Link Log for April 6

Categories: Animals, Books, Christian, Crafts, Diseases & Conditions, Easter/Passover/Holy Week, Fashion, Food, Funny, Language, Pac-Man, Phenology, Politics, Writing.

Animals 

Five fun facts about polydactyl cats (like Heather)...

http://www.catster.com/lifestyle/polydactyl-cats-facts

I want this book...I don't know why Amazon insists on bothering to create a separate Wish List for me to add it to. I know some of Berton's books were printed in the United States and can't think of any valid reason why this one should be banned in the States. Something I need to know?

http://www.amazon.ca/Cats-Have-Known-Loved-Publisher/dp/B00SQAPJ2K/

Animals as things we have to walk around...

http://challengeyourwriting.blogspot.com/2015/04/walk-around-what.html

Animals walking around...in Alaska.

http://laylalawlor.livejournal.com/245017.html

Sea lions, ordinarily peaceful fish-eating mammals, can get dangerous when too many of them have been living on apparently peaceful terms with too many humans for too long:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/06/fisherman-posing-with-his-catch-for-a-picture-is-dragged-under-water-by-aggressive-sea-lion/?

Duck...not an American species...with duckling:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/104296559060154469022/albums/6133556978432409057/6133556974254229794?sqi=105248841768188069608&sqsi=dc6b8116-a230-46c9-aba2-0e6dc64a9f65&pid=6133556974254229794&oid=104296559060154469022

Children who neglect animals...My brother and I bonded with a pony, and always took her the fruit and vegetable scraps we were allowed to give her as treats, right away. We also bonded with our bantams, let them out in the afternoons, led them back in and sang and rehearsed our stupid pet act with them at sundown, without being told.

We also had a parakeet. Somehow that parakeet never became a real pet, never seemed to communicate with us. And we'd look at his food dish, but the empty husks of millet he left in the dish look an awful lot like the fresh millet we put in. And during his third winter in our home, even our parents had a rough time with flu...and one day when we were up one of us said "That parakeet's awfully quiet," and checked, and sure enough he'd starved to death in a cage with a couple of cups of empty husks.

That wouldn't have happened with the pony. Nor with the bantams. So in addition to the things +Lyn Lomasi suggests here, if your child neglects your hamster, you might want to consider choosing a more interesting pet.

http://www.heartandmindpawrescue.com/rescue-blog/help-my-child-is-neglecting-the-hamster

If anything should happen to you, what would happen to your pet(s)? Most of the real-world friends who've been referenced here by "nature names" are people with whom I've had some sort of emergency animal care and adoption pact.

http://www.dogpawsitivetidbits.com/2015/04/if-i-should-die-before-my-dog-book.html

Abused and neglected horses...

http://jaquo.com/important-moment-wild-horse-history/

(And here's the book referenced in my Google+ comment:

http://www.amazon.com/Mustang-Wild-Spirit-Marguerite-Henry/dp/B000YA7D0G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1428363944&sr=1-1&keywords=Henry+book+mustang)

Books 

Coloring books for adults (and teenagers)? Why not? If you don't make gorgeous, colorful, symmetrical doodles all by yourself, buy some and color them in.

http://booktrib.com/2015/04/adult-coloring-books-are-the-new-craze/

Christian 

Some commenters read this article as anti-Catholic. I don't. I read it as anti-monastic, perhaps failing to recognize that some Christians are called to be more contemplative than active, but accurate. If I had to quarrel with John Nantz about something in this article, I'd ask him where he got the idea that people would imagine Paul as a monastic character. The Bible shows him to have been about as un-monastic as a Christian can be. (Thanks to +Allen West Republic for sharing...and yes, this Townhall page behaved quite well, at least in Chrome. Has the site finally heard my pleas for less annoying ads?)

http://townhall.com/columnists/johnnantz/2015/04/06/a-slumbering-christianity-the-liberals-best-friend-n1981183/page/full

Crafts 

Traditional embroidery stitch adapted to crocheting:

http://www.allcraftconnection.org/

The things one can order online...include personalized Mothers Day gift tags with daisies:

http://www.zazzle.com/personalized_mothers_day_gift_tags_with_daisy-256707790159331819

Y'know, you could call money spent to help +Ruth Cox move a donation...it is meant to help keep an old lady and her dog together and out of shelters, after all...

https://fundrazr.com/stories/d9KP70/gp/61I2Q0

...or you could just buy a bunch of these extremely cool original, non-Hallmark cards that put a marvellous spin on the idea of "feeling emotionally bankrupt."

http://ruthcoxpoetryprose.blogspot.com/2015/04/feeling-emotionally-bankrupt-or-bloated.html

Diseases & Conditions 

"Autism Speaks"? Not for the afflicted children, themselves...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/115672855794/autism-speaks-gets-even-worse

To me the term "high-functioning autistic" does seem useful, though, as noted, it does not have anything to do with HSP or introvert traits. Although child psychologists did originally use "autistic" to describe activities that were self-contained, self-defined, not shared with anyone else, I'm going to pull demographic rank and say that, when the majority of English-speaking people learned the word "autism," it meant a pattern of massive brain damage that normally made it impossible for a child to communicate. So, "high-functioning autistic" would describe someone like Temple Grandin or Donna Williams who has that kind of brain damage but has been able to learn to use some sort of language to some extent. It would also be predictably, though inaccurately, used as a catchall label to describe any child who appears to have brain damage, probably some other, milder kind...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/115660551654/2ndhalfoflife-nomorepuzzleprofits-we-need-to

Easter, Passover, Holy Week 

An emotional Easter story...

http://challengeyourwriting.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-z-emotion-challenge-emotions.html

Cartoon by +L. L. Reynolds :

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/+LLReynolds/albums/6133699786354161713/6133699791650617058?pid=6133699791650617058&oid=100464596219726743506

Happy Easter story from +Coral Levang :

http://personapaper.com/article/28695-there-will-be-chocolate-bunnies-this-year

Fashion 

In some countries, I'm told, it's socially acceptable for a woman to wear one dress or suit every day until it wears out. And of course there are some very socially acceptable schools (and workplaces) even in the U.S. where it's expected that girls and women will rotate among three or more copies of the same suit; it's called a uniform. I think most American women would feel that dressing this way was boring, though. (Well, I would.) But also, there would be women who'd insist on wearing different things to the building where they put on their uniforms. And this would go back to twentieth-century U.S. culture: If a man appears to be wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday, he doesn't care what he looks like, which was not always perceived as all bad. If a woman appears to be wearing the same clothes she wore yesterday, she unexpectedly spent the night at someone else's home.

I used to enjoy messing with people's minds, especially in the area of the good-girl-bad-girl stereotypes, and one thing I did as a Bright Young Thing was to buy two copies of the same outfit (I have two copies each of one suit, two dresses, and two T-shirts), but in different sizes--one for a "fitted" look and one for a "relaxed" look. I sort of enjoyed wearing them to one-day-a-week jobs and seeing whether people would comment on my apparent weight gain or loss...psych!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emily-peck/can-women-get-away-with-w_b_7000398.html

Food 

From a blog I just started following...if you can trust your supplier of oatmeal, this recipe would even be gluten-free.

http://joyfulcountrylife.com/2015/04/06/apple-crisp/

Funny

+Theresa Wiza posted the funniest thing I've seen online today:

blogspot.com/2015/04/when-other-people-think-youre-crazy.html

Language 

Dittoed and underlined...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/115668052064/heal-teavibes-sunfl0werpetal

Note that people who want to make this status distinction between foreign accents need to live in places where they meet only a few specific groups of foreigners. In Washington we hear everything, and it's not always easy to tell whether someone's accent is European, Asian, African, or one of those strange mixes that form when the person has lived in several different countries. Nevertheless. Fellow Americans, even when someone's accent is really heavy, difficult to understand, painful to listen to...don't youall think, "Yikes, this must be the way I sound when I speak whatever it is that I fondly imagine to be French"? I know I do. (Duh...those who do speak French fluently can always substitute whatever language you learned third, fourth, or later and will always speak with a heavy accent.)

Pac-Man 

Retro-cute:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/+GoogleMaps/albums/6134239014655275601/6134239014218233186?pid=6134239014218233186&oid=111401917971052287374

Phenology 

Redbuds are already in bloom, just a couple hundred miles south of here. They can't be far away...

http://personapaper.com/article/28672-spring-has-sprung

What's blooming in and around Gate City...will probably change during the course of the day. As of this morning the trees on the lower hills were starting to show green; the mountains are still winter-gray. Flowers: crocus (almost gone by now), daffodils, dandelions, vincas, Bidens, shepherds-purse, some ornamental Prunus trees but not the fruit-bearing trees in the orchard, maples of course, ground-ivy, violets.

Weather: just the way I like it. Cool nights, occasional dips below freezing, to control insects and humidity. Warm days. Lots of sunshine. Not much need for heating or cooling--during the daytime, at least. Ideal weather for spring cleaning and gardening, which is what I did all week.

Daffodils are popping up even in Canada by now.

http://poetrybysusanzutautas.blogspot.com/2015/04/exuberant.html

Politics 

Musician/activist/writer Lloyd Marcus adds cartooning to his skills list.

http://www.lloydmarcus.com/2015/04/i-obama-supplicant/

Dave Urbanski finds another cool family being hassled by control freaks...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/06/completely-awesome-cardboard-fort-is-the-hit-of-the-neighborhood-but-after-city-code-enforcement-found-out-all-the-fun-will-soon-come-to-an-end/?

Rick Santorum gets it right:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/05/rick-santorum-should-the-govt-force-a-gay-print-shop-owner-to-make-god-hates-fs-signs-for-westboro-baptist-church/?

Quo Vadis, anyone? (How many people in cyberspace have actually read Quo Vadis?)

http://ntlconsulting.blogspot.com/2015/04/nero-burns-rome.html

Writing 

Plots for "young adult novels" nobody seems to be using these days...

http://themillionhair.tumblr.com/post/115646016164/micdotcom-veryrealisticya-exposes-whats

+Lyn Lomasi shares a strange, seemingly extravagant writing technique that did work for me, back in 2009. I had more or less moved into a friend's house in Kingsport, had moved in the computer on which I write (which has no modem), and set it up facing the friend's computer (which had no word processing software) so I could retype drafts stored on my computer and publish them into cyberspace on hers.

http://www.articlewriterforhire.com/blog/does-using-multiple-computers-speed-writing-productivity-how

Book Review: Feast on a Diabetic Diet

Title: Feast on a Diabetic Diet

        
Author: Euell and Joe Gibbons

        
Date: 1973

        
Publisher: Fawcett / Ballantine

        
ISBN: 0-449-21565-2

        
Length: 307 pages of text by Euell Gibbons, including an “expanded” nutrient chart, plus a 7-page foreword by Joe Gibbons, plus an index

        
Quote: “The proper care of diabetes is also an excellent program to promote general health...the diabetic often outlives his non-diabetic contemporaries.”

        
Both Gibbons brothers were gourmets, but their paths diverged in Japan in 1942, when Joe Gibbons became diabetic. Euell Gibbons went home to invent European-style recipes for North American native plants; Joe Gibbons went home to convince himself and his doctors that a maintenance diet for diabetics can be interesting.

        
Although Joe didn’t become diabetic until age 30, he had the so-called “juvenile” type of diabetes which is caused by permanent damage to the pancreas and is therefore harder to control than the usual “adult onset” type. (Strict adherence to a good diet and exercise program will often reverse “adult onset” diabetes.) After hearing this news, Euell avoided Joe for years. When he did visit Joe he was “prepared to conceal my dismay at the way he must by now look, and all that he must have to endure.” He found that diet-consciousness had served Joe well: “My love of good food was beginning to show...he was still slender...still able to put out a hard day’s work. Joe is two years older than I am, but nearly everyone to whom he introduced me thought I was the older brother.” Prepared to make a great display of sacrificial love, Euell consented to eat exactly what Joe ate. And he liked it! After Joe outworked Euell at the wood shop, “for the entire week...[w]e fairly reveled in fine food... Best of all, by the end of the week my trousers began to feel loose.”

        
During the past 35 years, collections of recipes that are safe for diabetics but will appeal to other people have become commonplace. This one is special because of the Gibbons’ willingness to feast on things not everyone recognizes as food. I know of no other diabetic cookbook that features witloof, or tells you to “put a little rockweed or fucus in the pot when [steaming lobster]...otherwise, don’t you dare change or mask that delicious flavor with spices.” The expanded nutrient charts include information for raw bamboo shoots,shelled beechnuts, boysenberries, breadfruit, butternuts, crowder peas, field cress, dasheen, dewberries, dock, haws, loquats, litchis, goat’s milk, and “Opossum, roasted, lean meat only.”

        
The use of monosodium glutamate and sugar substitutes in some of these recipes turns me off, but most of the recipes are reasonably natural and appealing. When cooks are able to get good-quality natural foods and prepare them in ways that don’t destroy their quality, they can hardly go wrong. These treats are recommended even and especially to people who are not diabetic.

Neither Gibbons brother needs a dollar any more, so Feast on a Diabetic Diet is not a Fair Trade Book. However, it's a small book, so if you buy it in combination with a Fair Trade Book you can save at least one $5 shipping charge--possibly more. Our base price is $5 for the book + $5 for shipping. 

Care of the Hand-Knitted Sweater: Easy-Care Acrylic

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on February 5, 2014. Image credit: Tori Cooley, of the sweater available here.)



Yesterday I made it all the way to the computer center...and the Internet connection was "down." I sat here for six hours, watching the little circle slowly rotate backward to indicate that the browser wasn't getting anywhere, and retyping old material from the very back of the backlog for easy posting here. Because I wasn't able to post yesterday's Bubbles yesterday, my plan for today is to post yesterday's five Bubbles even before going to "Notifications," then post today's five bubbles toward the end of the day...so here's the first piece in a series about caring for hand-knits. 

Many Greensleeves sweaters are made of pure acrylic yarn. Most of this yarn is top-grade Wintuk, Sayelle, Dazzle-Aire, Red Heart, or comparable name-brand acrylics. These yarns are almost indestructible. They will hold their shape and color through years of machine laundering. They feel comfortable, although extremely thick and warm, next to the skin. The colors may be subtle and tweedy, but will not fade. The life expectancy of a top-grade acrylic sweater remains unknown. Most will last long enough to be handed down to the next generation.

Sometimes acrylic yarns that aren’t top-grade have some sort of special appeal. The color is still part of the fibre and won’t fade, but the yarn may need a little extra care. If acrylic loses its shape it will stretch, and it won’t shrink back easily—or at all—so it’s good to avoid hanging sweaters on hangers, and to pulling on wet acrylic material. 
Although some knitters and wool shops sometimes try to market the more expensive natural materials by acting as if nobody they knew would ever wear anything made of acrylic yarn, the majority of people who've actually bought Greensleeves knits have bought acrylic.

Book Review: Mystery by Moonlight

Title: Mystery by Moonlight

        
Author: Mary C. Jane

        
Date: 1963

        
Publisher: J.B. Lippincott

        
ISBN: none; click here to see it on Amazon

        
Length: 114 pages of text and drawings by Raymond Abel

        
Quote: “Morgan’s Green was only a ghost of a house.Yet for years—ever since the night it burned—Miss Morgan had sent her hired man to mow the lawns around the ruins...”

        
And one night, walking home from a movie, two boys and their sister hear sounds coming from the old house. The boys’ buddy, who is the sheriff’s son, immediately thinks of robberies that have taken place in the area. The girl’s best friend, who is afraid of lonely places, immediately thinks of ghosts. The girl, who has been sneaking into a shed outside the old house to write poetry in peace,  immediately thinks she’s in trouble. And of course, given the genre and period of this short, easy-to-read novel, each of the kids is partly right and each of them has a part to play in solving the mystery.

        
Although the characters are drawn as if they’re in their early teens, the story is written to be accessible to middle school readers. The solution to the mystery isn’t too obvious to allow adults to enjoy this remarkably innocent and warmhearted detective story.

Google reports that Mary C. Jane died in 1991, so this is not a Fair Trade Book. We still have to charge $5 for the book + $5 for shipping. We encourage you to buy a Fair Trade Book and add Mystery by Moonlight to the package, so that you'll pay only the one shipping charge and thus get this little book for only $5.  

Humans Dumber Than Social Cats (Gross-Out Warning)

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on April 14, 2014. Image: mine--the cat called Heather, displaying social and intelligent behavior. Yes, her eyes really are a very dark amber, almost brown.)

There's a nice clear photo of the woman we're talking about here...

www.bubblews.com/news/2979330-gruesome-discovery-of-seven-dead-babies-leads-to-arrest-and-questions

Apparently this woman lived alone, in town, and when she moved out of her house, the relatives who went in found seven dead and decomposing human babies in the garage. DonaldPennington reports further details.

I'm not convinced that the woman necessarily put the babies there. [Update: she later confessed that she did.]When women who are old enough not to be terrorized by the mere thought of rape live alone, sometimes they get harassed. Sometimes foreign objects are left on their property at night, to be discovered by the property owner. Sometimes the purpose of this harassment is to cause a woman to feel too disgusted to monitor what's going on on her property. Sometimes the harasser(s) hope that she'll sell out cheap. I have a neighbor who's tried that, actually, and the answer is NOT FOR A MILLION DOLLARS, NOT FOR A BILLION, NOT WHILE YOU ARE ALIVE. (Of course I am metaphorically yelling, so as to be heard by a rat-dropping thirty miles away.) So when I read that these seven babies were found in the woman's garage, I have to wonder...she does look like someone who's been afraid to look in her garage for a while and has found out that the nasty stuff deposited in it included human babies. I could believe that. When I find a live snake in my yard I just remove it, but I know women who would be terrorized enough to stop checking their outbuildings if that happened to them.

That said...somebody out there may have born into a human body but failed to develop a human brain, and should be put down as quickly and humanely as any rabid skunk. And if I were a police detective, I'd consider other suspects, including male relatives, ex-boyfriends, and guys this woman turned down for dates, as well as considering her as a suspect.

Nevertheless, the mind still squirbles...how long were those seven bodies left to rot in that garage, and how was it possible for this woman not to notice the odor, and why, even if she had reason to suspect it was just another rat or snake or something that had been dumped in the garage to scare her, didn't she call some braver person to go in and investigate?

Last week two of my cats gave birth to ten kittens. I was afraid one of those kittens was going to be dead on arrival, but it came out alive. But it didn't live long, and neither did one of its cousins. So the mother cats tenderly laid the sick kittens to rest, away from the others, to recover or die. And they died. And I noticed an odor and said to myself, "Oh what a bore, I'll have to move things around, find those bodies, and bury them." But before I'd finished the chore I was doing while making that mental note, one or both of the cats had taken the bodies out and buried them. (They had seen their mother bury one of their own young cousins, when they were young; their mother had seen me bury another one of their young cousins.) I suspect Heather was the one who did the work, because when I took the cats their breakfast this morning Irene's facial expression looked to me more like "See, we took care of that for you! We can take care of our own kittens on our own, even if we do want your house to do it in," and Heather's looked more like "Bleeaarrgghh...aren't you glad you didn't have to do what I've just finished doing, before breakfast at that." 

Social cats are as disturbed by seeing the dead bodies of their friends as humans are. They also have a good sense of smell, not as strong as a dog's, but stronger than a human's. And so, the first few times a Cat Sanctuary cat or kitten died, the other resident adult cats watched me bury it and looked sad and subdued, and then, two years ago, the cat Candice buried a dead kitten all by herself...and Candice's daughter remembered how it was done.

But this woman...those who are saying she's obviously insane have a point. She may not be a murderer, but there have to be a few wires loose somewhere.

But. Nevertheless. What about the rest of the neighborhood? None of them has the sense, or senses, God gave a lot of alley cats? 
Pheeee-yew!

Book Review: Trailer Trio

Title: Trailer Trio

        
Author: Emma Atkins Jacobs (1885-1983)

        
Date: 1942

        
Publisher: John C. Winston Company

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

        
Length: 280 pages, with drawings by Pelagie Doane

        
Quote: “A boy and two girls on their way to central Idaho were brought to the attention of authorities when they picked up a small child who appeared to be lost. They were on their way to the police station in their shabby car with a homemade trailer...”

        
The three lucky, plucky siblings (the eldest is twenty-one) drive from South Dakota to Idaho, with plenty of adventures along the way, making up verses and doing good deeds as they travel. Life hasn’t been so simple since 1942 and probably wasn’t then either, but this is a cheerful, goodhearted family story about teenagers who find pleasure in picking fruit, cooking, painting, and making ends meet.

        
Such incredibly nice kids deserve an incredibly happy ending. For parents who might have thought a fifteen-year-old girl was too young to find a boyfriend, the younger sister in this story gets a bit part in a movie instead. The brother gets a promising job, and the elder sister, who hasn’t gone to college due to poverty and ill health, gets a husband who’s guaranteed to put her back in school.

        
It’s all perfectly logical, given the use the kids make of the breaks that come their way, but the charm of this story is not in anything resembling suspense; it’s in the shabby chic and Creative Tightwaddery the kids practice. Recommended to all who enjoy old books and Creative Tightwaddery.

To buy it here, send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 for the book + $5 for shipping. You pay only one shipping charge per package, so please add a Fair Trade Book, by a living author, in order to get this one for only $5. 

Hair Colors: What Do Women Prefer?

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on April 30, 2014. Image credit: Typexnick at morguefile.com:  http://mrg.bz/aQx60I; and Aimee Low at morguefile.com:  http://mrg.bz/zS0rOy )

(Thanks to Bubblews' Realityspeaks for sharing: www.bubblews.com/news/3194469-brunettes-vs-blondes-what-do-guys-prefer )

I don't know...how many women out there even have one consistent preference? 

Obviously we're not talking about the love of your life and the fact that he might happen to be a different type than the type you consider easiest to look at, in a general way. Obviously whether we feel a physical attraction, much less decide to take it seriously, or not, is a completely different question than which type of actor is better cast as the romantic lead in a movie or would be a more effective model on whom to hang clothes or jewelry we've made.

In case any men are reading this, and don't understand what I'm talking about...My father was handsome. My brother was handsome. Most of my cousins are handsome. Men I find attractive don't look very much like my father, brother, or cousins. I trust this makes the point clear.

Anyway, female readers, do you have a preference, and if so what is it? 
As a type I'd say dark hair and fair skin is most likely to look good. That's not to say that individuals of other types don't look good, or that, if I were staging a fashion show, I wouldn't try to find a mixed assortment of models (including some with grey/white hair). Maybe the reason why I think the basic human type is more likely to look attractive than the less common mutations is that such a huge majority of humankind have dark hair and fair to pale tan skin.

Book Review: Lives on the Mend

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Lives on the Mend

        
Author: Florence Littauer

Author's web page: http://www.classervices.com/FlorenceLittauer.html

Author's newest book: Making the Blue Plate Special

        
Date: 1985

        
Publisher: Word Books

        
ISBN: 0-8499-0487-0

        
Length: 245 pages of text, 4 pages of endnotes

        
Quote: “Pain is a great leveler of people.”

        
When Florence Littauer started teaching Bible studies to ladies “who seemed to have their lives all together...many of them were quietly coming apart.” As she was asked to speak at retreats, “Lines formed outside my motel door as I tried to keep one woman from leavng her husband and another from killing herself.” And when she started training women as speakers, “I had assumed the women who came...would be trouble-free and ready to relieve the trouble-full, but I soon learned that everyone there had some knd of problem.”

        
Problems that seemed to be commonplace,even in “good church families,” included alcoholism, drug addiction,anxiety attacks, adultery, divorce, single parenting, family crises, teen depression, suicide, bereavement, physical pain, and emotional pains of the past. In addition, several Christians had been victims of crimes including actual or attempted rape, child abuse, and murder.

        
In this book, women from the “Christian Leaders And Speakers Seminars” share with readers the stories they told Mrs. Littauer and what they found most helpful. In an ideal world, stories of what helped others would not be used as cop-outs. Perhaps it would have been easier for Christians not to use any of the inspiring phrases in this book as a brush-off if the women had dared to share more details. Reality is that we are very unlikely ever to find or coin an inspirational phrase that anyone we may want to counsel hasn’t heard before. As Alcoholics Anonymous members know, clever clichés have their uses, but someone who desperately wants to get drunk again needs to be physically distracted. Likewise, people who’ve lost their homes need places to stay and replacements for clothes and whatever else they’ve lost, and people who are being abused at home need decent homes—not shelters—to escape to. 

The fact is that most of life’s difficult points involve money, and most people in difficult situations need money. Of course it’s better to offer them opportunities to earn money than to offer them handouts, and of course there may be times when it’s not just payments on luxuries we’d be happier without that make it hard to stretch each paycheque through the month, but the most important thing is that we never delude ourselves that we’ve been helpful when we offer someone a pious thought in place of the money the person needs. Or even when we offer the cash instead of the more complicated help in using it the person needs.

        
This book is recommended to anyone out there who may still have been able to believe that she (or he) was the only Christian in the church who’s had to deal with any of these problems. Or anyone who may have been thinking, “Having been molested by my stepbrother might have been sort of normal back in the ghetto, but nobody in a ‘nice’ neighborhood like this one would even want to understand.”

        
I really think that lack of attention to any family or emotional problem has not been a problem anyone my age has actually had. The generation before mine may have wondered where babies came from and had to dig through big intimidating medical books for information; my generation read all the essential information about where babies come from on the front page of the newspaper. In my grandparents’ time society may have frowned on self-disclosure; my generation have become the “shameless and open” self-disclosers popular psychologists used to think it would be interesting if we were, a real nationwide therapy group, and although we’re not noticeably happier for it, there is no psychosocial abnormality that’s not become fodder for daytime television.

However, as all of these stories focus on Christians whose faith has helped them through their difficulties, Lives on the Mend may be considered an inspirational Christian book, and either Christians or people trying to understand why people become Christians may even enjoy reading it. If you like short stories and prefer facts to fiction, this book is for you. 

As a Fair Trade Book, Lives on the Mend will cost $5, plus $5 for shipping, when ordered from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com. (You pay only one shipping charge per package.) From this total of $10, Florence Littauer or a charity of her choice will receive $1.  

Phenology: Red-Tailed Hawk

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on August 28, 2014. Obviously the rest of the phenology is not applicable to March 31, 2015, but I've seen the male red-tailed hawk flying above Route 23 again this month. Image credit: ShadowLight at Morguefile.com: http://mrg.bz/ftLukd)

I've mentioned earlier that ever since deadly poisons were sprayed alongside Route 23, I've not seen many living birds or butterflies there. This morning on the way to the computer center I did see a flock of small migrating birds fly over Route 23, southbound.

The red-tailed hawk who lives near Route 23 screamed three times as I passed by. I'm not really familiar with this red-tail, although I've been observing him and his mate for years--can't swear that he's the same one I've been observing, but he was definitely a mature male with the same color pattern. (Male red-tails are much smaller than females; both sexes show more red feathers as they mature, with individual variation.)

Anyway I can't claim to understand the red-tail's language. He might have been calling his mate, or mourning for the loss of her, or trying to attract another female red-tail's attention. He might have been able to raise a family this year, and been giving fatherly advice to his young. He might have found fresh roadkill. But it's just barely possible that he was saying, "Write about me!" So I did.

Though red-tails do sometimes eat smaller birds, they don't thrive on this kind of cannibalistic diet. Healthy red-tails eat mostly small animals--mice, rats, voles, frogs, freshwater shellfish. (They have been known to eat young domestic animals, but this is rare.) I was glad to observe that the hawk I saw seemed completely uninterested in the little tweetybirds passing by.

(Fun facts and nice clear pictures of red-tailed hawks are available at these nonprofit sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-tailed_hawk

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/red-tailed_hawk/id

http://birds.audubon.org/birds/red-tailed-hawk )

Book Review: Round the World in 80 Dishes

Title: Round the World in 80 Dishes

        
Author: Lesley Blanch

        
Date: 1955

        
Publisher: Gramercy Publishing / Crown / Harper & Row

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

        
Length: 174 pages

        
Quote: “My book does not aim to turn you from good English food, but rather to offer you a cook’s tour of supplementary dishes.”

        
This tour starts and ends in Britain. The table of contents lists three Canadian recipes, only two U.S. recipes, and nothing from the Caribbean.

        
It’s fair to admit that Lesley Blanch’s taste was not mine. Evidently it’s not a popular sort of taste in the U.S. at all. The first recipe that interested me at all appears on page 34, and more as a curiosity than as a treat; in a gluten-free kitchen one automatically dusts the lean meat, which in my kitchen would probably be turkey, with ¼ cup of cornstarch rather than ½ cup flour, and substitutes rice for either the barley or the tarhonyia pasta, but apart from that the recipe involves slowly stewing the meat with onions, tomatoes, bayleaves, garlic, paprika, and dried prunes. Definitely different. And probably very good for the digestion.

        
A few other quirky recipes from this book: Black coffee with a chocolate bar grated into it. Egg yolks beaten with brown sugar, warmed, then cooled. Potatoes “scalloped” with anchovies and topped with tomato purée rather than cream. Eggs poached in whole tomatoes. Anchovy suce on spaghetti. Spinach in rice cakes. Imam Bayildi—“the religious teacher fainted”—basically stuffed eggplants, or squashes, with more onion and less tomato in proportion to the breadcrumbs and chopped nuts than Americans would expect. Rose-petal jam. Home-fried potatoes seasoned with nutmeg, and topped with warmed honey, with lemon juice squeezed into it. Baked apples stuffed with chopped chicken. Onions, oranges, green peppers,and black olives, eaten as a salad.

        
Then again, one never knows...the very first odd recipe in this book, “Pain Perdu, or Lost Knights of Windsor,” turns out to  be what Americans know as French Toast. I never liked that either, but many people do. Other formerly exotic dishes in this book include rice pudding, shashlik, risotto, and rice pilaf. If you try some of the more bizarre recipes, you never know; you just might import a new favorite, like pizza, and launch chains of restaurants.

Lesley Blanch, who wrote more exciting books than this one, no longer has any use for a dollar. This web site still has to charge $5 for this book + $5 for shipping. Don't be too hasty to believe you've found a better price online. If you buy a Fair Trade Book from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, we can tuck this one in for only the $5. 

Living American Vampires

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on January 14, 2014. Image credit: Jdurham at Morguefile: http://mrg.bz/zHi4nE.)

Many vampires are alive and living in the United States.

The more common kind are, of course, people in whom other people see vampire-like qualities. I used to have long black hair and fanglike front teeth, so in primary school another little troll used to tell people I was a vampire and try to get me to chase her and anyone who was currently claiming her as a friend. I never held a grudge...we all spent far too much wasted, minimally supervised, overcrowded time on a so-called playground that was basically an empty parking lot, and anything to do that wasn't actually fighting was an improvement. As an adult I've told friends that I eat garlic daily to keep my vampire side under control.

My husband's French-African-West-Indian ex-wife never had long hair or crooked teeth, but had more serious qualifications to be called a vampire by adults. One was that she never seemed to age; she had documentation of widely separated birth dates, and all seemed equally believable. More alarmingly, as a private nurse, she persuaded several people to name her as a primary heir to their estates shortly before they died--and the last two were young. Then there's the bizarre fact that although she was five inches taller, obviously belonged to a different "race," and had a heavy foreign accent, she managed to steal my identity...simple bribery, or shapeshifting? And although she was seen outside her home during the daytime, she always seemed to be chauffeured by someone else, shielded from actual sunlight...

But there are people who become so alienated from other humans that they seriously tell themselves and others that they're something other than human, at least "on the inside." Some of these people feel that they were born into human bodies by mistake, the way some people in the homosexual/transgender community feel that they were born into bodies of the wrong gender. 

Live Journal hosts quite a few of these "Otherkin"; they have a community page that's open to public view: 

otherkin.livejournal.com/

My guess would be that several of these people were told a few times too many, as children, that "People" thought, felt, and behaved differently than they did, or that they weren't "acting like human beings." I'd also guess that the incidence of mental illness and brain injuries in this community is above average--the community page contains some posts from people who describe symptoms--but more of the group seem to be using metaphors to express a sense of emotional alienation. In addition to the vampires, demons, and space aliens, several community members identify their inner personalities as animals.

This is, of course, a different crowd from the LJ users who write speculative fiction from the aliens' perspective...we're ever so much more mainstream, although I sometimes wonder whether all writers haven't been made to feel like aliens during those bleak days when we were told that "Everybody" would rather be out on the playground, or pavement, trying to push each other flat, than be reading or writing, and we hadn't found each other yet and had no way to disprove this...

I can think of several good reasons for writing from the perspective of a rhinoceros, whether one seriously believes one's inner self to be rhino or human, but I'm less sympathetic to people who act out their vampire and werewolf sides by actually biting people. A relative of mine was so bemused by a girl vampire, when they were seventeen, that he let her bite his arms and slurp up his blood. Although he didn't realize it at the time, he was very lucky that he turned eighteen first and the vampire's parents threatened to prosecute him for statutory rape if the vampire didn't leave him alone. Fortunately it didn't take him very long to find a human to marry...I never heard what became of the vampire.

Book Review: Little House in the Big Woods

Title: Little House in the Big Woods

        
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder

        
Date: 1932

        
Publisher: Harper & Brothers

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

       
Length: 176 pages

        
Quote: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago,a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin...and she called her father, Pa, and she called her mother, Ma...”

        
And you know the rest. That girl was so little, and it was so long ago, that everything she did was an adventure. One day they smoked some venison! One day Pa shot a bear, but all the little girl saw of that adventure was the cooking and preserving of the bear meat. And sometimes she churned butter! And sometimes Pa made his own bullets! And at Christmas their cousins came to visit, and they played in the snow! And so on!

        
Sometimes the grown-ups told stories that were even more adventuresome! Once Grandpa was chased by a panther! Once Pa, as a boy, was frightened by an owl! Once a dog warned Aunt Eliza away from another panther, a big one! And so on!

        
And after many, many more of these adventures and stories, the little girl grew up! And got married! And had just one little girl of her own! And then that little girl grew up, and she said, “Why don’t we write down all the stories you’ve told me about your childhood, make them into books, sell the books, and become rich and famous?” And her mother did, with some help from her own, now grown-up, little girl. And lots and lots and lots of other children read the books. Boys liked them too, because Laura was so close to her Pa and all the hunting and fishing and wolves and bears and “American Indians” in the stories made them exciting.

        
But only after Laura’s own little girl was an old, old lady, in fact mostly after she had died, did two little girls, both called Melissa, and a laid-back actor called Michael Landon who didn’t look anything like Laura’s Pa, make a television show of the books. Then Laura’s relatives really started to collect the money. The little old house, one of several houses Pa had built for his family as they travelled, became a museum. Friends and relatives went on writing more Little House books, about Laura’s little girl, Rose, and her mother, her grandmother, and even her great-grandmother, when they were little girls. The Little House industry is still going strong (see http://www.lauraingallswilderhome.com/ for more information), and this little book is where it starts.

        
Probably every library in America now has a complete set of the edition of these books issued after Laura died and the original series was considered complete, the edition with pictures by Garth Williams; but a few libraries treasured their original editions for years, and so what I physically sold in between writing and posting this review was a harshly used, though superbly bound, 1932 copy with pictures by Helen Sewell. 

        
Although these books are wholesome and educational, one reason why kids loved them was that they offered an escape from both the safe little nicely-nice nursery world of children’s books in the 1930s through 1960s and the mindless, predictable violence of “Westerns.” There’s no melodrama in these books. The “Indians,” like the large animals, usually frighten the Ingalls family because they’re alien and unpredictable, but they come in peace; when fed or given souvenirs, they go away. There aren’t very many “bad men,” and they aren’t very bad, but you never know when you’re going to turn a page in these books and find one of the characters in what could be mortal danger—employees threaten to riot because the manager can’t pay their wages on time, a man wakes up to find his wife standing over him with a knife—and Laura’s matter-of-fact narrative tone, in these scenes, hardly varies from the tone in which she explains how they salted fish. This is not a world in which anyone asks children to talk to therapists about their feelings about having a new baby sister or losing a baby tooth. To a certain kind of child it’s a profoundly reassuring world.

Laura Ingalls Wilder no longer needs a dollar, but this web site still needs to charge $5 for the book + $5 for shipping. If you're not buying a Fair Trade Book and tucking this one into the package, you might as well find a better price online.

Book Review: Native Heart

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Native Heart

        
Author: Gabriel Horn

        
Date: 1998

        
Publisher: New World Libvrary

        
ISBN: 1-880032-07-4

        
Length: 291 pages

        
Quote: “I’m not a Cuban refugee from Florida! I am Indian.”

        
Well, for starters, he’s not very sensitive to people from India. “American Indian” is not a demeaning term, but it is a confused and confusing term.

        
And it’s my painful duty to tell you that this is a confused and confusing book. At no point in the book is it clearly explained exactly what Gabriel Horn is—genetically or otherwise. The book doesn’t even include any pictures. It does, however, include some self-discrediting statements.

        
He’s from Florida. Of that he convinces me. He cites a vision in which he identified with the Calusa people, who no longer exist as a separate nation. It’s not impossible that Calusa genes could survive either in Florida or in Cuba or Haiti. Horn carefully doesn’t tell us where his parents and grandparents were. He describes growing up with a foster mother who regretfully helped other women load him into a car and take him away, but that wasn’t the way young Seminoles were sent to school; that was the way children were removed from inadequate foster mothers. One can understand his reluctance to provide any details about this foster mother, but did the boy Gabe even know who his parents were, where they lived, what had become of them? Is his self-identification with Calusa people based on any known facts whatsoever, or only on a vision that reflected sympathy with their loss?

        
Three of Horn’s close friends are positively identified with Native American nations. No genealogy is given for his wife or for a possibly multiracial, fair-skinned, blue-eyed “uncle.” Many people whose legal identity is Cherokee have visible European ancestry, but people like that who are related to me are usually willing to give a genealogy rather than belligerently claiming that “one drop of Indian blood could overpower anything that Europe ever produced!” (Page 55.) They also have active, ongoing relationships with family groups, which Horn does not mention his uncle having.

        
The genealogy given for his teacher is confused: Horn claims that she was “the direct descendant of the Massasoit Osamekun and his two sons, Wamsutta and Metacomet.” Being a direct descendant of two brothers would be difficult. The teacher was controversial because she wrote and taught about what had been the oral traditions of her ancestors. The controversy was more about her exposing these secrets to outsiders than about her use of the name “Princess Red Wing.” Native Americans did not have royal families. The English called Metacomet “King,” so they would have called his daughters or granddaughters “Princess.” Red Wing was several generations past that title.

        
Horn was of course involved with a group called the American Indian Movement (AIM). Like the majority of social groups, including some purely social clubs, all political parties, all civil rights groups, many religious organizations, and many youth groups, during the mid-twentieth century, AIM was influenced by the atheistic religious thought of Karl Marx. Marxists who wanted immediate, violent revolution saw their best chance in reaching out to the less educated, less wealthy minority groups, in which people would not necessarily recognize how regressive and European Marx’s ideas were. They didn’t succeed in corrupting Martin Luther King, although they tried. They did succeed in corrupting more “radical” groups led by younger, less devout individuals.

        
Sadly, one of those groups was AIM. Gabe Horn doesn’t talk about this at all. He expresses sad bewilderment (on page 62) that “I could hardly find a person in this country who’s known about Leonard Peltier in the sixteen-plus years he’s been in prison. In Russia, they know about Leonard Peltier.” I knew about Leonard Peltier. Some have questioned Peltier’s conviction for murder, but whether he was the one who killed the two federal agents, he was definitely a revolutionary who encouraged others to try to overthrow our government by violence; Peltier really was what Randy Weaver and David Koresh were wrongly accused of being. Whether there could be any just cause for such efforts is another question. Peltier may be “a chief in the old tradition” who “led by example,” but if so he was a chief in the doomed tradition of Metacomet or Tecumseh. Horn does not explain why Soviets were more sympathetic to Peltier than Americans were; because Peltier was more sympathetic to the Soviets than to his fellow Americans.

        
Again, on page 264, he finds it “strange” that he received hate mail, saying that “All reds are better dead,” “the day after my picture appeared in the Minnrapolis Star with the vice-premier of China.” Did Horn really imagine that, while the Tiananmen Square incident was still fresh in people’s minds, anyone was going to believe that Deng Xiaoping was interested in promoting the freedom of speech among indigenous people? I don’t think so. Some people who had dealt directly with members of the American Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, or the Soviet Communist Party, as had Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan, were able to persuade even right-wingers that they were genuine liberals willing to communicate with anybody...but they did not accomplish this by pretending they hadn’t noticed what a tyrant Deng was, or how “tainted with red” AIM had been from its beginning.

        
No, I’m afraid that not only was Horn influenced by Marxist “Communist” thought, as most of his contemporaries were, but he became so emotionally involved with it that he’s never even dared to own the enormity of the mistake he was trying to make.

        
Another piece of irony appears on pages 193-194, where, as a teacher, Horn “talked about...the books that they needed: Lame Deer, Black Elk Speaks, The Education of Little Tree, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Way to Rainy Mountain... ‘This is the literature and history of all our people,’ I said. ‘Fill this place with books of truth!’”

        
The Education of Little Tree was, very unfortunately, not a book of truth. It’s not far from being one. It’s a very nice, idealistic story about a little multiracial boy who spends some time with his Cherokee grandparents in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a great nostalgia trip for Cherokees and for residents of the Blue Ridge Mountains alike. Little Tree isn’t going to be part of the Cherokee Nation; he’s taught very little of any non-English language, and what he's taught isn't Cherokee, but he’s taught some of his grandparents’ country-living skills and ethical wisdom. Anyway they are very authentic mountain grandparents. The trouble is, there's some question, and the complete facts may never be known, whether they were physically related to Forrest Carter at all. Many now believe the book to be pure fiction.

        
Native Heart may be fiction too; if fact, it's one-sided. “I was told how the early colonists slaughtered Red Wing’s ancestors in their sleep,quartering the body of Metacomet and severing his head...for twenty-seven years, [Metacomet’s head] was impaled on a spike and displayed in a glass case in the quaint Pilgrim town of Plymouth.” And why would anybody, even those mean old Pilgrims, do a terrible thing like that? Well, it seems, Metacomet had formed a nasty habit of murdering and terrorizing them...but you will not find any account of Metacomet’s own murders and treacheries in Native Heart. And when Gabe Horn tells the world about people’s hostility and inhumanity to him, he carefully omits any mention of why people opposed him so. 

        
This book is recommended to anyone interested in researching the controversy among certain Native American groups about so-called teachers such as Horn. Further than that, this web site cannot go. However, Horn is still living, so we can still offer Native Heart as a Fair Trade Book. Send $10 for the book + $5 for shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo, and we'll send $1.50 to Horn or a charity of his choice. 

Lower Grocery Bills by Comparison Shopping

(Reclaimed from Bubblews, where it appeared on February 10. Image credit: Seemann at Morguefile: http://cdn.morguefile.com/imageData/public/files/s/seemann/preview/fldr_2009_06_04/file6471244175261.jpg.)

Can you still eat on US$30 per week in these United States? On $20? On $10, if you have to? I can. Not as well as I did in the 1980s, but enough to survive. And here's my tip for other Bubblers...

Did you take Home Economics in high school? Did you make some sort of "artwork" on the theme "Comparison Shopping Makes Cents"? If you did, on behalf of art, I forgive you. Anyway, the idea was that each of the supermarkets in town offers a really good price on just a few grocery items each week. Supermarket managers may even sell something below the price they paid for it on the assumption that an excellent price on, say, packaged cereal will lure people into the store, and while they're there these people will pay a higher than average price for milk and also buy some bananas the manager wants to sell fast. People who are working full-time and have more money than time can afford to play this little game the way the supermarket managers want it to be played. Writers can, however, play the game our way. 

Read a newspaper. (If possible, subscribe to one, or more, so you can clip the coupons.) Look for sale prices on things you buy. If you live in town, you can plan your morning walk to include stopping at the store that offers a good bargain on something you need every morning, then plan your menus around what's on sale each week. You don't buy the overpriced milk every time you find a bargain on packaged cereal, because you've found a better price on milk at another store, or you've planned to eat your cereal without milk, or you're planning to store the cereal until you find a bargain on milk. 

By and large prices have doubled since the 1990s, when I started buying the foods I now eat regularly...but, by "comparison shopping," I still pay close to the same prices I paid in the 1990s for most things. 

Of course, since I live in a small town, the supermarket managers are aware that I'm doing this and they all haaate me. I figure that if people are going to hate me for something like this, let'em hate...it could be worse: people like that could like me. 

If we still had locally owned "corner stores" where the storekeepers were relatives, sold our garden produce, knew which disabled senior citizen most needed free groceries before they started rotating stock, and probably charged us less for the same things than they charged random people from town, I might still be loyal to "Our Store," the way my parents brought me up to be. But we don't have those stores any more.

Link Log for March 26 (#2)

Categories: Education, Health, Politics, Travel.

Education 

School choice wins in Alabama!

http://ij.org/l-l-4-15-ijs-supreme-victory-for-school-choice-in-alabama

Health 

Not all diabetics want to hear it, but...most adult-onset diabetes is caused by the diet and exercise choices people make, and can be reversed if they commit to making different choices before they're completely disabled by the disease. (Without looking it up, I believe Ralph Moody wrote about doing this, on the advice of his doctor, in the 1930s.) While some people become diabetic as a result of other things, such as permanent damage caused by injuries, the majority of people who are currently taking insulin could choose not to be diabetic. Adayahi has been doing this for many years; Grandma Bonnie Peters has been doing it longer than Mike Huckabee. Here's another blog by another self-cured diabetic:

http://www.diabetes-warrior.net/

Politics 

Seizure of a suspect's assets without a trial...we'd guess the average high school student would agree that that's obviously banned by the Bill of Rights. There are members of the current administration who don't see it, though. Frontline report on the ongoing congressional debate:

http://ij.org/l-l-4-15-ij-attorneys-and-clients-testify-as-congress-takes-up-civil-forfeiture-reform

Travel 

Professional-quality photos at this New York State nature/tourism blog.

http://fishingandhuntinginoswego.blogspot.com/