Status Update: Not Blocked, Just Scheduling...

So what happened to Friday's post, which did not go live on Saturday evening? Well, it was the bonus book review. Two other writing tasks took priority. 

1. I gave another blog the butterfly post I'd written for this week, so I had to finish the next post about the next butterfly. And it's a spectacular butterfly, one loved as passionately as North Americans love our Monarchs, for most of the same reasons. 

All the swallowtail butterflies are great gorgeous things--and the tropical birdwing family, whose place on an alphabetical list of swallowtail species means we'll get to them later this year, are the biggest and showiest of all. (A photo I did not gank, but Google can find it for you, shows this week's big rose swallowtail pinned in a display case next to a birdwing swallowtail. The birdwing is at least twice the size of the rose.) The first butterflies I noticed, as a child, were a couple of Tiger Swallowtails. They were one of the odd couples, yellow male, black female. I named them Spot and Stripe, and then called the next few butterflies I saw "Spot's Friend and Stripe's Friend." I was five years old. But I don't remember being disappointed that Spot and Stripe also had smaller friends, or maybe pets, the Spring Azures. Small and common though they are, the blue butterflies are interesting and ecologically valuable too. So are the copper, sulfur, and brown families. We'll not get to them this year but that's because of the hoary tradition of discussing the swallowtails first in butterfly books, not because the smaller butterflies aren't interesting. In fact some of the small ones have the most unusual stories.

And butterflies actually help farmers control "weeds"! They don't keep weeds from surviving and spreading into the garden, because they're not meant to destroy their own food supply. Farmers still have to remove weeds from fields...and while previous generations tried to do that by poisoning the fields, modern technology offers much healthier ways. Apart from our own health, yet another reason why farmers need to be making the move away from "pesticide" sprays is that nearly all butterflies eat weeds, and most pollinate flowers or even food crops. We think of butterflies mostly as pretty little decorations in this world. That's a mistake. We actually need them.

2. And I wanted to write a long, thoughtful review of a book I previewed on Goodreads, Netgalley, and Librarything last winter, which is due to hit the bookstores this Tuesday. That book was worth a long post as well. It's Tim Tebow's inspirational book for unusually mature, thoughtful, serious kids and for young adults. He wrote the book to be accessible to ten-year-old football fans but don't be surprised if they leave it on the shelf until they're in college. It is worth the attention of readers who are in, or have come out of, college.

It's also jolly high time for reviews of some other books whose authors and/or publishers have sent me review copies, and I'm delighted to report that I finished a long project last week and should be doing more reading this week, though the new book reviews won't appear here all at once. For them, too, quick short reviews will appear on Good Reads and Library Thing (more ways of typing for the search engines by all means!) right away. Longer reviews will appear here in due course. 

When I read a preview copy well before publication date I like to ask the author, publisher, or agent whether they want the full-length review right away or when the book becomes available to the public. Some opt for the review in advance with further mention of the book when it's published, some for the review on the official date of publication. Tebow wanted the review on Tuesday so that's when you'll see it. 

So today...

 

So writing those two posts took up the night, kept the light on and shadows on the windows...which left the Professional Bad Neighbor, who was back on his feet...concentrating his attention, I fear, on a relative's unoccupied house. \

That house needs to be refurbished and occupied by some relatives who are aware of how much we need our native plants and butterflies and birds and so on, and of what's been happening to our whole neighborhood and why. They need to know that there's room for questions about what went wrong with those well-kept bees, and even with some possible contributory factors to the mysterious disease that caused the beekeeper to die so young. That house of his that's "gone down" so fast lately, next door to the one where they congregated yesterday? I didn't know what was going on at his house at the time, because I didn't talk to him much and because the Professional Bad Neighbor used to be as smart and perceptive as any of us. But I know enough now to know that youall may well ask those questions of that mutual distant cousin of all of ours.

Do not sell any real estate to him.

Do not sell any real estate to a person you trust not to sell it to  him, either. Never doubt that, if you were to sell land to someone outside the family who was young and healthy and seemed unlikely to have emergency medical bills, some sort of medical emergency in that family would be arranged. And it would probably look like an accident--like something a child or an animal must have done. The Bad Neighbor may have been able to tell himself that most of his evildoing has been mere pranks that led to "accidents." That is probably the only way he's survived the loss of parents, siblings, wife, and child, with two of the funerals in one week. But he has to know that it's added up to real evil, and he doesn't seem to be stopping, slowing down, or repenting of it in any way.

It would be better not to talk to this man at all. Others have committed more vile crimes, but it has to take our special genes to commit such sneaky ones. This wretched relative of ours sneaked past my father, and I'm not aware that anyone else ever managed that. He's not sneaking past me any more, but he was, for a long time. For years I was almost able to believe that our resident snake, Gulegi, might have been doing the damage to the roof. Since we'd acquired the other places for the older and younger generations of the family to be when the Cat Sanctuary didn't feel quite like paradise, I was the only human who knew the full extent of damage to the roof. Except for the one who did the damage. And I heard him describe the damage, about a year ago. I expect that this summer he'll find a laborer who is completely deaf and be able to use some sort of sign language, but I heard him boasting about the damage to my roof, loud enough for old wossname the driver to share the "joke." (I would guess that his "improvements" to that field adjacent to my property are done, although the field certainly has not been improved. I would expect that he's now motivated to concentrate on fields adjacent to yourall's properties, and to the spring.)

I hope nobody who came to the just-because-it's-springtime gathering yesterday actually drank the spring water, which used to be so wholesome and palatable. There are a lot of chemicals that humans don't taste, that affect human digestion. And the Professional Bad Neighbor was back at home last week, on his feet and in the neighborhood on Friday. Coronavirus can do only so much good in this world.

I'm watching, neighbors and relatives all. Whatever you may have heard, no pranks have been perpetrated by any relative of yours who owns a house in the neighborhood. The father and son, and the siblings, may lay their grievances to rest, at least so far as the property damage is concerned. A few small things may in fact have been done by animals--I did catch a deer putting its feet in buckets set out under gutter spouts, and Rackety Coon was to blame for some losses of kittens. There was never any evidence that it came close to a house but there was, for a few years, a bear. But most of the damage has been done by a man. It was done by a man whose sight, hearing, agility, mechanical skills, ability to plan, ability to move quickly and quietly, and ability to be alert and do all these things by moonlight at three o'clock in the morning, were all extraordinary. This man, whose outline I've seen more than once and whose footprints I've found, is of "average" size, a little smaller than most of our generation, about 5'10", about 150 pounds, and he wears a man's size 8 or 9 boot of a style favored by older men, not the "athletic" shoes favored by the young. He is much smaller than the Young Grouch, as much bigger than I, and he's outlived several other people you may have heard accused. The truck he favors for sneaking around at night is a new one with a smooth-running engine that can be driven very slowly, by moonlight, without headlights. 

Come out at night and watch from your own property for yourselves, and those of you who can still be awake all night, and can see by moonlight, will see the same thing I've been seeing. The most dangerous animal in the woods is a man, and you all know his name. For a human name it sounds similar to "Rackety Coon." 

I don't know for certain that what broke into the basement was not a bear. I do know that, when I went up to approach those kittens, I was motivated to do nothing that would scare feral cats, like reaching out to touch the wall. I know that I didn't see bear tracks, or any other evidence of bear, nor have I seen such since the last bear was hauled away dead. I saw human tracks that might have belonged to someone who had a right to be there, or to someone who had none. I know that what was done to the spring box had to have been done by a human; whether the owner did it intentionally for repairs, or it was a malicious prank, I couldn't tell. And I don't know what the father and son may have said to each other, but the shed roof and the springhouse that are visible from my property were damaged when the Professional Bad Neighbor was in the neighborhood, sneaking away from my property across yours as he so often did.

Watch, therefore, neighbors and relatives. Look for correlations between mean pranks, especially "pesticide" spraying (especially on your property, where you know better than to spray poisons), ugly remarks made about other home owners in the neighborhood, and the remissions this Professional Bad Neighbor may have from his "aging" and his "Long COVID." 

He deserves a long, long case of COVID. Not without the kind of tissue damage Grandma Bonnie Peters survived, the kind of pain his "road improvement" brainwave caused our old Neighbor Gilbert, the kind of bewilderment and vain hope and protracted misery the beekeeper died of, the kind of grief his glyphosate poisoning has caused me, and if there's any justice in this world God will see to it that he knows what my Jenny Wren felt when that appalling mass of eggshell ripped her apart, as well. The reason why we don't take revenge on people like that with our own hands is that they need and deserve so much more suffering than we could possibly give them.

But we can see to it that this Bad Neighbor is the most shunned man in Virginia...and that we should be doing now. All it takes is a little righteous responsibility for your own houses and land, and concern for the safety of a poor little widow. Come out at night, bring your highest-tech gadgets--he'll probably try to operate without his, but he's too "old" to do that as well as he used to do--and let's get on with it. If there is any hope of saving whatever this wretched man has in the way of a soul, he needs to make a public confession, signing over every acre he owns to the people he has done wrong (at least the ones who are still alive). If he has a soul that can be saved, he will agree that he has no business ever again being able to see, much less drink from, a mountain spring.

Morgan Griffith's Two-Piece Newsletter

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

Update on Two Issues

Several federal issues I am passionate about have been in the news lately.

First, in regards to the safety of unaccompanied minors who have crossed the border. Second, is the debate over whether COVID-19 originated from a bat or from a lab incident.

On the first matter, I visited Fort Bliss, Texas, in May of 2021. Part of my trip included visiting the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facility there. ORR is the agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) tasked with placing unaccompanied minors with a sponsor in the United States.

During my visit, I asked questions using my perspective as a lawyer who used to do custody cases and it became clear that ORR was not doing proper background checks on these sponsors. I also determined there was not significant collaboration with law enforcement when vetting sponsors and the “public records check” they were using was a type of widely available internet search engine. Unacceptable!

When HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra came before the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in April 2022, I again expressed my concern over ORR’s vetting process. As I said to the Secretary, if this was a typical custody case involving American citizens, someone would be in trouble for this level of disregard for the child’s safety. Either the attorneys, the department of social services, or the judge would be in hot water for not requiring a more complete background and home check.

Secretary Becerra disagreed with my characterization of ORR’s vetting process.

Notwithstanding the Secretary’s opinion, a September 2022 Inspector General study related to the operation at Fort Bliss solidified my concerns. They too raised issues of negligence.

At the E&C Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations field hearing I conducted in McAllen, Texas, on February 8^th, I once again raised these issues.

Further, on February 25th, the New York Times published their investigation into a series of troubling examples of exploitation of unaccompanied minors.

It included many stories of middle and high schoolers placed with sponsors looking to profit from their labor, forced to work long hours in poor and dangerous conditions.

The findings of the New York Times investigation is evidence of the results from ORR’s negligent vetting process. This is what I feared when I first raised my concerns.

Unfortunately, until we slow or stop the flow of illegal unaccompanied minors, their exploitation will continue to be an issue.

It is critical we provide oversight to ensure the safety of children for which, rightly or wrongly, we have accepted responsibly.

As Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee on E&C, I will be pushing Secretary Becerra for more information and hope to have additional hearings on this subject.

The second matter is COVID-19 origins.

Since the onset of the pandemic and the search for its origins, I’ve stated that we cannot rule out a lab incident. As time passed, in late 2020 or early 2021 I came to the conclusion there is substantial circumstantial evidence favoring a lab source.

In early February 2023, I held a hearing examining the federal response to COVID-19. National Institute of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak testified during the hearing that the coronavirus studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to that of COVID-19 and therefore, could not have been the source of the pandemic.

But how could they know? As I pointed out in the hearing, the NIH has years of missing coronavirus data from their grantee EcoHealth Alliance and EcoHealth’s sub-award grantee, the Wuhan Institute.

While standing with the minority opinion for years that a lab incident was the likely culprit, a few days prior to writing this column, multiple outlets reported the U.S. Energy Department had determined that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak. This follows a May 2020 report by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that a lab incident hypothesis was plausible and should be investigated further.

While we are still waiting on the declassification of Energy’s reports, news reports cite new intelligence and analysis led the Department to switch their position from undecided to a lab incident.

Energy is now the second government agency, along with the FBI, to adopt this theory.

Over the next two years, I will do everything I can to get to the truth on COVID-19.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes taken on the floor.

"

 

Book Review: Cool It or Lose It

Title: Cool It or Lose It

Author: Dale Evans Rogers

Publisher: Revell

Date: 1972

ISBN: 0-8007-0551-3

Length: 96 pages

Quote: “All right—if you can buy this—let’s rap. But let’s make it an intelligent rap. Let’s keep it cool, lest we lose everything.”

What is so quaint as last year’s slang? Around 1970, when many churches were desperately bidding for the interest of hippies, to rap meant to discuss, debate, express opinions. Dale Evans Rogers guessed that this use of “rap” was derived from “rapport.” So here was America’s favorite grandmother, “rapping” with student groups across the United States, completely unaware that by the time this book reached the public libraries kids were going to be sharing, levelling, shooting the breeze, while “rap” returned to meaning, basically, “talking in a fast emphatic aggressive way that sounds like rapping on a door,” like an officer or judge reading a list of criminal charges (the rap sheet) or a musician chanting more than singing fast-paced, often protest-type words against a rhythmic musical background.

At this point in time I was on a mailing list for “rap sheets,” like Sunday School lessons by correspondence course, and kids already understood “rap sheet” to mean a list of criminal charges. But reasonably cool kids empathized with the clueless older generation, recognized their good intentions, and met them halfway.

That was apparently the reception Dale Evans and Roy Rogers got at most schools, though in one chapter of this book Evans describes one of her less courteous encounters with a student interviewer who started out with a long harangue about how she didn’t agree with any of Evans’ views or admire anything the retired actress had stood for. In fact, as Evans had already said in this book, she could relate to rebellious young people, because she’d been one, but there she stood to testify that most of the genuinely rebellious things young people had done, and were doing, had been and were still bad ideas.

Which makes this book relevant today. I don’t know whether Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her fans are capable of understanding archaic slang, and doubt they’d sit still long enough to read 96 smallish pages of largish print. You might have to summarize key ideas into a modern-style rap and use the book to beat time while holding them over your knee. But they soooo need these thoughts.

Each of the fourteen short chapters in this book would take about ten minutes to read to an audience, allowing time for a small group to discuss and debate, and some of the chapters are specifically written to invite audience responses. At schools with the now traditional system of three four-month “semesters,” that makes this book perfectly formatted for use in weekly chapel talks.

Chapter one is a general self-introduction in which Evans recalled her career just in case any kids had grown up in TV-free zones and didn’t remember (don’t laugh, my town was a TV-free zone); affirms her age, jokes about the then-current use of the word “Establishment,” and states that “GOD IS THE ESTABLISHMENT—for God is unchanging.”

Chapter two expounds further on the title. Concerned about the level of anti-U.S.-government feeling in the United States in 1972, church types were starting to remind the war protest types that in the totalitarian countries these protesters claimed to admire they might be shot for treason for some of their “demonstrations.” There are still countries where firing squads would be mustered to deal with some of the “protest” activities observed in recent Antifa, BLM, and election-doubting demonstrations.The same troublemakers make trouble at demonstrations for all sides, and though I have reservations about the firing squads I think a few years on a chain gang might do them good.

Chapter three further develops this theme. Nearly all of the demonstrations in 1972 were leftist, though Evans recalls one that started out with a celebration after a football game; at least back then the troublemakers weren’t misrepresenting both political parties impartially because right-wingers weren’t demonstrating—much. However, protests were often cast as a youth thing, and Evans called her young audiences’ attention to the age of the troublemakers, “hardened professionals who will never see thirty again…men who would destroy our national defense system as a first step toward abolishing the American government.” “They are deceiving you into destroying the government,” or trying to, “and when you lose, they’ll skedaddle for Algiers and leave you holding the bag.” Evans saw more radical change, at least for the short term, taking place where young people joined “the Jesus Movement.”

In chapter four, Evans described her own encounter with “Jesus Freaks” and explained why the established churches mostly refused to denounce this…It was a grassroots movement that formed around a well documented, though not terribly harmful, personality cult. At the song and study service Evans attended, she didn’t observe the more controversial efforts of hippies to “witness” to one another by sleeping around and sharing drugs. She just felt that churches could stand to incorporate more of this type of service into their programs, to attract students who liked folk-gospel music. Most did. Yes, in 1972 it was controversial.

By 1982, the songs Evans specifically mentions liking and singing in 1972 (in chapter five) were accepted Sunday School classics. New songs of every kind are composed in every year. Some are bad; some are good. I remember, and still occasionally sing at least part of, a 1970s gospel song called “He Sees It All” as an example of the worst of the folk-gospel genre, a dragging, droning, dissonant downer. But Evans’ own record sales were telling her that actually many adults liked the good folk-gospel songs, though a few churchgoers were still trying to claim that they weren’t formal enough to express reverence, that “the banjo has never been baptized.”

In chapter six she discusses what it means to say that Jesus was a revolutionary.

In chapter seven she discusses “soul pollution” (sex, drugs, and violence). I think the chapter would have been much stronger if Evans had been able to support the supposed “youth” position on air and water pollution. In 1972 my parents were well part thirty, Dad was past forty, Herbert W. Armstrong was a grandfather, and they were the ones teaching me about pollution. Because I’d learned to read more precociously than I’d learned to understand, and my brother was obviously at least as clever as I was, Dad was always pressing books and articles upon us, often things that were over the heads of his grown-up acquaintances. In 1972 I remember an Armstrong article on crop rotation as one of the ecological articles I did understand. But I did not, could not, think of it as a youth thing when the information was coming from older people.) This was, however, the decade when Dixy Lee Ray, then one of America’s most influential women politicians, wrote a book full of anti-Green misinformation and, just because Governor Ray was a Republican, quite a few Republicans kept repeating her mistakes on into the present century. Rush Limbaugh’s anti-Green rants, for example, quoted Ray’s errors as facts. Evans stayed out of that whole dispute. As an actress she hadn’t studied enough science to care to challenge many of her friends and fellow believers. Pity.

In chapter eight she talks about discipline, mentioning that one of her children once felt that a nanny didn’t like him because she didn’t “holler at” him. More than “hollering,” her target was the “affluenza” of the mid-twentieth century. While British baby-boomers grew up in hard times and became known as the generation most likely to bore the young with stories of “the good old days when times were bad,” American baby-boomers grew up in an economic boom. Everyone had been told to “buy, buy, buy” because “buy days mean pay days.” Children, especially, were seen—by one advertiser who talked to author Vance Packard—as “happy little dollar signs” for whom parents were exhorted to buy all the luxuries the parents hadn’t had. Evans’ description of the kind of situations that resulted, even in movie stars’ homes, was funny, and sad, and right on. (Believe it or not…in 1972 I could usually think of things I wanted to have, or earn more pocket money to buy, but by and large I was on her side. At least I thought some kids I knew ought at least to have packed up their surplus trinkets and handed them down, or sold them, instead of just breaking them, leaving them out in the rain, and throwing them away. Well, some toys manufactured in the mid-twentieth century might have been junky enough to deserve to be broken or thrown away. I am talking about bicycles here. Schwinn bicycles. I was a poor relation and had to take care of my bike. I knew kids who left Schwinn bicycles lying on the ground.)

In chapter nine Evans discusses the epidemic of emotional problems that were blamed on working mothers not spending enough time with children. 

In theory we as a nation agreed to accept as a fact that children don’t need to spend all or most of every day at home with a full-time parent, that “early childhood education” can substitute for parental attention to toddlers all day because toddlers can accept “early childhood teachers” as “secondary parent-figures.” In practice…I dunno, the epidemic of emotional problems has gone on and on and got worse and worse. 

Dale Evans and Roy Rogers tried being “working parents” who left children with nannies first, and then being full-time parents later. They were in a position to know what a difference it made. 

Obviously women weren’t satisfied with the idea that having a baby, or even being willing to consider having a baby, doomed them to a lifetime of domestic drudgery. Being a full-time parent was never meant to last a lifetime. Five or even ten short years, and away the children go! See how they run! We as a culture needed to focus more attention on the idea of recognizing women as qualified either to pick up their careers where they left off, or to be promoted, after five or ten years of full-time motherhood, along with the equally important idea of recognizing veterans as qualified to pick up their careers or be promoted after two or seven years of military service. Either experience takes a young person off the job, but when it’s over it leaves the person with additional skills and life lessons, so it should be seen as an asset. 

But babies do vociferously prefer that their “primary parent-figure” be equipped for lactation, actively lactating if possible. Toddlers do demand gender identities, even if they don’t conform to every detail of a gender stereotype until someone has told them about it. Babies scream for Mama, and toddlers need their same-sex parents, and there’s no doing anything about it. Equality of opportunities to climb the corporate ladder is the sort of thing children understand when they’re ready for school, around age ten or twelve. I think more feminists (and Evans was a feminist, make no mistake) need to affirm the choice of full-time motherhood…and preparing early for a career that has room for it. 

Yes, throughout most of history, a lot of people not only didn’t have full-time parents, but didn’t have a chance to know their parents; it’s possible for a baby to be born after both of its parents are dead, and historically what was done about this was that people sent for the next of kin and named the baby Posthumus. They had emotional problems then, too. They just didn’t have our names for them. A man like Chief Benge could act out his feelings, about being rejected by his father’s ethnic group, by declaring his own private war on that ethnic group and killing dozens of them, and though his contemporaries had plenty of names for this—“evil” and “cruel” and “the man who killed him is a public benefactor”—those names did not refer to the obvious emotional problems. Maybe society was better off not seeing such emotional problems as obvious. In any case, we have evolved to the point where we are, and at this point in time I’d like to see more feminists dare to affirm full-time parenting.

In chapter ten she mentions drugs, including alcohol, as “hang-ups” (which, as Tom Wolfe later summarized, might prevent “hooking up”). Another word usage the young may want to note is that, for Evans and her audiences, “straight” could mean primarily sober. “Straight” took over for what had been the good slang meanings of “square,” after “square” came to mean unhip. It meant honest, forthright, reliable, and among people who used drugs or knew people who did, it meant more specifically that someone was able to be those things because person didn’t use drugs. (In the 1980s I remember raising some eyebrows…the “straightest” person I knew, in the slang with which I grew up, happened to be bisexual. I still prefer the older meaning for “straight” but I suppose, by now, it’s another word that’s past reclaiming in any but its dictionary sense.)

In chapter eleven Evans states that “Jesus can bridge the generation gap,” or that Christians of different ages can work together with due respect for one another. In 1972 this was controversial. Not that, in 1972, many of my generation hadn’t noticed that some older people did indeed Get It. If not blessed with parents or grandparents in that category, there were always our favorite rock stars, nearly all of whom belonged to the Greatest Generation. But, in 1972, at most schools it probably took a fair bit of courage for a teenager to stand up and say that. The fact that we’ve become older and wiser now in no way implies that we were born with a single lick of sense.

In chapter twelve, Evans reports the snappy answers she gave the hostile interviewer.

In chapter thirteen, she affirms that many older people wanted most of the same things most young people were claiming to want, and suggests that unity through spirituality would get more of those things than quarrelling about a Marxist revolution was likely to do.

In chapter fourteen, she invites the young to “drop in” (to church) rather than “drop out” (of school, the corrupt corporate economy, the capitalist system, life in general—in 1972 a lot of people were “dropping out” in a final way, often unintentionally, by experimenting with drugs). She mentions several of the reasons why people weren’t going to church in 1972. She does not happen to mention several reasons why people aren’t going to church today, but her time was limited and presumably, at most schools, the audience would raise the questions she’d overlooked.

I’ve given this outline because I think it’s relevant to the ideal audience for this book. You might buy it, and I’ll admit I bought it, as part of a collection; Dale Evans would probably have been a collectible author if she’d only ever written about her adopted children, but her having been a movie star first made all of her books ultra-collectible. There’s nothing wrong with buying books for a collection but I’d like to see a well-known lecturer update this book.

Status Update: End of a Week I Hope Never to Repeat

Let's just say that this week had lots of things I don't like in it: business meetings, one with a storekeeper who didn't want to display the beautiful new books I have for sale, and bad news about old friends, and sexual harassment (yes, seriously, at my age), and spending time trying to sell stuff and not succeeding, and chasing a phone-free acquaintance ten miles and not catching up with person, and being cutesipated by somebody else's probably illegitimate and certainly ill-brought-up child, and then to cap it all off, as I came home to crash at the end of the Friday, the Professional Bad Neighbor got up and drove past. A Professional Bad Neighbor is much improved by any kind of virus that keeps him at home.

I intended to post something else in addition to a book review today, here, as well as sharing a butterfly post with another blog...

https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-butterfly-post.html

...but, having formed a habit of sleeping in the afternoon due to staying up at night to watch for the Professional Bad Neighbor, I fell asleep. Now it's time to unplug for 24 hours. 

Today's post will appear tomorrow night. 

Book Review: La Escuela de Magia

Book Review: La Escuela de Magia y Otros Cuentos

Author: Michael Ende

ISBN: 978-8434847330

Illustrations: full-color surrealist drawings by

Apology: The translation and edition I had is older than the one Amazon sells. I have not made time to dig for accurate information. I dug up a book review I'd written a few years ago and not posted, and pasted it in, with an eye on the clock.

This has been the kind of week you might wish on your enemy, if you have a serious enemy. Another visit to the timeless truth: "When you're reading about earthquakes here and famines there, and confronting a major problem in your own life, and your browser decides to crash, the bigger bad things on your mind do not put the browser crashing into perspective. We don't process unpleasantnesses in perspective. We process them in a cumulative fashion, so that when we're dealing with major unpleasantness in a healthy, mature, left-brain, almost emotion-free way, the browser crashing is the sort of thing that makes us scream words that are banned by this web site's contract."

None of the unpleasantness is the book'.s fault, however. It's a cheerful funny book written for adults to enjoy sharing to children. The idea seems to be that, as with Gulliver's Travels or Pilgrim's Progress, the adult mind can ponder the serious ideas for which the silly stories are metaphors.

The author of The Neverending Story was one of Europe’s best known writers. Probably more of his work deserved to be translated into English. The only other book of Ende’s that I’ve found in a language I can read, in real life, is this collection of five short, whimsical stories that were obviously written for an older audience than the large type and color pictures suggest. Amazon shows more. You can always use the giftcard widget at the bottom of the page to send me books or giftcards.

These stories are not quite science fiction. They are speculative fiction, in which each story explores an idea. The title story, set in the mythical kingdom of Desideria, explores the “magical thinking” of New Age humanist psychology, where if your mind can conceive it and you can make yourself believe it, you can achieve it...so what happens when two students who want to visualize the same thing into being “see” different mental pictures? In another story, an explorer searching for the mythical country called Absurdistan meets the man everyone talks to but no one remembers, and then the man everyone remembers but no one is aware of having talked to, and one of them—if there are two of them—steals his wallet.

Another story is so realistic one suspects it must actually have happened, somewhere. After inadvertently having hurt a child’s feelings by mistaking her self-portrait for a picture of the Easter Bunny, a kind adult dares to suggest only painting more things into the picture...until the child adds dark curtains that blot out the whole picture.

The other two stories fit somewhere between these levels of realism and surrealism. To preserve suspense, all I’ll say about them is that one of them is narrated in such an offbeat yet deadpan way that it kept me guessing up to the last paragraph.

This is such a short, easy-to-read collection that readers whose native language isn’t Spanish shouldn’t even mind having to look up a word or two.

Book Review: Interweave Knits Winter 1997

Title: Interweave Knits, Winter 1997

Author: Interweave Knitting original staff

Publisher: Interweave Press

Date: 1997

ISBN: not applicable

Length: 88 pages

Illustrations: glossy full-color photos on every page

Quote: “[W]e offer some quick-knit projects that you can make in a few hours…[or]…more challenging double-knit pieces that will carry you through the long winter days ahead.”

And at least three patterns for women’s sweaters without that snug band of ribbing across the hips.

That was editor Marilyn Murphy, reminiscing about how her yarn store used to get seasonal floods of requests for help to finish projects by a special day, most often Christmas, making the store staff feel like “Santa’s little elves” and hosting all-night knitting bees. Though Interweave Knits was still growing into a major magazine for creative hand knitters, its for-us-by-us, baby-boomer-feminist vibe was strong. The few patterns chosen for this magazine were practical: last-minute projects for those who weren’t going to get that elaborate sweater finished by Christmas Eve, and potentially extremely warm (and complicated) double knitting.

And the cover jacket, daringly photographed as a close-up of a sweater rather than a face, definitely qualifies as a challenge because of all the jacquard inlaid colors and the elaborate shaping of that flattering V-pointed yoke and flaring, hip-skimming, skirtlike bottom section. I want to do it. I’ve not done it yet.

Then we come to the double-knitting section. Double knitting is a slipstitch technique worked with two yarns (contrasting colors are optional) to create, as you choose, either a double-thick reversible fabric, a tube of two separate layers of fabric, or two separate but identical pieces of fabric at one time, depending on how you start, stop, and twist the yarns along the way. I’ve used it to insert pockets and make scarves. If I’d wanted to take the time, this magazine is a complete tutorial that would have guided me from a two-layered hotpad (be sure to use all natural fibres, because synthetics will melt) through a two-layered baby blanket through a pair of double-thick mittens to, finally, a pair of elaborately shaped two-color sweaters, one with a matching hat. If you work two-colored double-knitting correctly the two sides will be photographic negatives of each other: one side will have white figures on a black background, and the other side will have black figures on a white background. One sweater has traditional “rose” motifs; one has reindeer.

Several of the knitters who contributed designs to Interweave Knitting in its first ten years were stars of the contemporary knitting universe. Marcia Lewandowski was not the only one who published books of original designs. Her mittens pattern in this magazine is by no means the most unusual (or challenging) pattern in Folk Mittens but its inclusion does give me a chance to mention that I’ve always been glad I bought copies of—well, the copy I kept actually has Folk Mitens on the spine. Copies, plural, either sold or given to friends long ago; my own copy is not for sale. It’ll take years to explore all the mitten-knitting ideas in Folk Mittens.

What makes me think a pattern magazine this old is still likely to interest women today is the fact that knitting, viewed properly as a way women empower themselves rather than a way they can be exploited by the fashion industry, does not really have fashion as most of us know it. Instead, a pattern that’s quirky and arty one year (the way that cover jacket was in 1997) is the fashion for another year. Since sweaters were originally men’s wear (and mostly underwear), all the classic, easy knitting designs naturally fit some women better than others, adapt to suit another subgroup in the group “women” better than others. Top-heavy women have no problem with the way the traditional sweater shape has a snug band across the wide part of the hip, or can be cropped to hug a narrow waistline. Bottom-heavy women are always interested in designs that skim vaguely off the hipline, whether those designs are seen as quirky or as trendy.

So, this magazine offers a selection The cover jacket is a long A-line; the Double Exposure Jacket in double knitting actually has a traditional shape with a color pattern that gives the illusion of widening toward the bottom, but once you’ve worked your way through the other double knitting patterns you’ll be ready to give it as much of an A-line as you want; and the “Ribbons and Snowberries” pullover, with those slimming vertical lines, can be cropped or lengthened as you like.

Though “Ribbons and Snowberries” looks more like a variation on Aran traditional patterns than on Scandinavian ones, it opens a section of patterns with a Scandinavian cultural influence. (Double knitting techniques may have been discovered elsewhere but they’re first mentioned in literature from Russia. Russian knitters used them to make both socks in a pair at the same time, thus ensuring a perfect match.) There’s a hat and pair of mittens in Danish entrelac, a pattern for matching jacket and pullover in Swedish “brocade” texture patterns, a family collection sweater worked in real Norwegian yarn from the very fanciest Norwegian pattern stitches, a sock pattern “modeled after a pair of socks I purchased…in Estonia,” and then we come back to Britain with a hat, scarf, and mittens in lace-and-cable patterns described as (recent) traditional ones worked on the Isle of Skye.

The last batch of quick-but-quirky patterns are frankly born in the U.S.A., and although they’re from the 1990s not the 1980s they continue the tradition of Witty Knitting. (However, in the 1980s, the main focus of knitting was sweaters.) Child-sized mittens are decorated with warm (and slow-drying) little bumps that suggest dinosaurs. Six variations on a basic hat pattern range from wacky-like-Dr.-Seuss-drawings to wacky-in-a-traditional-way. Then there’s a miniature hat and a miniature mitten, for laughs, with the warning that actually giving somebody one miniature mitten is an old traditional way of rejecting a suitor. (Does everyone remember the old song in which “She gave him the mitten, sure as you’re born, because that young man didn’t hoe corn”?)

All but one of the sweaters are worked in fairly thick yarn (widely available, quick to knit up) and the one worked in fine Norwegian wool has two colors on every row, which means that, though it’s not double knitting, it’ll be quite warm. Double knitting in thick yarn is snowproof; walking in it through falling snow, you can start to feel that it’s too warm. The stitch patterns used on these sweaters are too big to be easily adapted to hats, but they’d work very well on blankets or cushion covers.

Bloggers' Favorite Classes at School

The question at LongAndShortReviews this week was "What was your favorite subject in school, and why?"

You might guess we'd all say English. I wouldn't guess that. People who enjoy words and writing don't necessarily enjoy being stuck in English classes with people who hate those things. In grade four my teacher (the same Mr. Ed who taught every one of us all the arithmetic we'd ever need in life) detested the Language Arts so much he used to threaten grammar lessons as a punishment. Nobody ever rated his English classes among their favorites.

I did reading and writing for fun, at home. I read English language and literature books for fun. There was a year when school was closed for a month and I spent much of that month reading a college English book my teacher had left lying on a shelf. I would rather have had more of a selection but I liked the English textbook and was glad it was the "library book" I had at home that month.

At school my favorite subject was music. 

So what did other bloggers say? Supporting my theory that it depends on the teachers and the way the classes are organized...only two bloggers said English, unequivocally. Several said "English or..."--depending on the year in school.

One blogger had the option of counting "Yearbook" production work as a class, which sounds as if it would have been anybody's favorite.

Two novelists picked Drama. I always thought a drama group would be a good way to prepare to write fiction, but always wanted to take music classes instead of drama--most of us were allowed only one "fine art" a year.

Two bloggers picked Art.

Four bloggers picked History. One of them grew up to write historical fiction.

One blogger, who mentioned not liking any classes during the compulsory-pre-choice-public-school years, said college level Anthropology

Two bloggers picked Science. 

Meh. I have vivid memories of days when I enjoyed what we were doing in almost every class, and days when I was bored to the point of pain and hated school. As an adult, though, looking back, I find myself feeling more empathy for the poor souls who had to teach my classmates and me. The basic problem was the idea of education on an assembly-line plan. Each of these luckless people who had just wanted to go to college, because it was cool, and qualified for a scholarship that required them to teach in a remote rural school like ours, was plunked down in front of twenty-some units of childish rebellion, all of us trying to impress one another with how contemptuous of school, teachers, and lessons we could be. They were supposed to stand up and spray knowledge at us with a sort of fire hose technique, and three-quarters of it was supposed to sink in. What really sunk in was a deep hostility toward humankind that some of us never have outgrown. I do have to feel sorry for those teachers.

Book Review: Women's Circle Home Cooking October 1982

Title: Women’s Circle Home Cooking, October 1982

Editor: Barbara Hall Pedersen

Publisher: Tower Press

Date: 1982

ISBN: none

Length: 64 pages

Quote: “If you’re searching for perfection, you’re destined to suffer a lot of disappointments.”

The editorial is about pots and pans, the good and bad points of different materials. Still, as the first line of the first article in what was apparently a monthly magazine, this seems like a confession. There are several obvious errors in this magazine. One bread recipe begins with some milk, but does not indicate how much milk.

For cookbook collectors, this is a small magazine, glossy paper and color photos only on the cover, possibly inspired by the success of Workbasket. It contains very few ads, almost all recipes. Recipes seem to have been printed as readers mailed them in. There’s a nice period vibe with recipes for quiche, recipes that call for wheat germ, and (in October!) recipes that use up zucchini, but most of the recipes aren’t particularly trendy. Ingredients are still easy to find in stores.

Short review, short book. If you enjoy testing recipes you’ll enjoy this one.

Butterflly of the Week: Atrophaneura Daemonius (or Byasa, or Papilio)

Today's real post is about a ridiculously obscure butterfly in the Windmill group, found in China. 

For those who came in late, there is a large group of large black swallowtail butterflies, some nicknamed batwings and some nicknamed windmills, that flit around southern Asia. Ecologically they're somewhat helpful to humankind, but because they have black wings and some have vulture-like red heads, there's a tradition of giving them Halloween-themed names. Atrophaneura daemonius literally means "black-nerved-wings demon." The position of this web site is that that's harsh, even though the butterfly does seem to have proved itself devilishly difficult to find.

Well, when people call you names like that, don't you want to avoid them? If so, you should stand with Scott Adams, whose latest bid for attention has got people calling him everything but a child of God. I know what he said was ugly, but censorship is even uglier.

We should stay away from people who call us "devils" and say it's not okay to be us and otherwise express hate toward us, especially when that hate is based on things we can't help. It is not actually possible to spot those people by looking at them, but when the hate is genuinely based on perceived "race" rather than on things like being overtly "gay" or known to be poor, it is a little more likely to be expressed by Black Americans toward White ones than vice versa. And why is that? Probably because White Americans have felt that it was some sort of duty to put up with it, as if applauding Black people's hatespews today were some sort of reparation for slavery or some such idiotic idea.

Maya Angelou had some light to shed on the reasons why Black Americans have not been overwhelmed with love for those who applauded a play in which she and other characters expressed hateful ideas, but this post does not have time to go all the way back for those who came in all that late. If your great-great-great-great-grandfather owned slaves and you want to make reparations to them, why not write to them and ask...if your many-greats-grandfather never offered his ex-slaves jobs or wages, offering jobs or wages might be a place to start, if you can. This post is not about Black, Red, and White people. It is about black-red-and-white butterflies.

Little is known about the species most recently called Byasa daemonius. Some have called them a sub-species of alcinous; some have identified sub-species within the species. The link below is to an old document (printed in French) that describes the differences between daemonius and alcinous, noting that daemonius can have has a brownish or greenish-black color and may not have clearly visible red spots. The white patches on the inside edges of the male's hind wings are furry. Like some of the other Atrophaneura, the wings can look white in some lights, with only the "nerves" or veins picked out in black.

https://archive.org/details/deutscheentomolo81895ge/page/181/mode/1up?view=theater

Gao Chen has documented how the almost microscopic beadlets of texture on the bead-like eggs of this butterfly contain aristolochic acid and protect the eggs from ants. It's possible for the eggs to lack acid coating, in which case, as the photo at the bottom of the montage shows, ants eat them. 

The article is available in English: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Byasa-daemonius-a-eggs-dark-spheres-without-aristolochia-acids-AAs-in-the-ovary_fig2_281809543

Photos of living adults are hard to find. This picture was donated to inaturalist.org by someone who wrote per screen name in Chinese: 

Even typical wingspans are not available for this species, though the white-reflecting individual shown looks at least as big as our Tiger Swallowtails, probably bigger if the plant is similar to our mimosas. Only one photo illustrates this species at most web sites, if any illustration is given at all, and it's a sad, faded museum piece.

They're rare even in China and Tibet, and even if you go hiking in one of those countries and find one of these butterflies dead on the ground it should probably be illegal to collect their bodies.

Book Review: Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Title: Selected Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Author: Mary Wortley Montagu and Robert Halsband

Publisher: Penguin

Date: 1970

ISBN: 0-14-057026-8

Length: 301 pages plus index

Quote: “I don’t enjoin you to burn this letter, I know you will. ’Tis the first I ever writ to your sex and shall be the last.”

Rarely if ever has a resolution been so well broken. Lady Mary Pierrepont (daughter of the Earl of Kingston) defied her father to elope with Edward Wortley Montagu, to whom she “writ” the letter containing this famous falsehood. They travelled extensively together, and Lady Mary wrote vivid descriptions of their travels to everyone she knew, male and female.

I’ll admit that, much as I enjoy dipping into one of Lady Mary’s letters, I’m eager to part with the Penguin edition because of its cover. Penguin’s “trade” paperbacks include many fine books, but they are not well bound. The cover long ago detached itself from the book, and the cover drawing is probably accurate, though not particularly lifelike, and embarrassing in its frank ugliness. In any case, given a choice between a collection of anything “selected” by someone else and a complete collection, I’ll take the complete collection any day.

But the letters are fine examples of letter-writing as an art; most were written as thoughtfully as chapters in a book, so that, when printed in a book, they read very much like a book. We could all benefit from taking eighteenth century letter collections as role models.

In other ways Lady Mary was not much of a role model. After the drama of her elopement, she didn’t stay with Wortley Montagu after all. Observing local customs of adultery in the countries they visited, she quietly informed a few dozen of her best friends, including Wortley, all about how much she fancied a younger man, who was from Italy, and she thought she’d go to Italy for a few years and spend more time with him. She didn’t stay with the young Italian very long, but she did stay in Italy for more than twenty years. She was Europe’s first and best known promoter of vaccinations. She ate a high-fat, high-carb, low-fibre diet on which it was a wonder anyone survived, let alone a woman late in middle age who described herself as old. She was generous with praise of her friends’ good qualities, and equally generous with wisecracks about everything from their clothes to their personal secrets. She was vain, and spent a lot of her early-middle-age years expressing fear of being old. In short, like most writers, she was an imperfect mortal whose letters were fun to read.

Even in the eighteenth century most people’s letters are not much fun to read; they form the bases for the biographies of people who accomplished interesting things, but they’re too personal to have much meaning for anyone but the people to whom they were written. Lady Mary was of course capable of writing the lines of which ordinary letters are made, “My compliments to A, and blessing to B. I wrote to C. Have you received…?” but she had the unusual gifts, both of noticing and calling attention to things other than her and her reader’s selves—landscapes, people, fashions, books, philosophy—and of incorporating the personal details into letters in such a way that, three hundred years later, the personal passages in her letters make sense.