The kind of questions they get from novices (which are the kind of easy questions women are likely to think it’s “nice” to ask) drive the Wensels to the point of using Army language. “Someone will say...``”I see him a couple times every year but I haven’t bagged him yet. What am I doing wrong?’ Chances are very good the hunter isn’t doing anything wrong...[I]f the guy is seeing a monster buck several times a season, he’s doing something very right!” Part of the hunting experience is waiting. While the rain drips into the treestand, and late-flying mosquitoes whine around the back of your neck, and a tiny pebble works its way up into your coveralls and thence down into your boot. The waiting is part of a good hunting story but it’s the part some impatient kids like to forget.

“Passing up legal deer,” the brothers remind hunters, “can also become a learning skill...Watching deer is a very important educational implement.” It’s also the way to get all those gorgeous photos. The secret to amassing a book-sized collection of good clear snapshots is to snap about twenty times as many shots as the book needs and print only the top five percent. The Wensels took 15 of the photos in this book and credit 16 other photographers with the 78 others. Still, that’s a lot of pictures—some of landscapes or hunters, and some of live deer.

While warning that there are no universal rules about gear or magical purchases that guarantee success, the brothers briefly discuss the types of clothes, hats, gloves, lights, etc., that work for them. They don’t recommend brands and don’t get into any discussion of bows or guns—that would be a different book.

My copy of Treestand Strategies and Techniques was discarded by a local library because, after ten years of enthusiastic use, it was beginning to fall apart. It was rebound, but one page is lost forever. It’s still worth the dollar a local person would pay. If you order it online you’ll get a copy in better condition. This book was designed to stand being carried around in a truck, with glossy mildew-resistant paper (the better to show all those color pictures) and a leather-look cover.

It’s no substitute for your own hunting experience—as the brothers are the first to tell you. The instructions that come with a treestand can tell you exactly which kind of screw goes into which hole and whether you have to buy it separately, but no book can possibly predict what the deer are going to do in response to the weather conditions on the nineteenth of November. You might happen to have a friend who could tell you as much as this book can, possibly more, and possibly even with more useful information, due to having more local experience. Then again, you might not, and in that case, the book would be the next best thing.

Anyway, as the history of my copy shows, there are times when through no fault of his own a fellow is required to report on a full-length book in order to get into the next grade level’s English class next year...and at such times a book like this is useful. The student might find it more interesting than David Copperfield or Crime and Punishment. The choice of this book for a report might give a teacher a sense of how different from the student the teacher is and why the teacher should leave him alone. On the other hand, there’s always some chance that a report on a book like this one might give the teacher some empathy with the student. You never know. In any case a lot of high school students have appreciated this book.

Book Review: Esperanza Rising

Today's book review is brought to you by three of the most photogenic beagles on the East Coast. The Petfinder pages for some of these dogs are unreal. "Send us a begging, pleading letter and maybe we'll get back to you at our convenience to discuss selling you a pup that resembles the picture for $500"? Who do these shelter people think they are? Whom are they saving these allegedly homeless beagles for--Fauci? The fact that I rejected some pictures from consideration, because the pages looked so phishy, in no way implies that the purported rescuers of the selected dogs are legitimate or will not be collecting and selling any information you give them. Nor does it imply that they won't try to charge fees more appropriate for, say, 18-karat gold jewelry than for stray dogs. Anyway beagles are cute.

Zipcode 10101, New York: Copper is described as a four-year-old, forty-pound male who's already been neutered and vaccinated, good with other dogs. He is available for "foster" care or adoption. His Petfinder page is https://www.petfinder.com/dog/copper-54805537/ny/ozone-park/heavenly-angels-animal-rescue-ny1047/ .

Zipcode 20202, Washington, D.C.: Shelby is described as also being about four years old, a 32-pound female in search of a permanent home. "Her $350 fee includes vaccinations and spaying" so it might not be outrageous; ask your vet about the cost of those operations for a dog found in a less expensive neighborhood than Potomac. Her Petfinder page is https://www.petfinder.com/dog/shelby-54956952/md/potomac/petconnect-rescue-md250/ .

Zipcode 30303, Atlanta: At the county shelter, all the staff have found time to post about little "Bagel Bite" is that she's a small female puppy. Small size could mean large price since the veterinary care is still ahead. They have other beagle puppies, a younger litter so small that most of their photos haven't even been posted yet, and adult and senior dogs as well...my guess is that this shelter will be very reasonable about letting you pick one of a wide selection of future Best Friends. Contact Bagel Bite's caretakers at https://www.petfinder.com/dog/bagel-bite-54976201/ga/atlanta/fulton-county-animal-services-ga217/ .

Meanwhile, back at the Cat Sanctuary, the Bad Neighbor succeeded in killing some kittens with his poison spray. Other things can go wrong with kittens besides glyphosate, but no, it's not only a coincidence that kittens who seemed healthy before I felt a glyphosate reaction beginning were dead a few hours later. I went out to bury one baby kitten and when I came in one of its litter mates had crawled out of its warm nest and died. 

During the cold snap four of Serena's kittens (she gave birth to six, four born alive) and two of Silver's (she gave birth to five, all premature, one dead, one gruesomely defective) came into the warm room, and I didn't leave. Serena is hostile to the idea of being in a cage but she and Silver behaved perfectly in the office, staying with their babies and venturing out only to summon me for valid reasons. I didn't want to jeopardize this relationship of love and trust by confining the cats where they couldn't feel desperate and look for their own solutions to any problems that might have arisen. So at the other end of the office I brooded over the kittens almost as much as the cats did. Today was warm enough for the kittens--only five, one of Silver's didn't make it--to be returned to their original nest where the cats can come and go. So I finally ventured out again. It wasn't raining when I walked down to the road, but started raining after I joined a car pool and is raining heavily as I type. It had rained earlier in the morning; I'm praying that the rain had washed the glyphosate vapor out of the air so there'll still be five living kittens when I come home. Their eyes aren't open yet but they're starting to crawl around and sniff at their mothers' tracks when left alone. 

The good news, if there is any: All animals that have been studied can react to glyphosate, but dogs seem to be the species least likely to show immediate unmistakable symptoms. (Which is why those corporate labs found it so profitable to extrapolate their estimated safe level of exposure for humans from what seemed like a nearly-safe level of exposure for dogs. Big mistake. Humans in my part of the world show a range of reactions much more similar to rabbits'.)

Now, today's book:

Title: Esperanza Rising

Author: Pam Muñoz Ryan

Date: 2000

Publisher: Scholastic

ISBN: 0-439-57617-2

Length: 253 pages of text plus 9-page historical note and 2 pages of discussion questons

Illustrations by Joe Cepeda

Quote: “‘Your uncles are very powerful and corrupt,’ said Alfonso. ‘They can make things difficult for anyone who tries to help you.’”

Esperanza was a happy little rich girl up into her teen years. Then her father died, and her uncles wanted Esperanza and her mother and grandmother to go away and let them take over her father’s land. So they went to California and became poor laborers.

This historical novel is written to be accessible to middle school children. There’s a hint, but only an age-appropriate hint, of a sweet romance between thirteen-year-old Esperanza and sixteen-year-old Miguel. In Mexico, although they were close, her father’s being his father’s employer put “a river” of social prejudice between them. In California both are poor, and looked down on by everyone outside the labor camp where they live, so they’re free to...enjoy holding hands and thinking about their future.

They won’t always be poor, any more than they’ll always be teenagers, Muñoz Ryan wants us to know. This is a fictionalized reconstruction of her grandmother’s story; the tendency for grandmothers to tell grandchildren about their Teen Romances, if any, when such romances involved the children’s grandfathers, may tell us what Esperanza’s and Miguel’s future will be, but Ryan never specifically tells us so.

Efforts have been made to market history to specific ethnic groups only. This, I think, is a mistake. History is for everybody. Esperanza Rising deserves a place beside Caddie Woodlawn, Johnny Tremain, or Little House on the Prairie. Let middle school students choose their own favorites and their ability to cross gender, ethnic, and regional boundaries may surprise teachers. Sometimes even teenagers like stories that work like windows rather than trying to work like mirrors. 

Petfinder Features Return, But Not Here

Blogspot is still not displaying photos efficiently. This site always had a quirky approach to photos--the page I see claims that I have some choice over whether they appear in the center or on the left or right of the screen, but in reality I've never had any control of that. Now it has a discouraging tendency to fail to display photos at all. Obviously this web site is not going to be featuring photos of America's most photogenic adoptable pets for a while.

But I have been nagging Petfinder, as I hope youall have been doing to, and I have seen enough improvement there to be able to say that the Petfinder links will return...in my Tuesday Revue newsletters.

For those who came in late: Twitter has been trying to promise corporate sponsors "bigger reach" than individuals on Twitter, which of course is contrary to everything Real Twits used to like Twitter for, and Real Twits have been continuing to resist and complain in every way we can think of. Some people did a "Twitter boycott" one day. I keep blocking the "promoted tweets" and those who post them, and posting any product-unfriendly thoughts that come to mind. I've been shadowbanned. Yes! You're nobody until you've been shadowbanned on New Twitter! Bestselling authors, winning politicians, even artists and musicians get shadowbanned all the time these days. The bottom line, though, continues to be that Twitter is still treating the private people whose tweets people visit Twitter for as "low-quality" accounts. When I read my own Twitter "home" page I'll see all the latest tweets from, e.g., Amy, Carol, and Ellen, if they're the last few Tweeps whose pages I've visited this week, but I'm still having to go to their "profile" pages to see whether Barbara, Diane, Felice, Gail, and Hazel are still using Twitter. Like many Real Twits I really, really don't like having friends' tweets blocked just to keep our "home" pages full of corporate drivel, even after the only corporate accounts I've not blocked are those of the main news media I originally wanted to follow. It's very annoying. I do want to see the headlines from the Washington Post, but I also want to see the "low-quality" friends-only tweets with the photo of what Ingrid had for dinner last night and the terribly cute malapropism Jane's two-year-old uttered. 

Enter a European company, originally based in Ireland but now with headquarters in Amsterdam, called Revue, offering to make it easy for Twits to read each other's content by e-mail. Currently there's no charge for anyone with a Twitter account to set up a Revue newsletter. Revue handles the mailing list so the newsletter compilers don't even see our correspondents' e-mail addresses; Revue promises not to spam people. 

It would be possible to set up Revue newsletters to circulate all the "went to this restaurant with Tracy and this is what I ate and this is what Tracy ate" kind of tweets, among groups of friends who were interested in that. Probably some Twits are doing that. I didn't want to do that. I want to scroll through pictures of what people had for dinner on Twitter but I'm not sure that that sort of thing needs to be republished and recirculated in e-mail.

I also didn't want to go back to doing the weekly Glyphosate Awareness Newsletters because, although this may change, currently both Carey Gillam (US Right to Know) and Robert Kennedy (Children's Health Defense) are doing those, and since they have better photos and more professional newsletter production teams than I have I prefer to promote what they're doing rather than imitate it.

I would suggest this. If you follow Green sites and people, generally, there is currently an easy way to sort out the True Greens from the Poison Greens. All True Green sites, organizers, and organizations, and this includes Ralph Nader's USPIRG, yesss!, are currently working on Glyphosate Awareness. Not all private individuals who just blog about their own Green lifestyles are working on any public issues, because they're busy canning their garden produce and upgrading their solar water heaters, but if they work on public issues the good ones are working on Glyphosate Awareness. The ones who've sold out to George Soros and his Euro-socialist friends are ignoring Glyphosate Awareness and screaming about Al Gore's long-disproven hypothesis of "global climate change" or "global warming," according to which, as all adults should remember so well, Miami was supposed to have been underwater by 2010, and as Miami is still above water adults won't touch this theory with a ten-foot pole. But the young always want money and the Euro-socialists have bought a lot of influence on people who weren't reading newspapers in 2010. I don't blame these kids for being kids, nor recommend that you do. I merely state that their public work is not True Green and not likely to accomplish anything good for our environment. 

Anyway, what I'm offering in the Revue is "GAN: The Fluff," the cute, warm'n'fuzzy, feel-good links that people used to read this web site and/or follow me on Twitter for. It won't be the same as my actual Twitter page, where there are a lot of retweets and links of mere tweets. The Revue will link to full-sized posts and web sites and feature categories like New Books from Favorite Authors, Poems & Songs, Funny Things, Nature and Phenology...and also Animals. This week we have cartoons selected by a bestselling author, a batch of book reviews (other than mine--I don't plan to link most of mine in Revue since you can already see them here), the Petfinder winners and more.

You can get the Petfinder feature in your e-mail on Tuesdays, free of charge. You'll see small pictures of the most photogenic animals in their category with links to their Petfinder pages. Petfinder is still a clunky site (some nagging remains to be done) but you'll need to open it only if you want to adopt one of the animals; their stories and small pictures will be in the Revue. You're positively encouraged to forward the Revue to friends who might want be interested in the animals, and you're invited to nominate places (or even specific animals) you'd like to see featured as bonus Petfinder links. 

I don't know how Revue is going to work out but, so far, it's working very nicely for those of us who are circulating our first few issues to one another. No spam, newsletters open easily, links work. Revue has the potential to be tremendous fun. 

If you'd like to get the Petfinder links and other pleasant things in your e-mail on Tuesday morning, click here to subscribe: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/priscillaking2020 .

And, if you want to see my uncensored Twitter feed, or display yours for your friends? There are several blog hosting sites that can be automatically synced with Twitter to display all of your tweets in one place. Live Journal, where my shadow blog address is cat_sanctuary.livejournal.com, indexes them by time and date so you don't have to scroll back through seven years of tweets to find the older ones (which by now include several vital Glyphosate Awareness links). It's a diabolically effective way to subvert Twitter's hateful "low-quality accounts" filter. I love it. 

Status Update: Animal Dumping

So on Thursday morning I posted:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2020/05/tuxie-thursday-bad-week-at-cat-sanctuary.html

It does mention that we want to help keep cats out of shelters, and that Serena, having given birth to eight kittens, seven of whom were born alive and almost certainly viable, and had them all die while glyphosate vapor was drifting past us the next morning, seemed to be trying to end the lactation cycle and move on rather than extend the lactation cycle and adopt more young kittens right away.

Cats, like humans, produce different kinds and amounts of milk to meet what will normally be the needs of the offspring it's meant to nourish. The first gush of milk that comes in after birth has a special name, colostrum, because it doesn't even look like the milk the mother starts to produce the next day. Then for a few months the mother's body can produce more and richer milk if she gets adequate rest, food, and water--humans nursing babies say they have to remind themselves to try to drink water or juice whenever they're awake. Then the supply of milk tapers off. Cats can keep themselves producing small amounts of milk for six months, and some women have extended lactation in the same way for three or four years, after birth if they want to maximize recovery time in between pregnancies. A cat who has stayed close to her half-grown kittens, the way Serena has to Silver and Swimmer, can choose to extend lactation or not.

Serena has chosen not. To whatever extent cats plan these things, she may be planning to try to have kittens later this summer. This is risky, not because warm weather doesn't last long enough in Virginia to give July or August kittens time to grow enough fur to survive the winter, but because glyphosate and other poisonous vapors are even more of a hazard later in the year. I might have preferred for Serena to try to extend lactation and adopt another litter, but even for social cats who don't mind nursing one another's kittens when they have a lactation cycle going, extending or inducing lactation just to adopt another cat's kittens is a minority behavior pattern.

Heather did it once--not twice. (She learned. Heather seemed never to produce enough milk to rear even her own kittens without help.) Ivy did it regularly. Sisawat did it, apparently for birth control during her first year as an adult cat. But even social cats are more likely to go with the natural flow of things than to try to extend or induce a lactation cycle, even when they're exposed to orphaned kittens. Since Serena was exposed to glyphosate vapors too, it's likely that her milk wouldn't be good for orphaned kittens to drink right after the poisoning episode.

So...I reported that on Thursday morning. On Thursday afternoon someone offered me a lift home in a van. It's hard to shout directions across a healthy distance in a big loud van so I didn't direct the person precisely to my home. Maybe it was just random chitchat when the person said, as I left the van on the main road, not within sight of the Cat Sanctuary, "So you live just down there?" I did not turn around and see exactly where she was pointing, but just waved cheerfully and called back, "Yes, I'm fine, thank you for the ride, have a good night..."  

Maybe it was just random chitchat. But for security reasons I don't like to give out any residential addresses in the course of random chitchat. The security reasons I mean...

I walked back up the road that is "just down there" from the main road, later. All the commuter vehicles parked by the houses "just down there" had already rolled off to work. A little car was parked in the road beside one of those houses. What was that car doing there? Was one of the commuters' cars in the shop; was someone car-pooling to work? No, only one head was visible above the seats in the Tennessee car as it moved away. The people who live in that house are tall enough that their heads show above car seats so, unless a short person from Tennessee had come out to that house to pick up one of the residents, then let that person drive back toward Tennessee, someone had just stopped in front of that house...to hang a flier on the door? To make a delivery?

Then I saw the two cats, a matched pair, not spring kittens but possibly last spring's kittens, brother and sister by the look of them, both sniffing and peering around the driveway as if they were exploring a place they hadn't been before.

I walked another half-mile and I saw a very big, rather fat looking dog, not on a leash, sniffing around the porch in front of a house that is in town where leash laws are enforced.

Attention Tennessee readers. Possibly someone overlooked this part of the post about Serena and me:

"
If anyone wants to send kittens to us, they need to tell me about it first...not just wander up here and dump kittens out of a truck!
"

Goes double for puppies 'cos they're twice the size! Yes, the two cats did look a bit like a cat the owners of the driveway had rescued when he was dumped out on them, years ago. Yes, some people in Scott County love all dogs. Yes, for a lot of people who live in the country, any reluctance to pet, feed, or bring home an unwanted dog or cat comes directly from our concerns about the well-being of our current resident dogs and/or cats. But you always need to ask. Don't just dump animals out in the general neighborhood of where you have heard an animal rescuer lives, or used to live. Talk to the human. The animal's chance of surviving will be so much better if you can deliver it directly to a place where the right kind of food, and a safe place where it can keep out of the way while showing due respect to resident animals, will be at its disposal. Dumped-out animals are apt to panic and run right into danger.

I personally don't like to accept responsibility for an animal until it's at least approached me of its own free will; I don't like to send animals to people the animals have not approached, either. Animals do have to accept and adjust to some changes that they would not have chosen. Their original humans may have rejected them, or may have moved away or died. They can accept an Emergency Backup Human if they have to but they deserve to be able to feel some sense of potential friendship with that person. Many animals who have been pets still feel terrified when they're dumped into the custody of total strangers. Far from being evidence of past abuse, I read that as evidence of common sense!

The big dog woofed at me in a lackadaisical way...not a challenge to a potential intruder on its home, not a cry for help. I walked on, having no way to help it.

What was that beside the road? A bullfrog, almost as big as a toad. It had been knocked down by a car but why had it been on the road? Frogs and other shore-dwelling animals look for higher ground when their homes are flooded after rain. No rain fell this weekend...since the dicamba poisoning. I'd continued to feel sneezy, sleepy, grumpy, bashful, dopey, and also blocked, but actually been less sick than the previous weekend. Someone else had been less lucky because another sprue spew in a plastic take-out box was also lying beside the road. If you didn't look closely you might have thought it was melted chocolate ice cream, but it wasn't. I see this type of mess on the same stretch of road regularly enough to suspect it's all coming from one person, who probably commutes through the neighborhood rather than living there, and if so, that person should move further away from the railroad.

What was that complaining noise coming out of a house along the road? It was somebody's grandfather. "I've been sick all weekend. I think I've got the coronavirus." People like him often say "sick," which I would not use to describe the reported effects of coronavirus, when they mean "ill," which is what people with coronavirus describe themselves being. I didn't ask him where the pain was, exactly, but if he'd had coronavirus all weekend I would not have expected a patient of his age and condition to be standing behind his storm door and complaining. I suspect Friday's dicamba and last week's glyphosate were what was bothering him.

But he might really have it. I might really have been exposed. He was talking through a storm door; I was standing on the porch step, taking an object I had for sale out of a bag to show him, not giving any gossips any ideas about my being with a divorced man in his home, but the door did swing partly open as the man leaned on it. I have been looking forward to getting that behind me for a couple of months now. If the rain that's starting to sprinkle down now, washing the poison out of the air, does not wash away all the urges to sneeze I've been having all weekend, or if I feel the least bit feverish, I will go home and quarantine myself. Most of the people I know are older than I am, and the others are close to their parents, who are older than I am. I would hate to cough coronavirus on them.

(It would be a pity to lose your sense of smell at this time of year. My hedge is just a cascade of roses this week, with privet not far behind. I paused to sniff my roses and iris almost every time I passed them--no, that wasn't when the urge to sneeze struck me. I enjoyed the tall brown-freckled yellow iris, which I hardly had to bend over to sniff, on Jackson Street this morning too.)

What was that fretful noise coming out of a business? "But some people will get closer than six feet when they hand us a card," fretted a worker. The worker was fretting about losing virus-phobic customers and thus losing work time; the worker was nowhere near old enough to have anything to fear for perself. "Masks or bandanas, I can order us some cute ones," the owner cheerfully replied.

I'm not keen on tying strings or stretching elastic bands around my head, or ears. In theory a veil draped over a straw hat ought to be the coolest face covering in steamy weather; in practice I tend to lose straw hats. When that Michaels giftcard arrives I plan to buy some cotton yarn and knit some of what some clients have been requesting, "open-topped hats" that can be pulled over the face if we have to talk to people, around long hair while we work, or around the neck for warmth in winter. The traditional word for such a garment was "cowl."

Some readers might want to think about colors. Black and dark blue might suit some people's taste, but cotton yarn does tend to shed dye when it's new and faded as it gets older. In Morocco the desert-dwelling Tuareg people used to be nicknamed "Blue Men" because they were always pulling indigo-blue scarves and veils over their faces to keep off the sand, and the dyed fabric would react with sweat and stain their skin blue. Some people who don't normally wear white might want white cowls.

Still so much panic about something that's actually not life-threatening for most of us, and so much denial about things that are life-threatening for many.

For animals, too. The incidence of Tennessee animal dumping in Scott County suggests that people in Tennessee like our belief that animals shouldn't have to be sentenced to life in solitary confinement, with sterilization and perhaps other surgical mutilations, just for the crime of being animals. We don't think being other than human is a crime! We don't think a non-human birth is a disaster! But that doesn't mean it's safe--or sane!--just to dump animals randomly out on our streets. Many of us drive motor vehicles just as people in Tennessee do.

My choice would be to move animals only when there's a reasonable expectation that they're not going to bolt or hide. When I've taken Cat Sanctuary "graduates" to their Purrmanent Homes I usually hang out with the humans for an hour or so, watch the cat eat from a new dish and find a new litter box, make sure any encounters with resident animals (or children) don't seem life-threatening. Some cats choose their own Purrmanent Homes, some gladly accept the ones humans have chosen for them, and some have been blessed to move in with friends who've visited them at the Cat Sanctuary and begun to bond with them there, so everything goes smoothly. Other cats, I'm told, have sulked or hidden, cried, or clung to things they recognized from the Cat Sanctuary for a few days before accepting that another place might be their new home. Sometimes this kind of thing seems to be hammed up for the benefit of resident animals, a sort of "I certainly don't want to be in your home," and sometimes social cats then proceed to bond with normal resident cats, after which they'll nonverbally tell us they do not want to go home with me any more! It's possible to move animals in a sufficiently tactful way that the move might as well have been the animals' own idea.

"I don't have time to do that. I'm a busy working parent with a geriatric busybody of a mother and a seriously disabled grandmother to worry about! I don't even have time to hang out with the school friend I swore would be my Best Friend Forever, much less make new friends. I need to move this animal out of the house my mother and grandmother have to vacate, right now!" What a regrettable, even deplorable, way to live...I do understand that, through no fault of their own, some people's lives do become crowded, and pets are likely to be among the first things they want to shove away as they struggle for breathing room. So you feel a need to make the cat be somewhere else right now and at least you don't want to put it in a shelter. That can happen. But you can take the time to confirm that someone, however partial to that kind of animal the person may be, can get the poor, scared, grieving animal into a pen or cage where it won't run out in front of a truck.

Dear Stanford Students: Why I'm Not a Vegan

Dear Stanford Students...

Of all the paid survey sites I’ve found...Yougov has separate sites in other countries that operate by other rules, but Yougov US is the best survey site. They don’t collect personal information; they don’t use up your cell phone minutes or allow anyone else to do; they don’t sell your contact information to spammers; they don’t waste your time, as many sites do, loading screen after screen of personal questions and then telling you you’re not in the right demographic group to take the actual survey. Your Yougov demographic information is stored and used to filter surveys so you only open surveys for which you get points. They’re legitimate; if you don’t shop much it can take months to earn a giftcard, but they do deliver those cards. (I took one to Michaels again last week.) If you’ve not already joined Yougov, you can join all by yourself, but both you and I get points if you join using this link.

https://today.yougov.com/refer/brglBv6yISldXGeAQbYXBg/

Because they don’t exploit and abuse respondents, or demand information that respondents are going to falsify, Yougov is trusted by polling companies too. When I saw that Stanford students were using a Yougov survey to do a research project, I was chuffed. Yougov has arrived!

The actual project, however, left me with more to say than a survey form has room for, and I think it’s worth a post.

First of all, I don’t know whether a confrontational, judgmental approach was what the students intended. If it wasn’t, they must be awfully young students, and I recommend that they read Business Speak before they next communicate with full-grown adults.

Fun fact: Elgin didn't like the original cover of Business Speak and reworked the second edition into (almost) a different book, to go with its different title.

The survey began by asking participants to watch a very icky live video of the slaughter of animals for meat.

Fair disclosure: I’ve never been the one who went out and killed the steer or the rooster, but many’s the time I’ve cut up and cleaned his body. I know where meat comes from. If it’s fit to eat, it comes from a young healthy animal who was enjoying life before he was killed, probably by someone he’d always considered a friend. If the animal was not killed by a close friend at his home, however, he probably spent his last days in a filthy, crowded slaughterhouse, where he was undoubtedly exposed to contagious diseases and probably overdosed with antibiotics, may have been injured in a fight over crowded standing space, and was probably fed hormones at doses that probably made him feel sick. He wouldn’t be used for human food if he’d reached a stage where cancer became visible, but he may have had cancer. Slaughterhouses use machines to kill animals; they’re supposed to be humane and efficient, but if the animal wiggles about they may be inefficient and disgusting. And, in another shocking disclosure, all babies are made by adults doing things adults have told you not to do or think about.

After watching the video the survey proceeded to ask how often respondents eat different kinds of food, including the meat of which we’d just watched the ugliest moments of the commercial production. Then it asked whether our plans to eat those meat products had changed as a result of watching the video. If not, why not?

This is very similar to the “How could you...” vap discussed in Business Speak (new link for a newer edition). It’s a valid question, and since the questions pop up on a computer screen there’s no obnoxious spoken intonation to identify the “How could you” verbal attack. The words “how could you” weren’t actually used. Nevertheless, the effect of the survey was a lot closer to “How could you do such a horrible thing!” than to “If you (or ‘some people’) intended to do X, how could you/they address or accomplish Y?”

Partly that was because the survey included a few teenybopper questions like “Are you aware of the concept of eating less meat as a way to protest the disgusting, unhealthy, inhumane practices of the commercial slaughterhouses?”

Oh, children...I can’t imagine a literate adult not being aware of that concept. It’s older than I am; I’m only about fifty. When I was a child we never bought chicken at the grocery store. We ate chicken at family gatherings, where one of my older cousins would go out and call one of his tame animals into the back yard and kill it. We didn’t buy chicken from people who weren’t as kind to their fowl as we were. “Why Your Daddy Turned Down the Job at the Commercial Chicken Farm” used to be a bedtime story my mother told my brother and me.

I’ve phased in and out of being vegan. My body does not absorb protein from wheat; some years it seems to be getting enough protein from rice and beans and peanuts, some years not. Currently I buy chicken, turkey, and sometimes fish, when I can afford them, for the bonding ritual of Sharing My Own Food With the Cats. Often the cats eat kibble and I eat beans or nuts. I don’t complicate my life with any commitment to be a full-time vegan, but I have vegan days.

Because I’m one of those who find it easier to follow a McDougall-type diet (more complex carbs, less protein, minimal fat) than an Atkins-type diet (more protein, fewer carbs, lots of fat), I could be tempted to agree with Dr. John McDougall that a plant-based diet is The Way (for everyone) To Go. Research shows that either a McDougall diet or an Atkins diet is better than the restaurant-food diet advertisers want to sell us, either may work for some people, and neither works for all people. Grandma Bonnie Peters has been happily “McDougalling” for many years but some people say they become listless and depressed when they go vegan. I refer those people to Dr. McDougall, who will tell them to go ahead and have a fat-and-protein “feast” once or twice a month if they feel the need, but if I’ve learned one thing from the celiac gene it’s that humans are diverse. We are not all designed to eat the same things.

These recipes will lure carnivores over to the vegan table. And I can tweak this diet, easily, into something that works for me--though it's not cheap. I feel no need to lay a guilt trip on those who say they can't.

Human bodies run on different types of fuel. A majority of humans can digest wheat efficiently, as long as it’s natural wheat, not soaked in glyphosate, as most wheat sold today has been. A majority of humans can digest cow’s milk efficiently only in early childhood. The minority genes for the opposite of these traits occur separately, but in an overlapping area, in Britain and Western Europe. The “strong form” of the celiac gene fairly well proves descent from certain specific families in Ireland. There are also genes for about half a dozen specific patterns of alcohol intolerance, of which the most common is found in a majority of both Irish and Native American populations, suggesting that those ethnic groups weren’t separated as widely for as long as many people think. Some people think there are genes for fat tolerance, too. Some have even found correlations between food tolerance and blood type, and recommended four different types of diet...Much remains to be learned. I feel perky on a low-fat vegan diet, and so do all the people I’ve known well who’ve tried one. That’s no guarantee that other people will.

However, what we know about Stone Age cultures suggests that more humans are likely to have evolved to live mostly on plant products than to need a high-protein, high-fat diet. The explosion of “eating disorders” in the mid-twentieth century reflected several things; one of them was that many bodies instinctively rejected the high-protein, high-fat diet that had been “scientifically” recommended to American families based on the proportion that worked best for rats. Most of our metabolisms are not that much like rats’.

What I believe is really unhealthy is our cultural tolerance for Food Bullies who think everyone should eat the same thing. If people want to make it their mission to change the way Americans eat, I’d recommend that as the problem they should tackle. How can we become a culture where a conversation like,

A: “No, thanks.”

B: “Why not? It’s good! It’s good for you! Much healthier than that stuff I’ve seen you eat...”

—generates universal agreement that B should not be allowed to eat at the same table with other humans. People need to tune out this kind of obnoxious “peer pressure” and pay attention to what works for their bodies.

I don’t like bacon. I’ve observed living hogs and felt that, like possums, hogs are animals I don’t care to touch, dead or alive. I’ll agree that pork fat, like cat urine, smells yucky in its natural state but yummy when it just starts to burn, when some of its chemical components carbonize. The rich aroma of sizzling bacon doesn’t make me want to eat it, any more than the rich aroma of charring cat cage liners makes me want to eat those. If you enjoy bacon, fine. You can have my share of it. Just don’t ask me why I don’t want it, because I don’t want to become the sort of person who talks about this kind of thing at the breakfast table, and I will.

My body is my own. Your body is your own. None of us should ever allow anybody to tell us what to eat. Information about nutrients generally, and food contamination alerts, and recipes, are fine...but don’t even think about telling me how bad something that doesn’t make me sick is “for me,” and how I should be eating something that does make me sick, instead, even if it works for you.

A primary reason why I’m not a full-time vegan is that I do belong to one of those Irish families that have the gene for full-blown celiac sprue, which is even yuckier than it sounds. I can’t eat anything containing any form of wheat, or any kind of cheese, without being sick. Any exposure to glyphosate makes me sick. As a result the list of things I can safely eat has become very short, in recent years, and I’m not about to add any optional boycotts to a list of dietary restrictions that’s already unnecessarily, and non-negotiably, very long.

Ask anyone who’s been successfully living with the celiac gene during the past twenty years, and I’m sure you’ll get the same answer. If the people who raise food we can eat, without immediate physical distress, also run an abortion clinic so they can burn fetal tissue on their backyard grill and dance around it howling “Hail Satan,” probably most of us are going to continue buying from them. It would be nicer to buy more food from a nice local farm, but since Big Government has handed Big Agriculture enough regulations to strangle all the ones we used to know, we’ll probably continue buying from the Satanists. That’s just a fact of life these days.

I liked this book. I recommend it...to non-celiacs. I also blame it for 90% of all the unhappiness in my childhood, which came from constantly trying to eat things I was not built to digest and consequently feeling sick.

I first read Diet for a Small Planet in grade two. I learned all about how, if everyone on Earth could eat bread and cheese, there’d be enough for everyone who was alive in 1970 to eat bread and cheese every day. Nice theoretical thought! The fact is that everyone on Earth can’t eat bread and cheese. The majority of humans worldwide can’t eat dairy products, and celiacs can’t eat wheat products. For me bread and cheese is poison. I might as well try making lunch out of D-Con sprinkled with Sevin Dust. And I’m sure you food bullies would just love to discuss how bread and cheese affect my body right at your lunch table. Not.

I went to a Seventh-Day Adventist college. They used to serve those Worthington and Loma Linda soybean loaves and sausages and so on, at almost every meal. I ate those things. I liked them. In those days the soy wasn’t saturated with glyphosate and I had no idea that the wheat was what was making me so ill. It was the 1980s; we thought minor illness was psychosomatic and the cure was to deny it and push yourself to act perky. I denied, I pushed, I acted perky, I crashed and burned. I had mononucleosis for most of two dang years and, having been in Michigan when I got that disease, I hadn’t even kissed anybody. Mono is caused by a virus, and the strain that contaminated a batch of vaccine (that I didn’t need) against a trivial disease (that I’d already had) in Michigan was a particularly nasty virus, but I’m sure that that “healthy” wheat-based diet contributed to my “chronic mononucleosis, opportunistic hepatitis” experience.

I have lived through a lot of unnecessary pain that was caused by allowing anyone outside my own body to tell me what I “should” eat. At least I’ve learned, thoroughly, that there is no single diet for the whole planet. People are different. People absorb different protein in different ways. People have evolved to live in different places where different foodstuffs grow. I can safely eat some things, like (unpoisoned, non-GMO) peanuts, that are poisonous to some people. Some people can safely eat some things, like wheat, that are poisonous to me.

North America has long been, and is still, a place where delicious, nutritious vegetables grow well. Our problem is that big industrial-model farms want to nurture pest species by monocropping and try to control them by spraying poison on them. Possibly Americans would eat more vegetables if we hadn’t had reactions to the poisons humans have added to those vegetables. I like garbanzos, but since they’re often planted in glyphosate-drenched soil in rotation with wheat, I can’t eat very many garbanzos very often. I love strawberries, but since they have no peel to speak of and soak up poisons sprayed into the air like little sponges, I have to plan around the possibility of being sick for a few days after eating strawberries. I like corn, but when it’s been genetically modified to be more like wheat so that it can be saturated with glyphosate, I know better than to expect corn to like me.

Animals eat poisoned plant-derived food, so meat isn’t safe either...but generally the ratio of glyphosate to food is still considerably lower in meat than it is in grains and beans. In recent years, as farmers have been encouraged to spray this particular poison right on food, Americans who like vegetables are being conditioned to avoid vegetables, and eat more meat, by our own bodies.

I inherited the “strong” form of the celiac gene. I have that in common with approximately one of every ten thousand people of Irish descent and, for all practical purposes, nobody in any other ethnic group. A “weak” form can be traced back to other parts of western Europe, including Iceland and Italy, but it’s still a minority gene. Since glyphosate spraying and GMO crops have become common, though, we’re reading that one out of five, one out of four, even one out of three North Americans, not necessarily even those of Western European descent, are having celiac-like reactions to wheat, soy, and other glyphosate-soaked foodstuffs. Those people don’t always have any idea what’s making them sick, nor are their symptoms necessarily easy to identify as celiac-like. They just know they’re chronically hungry, chronically malnourished, chronically dyspeptic, and if they switch from eating more meat to eating more grain they’re much more of those things. 

I do not like this diet plan at all, but it works for some people.

So we have the Atkins Diet. Reading an Atkins Diet menu makes me queasy but some people choke down their turkey sandwich with mayonnaise and milk for lunch and then their beef jerky for a snack and then their porkchop for dinner, and they feel better than if they’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich with strawberries, a V-8 for a snack, and a big salad full of sunflower seeds for dinner. I imagine that that would not have been the case before 1990 but it is the case today. Even people who enjoyed being vegans before 1990 are getting sick after enjoying a delicious, comforting, vegan meal like Mother used to make, today.

No doctor, Euell Gibbons didn't even follow the special diet he needed, didn't live very long...but his "wild foods" are what I eat a lot of these days. If you live in the country and can trust your neighbors, these are a few things it's still safe to eat while Irish.

I don’t buy a lot of supermarket vegetables these days. I eat what grows in my own garden, much of which are not supermarket-type vegetables; they’re exotic native plants only Euell Gibbons and fans used to eat, but my mother happened to be a Euell Gibbons fan. I have a patch of violets in the not-a-lawn. When they bloom, I think “How pretty!” and then I think “How tasty!” I eat about half my violets. That’s my fresh vegetable for the day. Violets are so vitamin-rich that a whole bowlful would cause a Vitamin C overdose, which isn't dangerous, but people for whom I've cooked health food feasts have been alarmed by one.

I used to enjoy all the vegetables in the supermarket, though. I do not have childish tastes. I like raw or barely cooked veg; I like the different flavors, bitter, earthy, watery, pungent, and the crunchy textures. I miss them, now. But the last time I feasted on fresh corn, which was a big annual celebration for the old-time Cherokee, I was sick. The last time a farmer gave me some fresh juicy vine-ripened tomatoes, oh goodness gracious they were good, but I was sick. I am a human not a vulture, but the last time I ate chicken, even if that chicken led a miserable life, it passed through my body in peace and did not make me sick.

Stanford students...I picture them with their fresh young faces, pearly teeth, long glossy black or blonde hair. Who knows what Isaiah meant by saying “Ye are gods,” or what Jesus meant by quoting him, but there is something of what the ancient Roman Empire called divinity, the goddess of youth, Juventas, about that splendor of youth and health. Many of Earth’s population, past and even present, feel something like worship when they look at you. Many people want to do anything you ask them to. So whyyy do so many of us mean, grumpy older people not join your protest against the meat packers?

I’ve not even mentioned, nor do I want to go into, the political reasons some of my correspondents would have put first. I don’t think they’re particularly worthy reasons. Old Socialist drivel about separating people from family farms, homes, land, and animals, does tend to mix into some people’s embrace of a vegan diet; but not others’. I do notice some vestiges of Old Socialist religious thinking in Stanford’s course catalogue—home of the economics class titled “Love as a Force for Social Justice”!—and suspect the students’ young minds-full-of-mush have been corrupted a little bit, but wotthebleep, Stanford minds can get over a little corruption once they’re exposed to reality. I do think the students need to concentrate more on how individualism built the once-provincial United States and collectivism destroyed the once-mighty Soviet Union.

That is, technically, a separate issue. If Khrushchev or even Hitler said it was raining, that, by itself, did not necessarily cause it to stop raining. Even though socialism as a national policy is unsustainable, from time to time a socialist does get something right. A vegetarian diet could be one of those things. Many Americans eat far more meat than their bodies need, and feel better if they eat a well balanced vegan diet for up to two years at a time. (Vegetables don’t contain enough Vitamin B-12 for most humans’ needs but healthy humans manufacture their own Vitamin B-12 in the process of digesting grain.)

So here are my three positive recommendations to the Stanford students:

1. All life thrives at the expense of other life. Humans have the physical traits of animals that need a mix of plant-based and animal-based food. When we slice into vegetables they register an electrical shock that is probably more like pain than pleasure. So a productive discussion of cruelty to other living things needs to accept that we humans are predators. We kill other living creatures. The question is whether we mistreat them before we kill them. Try a focus on restoring the ideal of small communities made up of individuals who raise their own animals and vegetables. Emphasize how much longer, healthier, and happier cows’ and hens’ lives are on a small family farm than in a big commercial meat factory. In the twentieth century we as a nation went considerably too far in the direction of centralizing too many things. Your focus should consistently be on decentralizing, on small, on independent, on well separated. Cows are miserable when hundreds of them are packed into a barn or lot; they’re happy and healthy when two or ten of them are browsing through a few acres of grass.

2. If you are less than 100% sure that someone else is 100% unaware that something he or she is about to eat has been poisoned with something that’s 100% fatal, don’t question other people’s food choices. Ever. Try not to look.

3. Naturally, even if a totally socialist education had made you ashamed of it, you’d like to see everyone eating California-fresh vegetables—beautiful California children that you are. I do like that about you. So, focus on getting those vegetables glyphosate-free, and otherwise unpoisoned, so that everyone can safely enjoy eating them.

I've yet to read this one, but the evidence just keeps piling up--the title says it all.

 

Book Review: Family Grandstand (Update)

(Updated because, on reflection, I think this old children's book ties into a thread this web site has discussed.)

Title: Family Grandstand

(This reprint is not what I have. I have the original hardcover book, library-bound, no picture on the cover, and goofy but lifelike drawings inside. I wouldn't recommend the reprint in which "Nancy Pearl," whoever she is, demands co-author status on Amazon and signature credits above the author's name on the front cover for adding pictures that aren't as well drawn as the original...but that's what Amazon and/or "Nancy Pearl" is pushing, hard, by listing the original book with "no copies available.")

Author: Carol Ryrie Brink

Date: 1952

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 208 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Jean Macdonald Porter, who probably earned better grades in drawing class than this pushy "Nancy Pearl" person

Quote: “Dorothy...was not used to living with people who  sang at the table.”

The Ridgeways, for whom Dorothy works, sing at the table. Professor Ridgeway teaches at Midwest University; his house overlooks the stadium and has a tower, where his wife is writing a novel. They have three children, ages twelve, ten, and six, and a couple of university students who help out around the house. This children’s novel is written from the children’s point of view, with the focus on the fun the children have baby-sitting, adopting a dog, and helping yardman/quarterback Tommy and housekeeper/A-student Dorothy have a wholesome, family-friendly romance.

As a child I remember finding this hybrid between children’s story and teen romance awkward, and preferring the sequel, Family Sabbatical, which is about the Ridgeway children. Nevertheless the Ridgeways are a delightful fictional family, almost as delightful as the Woodlawns (Caddie Woodlawn, Magical Melons), and my preference for the second volume of their adventures did not keep me from rereading the first volume several times.

The children’s relationships with animals are probably more interesting to child readers. The Ridgeway household includes small caged animals who aren’t even introduced individually to readers, a set of turtles who really do “want to get out,” a canary who seems to “want to get out” but stays near his cage when he does get out, and the dog. While Family Grandstand is not a pet care manual, it does open the question of whether animals really want to live with humans for further discussion.

What may interest some readers and correspondents is the characterization of six-year-old Irene "Dumpling" Ridgeway. I suspect the Ridgeway children of being based on Brink's own children, so it's possible that Dumpling's peculiar version of precocity is being exaggerated by a doting mother in the way my brother's and mine used to be. At least Dumpling is spared the burden of being a "child prodigy" in the sense of reading before age six or doing advanced math before age ten. Her I.Q., we're told, is in the high normal range. Yet she's not exactly a normal six-year-old. She worries about whether animals really "want to get out"; at her brother's birthday party she not only seems to be the only one whose present is what her brother wants, but even worries, afterward, about having chosen that present (the turtles) out of empathy for the turtles rather than the brother.

Six-year-olds are not normally capable of thinking on that level. Reasonably bright six-year-olds are capable of being trained to say things and make gestures that sound as if they were starting to imagine others' feelings when, in fact, they're learning to repeat behavior adults reward. We don't (I remember this well) actually sympathize or empathize in the way we'll start doing after puberty, but we respond to conditioning. To adults it can look as if a "prodigiously" precocious level of empathy was developing in flashes. One minute a six-year-old pleases its parents with "I want this toy for my baby sister," and another minute it's still saying "Can't we send that baby back for a refund?"

Dumpling is a soul sister to Charles Wallace Murry in A Wrinkle in Time, whom Madeleine L'Engle shamelessly based on a son she believed to be a prodigy of empathy as well as intelligence. It's possible that adults' hopes and disillusionments with children like these provided the plot twist, in Wrinkle, that Charles Wallace helps rescue his father from IT but then falls into IT's power himself.

Then again, it's also possible that children who respond to patient, gentle conditioning and learn to act as if they felt empathy, before they really do, really are "Highly Sensitive" enough to become more empathetic than average adults. Dumpling's being a self-conscious "prodigy" might not really be "very, very good," but Dumpling really is a very intelligent, very lovable child. Adults might be interested in reading about Dumpling (and Charles Wallace), recognizing them as heavily biased portraits of real children, but studying the kind of social behavior it's possible to instill into moderately gifted-and-talented children.

It appears to me that prices for this book are being artificially inflated, possibly by the same vulture-like "Nancy Pearl"; what I have in real life is the collectible edition (albeit a library discard), but what you'll get will probably be the new edition with the cover I find comparatively ugly, and the best this web site can do will still be $10 per book, plus the usual $5 per package and $1 per online payment. And Carol Ryrie Brink doesn't even have any use for $1.50 from the sale of this book...and if "Nancy Pearl" imagines that billing herself as a co-author is going to bring her into the Fair Trade Program, she's seriously delusional. This web site exists to encourage writers, not vultures.