Book Review: The Book of Merla Meadows

Title: The Book of Merla Meadows

Author: R.C. Mogo

Quote: "It was  a dark secret to doubt their people--the Catari..."

The Catari, or Cathari, or Cathars, were one of several Christian dissenters that were stamped out by the Catholic Church before the Reformation. They were neither Catholics nor Protestants but I'm not sure whether Mogo is justified in saying their beliefs were "fundamentally at odds with Christianity." They did teach that celibacy was more virtuous than marriage, that abstinence from any kind of pleasure was more virtuous than enjoyment, but so, at that period, did the Catholic Church. Their "heresies" were, from what I've read, which isn't enough, more a matter of theology; specifically, they didn't think the Pope was infallible and did think that adhering to the vows they took would make them "perfect." 

The Lollards were a different sect, in England, less distinctive, more easily suppressed, and more easily forgotten. 

Margery Kempe was an interesting historical character in England. She was called a Lollard, but denied being one. She is remembered for writing (more strictly speaking, dictating) a book in the extravagant theological language of her time, which is likely to impress modern students as evidence of religious mania. She was just a bit heretical: she dressed all in white, which was seen as pretending to be a nun while married, and preached and prayed as if she believed she was a saint. She always claimed to hate sex, though she seems to have had rather a lot of it; after producing more than a dozen legitimate children she petitioned for permission to take a vow of celibacy and go on pilgrimage in Europe, but on her pilgrimage she somehow or other became pregnant again. Given contemporary attitudes toward women, I find it just barely plausible that Margery wanted to go on pilgrimage just to catch her breath in between births and may have been raped while on that pilgrimage. She dictated a book about her spiritual life and the opposition she met from male authoritarians. How many children she had, altogether, and how her life ended, are unknown; there were at least fourteen children and she lived more than sixty years, from the early 1370s to at least the late 1430s..

Now you're prepared, more or less, to read this short "novella" intended to motivate you to buy more novels the author has written about Margery Kempe's children. Very little is actually known about them. In this novella James Kempe meets an English girl called Merla Meadows whose parents joined the Cathars in Italy, who is not sure what she believes but is sure she wants to enjoy life and not take the Cathar vows of abstinence even from most foods. (The Cathars practiced extreme frugality, probably to support themselves in the face of social persecution.) The Cathars don't want to lose the precious soul of a young virgin (who would be obligated, of course, to care for the elders in an aging community) and punish her for even dreaming of going back to England with James Kempe, so harshly that James feels he has no alternative to taking her back to England. 

I don't think it's especially well written, and observe that most historians judge the Cathars less harshly than Mogo seems to do, but after all Mogo seems to have seen the Cathars first through the censorious eyes of Margery Kempe. The historical story is interesting. I'd like to know how much of this fictional series is based on facts, even the biased reporting of facts by a well-known eccentric like Kempe or, well, just about any of her contemporaries, before I read more of the fiction. If this chapter of history interests you (and it's said to interest enough people to generate major tourist attractions in Europe), you might want the whole series.

Book Review: Mystic Treasure

Title: Mystic Treasure

Author: Ada Bell (also known as Laura Heffernan)

Date: 2021 

Quote: "Today was the perfect day to win a fortune."

But Aluminum "Aly" Reynolds is not fated to be the heir of the fortune. In the fictional town of Shady Grove, New York (in no way confusible with the real Shady Grove, Maryland), many people have some sort of magical power, though it may be weak and confusible. Aly sometimes sees visions associated with objects but they're usually not clear or complete enough to be really useful. The town is holding a treasure hunt. The treasure is the title to an abandoned house. Aly could use a house, so she's hunting, but what her powers will help her find is the rightful heir to the house.

This short, mildly funny, whimsical fantasy comes somewhere in the middle of a series of longer novels, having been added when Amazon's analyses reported that the most successful marketing technique was to have a shorter volume in a series that could be given away as an introduction to the rest of the series. It didn't leave me longing to own the whole series. If you enjoyed "Charmed" and "Bewitched," it might have that effect on you.

Web Log for 8.13.25

This one's late because the electricity was off between about 3 a.m. and about 9 p.m.  

Economy, The 

When big corporations get hubristic and crash down, this is called a market correction. In a healthy, free-market economy it makes room for smaller, more efficient, more customer-appreciative companies to prosper. What concerns me is that the corporations going down are not the ones that most need and deserve bankruptcy--not Blackrock, not Microsoft, not Bank of America, not Bayers or Lilly or Merck or even Pfizer. Granted, they fell behind their competitors because their products or services or prices, or all of the above, were inferior. Still...

Big Lots

Brooks Brothers

Brookstone

Burger King

Butterick

Contadina

Del Monte

GNC

Hemper

Hooters

Hudsons Bay

JC Penney

J Crew

Joann's

Kohl's

Lake Shore

Lehman

Lord & Taylor

Macy's

McCall's

Modell's

Monster.com

Neiman Marcus

Party City

Pier 1 Imports

Publishers Clearing House

Red Lobster

Rite-Aid

Sears

Simplicity

Sunnova

...may have been yesterday's stores that will never be missed, but are their failures opening room for leaner, cleaner, better businesses, or are they feeding the bloated giants? Will Sears and JC Penney stores be replaced by stores with policies Mr Sears and Mr Penney would have respected, or merely by Amazon?

Electricity 

Trump promised to cut the cost of electricity by encouraging more use of costly, unsustainable fuels--more use of coal, for instance, meaning more strip mining and/or deep mining, and more encouragement of merely stupid ideas like fracking and nuclear reactors. He needs to focus on what will actually cut the cost of electricity to private people--putting solar collectors on the outbuildings, covered walkways, bus stop shelters, etc., of customers  beginning with the ones whose electricity has been disconnected or threatened with disconnection for non-payment. Those people need to be promoted from beleaguered, reluctant, discontented consumers into respected producers. People who have had to choose between electricity, medication, or meals should be the first to start getting monthly checks, instead of bills, from APCo or PEPCo or Dominion.

What do youall think? Is this a good enough song to be a theme for this issue? Has anyone Out There found a better one?

https://www.frank-turner.com/tracks/blackout/

It's late in life for Trump to learn new negotiation skills...He did try to deliver what he promised, at a fast'n'furious pace, didn't he? He failed because the US government is set up to be different from the sort of private business with which he has experience: under the Constitution, our President has to recruit a critical proportion of our Congress (and their electorates) to support any big sweeping policy changes he wants to make. Trump needed to make haste a little more slowly by negotiating with Congress; he needs to keep hammering out those issues and not just go into a sulk and use the rest of his presidential term to indulge in personal vindictiveness. He is old, and he is male, and it will be hard for him to wrap his mind around this concept, but I believe he's capable of it if he's guided by people who are patient and mindful of his built-in challenges to new learning.  We need to be those people, Gentle Readers.

(Am I saying that old men are more resistant to new learning than young women are? I am. Am I saying that this is necessarily always a reason to have young women making decisions? I am not. Young women absorb new information quickly--sometimes too quickly. Sometimes we follow along with ideas just because falling in and following feels comfortable to us, when we ought to be resisting and asking more questions. I think it's actually good to have decisions made by a mix of diverse people, which is why we have the US Congress.)

Federal Budget Cuts 

Today's (Thursday's, the day when Wednesday's links go live) "main feature" post is about a topic raised in the Appalachian Voice, which most of our local lurkers also read. The Voice also discussed a list of federal programs Trump wants to defund or cut back "that have a disproportionate impact on the air, land, water, and local economies" in the Appalachian Mountains. (Note that the Voice only ever considers the Southern Appalachian Mountains--well, counting the Illegitimate State, which ought strictly speaking still to belong to Virginia and thus to count as Southern, but who wants it back?) Some of these are still being kicked around in Congress so this web site will weigh in on them:

Trump wants to eliminate something the Department of Energy calls the "Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations," which tests new energy technologies in rural areas or on mined-out land. Why do we have a federal Department of Energy at all? Do we want it testing, say, nuclear reactors on abandoned mines where the land is likely to sink?

Trump wants to halve the budget for the Economic Development Administration this year, closing it next year, paying it just enough to administer "already awarded grants" to local governments to "build the necessary public infrastructure that can lead to private investment." To what private investment has this increase in local government size and expense led? To what gain to the local communities?

Trump wants to halve the budget for the EPA's "Brownfields Program," which is supposed to clean up and redevelop polluted sites like abandoned factories or gas stations. Well? How many of those sites have been cleaned up and redeveloped, and by whom?

Trump wants to eliminate the EPA's "Wetlands Program" development grants, whose goal is to increase the amount of land grabbed by government, removed from private owners, under the pretext that it is "wetlands." What good can land grabs possibly do? Should government be allowed to own more land than a severely limited number of government offices sit on?

Trump wants to eliminate the "Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program," which pays part of the "energy" bills for welfare-dependent families. "This program helps prevent deaths...related to hot and cold temperatures," its advocates chant. If its funds were reserved for low-income working people, withheld from welfare dependents, would those people still want to keep it in the budget?

Trump wants to halve the National Park Service's budget. A suggestion: If the Park Service showed the ability to trim the fat and work with a smaller budget, We The People might be more willing to let the federal government continue to own the National Parks.

Trump wants to cut the budget for the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation & Enforcement...from $116 million to $101 million. Trust me, I've worked in federal offices; most of them could only benefit from that sort of tightening. And, if one round of budget cuts does not motivate them to trim the fat, fire the people with whom the most efficient workers "just don't fit in" rather than the more efficient workers e.g., cut'm again, deeper. Cry me a river, heirs of the federal employees who hated me so in my contractor phase. The nation needs you in jobs where your sluggish brains aren't doing anyone any harm or costing anyone any money. I don't know, maybe street cleaning.

Trump wants to cut funding for the USDA's Rural Utilities Service, whose original job was fairly well done in the 1970s, by letting them coast through next year on "carry-over funding" from previous years with no new funding. Should they complain? Is that better than no funding at all?

Trump wants to let the Fish & Wildlife Service's "State and Tribal Wildlife Grant Program" coast to a halt, similarly, on $59 million in fees and carry-over funding. Likewise the Forest Service's "State, Private, and Tribal Forestry Program," which supposedly helps "protect communities from wildfires"--hello? We're not the ones having the wildfires...yet...but California does not sound as if it's being protected.

Trump wants to cut the Forest Service staffing budget, and the US Geological Survey Water Resources Mission Area's budget, by about a third. I'd be surprised if any federal office couldn't survive having its budget cut back by only a third.

And, Trump wants to cut FEMA's "Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities Grant Program" waaay back, from $256 million to $50 million. Hello? This is the FEMA that deliberately failed to help citizens who supported the Trump administration. They're not falling on their knees with gratitude that they're still in the budget at all? I think Trump needs to be a good Christian and resist temptation to act out private vindictiveness, but objectively, speaking as a person who is not partial to Trump either, I think the FEMA's behavior in North Carolina was despicable and merits deep cuts. You don't get funding for humanitarian work if the humanitarian work you do shows partisan political bias. A valid request for funding for humanitarian work wouldn't show bias against people who were still supporting Lyndon LaRouche (who died in 2019, but who cares? Clueless people are human too).

I love this glorious nation,

And its government, I do,

Just as I love my own body;

I keep that the right size, too.

The good that some of these federal agencies are doing could be done by states or localities, or by charities. I'm in favor of these budget cuts. Please tell me, Gentle Readers, if any of you benefit from any of these agencies and if you believe they need to continue to be funded by tax dollars rather than by private funders.

Safety 

What a sad, sickly, puffy, pasty, prematurely "old" face. 25 going on 95. This is the look I call UGLY because in my family it indicates illness. I don't think it's natural for her either, and I see it as UGLY. And it's likely to be a direct result of listening to, and believing, years of "We can't LET you go out and play, dear, because you might get HURT." I see that sad, ugly woman as a victim first and a perpetrator of abuse second...but she is both. Take a good look at her, Gentle Readers. This is what too many of us are doing to children, especially girls, in the name of "protecting" them. Stop doing that. Children, especially girls, need to be outside for as much of every day as they're willing to be, climbing as high and running as far as they want to, short of violating other people's rights. The function of adults is to stop holding them back and start letting people, even grubby little boys who want to pick fights, know that nobody is allowed to interfere with our children, especially the girls, even by speaking to them if not recognized by full eye contact. If it feels "unsafe" to let the children run and play outside all by themselves, get out there with them. 

https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/2025/08/12/its-for-your-safety/

Because who wants to have to look at this around the table every morning...

(Photo from Twitter, presumably a CBC TV clip)

when the same genes could as easily produce this?

(Photo from Google, which credits Getty Images)

Writers, Hazards of Being 

Should we pray that Anas al-Sharif "rest in peace"? Perhaps. In the sense of "may his soul be found unworthy of resurrection into destruction, and be dead and forgotten forever without having to burn in Hell." If our beliefs have room for that option. Because this is what he wrote:

"Better unborn than fool.

If born, spare Earth your breath.

Don't wait. Go straight to Hell"

(attributed to St Hildegard of Bingen)

...but, if one must be born a fool, one should try to avoid being a writer. It's too dangerous. For Sharif, and for any decent human beings who may happen to be writing for Al Jazeera. May they be guided to dissociate and protect themselves, and not share in the human or the divine punishment he has earned.

Book Review: Death of the Party

Title: The Death of the Party

Author: Etta Faire

Date: 2019

Quote: "My dead ex-husband was in a bad mood..."

That's what some readers will hate about this well crafted mystery. It's the opening of a series but it's a full-length murder mystery in its own right...but the detective works by "channelling" ghosts who witnessed murders, or were murdered, and lives with ghosts whose stories aren't mysterious. Dead people aren't at rest and they don't go to their judgment. Depending on your religious views this may be a reason not to have the book in your house.

If you don't mind seeing the fatal dinner party through the murder victim's eyes, this is a legitimate detective story where the mystery is solved by logic and observation. And a nice, not overly detailed, period feeling (though I did spot a "scam artist" where people in the 1930s said "con artist"). And a cheerfully snarky narrator. 

Save the Hellbenders

It was refreshing to find the Appalachian Voice in the mailbox recently; I don't think this small, partisan news magazine has been printed since the hurricane. In this summer's Voice was an article about an animal I've read about but never actually encountered. Since you readers have a high tolerance for biological gross-outs I thought you might like to learn more about the hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, which most people never see even if they live near the animals' habitat.

Photo from Tn.gov. 

A hellbender is a sort of salamander. It's not as attractive as more common kinds of salamander. It has a large round head, is the color of clay mud, and can live for thirty years just growing bigger and uglier.  It's usually seen as similar in size and shape to a mudpuppy (it can grow bigger), but lacks the long gills at the back of the mudpuppy's head. Some old hellbenders weigh as much as five pounds, and measure up to 29 inches long; 16 inches long is more typical.

Hellbenders breathe oxygen underwater, through their skins as well as their faces. They can breathe on land but don't venture onto land if they can avoid it. As cold-blooded animals they need to stay where the temperature suits them, which, since they are adapted to function at a much colder body temperature than a warm-blooded animal's, is in deep water. When they swim up to where humans can see them they usually move fast back down to where the water feels good to them. 

Why is it called that? I've often wondered whether "hellbender" was one of those names, like "raccoon" and "skunk" and "possum," derived from an indigenous language. Apparently it's not. Early English immigrants, seeing the animal as some sort of unnatural cross between fish, snake, and lizard, thought it swam fast because it was "hell-bent" on returning to the underworld whence it came. It's also called "snot-otter," if you  prefer. It has no name that Victorians could utter in polite company because people didn't think the animal deserved to be discussed in polite company. Nicknames like "mud dog," "grampus," "den master," and "lasagna sides" are printable but not widely understood. If you want a name that sounds polite, try "cryptobranchid." There is only one species in the genus Cryptobranchus, but if there were others, the family name would be Cryptobranchidae.

Cryptobranchus means "hidden gills." These salamanders have visible gills when they first hatch, but in the second year of their lives the external gills drop off. For the rest of their lives they breathe through bare "gill slits" and absorb oxygen through their skin. 

So why does this animal inspire so much hate? Apparently just because it's big and ugly. It has sharp little teeth and can nip if grabbed; apart from occasional self-defense the animal is a harmless part of the food chain that indicates premium water quality. It stays in the water, eating small fishes and shellfish and doing humans no harm at all. It's not big enough to compete with us for fish big enough to be worth cooking. Though it seems as if it would be a predator on fish--it will eat chunks of killed fish--it's actually a prey animal for fish.

Hellbenders, like loons, can live only where the water is deeper, cleaner, colder, and richer in oxygen than most North American streams have ever been. They're not found in lakes, ponds, or branch creeks where children might wade. 

Their family lives take the concept of patriarchy beyond the wildest dreams of any patriarchal male mammal. Males scoop out nests on the bottoms of rivers. Nests are usually made under rocks or logs, sometimes in holes in riverbanks. Females are allowed in to lay eggs in the nests, where the males fertilize the eggs after they are laid and then defend them until they hatch. Females don't bond with males; they wriggle around together as males try to fertilize eggs as soon as they're laid, but don't have sex in the sense that most animals do. Both sexes are likely to choose another mate the next time. When each female who has mated with a male lays her little round eggs in the same nest, the male may wind up tending a thousand or more eggs, a few hundred from each female. Male hellbenders take their family responsibility very seriously--so much so that they may kill and eat other males who swim too close to their nests. (When not brooding, male hellbenders seem pretty peaceable.) The eggs are about a quarter-inch in diameter and take ten to twelve weeks to hatch. Then the inch-long hatchlings swim away on their own.

Larval hellbenders resemble other baby salamanders. They have noticeable gills for about a year and a half, while they grow to about four inches long, and then they lose the gills and look more like their parents. They breathe through gill slits and through their skins. They have internal structures that are classified as "simple lungs," which they use more for buoyancy than for breathing. A lateral frill of skin on each side, and folds of skin along the body, increase skin surface area and facilitate breathing. In a few more years, when they're six to eight years old and about a foot long, they become able to breed, but they never stop growing.

A baby hellbender with small ear-like gills. Photo from NCWildlife.gov.

They seem to be able to see fairly well in the light, but hunt and eat mostly at night. 

Photo from Wikipedia. Four toes on each fore paw, five on each hind paw.

Appalachian and Ozark hellbenders are different subspecies, but can crossbreed, so they're counted as one species. 

Males and females look alike and are similar in size. Males are more aggressive; they herd gravid females into their nests and keep them there until the females lay their eggs. Females have nothing to do but hide from predators, eat, and wait to grow more eggs and mate again, so they tend to be the individuals who live longest and grow biggest.

There are believed to have been 626 populations of this species. About 40% of those populations have died out. A majority of known surviving populations seem to be declining. States where this animal has been found classify it as "threatened" or "of concerned," and some people lobby for it to be classified as "endangered." 

Threats to the species' existence include

• pollution
• de-oxygenation of river water from pollution, silt, and dams
• loss of river depth as streams silt up, a natural process aggravated by human activities such as ploughing and construction
• anglers catching and killing the animals in the belief that they eat fish and/or are venomous
• fungus and virus infections
• cannibalism when the protective fathers believe the young cannot survive, when an egg seems to be non-viable or when the water becomes muddy

They are a species that nature always intended to remain rare. Populations of hellbenders thin themselves by cannibalism if there is the least chance of overcrowding. 

These unappealing animals caught the Voice reporters' attention when dead bodies of a species many local people had never seen turned up in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Many home-loving hellbenders were washed away from their homes to succumb to what they experienced as heat strokes on the mounds of silt and mud displaced by flooding. Though North Carolina's hellbender population was estimated by ones before the hurricane and obviously decimated after the hurricane, living hellbenders have survived and still live in the affected rivers.

Though most people living in the States where they live never have seen a living hellbender and never will, there are things they can do to help this species survive:

1. Preserve stream and river banks, even along shallow branch creeks. Reduce the rate of silt transfer by encouraging large wildflowers, reeds and rushes, and trees where possible, to grow on steep, near-vertical stream banks. 

2. Stop spraying poisons in the outdoor environment. (Poisoning termites inside a building is less likely to affect wildlife.) "Pesticides" kill more valuable wildlife than pests.

3. Try planting crops in mounds of mulch, straw bales, etc., which can even be terraced along hillsides that are too steep to plough, instead of ploughing up topsoil. Mountain people prize "bottom land" that lies at or below the level of the nearest stream because topsoil does not run off every time it rains, and "bottom land" fields are the only ones my family have ploughed since about 1980, but even "bottom land" can still be built up and fertilized with organic mulch.

4. Don't support new construction projects near streams. Especially oppose mining, which adds pollution to the silt it displaces, and large "housing projects" that increase population density and local warming. True Greens already oppose "fracking" and nuclear experiments; hellbenders are just one more species that benefits when humans don't engage in these harmful activities.

5. If you inadvertently catch a hellbender while angling for bass or trawling for catfish, throw it back alive. Handle (or avoid handling) this animal carefully but without fear; it's no more dangerous than a fish of the same size.

Book Review: Alaskan Dream

Title: The Alaskan Dream

Author: Lynn Eisenhauer

Date: 2023

Quote: "This short story is a companion piece to my novel Sea of Fate."

If it's meant to advertise the novel, it doesn't. This short e-book doesn't even work as a complete short story. It introduces a character's situation but all the character does is christen his new boat, and he doesn't even spend onstage time thinking about the name. The story about this man may be worth telling--he's given up hope of finding his wife and child, which in fiction often means he's about to find them--but the short story gives no indication of it.

If writers are going to send out short stories as e-books in hope of selling more copies of their full-length e-books, those short stories should have been published in a good literary magazine.

And the Book Funnel copy I received also had the type sizes fouled up. 

What I Read When I'm Not Feeling Well

The Long & Short Reviewers web site asks "What I Read When I'm Not Feeling Well." 

It doesn't usually make much difference, unless the discomfort is coming from my eyes. I do own some books that I wouldn't try to read during a reaction to New Roundup, one of the chemicals in which irritates my eyes. Badly. Enough that I want to read only large print, or better yet do something  other than read. And if I had a high fever, or were recovering from major surgery, I'd probably just doze in front of a television set. 

The one time I spent some days reclining in bed feeling bad, with salmonella, I read through a stack of paperback books I'd acquired on a bargain sale. I alternated one Louis L'Amour Western with one novel, romance, or religious book of similar size. If I'd planned that week, since the salmonella episode involved pain and did not involve sutures that had to heal, I might have tried to plan a higher proportion of laugh-out-loud comedy. (Laughing out loud triggers the production of prostaglandins and reduces pain, except from broken ribs or sutures on the trunk of the body.) This web site does, of course, note when a book combines light, cheerful content with a light, comfortable, flexible binding, which is ideal for hospital bed reading. 

If I wanted not to laugh out loud too much, as it might be after surgery, I'd look for good genre or light nonfiction. Louis L'Amour is quite tolerable; at least, since most people have watched a few "western" movies and TV shows whether we wanted to or not, one can always try to work out which of his stories was made into a show one watched. Tony Hillerman, early Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ellis Peters, or Jane Langton would be fun to recuperate with without being too funny. Light nonfiction, as it might be popular biographies, is often available in paperback and also entertaining without much risk of ripping open any wounds. 

If I wanted to laugh as much as possible, as if might be after major dental surgery or a knee injury or anything that's painful but does not involve stitches right across the midsection, I'd look for the work of shameless comedians. Dave Barry is generally agreed to be the funniest writer in the US, Douglas Adams in the UK. P.J. O'Rourke and Terry Pratchett have been identified as runners-up. To some extent comedy is a matter of taste. I started to type a list, just thinking in alphabetical order of writers at whose work I expect to laugh out loud. Joel Achenbach? Yes, you'd laugh over his writing; you might not have read it yet. Cleveland Amory? I rolled about and pawed and whinnied during the first reading of each of his books but some people think Ranch of Dreams is too serious to be funny. I don't think anyone should read anything by Henry Beard while eating or drinking, but maybe you can do that, I don't know. Erma Bombeck's early books were hilarious, her later ones not so much. Peg Bracken was hilarious, I think, even when she was making serious points, as in her list of 108 sins everyone should at least consider whether they need to repent of, but some people used to manage not to laugh at her books. I think Art Buchwald made contemporary news stories funny whether I'd read the original news stories or not; younger people might not remember enough to agree. And so on. 

There are comic writers who remain obscure because the publishers are putting all their efforts into promoting a bigger name, and there are comic writers who remain obscure because some people are capable of reading their work without laughing out loud. I think new comedy is suffering greatly from writers' freedom to use rude words and topics. 

I think G.K. Chesterton would, after venting his initial rage, have laughed at the idea of what his phrase "purpling on the poop" brings to modern readers' minds. (Clean your minds, please. In Chesterton's day everyone knew the poop was one of the decks on a ship.) He might even have written, or laughed at, a parody that made further use of the word "poop." But now we see and hear comedians who go on stage and just shriek "Poop! Poop! Poop!" until one wants to give the command, "No! No deck at all! Throw him overboard!" 

Anyway, I like more references to literature, or at least pop culture, and news items, in comedy, and fewer references to body parts and functions. Though I can see where some comedians are getting confused. Many current songs sound like body functions and Ariana Grande claims to be a body part. It must be harder to come up with jokes like "There's a lawn, lawn trail a-winding..." than it used to be.

At some point one may get tired of comedy, old or new. Illness and medication can have effects on a person's ability to absorb new information, but some people do use periods of physical recovery as time to learn new things. This can be done in a low-pressure way by simply reading books on a new subject, or more extensively by taking an actual online course. Mileage varies. I wouldn't try to learn a new language during chemotherapy but I might try to memorize a tourist language course while recovering from a broken leg. If it worked, it'd be cool. If not, I'd remember that leg injuries have a way of being more tiresome, longer, than seems possible, and scale back expectations until the leg had thoroughly healed. (This goes out to The Polka Dot Chicken. Please don't give up knitting forever--only for the duration. I don't know why knitting would seem like work because of a leg injury, but when I had one it was/)

Petfinder Post: Homeless Animal Day

(This post is late...I don't pre-schedule the Petfinder posts. I want the featured photos to be of animals that are available for adoption on the day they're posted. And it was a rainy day, and the Internet faded in and out.)

Saturday is St Roch's Day.

"Rocks day?"

Roch, or Rock, or Rocco, was a fourteenth century European Catholic priest. France, Italy, and Majorca island off the coast of Spain all claim him; he travelled a good deal. A lot has been written about his life--much of it contradictory and improbable. He might have been born in the year 1295 or the year 1348 or some other year; the written stories disagree even on that. Some say he was born with a cross-shaped birthmark, which was taken as a sign that he was to be dedicated to priesthood. 

As a baby Roch was said to observe two partial fasts every week, taking his mother's milk only once on the days when she was restricting her food intake. This may have contributed to his becoming the sort of mixed-up kid who could find sympathetic adults, after his mother died, only in a monastery in those days. His father wanted to prepare him for the political career for which his hereditary place in the feudal hierarchy predestined him; his mother wanted him to be a priest. In any case his parents died while he was a teenager. His father left him a plummy political appointment but young Roch gave away all his worldly goods and joined a monastic order. 

As a priest he was the "confessor," the kind, weary gentleman who listens as good people enumerate their boring little shortcomings, impure or uncharitable thoughts, petty lies like "I'm glad to see you," overeating..."There is no need to linger on the details of sins already repented. Say ten extra prayers, buy two more candles for the church, and you shall be forgiven." He went to Rome during an epidemic of some sort of disease, where he nursed, as well as hearing the confessions of, people who seemed to be dying and was credited with healing some of them. When he himself became ill, he retreated into the woods, set up a shelter of broken tree branches, and lay down to recover or die. A friendly dog came and licked him in a sympathetic way, then led its human, the highest ranking local aristocrat, to discover Roch and care for him as he recovered. The dog is said to have been a greyhound, or at least some sort of hound. The disease is said to have been a "plague," meaning an epidemic. It probably was not bubonic plague, from which very few people recovered.

According to the stories, Roch then wanted to go back to his home town. Possibly because he had offended people by rejecting political office, he travelled incognito. Priests and monks were generally respected; Roch didn't even identify himself as a priest. He was arrested for espionage because he wouldn't tell anyone his name and kept in jail for five years. Since he was obviously a gentleman no one thought of lifting his shirt to check for identifying marks until he had died in jail, when people recognized his birthmark. He had had a nice shirt when arrested and, apparently by a miracle, it lasted him five years during which nobody saw him take it off. Well, if the medieval writers believed that was the sort of thing that would have happened, I'll take their word. Medieval writers unquestioningly accepted a lot of stories that sound preposterous today. When what is hard to believe is the way people behaved, I can only imagine that the medieval writers understood how people back then behaved better than I do.

Nobody knows what Roch looked like. According to his story, even while he was living people weren't too sure of anything but that he'd left town when he was very young; nobody could even guess how he was likely to have grown up. There is some disagreement about how long he lived and how old he was when he was arrested This did not stop medieval artists reaching a consensus of what he should have looked like. He was drawn with brown hair of any shade from pale sand to black coffee, but never gray; wearing a wide-brimmed hat and long tunic, often raising the hem to expose a lump (understood to be an incipient bubo, as if he had had bubonic plague) on his upper leg, and accompanied by a dog carrying a loaf of bread in its mouth. 

Why do we remember this unverifiable story of a very dubious saint? Because Roch was remembered for kindness to animals. A dog had helped him find shelter while recovering from illness, and he helped dogs find shelter and recover from illness. He became the patron saint of homeless animals and animal rescuers. People who are not Catholic may observe St Roch's Day as Homeless Animal Day. Guess how it is traditionally celebrated.

Right. Today's photo contests are for grey cats, and greyhounds, or at least hounds, that are up for adoption. The cats selected are also known to be cool with dogs, and the dogs to be cool with cats.

Zipcode 10101: Mix and Match from Pleasantville 

Their web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/mix-match-75770447/ny/new-york/rain-or-shine-rescue-ny1623/

These "brother" cats lost a good home when their human died. Mix, who looks bigger in the picture, is twelve years old and has some minor, age-related, chronic health issues. Match, who really is bigger, was not quite seven years old when the web page was set up and needs to lose a few pounds. They seem to be clinging to each other as the last souvenirs of their happy home life together, and must be adopted together. 

Zipcode 20202: Furginia from Herndon 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/furginia-77296480/va/herndon/fancy-cats-rescue-team-va145/

I've known older people, with some known German ancestry, who actually said they'd grown up in "Furginia." In this Maine Coon crossbreed kitten's case, the name refers to her fluffy fur, some of which is actually creating a health problem on her eyelids. She is expected to be recovering from the first of two corrective operations by now. Her vision seems adequate, though. Her age is not known. Maine Coon cats are typically bigger and furrier than most domestic cats. She is described as a typical kitten who likes to bounce around, play with toys, and snuggle. They don't say she must be adopted with one of the siblings shown behind her, but they do say there must be another kitten in the home. If you're not adopting her as a playmate for a lonely only kitten, you might as well inquire about her siblings. They want $250 as an adoption fee, which is not reasonable for a crossbreed but undoubtedly includes a rather high vet bill she's already run up. But you can "foster" her and make sure she's worth it to your family before you have to pay. I'd consider "fostering" all three siblings to find out which one I was willing to part with.

She's good with children, but as a general principle the shelter tries to avoid placing kittens in homes with very young children--under age six--if they're not already living with cats who have taught them good manners.

Zipcode 30303: Princess Leia from Warner-Robins 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/princess-leia-76853804/ga/warner-robins/paws-in-middle-georgia-animal-rescue-ga1028/

They don't show her siblings on the web page, but they know she's going to be a Queen Cat because she's the alpha kitten in the litter. She will probably grow into those ears. $150 just for her includes her vet bill. They don't say you will need to adopt one of the siblings unless you're adopting her as a companion for a lonely only kitten, but you will. (Our Queen Cat Serena, who spent part of her kittenhood alone with a devoted mother and doting human, says kittens MUST have other kittens to play with.) 

Bonus: Westley & Neo from Clyde 

Their web page: https://www.petfinder.com/cat/westley-76391063/nc/clyde/misfit-mountain-nc1192/

The web page doesn't say which one has been given which name. These two brother kittens are available on a "foster to adopt" basis. You pay a deposit to take them home, which seems like a perversion of the "foster" concept to me but this is one of the hurricane-hit towns we want to help to recover, and the shelter says nothing about free kibble during the "foster" period, but you get the choice of returning them or finalizing the adoption by paying for them to be neutered when old enough.  

Zipcode 10101: Bella from Texas via Brooklyn 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/bella-77734764/ny/brooklyn/true-north-pet-rescue-mission-ny1520/

Sorry. She's not a hound. This photo distracted me.

You may know someone who's always wanted a Pomeranian. If so, e-mail quickly--the web page makes it sound as if she won't be up for adoption long. This ten-year-old, seven-pound fluffball likes to bounce around and play, but those little legs can't keep up with a human for very long at one time, so she comes with her own carrying bag. She's used to going where her human goes, being scooped up and carried when she gets tired of running at heel. Her foster humans have carried her on the New York subway (where Mayor Koch once said even his guards wouldn't go) and into the laundry room in a New York apartment building, and can testify that she's brave and quiet. Pomeranians can live to age fifteen or beyond.

Now, seriously, about the hounds...There aren't actually a lot of greyhounds up for adoption. With dog races being shut down, few of this breed are being bred any more. Too bad. A friend adopted a retired racing greyhound, once. They really are wonderful pets, once persuaded that they don't have to race any more and can be pets. Sweet, patient, quiet, gentle, they don't even need much grooming. They do need a lot of food and a lot of space to run in, and they can easily run even athletic humans off their feet--they need a big fenced yard where they can run all out, just for exercise, before going for jogs with us slower lifeforms. So they're not what contemporary couch potatoes would call an easy breed to live with. Even smaller hounds tend to be easy to love and unlikely to end up in shelters, but...it's hard to pick the cutest photo because they're all cute. In the absence of real greyhounds I looked for hounds with some gray color, which makes it easier, because most hounds are black, tan, white, or some combination of those colors.

Zipcode 10101: California from Manhattan

His web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/california-77339999/ny/manhattan/social-tees-animal-rescue-foundation-ny835/

His web page was set up in March, when he weighed just five pounds. He's bigger by now. He is expected to weigh about forty pounds as an adult dog. Although he was sent to Brooklyn as "overflow" from a crowded shelter (they say "in Tennessee and St Thomas (island)"), shelter staff think he has potential and want him to be educated up to that potential. They prefer that he be adopted by someone who either has trained hound puppies before, or is willing to work with a professional trainer. He could be just a good city pet, or he could be a serious working dog. He is available to "foster-to adopt," so you can get to know him before making a final commitment. Where does California come into this, anyway? Apparently some people just think it's a cool dog name. "Here, Cal! Cal-iiii!" 

Zipcode 20202: Daisy May from West Virginia via Fairfax 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/daisy-may-wv-77156243/va/fairfax/hart-homeless-animals-rescue-team-va56/

Daisy May is described as a real hillbilly hound who's happy with just about any kind of home as long as she gets some sort of food and some attention from her humans. Cool with other animals, she likes to patrol a fenced yard and keep out intruders, like mice. She is six years old and could easily live another six years. She's not been seriously trained--they're still working on the basics of city dog life.

Zipcode 30303: Cassi from Ball Ground 

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/cassi-75140526/ga/ball-ground/semper-fi-legacy-rescue-ga1079/

Her web page is incomplete but, at full size, this was the cutest picture of a hound with any grey color and a history of peaceful coexistence with cats.  

Bonus: Holly from Mountain City

Her web page: https://www.petfinder.com/dog/holly-71868677/tn/mountain-city/rescue-dog-end-of-life-sanctuary-inc-tn464/

This terrier-hound mix is nice to other animals but likes to cling to a human and feel that she's a favorite. She is said to cuddle and clown and make treating her like a favorite very easy. 

Book Review: All in the Past

Title: All in the Past

Author: Betsy Hayes

Date: 2022

Quote: "As much as she didn't want to hear about Mr. Graffen, she hated the sound of Jacob's name."

The Graffens were the super-rich family for whom Lucy's father worked. During the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, she formed a crush on their son Jacob. When the Graffen parents caught the young couple in what was probably an experimental kiss for Jacob, they cut off Lucy's scholarship and separated the two. It might have been the very nastiness of Mrs. Graffen's remarks about Lucy "getting your gold-digging claws into my son" that have kept them thinking of a summer crush as the One True Love of Their Lives...

There's no suspense about this romance, there's no character development, and I can't feel very optimistic about the couple's prospects. This is just the basic fantasy of everyone who's ever wanted to marry money and not done it. If that's your favorite fantasy, you'll enjoy this mini-book.  

Book Review: Council of the Dead

Title: Council of the Dead

Author: K.A. Ashcomb

Date: 2024

Publisher: Liquid Hare

Length: 494 pages

ISBN: 978-952-69026-8-5

Quote: "Like a curse, they were doomed to roam the land in search of meaning."

The Council of the Dead is volume five in the series that included Mechanics of the Past. I have only the two volumes. This is one series that I want to collect. It's not at all like Xanth or Discworld but it is, like those series, a silly enough fantasy to keep me giggling while its deep philosophical undercurrents keep me awake. 

How often do I actually like fiction? I mean, beyond noting its good and bad points and who is likely to like it. How many novels would I pay money to own after I'd read the PDF version? Not many. This is one. If you feel that your mind is similar to mine, run don't walk to the bookstore to order all five of the volumes available so far. 

That said, I should mention that this is a grimmer, punkier story than Mechanics of the Past. It takes place almost entirely in, or in a cave deep under, Necropolis. None of the characters is fully human; they've all mutated into occult-type fantasy fiction characters. They live in the darksome land of postmodern, post-Christian concepts of life and death where there are no real gods and there is no real morality, and so they search for meaning for their bleak atheistic lives, some worshipping false gods like Death and the Kraken, others infatuated with the magical powers their city offers some of its citizens.

This is the home of Otis, who recreated the Finnish sampo as a machine powered by the vital force of dead people, thereby depriving their chance to be re-embodied even as ghouls, which they felt as a heinous wrong. Otis is in prison, awaiting sentencing. His fate depends partly on whether or not he can in fact make another machine like the one that's been destroyed. 

Meanwhile the city, with its various sectors and factions--witches, ghouls, vampires, necromancers, ghosts, imps, zombies, and bureaucrats, which may be the worst of all--act out a gloomy yet insightful study of practical politics. Will mitigating the fundamental evil of Necropolis destroy one of the nicer witches? What is it like to be banished to the underground city of the cave-dwelling, corpse-eating ghouls? Will the Kraken accept the deification some Necropolitans want to give him? 

This plot may sound too noir for some readers. They should read something else. If you don't go into satanic panic or depression when this kind of monsters are mentioned, but recognize them as metaphors for different approaches to applied politics, you will like this book. If you're a Christian, it will make you feel sorry for, and perhaps help you understand, the mental plight of unbelievers. If not, I don't know what you'll make of the ideas in the book, but you'll probably enjoy it.

Butterfly of the Week: Graphium Kosii

In a small, tangential way this week's butterfly is part of a political controversy. Graphium kosii has been usually, but not always, accepted as a distinct species from Graphium weiskei since 2006. (It had been described by Mueller in 1999.) Both species live on the islands known as New Guinea. G. kosii lives only on the island called New Ireland. G. weiskei is a little more widely distributed. They look very similar to each other, and to G. stresemanni. If kosii is a species, though, it's a rare and probably threatened species whose existence would justify turning its whole native island into a nature preserve.

This museum specimen, ganked from Wikipedia, is the only clear photo of Graphium kosii I found. 

Personally, I'm not opposed to nature preserves on one condition, but where that condition has been offered it has generally been violated. Nature preserves must not be owned by governments; when that happens, what's to stop somebody like Sarah Palin from strip-mining them. They should be owned by families who agree to live sustainably on the land and tolerate a certain amount of tourism. 

But shouldn't governments "own" places like the Appalachian Trail in order to protect endangered species from extinction, someone will say. What has person read about the number of endangered species, or subspecies, known to have gone extinct along the Appalachian Trail, lately?

Right. This post is about butterflies in New Guinea. Anyway, the unsuspecting butterflies we're studying this week have been pressed into the service of an unholy, antichristian religious cult. The cult calls itself Globalism. It preaches, irrationally but with religious fervor, that a tyrannical global government--with the power to enforce things like vaccine mandates, medically assisted suicide, population increase or decrease quotas, mass migrations, military conscription, etc., worldwide--is necessary to prevent war or global warming, whichever the population most fear. It refuses, with religious zeal, to consider that a tyrannical global government would have no such effect. It treats land grabs as a religious ritual.

New Guinea didn't need Graphium kosii to have extremely attractive land. It's the home of several unique island plants and animals. Its rich green mountains are what are called a tropical paradise. Its indigenous population have been isolated and illiterate, subjecting themselves to the irrational taboos and superstitions people tend to believe when they have no other idea how to reduce the danger they face every day, for hundreds or thousands of years; nobody knows how long. They have not had the means to exploit the land in the way greedy Asians and Europeans would like to do; nor have they reached a level of cultural enlightenment at which they appreciate the land for its own sake. The land and  the creatures who live on it are indeed in danger.

Through this situation flit rather pretty butterflies, small by comparison to New Guinea's Birdwing butterflies and Atlas moths, only about the size of what North Americans call our large butterflies: Graphium kosii kosii, Graphium weiskei weiskei, Graphium kosii gigantor...

Cleveland Amory, a wonderful old curmudgeon I used to want to work for, bequeathed control of his World Wildlife Fund to Globalists. The beautiful e-book linked below is an evangelical tract published by a Globalist cult--but if you read these butterfly articles, you'll want to read it, anyway, for the gorgeous wildlife photos.

https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/new_guinea_new_species_2011.pdf

Graphium weiskei, the Purple-Spotted Swallowtail, and its look-alikes are very colorful and attractive butterflies. Their wings iridesce, and also contain some color pigments that produce a pattern that often looks purple, green, blue, and black. The wingspan is usually less than three inches. G.k. gigantor, found more recently on the nearby island called New Britain, may be larger than G.k. kosii.

https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/226/10/jeb245221/310759/Subtractive-colour-mixing-with-bile-pigments

Graphium kosii live at rather high altitudes and are seldom seen by humans. Though not even close to being the rarest Swallowtails, they are among the rarest in collections. People who recognize kosii as a species usually don't have a clear photo of one.

Nobody seems to know anything about the early stages of this butterfly's life.

Web Log for 8.8-9.25

This should have gone live on 8.10.25, too.

Animals 

Sunday is "Spoil Your Dog Day," according to some person in charge of making up new holidays to celebrate on the Internet. 

Why not? It'll be easier to remove fleas and ticks with just a comb, no special shampoos or powders required. The dog will be cooler during the last hot days of summer. The coat will start growing back before cold weather arrives...well, that depends a bit on where you are. Where I am, Shaggy will be fairly shaggy again by the first frost, if he's neatly clipped today. 

Bad Poetry: Step On Back

Step forward
Step back
Back down
Back off
Off with the volume
Off with the hands
Hands in your pockets
Hands down
Down the pressure
Down the scale
Scale back 
Scale exercise
Exercise good will
Exercise patience
Patience is a virtue
Patience will prevail
Prevail over impulse
Prevail over emotion
Emotion misplaced is
Emotion wasted
Wasted time
Wasted effort
Effort to impress
Effort to please
Please sit down
Please remain calm
Calm your heart rate
Calm your ego
Ego locks horns
Ego fouls up
Up to Heaven
Up to you
You were too close
You step away now
Now you can be seen
Now you can be heard
Heard speaking your truth
Heard making sense
Sense of boundaries
Sense of respect
Respect for self
Respect for the other
Other created to be
Other than you are
Are not offending
Are stepping back
Back off from conflict
Back with a quick step
Step
Back

On Friday the Poets & Storytellers United posted a good prompt; I just kept not thinking of poems to write about it. When this happens, one way to shake something out of the writing brain is...

"

The Blitz Poem, a poetry form created by Robert Keim.

This form of poetry is a stream of short phrases and images with repetition and rapid flow.

Begin with one short phrase, it can be a cliché. Begin the next line with another phrase that begins with the same first word as line 1. The first 48 lines should be short, but at least two words.

The third and fourth lines are phrases that begin with the last word of the 2nd phrase, the 5th and 6th lines begin with the last word of the 4th line, and so on, continuing, with each subsequent pair beginning with the last word of the line above them, which establishes a pattern of repetition.

Continue for 48 total lines with this pattern, And then the last two lines repeat the last word of line 48, then the last word of line 47.

The title must be only three words, with some sort of preposition or conjunction joining the first word from the third line to the first word from the 47th line, in that order.

There should be no punctuation. When reading a BLITZ, it is read very quickly, pausing only to breathe.

"

Sometimes the most important step we can take is a step back. A support-group-for-extroverts culture may have taught us to stand too close, ask too many questions, push too hard. Living/working with cats is a good corrective: When you feel as if you're meeting resistance, back off and give the cat time to think things over. This can help resolve conflicts with humans, too.

Book Review: Living in God's Love

Apologies for this post not going live sooner...

Title: Living in God's Love

Author: Billy Graham

Illustrations: black and white photos

Publisher: Putnam / Penguin

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-399-15346-2

Length: 125 pages

Quote: “You have been born into a human family, but when you are born again, you are born into God's family. I'm asking you tonight to come and be born into God's family.”

This is a souvenir book, containing the text of sermons preached during the Billy Graham Crusade in New York City, June 2005. The late Billy Graham had been evangelizing New York City since 1957 and had been persuaded to admit that the 2005 Crusade would probably be his last one.

Apart from that...Living in God's Love contains the basic evangelical Christian message. God is perfect. Sinful humanity is separated from God by our moral imperfection. God so loved the world that God became incarnate as Jesus, the only sinless man who ever lived, and died as a sacrifice for our sins. If we repent and ask God's forgiveness, our sins can be forgiven.

This is not all that Billy Graham said to the world for fifty years, nor was he the only one saying it, but it is the message for which Graham has been best known.

The 2005 Crusade was indeed a memorable event. Not only did Billy Graham preach “probably the last” of forty-eight years of sermons; George Beverly Shea sang “probably the last” of forty-eight years of gospel songs (at least in New York City). Anyone who was impressed by the sheer longevity of these gentlemen would have wanted to be there—if only “by way of radio, television, or the Internet,” as a local minister said while introducing Graham's Friday night sermon. For those who weren't there, this book would be an excellent gift.

Is there anyone to whom I would not recommend this book, aside of course from the people who already own copies? Yes. Please don't use this book to needle Christian-phobics. It's too good a book to be used that way. I recommend a different strategy to Christians who are concerned about the souls of Christian-phobics. Christian-phobics tend to be people who have known more hypocrites than real Christians. Give them the experience of knowing a real Christian. It just might “blow their minds,” and then as their minds slowly reassembled themselves they just might lose their phobias and ask for copies of memorable Christian books.

Web Log Weekender: 8.8-9.05

First of all, this web site's Top Slow Steady Seller post has been brought fully up to date at last.

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2013/06/heres-summary-of-whats-known-about-buck.html

Animals 

More stunning photos of Malay butterflies. These are smaller species than the ones in his previous post (it'll take us years to get to them!), but no less unusual looking. 

https://ronnieooist56.blogspot.com/2025/08/butterflies-in-july-2025-more.html 

Marketing 

Among the silliest gimmicks of all time...but it worked.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/08/a-left-handed-whopper-of-story.html

Men, My Age, the Main Problem With

It's not just that their baby-making days are over--that's a good thing. It's the hang-ups they have about that fact of life and the way they become obsessed with trying. If their efforts weren't doomed, they might be able to be reconciled with their wives and be fit for anyone else to be around, again.

https://theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com/2025/08/better-stand-up-and-walk-around-if-you.html

North Carolina Update 

Seems this company came in to repair a railroad track and saw an opportunity to strip-mine a steep mountainside directly above a river. 

https://ncrenegade.com/stop-whining-part-ii/

Vegetables 

Luck to you, Gentle Readers. Lens doesn't know where it originated. I saw it posted on Tumblr by someone called Dearmrbean whom I don't know or follow.

Web Log for 8.7.25

Computers 

If you ask a plagiarism-bot the right questions, it will plagiarize existing content to "confess" it's serving Satan. Seriously.

https://ncrenegade.com/ai-3/

Food (Yum) 

If you have these vegetables in your unsprayed garden, what fun to play with food like this! Eat zose delicious, nutritious little "bug" salads!

Found on the Mirror. Lens says 

Mobility 

Citizens of the United States have a right to live in whichever State they fancy, but if they're fleeing the bad effects of leftist policies on "blue" cities and States and trying to move into "red" ones, they may find themselves unwelcome. Longish video rant, a bit repetitious, but worth sharing.

https://x.com/AlBuffalo2nite/status/1952761564534042916

Music 

So it's 2:18 a.m. I am my own nightwatchman. I'm out here on the screen porch, enjoying the good old prevailing wind from the north after last week's windless humid heat. I'm adding geographical tags to the Butterfly of the Week posts, since some people are avidly reading the ones about Asian butterflies, and listening to some of that backlog of stuff people post as audiovisual content merely because they're too lazy to type the words...and I finally come to an actual song that needed to be on Youtube. It's a good song for a Bad Neighbor who's causing my neighborhood to need nightwatchmen, which has never happened before. Hello Wrymouth, disgrace to the family, disgrace to humanity? Johnny Cash didn't know you, but he was singing about you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJlN9jdQFSc&t=171s

Personality Test, Not Very Scientific 

This is a seventy-year-old test designed to test your receptivity to fascist ideas. The web site that hosts the digital version admits it's not very scientific. I will go further. I think it's not well designed. Fwiw, according to the test I'm a little less sympathetic to fascist ideas than the average American. To people who've read what I'd call a reasonable amount of European history for an American high school graduate, the design of the test is dead obvious. Anyway, conservatives can use this test to avoid sounding like fascists online...

https://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

Book Review: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Title: Rescuing the Bad Boy

Author: Anna Catherine Field

Quote: "You'd think at nearly thirty, he'd come up with something better to do with this time."

Could this e-book ever have benefitted from developmental editing. The book title Rescuing the Bad Boy and series title Last Chance at Love made me think it was going to be about a desperate older woman convincing herself that she's "in love" with one of those juvenile delinquents shuffling around in fifty-year-old bodies. It's not that, but, as the line quoted shows, it's not been professionally edited either.

Gabrielle is a social worker who's been managing a halfway house for juvenile delinquents in adult bodies, like the one referred to above. He's mostly harmless; he just hasn't learned, from Gabrielle's kind of approach, that it's wrong to steal other people's cars to go "joy riding." He is, once again, locked up for test-driving another neighbor's car. And really, as long as the consequences of test-driving neighbors' cars instead of going to a used car lot and talking to the dealer are limited to free meals and rent in what's probably a reasonably clean jail, followed by free meals and rent at Gabrielle's place with a few pep talks about self-esteem, he's likely to keep "joy riding" until he's ninety years old, unless he dies first. As long as the federal grants keep rolling, Gabrielle will keep exercising her maternal instincts on him and his kind.

In one of those coincidences that happen in cornball romance novels, "Chance" happens to be the name of the judge, who doesn't want to tell Gabrielle her approach to crime is wasting taxpayers' money. What he wants is to ask her for a date, as he did in high school, but since they quarrelled in high school the judge has yet to reach a decision on what to say. Right.

When the federal grant money is cut off, however, Chance and Gabrielle have a chance to talk. This story does not end with "happily ever after." Field is not that amateurish. There will be a short series of longer novels about other couples who get married and live happily ever after, and then Chance and Gabrielle will be ready to affirm that they do.