My Life in Photos?

What a topic for Long & Short Reviewers to propose. Photos of living people do not belong on the Internet.

But wait--this might be fun. They didn't say "my life in photos of me." 

Typical house in the suburb of Los Angeles where I was born...

Photo from Zillow.

The kind of car my mother drove across the length and breadth of the continental States when I was a wee tot. It was called the Plymouth Fury and advertised as having "a hellcat of a motor." It behaved very well in the hands of a competent, responsible driver. It must have been her generation's counterpart to the Camaro.

Photo from Daniel Schmitt & Co., thanks to Google.

The model horses my brother and I used to play with. We had all five of these and hundreds of other, smaller models. These were Barbie-size, two inches to one foot; Our "herd" of model horses included "Matchbox" horses that were just one inch high. The company that sold these horses, all cast in one mold, would later develop a line of horses that stood up in different positions; we never had those. We did have the one with jointed legs.

Photo from Google.

The first books it was known that I actually read, as distinct from memorizing stories after they'd been read to me a hundred times. I must have been reading Little Golden Books before these, but when I moved from memorizing to reading I don't remember.

Photo from Amazon.

The first game I played with my brother involved me shouting "Bz-z-z-zip!" and him giggling, when he was six months old. Later these little plastic things were all his.

Photo from EBay. They lived in houses and forts like these, if anyone took all the pieces out of the box to build the house.

Photo from NYPathSociety. We both liked Legos, too, and Tinker Toys, but neither of us ever got into Erector or Meccano building sets. We branched out. My Barbie collection started with this.

Photo from Etsy. Mine had an amateurish haircut when I got her, but I had fun with her and her foot-high friends, anyway.

Beyond the nursery...Historical events happened. I have very little memory even of joyous historical events like this.

Photo from Forbes.

A teacher brought in a TV set on which we could watch this. I was bored.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT7WA70aE_g

I do remember this. We were renting a place that had television. I watched the speech.

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

My brother and I tried to listen to this debate. Both of us fell asleep in minutes.

https://abcnews.com/video/42316324/

I wore this little cotton dress to school almost every Thursday in grades three through six. We actually chanted, at summer camp,

"We are Girl Scouts green and jolly.

We don't swear; we just say "Golly."

We don't smoke, and we don't chew.

We don't go out with boys that do.

Do you think we don't have fun?

You're right. We don't."

Actually swearing, smoking, and dating boys who did weren't much temptation in the middle grades.

Photo from Etsy. Of course the insignia on the shoulder sash were individual souvenirs. I had a sash full of badges, though. The only one I now remember earning was the "Pets" badge, in which my mother documented that I fed a goldfish every day for a month.

Having one of these was mandatory though having a place to ride it was never guaranteed. The important thing was that although it had small wheels that didn't make good time, the seat and handlebars could be adjusted to fit any child, up to and including one tall enough to ride a full-sized bike. My brother's was a Schwinn Stingray, as shown. As I recall mine was a Schwinn Daisy, though I learned to ride on an off-brand model, first.

Photo from Google.

In the 1970s Girl Scout uniforms changed to give us more options. None of the options was very flattering but I think the one my mother picked for me, as modelled by the little nerd kneeling at the far left, was absolutely the most unflattering to me. Sturdy Polyester Pants That Wouldn't Tear or Show Dirt and Would Grow Up With the Child! (Static cling city and, since nobody wanted to bother with Scouts after grade seven, destined never to fit me.) And That Vest with Extra Room to Display Lots and Lots of Badges! Way to make a scrawny, though already top-heavy, body look fat! I wore it, anyway. 

What I did after school on the other days:

Photo by Hope Gardens.

Photo from Music Teacher. ("Don't fear the French Horn" indeed. No. There's nothing to fear. It just makes a horrible noise in the hands of a child who wanted to play the flute. Wear ear plugs. You'll survive.)

The dog who met us at the bus after school legally belonged to the neighbors, though she was my pet. The dog we had euthanized, after he ate a bantam, legally belonged to us, and was nobody's pet. Go figure. The dog who met us at the bus looked something like this.

Some teenagers hid porn under their beds. I hid this.

Photo from Etsy. I display this book with pride now. In junior high school I hid it under the bed. Dad hated Latin and said no child should have to study it. So we didn't have to study it any longer. So I wanted to study it. Even nice, quiet children who hardly ever make trouble are perverse and rebellious.

Bantams are chickens bred to grow to about half the size of the standard breed they resemble. There are lots of different breeds with different looks. All healthy chickens have bright red wattles, crests, and eyelids, except a few who have been bred for melanism. This melanistic specimen resembles my little buddy Loretta. Free-range chickens normally live up to five years; at the time Loretta's six and a half years was just half of the world's record life span for a chicken. By now it's been confirmed that some chickens have lived more than fifteen years. 

Photo by Grubbly Farms.

We knew two horses who looked something like this one. One had a white star on his forehead, so his name was Star. The other one was dark all over, so his name was Blackie. Like my current resident cat, they were animals of good will but visitors were warned that they weren't pets, so stand back. Usually they ignored me, or at most sniffed at me. My brother rode them. Bareback. It got him scolded with pride.

Photo from Picryl.

House on one of the streets where we had to occupy a rental property, some years, in winter. This is not the same house but they all looked as if they'd been designed by the same man. (This was not necessarily true. Some of my "Aunt Dotty's" houses had been designed and built by Aunt Dotty. They fitted in with the other houses on their streets.)

The college I attended has had so much renovation that Google photos of it don't look like anything I remember. The campus church was architecturally distinctive: Built to look like a new movie theatre instead of a church, it got around "wartime" building restrictions, It had individual seats that folded up as you stood up, rather than pews.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

I voted against Mondale.

Photo from Biography.com.

University: We spent the first week learning where things were, on the huge sprawling campus.

Photo from Adventist Universities.

Home with mononucleosis. Back to the city to work...wherever the little four-car Metrorail trains ran. 

Photo from Yelp. 

In the 1980s floppy disks were really floppy, and Google tends to feature the later, smaller designs. We did not yet think of computers as portable. If an office had its own computer network, the main computer had its own room and was typically between the sizes of a cooking range and a refrigerator. An individual terminal linked to such a computer looked like this (if you were lucky--often the screen lighted up in orange). It did not run different programs at the same time in different windows. In fact each computer's programs were limited strictly to what the employee was paid to do, and pity the fool who tried to get the office computer to do something more interesting.

Photo from Newretro.net.

The Awesome Eighties ended when the Gulf War began. President G.H.W. Bush advised all nonessential personnel to leave Washington and gave us a good example by going to Kennebunkport. I went to Pittsburgh. I saw things that still make me cry, but I loved the people I met in Pittsburgh.

Photo from Next Pittsburgh.

Berea College had been my first choice, if I haaad to go to college, when I was sixteen and knew some people who'd gone there. Years later, when they'd graduated and all the attractive men my age on college campuses were teachers, I had a chance to go to Berea. Loved the courses, the library, the computers. The people...I suppose there are cliques and rivalries everywhere. I did not like the social atmosphere at Berea and did not want to support it by staying another year. They really did proclaim that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." So far as I could tell, that meant all equally hostile and competitive. Continued residency depended on grades. Grades were on a curve system. If you got an A someone else couldn't get that A, so look out behind you. More aggressive people claimed to love Berea. I didn't.

 

Photo from Wikipedia. I will say that Berea has a beautiful campus. 

Everyone who liked computers loved Berea's computer labs. Shiny new terminals with this wonderful new layout that looked almost like a printable page, right on the screen...Windows! We wrote programs to tutor freshmen and tested programs older students had written to tutor us.

Photo from Computer History Museum.

I could still earn a BS at a public university. Which one? Johnson City, Tennessee, and Wise, Virginia, were about equally long commutes. I was accepted by both in June. Each of my parents was in a different hospital in July. Long commutes didn't seem feasible. I never did finish that BS. I had a CGNA certificate, although I hated sitting with geriatric patients. I earned a CMT certificate so I could work with healthier people. In the 1990s the overnight express Greyhound bus was my friend. Board that bus, go to sleep, wake up on the other side of Virginia...

Photo from Yelp.

Married my business's best asset, found a little fixer-upper house in between his house in Clarksville and mine in Virginia...Google currently shows five different houses, and (inexplicably) a street carnival that couldn't fit into a residential neighborhood, at the address of our little house in Maryland. Of the five houses this one doesn't look like the one I remember, but is the only one that has a chance of being the same house after twenty years of redecorating.

It was interesting to find books with which I helped writers on Amazon. Some books of which I wrote the complete first draft can't be found on Amazon because, of course, they were revised and published under different titles. Some books on which I've worked weren't completed, or weren't published. These three, for which I did typing and copy editing, are still available and warmly recommended. They are their authors' own work. I might have suggested a phrase here and there, but although these are books on which I spent time they're not my books at all.

The brand known as Priscilla King was "born" into cyberspace in the summer of 2006. Since brands aren't born in the physical sense and Priscilla King was born a middle-aged aunt, "she" has been given various "birthdays" between 1961 and 1967. "She" was originally a collaboration among three people. "She" was born in, and named for, Kingsport, Tennessee.

In the public library's computer center. Photo from Yelp.

From this point on, youall know the story. The pictures are on this web site. Browse about.

A Bright Side if You Look for One

Years ago, someone posted a prompt/challenge at a writing site, beginning with a photo of a neglected, abandoned house and asking writers for a short "flash" story using five of a list of words that seemed chosen to suggest a depressing story. A horror story, even, like this rather clever one:

https://writinginnorthnorfolk.com/2017/01/07/tearing-down-the-house/

Looking at the picture, though, I think of all the little towns in "flyover country" that have been abandoned because a factory closed. A determined couple could see this as the start of a cheerful story. I, having some good memories of remodelling homes as half of a couple, see this picture as positively erotic.

[Photo is in the public domain, so far as I know.]

Five words from the list: abandon, abundance, axe, disappear, love

"What luck to get these two fixer-uppers together for such a price," Jill said, squeezing Jack's hand. "I love it, I love it, I love it!" 

"Whoever abandoned it wasn't thinking of abundance," Jack agreed. "The smaller house is a wreck inside, but it should be ready for us to move into by the time Junior gets married."

"Eww ick! No kissing!" Junior yipped from the back seat. "Those yellow walls are just begging for an axe. Can I make them disappear? Please?"

Memes That Remind You of a Favorite Show or Movie?

Say what? I don't have a "meme garden." But let's see what Google can do today...a movie and a dash of snark...

 

And a happy, brain-restful Thanksgiving weekend to all...for those going offline for the weekend today, a tip from this web site: Try to find out one brand-new thing about each relative that you didn't know before. "That she's even fatter this year" and "That he's a stubborn wingnut" do not count. Make a list: name of relative, new fun fact--their favorite song, funniest childhood memory story, all-time favorite car model, anything you can think of them to ask them about that maintains a festive mood. 

If you liked these memes, check out everyone else's at http://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-november-22-2023/ . I laughed. 

Book Review: King of the Wind

Title: King of the Wind

Author: Marguerite Henry

Date: 1948

Publisher: Rand McNally

ISBN: 0-590-45316-5 (Scholastic paperback)

Length: 192 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Wesley Dennis

Quote: “[S]elect six of the most perfect steeds in the royal stables. They will be a gift to His Majesty, Louis XV, the boy King of France.”

There’s just one problem with using the history of the horse known as Godolphin Arabian, or Godolphin Barb, as an inspirational animal story for children: It’s an adult story. To make a novel for children out of it Marguerite Henry had not only to invent a little boy who not only lives with a disability but never seems to grow up or change his clothes, but also to alter the pivotal moment in the horse’s own life in such a way that the inspirational consequences have to be narrated thirdhand.

The broad outline of the story needed no changing, just a little fictional embroidery. History records that in the eighteenth century Sultan Mulai Ismael of Morocco sent six fine Arabian race horses to France for racing and crossbreeding. At the time Europeans were trying to breed fast race horses, but the fashion was for breeding big, heavy, thickset animals (of all species, actually). The preferred types of horses were the ancestors of today's Clydesdales and Percherons. Beside them even healthy, well fed Arabian horses looked small and thin. And these horses, apparently, weren’t well fed when they got to France. Apparently a greedy ship’s captain had supplied scant and poor food for the six horses and the six stable boys who travelled with them. When they got to France the boy king’s many aristocrat advisers sent five horses and boys directly back to Morocco. The palace cook being between horses, one of the bony Arabian stallions was harnessed to the cook’s shopping wagon.

Unaltered male horses aren’t the easiest to handle. Why the cook sold the Arabian horse to a vendor of firewood rather than having him neutered is one of the unanswered questions of history. Anyway, during the tough little horse’s first winter in France, an English visitor found him fallen down on the ice, being beaten by the vendor. The Englishman bought the horse, brought him back to England, and sold him. To the Earl of Godolphin, who wanted to breed race horses. The Earl did not, however, want to breed fine-boned, long-necked Arabian horses. He bought this horse as what horse breeders call a “teaser.”

Horses mate only once a year, and their preferences about exactly when and with whom they will share this moment often conflict with those of humans. The Earl, it seems, had particular problems getting visiting mares interested in his big fat male horse, and had noticed that they seemed to find the Arabian stallion more interesting. So the job of the stable boy, who history records was still travelling with the horse, was to lead the Arabian horse out to greet visiting mares before the mares were led in to mate with the Earl’s stallions.

“Stud farms” are not as idyllic as non-horsey men fantasize that they would be. Unaltered male horses do not have a natural instinct to graze peaceably in herds like cows. Nor do horses pair off and live in human-type families. Male horses fight, sometimes to the death, to select one leader who is then allowed to mate with all the females who form his herd. Young horses follow their mothers about until they reach adolescence, when the males start fighting. Most males will try to go their own way and perhaps start their own herds, if they can. But on stud farms there’s no place for them to go, so all these male horses spend their days indoors. Their instincts give them a tendency to be hostile and dangerous at best. Since their situations are not the best, from their point of view, the expectation is that they’ll become vicious, and can be handled only by teams of professionals using various restraining devices, sometimes including drugs. Nobody expects a male horse who is kept specifically for breeding purposes to be pleasant to have around. A male horse who is free to roam a pasture with a mini-herd of female and/or neutered horses and other animals is nearly always easier for everyone, including himself, to live with, and may even make himself useful, if only to one particular human friend.

The Godolphin Arabian had such a friend in the stable boy who came with him from Morocco. Who this man was, where he came from, whether he was completely unable to speak or just never learned to speak English, have been lost to history. The Earl called him Agba. Both horse and man were young when they came to England; they grew up, and the horse grew old, on the Godolphin farm.

The adolescent horse was led out to meet several females who were then bred with the Earl’s male horses before, as young male horses used as “teasers” will, he realized he was old enough to mate, too. Probably with the connivance of his human friend, he “broke loose” from the team of men who were supposed to control the male horses. He whipped the bigger, lazier, older horse in a fair fight and, as male horses do after winning a fight, mated with the female “before his handler could stop him.” The Earl was not pleased.

But he kept the mare and her colt, along with the other colts his horses had produced, and he soon saw that the lean and wiry Arabian-British crossbreed colt was faster than any of his purebred British colts. Or, it turned out, than anybody else’s. The Godolphin Arabian’s first two colts were called Lath, meaning a thin bit of wood shaved off on a lathe, and Cade, meaning the smallest young animal in a litter—and they won races under those names. The Godolphin Arabian’s third colt was called Regulus, because he was expected to win races regularly, and he did. These and the Godolphin Arabian’s other crossbreed offspring became the founders of the Thoroughbred breed. Two other male Arabian horses were imported to England. Before long, one-mile races were restricted to Thoroughbreds—descendants of these three stallions, whose offspring were then bred with one another. On one side or another the Godolphin Arabian was an ancestor to almost every horse whose name you’ve seen in the newspapers: Man o’ War, Black Gold, Native Dancer, Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Seabiscuit, Barbaro, Smarty Jones...

Horsey adults have long enjoyed the ironic history of the first Thoroughbred horses, but it’s hardly an edifying story for middle school readers. Making it one remained for Marguerite Henry to do. She did this by telling the story from the point of view of Agba, about whom the real world knows nothing, which left Henry free to invent an inspirational little story based on what really happened to children whose parents had died young and poor in the eighteenth century. Agba is taught nothing but how to groom horses. We learn with him about the body proportions required for show-quality Arabians, but mostly we see him being loyal to his horse.

In the children’s story version, the horse just eats, rests, or runs about, often carrying Agba and their pet cat, in between intervals of starvation, until he falls in love with the Earl’s youngest mare. The urge to inject an “affectional” quality to animal sexuality rings about as false as Agba’s reaction when he and the horse and the cat are banished from the stables to an isolated property down in the Fens, then brought back when the Earl sees how Lath can run. At Wicken Fen he sees only one other human being, a poacher; free to farm or fish, he doesn’t learn how to do either, but subsists on barley cooked in brackish polluted water. We can believe he might have been shy enoough to feel not much more isolated during this time than he is by his muteness all the time, but I suspect a real man would think of better rations at the Earl’s farm, new clothes, and presumably a little pocket money, before thinking about the horse’s reputation. Well, read the book. Maybe, if you’re as goodhearted as Agba, and a horse is what you have to love, you might think of the horse’s reputation first. I’ve never been sure.

Henry also gave the horse an Arabic name: one of the simplest sords in the language, Sham, “sun,” although the horse’s coat was usually described as the shade of brown called “bay.” Though, if the stable boy really couldn’t speak at all, the horse would never have answered to that name either, many Thoroughbreds don’t know their official registered names. Stable staff often give them simpler, more descriptive nicknames, often things like “Horse” or “Big Boy.” Man o’ War, the newspapers reported, actually answered to “Big Red.” The Godolphin Arabian might have had a grandiose official name like "King of the Wind," and "daughters of the wind" is a traditional name for Arabian mares, but whether the horse had a name will never be known. To the Earl his being an "Arabian" or "Barb" was distinctive enough.

In any case, most children who like horse stories like Marguerite Henry’s. Though what I currently have for resale is a reprint with only a few of the original illustrations, I recommend looking for the original if you can find it. Most of the illustrations in children’s books are badly done, included just to distract the eye, but Wesley Dennis’s horse and dog drawings are lifelike. Children who consciously study how to draw and paint animal pictures, with or without humans and landscapes in them, will want to study all of his. If you grew up with a copy of King of the Wind that had the full-page color pictures in it, a reprint with only the little black-and-white pictures above the chapter headings seems unsatisfactory somehow.

Book Review: Dixie Dobie

Title: Dixie Dobie

Author: Margaret S. Johnson and Helen Lossing Johnson

Date: 1945

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company

ISBN: none, but click here to view it on Amazon

Length: 90 pages

Illustrations: several pencil drawings

Quote: “The most important animals on Sable Island are wild ponies.”

On Sable Island off Nova Scotia, as on Chincoteague, harsh conditions have caused an abandoned herd of horses to evolve into a breed of sturdy “ponies.” These ponies were sometimes rounded up and sold to people on the mainland. Dixie Dobie is the story of a Sable Island pony.

Written for grades two through four, this is a simple be-kind-to-animals story that will appeal to even younger children if they are precocious readers or if the story is read aloud to them. Sophisticated fourth grade readers might pronounce it dull. There’s no suspense, no surprise.

The pony’s first purchasers, a family called Dobie, expect “Dixie” to behave like a well trained farm horse and are predictably disappointed. Her next human family, the Bradfords, add “Dobie” to her name, take the time to make friends with Dixie Dobie, and are able to benefit from her toughness and good sense.

If it’s not the straight facts, Dixie Dobie is certainly true in essence, and predictable as it can be. There are no distracting subplots or characterizations. Like the drawings of horses, people, and landscapes that break up the text, this story is meant to communicate information clearly, not to entertain anyone with flights of imagination.

As a first book about How to Care for Your Pony, Dixie Dobie might disappoint children who imagine that the bonding process will be as quick in real life as it sounds in the story. Adults reading this story to children who are going to be living with any kind of animal may want to emphasize that, although Johnson didn’t expect anyone to sit around and read about each day, the Bradfords would have spent months making friends with their feral, independent pet.

People who seriously intend to adopt a feral horse will need more informative books than Dixie Dobie. In fact, they’ll probably need a support group. Nevertheless, Dixie Dobie is a nice first book for those people to give to young children as a pre-introduction to their new friend.

Wild pony photo from Thelesleyshow at www.morguefile.com/archive/display/977192:

Posted on October 8, 2015 Categories Book, Horse Tags feral animal, Nova Scotia, wild pony

Book Review: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Title: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Author: Roger Tory Peterson

Date: (?) 1978

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: 0-517-53545-9

Length: 160

Illustrations: color prints of John James Audubon’s paintings

Quote: “Audubon...was the first to take birds out of the glass case and give them the simulation of life.”

Before photographs were invented, wildlife artists worked from dead specimens. John James Audubon (born 1785), like Alexander Wilson, Mark Catesby, and John Bachman, shot the birds they “studied.” They were fascinated by how easy it was to kill birds without making a noticeable dent in local populations. “Besotted” might be a better word. Though Audubon was amused by the behavior of birds he was able to catch alive, he didn’t mind eating birds he;d shot or selling them for meat, either, and might kill three dozen birds while preparing to paint two.

In Audubon’s time the Carolina Parakeet, which is now extinct, was a noisy, messy pest, and Audubon wrote that while the birds were “plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain,” a farmer could “commit great slaughter...All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds...return to be shot at until few remain alive. I have seen hundreds destroyed in...a few hours.” Passenger pigeons and prairie chickens were also slaughtered whether or not anyone could eat them. In pigeon season the poorest had fresh pigeon pie.

Egrets, whose “breeding plume” feathers were especially popular as hat trimmings, were slaughtered in their breeding season, so the orphaned baby egrets died shortly after their parents. Peterson’s comment on “the stench...heavy over every colony” socks it to the imaginations of readers who can remember all too easily that a healthy colony of any kind of herons always has a sufficiently strong odor.

Audubon observed closely the positions in which the birds he shot for his own use had flown, perched, sung, scolded, or threatened him. While painting he nailed and wired his specimens into similar positions. Big birds, like pelicans, great herons, and Canada geese, were posed with their heads down so they could be painted at life size, or close to it, on a 26x39” page. Some of his specimens seem to have stiffened into grotesque positions. Birds’ necks naturally form curves and angles that look uncomfortable to humans; a living heron is as good an argument as a giraffe is for the claim that the Creator must have a sense of humor, but some of Audubon’s herons were hard to believe. I have never seen mockingbirds try to fly in the position one of Audubon’s mockingbirds seems to be flying in, either.

Audubon's language could be flowery, and his article on Bachman's Warblers raises the question whether these birds ever were a true, distinct species. Marylanders who wanted to believe they had a rare, endangered, vanishing, and finally agreed to be extinct, species have paid dearly to protect the habitat of what may have been merely a variety, all along. In the name of preserving Bachman's Warblers cats have been forbidden to hunt in otherwise pleasant parts of Maryland, allowing rats to reach the top of the food chain. 

Even Audubon's observations were imperfect. Mostly they are reliable even today, but we've learned more about typical bird behavior, especially the number of eggs laid in the average nest. Recent editions of Birds of America have footnotes correcting Audubon's average-brood-size counts. Audubon also through herons were solitary; they are of course solitary when fishing, which means most of the day, but they roost in great loud messy flocks. When fish are abundant, as when ponds have been stocked, I have seen a half-dozen herons fishing side by side on one sandbar, and when the shadow of a passing human did not disturb the fish it did not noticeably disturb the herons either. Most conspicuously of all, of course, Audubon mistook the young bald eagle for a separate species he called The Bird of Freedom.

Nevertheless, Audubon's paintings were magnificent, his stories about the birds he studied were often entertaining, his descriptions were precise, and with just a few explanatory footnotes his Birds of America is still a valuable reference work. More recent birdwatchers have dreamed of writing something like Birds of America for themselves, using their own observations and stories. 

Today a claim might be made that David Sibley's Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, taken together with his Field Guides, have reached that goal. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, no one was better qualified to emulate Birds of America than Roger Tory Peterson, already famous as the author and illustrator of Peterson's Field Guides to the Eastern and Western North American birds and founder of the series. He probably knew most of Bird of America by heart, with its few necessary corrections, and he had stories to tell of his and his friends' observations of these birds, "hunting" with cameras rather than guns, worthy to set beside Audubon's. So he was asked to write 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America, and he wrote it. It is of course shorter than Audubon's masterpiece, and was printed in a much smaller size, as if to say "Of course this book is only a successor,--no one would try to compete with Birds of America!" 

Here, anyhow, are 102 updated "biographies" to accompany smaller prints of Audubon's paintings--a modest, affordable, coffee-table book that explains, accurately, how young bald eagles have dark coats all over, and white feathers grow in on their heads after the first few molts, when the birds are four or five years old. And many other fun facts, many quoted directly from Audubon and some of Peterson's very own.

If you like watching the birds around your house and garden, or even at the local park, and you live in an Eastern State, this book will probably meet your reference needs for several years. The birds most people most often see are here. This book does not go into the details of how experts identify the other warblers of which Bachman's might have been a mutant or crossbred form, but does provide fun facts about palmated and piping plovers, herring gulls and sooty terns, red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks, sparrows and wrens and all the other favorites. 

Peterson was a cautious scientific observer. Over time, the works of cautious scientific observers seldom need to be changed--only added to.

Book Review: The Golden Book All Paris

Title: The Golden Book All Paris

Author: Giovanna Magi

Publisher: Casa Editrice Bonechi

Date: 1998

ISBN: 88-7009-191-0

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: full-color photographs

Quote: “Writing a brief historical outline of Paris is no easy task: few cities have been so involved in great events which have changed the course of history.”

So, although there’s a sketch of the city’s history, no fear, this is mostly a photo album of Paris. Of course choosing what to include in the photo album is never an easy task either. Everyone agrees on the Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Triumph, and the Mona Lisa painting reprinted on the back cover. Beyond that, much depends on which of the pictures the visitor snaps come out best. (One way real progress has been made: with a good digital camera you can snap all the pictures you need to save only the ones that come out well.)

People who’ve been to Paris will start listing things that ought to be in the photo album and aren’t in this one, no doubt, but almost every one of these 128 pages contains premium-grade eye candy. Magi hardly needed to bother translating the text into English but she wrote nice, clear notes in English, too, if you can pull your eyes away from the pictures long enough to read them. If she’d chosen the title she would probably have chosen a better one. The Golden Book is a series of travel picture books printed by the publishers. Each book is “all” pictures of one popular destination or another.

If you’re a fan of “Wordless Wednesday” photo blogs, you might want to collect the whole series…though these Italian Golden Books are in no way connected to Whitman’s cheap, popular “Little Golden Books” for children.

Book Review: Tales of Whimsy Verses of Woe

Title: Tales of Whimsy Verses of Woe 

Author: Tim DeRoche

Date: 2023

Publisher: Redtail

ISBN: 978-0-9992776-1-4

Length: 99 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Daniel Gonzalez

Quote: "If your moral character is flimsy / Or your wit be rather slow, / Oh dare not read these tales of whimsy / For often do they end in woe."

This book would have you know that it received a "Baldersquash Medal"! Also awarded to the works of Edward Lear, Dr. Seuss, Edward Gorey, Shel Silverstein, and Lemony Snicket! (And others.)

These poems, and the drawings that accompany them, remind one of all five of those geniuses. 

It's unfortunate that the first and last poems, which people picking up a book in a store, would be likely to read first, are likely to put people off, because what's in between them is good clean hilarity. Here be mudpie shakes with hollandaise, a gallant prince who decides not to kill the wild beast that he's heard killed his father, a young couple who set out to paint all the green things on Earth red or blue, a fish who wants to be eaten by the king, a Jabberwock that doesn't need slaying, and more. 

The first poem, in which a girl's head explodes from studying too much, advises the child reader Silverstein-fashion to tell this story to parents who tell them to do their homework. If they do, the kids certainly ought to get a little extra reading about how that kind of thing was used in the past to discourage little girls from letting themselves do better than little boys at school. The last poem, in a boy claims God told him that God looks forward to seeing him "up here" when he dies, leaves me wondering whether to say "You shouldn't make up stories like that about serious things!" or to feel sorry for the parents who might be about to lose their son. So they're not quite up to the Lear, Seuss, Gorey, Silverstein, Snicket level of quality. 

But then you'll want to know what happened when:

"The King of the Land

Had a band.

They practiced their punk.

But they stunk."

Or: 

"...my bathroom faucet cannot make me clean,

Since it brings only lukewarm gasoline."

These poems won't disappoint you. Neither will the pictures, which are too detailed to be cartoons and too goofy to be baroque, and delight the parts of my brain that like both of those genres. Somewhere in my mind Silverstein, Carolyn Wells, and Gelett Burgess laughed out loud and agreed, "The trouble with this book is that it's too short."

Book Review: Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic

Title: Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic

Author: Rachel Ashwell

Date: 1998

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-039208-8

Length: 210 pages

Illustrations: color photos and line drawings

Quote: “I learned to appreciate vintage and history...I honed an ability to know what to restore and, more important, what to leave alone.”

Rachel Ashwell financed her move from Britain to Southern California by decorating other people’s houses, not with whatever some department store was trying to sell (as an older generation of home decorators did), but with her own flea-market finds.

This daring move calls for criticism on social-political-economic grounds. That Ashwell did it was laudable. Whether the rest of us should try to copy it is debatable, and calls for mindfulness. Making something fashionable can be an easy way to destroy what made it valuable. Flea markets are, primarily, FUN. They’re also a way for small businesses to start without going into debt, and a way for the recently unemployed or disabled or bereaved to meet a few of the sudden expenses life has dumped upon them. This gives them a valuable place in society that depends on their being kept accessible, cheap, and, well, fun. The idea of “an upscale flea market” is not obviously or intentionally contrary to the idea of a good flea market—but in effect it is. Raise the booth fees, edge out the cheap junk that might appeal to jammy-fingered kids rather than the selfconsciously trendy and arty crowd, and you’ve replaced a good flea market with a horrid, pretentious source of overpriced...well...cheap junk. Because real gold will be real gold no matter how much brass and plastic surround it, but when people who don’t have real gold start charging the same prices for brass and plastic that they would for gold, then people who recognize real gold have a reason to sneer at the pretentious flea market.

There’s also a tendency for slick types to finance “really interesting” flea market businesses with illegitimate operations...one way to recognize this happening is when the genuinely casual vendors or the resolutely wholesome and small ones start feeling dissed or patronized. Women tend to enter flea markets, either casually or amateurishly, to sell off things that no longer need space in our homes: baby supplies after menopause, things a departed friend or relative won’t be using again, things that cost more than we ought to have spent on them in the first place and might have enough resale value to allow us to keep the house. When we are new both to an individual market and to flea-marketing, it’s easy and natural to assume that a guy who’s obviously buying and selling the more coveted items, for profit, might overtly fail to listen to us, address us as “Baby” or “Grandma” or some similar bogus endearment as a show of lack of respect, even try to discourage us or push us to go home before he does, because he is a sexist jerk. Guys who act that way are, of course, sexist jerks but if we pay attention we find that that’s not the full extent of what’s wrong with their operations. It’s always worthwhile to find out what kind of illegitimate business they’re up to—drugs, illegal gambling, stolen goods, etc.

Even a wholesome, low-budget market tempts vendors (they’re numerous these days) who are in fact old, ill, and in pain, whether they look it or not, and do in fact receive prescriptions and discounts for medications they find it possible not only to get by without, but to resell at a profit. They may be enabling the self-destruction of idiots who aren’t likely to be missed, but by keeping themselves active  they are replacing those idiots with smarter, more experienced, active citizens.

Any movement toward oh-not-just-raising-prices-for-profit-but-making-the-market-more-“upscale”-and-“professional”, which market managers will try if they think some vendors and customers will tolerate it, creates the financial pressure that makes pill resellers start buying as well as selling, handling more and “harder” drugs than their own surplus. That’s when they start trying to clear the “sweetie pie” vendors out of the way so “the big boys” can “do business,” and when their business needs to be shut down by the police. As these markets lose the respect of people looking for fabulous deals on “shabby chic” china dishes, they also attract vice and crime.

Toward the end of Shabby Chic Ashwell lists her favorite (big, pricey) markets, sources of the faded colors and antique styles that fitted into her decorating look (which, for those who don’t recognize it, might remind them of Laura Ashley). That’s the part of the book that could most usefully have been left out. If those were good, legitimate markets in 1998, chances are that they’d been ruined by 1999. Ashwell really should not have given the kiss of death to those markets. Fortunately they weren’t even in the same States where I’ve either shopped or sold. The focus is of course on California.

That’s a short appendix, squeezed in at the back of the book between a discussion of cleaning and refinishing techniques and an early-twentieth-century style “inspirational poem” at “The End.” The main 200 pages of this book are all about decorative looks. What Ashwell had to tell people probably can be communicated better through photos than through words; certainly her book consists more of photos than of words. We see lots of furniture, dishes in china cupboards, books on shelves, plus some clothes modelled by young women and children.

And, of course, colors...

I think the essential challenge for anyone writing about colors, designing (anything) with colors, mixing colors, shopping for colors, etc., is to acknowledge that, while you might like a particular “palette” of colors better than others, not everyone else needs to share your taste.

Women tend to sound judgmental about colors when we lack training in working with different styles and palettes.

I think Carole Jackson’s biggest contribution to the world was that her “Color Me Beautiful” system required everyone to learn to see four general categories of colors (with or without advanced practice in identifying “palettes” that blur the edges between two of the big four categories). Human faces usually fit into one category more than the others, although some people are hard to classify. In theory all colorists would agree that a face fits into one color category. In practice some people really do look good in colors from two or even three categories, and trained colorists can disagree on whether to count an individual as Spring or Autumn.

Printed color photographs can complicate matters by nudging color tones closer together than they might have been in real life, but it looks on the front cover as if Rachel Ashwell is one of those people. “Her” color palette appears to be a compromise for her face. She looks like a natural Autumn, or maybe even Spring, who likes colors that are in the Summer palette and has built her whole look, at least when these pictures were taken, around mixing colors that blur on the edges between the Summer, Spring, and Autumn categories. Things are off-white, or they are pastel-colored. Most of the pastel colors are very pale pastels. They’re pink and mauve, but very pale shades of pink and mauve, with brown rather than blue undertones. Or they’re yellow, but very soft shades of yellow that blur toward cream, ivory, and pine wood rather than lemon or orange. Or they’re green—pale greens with visible blue overtones and quite strong yellow undertones. Occasionally they’re true blue, but faded...like indigo-dyed denim, which is bright blue when new but always shows its white warp threads even before the blue starts fading, or like blue-on-white china, where some parts retain a bright true blue color but the white always predominates.

Enough people like this cross-“seasons” group of colors, at least in decor, that there’s an alternative school of colorists that regard it as a primary color group in its own right. In the 1980s Leatrice Eiseman worked with a color classification system of cool-toned “Sunrise,” warm-toned “Sunset,” and this mix of pale colors with cream and ivory as “Sunlight.” The “Sunlight” palette definitely lends itself to secondhand furniture, which is often faded. It’s probably a compromise palette for almost anybody to wear. Sunbleached furniture material is often good for several more years of service; genuinely sunbleached clothing may not be.

Shabby Chic is a visual guide to using Sunlight colors. They make soft, pretty combinations. They clash with the Winter colors the majority of people wear well.  Since the effect of mixing Winter colors with softer, more “natural” (non-aniline-dyed) colors tends to be making the other colors look faded...

Women can sound downright bigoted about the colors that aren’t their own (or, in some cases, their mothers’, or those of some other fashion mentor). In the past, when everybody did not have equal access to every color that caught their eye, various cultures evolved judgmental ways to describe colors. The intense Winter and Spring colors were dissed as “garish” or “childish”; soft Summer colors were “faded” or “washed-out,” and warm Autumn browns were “pre-soiled” or “dirt-colored” to those they didn’t suit. 

Since my hand-knitting brand is “clothing, not ‘fashions’,” I’ve not retreated back, as most retailers of mass-produced garments have, to the bad old Waste Age custom of marketing “this season’s colors” and purging colors that may be what someone wants from my display. Sometimes someone twits me about this: “Don’t you have some more contemporary colors than all those 1980s [they mean Winter] colors?” I do, but since the person has used a hostile rather than professional tone I’m apt to hit back, “Y’mean that pre-soiled, urban grunge look?” Actually it’s only on Winters that browns and brownish grays look “dirt-colored.” On Autumns, of which the speaker is probably one, brown is a vibrant color that brings out the person’s unusual good looks.

Colors speak directly to the emotional, even reptilian, layers of our brains but it’s worth the effort of learning to see colors with a detached professional eye. You are, for example, more likely to get the designs of your dreams from artisans or decorators to whom you describe your colors without making harsh judgments on theirs. Better yet, as Ashwell fortunately does in this book, show pictures. If someone has a clear, true picture of the couch and the rug and the picture on the wall and says "I want a blanket to put on this couch," we are communicating.

Ashwell betrays a habit of thinking of books on shelves as décor items, to be judged by their covers, rather than words to be judged by their meaning. She knows someone who finds the freshly printed colors on book jackets too bright, so she loses the jackets and displays the beautifully fading colors of older books’ hard covers. Isn’t that special! Ick! Actually, it depends on the community. I both buy and sell secondhand books without paper jackets, but some booksellers say they can’t sell them.

If a person wanted to display books as décor items, it’s not hard to do. In fact it could be fun to do as a family project with children. You can’t have too many book covers and it’s so easy to cut paper to wrap around a book. You could color-code book covers to make it easier to see which shelf a book belongs on. You could decorate them with scenes from the book. You could play with visual effects on your computer, printing off book jackets with colors, shading effects, or decorative fonts. But the backs of books on a shelf are such small areas of color that books can’t really be said to affect the color balance in a room, unless you put a lot of color-matched covers side by side. 

Actually, since most houses benefit from having light-colored interiors that maximize the efficiency of lighting, Ashwell’s pale color palette could inspire tweaks in any direction. Ashwell suggests re-dyeing yellowed white fabric to a “flattering sepia.” Spoken like an Autumn...to the majority of humankind, who are Winters, there is no such thing as a flattering sepia. If yellowed white fabric doesn’t bleach back to white, most of us would dye it a bright color, or maybe black. If you take design or decorating seriously, you do this kind of “translation” automatically, and you can use and enjoy Shabby Chic. If not, you probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.

So, in summary: If you are the kind of person who can get the most use out of Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic, you probably don’t need it, but you’ll probably enjoy it. I don’t think it’s an ideal first book for someone who’s new to The Applied Visual Arts, unless that person happens to be in Ashwell’s peculiar color niche, as described above. It is, in any case, a gorgeous book. It’s the sort of book I like having on a display just to show that, bristling and value judgments aside, I do understand how those minority-appeal color palettes work...and actually I enjoy using them, now and then, on commissions from people who look different from me. You might like it for that purpose too, or you might like it as a guide to putting together your home and/or wardrobe.

  

More Petfinder Links, Anyone?

A few years ago, this web site was featuring daily Petfinder links.

It all started when I took the Laptop of Then home and looked at "cached" web pages while the Queen Cat of Then, Heather, was being encouraged to curl up and purr beside me. Heather would look at the laptop, and though she didn't mistake pictures for real things in the room or try to swat the cursor, she did seem to recognize cat pictures as images of other cats. She'd look at cat pictures and usually point her ears slightly toward them, showing mild interest, not alarm or hostility. I thought it was cute to make a post that suggested that a cat an e-friend's local shelter was finding hard to place might become an "e-friend for Heather." Publicity got that cat (a crotchety senior cat) a home, and Heather and I then started picking the cutest cat photos near the zipcodes 10101, 20202, and 30303--New York, Washington, and Atlanta.

The rule was that we, or more often just I, would look for photos of the type of animal first mentioned by an e-friend or Tweep during each online session. If the first animal content I found online came from Mudpie's Human (the blogger who started it all), I'd pick the cutest three-colored cat pictures. If it came from LB Johnson, I'd pick the most photogenic black dogs or retriever-type dogs. And so on.

The cool part was that Twitter would automatically display one of the pet photos, people would retweet the cute animal picture, and the next time I'd look at pictures of that type of animal, that one would no longer be in the shelter. (Usually. There was one beautiful cat, who looked a lot like Heather, who the shelter staff said just wasn't friendly; people who saw her picture would decide to adopt some other three-colored cat instead.) We were actually helping animals find homes! Heather really was pleased...because other people were adopting those cats, so they weren't moving in with us. Heather was a gracious Queen of a Cat Sanctuary but she had a way of looking at other cats, just to let them know who was Queen, that caused several prospective temporary residents to sprint half a mile. Even some human readers, seeing Heather's "Excuse me, I happen to be the Queen Cat here" expression, thought she looked "mean."

Nah. Miffed is the word. I never saw Heather looking seriously angry, or wanted to. She was a gentle, goodhearted cat who once lost her own kittens by trying to adopt some orphaned kittens too completely, too quickly. She was extremely social, and failed to develop some of the standard adult cat survival skills by relying on her friends to do things like supplying enough milk for all the kittens or even cleaning the fur on Heather's head. The one time she encountered a cat who really was hostile, her attitude seemed to be "Is this even possible? What can you do in such an unnatural situation--an antisocial cat!" But when she reached her full size she was a serious predator--the hunter for the family. Most other cats didn't want to mess with her. She always seemed to wish other cats well, and to understand that their well-being included plenty of space.

Heather grew older and dozier, spent more time indoors but still wanted to spend most of her time outdoors, and was eventually caught in extreme weather. She was survived by a foster kitten, Samantha Scaredycat, and a nephew, Burr, who produced our current Queen Serena. Serena really can be a tough disciplinarian, though not mean. And she's shown subzero potential for ever actually participating in any cute little rituals of helping pick out cute pictures to show on this web site. Serena disapproves of electronic screens; that's why there aren't more pictures of her, though she knows she has a pretty face and likes to be admired.

In that picture, taken before she was even half grown, Serena was asserting ownership of Samantha's Safe Place. She's usually nice about it but she is the most dominant social cat I've ever known. (Often social cats don't seem to have a hierarchy.) She loves other cats as long as they're completely submissive, subordinate followers who don't get any ideas about e.g. snuggling up to her human. Possibly that's why, on seeing a glimpse of her own reflection in a screen, Serena either moves away from a full-sized image, growling and hissing, or wants to play roughly with a miniature image such as a digital camera phone. She probably sees herself as either a hostile intruder, or a very bratty kitten who needs a lot of slapping around. No other living cat has ever replied to Serena's normal body language with equal assertiveness, and if one did, fur would probably fly.

 But with humans, at least, the Petfinder links were extremely popular, and seemed to be doing some good, so I continued doing them without Heather's input until Petfinder redesigned their web site and added some cookies that the cookie-cleaning software on the Laptop of Then was not able to clean away. This made using them a violation of our Google Contract of Then: This web site's contract forbids us to use links that might adversely affect people's computers' performance, i.e. links to sites that use messy cookies.

But guess what's happened? I have a new laptop with newer cookie-cleaning software. Google has changed their coding to include newer cookie-cleaning software. I can now visit Petfinder without picking up messy cookie crumbs. That does not necessarily guarantee that everyone can, so the following Petfinder link is only a test. If it opens slowly or strangely, or the link works slowly or strangely, for any readers Out There, please let me know, and I won't do more Petfinder links.

Here, in any case, is Claudia from Blountville, Tennessee, nonverbally saying "Please give me a decent home, away from this lunatic who wants to drape beads around me."



Can you resist that eyeroll? If not, click here. That shelter near the Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee is a long drive from anywhere but it's where I found Dusty, the legendary Queen of the Yuma Cat Sanctuary, and it's where shelter staff found and documented a pair of social cat cousins whose bonding was remarkable enough to be written up in the newspapers. Claudia is a full-grown cat, which means she'll take longer to become a real part of your family than a kitten would, but also means she's already received the routine veterinary care, including spaying, necessary before you can take her home.

If I don't receive complaints from readers, the Petfinder links will return.

(For those who don't know, that straw-gray tabby coloring with patches of yellow makes Claudia what some people now call a "Torbie"--a combination of tabby and tortoiseshell. I don't know that there is a stereotype of what's considered a typical Torbie personality yet. I know our Mackerel was a big, tough, independent, sweet, super-social Torbie tom who lived in the woods and spent quality time with all the different families who loved him, and Suzie, the Queen of the Jackson Street Cat Sanctuary for many years, was a long, lean, mean-faced but sweet-natured Torbie who spent lots of time warming a sick patient's feet. So the common characteristic for both of the Torbies I've known was that they were unusually kind cats, but I don't know that that's really typical.)