Romeo, Romeo ...

Well, I had thus far regarded the little dog that belongs to my friend as just a noisy nuisance.  But recently, when I was visiting, I noticed—several compounds away—an interesting-looking dog.  Our dog—you know who I mean; he of my friend, who owns the cat—I had seen on a previous occasion, when we were ready to head out, barking at a dog at some distance away.  I never paid much attention to this behavior; all we wanted was to get him indoors and head out.  But I did notice that the dog was a Dalmatian.  This most recent dog I had seen was definitely a Dalmatian; not that I could see the individual spots, but I could see a general spottiness.

Now that I had been alerted to a one time general doggie presence out õver there, now, every time I looked in that direction, I've been seeing a Dalmatian pacing up and, down in their yard.  A couple of days later, I had concluded that it was a female, and a young one, too.  And I had never heard her bark, not even once. 

Our man, in contrast, barks his head off at the least opportunity: people walking along the alley, cars, bicycles; squirrels of course, our neighbors, and certainly Dalmatians.

The Dalmatians, a very distinctive breed, because of the spots, were used to guard carriages, in the 1600's and 1700's, and especially the carriages of fire companies (with hoses and pumps on board).  I read somewhere that they were troublesome to train, because they were exceedingly food oriented.  Well, I thought to myself, show me a dog that isn't.  OK, I'm going to check out that prejudice right now ...

Well.  There isn't any mention of food!  However, apparently they're more intelligent than average, and so training them has challenges.  They also need a lot of exercise (not apartment dogs) and supervision.  Honestly, all dogs are food oriented; Dalmatians being clever, probably find many ways of getting food (from the kitchen) which results in the reputation for stealing food, and being food oriented.

Well, I was back again, visiting with my friend, and went out in the yard, and there was the Dalmatian, about 100 yards away!  I started at it, and it stared back, and proceeded to sit and regard me closely, to see what I would do. 

I grinned at it, and waved.  It considered that as unwarranted familiarity, and warned me with a bark.  Then 'our' dog ran up and barked back, eliciting no response from the Dalmatian.  I got bored, and went inside. 

I so want a Dalmatian to play with!  They're moderately large dogs (they were bred by crossing Pointers with Great Danes), and have a lifespan of around 13 years, in case my readers are interested.  In any case, getting a dog is a lifetime commitment.  If you get one, and later give up (it's not Good Fit, etc,) the dog will be miserable.  Any dog is a lifetime commitment.  If you don't have time, don't get a dog. 

Kay

Margaret Alton: A Wonderful Heroine

I wrote the series about Helen over many years, from when I was a teenager, to when I was in my thirties.

That's a long time!  Obviously, I was a very different person when I first invented Helen, from when I wrote about Helen becoming a mother.

I was a senior in college when I was writing On the Run, which is where her little boy is born.  But Helen was a mother starting earlier, when the two little girls, Gena and Alison join her, and I was still improvising a personality for Helen, based on myself, really.  Shortly afterward, when I might have been getting ready to write the books that continue the Helen story past On the Run, I was busy teaching, writing lots of stories unrelated to Helen, and reading, especially the Darkover books.

The Darkover series is complicated.  The author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, who also wrote The Mists of Avalon, and several other books—one of which, Firebrand, is a favorite of mine—wrote the Darkover books over more than a decade, and I'm willing to bet that not only did her concept of Darkover morph over the years, but she also probably forgot some of the facets of her early concepts of the planet.  But then, she wrote several books—mainly three—centered around Margaret Alton.

Margaret ('Marguerida') Alton is an interesting character.  We first meet her as a little kid who is put in an orphanage, while her parents are engaged in an epic, superhuman battle.  That, right there, would have been enough to guarantee that the kid would be psychologically damaged.  In addition, her (Marguerida's) mother had huge problems, and was extremely neurotic, to put it mildly.  Her father rescues her, and leaves the planet—Darkover—with the child and his new wife (much more sane than little Margaret's birth mother),  and they try to make a life (on Earth, incidentally).  Some 20 years later, Margaret is a scholar of ethno-musicology, and is sent to Darkover with an elderly colleague, to study the folk music of Darkover.  (That's what ethno-musicologists do: they study folk music.)

In case you didn't know—and you probably don't—what makes Darkover interesting is that a large number of people of Darkover are gifted psychics.  They can read minds, they can send mental messages, they can cause pain, and so on.  It turns out that Margaret is, in fact, a generational psychic talent.

Now, obviously, apart from the fact that Margaret (or Marja, as her father calls her) can sing, and she is an able musician, there's not a lot that I could have borrowed from her character for the character of Helen.  But in fact, I appear to have borrowed quite a great deal!  Marja marries, and has children, and for some of the character of Helen as a mother, I modeled her on Margaret Alton.

At least some of what I have written above I've written before, I'm sure.  Well, that's only to be expected; this is an instance where one author simply acknowledges her debt to another author.

Kay

Indiana Fever

I have never been interested in the game of Basketball.  I knew it involved people running up and down this court, and attempting to toss a soccer-ball sized ball into one of the baskets at the two ends of the court.

When I realized that guys would leap up, pull themselves up on the rim of the baskets and stuff the ball in, I lost what little interest I had in the game; I felt that any style and grace there was in the game had been taken away!

Then, when I was visiting some cousins some years ago, one of my littlest cousins showed me that there was a Basketball hoop buried behind some conifers in their backyard, and pestered me to help her clear up the space around the hoop, and finally to play Basketball with her!  She was a cute, funny, bright little thing, so I couldn't resist. 

The way she played it—she was about 10—it was all about getting the ball in the basket from different spots on the court.  (We had bought a new net for the hoop.)  This was actually a lot of fun, and once I had returned home, my aunt would send me regular reports about how the kid was getting seriously into the sport, hoping to entice me to visit again!  There was no physicality in the game as she and I played it, just hand-eye coordination.

That's where matters stood until last year, when Caitlin Clark became famous in the media. 

I was immediately drawn to this girl.  At first, I was still clueless about every aspect of the game except getting the ball in the baskets. 

After I had watched a few highlights reels, I realized how much fun it was to watch the passing game.  And CC was really great at passing.

I also began to admire how generous and civic-minded she was.  (She probably realizes that no matter how much she gives away, we would expect yet more from her.  I don't think she's resentful of that expectation.)

Then, I began to take an interest in some of the other players in her Indiana Fever team: Aliyah Boston, Lexie Hull, Kelsey Mitchell, and then, later this year, Sophie Cunningham, DeWanna Bonner, and others whose names I haven't learned. 

I hesitate to write about my feelings about these women, in case they're taken amiss, but they're so wonderful in many ways that I can't help myself!  I have commented about Caitlin at length so I don't need to, any more.  Her niceness as a girl is partially balanced by her determined attitude as an athlete, and a member of her team. 

Aliyah Boston strikes me as a very kindhearted girl; the opposite of mean.  Whenever she speaks to the Press, there's a strong element of idealism that is present.  That's a very endearing quality. 

Kelsey Mitchell comes across as a player who has just been fired up, and is determined to push the team to greatness. 

Lexie Hull is a cross between a tough, physical player, and an ultra girly girl.  Many of the members of the team—not all—are surprisingly into makeup and fashion; that makes some of the jocks in the team cringe, and I laugh to myself.  But Lexie does little mini-podcasts that appear on YouTube, and they make me crack up!

Sophie Cunningham is very interesting.  She is fearless about what she feels is unfair targeting of Caitlin and maybe others, for unnecessary roughness from other teams.  She seems comfortable with physical conflict as well as tough talking; she doesn't hold back when Caitlin has been roughed up.  To balance all this, Sophie is bubbly and cheerful in front of the cameras, and determined not to come across as a dragon.  I love her sunny disposition, and I hope neither the WNBA nor the Fever management act against Sophie.  I don't know about such things, being a determined outsider, but it would ruin the team. 

Kay

Fear of Intelligence

I think Donald Trump is afraid of perceived intelligence in people.

If he meets someone who talks at length (or really fast) about some abstruse topic, designed to put their audience on the defensive, the president must have been intimidated, when he was younger.  Of course, over 79 years of being wrong-footed by 'intellectuals' gave him a lot of practice in dealing with them!  Unfortunately,  he probably borrowed some of those techniques to make himself sound smarter (than he really is).

But when he got into politics (having been taken in by his own tricks, and persuaded that he was handsomer, more intelligent, and more admired and popular than he really was) he began to speak in sentence fragments, both to disguise his declining acuity (sharpness), as well as to connect better with people whom he thought were less educated than he was.  He also took to heart the principle that people of low intelligence always bragged about how smart they were.  So to dispel the people's distrust of intellectuals, he boasts about how smart he is, hoping that they will see behind his joking reference to how sharp he is.  It gets a little tiring to keep unraveling these little deceptions, especially as it all gets clearer as we go along. 

I was suspicious about intelligent people when I was in college.  Everybody was trying hard to display their super intelligence, and so you got accustomed to it after a while.  Yes, there were some people smarter than me.  But each one was smarter than me in only particular ways, some of them in some ways, some of them in others.  I began to realize that their intelligence was less important than their motives.  I got better at discerning their motives as time went on, and I just disregarded the ones whose motives I wasn't sympathetic to (always leaving room for them to have a change of heart).  By this time, I wasn't suspicious of them too much. 

With people who want a lot of power, there seems to be a lot of pretense, a lot of play-acting.  So Trump pretends to admire certain people—Putin, Musk, Netanyahu, etc.—hoping to get something from them.

It's all very sad.  A lot of his helpers in his cabinet are also pretending.  Once he discovers this, he'll pretend that he knew all along!  It would be comic, if it wasn't so sad. 

Kay

It's 249 Years and One Day!

Oops; I made a mistake: it's only 249 years.

I don't think the maga people have much of a plan for 2026, except to create confusion.  We have one tiny year in which to set things right!!

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated matters, the young artists of DA (a website for young artists—DA stands for Deviant Art) are confused about this new fashion of gray hair color.  Artificially coloring the hair of women gray is, I believe, a 21st Century thing.  But Asian artists just love that style.  So when they're depicting say, the Goddess Aphrodite, they give her grey hair!  Makes no sense. 

Kay

It's Independence Day!

I have been thinking: do I want to celebrate Independence Day this year?  Or ever again?

But you know what?  I'm glad to think that nobody owns Independence Day.  The celebration is about a single thing: the Rule of Law.  In an Election Year, we select someone to oversee the law, and whether, and how, the law is obeyed.

These last few years, a large portion of our fellow-citizens—not a majority, in my belief, but I could be wrong; it's a matter of knowing what people are thinking—have come to think that the laws are not working out, and that something desperate has to be done about it.  It's just that they have put their faith in a weak person.  Who has to, every once in a while, make a show of how strong he wants to appear.

Freeloaders.  A large portion of the Conservatives* believe that too many people are enjoying the national wealth, specifically those who have little or no income.  We have those who believe that these poor folks are mostly immigrants, and are in the situation they're in due to self- inflicted reasons. 

But it's important to examine just how much of the National wealth is being siphoned away by these so-called freeloaders.  Very little indeed.

Big Businesses.  The biggest businesses have used their influence—allowed by congress who mistakenly thought that these business will use their lower taxes to benefit the people—to negotiate extremely low taxes, and to get congressmen friendly to these businesses elected.  Their low rates, lower than the rates of citizens, are an enormous loss of revenue.  And what's more, they keep influencing elections, resulting in low tax rates for them, forever, until someday, Congressmen realize that the low rates of the biggest businesses push everybody else's rates higher!

So there certainly are freeloaders.   But they're very rich freeloaders, and they don't fit everyone's image of a freeloader.