The First 27 Things Kay Smythe Got Wrong

Misogyny is not dead. Somebody called Kay Smythe, who claims to be a woman but I doubt it, is out there advising young women to prove that they want marriage and children by slacking on the job. After all, working and rearing children at the same time is only a "feminist myth that we can have it all." 

Er. Um. It's not so much that baby-boomer and younger women wanted to believe we can have "it all."  It's more that reality has shoved "it all" at us whether we wanted it or not. As Barbara Ehrenreich documented in The Hearts of Men, 1960s feminism was a reaction to some 1950s men's refusal to accept the financial responsibility other 1950s men wanted to claim as a male prerogative. Women who had the vote and property rights were generally buying into the myth that our reproductive capability was a disability, until men stopped believing it, first, and we discovered what a load of garbage it was. And anyway most of us have that reproductive capability for only half of our active adult lives!

This is a rebuttal to an argument too many "conservative" Christian women are starting to hear again. It is only a blog post. It wants numbers. Numbers cost extra. 

For what it's worth, I was working sixty hours a week and raking in the money during the same years (early twenties) when I was "fostering" my adoptive sister, recovering from mononucleosis, and growing to my full adult size. I also wrote several full-length novels I considered unpublishable and outlined an ambitious historical study I decided I was too young to write, during that time. I also commuted. I also had an occasional date, and sometimes I also slept. "Having it all" is actually a great way to use crazy late-adolescent energy. All I really had to give up was "hanging out," aimless social chatter. I had to accept that most men, even the attractive ones, weren't my beshert and most women, even the likable ones, were never going to be my close friends. No elaborate hair care sessions, no TV, no daily ritual of wailing about things I didn't really even want to change. (I wouldn't have had time for a blog, either, if blogs had been invented back then.) I could have all of the "it all" I wanted in my life, at twenty-five. 

So can other young women, if they're willing to step away from the sort of storge love they may feel toward people with whom what they do is, basically, waste time. In our early teens, our culture wastes a great deal of our time, and we bond with people sharing the boredom. When our schedules start to fill up with things that matter, those friendships that are all about "killing time" together have got to go. Our friends are the people with whom we share work. 

But work is also the source of hostile competition. Some of that comes from guys who would just love to lower the standards in the HEAL fields (health, education, administrative, and legal work) to the point where they might be seen as doing those jobs as well as women do. They are, I suspect, the source of the myth that "young women can't 'have it all,' so they'd better just have babies." 

The position of this web site is that nobody who is still paying rent and/or living in an apartment should even think about having babies. The whole planet needs overall negative human population growth. We obviously don't want to do that in the traditional way, by having wars to kill off the surplus males, nor do we want any "eugenic" schemes for selective homicide, so the way to reach the goal of an overall reduction of human population is for everyone to choose between "one child or none," ideally with a lot of people choosing none. Childbirth is not a source of pleasure. Women endure childbirth in order to have babies. Women do not have to give birth in order to have children, though. Adoption is an option for thsoe who've reached a position where they can afford to adopt. Adoption is a source of pleasure.

Beyond the header, I was interested enough to number the things that were just plain wrong in Kay Smythe's post. There were twenty-seven.

Misogynist Myth #1: "She'd need to choose between career and family if she ever found a husband."

Reality: Today's men do not want to support a completely dependent wife. They want wives who are earning as much as they are, or more. They want the Playboy lifestyle with financial backing from wives who can afford to support them if they lose their jobs. I've heard men talk about divorcing wives who wanted to spend even one year at home after giving birth.

Myth #2: "Boyfriends have left because she prioritizes work and herself over The Relationship."

Reality: "Boyfriends" leave. That is why they are "boyfriends" rather than fiances or husbands. They want a committed monogamous relationship that offers all the benefits of marriage except they get to walk away without a hassle. Women could avoid a lot of heartache by just accepting reality: When you eat, you're fuelling your body with calories, of which the ones that aren't burned off first will stay with the body in the form of fat; when you do what makes babies, during those peak-fertility years when the thought seems so fascinating, you'd better have a place and a plan to nurture a baby. There are other ways to show affection. When you don't want a baby, the pleasure of showing affection and not starting a baby is greater than the pleasure of starting a baby. 

Myth #3: "If your daughter resists manipulative advice to slack off at work and grab the first man who talks about 'feelings,' not even marriage, and cling to him as a drowning man clings to a straw, she's a difficult woman."

Reality: A woman who talks to someone who says things like that may have a deficient Inner Mamma Bear. (I have a sister who's had a difficult life despite life's having handed her every possible privilege. I may not feel that she and I have any common interests, now that our parents are dead and her children are grown up, but one of the rules for my generation was: Even if you pick on your younger siblings, nobody else has a right to pick on them.)

Myth #4: "Perhaps she's single and childless because of her personality." 

Reality: Young people have immature personalities. When they're not living in overcrowded conditions, they marry each other anyway. When any living thing is in overcrowded conditions, from plants and insects all the way to humans, nature's first defense is to reduce fertility. When a woman says she wants children but she's still single and baby-free at 35, there's a high probability these days that she she has PCOS--polycystic ovary syndrome--and won't give birth to a living baby if she tries. 

Myth #5: "And treatment of others...a woman who resists manipulation must be a horrible person!"

Reality: If old-at-heart people still trying to tell her that men still want a clinging vine around their rose-covered cottage door, and she's still talking to them, she is unusually patient for a young person. She might be excessively passive. Maybe she should consider karate.

Myth #6: "And/or her 'addiction to work' and Communist politics."

Reality: Dedication to work is good. Today's advocates of global dictatorship no longer call themselves Communists, nor do they claim to believe that totalitarian government can lead to a "communist paradise" (except, in Marx's fantasy, by generating war after war until the human population shrinks to Golden Age levels where all humans have to unite against the wolves). Real oldfashioned "Commie" chicks used to be addicted to welfare.

Myth #7: Women were misled by Gloria Steinem, who told Hillary Rodham Clinton that being at home, having children and a loving spouse, was a prison.

Reality: Women who took that claim seriously were reality-checking and had known people for whom it seemed true. Women who grew up knowing happy full-time mothers, or even women who were home with their children because of chronic illness but were able to make the best of it, felt sorry for Gloria Steinem. What makes "the home" a prison, as the dictators of countries that have "house arrest" know, is not being able to leave. The full-time mothers I knew could leave any time they wanted. In the case of my mother, for whom having her own business meant health and being at home all the time meant illness, the husband and children wished the woman they adored did want to go back to work. But we accepted that it wasn't happening.

Myth #8: Steinem was a "mentally deranged domestic terrorist."

Reality: If anybody was a mentally deranged domestic terrorist in the 1960s, apart from the various "revolutionary" cults of troublemakers, it was the "helpful" people who advised women to pop tranquillizers when they worried about losing the husbands on whom they were dependent. The "tranks" people popped in the 1950s  and 1960s didn't produce violent insanity, as today's antidepressants sometimes do, but they did produce the nonviolent, demented, twitching homeless population of the 1980s and 1990s.

Myth #9: "Have you tried explaining to her that if she died today, she'd be replaced by Friday and forgotten by Monday?"

Reality: It's true that those who use and recommend antidepressants feel that thinking about people in their own generation being mortal is unbearably depressing. But it's also true that single women report being healthier and happier, on average, than married women. This does not mean that all single women are healthy and happy and all married women are miserable. It does mean that celibacy is one of the best things a young woman can do for her own health.

Myth #10: Having a job is "wasting life, working to achieve the dreams and profit margins of her employer. It will literally mean nothing after one is retired or fired."

Reality: This is unfortunately true for too many young part-time workers who spend all their money on rent and depend on welfare to buy food. But for those who have the kind of "career jobs" that people take seriously, doing their jobs will mean having money in the bank when they're retired or fired. 

Myth #11: "No one wants to marry a difficult spinster."

Reality: These days, spinning thread is a respected artisanal skill. And if anything motivates today's young men to do the kind of pursuing that orients young women's hormonal feelings toward them, it's a woman who's never going to pursue them. It'd be interesting to read Kay Smythe's review of the movie Chasing Amy, which was made by young men and could afford not to be part of the traditional Hollywood myths about hormonal "love."

Myth #12: Young women who take their work (and finances) seriously "need a hefty dose of therapy and reality."

Reality: They know more about the reality in which they live than Kay Smythe and its audience do.

Myth #13: "Having it all" merely means "pleasing everyone instead of yourself."

Reality: Whatever life roles women play, being "feminine" has long been confused with "pleasing everyone instead of yourself." Women still have to discipline ourselves to carve out daily quiet time to reflect on, among other things, the personal boundaries we need to enforce.

Myth #14: It would be "therapeutic" for young working women to spend a weekend surrounded by women who urge them to quit work and have a baby before they're ready to rear it properly.

Reality: If there are groups of women who do this, my advice to those of The Nephews who are actually nieces would be to stay as far away from those women as they can get. They were probably born male. They probably still have male hormone reactions to unequivocally female bodies.

Myth #15: At 35, a woman is "almost out of time to have a baby."

Reality: Women's healthy, viable ova tend to be released first, so at 35 many women are "out of time to have a baby." Fortunately, one is never too old to adopt, though after age 60 adopting a younger adult "child" with "grandchildren" is a good idea.

Myth #16: "Of course she might...have kids via surrogate, carry on working, and your grandchildren will be raised by nannies."

Reality: How many jobs pay for that kind of thing? These days, even bankers are likely to be pushed into early retirement at 50, which is a good age to consider motherhood as a second career.

Myth #17: "Kids raised by nannies turn out weird and emotionally stunted."

Reality: People who think emotional adjustment to unusual situations (such as overcrowded living conditions, or the breakup of marriages that were contracted because somebody thought she needed to give birth, or acquaintance with creepy people like Kay Smythe) is "weird" are emotionally stunted. They should be kept away from anyone young enough not to recognize how dysfunctional they are.

Myth #18: "Maybe she wants the kids doing cocaine...incapable of loving anyone...caring more about...designer shoes...than being a good, normal, healthy, happy human being."

Reality: Statistically "normal" isn't very healthy or happy, these days. One reason may be that, given the balance between her salary and the cost of living in a modern city, a realistic description of a woman who wants to feather her nest before she starts a brood would be "Maybe she wants the children to have a decent home and education, rather than being 'nannied' by social workers."

Myth #19: "Or incapable of even making a dinner reservation for themselves, at the age of 24, because they always had someone who was paid to do everything for them."

Reality: That's only a concern for the children of billionnaires. It's caused by the security concerns that go with being rich and famous.

Myth #20: Work-focussed, disciplined, independent women need a sharp slap.

Reality: Kay Smythe should try substituting any other demographic group for "women" in this rant and see what happens. 

Myth #21: It's sad to watch women wasting their best years (not having babies).

Reality: It's sad to watch women trying to bring up babies they didn't want and couldn't afford after being abandoned by men who didn't want and couldn't afford those babies either. Many of these unfortunate children become wards of the state, which is why there is no need to worry about not being able to find children to adopt, once a woman is in a position to adopt them.

Myth #22: (Women remain baby-free) "because they were lied to by the feminist movement."

Reality: The feminist movement did not take place exclusively on the left wing. While left-wing feminists, who were misguided by political extremists, were squalling about their "right to abortion," more conservative/traditional feminists were quietly demonstrating that they were more valuable employees than their male competitors. Whatever ideas we may have discarded, whether or not we now judge those ideas to have been deliberate lies, they did not include feminism itself--the awareness that women are at least as valuable as men. 

Myth #23: "Women who are 'difficult' (to manipulate) need to be scared or shocked."

Reality: It's generally good to be difficult to manipulate. 

Myth #24: "Feminism is ugly."

Reality: Me rubber, you glue, nanny nanny boo boo and so's yer old man, and if yer mother had wheels she could be a Metrobus.

Myth #25: Any woman who's baby-free at 35 "will end up alone, depressed, and broken."

Reality: As people age and ambitions fail, a lot of people seem to end up "depressed and broken." Consider your own acquaintances. Independent of the prejudice that all people need to be married to be happy, which many don't, aren't the bachelors happier than the divorcees? 

Consider the example of a woman this web site will, per its usual policy, call Jane Doe. Feeling no specific career vocation, Jane left college to elope with John, the boy all the girls at her school wanted. Before she was thirty years old, they had four children, and John was cheating on her. (Jane was easily mistaken for the "Miss America" pageant winner of her graduation year. The woman for whom John left her was often mistaken for a man. Men who cheat will tell you they like variety.) Jane had no skills, no training, and a work history of having quit one student labor job to elope and another one to have a baby, so in the job market even twenty years ago she had no chance at a "career job." John didn't want to send his money to the children, so he told a judge Jane was an unfit mother. After all, she'd defaulted on the mortgage to their home and moved the children in with her mother, who had installed them in her rental property, rent-free, so that at least the children had their own rooms...for two years. So the court gave John custody of the children and required Jane to send him half of her wages, if she found a job. When she found jobs they were part-time and short-term. Mostly she lived on food stamps and spent her time watching television in her mother's rental property, dreaming of ways to get the children back. This lasted until the mother defaulted on mortgage payments too, due to becoming unable to work while unable to rent out her rental property. Then Jane and her mother became wards of the state. The mother promptly died. Now Jane has no education, no job training, no savings, no spending money, no credit, no credibility, no prospects, and no noticeable reason to live. 

Well...I've outlived my husband, my hormone cycle, and more recently the man who shared the last few hormone-cycling years of my life. Sometimes I feel lonely, discouraged, and bereft. Old age is not for wimps. If you can't live without your favorite fellow mortals, you're not going to last to age 50 in any case. When I feel unhappy about the way my life's gone, I consider Jane Doe.

Myth #26: We can assume that female bachelors, even in their late twenties, are "self-entitled, narcissistic, with no hobbies or interests other than work," and "when guys show any feelings, she treats them like dirt."

Reality: Narcissism is a serious character defect, but dedication to work and disdain for the "feelings" of young would-be-Playboy "guys" are not symptoms of it. Today's young men are simply not plausible as providers and protectors. While it's easy to understand their lack of security in the relatively few, often dangerous, heavy labor jobs in which men still excel, it's hard to understad why people reject the obvious solution: "Just give these commitment-phobic slacker boys the vasetomies they so desperately need, and let them spend all their off-work time on the couch or in the bars, until and unless they get up and demonstrate some reason why any woman would ever consider making a commitment to be seen standing within six feet of them."

This web site recently reviewed an e-book called America's Loveless Age in which a male writer lamented that 80% of the women seemed to be pursuing 20% of the men. That's the way the courtship and dating game has always gone for those who weren't really ready to be married. When people find their beshert, they've always known it, and they still do. But men could benefit from dropping the ego defenses and considering what the 20% of young men really have in common. From what I see, of my generation and the others, it's not height, it's not color, and it's not money. It is fortitude. 

Men have tended for a long time to confuse fortitude with willingness to fight. They can even recite a credible line of "evolutionary biology" about how primitive women needed mates who could fend off predators. Of course we'd like to think that our men can fend off predators, if we encounter any, even today, but that ability is not demonstrated by idiotic brawling or unnecessary wars (hello, European readers). Try being able to "slay" debts, leaks, dependency on corporate employment for income, lack of a permanent home with its own food and energy resources, and the need to fit into a crowd of wimps who sit around whining about things they don't even want to change. Women will run after you and you, too, will be able to choose a wife who has more to offer than the bimbos who throw themselves at your feet. 

Myth #27: "Women have never been more miserable than they have been under feminism. This can be measured from the number of single women and the number that are on antidepressants."

Reality: Antidepressants have not been so successfully marketed at any period since the invention of alcohol. And our culture is quicker to tell women, "If you're not smiling, you must be depressed," than to tell men this--possibly partly because men are more likely to punch a pill-pusher's lights out, which is more pardonable than the average brawl. Nevertheless, women are glad to have the chance at least to demand fair wages for our work, and nobody needs to be allowed to try to tell little girls that they'd be happier without the right to earn and keep their own money. 

Real liberation never was the goal of left-wing feminism, because real liberation, for men or women, means not being dependent on either corporations or government as employers. Real liberation involves earning a decent living on, and from, our own private property. It involves relating to corporations and government, which has become merely a big corporation, as a skilled independent contractor. But the failure of left-wing feminism to guide women or men toward real liberation is due to the left wing, not to feminism. 

Another New Book Review: Everything You Dream Is Real

Title: Everything You Dream Is Real 

Author: Lisa De Nikolits

Date: 2023

Publisher: Inanna

Length: 334 e-pages

ISBN: 2022039993X

Quote: "Admittedly, he fell in love with my avatar, not me. And admittedly, we were only together for a few months." 

But Noelle is a classic extrovert, a creature of impulse, and also a military general with steel legs. When she kicks things, they know they've been kicked. Noelle, at the beginning of this novel, wants her man back. Her man, Sharps, has been punished for multiple murders by being sent back in time and not decanted from the computer in which his consciousness is stored, so he's lying on the floor in an alternate dimension trying to figure out what happened. (Do not think too hard about what passes for science in this book. It is not Jules Verne.) Noelle dives back into the Mainframe that now runs the world, or what's left of it, to drag Sharps--kicking and screaming, because time travel turns out to be painful and he's now quite sure he doesn't like even her computer avatar any more--back into the dystopia of her own time.

Which is an impossible time. In the middle of the current century, we learn, people are obsessed with the 1980s, mainly because a lot of people in my generation consider that to have been a tacky decade. They adore all things tacky. Trying to gain control of the Mainframe, Noelle and her friends soon find themselves living in the fantasy kingdom of a 1980s plutocrat, with neon, big hair, plastic surgery, sex as commercial entertainment, and punk makeup out to there. The fantasy kingdom is occupied by a cult whose leader, Axel the plastic surgeon, funds everything by putting his clients to work in his porn business. 

All the characters who narrate chapters, in turn, are disgusted by the porn business but that doesn't stop them describing their own sexual adventures in gross detail. Noelle's attention-deficient mind is soon distracted from Sharps' disliking her when one of the porn stars (a woman) grabs her Trumpzone. Sharps has found another woman to love while his time-travelling has neutralized his violent tendencies--he's become a wimp, actually, but  his violence was probably a defense to conceal the fact that he's always been one. Sharps' mother falls in love with Axel in much the same way Noelle falls in love with the porn star. 

There's a throwaway nod to the International Union of Rich White Men Who Want To Claim Victim Status Too, which, in my opinion, does nothing for the book. The way Axel describes his evil twin sets readers up to expect that the twin, who "became a woman," is Axel's shadow personality; I don't find it credible when the twin turns up modelled on Caitlyn Jenner and everybody likes "her." These characters all liked Axel, too, but they all turned against him, and in real life I suspect even Noelle wouldn't be too fond of even a natural sister of someone who's behaved the way Axel has. But, according to all rules of fictional twins, the evil twin who's never been seen in the same place with Axel is all but required to be Axel, or at least a replicant of Axel who blew into the world through a glitch in a time-travel program. A live interactive porn broadcast run by a plastic surgeon ought to have a male-to-female sex worker around somewhere, and I could suspend disbelief in Noelle's new love being it, or Axel's old flame; it's the twin that seems so gratuitously wrong.

And so far I've not even mentioned the Revenge of the Butterflies. In this novel North Americans failed to save the monarch butterflies. Instead, they--we--the North Americans in the fictional universe with time travel--bioengineered the butterflies to survive the destruction of their habitat. The descendants of monarch butterflies now come in all the colors monarchs are not, and their size and shape are more like birds', and they're vicious. One bite usually costs the person an arm or leg. By way of compensation these no-longer-butterflies' pheromone dust is a drug that has displaced cocaine. Noelle is addicted to "butt dust," and so are some of the porn stars. 

Then there's De Nikolits' take on climate change: Canada is still cold. What's changed is that weather control technology allows humans to cut off the snow, so when Sharps and his new love Shasta are trapped in the tundra, they can't even burrow into the snow and snuggle together to get through the night. 

There are other satirical plot twists. I wouldn't even try to summarize all of them except to mention that, at a point when the plot seems about to depend on Noelle's solid steel kick, she misses. And the plot rolls on.

This may be the most hilarious science-fiction dystopia ever written, unless you count The Hitchhiker's Guide books as dystopian, which I don't think you can. If you don't mind a couple of explicit sex scenes and a continuing reminder that everyone else is doing about the same sort of thing throughout most of the book...and aunts don't mind reading that sort of thing nearly so much as we mind having it around the house where nieces and nephews can see it, or selling it in town where other people's grandparents might...prepare for a long giggle-fest. 

Double the fun? If you don't mind comedy fiction full of explicit sex, buy Tales of Tucson, which is a comically exaggerated memoir of the way things were in the 1980s, as a companion to this comically exaggerated parody of the 1980s. Tales of Tucson has a sequel (in some countries); taken together the three books should be good for enough laughter to get most people through a longer-and-messier-than-average strain of flu.

New Book Review: Mission Possible Young Readers Edition

Title: Mission Possible Young Readers Edition

Author: Tim Tebow

Date: Today, 7 March 2023

Publisher: Waterbrook

Length: 176 pages

ISBN: 978-0593194072

Quote: "We are each on a mission to make a difference."

And this book addresses readers as young as age ten--usually a pre-spiritual stage of life, but you never know--encouraging them to pay attention when their emotional hearts "ache for the kid in your class who always gets picked on" or feel "touched by a need" when they see TV commercials for charities.

Homeschooled preacher's kid Tim Tebow, best known as a football star, put most of the profits of his first career in sports into his charitable organization, but he launches this book with the story of how he invested time as well as money in proposing to his wife. A focus on the planning and staging, rather than "eww ick, mushy stuff," may keep this story interesting to middle school readers. Know your students.

Homeschoolers tend to push the envelope when it comes to imagining what children may be capable of. It works in the homeschool setting because parents usually have a good idea of how much their children understand. 

I say "usually" because part of the normal human learning process seems to be that adults assume that a child who can do or understand A can also do or understand B, and this usually produces a manageable amount of stress as the child pushes itself to do or understand B. I've often reminisced about the things my father expected my brother and me to do just because I was able to see letters and sound out words at age four: "If the older one could read Disney picture books and Dr. Seuss at four, she ought to be reading news magazines and Bible stories at five, and the younger one ought to be reading picture books at four likewise." We weren't. We had high I.Q.s and loved reading things ahead of "grade level," but Dad had few grown-up friends because of his tendency to expect even adults to learn more new information faster than they could. Then when his audience were thoroughly confused Dad was apt to start berating them for being "stubborn and stupid." So, at least we grew up with a solid role model of how not to teach. And so today, if this web site seems to assume that readers of one post know more than they do and readers of another post don't know as much as they do...I try to keep everything at this post accessible to a bright ten-year-old reader. Some posts will actually interest that ten-year-old reader and some will not. Since it's only a web site I do assume that readers can browse about, find their own level, and look up anything they don't understand. In real life I'd have audience reactions to go by; in writing I have to do the best I can, as all writers do. Tebow's writing a serious evangelical book for very bright ten-year-olds or, more likely, normal fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds is probably a reflection of his own early life, spending most of his time with highly educated, mentally active, adults who might have found in their clever child something they missed in most of their friends their own age. 

This book will work for some middle school sports fans but I would emphasize that there's nothing at all to worry about if your own half-grown football fan prefers books with more pictures of actual games and less talk about missions and God. I'd be more concerned about a child if adults created pressure for the kid to show more interest in "spiritual things," even in Fellowship of Christian Athletes terms ("Celebrate God all day and every day. I mean...revel in Him!"). That generates a rebellious reaction in which "cradle Christian" teenagers seem to want to go out and do something they can repent of. While cultural expectations that this Rumspringe phase will merely bring the young back into the church seem to work for a majority of teenagers in Amish, Seventh-Day Adventist, and Southern Baptist communities, the Rumspringe experience can be dangerous for individual teenagers. 

I would offer this book to any young reader who is interested in now-retired football stars, but I'd probably say something like, "Tebow grew up a bit different from the average kid. You might get more out of this book when you're in high school or college." And let all further discussion of the book begin with the student. Spirituality does not develop on the same schedule as language and math skills or physical growth do. Here I stand to testify that although I was sounding out words in adults' books and magazines at four, although I was the first skinny eleven-year-old to find a use for a bra in grade six, I didn't have an adult spiritual life before my early twenties. My "adult baptism" at sixteen turned out not to be a great mistake, but I wasn't altogether sure whether it was going to be a mistake during my years as a young "adult" church member.

For readers who aren't totally turned off by the story of a man's setting up an elaborate scene to propose marriage, Tebow goes on to share other stories of more interest to kids. As a homeschooler, he tells us, he was encouraged to socialize in a church that had a large youth group and staged lots of activities. The group had enough students to require auditions for their plays and pageants. "Eight-year-old Tim Tebow" was ordered to recite a poem he "mumbled...[s]taring down at my shoelaces" and rush through a rendition of "Jesus Loves Me" in which "Every sound...fumbled out of pitch. When I was done squawking the last line, I speed-walked to the side curtain." After this audition, due to family connections no doubt, he was given a part in the play and a position in the choir. Though "basically taking up space in choir due to my lack of talent," he came to feel real gratitude for the adults who "didn't see me as a one-sided jock" but patiently taught him to sing. 

From such adults he also learned values like integrity ("While it's nice to be rewarded with stuff, it's more fulfilling to please our Heavenly Father"), gratitude ("when I shift to being grateful...the muscles in my neck relax"), and excellence ("Your Work Is Worship"). And he learned that your vocation to work, which may or may not be the job that pays your bills, is "your mission superpower." 

For Tebow's target audience of talented teens...I'm one of the people who routinely use the term "teenagers" to include ten-to-twelve-year-olds who are developing the sense of purpose and ability to concentrate that are normally found in thirteen-to-sixteen-year-olds...it is commonplace to have a strong sense of vocation. A talent was probably noticeable before they were even five years old, though that's not always the case--sometimes kids don't have access to ways to develop and show their talents early in life, or their talents aren't recognized as "real" vocations because adults' prejudices suggest that things like cooking are less "real" vocations than things like teaching. (Grandma Bonnie Peters rebelled in youth against pressure to get a college degree and teach school, because that was the "upscale" thing for young ladies to do with their intelligence. Her vocation first manifested itself as a talent for cooking, and later matured into her vocation for home nursing, nutrition counselling, and life coaching.) Small children may also show a precocious talent that turns out not to be their vocation, as when my natural sister, who was able to sing on key before she was able to speak clearly, lost all ability to hear sounds in the soprano range at age five. 

Most talented young people, however, do know what their talents are, and are ready to have a "first career," even if it's a short one, in middle school. We want them to keep learning and exploring different things but we need to let children use their talents and energy. Sometimes people still show vestiges of an archaic belief that every boy has to be a soldier and every girl has to be a mother, starting as early as possible--why make them wait till they're eighteen, when boys can fight and girls can get pregnant at fourteen! In fact civilized societies flourish when most men never have to go to war and most women never have to give birth. Focus on their other talents is probably best for society as well as for these individuals. Children should "start small" with relatively short work days, if possible, and "safe," well supervised tasks that won't compromise their ability to do other jobs later. There are still countries where giving kids jobs in textiles or machinery is the way nice people keep children from being recruited as pickpockets or prostitutes, but having them work with toxic waste, as has been reported in modern China, is going too far. In the United States we tend to go too far in the opposite direction, nannying at children who are perfectly happy with their first steps toward their vocations: "Put down that book, you read too much. Must you practice your music every day? Normal kids don't ask for math books for birthday presents--you'll never have any friends if you go on like that! You're too little to handle needles or hammers or whatever, you might cut yourself. There'll be plenty of time to sell things for money when you're grown up, don't start that now," and so on.  Tebow encourages kids to take those first small steps into their vocations. Their work is worship. He's right.

He also sides with "Convictions Over Emotions": "[F]eelings come and go. [God's] love for us does not." This detail is important, yet divisive. It hinges on one of those physical differences we're not comfortable even recognizing--probably the only physical difference that needs to make any difference in the way people behave toward one another. "Race" doesn't matter at all when intelligent people want to accomplish something. Age and sex matter less than we might think. Even physical abilities can often be worked around. But the difference between introvert and extrovert brains may remain crucial.

In contemporary American society we often meet people who do have consciences, vocations, the ability to work alone, and even some conspicuous introvert-type talents and perceptions, who believe they are extroverts because they are not shy. This doesn't mean that they are extroverts in the sense that is relevant in the light of recent scientific discoveries, the sense of incomplete neurological development. It means that they're still using an outdated working definition of what appear to be introvert and extrovert behavior, according to which that mythical "balance" between the two is possible. People have either introvert or extrovert brains but a healthy introvert brain normally does develop social poise, especially under the guidance of healthy introvert adults who appreciate a quiet, focussed, talented child. Shyness is typical of adolescents who know they're raw beginners at most of the things they do, of extroverts who have less wealth or "looks" than those around them, and of introverts who've been emotionally abused by extrovert bullies who were not taught to be grateful for the attention they get. When we as a society become more vigilant about training children not to start a bullying relationship, saying things like "You're yapping at someone who wasn't even looking at you? How DARE you? Go to your room until you can get some control of that mouth!", then the stereotype of the socially awkward introvert will probably disappear.

The real difference between introvert and extrovert brains is not always obvious from behavior, but it's permanent and important. Introverts have convictions because, whatever specific talents our brains also develop, we all share the crucial part of the brain that links spirituality to the sense of right and wrong, the conscience, from which we make aesthetic as well as moral judgments. We need to heed and develop our consciences. Extroverts fail to develop the conscience, which is a real disability and needs to be recognized as one. They need help; they need guidance; they do not need a great deal of individual responsibility, because all they have to go on, when making decisions, are the emotions they feel primarily about other people's reactions to them. Because of this difference in the physical brain, extroverts remain stuck at what Kohlberg called a juvenile stage of moral development, while introverts reach what Kohlberg thought was moral maturity. 

This doesn't mean that all introverts always behave well. Anyone can consciously choose wrong, for bad reasons, such as money or social pressure. Introverts do need to learn effective ways to communicate in situations where their moral senses and social senses conflict. Left to ourselves introvert children are likely to want to solve social problems by beating up bullies, thus putting themselves in the position of super-bully or else getting beaten up themselves, or screaming ineffectually at adults, thus usually getting a harsher reception than Greta Thunberg has so far received. We need positive instruction in how to communicate our beliefs, but the kind of "counselling" many adult introverts got in the 1970s and 1980s, which began with "feelings" and "Can you remember when you lost your warm fuzzy feelings toward other people? Who did what to you when you were just a baby or toddler? Was it your mother or your father? Did they actually molest you or did you just feel the way they cleaned your bottom as something like sexual abuse?" does no good at all. Neither did the milder, or New Age, version of "Let's all just go back to a more primitive level of civilization where nobody dared to make value judgments." For one thing that view of history is almost certainly false--when isolated primitive tribes failed to develop a coherent moral law they usually seem to have been dominated by superstitions about what might appease the hostility of their vicious "gods"--and moreover it's counterproductive for individuals and for society. We need to heed the moral judgments of enlightened people.

Tebow discusses what might be seen as the sad end of his first career in this context of where "feelings" fit in the Christian life of a neurologically complete adult, or what is now the objective scientific meaning of the word "introvert." "As I walked around the Star" in the Dallas Cowboys' extravagant complex, "I became swept up in unmet longings...I wish I had a chance to be a player in this facility...God, I wish You had a different plan. Seeing the Cowboys' facilities made me miss football," even though his adult moral sense knew, "My mission that day was to have an impact on a bunch of souls" as a preacher whose football career was over. Nobody can be a professional athlete forever and most athletes would do well to be thinking of their second careers as their adult careers, since most athletic competitions are dominated by the crazy teenage energy that just subsides when the body has stopped growing. Most of the time, Tebow tells us, he knows he's here to preach and "encourage" and raise funds for his charity, but he has moments when he misses football. 

(Eventually, I'd like to encourage him, it settles down into pleasant nostalgia. Pleasant feelings associated with our adult careers displace the older memories of pleasant feelings associated with our earliest successes. This, too, is a physical process. During the process nostalgia can stab like a toothache as easily as it can give pleasure and inspire works of art, later. The challenge is to resist any temptation to "drink to forget" what we lose by growing up.)

For Tebow, whose own emotions must still be making strong waves in his consciousness, "feelings" are like the two wolves in the story he tells. Some readers may need to be reminded that for Native Americans the predatory animals, even the deadly dangerous wolf, bear, and eagle, were symbols of power rather than danger. Humans can tame and train those animals. Legendary heroes of American culture did that. So in the terms they used, it made sense to describe emotional energy as like "two wolves fighting" and one wolf being "good, kind, and generous" while the other was vicious. A wolf who became your friend and protector, like Julie's Amaroq in Julie of the Wolves, would fight off a hostile wolf who might want to eat you. Anyway, our emotions are like the two hypothetical wolves fighting. The one that wins is the one you feed. We can use our moral judgments to choose which emotion to feed our attention to. 

This will not give teenagers, instantly, the power to snap into the emotional mood an emotional abuser might demand that they feel or simulate, Nor should it. Nor should they. Their feelings are their own and they have the right to feel tired, impatient, even frustrated by tasks they've not yet mastered. The rewards go to those who learn to work through those feelings. 

Tebow's phrase is "Embrace the Grind." For every skill we learn there will be times when learning itself is difficult, and times when using what we've learned is boring. Rewards come to those who push through the drudgery to recover the joy and glory of their work.

Adult readers, at least, know where this book is going--the last full-length chapter will call attention back to a beneficiary of Tebow's charity, and the last page will be the Christian Altar Call--but this review leaves a good dozen stories for readers to discover in the book. 

Dotty Old Ladies and Grumpy Old Men, Long May They Wave

My home town has no homeless population, so, strictly speaking, we have no bag ladies.

We do have a couple of dotty old characters who don’t look, sound, or smell very different from the real thing. Some of the medications given to geriatric patients, to treat chronic physical conditions like cardiovascular disease, affect their memory, perception, and personal habits in ways similar to the effects psychiatric medications have had on the mentally ill homeless population. Frequent outdoor exercise is a better treatment for cardiovascular disease than overmedicating the disease is, so these frequently confused elders seem to be encouraged to get out and walk, in nice safe places where they're not exposed from the weather, far away from bathrooms or from people who can help in an emergency, or in crowds...so almost every day they wander about in the shopping districts.

They do have homes. Perhaps able-bodied people come into their homes, or stay in their homes, to look after them. The clothes they wear often fit as if they’d been bought when the wearers were taller and heavier, or as if they were grabbed off a rack at a sidewalk sale. Sometimes they favor dreadful near-miss color combinations, especially burgundy with orange. Still, the clothes are laundered regularly, and the old people hobble from shop to shop, fingering much more than they buy but always seeming to have enough money to pay for what they take, and at the end of the day they usually do buy something, somewhere.

They are usually referred to, by courtesy, as ladies and gentlemen. Possibly they do belong to the landowning class. There’s nothing ladylike or gentlemanly about their manners. They neither speak clearly nor hear well, so it’s hard to talk to them, but often they take advantage of their obvious senility to insult people. It’s not clear whether their senses are even keen enough to give them any idea whom they’re insulting; sometimes their nasty remarks are about someone other than the person they are currently annoying.

They are not terribly clean. The fact is that the hygienic standards of older Anglo-Americans are much lower than those of most of the world, including younger Anglo-Americans. How often we see geriatric patients who really would be easier to be around if they used soap and water after every single visit to the bathroom, but they don’t believe they need even one bath a day. There are reasons for this behavior; their skin may be dry and itchy, their blood pressure medication may make them chill easily, their rheumatism may make getting in and out of the tub difficult. And also, even if they bathed before leaving the house, their shaky old hands tend to spill things and aren’t too good at cleaning up the mess. And on top of that, one of our specimens is a chain smoker. It doesn’t take them very long to become as dirty as the residents of homeless shelters—who are often required to take showers before entering and leaving the shelters, too.

They can be quite a blight on the atmosphere. Once during flu season I went into a store’s only restroom after one of our confused old men had left it, and found little puddles of diarrhea on the floor. Anything concave left within reach of the public is likely to attract these characters’ tissues, cigarette ends and ashes, gum wrappers, even globs of hacked-up phlegm. They do mean well; they wouldn’t be allowed out if they didn’t try to get their effluvia into toilets, ashtrays, or garbage bins. Sometimes their various disease conditions move faster than their shaky old feet do.

In cities the default assumption is that people like this are homeless and poor. In my home town we know better. They qualify for as much Social Security money as the healthier senior citizens who are still managing many of the businesses, running the churches and social clubs, even doing a considerable amount of the physical work in town. Some of them are in fact younger than the active and healthy people who express so much empathy for them. How often I’ve heard a disabled 60-year-old referred to as “that poor old dear, bless his/her heart” by some working person who is 75 or 80. How many of Grandma Bonnie Peters' last few patients, and those of my great-aunt who trained her, were younger than the nurses caring for them. The nuisance value of these old nuisances shows no correlation with their income, their "background," or even their literal age.

So what can you do? Mostly we try to be kind and patient. Living in one of the small towns that become de facto senior communities gives a person a lot of practice in being patient. And scrubbing down the disgusting restroom, because you’ve already had the flu, so better you should be exposed to the virus than that someone more vulnerable should be.

I don’t even try to communicate with the really confused ones. Some might call this a character defect, or at least a deficiency of communication skills. Some people who were not English majors in college do seem to communicate with them, after some fashion. I never have.

Often these almost-but-not-quite-senile seniors interfere with business. I was once mortified while waiting in a car outside a store with an 85-year-old relative, who was then heavily medicated for atherosclerosis. The formative trauma of this relative’s life was that, when they were teenagers, his (long dead) sister had been raped. A family with giggly children parked beside us. Suddenly the relative bounded out of the car and started yelling, in his feeble voice, that his sister was a good girl and they had no right to laugh at her. Such episodes can happen anywhere, but in small towns with large populations of active senior citizens they happen more often.

I was shopping in another store, in another decade, when an eighty-something woman who had been the official bad character of her town hobbled in, apparently thought she recognized me as a niece or granddaughter of hers, and said I ought to move in and work for her. Since local rumor had it that this woman had never worked at anything honest in her life, I made polite noncommittal noises and got out of the store fast. Later, after Old Mrs. Nogood had left, I went back into the store...where the 67-year-old storekeeper must by then have had it fixed in her mind that I was an accomplice in thievery, prostitution, drug smuggling, probably espionage and possibly high treason, plus neglect of my elders, and she refused to sell me the rare book that had caught my attention.

Some of the more colorful and embarrassing stories in the histories of small towns involve encounters between two or more senior citizens, many of whom died from strokes or heart attacks a few years after disgracing their families. I was in a grocery store on the day two hags approached each other and spoke quietly for a minute or two before one of them shrieked an obscene taunt and the other one smashed an oversized, overripe zucchini across her head. I was not in town, but I’ve heard several versions of the story, about the estate case in which a whole clan had assembled on the courthouse steps; a 70-year-old hag threatened her 85-year-old aunt with an act of unprintable violence, and one of the older woman’s children, about age 60, shoved this disorderly 70-year-old down the steps...Once while I was working in Gate City’s Friday Market, a geezer from another town came up and confessed having been one of a spontaneously formed posse who all cornered and shot a man they believed to be a child molester. I’ve not heard that story from any other source. It could have been a pseudomemory induced by medication. In any case it seems as if those who care for these old characters ought to know when to lock up the firearms...

Sometimes they really ought to do something about the car keys. I can count a half-dozen buildings that have been remodelled in unattractive ways after some senile senior citizen drove a car right through the display window. I was in one of the buildings; the window made a noise like a gunshot and some veterans dived, and/or shoved their families, under tables. I turned and saw the front end of a car where a table was supposed to be, the diners at the table having scrambled away in time not to be hurt, though a few people were taken to a hospital to have surface wounds checked out. 

Sometimes, when globs of phlegm or tobacco juice splash up onto the merchandise in a store, or shoppers who were obviously born after 1970 are loudly accused of crimes that were committed in 1930, it’s tempting to say that the characters ought to be locked up. Permanently.

This is, however, a judgment call every family has to make. My “Aunt Dotty” may or may not actually have had cancer; around 1970 she found a lump and had a full course of cancer treatment, and became depressed, and was offered a medication that “they took off the market because it made some people nutso, but all it did to me was help me communicate with the spirits.” She was never technically insane, because she could always tell the difference between her hallucinatory “spirits” and real people, and she was able to rebuke “spirits” that seemed to say nasty things. She was just a bit dotty. She was always prowling charity stores and bazaars, trying to ask the “spirits” of people she knew, telepathically, what people would like as gifts, and happily sending everyone in the family whole boxes of the ugliest old clothes and bric-a-brac that ever came out of Hong Kong. And anyone who hadn’t called or written for a few days was likely to hear that our “spirits” had told Aunt Dotty we were having all kinds of absurd adventures—“Well, how was Timbuktu? Well, maybe it was Tampa, but what your spirit was telling me sounded like Timbuktu.”

Aunt Dotty didn’t seem to get dottier after age eighty, but she did discard some inhibitions, and it seemed to be hard for newcomers to the neighborhood to know how to take some of the things she felt free to say. “Where did you get this, again? Are you sure? Because this old lady who used to own it is telling me you stole it! Right out of her house—in Orlando, wasn’t it?—and she wants it back!” Family members started trying to stay nearby, in case of serious misunderstandings, after Aunt Dotty said on the phone—from the patio, where she could be heard by the new neighbor in his garden—“The plumber thinks it’s a tree growing into the sewer line, but old Mr. Smith who used to live next door says that young man who’s moved in now killed him and buried him down there.” And yet she understood and remembered what was going on in reality, and took care of her own house and affairs as well as ever.

That was, I need to mention, pretty dang well. My Aunt Dotty was a real oldfashioned "little woman" who grew up expecting that her mother was going to die, and caring for her mother, while normal little girls are still figuring out how to pull the shiny new clothes off their dolls. She basically reared my mother and most of the foster children the grandparents took in, while going to high school, going to college, getting a job in a factory and keeping it after marriage. She was a licensed teacher but she stayed in the factory, earning more money there, until we children started to covet luxuries, and then she took a job tutoring some rich brats she didn't like much so we could have all the luxuries they discarded so quickly. She'd helped her father round up cattle on a pony at ten, and helped keep the old Studebaker sputtering along, and helped cook for the temporary labor crews until Mother took over that job (at five, standing on a chair). After she grew up and moved to a nice suburban neighborhood with her husband, her hobby was building houses, some of which are still standing. She wasn't big or strong but she designed houses and hired help to get them built. She was the one you could ask how to maintain and refurbish things, all her life. She was neither crazy nor dangerous nor even stupid, and refused to be treated as if she were...and we let her wander, annoying people but not really doing any harm since her husband kept the peace, until the very last weeks between the crippling stroke and the killing one. 

Which seems the only decent thing to do. Otherwise where could one draw the line? In Canada they've legalized euthanasia, and now the rumors are flying of young, healthy people being urged to choose euthanasia too. Oh my. In this crowded world, everybody has lost some friend or relative they'd prefer to keep, and everybody can think of a few hundred people who are less worthy of life than our dear departed were. 

I would like to recommend euthanasia to every single member of the World Economic Forum, on the grounds of their being senile enough to fantasize about ruling the world, with a possible exception only for Greta Thunberg, only in the custody of people who will correct her miseducation. I would also like to recommend it for all members of CNN's panels of "news analysts" who sit around gushing pre-rehearsed approved emotions at people who are trying to find out the names of the wounded, the dead, and the survivors after a disaster, on the ground that the gushers make a career of demonstrating to the world that they're too stupid to survive. I would also like to recommend it for all people, including some of my own generation, who want to believe that people my age and older are either fooled or flattered when younger people call us names that suggest that we might ever consider sleeping with them, on the grounds that that certainly feels like sexual abuse to me. (I personally don't mind being mistaken for a stranger's aunt or grandmother--I just explain that the confusion is all theirs--but I feel violated by the idea that I'd ever touch such nasty creatures.) You can see where this kind of thing is likely to lead, and reportedly, in Canada, it is leading there--fast. I think they want to have some sort of law against euthanasia and make sure it's very selectively enforced, in such a way that people who really want euthanasia can have it, if they pay cash in advance, but nobody else has to pay for it.

The dotty old hags and the cranky old men do seem to enjoy being alive, most of the time. Some of them, like my Aunt Dotty, are dearly loved by those who know and understand them. In some cases those who know and understand them may be a small group, perhaps limited to one visiting nurse they've mistaken for a long-gone favorite cousin, one grandchild, and a half-dozen geriatric cats and dogs nobody else would want to look after...but the geriatric Chihuahuas are souls, too, at least according to the way King James' Authorized Version of the Bible uses the word. They matter. They will have enough time, and enough reason, to miss the people no one else misses, in due course.

One morning in 1996, a year when I didn’t have a “home” in Washington, I got off the overnight bus and headed for Metrorail. A gravelly voice behind me creaked, “Wait! Are you going to the Metro? Well, can’t you walk with me?” So I waited and walked beside an old hag from some Western state who’d come in on the same bus but was, thank goodness, going to a different hotel, and although I’d combed my hair a breeze must have blown through it, because the hag brayed, “You look like you’d just been thrown out of someone’s bed!” Annoying? Yes; just about anybody would probably have found that old hag annoying and I’m sure it was a great disappointment to her family if she made her way safely home. Then again, I find several "celebrities" very annoying. I suspect Mitch McConnell's grandchildren may be the ones urging him not to retire, I suspect only plastic surgeons will miss Caitlyn Jenner, and I also think Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez needs at least ten more years at a more effective school just to stop embarrassing those of us who merely look as if she might have been related to us, but does that make them senile?

So I try to remind myself: Even when I have no idea what they’re trying to say, and even when they look and smell and act as if whatever they’re trying to say ought not to be said, our confused characters are not just nuisances in my life. Maybe their lives used to be as adventurous as Aunt Dotty’s. Maybe they were caring for wheelchair-bound mothers and infant siblings at twelve; maybe they sponsored dozens of needy children; maybe they built houses that are standing, somewhere, even today. Maybe their relatives have learned to overlook the vagaries in their minds and appreciate the wisdom they may still actually have. I don’t know that anyone else thought my Aunt Dotty was brilliant, multitalented, and wise after she reached age seventy, but we knew she was. For all I know, the mad old bat I shoo away might be one of her family’s most admired elders too.

Confinement and even euthanasia do come to mind, especially when one has barely recovered from stomach flu and finds diarrhea on the floor...but if confinement and euthanasia stay in your mind, then you deserve to grow up just like the person you’re thinking about.

Mark Warner Thinks Security Grants Are Good News

Official editorial comment: Bless his heart.

From U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-VA:

"

Friends,

I’m writing to make sure you’re aware of critical grants that are now available.

Protecting the safety of Virginians is top of mind for me, and it’s what motivates a lot of my work leading the Intelligence Committee. I’m glad to see the Department of Homeland Security continue that work by unveiling competitive grants to improve preparedness and strengthen resilience against a range of potentially catastrophic events.

I wanted to make sure you had information on these grants. Applications for all the below grants close May 18, 2023. If you are looking for a letter of support for your application, my office is eager and willing to help. Simply fill out our easy-to-use online request form here.

Read more about the specific grants below:

Transit Security Grant Program: $93 million available to public transit systems to increase the resilience of transit infrastructure. More information is available here.

Intercity Bus Security Grant Program: $2 million available to owners and operators of intercity bus systems to increase the resilience of transit infrastructure. More information is available here.

Tribal Homeland Security Grant Program: $15 million available to Tribal nations to strengthen the nation against risk associated with potential terrorist attacks and other hazards. More information is available here.

Nonprofit Security Grant Program: $305 million available to support physical security enhancements for nonprofits that are at risk of a terrorist or extremist attack. More information is available here.

Port Security Grant Program: $100 million available to help protect critical port infrastructure from terrorism. More information is available here.

Together, we can bring in federal money to Virginia that will help us prepare for a range of threats. The investments we make in preparing our infrastructure today will pay dividends tomorrow. I’m proud to have supported the bill that made this funding possible, and I’ll keep fighting for every dollar available for Virginia in Congress.

Sincerely

[signature graphic Google doesn't like]

"

Book Review: The Pampered Chef Season's Best Recipe Collection

Title: The Pampered Chef Season’s Best Recipe Collection Fall-Winter 2002

Author: Doris Christopher

Publisher: Pampered Chef

Date: 2002

ISBN: none

Length: 32 pages

Quote: “Once you taste the results of our recipes, you might want to host a Kitchen Show.”

Why do people buy “books” that are written entirely to market things—in this case, pricey cooking utensils? Often these books are packed with the utensils. Somebody apparently gave this little cookbook to a friend for Christmas, before it reached me. Apart from the holiday message hand-written inside the front cover the book is in good condition.

The recipes? Not my kind. Though some of them are dairy-free they’re all “cheesy” in the sense of “extravagant to the point of vulgarity.” Though some do mention fruits, nuts, or vegetables they all use a lot of prepackaged junkfood—refrigerated dough, dry soup mix, pre-packaged cookies, pre-packaged candy, instant pudding mix, canned pie filling, cake mix, prepackaged “toppings,” all those “time savers” to free up more time for more elaborate visual effects with more chemicals added to them. Some of those visual effects can be reproduced with the utensils you already have; some cannot.

If “trendy and spendy” is your cooking style, or if you want a demonstration that the 1980s yuppie beat goes on for your cookbook collection, you will love this book. It explains how to create pre-mixed sandwiches by tucking the fillings inside the loaves of bread, then twisting two long thin loaves together on the baking sheet, er, stone. It gives several recipes for eccentric, trendy confections inspired by pizza. It’s awful, and if you’re thinking “That sounds like a book for my mother-in-law, or for the lady whose son I’m glad I dumped if only because now I’ll never have her for a mother-in-law,” see me.

Butterfly of the Week: Crimson Rose

For those who are keeping track, the post about Byasa dasarada appeared at HowToMeowInYiddish.Blogspot.com. Atrophaneura dixoni was profiled here several weeks ago, and here is the very popular butterfly most recently called Pachliopta hector, the Crimson Rose. It was formerly called Atrophaneura hector, and, before that, Papilio hector. Menelaides and Tros have also appeared as genus names for hector but not been generally accepted. Web searches bring up more hits for Atrophaneura hector but the freshest information will be at the sites that mention Pachliopta hector. An alternative English name is "Chakkara Rose."

Everyone seems to want to photograph the Crimson Rose. This picture comes to us courtesy of Fair Use from the Polish nature site Medianauka, https://www.medianauka.pl/Pachliopta-hector .

Linnaeus defined this species: wings are tailed, blackish on both sides, the forewings with bands of white spots, the hindwings with a double row of red spots. 

"

...alis  caudatis  concoloribus  nigris :  primoribus  fascia  alba ;  posticis  maculis  rubris.     M.  L.  V.

Fai.  i7if.  194.  et  137.     Papilio  indica  maxima  nigra.

Hahitat  in  Indiis.

"

In the bad old days when people collected dead butterfly bodies (which, among other things, cause carpet beetles to infest buildings) instead of taking photographs, it was observed that the Crimson Rose is "a difficult fly to catch" because of its alertness, cleverness, and agility.

"I should like to be a beautiful butterfly,

All yellow and blue and green and red;

But I should not like

To have Dan put camphor on my poor little head,"

Louisa May Alcott had a character observe, watching an older child kill butterflies for a science project. Hector often seemed to have it both ways, blessed with better than usual abilities to dodge as well as repel predators, but people are still buying and selling these butterflies' carcasses. "Anyone who pays attention to butterflies knows where to find dead ones--individual butterflies don't live long--so what's the harm in collecting, displaying, and selling them? The wings are still pretty, and scientists may have some use for the bodies." The danger is that a species or sub-species may be pushed into extinction if cash-strapped students can sell the bodies of butterflies who did not die naturally. We should never buy butterfly carcasses.

The species name may give some indication of its popularity. Because of their dark wings, butterfly species in this genus were traditionally given names associated with funerals in some way. Hector was the name of a war hero who was finally killed in battle.("Hectoring," an old word for pushing, nagging, and bossing, derived from his reputation as a warrior. According to the Iliad this ancient war chief was rather mellow and lovable at home. He was missed.)

From a distance the wings can even look purple, as in this photo from Macroid. https://macroid.ru/showgallery.php?cat=65263&mode=box&lang=en

Or the red spots can fade toward orange.

Photo by Christoph Bausch, https://lepiforum.de/webbbs/media/forum_2_2017/3/3177_2.jpg

Is there a correlation between orange or pink tones and sex? Girishacf's snapshot suggests one. So does surfing the'Net, where gravid orange females bulge. Some scientists mention female "specimens" in which the red has faded to yellow or white. However, other snapshots of pairs show that males and females can be equally orange, like Pamsai's, below. Dead bodies fade, whether male or female. There don't seem to be true geographical "races," either. Revathy and Mathew discuss the influence of environmental factors on the size and colors of Crimson Roses at https://app.dimensions.ai/details/publication/pub.1052535616 . 

Pamsai's sequence of five very fast-exposure photos at https://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/17084535

shows the larger butterfly (female swallowtails tend to be a little larger than males) hovering, flapping those forewings, while bracing the smaller one with the hind wings. Note that his legs are folded in, not holding on to anything. She's the only thing keeping him in the air. 

Though abundant, this butterfly would be missed, and it's protected by law in its native countries--India, Sri Lanka, and Burma/Myanmar. It is considered an endangered species in Bangladesh, though there is some question whether it's ever really been native to Bangladesh; individuals rarely breed or stay there. In India it's protected because it's a crucial pollinator for a valuable plant, Rauwolfia or Rauvolfia micrantha.

As with our Monarchs, the species is known and loved partly for travelling in large groups, so any decline in numbers is a matter of concern. Pachliopta hector is not the biggest butterfly in those countries, with a typical wingspan of four inches or a little more, again comparable to Monarchs. 

In fact hector behaves like our Monarchs in several ways. It is easy to spot, and, being a great traveller and explorer, it can be found almost everywhere, from dense tropical forests to mountain slopes. Like the Monarch, it flies slowly, close to ground, when looking for food. Its wings are big enough to be heard and to shake the leaves and flowers it visits. Also like the Monarch, the female butterflies cover great distances as they try to place one egg on each vine, thus ensuring that the caterpillars won't kill the host plant. Caterpillars can eat different species within the genus but eat only leaves that most other animals can't digest; in the case of Pachliopta hector the plant genus is Aristolochia. Like Monarchs, the caterpillar and butterfly are toxic to animals that eat them; eating one won't kill a predator but, if the predator has the ability to vomit, it probably will. When they fly higher, crossing places where they're not finding many host plants, they fly faster and sometimes form flocks; like Monarchs, they get some boost from one another's draft. Though the flocks disperse during the daytime, they roost together on tree branches at night. Flocks can include dozens or thousands of butterflies who migrate together over land as the seasons change. 

Adult butterflies live on flower nectar, and their favorite flowers are in the genus Lantana. They are a pollinator species. Gayathri Upamali Perera, who is possessive of the lovely photo essay at http://chasethedreams28.blogspot.com/2012/11/common-rose-atrophaneura-pachliopta.html , notes that they can hover, flapping the fore wings while the hind wings rest, while sipping flower nectar. 

The life cycle of the Crimson Rose is illustrated in a photo montage at https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-h-Life-cycle-of-Atrophaneura-hector-Linnaeus-a-Egg-b-I-instar-larva-c-II_fig3_283786049  The egg was described by one researcher as "a miniature pumpkin" (the viable eggs of some swallowtail butterflies are beaded with microscopic drops of aristolochic acid, which discourages predation). .

Photo donated to Wikimedia Commons by Chinmayisk: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atrophaneura_hector_egg.JPG

In the tropical regions where they live, there is no real winter, and there can be seven generations of Pachliopta hector in a year. Each egg takes about a week to hatch. From the time the egg is laid to the time the butterfly takes flight, the juvenile stage of its life typically takes only forty days. Caterpillars are small relative to the size of the adult butterfly, only two to three inches long. 

Hatchling caterpillar, already warty and bristly, photo donated to Wikimedia By School of Ecology and Conservation, UAS Bangalore, India <kchandra58 @ yahoo.co.in> - School of Ecology and Conservation, UAS Bangalore, India, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1107747 

The caterpillar's whole appearance is designed to be maximally repulsive to hungry birds. Lots of excrescences in its skin make it look difficult to bite into. Its thoracic segments are decorated with a false face. The thickened thoracic segments behind the head, though not as conspicuous in this species as in some other swallowtails, have spots that can look like eyes from some angles, and conceal the osmeterium. Under stress the osmeterium erects, looking like the tongue of the bird-eating snake the eyes suggest, and exudes a fruity odor birds dislike. However, the Crimson Rose seems to have an easygoing disposition; of four dozen specimens photographed, none seemed stressed enough by being photographed to display its osmeterium. A bird that was hungry enough to eat a black caterpillar with red warts--warning colors produced by the caterpillar's eating plant leaves that are toxic to birds--might mistake these caterpillars for little snakes and decide to avoid them. 

Photo donated By Balakrishnan Valappil - Crimson Rose_Life History_08, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67294991

The "face" in the picture above is a false face, located on the caterpillar where a collar would be on a human. The caterpillar's working eyes are closer to its mouth, on the underside of the head as the animal crawls with its face toward its food, and are not usually noticed by humans. No caterpillar's eyes are easy for predators to find.

The white "belt" that characterizes some of the other Rose caterpillars is present in this species, but less conspicuous than in the Common Rose:

Another picture By Balakrishnan Valappil - Crimson Rose_Life History_12, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67294993

In one way the caterpillar acts like a little poison-pill, too. Like many of the large butterfly and moth caterpillars, it eats its own eggshell after hatching and cast-off skin after molting. Mother butterflies don't stay around to see their babies hatch, but they do work hard to place only one egg on each host plant, so that the caterpillar will find plenty of food and not have to leave its host plant until it's ready to stop eating and pupate. Sometimes two eggs pop out together; one is wasted. In the natural course of events the caterpillar will never meet its relatives until it's an adult butterfly. When cage-reared caterpillars meet each other, they have no sense of family; their instincts tell them to eat their own skins and, when they recognize another skin of their own kind, they seem to think they'd better eat that too. People who rear these caterpillars need to provide a separate host plant for each one. Social instincts develop only in the adult butterfly.

A young hector features in this vintage drawing of swallowtail and birdwing caterpillars: http://animal.memozee.com/view.php?tid=3&did=39848 /

Pupae are usually loosely attached to a plant stem where they look like dead leaves:

Photo By Vinayaraj - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123853709

Like our Monarchs and Pipevine Swallowtails, the Crimson Rose is well enough recognized as inedible that at least one other species gets some protection from being mistaken for it. The Common Mormon, a less toxic Indian swallowtail species, is usually even gaudier but some females resemble the Crimson Rose.

Ideas This Web Site Classifies As Right Wing: Part 4 or 5

(This post is part of a series, links to the rest of which are on the right side of the web page, about this web site's use of the categories "Left" and "Right," as distinct from "Loony Left" and "Rabid Right." Rightists...)

* Came from good families and tend to believe that all families are basically good, that even dysfunctional families are better environments for children than anything government could do.

* Feel satisfied with traditional religious identities, affiliations, or practices.

* Don't want their freedom to be based on the denial of anyone else's freedom, or their wealth to be based on less than fair and honest trade with other people, and vigorously resist any claim that it does, even when...to some extent...some of it...well...sort of does. (If they agreed that factual evidence supported the claim that modern Britain still had any wealth stolen from India, rather than having lost it all in the struggle to save the world from the more racist and oppressive Third Reich, they'd feel that reparations were owed. But they don't agree that modern Britain has such wealth, and they think it's petty and mean to doubt that Britain has been more than fair in inviting people from ex-colonial countries to live in Britain and be British.)

* As a result of this sense of justice, are disproportionately delighted by the fact that Indigenous American groups that have received less federal handout money tend to be better off economically than groups that have received more. 

* Do not hate any particular ethnic group, (It's not that White or Black Rs hate the other color group, believe that they personally ever could participate in the oppression of the other group, or would want to oppress any group if they could; it's that, in the absence of the rituals of tokenism that both Black and White Rs despise, they expect hostility from the other side of the color war and don't know how to make friends on the other side. They want to have friends on the other side. They kvell over any evidence of friendliness, neighborliness, or even individual pity--as for a disability--from people by whom they expect to be hated. I have seen older Rs, male and female, shed tears when people in what they used to believe were hostile groups have claimed them as friends.)

* May, if they grew up long enough ago, harbor strange, quaint ideas about groups different from them. And probably will say things that gravel the souls of their first few friends in those groups. But are deeply hurt, and vehemently enraged, by having this ignorance confused with what they remember of real racism. 

* Actively try to show good will toward people from different demographic groups--while remaining wary of tokenism, which they know their counterparts in those groups loathe. (Through several presidential elections now, Rs have nominated candidates from ethnic minority groups, and a similar pattern has been observed: Most Rs were interested in the minority-type candidates but, after reading more of those candidates' stated positions and watching them in intra-party debates, decided to back rich White men anyway, citing pragmatic reasons such as concern that the richest White men, e.g. W Bush or Donald Trump, would sabotage the candidates they might have found more likable.) 

* Probably live in homogeneous neighborhoods and attend homogeneous churches. However, if their churches are part of worldwide denominations, they welcome foreign members, and if they happen to take jobs or go to school in big cosmopolitan cities, then their circles of friends may be as diverse as other Rs wish their circles of friends were.

* Usually--pace Pat Buchanan--think a little cultural appropriation is an excellent thing, a way to open the door to inter-group friendship. ("A little" remains a keyword. They do have their own traditions to preserve. John Verney's satire of a frivolous teenager expressing interest in Italy in terms of shoes and spaghetti, though British, was accurate for some Rs--but, like Verney's teenaged character, most of those Rs have lived and learned.)

* Had grandparents or great-grandparents who were taught to hate or at least fear some group or other, as enemies during a war or disease carriers during the plague years. (Hello? Unless they were Black Americans, that would have happened before 1945. How many of that generation are still alive?) 

* Were taught, in their traditional religious groups, not to hate demographic groups.

* Prefer peace to war, but prefer not to mention this at times when it might be construed as showing a lack of Support for Our Troops. Believe that failure to Support Our Troops is treason.

* Aren't going to flip the beliefs they learned early in life. If loving our flag and our Declaration of Independence was good in 1976, it'd be best to forget about trying to rebrand patriotism as a bad thing or market any "Declaration of Interdependence" now...even if there were any objective evidence of any good reason to make such efforts.

* Basically tend to feel that civilization reached perfection in the United States in 1950. Acknowledge the necessity of some changes, e.g. that President Eisenhower had to retire, and didn't notice that the presidential administrations they liked, e.g. Reagan's or Trump's, enabled other changes some of which were undesirable. Can be reminded that the world depicted on old TV sitcoms was always fictive and that many things needed changing in 1950, but even after being reminded, they still feel, deep down, that everything was better in 1950.

* Have always tended to agree with "progressive" socialists that changing some things would be progress in the right direction, then withdraw support for what merely represents "progress" toward socialism. (Women needed and deserved equal employment opportunities, equal pay...and men deserved equal rights, along with women, to pursue more "liberating" self-employment, or work in smaller businesses, rather than indenture themselves to huge corporations, including federal or even state-level government.) 

* Take the benefits of living in a democratic republic for granted. (The Tea Party movement lost momentum when people realized that it was going to call for radical efforts, such as, well, spending our online time following the state legislature rather than friends' blogs and football scores.) Resist awareness that opposition to political movements that are organized into actual jobs may take some thought and effort too.

* Often aren't very active or demonstrative in support of their churches or charities, either. 

* Support a strong military presence, not because if we must fight wars we should give our troops as much protection as possible, but because they seriously believe fighting wars solves problems.

* Seriously imagine that if women aren't able to have abortions either those women or someone else will want and love their babies, who will be born healthy and brought up happy, and everyone will live happily ever after. 

* May believe that verbal abuse is part of healthy relationships among people who never seriously question their value to the family, the social group, or society as a whole. Thus ethnic slurs, or even references to physical quirks or disabilities, can become nicknames people use with pride. (Mary Daly, who was not on the right wing, was referring back to her traditional-Catholic-Irish-American roots when she wrote that "[the sentence] 'She is a Revolting Hag' would never be mistaken for 'She is a revolting hag'.")

* May have grown up with other cultural traditions that are dysfunctional; feel defensive about these dysfunctions and don't want to reexamine or discuss them. For example, if they didn't grow up with a strong extended family in a neighborhood with a solid sense of community, they may tend to underestimate the benefits of those things.

* Are well off but not super-rich. Appreciate the value of money. Understand that respect for private property is the foundation of civilization.

* Know what it means that our Constitution describes us as a Sovereign Union of Sovereign States and that three of those "States" actually call themselves "Commonwealths," but soft-focus on these things and don't insist on maintaining the sovereignty of the States and Commonwealths or the difference between them.

* Admirably recognize gender and ethnicity as necessities not virtues. May underestimate the value of women's and minorities' struggle to overcome bigotry. May give too much weight to men's ego defenses and pay serious attention to claims such as "women commit just as much domestic violence against husbands as men do against wives." 

* May be in denial about the effects of overpopulation and overcrowding on humans.

* May be in denial about the root cause of overpopulation and the only reliable, ethical method of preventing it. 

* May actually have pulled themselves up by their own proverbial bootstraps, at some time in their lives, and consequently fail to realize that big strong central governments have deprived other people not only of proverbial bootstraps but of proverbial boots. Grossly underestimate the harm welfarism does to communities and individuals. 

* Believe in being prepared for self-defense. Typically own a few firearms and shoot for sport once or twice a year, which may mean the weapons in their collections are cleaned, loaded, and used once in a decade or less often. Think the idea that having firearms predisposes people to use them violently is laughable, because nobody they know well has ever had Prozac Dementia.

* May believe that things themselves, rather than individual reactions to those things, "are safe." If it's safe for me to shoot, drive a car, drink alcohol, pop Prozac, or work on roofs, it's safe for anyone else to do those things. This can be a fatal mistake.

* Probably let themselves be peer-pressured into adopting the belief that nobody has time to walk to work, school, shops, church, or social events, and that people who walk to these places do so because there's something wrong with them that prevents them being able to drive to these places. Distrust the idea that it's healthy to walk, or harmful to form a habit of driving short distances, because they've heard things like that coming out of the mouths of Lefties. Are shocked, sometimes into uncharacteristic rudeness, when they hear a "conservative" argument that it's liberating to be able to walk...here I stand to testify!

* Fully sympathize with real women's demand for self-employment that permits quality time with their babies. Not necessarily so sympathetic when men want the same thing. Wouldn't have questioned my Dad's machismo when he was saying he wanted it, but might now question the machismo of young men who want it today. (Nature did not intend that all of us would be big strong polio survivors. Short White guys can be Real Men too.)

* May believe that forcing people to "compete" and "meet challenges" to get the jobs they want is good for the people, the jobs, or society. 

* Grew up with the belief that it's built into the teachings of the major religions that we should respect each other's right to practice our religions. May have attended some of the more public celebrations of religions other than their own. May earnestly believe that, if you were brought up to be something other than a Christian, then Jesus wants you--and they want you--to be a good, faithful whatever-else-you-are, at least until you receive a religious "vision" or "guidance" showing you a way to accept Jesus as your personal Savior while continuing to be a faithful whatever-else-you-are. (This is why they feel so indignant when anyone suggests suppressing any traditional expression of their beliefs in the name of tolerance of others. The followers of other religions they know are comfortable with the same system of etiquette they are comfortable with.)

* Expect people to be adults and settle their differences like adults. Don't think the United States should be responsible for intervening in other people's disputes. 

* Believe that, if one does start fighting, one has to win. (We didn't withdraw from Vietnam "in peace with honor," in this way of thinking; we lost. So, well, we'd jolly well better not lose in any subsequent wars...which is why the prospect of our getting into a conflict with any nuclear-armed nation is so ghastly.)

May not question, review, or update their beliefs every fifty years, but they're easy people to like, certainly not violent or hostile or even prejudiced in the way Ds like to think.