How to Reduce Your Electric Bills

This post contains shameless tongue-in-cheek bragging, so let's start with a confession of something I probably ought to change. Since the COVID mess I've become very lax about going to the post office. The electric company sent me an extra piece of mail, apparently, in August. I picked it up in October and, having opened and paid the bills, let other things pile up around it and only read it today. 

Apparently in August the company sent people a "Home Energy Report" showing "How you compare to others" in terms of kilowatt-hours of electricity people use per month.

Apparently the average house the size of mine uses about 827 kwh per month.

The 20% of houses in the same size range that were the most energy-efficient averaged 312 kwh per month.

I used just 92 kwh that month. Well, that was the month before the POG was replaced by the Unsatisfactory Toshiba.

Mother and I used to be just a tiny bit competitive about how low we could get the bills. I don't use a lot of electricity; even the toilet and water heater work, not at their peak but adequately, on solar power alone in summer so that's how they generally do work. Mother was conscientious about not leaving computers or stereos plugged in, but she used electric blenders and suchlike. I'd show her a bill and say, "How do you like that?" and she'd say, "Meh...you were working in town most of the days, weren't you?" I felt a great urge to show this little printout to Mother. I was not working in town. I was at home almost all day, almost every day. I was using the Lasko Fan to cool the desktop computer and me, and one electric light, and that's it, that's all! 

Of course my energy efficiency rating went down in the next month when I started running the Unsatisfactory Toshiba, and it's due to go down further whenever the weather turns cold. 

Nevertheless. 92 goes into 827 9 times. How Green is that?! 

Here's the hilarious part. Those "Home Energy Reports" came with "tips for you."

Any time a machine offers anything "for you," prepare to chortle.

The company's recommendation to me was "Choose an efficient television...save up to $10 per year."

I last plugged in a television set in 1989.

Right. Serious tips for getting a seriously Green Home Energy Report:

1. Install things that use electricity as a source of heat right in the way of the afternoon sunshine. Let that sun shine in on them. If more than two people are using the toilet and water heater you will want to plug them in, but they'll need much less electricity to maintain the same temperature. If only one or two people are using them, go solar-only--the heat will be lower, warm baths less warm and the toilet slower, but you still have warm water and heat-dried, sanitized biomass.

2. Television is a great distraction for people who have to spend a lot of time lying around healing from something. If you are not in that category, donate your television set to someone who is. Life's too short.

3. Instead of watching television, listening to the radio, etc., learn to sing and play your own music on acoustic instruments. Nobody starts out perfect. Some superstar musicians have released recordings in which they sounded as bad as your family probably do. June Carter Cash used to be known for singing off key. Joni Mitchell got the giggles during her first recording of her best known song. I don't even want to talk about Celine Dion, because I suspect somebody told her to mangle those melodies on purpose, as a trademark. I also suspect James Brown was considered more of a dancer than a singer. I don't know how anybody ever could stand to listen to Louis Armstrong's voice--they must have hoped that if they were polite about it, considering that he seemed to be in so much pain, he'd stop trying to sing and just play an instrument again. So there are five very famous professional musicians than whom you probably sound better. So you can do your own music.

4. Instead of trying to exchange texts with a lot of different people and getting them mixed up and creating drama, actually pick a friend, or small group of friends, and go out and do something in the real world. Walk in the park. Play a real game instead of watching other people play. Volunteer at an urban mission. Use all the money you're saving on your electric bill to go shopping. Sing.

5. In summer the only real reason to cook is to can surplus produce for winter. In winter you can do most cooking over whatever you use for heat. A wood stove is great, but it's not the only heating device that can also be used for cooking. In winter my office is heated by electric room heaters. The 200-watt models will do a surprising amount to keep one room livable. To cook rice, beans, scrambled eggs or even cornbread for one, I suspend a saucepan above a candle in front of an electric heater--the 1000-watt one alone most of the year, the 1000-watt and 200-watt ones together in extremely cold weather. The main reason why more people don't do this is that soot forms on the bottom of the saucepan, but soot is not hard to wash off.

6. Healthy people are their own primary heat sources. When the weather turns cold, put on extra layers and get some exercise. In a few days you too can become comfortable at earth temperature. Of course this means you'll feel that most people's houses, offices, and businesses are overheated, but perfection is hard to come by in this mortal world. Human bodies really were designed to adjust to the weather, wearing extra layers at 40 degrees Fahrenheit (refrigerator-cold) and scampering about in cotton shirts at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. If you make this adjustment, in many of the United States there will be only a few days each winter when you have to turn on a heater or light a fire. This is not applicable to households where anyone is running a fever, is immobilized by a disability, or is using anti-hypertensive medication--don't try. If you come down with a virus, you'll need to keep yourself warm until you've completely recovered, then readjust to cool weather all over again. But learning to adjust your internal thermostat rather than an external one will serve active healthy people well.

7. Do not overlook the value of your close friends and relatives as heat sources. In extremely cold places, where people build houses out of thick blocks of ice and snow, a family can pack into such a house and soon have the inside of the pile of ice feeling warm. The temperature outside has to be bitterly cold for this to work; in the kind of weather most of the United States get, the body heat indoors would melt the ice. So our homes are not made out of ice and we can pack a half-dozen family members (children, parents, grandparents) into one warm room and, with no other heating at all, raise the temperature by about ten degrees Fahrenheit. 

8. If you don't use a refrigerator, you won't buy food that needs refrigeration. If you do use a refrigerator you can save some time and trouble, so think long and hard about deciding not to use or replace one. However, a refrigerator is not an essential part of a healthy diet. If you want to eat meat or dairy products every day, you just have to go to the store and buy them every day--you can't store unrefrigerated food of animal origin in warm weather. You can, however, buy dried or canned meat, which will last for several days.

9. Bring back public computer centers. If daily use of the Internet is not in your job description, have an Internet-free home.

10. Get a few solar-powered lights to use in place of electric lights. Get some solar-powered batteries and solar collectors, too, as your budget allows. Next time the power company starts wailing about the need for a new power plant or new energy sources, call your Congresspeople (all three) and tell them to say no. Let the company invest in the community by turning your outbuildings, if not your home, into solar power plants. Home owners should be able to collect enough solar energy to sell electricity to the companies, to get paid for staying "on the grid" and helping heat and light the cities.

The "Solar Power Carol" deserves a better music video than this one. So make one.

Book Review: Between Sisters

Title: Between Sisters

Author: Kristin Hannah

Publisher: Ballantine

Date: 2003

ISBN: 978-0-345-51946-7

Length: 459 pages

Quote: “My sister and I have problems, I’ll admit it. But nothing major. We’re just too busy to get together. Okay, she makes me crazy, the way she’s throwing her life away.”

Two aging sisters make a final heroic effort to pull their fractured family together. Their mother, an actress, walked out on them. Meghann, the older sister, mothered Claire until she was ready to go away and be the kind of lawyer who encourages women to stick it to their husbands in divorce cases. (Meghann talks to a counsellor who asks “When was the last time you slept with the same man twice?” Meghann’s not sure but she’s starting to find it more difficult to pick up younger men for one-night flings.) Claire, the younger sister, stayed with their father in an unprofitable resort business. Now this family want to bond again before one of them dies.

If you feel empathy for a family of people who keep making stupid life choices, you might enjoy this novel. I didn’t. My feeling is that, sure, readers like feeling that they’re smarter than fictional characters, but these characters overdo it. Reading about them is like talking to someone who obviously needs more help than you can give the person, or like watching a TV soap opera. So if you can watch a TV soap opera and feel motivated to watch the next segment rather than turn off the television set, Between Sisters is probably for you.

To be fair, Hannah says that accepting and pardoning family members’ stupidity is the point, so she’s probably exaggerated this fictional family’s dumbth on purpose to suggest that your family are probably much easier to pardon than this fictional family. Meh. Any writer should understand business decisions that place other considerations ahead of money, since all writers have by definition made those for ourselves, but lumping that together with things like Meghann's sexual behavior is unlikely to help readers achieve reconciliation.

Tortie Tuesday: Serena on the Importance of Entertaining Cats

We didn't even have a Petfinder post last week. Apologies. We can have one now, in the animal interview format that annoys the humor-impaired. I write these things from sober human observation... For new readers, Serena is the resident cat in charge of the Cat Sanctuary. 

She was a baby Queen Cat when she was five months old. Now she's five years old and really into being the matriarch around here. She's easy for cats and humans to love, provided that they accept that, at least as far as she's concerned, Serena is the boss,

PK: "Stop clawing at the door! What is your problem, anyway? Don't tell me you're hungry already."

Serena: "No. I'm a nibbler not a gobbler. As usual I saved some food from breakfast for nibbling if I feel like it, later."

PK: "Want some water?"

Serena: "Purr-course! They changed the package and the taste of Pure Life water this summer, and it's better than ever now. I always like a taste of your water."

Crayola: "Me too!"

Pastel: "Me three!"

Silver: "Leave some for me!"

Serena: "Well! Aren't you going to sit down and finish the bottle?"

PK: "I'm taking it indoors. It's not so warm out here for those of us who aren't covered  in fur."

Serena: "You're no fun!"

PK: "Will you stop? You're damaging the wood."

Serena: "You can get more wood if you want it."

PK: "Serena, look around you. See the orchard? See all the trees? See all the dead wood they shed? I need to prune some more dead wood and cut back some of the privet hedge, but already you have a selection of wood to claw at. What makes the door so special? Why don't you claw at this piece of firewood? It's nice and dry just like the door."

Serena: "That wouldn't get your attention."

PK: "Why do you want attention now? What do you want?"

Serena: "I'll show you. Follow me. See the corner of the shed? What do you see leaning against it?

PK: "That switch I used to amuse the kittens with, before the weather got too hot and they got bored with baby games."

Pastel: "We're not bored with those games now." 

Crayola: "It's not too hot any more!"

Serena: "Yesss! For a human you seem almost rational sometimes. Swing it faster! That's the way! I like skidding and sliding on dead leaves, too!"

PK: "I thought you had decided it was beneath your dignity as a Queen Cat to play with kittens."

Serena: "That was when the weather was hot." 

PK: "Well, if you don't mind playing with kittens, you have plenty of playmates."

Serena: "Hide the end of the switch under some leaves so I can guess where it is! Of course I have other playmates now, but sometimes I want to play with you. You're my human and it's my responsibility to exercise you. You were my first playmate. You're still my dear friend. Your alien brain thinks up moves that would never occur to a kitten."

(Three days later)

PK: "If only doors could grow back like pruned hedges, that door might be starting to grow back now. Is it really safe to take your leaving the door alone as an indication that you're satisfied?"

Serena: "Purr-now I'm satisfied. You're coming out to play in the sunshine, playing with me instead of the Lap Pooper." 

PK: "You don't seem to want your claws trimmed." 

Serena: "Of course not. I take care of my own claws, thank you very much! The kittens like to let you trim their claws just as an excuse to snuggle up to you and get treats, but when I call attention to myself it's because I want attention." 

PK: "It's time for another Petfinder post on the web site..."

Serena: "Fiddle-dee-dee! I wish you'd find another home for the Lap Pooper and let that web site go!"

PK: "The laptop computer supplies you with bottled water and kibble. Now, have we anything to say to humans whose cats suddenly start clawing at things the humans want them not to claw at?"

Serena: "I don't know about them. Some cats are just dumb animals who don't have enough brains to remember their own families. Once they stop nursing and smelling milk on her, she is just another cat to them, and instead of being as polite to other old females as they want other cats to be to their mothers, they are as vicious and violent with their own mothers as they are with other old females. It must be hard for you to imagine. Pastel's and Crayola's father's family--if you could call them a family!--are just trashy! And I don't think much of their humans, either, but...Are humans ever so trashy as to scratch or bite an old female?"

PK: "Once in a while they are. There was one in California last week. He wanted to hurt an old lady, but not finding her at home, he hurt her husband instead. He wasn't even in the right country. Some people who belong in different countries want to be here because they've had disasters or wars in their own countries, or because people there want to kill them, but this fool was here just because his own family despised him and told him to go away. And he was babbling about politics, but what would our politics have to do with him, as a foreigner? If he'd had any real interest in politics, his own country has some controversies going on. Some humans just have something very badly wrong with them .Yes, it's hard to guess what that kind will do."

Serena: "But yes, if we are dissatisfied, we'll send you some sort of message, even though many humans are said to be so thick that nothing less than a big puddle of personal 'honey' right on their pillows, or down in the toes of their shoes, gets their attention."  

PK: "Many cats are less imperious than you, Serena."

Serena: "That's their loss. They will still have to find ways to communicate to their humans when they aren't satisfied with their humans' behavior. That could include anything the human has told the cat to stop doing. Not all cats understand or remember when a human told them to stop doing something, but most of us have quite clear memories of things that really got the human's attention, whether it was jumping down onto the human's back, clawing at a particular object, whining, or whatever else. Most of us will try to avoid doing those things again, because we like peace...and we'll do them again if it seems to be necessary."

PK: "What about things the human thought were cute and clever?"

Serena: "Of course we'll use those ways to get attention too, if they work. If you spent more time in your bedroom, where you could hear a cat pull the screen door ajar and make it rap against the door frame, we'd probably do that to get your attention, as you say the cats who lived here before the Lap Pooper used to do. Now that you spend almost all the time in the office, the screen door is no use to us. If you spent more time outdoors, I'd make eye contact and blink at you, which has generally worked when you've been out where you could see it. When you're hiding from us, indoors with the Lap Pooper, you don't always even hear when Sommersburr calls you."

PK: "With this important message in mind,  which kind of shelter animals should we feature in today's blog post?"

Serena: "Don't do a blog post! These warm southwest winds are too much fun. Stay outside and play with me!"

PK: "Black cats, because Halloween is over and shelters feel less need to hide them?"

Serena: "I am ignoring you! I am playing with my own daughter!" 

Black cats it is, then. But, on opening the Petfinder page, I immediately see that at this time of year I'm not going to be able to find the cutest cat pictures. There are two thousand pictures of black cats who've been hidden in shelters during the season before Halloween in New York alone. Actually some of these pictures appear to be duplicates, possibly because pages were pulled in October and restored in November, and most of the cats look very similar to each other. Several of them are in fact siblings, having been placed in the shelter as litters of four black kittens. Any slim, short-haired black cat with amber eyes and white skin rates high on my scale of appealingness, and there are thousands of them. Here are nice clear pictures of cute black cats in search of good homes. Search your own location; you may well find cuter pictures, and the relative cuteness of the pictures doesn't even indicate the adorableness of the actual cats. Shelter staff often fail to make the time to take good clear pictures of animals who are naturally adapted to fading into the shadows.

1. Kenny from New York 

Good things come in small packages but Kenny, who was born in August 2021, might grow a little bigger. A year-old cat is like a college-age human. Both are still growing, but usually the bones are at least close to as long as they're going to grow and the gains are in bone and internal organ mass. They are still bursting with energy at a level that can be tiring; the shelter recommend Kenny to a family without children because his restlessness might cause problems with them. (They don't actually say that if nobody gives him something to chase he's likely to try to start a good play-fight, but that's a thing some adolescent tomcats do.) Already neutered, he reportedly gets along very well with other neutered males but "seems to dislike" the female cat he's met. The shelter staff think he'd be an ideal junior cat for the human companions of an aging male cat. Kenny has been brought up as a house pet with a lot of freedom; at his web page, https://www.petfinder.com/cat/kenny-58705937/ny/new-york/anjellicle-cats-rescue-ny488/, there's a picture of him looking not exactly enthusiastic but resigned to being bathed in the bathroom sink, and one showing that he's comfortable riding around on someone's arm.

2. Sammy and Maggie from Mount Rainier

The one on the left is Maggie, described as the smallest kitten in a large litter. Sammy is the one who qualifies as a black cat. As you can tell by their size relative to a cat carrier, they're late-summer kittens with purrsonalities described as, well, classic kitten personalities. They like to play, they like to snuggle, they take lots of naps. They look awfully little to have been spayed and neutered, but they have. Sammy reportedly turns up the volume on his purr when allowed to nap in someone's lap, and Maggie seems quieter but, if moved off the lap in question, will bounce right back to it. They share a web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/sammy-maggie-56864388/md/mount-rainier/a-cats-life-rescue-md492/ .

3. Raven from Fayetteville

She was a spring kitten and she's already run up a vet bill of $125 that includes microchipping. I'm not enthusiastic about microchipping, but all black cats can look very much alike--if she were lost, after a few weeks on the street that glossy blue-black fur would probably start to look rusty. So at least with a chip you'd be able to prove she was yours. All the shelter staff took the time to write about her hisstory or purrsonality is that she's a "sweet kitty." Well, yes, her willingness to pose (as distinct from trying to grab the camera and throw and kick it about, like some cats I could mention) shows that. 

Book Review: Sealed with a Diss

Title: Sealed with a Diss

Author: Lisi Harrison

Publisher: Little Brown

Date: 2007

ISBN: 978-0-316-11506-3

Length: 248 pages

Quote: “They had spent weeks fantasizing about this mysterious room and all of the things they would do with it once it was theirs.”

In the real world there are schools where just one student club, and not the others, have access to a special room or house. At the university I attended it was the Scholars, the ones who maintained the highest grade-point averages, who were allowed a separate house to work—in the daytime, but they could stay in it between nine o’clock and midnight—on special art and science projects. At the fictional Octavian Country Day School it’s the “alpha” clique in grade eight who, supposedly unbeknownst to the teachers, have the key to the old bomb shelter, which they’ve rigged up with all kinds of goodies including a spy-cam to see into the Briarwood boys’ school’s “Emotional Sensitivity” classroom. Claire, Massie, Alicia, and the rest of the Pretty Committee are in line to inherit this room from the graduating DSL Daters, but by way of initiation they have to bring dates to a party and Massie has to help Skye, the leader of the DSL Daters, reconnect with Chris, the boy Skye fancies. Massie likes Chris too, if only because Skye does, and her goal throughout this story is to bring Chris and Skye together in such a way that Skye will feel that Chris would rather be with Massie. Whether Chris really would prefer to be with Massie, or even whether Massie would prefer to be with Chris, are lesser considerations. Massie is that kind of girl.

All five Pretty Committee girls are about to learn an important lesson about petty spying: While we obviously don’t want government spying on us because the motivation for government to do so would be to violate the Bill of Rights, we also don’t want to spy on our friends, any more than we want to be spied on by them, because there are reasons why they tell us what they want to tell us about themselves, and the added insights we gain by spying aren’t likely to boost the relationship. Claire, who officially has a boyfriend, has the most painful time learning this lesson. While her friends merely baffle the boys they’re trying to impress, Claire sneaks a peek at Cam’s cell phone and sets herself up for major misunderstandings.

If you liked the other Clique novels your collection needs this one. Personally, I’m underwhelmed by the series . That Lisi Harrison has publicly admitted having written this series as a sort of vindictive parody of some former co-workers, and earned enough money from the series that she doesn’t need to work with the said co-workers any more, makes the meta-message of this novel “Living well is the best revenge.” I suppose that gives it some redeeming social value but, personally, when I think of series of school stories, I miss the clueless but basically well-intentioned quality of the teenagers in Clueless or The Facts of Life.

Your Opinions Count, Gentle Readers

Can you read this? Y/N. Reply via Twitter...

Yes, this is (partly) a hint about what U.S. readers need to schedule doing tomorrow.  Having made sure your polling place has NOT actually been changed to somewhere ninety miles from your home, or got that settled if it had been, plan to go where it really is. Some of you may know people who drive minivans or other vehicles with extra seating. This is a great time of year to be a van owner. Plan now to fill every seat.

This is also a poll about legibility. Last week a reader e-mailed to say that he thought this web site looks oldfashioned, which is good, and that he was having trouble reading it on his stupidphone, which is not so good. Although this web site's goal is to remain easy to read on devices as classic as the Original Toshiba and the Sickly Snail (the 1989 and 1991 laptops we keep around because they were good laptops), we don't want to be out of reach for those who can't afford decent computers.

We want to apply pressure to the industry, Gentle Readers. Objects like the Android stupidphone, which I've personally tested and found a detestable, ought-to-be-criminal waste of mineral resources, must NEVER be imagined as replacing real computers. Paw-and-smear "touch screens" may entertain some house pets but they're no substitute for real keyboards. You should insist that your phone, which is for making live voice calls for which you pay, and your computer, which is for visiting web sites where you read and write and get paid, have solid, separate, replaceable, opaque keys on a real keyboard or keypad and their screens (not that a phone needs a screen) are not for touching. Screens are hard enough on our eyes when they're touched only by insects and cleaning cloths. Never touch your screen with your finger. 

If you own an Android or similar clunky flat object that claims to be an all-in-one phone, camera, radio, TV, computer, Kindle "book" reader, and Swiss Army knife, or what we in the United States used to call "everything but the kitchen sink," and in practice the only other device for which it can really substitute is the flashlight...well, I have kept mine for use as a flashlight, so I don't recommend the kitchen sink as being the best place to store it. I recommend a dark drawer, where all that little spy camera can see is wood, or maybe the blank black back of a binder, or a plain manila folder. Store it turned off to conserve battery power to use the thing as a flashlight. Demand a real computer with a real keyboard if your job or class requires reading or typing.

If your school or employer demands that you carry around a stupidphone...in the spirit of Shel Silverstein...

"If you have to dry the dishes

And you drop them on the floor,

Maybe they won't ever let you

Dry the dishes any more."

Think kitchen sink. Think moving bus. Think toilet. Those nasties are so brittle, and that slippery surface was just made to slide off things...I only ask that you think of places where stupidphones can be cracked, crushed, and soaked indoors, or on pavement, so that the pieces can be picked up before they damage the environment. Make stupidphone surveillance so expensive that the school or company will have to spring for decent phones and computers.

I make these recommendations primarily as a writer who'd be crippled without a keyboard--I was using typewriter for school when I was seven years old!--but also because you should be aware of the sinister possibilities the stupidphones present for those who want to implement a "social credit" system of 24/7 surveillance. Touch screens are messy and unsightly and hard to read with all those little finger smudges all over them. They're meant to be used not actually for their owners to read web pages, but for spies to track users' fingerprints. Don't touch them. If you use a stupidphone at all, get a stylus to tap on the screen. It's a good idea to add gloves to your sunglasses and COVID mask, and put on all three before taking the stupidphone out of its nice dark drawer.

Though replacing and "recycling" electronics is not a Green thing to do, and those who care about the Earth make it a goal either to own no electronic devices at all or to own one electronic device of its kind for their lifetime, in the case of the flat, slick, clunky-sized "phones" with touch screens there might be some forgiveness for making an exception. Dumping every one of those things on the undoubtedly sprayed and mown lawn in front of the corporate headquarters of the company that inflicted them on the world, and demanding that that company "recycle" them with their own hands and on their own premises, paying for the extensive ecological compensation that will be necessary, would be one way to dispose of them. We certainly do not need them in our lives.

Since this web site does not recommend that anyone own or use a stupidphone, this web site is not about to change its format to fit the stupidphone screen. We like it the way it is. We particularly like that, although the font display has always been hard to control (Blogger offers a selection of fonts; the HTML code tells Blogger to display this site in Times Roman; Blogger displays this site on most of the computers I've used in Georgia--that is, the font called Georgia), at least this site uses serif fonts. We hate sans-serif fonts. They may look more like the way a six-year-old prints letters, when magnified to that size, and thus be "easier to read" for those who originally learned to read languages that did not use our kind of alphabet, but sans-serif fonts are hard to read at a normal size; all the i's and l's and I's and 1's and t's and f's and also 7's and even 3's look alike. We like the way you see sans-serif fonts, at this web site, only in graphics.

Google does, however, positively encourage bloggers to set up multiple blogs. We want this site to be accessible to everyone. We offered taped versions until read-out-loud software became common. We still offer printed versions for those who don't own electronic devices. We could offer a new-format shadow blog with phone accessibility...after all, which audience most needs to be warned to keep the espionage device disguised as a phone out of their lives?

Another concern the reader mentioned was with being able to see or use the comment section. We've heard about this before, from someone we trust and respect (the writer known as Andrei Codrescu). We installed Disqus. At the time readers did not rush to interact on Disqus, although hundreds of people find Disqus easy to use. We found that more of our readers found it easier to use Google's in-house commenting system. Has this changed? Do you use Disqus? Would you want to use Disqus here?

Some web sites, probably the ones that do all of their own HTML and security rather than relying on free hosting, do manage to install double-track commenting. At S.A.R.K.'s blog, for instance, you have a choice of commenting via Facebook or (iirc) Wordpress. We thought it would be nice to give readers a choice of posting comments via Google or Disqus, here. Unfortunately Blogspot doesn't offer that feature. We have to choose one system or the other. If Disqus appears Google comments disappear, and vice versa. 

A related question might as well be addressed here too...We are aware of some blogs that are real multimedia productions, often more collages of pictures and videos than original words. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba is able to read those blogs, but that's not the way this web site has chosen to be. We want to keep the words accessible to older devices where the pictures and videos display as blank squares. We use small simple pictures, mostly in animal-related posts, and links to music videos. At an alternative site we might be able to post stacks of music videos that would play right on the page, as Priscilla Bird, Rob Kistner, Melissa's Mochas, Michelle's Mirror, and several other bloggers now do. Google would do that at this web site, and the Unsatisfactory Toshiba would do it. This web site has a commitment not to do it here, because some of our readers may be using devices like the Sickly Snail. We just give you the links, as Small Dead Animals does, so that those whose devices can handle them may enjoy them, and those whose devices would crash may ignore them.

Are you trying to read this web site on your phone? Is it hard to read? Would you prefer to see this content on a newer-style web site? 

Do you have trouble seeing or using the comments? 

Do you prefer Disqus?

Are you Wordpress partisans who'd prefer to read and interact within the Wordpress system?

The complaining reader offered to redesign the whole site (to something hosted and maintained by associates of his, for a fee, no doubt). Actually I could probably redesign it myself by switching to one of the other formats Google offers, but I'm not going to do that, because I chose this simple format for reasons that are still valid. I could design an alternative site for you readers all by myself, too, in either Google's Blogger or Wordpress formats recommended for newer devices, but I wouldn't know how well that worked for you. People I know in real life use computers much older than the Unsatisfactory Toshiba.  

Here's what you can do toward building the alternative site you require, if more than one of you readers do require an alternative site. Open blogger.com in your own browser. Set up a blog (you don't have to use it regularly or maintain it; if you don't want to be a blogger, deleting your blog after it's served its purpose is encouraged). Choose a format that works for you to post something. Post the Gettysburg Address if you have nothing else to say, just to test the formatting. Share a link to this post to show me what works for you. If I can read it, too, that will be the way our alternative site will look. 

Book Review: The Incredible Power of Grace

Title: The Incredible Power of Grace

Author: Roland R. Hegstad

Publisher; Review & Herald

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-8280-1912-6

Length: 143 pages

Quote: “Strange, isn’t it, that the Bible so often stresses God’s tender forbearance rather than His wrath. It’s as if He wishes us to remember that the strength of the church does not reside in political power. The strength of the church resides in its avalanche of powerlessness.”

It’s hard for me to give this book a fair review. The church Hegstad meant may have been the entire Church Militant (all living Christians on Earth); the one he knew was the Seventh-Day Adventist church that sponsored the college I used to attend, where I was one year ahead of Hegstad’s daughter (who is mentioned in this book). That church is a powerful subculture with its own version of literate folks’ folklore, folk songs, foodways, healing traditions…and dialect. One of the rules of the culture was that books published by church-owned presses had to cover at least two dozen points of doctrine on which the church, at that time, agreed. In this book Hegstad, writing within and for the culture, relates his life to those points of doctrine. If you understand what he was trying to do, I think, the resulting book makes sense and is even rather well written.

At church the Hegstads were family friends. At school the daughter who was close to my age had few interests and no friends in common with me; one of those few common interests happened to be our major field of study, but curve grading motivated people with similar interests and talents to try to avoid being in the same classes. Since I'd moved off campus I barely saw the Hegstad girl. It's not relevant to the book review, but somebody Out There need to read it: When I went home at breaks Mother would always ask "And how are the Hegstads doing?" I had no idea how the Hegstads were doing. I felt pressured. I began to associate an unpleasant feeling with the mention of the Hegstads and thus to dislike the whole family, at home and at school--though I liked them in Florida. 

And then Roland Hegstad wrote another book. A controversial book. Cosmic Conflict presented the gospel story in cartoon form. It felt pleasant, in a way I'm not proud of now, to stand with those who said that the graphic version of any story could only be a parody of the real book.Cosmic Conflict did not sell well, nor did it become one of the books the church printing houses kept n the market. Hegstad also edited the news magazine Liberty, which I dismissed as a magazine for lawyers.

I became more interested in law around age forty, and more interested in graphic novels around age fifty, when young book buyers began asking for them. By the time I inherited this book from Mother, I felt no desire to avoid talking or thinking about the Hegstads. The Incredible Power of Grace sounds the way Roland Hegstad talked. As a result I think it's informative, entertaining, engaging, inspirational, and a fun read. 

You might think it’s scattered, narrowly denominational, or  confusing. \It’s not only a personal testimony, though it contains parts of one. It’s not a first book of Christian doctrine, written either to convert unbelievers or to edify new converts, either. To some extent it’s a typical Adventist’s testimony. Adventists are overwhelmingly upper-middle-class people. Many of them are very literate, very sophisticated, often world travellers, not infrequently polymaths with a half-dozen seemingly unrelated degrees and certifications, often multilingual and multicultural. The ones whose names are familiar outside their subculture have mostly been doctors , from the Kellogg brothers through Jethro Kloss to Ben Carson). Their personal stories really are stories about what they’ve read and learned as much as what they’ve seen and felt, so that a book full of research, Bible studies, news items, cultural references, and footnotes can indeed be an Adventist’s memoir…especially if that Adventist was the retired editor of a glossy, mass-distribution news magazine (Hegstad edited Liberty for most of his lifetime). But the shape of this book is not a memoir; it’s a Seventh-Day Adventist’s rather wide-ranging view of Christian doctrine, written, I think, mainly to edify new members of that denomination. It’s about the grace of God as that grace appears to Adventists, who see the specific doctrines of their church as aspects of God’s saving grace.

So this book begins with some unrelated short-short stories of how sad life is without faith, then proceeds through a coffee-snorting description of how the world would be different “if (you or) I were God,” into a serious consideration of God’s Judgment, God’s Incarnation, conversion, the Christian life as a matter of “making God look good,” what the Unpardonable Sin is and why, the Second Advent, the seventh-day Sabbath, and the brevity of life. For Adventists this is a very clear and logical way of saying either “Don’t you want to join our church now?” or “Aren’t you glad you did?” For non-Adventists…I don’t know. Read it, if you’re a complete non-Adventist, and tell me.

Since the book’s not on my display, and I see a lot of local book buyers demonstrating concern about the physical properties of a book, here’s what they want to know about The Incredible Power of Grace. It is a book that a geriatric patient could read after breaking both wrists. My copy was one of the half-dozen books my mother took into that situation. Hip-pocket size, lightweight, not terribly sturdy paperback binding, clear 11-point Bembo print. That's not classified as "Large Print" but the print looks large relative to the book.

Book Review: The Santa Fe Trail

Title: The Santa Fe Trail

Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams

Publisher: Random House

Date: 1951

ISBN: none

Length: 181 pages

Illustrations: maps and drawings by Lee J. Ames

Quote: “The Santa Fe Trail is wiped out. It is doubtful whether a single one of the original landmarks could be found.”

The gold in California distracted attention from Santa Fe in the later half of the nineteenth century. For a time, though, Santa Fe was the goal of explorers and traders, and the Santa Fe Trail was long and dangerous enough to suit anybody. Using the few old records that survived, Adams reconstructs the first few journeys after the Trail was named. The old records documented plenty of battles and life-and-death struggles as explorers—mostly reckless young men, as nobody else thought the danger was worth the possible profit—looked for water sources that might have dried up or shortcuts that might not be usable. Laws were enforced by the leaders of parties. When different parties met they never knew in advance whether the others wanted to trade or to fight; men of English, Spanish, or American descent were equally interested in fair trades when they had goods to trade, equally desperate when low on food or water, and equally bad-tempered if they felt they had been cheated…and, though the nominally Christian English and Spanish types tried to deny it, about equally likely to rob and raid if they lacked goods to trade. Though perhaps partial to the English (or just able to read more of their records), Adams tries to be fair.

Written for grades four through six, this book was part of a series marketed to schools in the mid-twentieth century. I remember appreciating the lifelike, though not accurately colored, drawings in all of the books and the lively narrative in some. The Santa Fe Trail offered plenty of material for lively narrative. It should appeal to adults who collect “westerns” if they’ve not read it before, even though, except for little things like imagining a conversation to explain how now-obsolete words were used, Adams generally sticks to facts. It certainly used to appeal to fifth and sixth grade students who had finished their in-class assignments; some kids might even want to read it at home.

Bad Poetry: A Page from the Science Fiction Bestiary

(The Angleterry appeared in science fiction poems by Suzette Haden Elgin.)

The Angleterry is a beast

that prowls through outer space

in search of planets where to feast

on the indigenous race.

It looks just like a pretty rug

at first sight, when it meets you,

but rather than keep your feet snug,

it rises up and eats you.

It's in a book, not from the U.K.

It sounds like angles and like terror,

and the author always used to say

she never thought of Angleterre. 

Do Politics Like Civilized People or Not at All

This post wanted to be a full-sized, hard-hitting post about the subject so dear to so many Republicans, election fraud. I believe it happens, all right. And maybe, if Republicans want to put their backs where their mouths are, something can be done about it. Experience has not shown me that Republicans generally want to put their backs where their mouths are, but maybe in crisis mode they do, who knows?

Having said that about Republicans I might as well add that Democrats aren't too good at putting their backs where their mouths are, either. They taught the Republicans how to wail about election fraud in 2000 and in 2016, but funnily enough I've seen no reports of Ds trooping down to election offices, demanding the right to use the first two weeks of November physically counting ballots. They, too, prefer to let somebody "guesstimate" from a partial count, or worse yet try to use computerized scanning devices to read handwritten write-ins and "chads" punched out with dull stampers, and then spend the next four years wailing and whining and moaning and carrying on about how much they hate the current p'resident (presumptuous resident) whom they never sent to the White House, wooooe! 

The position of this web site is that this wailing is childish and poor-spirited. The spirit of T.E.A. steams out of this web site's little spout. Grow up already, it exhorts the partisans. Stop the stupid sulking about having failed to elect Your Man, or woman, and try to work with the people in office in a responsible, effectual way as Loyal Opposition. Heaven knows the Presidents we've had since the rise of the Internet, and likewise the Congressmen and the various elected and appointed bureaucrats around them, have needed Loyal Opposition: a million bloggers all expressing no malice toward the office holders, in fact showing due respect for them since they obviously got someone to put them where they are, but an honest concern about an issue, or issues, and desire to help the office holders understand the will of the voters and taxpayers. 

But, but, but, the partisans sputter, being loyal opposition may be a nicer way to do it, but those nice ways often fail... (Music link here.) 

Right, this web site puffs. How far did public displays of bad sportsmanship get HRC's partisans in the Trump Administration? What have similar displays done for Republicans lately? Reason may not win as easily or as often as it should, but it has to be better than that.

This web site once responded to an e-mail inviting people to wish one of our U.S. Senators a happy birthday with a little verse in the tradition of birthday roasts and spankings:

"Happy birthday, Tim Kaine,

In the Senate you're a pain;

You should live long and prosper,

Only maybe in Spain."

In a certain way this web site does respect Tim Kaine, and not merely his office. Senator Kaine once ran against a relative of mine in an election, and did so partly with a campaign storyline subtly suggesting that my relative was a lightweight because he was and still is a better-looking man. That does take talent. Many are the less-attractive politicians who could only dream of making it work for them.

But, without claiming to be partisans of his, this web site has followed the example of the Kilgore twins themselves and behaved with due respect for the Senator's office, and as a result we at least raised the Glyphosate Awareness of his staff. Not that Senator Kaine has been a strong enough leader to get an actual bill passed, or imagined that he was; but his office has demonstrated awareness. When someone else has the following and the fortitude to sponsor a glyphosate ban, if it reaches a vote as a simple bill without anything stuck onto it that is particularly abhorrent to the Senator, there's a good chance of his remembering to vote for it. That's about as good as it gets with the average Congressman.

On the other hand, consider where hating on people leads. I do not believe actual Republicans' hating on Nancy Pelosi has been enough to upset even a mental balance as precarious as DiPape's apparently was. I think D infiltrators of far-right groups found this aging "gay" male prostitute hanging about on the fringes of the fringiest sort of groups, desperately seeking human companionship after having cut it off in his immediate family, and exploited his loneliness. Why would DePape go to the door of the person he was stalking when he could easily have learned that the person wouldn't be there? Possibly because he was acting on the instructions of his friend the saboteur? Likely the saboteur thought DePape would flee at the sight of Paul Pelosi. Likely the saboteur was horribly surprised to see that DePape was in fact aggressive enough to hit a man--a man twice his age, anyway. 

But where does it lead? I left Twitter last night after seeing a photograph of the anguish on the Speaker's face. People have died from less. Many people hate Nancy Pelosi's politics, and rightly so--though I was struck, when researching an article about her, by the fact that nobody seems ever to have found anything about her to hate except her politics. For anyone as rich, as famous, and as easy to blame for as much as the Speaker has been, to have avoided scandals and lawsuits for as long as she has done, is indeed a class act. She may be too old to learn much, but she is a fine lady we should all hope to have the honor of educating, not hating.

However hard to educate she would have been before this act of emotional torture, she'll be much harder to educate now. How could she possibly listen respectfully to any representative of any group with which she associated DePape? How can any Californian hope to reason with the Speaker, on any non-partisan issue of concern to people in San Francisco, after this?

Of course that's one more reason why she should retire. And it's one more reason why her constituents will try to find somone whose politics are even worse--and they'll be very lucky to find anyone whose character is anything near as unassailable. DePape's act of terrorism probably did not involve any contact with any actual Republican, but for all the Republicans in California who feel hated, cheated, and lied to by their elected officials, DePape's dastardly deed will be another very large brick in the wall.

It doesn't end with Nancy Pelosi, who would have served the nation better if she'd retired twenty years ago, before uttering that unforgettable line, "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it." As an indication of an individual's having reached her or his personal retirement age, that one does rate a place close to Hillary Rodham Clinton's repeated pleas of brain damage under oath. But when you want someone to retire, you don't attack or persecute the person; you talk about the good only that person can do in a less demanding position, you talk about the quiet joys of grandparenthood or the pleasures of travel.

I'll be surprised if DePape turns out to have any connection with any real members of the Republican Party. Real Republicans are game players. They understand that although a two-party system may have some room for divisive rhetoric, especially when candidates are debating, a civilized nation cannot allow partisan violence. 

There are two approaches to preventing partisan violence. The one the rest of the world understands is to have a single-party, totalitarian government. "Common people" are taught not to think but to obey. Feudal Europe has been resentfully eying the more successful English-speaking countries since before even colonial days. The latest angle for the "yes, but in the English-speaking countries the common people have too much freedom" camp has been the allegedly scientific studies that show that people report more happiness in countries where they're punished for expressing dissatisfaction. The flaw in the "science of happiness" studies is that people who are bullied and threatened into claiming that they're happier not having to make choices may feel less happiness than people who wail contentedly about "decisions, decisions," especially while shopping. Having higher standards for what they describe as positive happiness does not necessarily, or even probably, mean that people are less contented.

The one that has historically worked for the English-speaking countries is to raise the tone of political discourse. Discourage the tabloid-style obsession with branding individuals as saviors or demons. Keep in mind that humans are annoyingly human, likely to do both good things and bad things. Focus on rational discussions of what the people want and what they can do to get that, rather than nursery-school fantasies that "Candidate A can make us a richer nation" or "Candidate B can make us a nicer nation." Remind people to think more in terms of, "If I want the nation, or myself, to be richer or nicer or cleaner or whatever, I want our government to do ---, and my part of this movement is ---." If politicians oppose what you are doing toward the changes you want, vote them out, without hostility. 

I don't really want the United States to be a more censorious nation but I think partisan rhetoric needs to be toned down. (Impartially--none of this "But it's all right for this D to call all Rs homicidal maniacs, because this R called the D in question a left-winger.") 

We could just remind people: "Do politics like civilized people, or not at all." We could just stop following people who post partisan verbal violence, and follow only moderates.

We could just stop voting for Ds until they purge their ranks of people who favor censorship. I realize that this is easier for me, this year, than it is for many Independents. I have to vote for or against keeping an incumbent who is generally well liked, such that he's being opposed only by a very young and naive Nobody from Nowhere with No Background and No Friends. The Rs haven't even wasted any money on campaigning. For people who have several partisan choices to make next week and who know at least one of their R choices to be in great need of retirement, an alternative would be to tag the current D party leaders as "The Party of Censorship" and require any Ds for whom you vote to denounce censorship in public. 

Book Review: Soap Opera Cafe

Title: Soap Opera Café

Author: Robin Mattson

Publisher: Warner

Date: 1997

ISBN: 0-446-52056-X

Length: 281 pages

Illustrations: lots of black-and-white photos of TV actors cooking

Quote: “Staying slim is…essential to me as an actress.”

The actress known as Robin Mattson loved to cook, loved to eat, and wasn’t star enough to write off her career in the way Rachael Ray and Nigella Lawson did a few years later. So she specialized in low-calorie cuisine. What makes the book special are the photos of TV actors.

Book Review: The Tanglewood Terror

Title: The Tanglewood Terror

Author: Kurtis Scaletta

Publisher: Knopf

Date: 2011

ISBN: 978-0-375-96758-0

Length: 264 pages

Quote: “I read that they’ve documented less than a quarter of the world’s fungi…There might be one extraordinary species of fungus that’s capable of things we never imagined.”

In this story a strictly out-of-school group of kids—not age- or gender-matched—discover a mutant species of honey fungus that they associate with the mystery of what caused an earlier town, built near their own town, to vanish without a trace. Tough and even mobile, unlike real honey fungus, the mutant mushrooms devour wooden objects with impossible speed, forming a bare dead clearing in the woods and moving aggressively into wood-frame buildings. Some of the older townsfolk still put their faith in fungicide sprays but, though Eric’s too nice a kid to condemn his father’s efforts to spray the fungi out of their house, he knows spray poisons never work very well for very long. Can he rally his friends, who happen to include a neighbor’s pet pig, to dig up the core of the fungus and kill it? Even if this impossible fungus, instead of putting out thin threads, puts out ropy tentacles that can whip around people’s waists? Or is there a simpler, more natural, more effective remedy than that?

There’s a lot to like about Eric and his friends. Though Eric is a big fat linebacker with a remarkable lack of interest in pop culture past or present (references are always sailing past his empty head), he’s learning that his strength is not for hurting people in this book. At first we see him acting rough and careless toward Brian (his little brother) and Randy (the best runner on his team), but any tendencies he might have toward being a bully are pulled up short when he accidentally breaks Randy’s leg. (They were just quarrelling and playing keep-away on the manure heap behind the pig’s sty, when Randy slipped…) His crash course in sensitivity progresses almost as fast as the mythical mushrooms. Eric learns something about Brian’s reactions to his playful rough “teasing,” stops pushing other kids around, and starts talking like the coach he’s probably destined to become. He’s good at it; with the credibility he’s gained from a solid performance on the field, when he invites the team to help dig up the fungus he finds himself recruiting even high school kids to join his friends from grade seven, and allergy-prone Allan, from grade six, and Brian, Mandy, and the pig.

The pig, inspired by the nonfiction story of The Good Good Pig, gets a meaty part of the action; she “mothers” a favorite bucket, finds the core of the fungus, and just happens, in one of those lovely coincidences one finds in fiction, to stray away from the kids at just the right point on the trail for Eric to stumble into an old stone “cabin” in the woods...Well, it’s supposed to be fiction. If your disbelief slips down from its suspension, at least you can laugh.

Can a seventh grade boy, not even a quarterback but a linebacker, with no interest in either reading or writing, write a book as long and (on the whole) as clever as this one? That’s another point where your disbelief might slip. Eric never even cares enough to look up the books, or for that matter the songs or movies, to which his father and his friends refer in conversation. At least half a dozen times he mentions not knowing something the reader, even if still in grade five, is supposed to recognize (and the adult reader can laugh and reminisce about). That he misses references to “I Love Lucy” and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E.Frankweiler seems plausible, but when he doesn’t recognize the Second Commandment…he’s not mentioned his parents being anti-religious. But when he learns that Mandy’s gone back to Minnesota and he’s unlikely to have a chance to tell her how everything turned out, and she orders him to write, he sits down and writes 264 pages of laugh-out-loud adventures, with some excellent insights into being a big brother and a future football coach…? ???

There’s only ever meant to be one of Gordon Korman in a century and if I remember correctly even he didn’t finish This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall in grade seven. But I think it’s important for middle school readers, to whom The Tanglewood Terror is marketed, to understand something they’ve not lived out yet. I don’t believe The Tanglewood Terror is what a kid like Eric sits down and writes to a friend who’s not able to finish an adventure with the rest of the kids who’ve shared it. No way. Nobody writes 264 pages of coherent narrative, with logical sequence and just-right descriptions and correct spelling and mostly correct grammar (it should be “fewer than a quarter,” in the first sentence quoted above, but that’s okay because it’s quoted from a conversation), in grade seven. By the time Eric had polished the story up to this degree, he would've been in grade nine or ten. But yes, big guys can write. Even linebackers can write. It's only been in Generation X that most of the English-speaking world stopped expecting guys to write better than girls.

NaNoWriMo What Do I Know?

Let's see if I can keep this short enough not to cut into the time of those doing "National Novel Writing Month" challenges...

Before "NaNoWriMo" was an American Tradition, the thought occurred to me in grade ten, which I did at a very boring school. Why not fill in some of the dead time in November by writing a full-length young adult novel? 

I called it Slowly Goes November. I don't remember just when I burned it--grade eleven, likely. I knew people believed all teenagers could possibly write would be autobiography, and what I'd written was anything but autobiography. I did weave in a few tidbits from the real world I saw, a kitten, as I recall, and the way an older person used a teenager's given name as a swearword substitute under stress. I made the character's first-person writing voice a conscious imitation of the voice of the teen drama queen in Katie Letcher Lyle's I Will Go Barefoot All Summer for You. Other than that, the story basically reminded my best friend, to whom I was writing regularly and who was just starting to date the man she later married, how many other school friends had been "in love" for a week or two and then fallen out of "love" again. I remember deliberately giving my main character my worst friend's given name, putting her in the classes neither my best friend nor I took, giving her food preferences that were opposite to mine. She liked grapefruit and hated pineapple. So then I didn't want anyone thinking that I preferred grapefruit to pineapple, or was going to take drama class and kiss a boy (described the way my best friend described her boyfriend) in the wings. So I burned the manuscript.

In a way it's a pity that today's word processors save so much paper. A lot of NaNoWriMo manuscripts would be of some use in this world if they were typed on paper that was used to light wintertime fires...

Earlier this week, reading back through an e-friend's blog archive, I came to the point where she started doing daily writing challenges. For years I'd been thinking that this was just a nice person who had more talent for finding pictures and music to decorate her blog than she had for actually writing it. Wrong. She confessed, in a post I had't read before, "I limit the time I spend on these 'poems' to five minutes. That is the only way I can post one a day." That explained a lot.

When people just apply the seat of the writer to the seat at the desk until X number of words or pages are produced, they get something the size of the content they want, all right. And if they then lock it in a drawer for a few months, and reread it, some of it will see that they have wrought the first draft of a novel or a poetry collection. Others, well, if they have modern toilets that need a balance of solids and liquids, they have a lot of good dry material to put down them. (Computer storage? Don't even think about it if you want first-draft privacy. People will be able to see what you store "in the cloud.")

Anne Lamott, Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg and other friends-of-writers use a phrase to describe first drafts. Adhering to the terms of our contract, this web site will translate that phrase as "Rubbishy First Drafts." 

If you're going to write them you must accept in advance that they will be, well, rubbishy.   

When I think about different levels of violation of privacy, I realize that I don't really care who sees me in the shower any more. It's not as if the body were nineteen years old any more, or likely to pass for it again in this lifetime. Older people usually cover our skin pretty thoroughly but that's in order to spare the eyes of the public rather than to protect any sense of pudor we may unrealistically have preserved after forty or fifty years of medical examinations, at least, and in many cases surgeries and childbirths. But I would feel violated if anyone were looking at my first drafts.

Nevertheless, when writers just do those first drafts, accept their wretchedness, and keep revising them, who knows where they'll end. 

In 1998 when I met the writer known as Zahara Heckscher, she was living in a very small furnished room--she'd lived in Zambia and made a commitment to share her money with her friends there--with a large closet overflowing with scraps of paper, letters, forms, brochures, and cassette tapes. She had a desktop computer and the Original Toshiba Satellite laptop and about a dozen .doc files, divided among them, that consisted of vague rambling low-content prose...a painful and pathetic sight to see. She and Joe Collins had spent a year or two gathering this, to put it kindly, mess. When I joined the team, they were just beginning to convert the mess to a real nonfiction book. 

In 2001 three primary authors, each with two or three main assistants, and a few hundred contributors had indeed turned the mess into a full-sized book, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. It was printed--as cheaply as possible, by the authors' request, so it was easy for students to read and carry around. It was a solid book that met a need. "It'll move onto the Internet as the Internet grows," the authors thought, but it went into reprints before the Internet grew to that stage. 

Writing challenge novels and poetry collections are usually closer to forming a book than that collection of data was, three short years before it formed a big serious reference book. 

So, if you have a month with enough free time that you can take the challenge, go for it. Write a rubbishy first draft of a novel or poetry collection. Hide it somewhere for a few months. Dig it out, read it, and improve it. Eventually it may be a good book. 

I'm not ready to commit, today, to writing a novel this month. I am no longer in high school, and for me even November no longer goes slowly, with endless half-hours of time spent practicing the highly dubious life skill of sitting still and watching the rain fall. Any novel writing I do has to fit in between writing book reviews and ghostwriting e-books and writing my own first Amazon e-book and I-would-like-to-get-in-some-time-outdoors-this-month. I've not spent enough time outdoors while trying to catch up with things in cyberspace. I don't mind looking (vaguely) like Yvonne DeCarlo but looking like Lily Munster, without the layers of makeup DeCarlo used, isn't even funny.

I'm not making any commitments not to write a novel this month, either. In November much depends on the weather--alluring sunshine, snowstorms, power outages, Wi-Fi tower collapses...

If I ever do rewrite my tenth grade November novel, it will reflect the reality: My best friend in high school took her teen romance slowly and sensibly, until time had shown that it was worth taking seriously. Last I heard, they were still married. 

If I do write it, I promise to spare other people any glimpses of the first draft. The nature of drafts is to blow about in a way that makes people shudder. Usually the third or fourth draft is bearable, fit to show a small select group of Beta Readers. 

Allowing at least six months for NaNoWriMo novel gestation, I'm willing to read other people's novels and show them mine. 

Book Review: The Burning Hills

Title: The Burning Hills

Author: Louis L’Amour

Publisher: Bantam

Date: 1965

ISBN: 0-553-28210-7

Length: 150 pages

Quote: “He had killed a man in Tascosa who called him a liar and he killed four Indians hw trapped him in a buffalo wallow…And a gun-slinger had died of bad judgment on the Ruidoso. But Trace Jordan was a quiet man.”

The man who called Trace a liar was riding a horse that had belonged to Trace’s murdered partner. This made Trace impatient, and disrespectful of the other man’s age and social status. Though killing anyone who accused you of acting dishonorably was not (yet) punished as murder in the West, the older man’s friends and relatives drove Trace into the desert along the Mexican border. There he proved his ability to survive extreme weather, picked off his enemies by ones, and even mustered the energy to persuade a Mexican-American woman that he was not a bigot like the inferior-grade White people she knew, but the Hero of a Western Paperback Novel, for the beautiful Maria Cristina would settle for nothing less…

It was comedy, and much of the time the joke was on the boys and men who paid for the books or for seats at the movies. Louis L’Amour wrote with more respect for the boys who collected his books than many of his colleagues showed. His books stayed in print, were reprinted many times; my copy of The Burning Hills is a 1992 reprint and thus lacks the price of less than a dollar, stamped on the spine of the book, that identified his first editions. Trace Jordan’s success may be improbable but stories as unlikely was his were at least printed as facts in nineteenth century newspapers.

 

Butterfly of the Week: Caucasian Festoon

As children searching our gardens and orchard for nuisance insects, my brother and I complained that the moth and butterfly books in the library were too British. "Aren't they the same?" Mother was surprised, because the books tended to fall open to the few pages that described the few species that are common to both countries. But although many British and European butterflies have American "cousin" species, similar in looks and ecological niches, most butterflies are found in one country or the other, not both. We wanted to read about the ones we saw!

This web site's commitment to provide information about butterflies at all stages of their lives grew out of that early disappointment. However, the Internet is global. This web site is read around the world and will consider butterflies found around the world.

So, this week, beginning with the Swallowtails, we consider the line-jumping genus Allancastria. The most efficient way to look up butterflies is by their Latin names but several Swallowtail species have been given different names as scientists learned more about them. Allancastria caucasica is now at the front of the list of Swallowtail species in alphabetical order. It used to be called Zerynthia caucasica, and be close to the end. 

For Swallowtail butterflies they are small. This little one was photographed in Georgia,

It's not always even been known as caucasica, **the Caucasian, although the Caucasus Mountains are where it lives. A. caucasica is one of the species in which individual size and color can vary widely, causing individuals to have been first described as different species, though the variations are produced by environmental influences like temperature. Generally in butterfly species that vary widely, individuals exposed to colder temperatures are smaller and paler than those exposed to warmer temperatures.  Older European books give some varieties of A. caucasica different species names like fkatshukovi, cachetica,, and cerysii (Thais cerysii), and Russian sources call this species Kafkaz or Kavkas, which reflects the way they pronounce "Caucasus." 

All butterflies (and moths and caterpillars) have some hair, but butterflies usually look smooth. Not A. caucasica. Its body can appear furry, especially when backlighted.

The scallops on the wing edges can fill in with white, or form a serrated edge.

Males are smaller than females. It's hard to believe that the structure of his wings caused scientists to classify this little guy in the same general category with the big Birdwing butterflies--but they do. 

Though not part of the United States' "Save the Butterflies" campaign, the Babochki kavkaza (Caucasian Butterflies) are threatened by habitat loss just as so many of our butterflies are. Their host plant is a vine called birthwort, in the Aristolochia genus along with our pipevine. The vine grows best in hardwood forests. Females are usually found near the host plant; males prefer to hang out near the sunny cleared edges of the forests. 

No source provides photos of the eggs. Caterpillars are grayish, with bumps and bristles rather than spots; some are pale gray, some are dark.

Pupae are drab and easily overlooked on the forest floor. 

Adult butterflies emerge as early as April and fly until June. Their average adult lifespan has been estimated as low as twelve days, partly because cold snaps put them into hibernation mode and birds can then find and eat them. They seem to be pollinators more than composters

Never very common or well documented, this species' population seems to be declining. It is classified as endangered in Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey.