According To Hoyt

On the bad side I have got markedly worse the last two days, and there’s a suspicion…. Okay, Dan thinks it sounds like I have pneumonia. Which he has reason to know because it wouldn’t be the first time. Again, the threat of dragging my butt to the doctor if this doesn’t improve. So, I hope it improves and will rest and such (Such as consume mass quantities of lemon tea and try to breathe very deeply), but I’m frustrated, as I intended to CLEAN today and the state of the house is making me sweat.

On the good –? — side, people on Twitter have been exceptionally stupid in ways that are so stupid they’re almost amusing. Or perhaps I just feel they’re amusing because my brain is starved for oxygen. Could be either.

We’ll gloss over the first super-genius, because I’m not convinced he wasn’t an AI or someone following a script. He did his best — after disparaging Elon’s mind, and my saying he mustn’t know many smart people — to get me to brag about my IQ and when I didn’t do that (my opinions of IQ as a measurement are well known. It measures something. I’m just not sure it’s what most people think it is) he proceeded as though I had. It ended with him declaring me a very bad writer because I’m not Ursula LeGuin (Those of you who know she tempted me into writing initially because she p*ssed me off so badly, and who have been following my most recent attempt at the book that engendered can feel free to laugh into your sleeves) and finished (!) by declaring my books the moral equivalent of Pinochet. (!)

We’ll gloss over it, because it’s like trying to argue with Kamala’s word salads, where none of it means what he thinks she means. I mean…. seriously? The only way to interpret that nonsense is to assume to him the definition of good literature is what promotes ideas he agrees with. And while that seems to be the left’s definition of “good literature” most of them are too smart to say it out loud. Or, once having said it out loud, realize they’re not painting themselves in the best color.

Since part of his script(?) included calling me meek and polite or something like that, then answering my tweet laughing about this (come on guys. Meek. Me.) by saying geniuses didn’t get bent out of shape (note I never claimed to be a genius) I’m going with the assumption he’s an AI script. Even the fifty cent army, following a script, is better than that at arguing.

So we’ll gloss over him, though he was, it turns out, an harbinger of things to come. At least yesterday I got a Super Genius claiming they could and WOULD ban private automobiles. (And I presume all internal combustion engine.)

I haven’t gone back, partly due to a friend visiting to condole on Valeria, partly due to the fact that attempting to cough out a lung is taking pretty much all my remaining energy. But–

His comment was in my making fun of someone saying while they realized that banning private transportation wouldn’t work with far flung people, people should be encouraged and given subsidies to move nearer other people.

My answer to his boastful nonsense was to point out that he would be dead. Then I realized he might think I was threatening him, rather than predicting consequences, so I pointed out he didn’t know where food came from.

Okay, I do get that transport trucks are not always private, but let’s work through this, okay?

I once lived in a tiny country — it’s amazing how small it is now that it has a highway system — where almost no one had a private car. I mean, there were still tons of them, but it was perhaps one per hundred people. And many/most of those were company cars.

On top of which the country was developed on a medieval plant, restricted by ox cart and carriage, meaning that population density was already, to begin with, much higher than the US, even the US East, and that population was distributed in concentrations roughly equivalent to a day travel on foot or less all along major routes.

I don’t know if I’m making any sense. Look, oxygen. But like this: the American West is dotted with little population groups (villages/towns) about 30 minutes away from each other by train, because of when it was settled. Nowadays that’s about 15? 20? minutes drive. Most of the tiny towns are dying or have died, which makes this harder to see, but it can still be gleaned.

In Europe, particularly in Portugal because it’s a seaside country and has a desirable climate (probably. I found it a bit wet, but…) it’s very densely populated, and about maybe five miles between population centers, large or small. The smaller population centers cluster around larger towns, and therefore there is a movement of live-in-the-periphery work-in-town that’s predictable and capable of being accommodated by public transport.

Even so, even with all the advantages of geography, people still needed to live far away, and those people needed private transport, even when I was little. You could sort of make do with long range public transport, but it was not easy.

To explain: most people who worked the land still had to live in fairly isolated locations, because they needed room to grow food in, (even though Portugal is so ridiculously fertile an acre MIGHT feed a family.) And they needed to come to town for supplies/seeds/ etc, not necessarily in a schedule cogent with public transport. And also well, have you ever taken a cow to the vet in public transport? The mind boggles. Okay, the vet could come to you, but if he’s dealing with rare public transport to isolated places…. your cow will die.

This is in a tiny country.

The US is not a tiny country. And again, I get the feeling of arguing with people who either aren’t American or who live in such large enclaves that they have no idea what the rest of America is like. Or, more probably, who want reality to conform to their mental maps. Which are drawn in crayon, and possibly the contents of their diapers.

There is no way in something the size of America that you can maintain population, even a tenth the population, if you forbid private transport. There will not be the ability to live remote to grow food. And unless people are now like angels, and don’t need to eat, that won’t work.

I mean, guys, I know you can live in places like NYC without a car. In fact, a privately owned car might be an hindrance, though people still have them from when they need to live. But from my reading (I’ve never lived there) that also restricts you. If my reading is correct, each neighborhood is almost a city in itself, experience wise, and you rarely venture out of it. Okay, you don’t need to. You have everything right there. But the everything you have depends on people who live remote to very remote, and need private cars, because their lives don’t move at the rhythm of public transport. And because public transport is hard to organize for remote and dispersed population.

I mean, they can ban privately owned vehicles. Of course they can. But at that point they are running straight into “never give an order you know won’t be obeyed.” Because even tiny Sri-Lanka rebelled after its rulers attempted to starve it with dictatorial mandates.

And sure, they can ban things on the sly by making gas super-expensive banning sales and new cars and…. If you assume Americans are less inventive than Cubans who have managed without new parts for over fifty years and still have functioning cars. And if you assume that within a month there wouldn’t be homemade cars made of plywood and living room sofas running on used fry oil. These are things I don’t advise to assume. Not if you put Americans in a place where it’s “Be inventive” or “die.” I mean, if you’re going to have to break the law to drive a car, might as well break it and build your own cheaper one.

And yes, I do realize this puerile “Super genius” would tell me that reducing population is the point of it. Somehow these idiots never realize THEY are the population they want to reduce. They always think their non-existent massive brains would rescue them from doom. Somehow. They’re too valuable to the state, I think is their idea. That they might be most valuable as compost is not something they contemplate. Which…. is the limitation of their brains.

Ultimately perhaps I shouldn’t be too upset at the poor idiots. The left is at war with reality. Why wouldn’t its indoctrinated cannon fodder think it’s a just war?

And now I’m going to take a nap. Which is more productive than trying to figure out what’s in these morons’ heads, right?

There might be doctor later, when husband comes down from the office. I hope not, but there might be.

I’ll just make lemon tea in the meantime.

I thought she was seventeen, but checking the blog, she was only 15. I do have pictures of her as an adult, but they’re hard to find, and harder to tell apart from other two voids, now also departed.

Above, she was only three weeks old, and just recovering from the massive eye infection that caused her mom to bring her to the humans, and ended up with us bottle raising her.

Dan was always her favorite person in the world.

We unfortunately gave her to someone totally unworthy, but she came back to us in 2018 and lived with us till today.

She has been losing weight, but I thought it was her not eating while daddy was gone, but today she was hiding and visibly panting. I made an appointment, thinking they could give her pain meds, and she’d be fine.

But her heart was… funny, and the doctor said if we were going to try to save her she’d have to go into the emergency vet, and she expected her to die overnight anyway.

With broken hearts, we chose to let her go.

Yes, she could be feisty. And she was not a cat person. She loved humans and was very sweet to us, but she hated all cats. You see, she was raised by humans from her earliest memories.

I hope ever after, if we’re worthy, she’ll be there waiting for us.

I feel bereft and numb, and a little aching. I hope Havey stays with us through the end of the year. I’m not ready for another loss.

Let There Be Candle Light By Orvan Ox

After the last post about the simpler (no pressure or mantle) kerosene lamps and lanterns, someone suggested a post about candles. This seems a bit strange, at least initially. Candles are rather simple things and who has not used one or at least seen one used even if merely for a few moments atop a cake? And yet… there are various sorts of candles, some better for light and some better for heat, as well as various holders and lanterns. And even so, while the modern era might go on about lumens for brightness, it’s candlepower that seems more readily understandable.

There are certainly many sorts of candles, but for “grid down” the purpose is light, heat, or both. It’s not about ambiance, entertainment, or who knows what else. This constrains things. The “birthday candle” doesn’t last long enough to be practical. The scented candles might be alright now and then, for some, but for any duration they can get overpowering. The big pillar candles might be alright for a while, but are subject to having the outside become a light-filtering wall as the center burns down. If they have multiple wicks, though, this might be mitigated and allow for a bit more light.

What it comes down to, at least for me, is unscented tapers, thinner pillars, and tea light candles. The tapers fit into various candle holders and even candelabras and, like the thinner pillars, are for providing light. Tea lights are made to keep things warm, and some can last several hours. Tea lights do provide some light and there are camping lanterns that use such. These are rather small and so the wall of the thing is close to the flame, thus it gets quite hot.

A few examples:

First, the tapers. A nice looking candelabra, with five candles so plenty of candlelight. And in the back a very simple candle holder. These are both “set it place and leave it alone” sorts of things. Moving them means the liquid wax at the top of the burning candle is apt to spill… possibly onto you. For paraffin and soy waxes this is annoying enough. Beeswax has a higher melting point/range and burns are all too likely. The ancient looking holder with the finger ring lets one carry the candle and any wax spills are caught by the brass, not the hand or arm.

The pillar in front is another simple holder, meant to be left where it was set and lit. The pillar contained all in glass can be readily moved around, just only grip well under the flame. The candle with the glass envelope does flicker some, but surprising little much of the time. It also seems to last quite a long time.

A couple candle lanterns. The one with the glass chimney is nice, but the lack of air intake (as manufactured) other than via the top of the chimney means it flickers quite bit. That’s unmodified. It was not unusual for a person to (with chimney removed!) poke a few nail holes in the base to let air in. One could also drill holes, of course. The other is a sort of “flashlight” and with the design of the handle, it can be hung on a nail or such. That’s a nice, fancy(-ish) thing made to look fairly nice. A larger soup can and some time with a metal snips and a bit of work to deal with sharp edges and it might not look as nice, but would also serve.

A tea light lantern. It’s not super bright (what candle is?) but there is some light.

But where the tea light really does well, is to provide heat, even if not very much. But if one provides some heat, more than one can provide more heat. An ideal heat source? Not really. Right, proper heaters certainly do better. But in a pinch something like this “dubious slapdash heater” might be enough to keep a small room if not comfortable at least tolerable.

This is a 5 by by grid of tea lights on an old cookie sheet, with a ‘cooling rack’ holding up a copper plate and a heat-powered fan to spread the heat around the room. The copper plate is admittedly expensive (fancy thing for using cast iron on a glass top range without worrying much about it) but aluminum is also a good thermal conductor – if it was not, why are most heat sinks aluminum?

There are some specialty tools for dealing with candles, which are not really necessary, but I’ll be complete and mention them. There is a wick adjuster, a wick trimmer, and a snuffer.

The wick adjuster might seem to be something to keep a wick straight up, but that can be the wrong thing to do. A taller flame is a brighter flame, true. A too tall flame is a sooting flame, however. Self-trimming candles have wicks that curl some and thus the end of the wick is burned away. If the candle is not self-trimming, adjusting the wick to have it burn off might be called for.

The trimmer is a fancy scissors that can catch the trimmed wick. Trimming is done before the candle is lit (or after it is extinguished). The wick should start about ¼ inch high.

And the snuffer is just that. A little bell to cover the flame and snuff it out. This has the advantage of not getting burnt fingers from pinching out the flame, or possibly spattering wax from blowing out the flame.

If you really to delve into things candle, there are plenty of texts on how to make your own or how they are made. For “what’s going on” there is The Chemical History of A Candle by Michael Faraday. You can find that on Project Gutenberg.

Once more, with feeling, I’m going to be the voice that cries in the desert. It’s not that anyone listens, but I have to try. And hey, if you can, spread the word. I don’t know if these help, but it’s logical and they can’t hurt.

Unless you’re in an all vote by fraud… er mail state DO NOT VOTE EARLY. Look, voting early just tells them how many votes they need to fake. The only way we can win against the fraud is with a total suckerpunch.

So, unless you’re in an all vote by mail state, vote as late as possible. And if you’re in an all vote by mail state, if they have a place you can come to vote if you spoil your ballot do so, and vote at the last minute. The later the better.

Vote as late as you can get away with. Take friends with you to vote as late as possible.

AND DO NOT — REPEAT — do no use the machines. If there’s an option for getting the paper ballot and fill it, do so, even if the line is ten times as long.

At this point we know, and there was an article on this site about it, that AT BEST Dominion machines are massively insecure. At worst, well…. They were created to help a Venezuelan tyrant win. You fill in the blanks.

So, again from the top: vote as late as you can get away with. Vote on paper.

Until we can get the whole thing reformed, that’s the best we can do.

And hey, even if they fraud themselves in, let’s make them spin up 400 million votes for Commie LaWhorish. Then everyone will know! It’s a goal.

Come on, 400 million!

When I was in Europe, whether visiting in Portugal or in brief airport sojourns in Madrid and Amsterdam I kept running into weird things coming off the TV. No, seriously.

“The government must provide more affordable housing.” “We demand the government create more pre-school slots.” “Government must provide more transportation.” “Government needs to create more child care.”

Look, it was so pervasive that I heard it twice at least per airport, though I only stayed there a couple of hours.

And it hit me wrong.

I’m not going to say that we don’t have our idiots claiming that “Government must provide” fill in the blank. I’m sure we’d find tons of them in deep blue areas, and they practically jump in front of the mic at Democrat conventions.

But the truth is that it’s not universal here. And in general, it’s understood that government doesn’t “create” things or “give” you things. At some level, in our back brains, we know it’s a matter of the government “allowing” i.e. getting the heck out of the way and letting things happen.

Most of the things we really desperately want government to “provide” are things that they should and we’re entitled to from them: border security. National defense. Answers.

But in Europe the phrasing wasn’t even questioned. And I’ve seen the same from Australian posters on Twittex.

It makes me wonder, it does. Do they think government is going to be out there with trowel and bricks building houses? If not, where do they think it comes from?

It’s like Commie La Whorish wanting to give every black man a 20k non-payable-back loan. Where does she think money comes from? Oh, yeah, sure, print it. But when you print it, since it’s a symbol of value, not value itself, it just devalues the other symbols out there. So in the end, it comes from all our pockets, including those of black men. And it will buy less and less the more you print.

Every time I heard “Government must provide” and what followed was not “Evidence they’re not a criminal conspiracy against their own people” my hackles rose, and I started talking back to the TV in a couple of languages. For some reason this performance amused my dad, though I’m not sure he understood what the objection was.

You see, they have become convinced that the government giveth, the government taketh away, blessed be the name of the government. And at this point what they expect the government to do is the equivalent of expecting vampires to produce living children.

I’m not saying we don’t have trouble right here. And if we manage to thread this needle and get ourselves out of this pinch, it will be proof certain that G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the united states of America.

But I hate to say this, in the fight against globalist technocracy, Europe’s feet are in a cement bucket. It is impossible to fight against intrusive, all controlling government when you think government is the engine of the economy.

In this global fight, our allies are more than a little brain damaged. Yep. I’m very afraid it is up to us again to once more get the chestnuts out of the fire.

Build under, build over, build around. Show the world there is another way. Because when the increasingly incompetent kakistocracy collapases, the world will be in dire trouble.

And we’re the only ones not waiting on directions from above.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

https://amzn.to/3AimcR0FROM PAM UPHOFF: The Bad Cop

“There was a shield piercing Impression on the bullet. Karl had a shield up, too, and it wouldn’t have stopped that bullet.” A faint snort. “I think he’s a little indignant that the ‘Bad Cop’ saved him.”
Police Captain Lord Daniil Ambrose Vinogradov grinned. “As opposed to the Good Cop? I’m afraid that when it comes to double teaming on a suspect, the role of Bad Cop does come rather easily to me. And Nix is a damn good cop.”
“Ah. I thought you two disliked each other?”
“We’re rivals for the next promotion, and, well, I am more aggressively ambitious and less well mannered. Or to be less polite, a ladder-climbing asshole.”

As the attack on the 300, the Government Council, leaves the Three part Alliance without leadership, a runaway teenager leads a police detective deep into trouble, and romance.

https://amzn.to/3YumrlfFROM JERRY BOYD: Mei’s Quest

Mark and Denise just want a little time off for a honeymoon. Wouldn’t you know that’s too much to ask? Denise’s mother has a little project she needs their help with.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Healer, Hunters, and Hearts: Familiar Generations Book Seven

Birds of mischief flock together …

Healer and Hunter, Deborah Chan Lestrang makes her way in the world as an herbalist and Healer who also hunts fell creatures when needed. Tensions inside her extended family call for a healer of hearts as well—a task far trickier, perhaps, than easing physical pain.

Weaker magic workers report being harassed by birds, birds inside a shield. Foul creatures appear, brought by a gate-spell cast by a coven. Or was it?

An old ill resurfaces …

Word comes from the north of a new drug, one that seems to grant magical abilities to those who take it. And that does not kill them as quickly as heart’s fire did. Could the birds of ill omen and the new pharmaceutical be related?


Deborah must find a path between duties and desires, the past and the present. But she does not travel alone. And she is her parents’ daughter. If she can survive Master Lestrang’s chili and his curries, she can banish abyssal evil. Maybe.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Meals on Wheels

Not by the (nonexistent) hair on her chinny-chin-chin…

Meg Turner, vampire, accountant, ruler of her own small territory. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Not if you ask her, it doesn’t. Because the world’s going mad, the idiot mortals in charge are forcibly shutting down the economy without the understanding that it won’t start up again as easy as it’s going down, nor that it’s creating a nasty blood shortage for hospitals, much less vampires.

Even better, the head of her line is invading her dreams again, and teaching her history of all things. And teaching her about the laws, and why they’re there. It’s not just to avoid being noticed by humans capable of staking, beheading, and burning vampires during daylight hours—a vampire that breaks fundamental laws turns into something worse than a vampire.

And she’s got a bunch of those knocking at her border, wanting to come in. Worse yet, they’re sending their day-help into her territory to kidnap their meals, and they keep mistaking her for prey. And leaving their discarded empties in her territory to make it look like she’s draining humans without concern for the laws.

This really isn’t looking good, and it’s really not safe for her still-living friends and family.

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: On Account of a Dame

Welcome to the New Jazz Age!

It’s the Roaring Twenties all over again — well — the 2120’s, that is. Where New York City has reverted to its Jazz Age roots of two centuries before. What’s missing? Prohibition, and gun control. What’s not missing? Tough guys, and the dames who (sometimes) love them. Gin joints. Speakeasies. Dance halls. The Social Register is still a thing, and the Beautiful People litter the society pages of the local hypernews sites.

Enter a typical gumshoe private detective — a member of that high society himself, yet a man who left society long ago for other pursuits. And his latest client, a rich young woman of leisure, who needs her new husband followed.

Throw in the recently-crowned queen of one of Chinatown’s tongs, a beautiful investment wizard from upstate, and a hundred million dollars in assets, and suddenly it’s all

On Account of a Dame.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Curses And Wonders

A collection of tales of wonder and magic.

A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair.

A woman fights a curse on her lands.

A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things.

And more tales.

Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

https://amzn.to/3UevEvuFROM LEIGH KIMMEL: City of Blinding Light

The Columbian Exposition has transformed Chicago into a vision of the bright shining future. However, the electric lights that turn night to day bring no joy to Kitty Hawthorne, and not just because they are the work of her employer’s chief rival. Now Edison wants her to abandon her investigation of Tesla’s alternating current system and look into a mysterious newcomer. Who is Samuel Gillian, who devises calculating machinery as easily as he builds flying machines?

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: EXAMPLE

While I’m sick — yeah, still kind of stewing. Better, but not well. I suppose it’s that whole “when you’re older you heal slower” but I’m kind of impatient — I’ve been preventing myself from doing what patently needs to be done around the house by watching endless youtube videos.

And somehow I settled into the channel of this guy who does “Faces of the Forgotten” (I first discovered him while looking up a curious sculpture in a cemetery in Iowa city.) Okay, full disclosure, my ADD spastic self watches him at 2x the speed, because otherwise I would get very impatient, but he tells interesting stories, in interesting places.

It’s frankly a little weird for me to watch it, because I’m the person who doesn’t even like to go to cemeteries. I know lots of people enjoy it, but me? Other than visiting grandma’s grave (just off the pic, above) I don’t really have any interest in wandering around cemeteries. Weirdly we did some on this visit, because my husband was fascinated by some of the imagery and sculptures in the old cemetery. (I don’t remember now when the decree came out to stop burying people IN the church, and the cemetery was started, but I think 18th century or thereabouts. Sometime in the twentieth it was decreed the sculptures had to be marble.)

My family has a crypt there, now, but we didn’t until mom bought one. We were buried in the “rented ground”. So, the way it worked is you were buried in the dirt, in an area reserved for it, and I think the rental period was 25 years? Which in Portugal in that region is enough to reduce you to bones. Then you could buy a small niche for the bones. And someone else would be buried in the plot you were buried in. Yes, this seemed perfectly normal to me, as a kid. My little cousin Dulce, my age, was buried in such “rental ground” when she died in the small pox epidemic that almost — but obviously not — killed me. For most of my childhood, we used to go and light candles at her grave for all Saints Day. Mind you, her grave was in the portion of rented ground marked off for children. I wonder if it still exists or is as large as it was.

ANYWAY, moving right along, as I said, my mom bought a crypt in dad’s name, but for bizarre family politics reasons, my grandmother (and grandfather) aren’t in it, nor in my grandfather’s ancient family crypt in the next village over, but in the crypt belonging to the family of my oldest uncle’s wife. Where my uncle is not, because he was buried with his new wife’s family. Anyway…. it doesn’t matter. Just that I know where she is, and I try to go there and leave flowers whenever I visit. I did not leave flowers this time, as there didn’t seem to be a vase I could use to put the flowers in, which is disturbing. In fact, all these elaborate monuments (as we wandered around) were devoid of vases for flowers, and few even had place for candles.

If I had to guess it’s the new generation of caretakers — mostly boomers and their children — not putting much stock in caring for the graves/making remembrance. I’m divided on this, as it was always mostly done for display and for the neighbors to see your piety. OTOH there was something consoling in visiting the graves, and knowing there was a place for you and you’d join them some day. There was…. You fit in when you came into the world, and there was a place for you when you went out.

And so I fell into watching this “Faces of the Forgotten” and what’s amazing, again, is how … ignored these graves are. No matter how famous or infamous, the graves are there, and the person is mostly quite forgotten. Worse here, in the park like cemeteries that don’t allow for headstones or photos on those. (I am told, though weirdly I’ve never been there, and am not sure how to find it, that my great grandmother’s picture, on my paternal grandfather’s family crypt, is a dead ringer for me. Um… perhaps vault is the name, not crypt, since ours is in ground and slightly raised, not the little chapels, which are for the very rich families indeed, and also old and no longer available.)

There is just a plaque with a name on the ground, and it gets mowed, and it is pretty much forgotten.

This slots in with thoughts I’ve had when doing stuff on this house. You see, it was last remodeled in the early eighties. And someone spent considerable money on the gardens, too. It then was sold around 2010 and there’s every chance the people who remodeled it are done and gone, and when I find their labels in the garden, or move some plant, I think of them, forgotten, under one of those plaques.

Of course, I’m sitting here, sick, watching these programs and thinking what’s the point even, if we’re all going to end up completely forgotten, as though we’d never been? Mind you, it’s only recently that I decided I don’t in fact want to be cremated. I want to claim my portion of the Earth — six by three — and be buried. I’ve told Dan that if I die before we have purchased a space, just ship me overseas to the family vault. Which prompted him to say it’s damn inconvenient, because then he’d have to be shipped overseas too, in time, and also, honestly, why bury an American abroad. Which I must admit feels wrong.

(Also think how inconvenient it would be for all of those who wish to piss on my grave to have to buy a ticket. And someone is bound to get offended if they go and piss on marble, anyway.)

But over these last few years I just started feeling overwhelmed with the futility of human life, and watching the videos more because I felt like someone should bear witness to the forgotten.

Perhaps I’m feeling better — or not — but yesterday something smacked me upside the head. I still visit grandma’s grave every time I go to Portugal. But more importantly, there is not a week that goes by when I don’t think of her multiple times. How she used to do something or other. What she’d say in some situation. How much something her great grandkids did or said would delight her.

In a very real sense, she is not gone, because I think of her as a living presence in my life. And through me she has influenced the grandkids, and perhaps even generations yet unborn.

This shifted the picture. Sure, the grave is a memento and it is often forgotten, particularly if the family line dies out.

But who the person was and what they did will reverberate through time till the end of the world.

There was a medieval belief you were held in limbo (or purgatory) until the last echo of your actions in the world was judged and your fate decided. When I heard it I thought that was silly. Might as well say we’ll all be judged at the end of time.

Look, it’s not always obvious. You won’t be remembered for what you want to be remembered. You can’t dictate it. But something you said or did, that affected others will keep reverberating to the end of time. Things you said that helped someone might have changed how they lived. Alternately, yes, your anger and pettiness also affected people.

But think on it, how many things you heard, not just from your ancestors, but friends’ stories of their parents and grandparents that influenced you no matter in how minor a way.

YOLO is supposed to be a nihilistic cry. You Only Live Once, so do whatever crazy thing comes to mind.

But–

YOLO. One day you and I and all we know will be ashes in the wind, or little plaques on the ground. Gone and done. But who we are and what we do, the things we believe, the things that animate us, the things that COUNT? Those go on forever in echoes and actions and reverberations.

Make it count.

Yesterday in one of my hangouts someone brought up the Tartaria conspiracy. This is one of my favorite internet insanity conspiracies, second only to “The dinosaurs are circling the Earth in a spaceship habitat, waiting for the right time to come back.” And I’m not sure it’s second to that, since on the insanity scale the dinosaur one is at least slightly more plausible.

For those who haven’t stumbled on this:

In recent years, a new alternative world history claim has arisen from the Internet — and it’s a doozy. It revolves around an alleged worldwide cataclysm believed by adherents to have taken place sometime in the 1800s, a disaster that wiped out a worldwide advanced civilization and allowed the nations as we know them today to rise up. The event was a “mud flood” in which several meters of mud washed in and buried the ground levels of houses and buildings everywhere. Those cities and towns that were partially buried constituted the worldwide advanced civilization called Tartaria, which had free wireless energy and was populated — at least in part — by giants. It was a civilization “reset”: out with the old, in with the new; and that “new” civilization is us. If this sounds too silly to be worth anyone’s time to even listen to, then consider the fact that of all the hundreds of topic suggestions in the Skeptoid queue, this is the one that I chose for this week. And I chose it for good reason, so attend.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4765

Or here: Inside The Empire Of Tartaria, One Of History’s Wildest Conspiracies.

Why do I love this? Let me count the ways: it’s relatively recent history and I keep scratching my head and wondering if none of these people had a relationship with their grandparents, and heard stories of their grandparents’ grandparents. I will grant you that my chronology is super-muddled, as I know some stories are grandma’s, some her grandma’s, and some possibly older, but they all tend to blend together, so I can come across as thinking the Napoleonic wars were in grandma’s living memory. But still, people, I got stuff from there, and if an entire superior civilization had collapsed, I’d know.

And yet it’s there, and it’s all encompassing, and you keep thinking “This is true in an alternate reality. Has to be.” And of course, this is the danger of these crazy conspiracy theories: they spawn novels.

On the other hand, if you really look at it, you feel a chill up your spine. Because the fact that this conspiracy has a lot of adherents, being as crazy as it is, means the official sources of information are viewed as nearly useless.

Put it another way: Regardless of how many people jump on the Tartaria bandwagon because it’s fun, the fact that the theory is all over means that people not only don’t believe a thing they were taught in school, but also are perfectly willing to believe they were egregiously lied to in a coordinated and seamless manner.

To an extent they’re right of course.

I mean, none of us knows the past, and the history we’re taught in school is by necessity canned. As an history geek, I can spend entire months diving down a few months of a country’s history and still know I come away with a “canned” version of it that ignores a million factors. To get a “History of the world” version in school, it means that what we get is canned, tendentious, and ignores most of what actually happened. This doesn’t mean it’s not generally accurate, even if — and this changes depending on when we were taught — it has an obvious slant.

It is the fact that history has to be compressed and facts selected that makes great hoaxes like the 1619 project possible. It’s possible to pick and choose a dozen events to present a bizarre racialist version of history that exists only in the heads of the person telling it and their cultists. And then push it on every kid in school. And it’s recent enough history that most kids will get rolled eyes from someone in the family, or other facts pointed out that make no sense in context. Which weakens their belief in what they were taught.

To make it worse, the progressive project has delighted in tearing down centuries-old accepted history, mostly by casting doubt in stupid ways. Things like “Oh, sure, you say Christianity won the west, but what about forced conversions?” (Which happened, but far less in the case of Christianity than any previous religion.) etc. etc. etc. undermining everything people thought they knew to install the “new word” of Marxism. Mind you a lot of what people thought they knew was indeed wrong, but it was wrong in ways that changed country to country and allowed people who didn’t travel much or didn’t have great curiosity to have a common stratum of “everybody knows this.”

The progressives have further undermined faith in the teaching of history and the information stream with their frantic attempts to hide the gigantic failure of communism and progressivism in general.

So the feeling people get is not that what they learned in school is canned and sometimes goofy and often wrong in details, but that it’s a full lying narrative, often weaponized against their own countries and cultures, in ways their older relatives dispute.

And this opens mind space to “What if they’re lying about everything?”

And then….. things like Tartaria appear, which is fun, but much worse things can appear.

Lest we forget both the Leninist and the Fascist project have their roots in times of just such instability, in the demise of the monarchies and their overarching narratives.

And already we see poisonous narratives appear, some very old like the divine right of kings (no really) and some given a shiny new coat of crazy paint, like the idea that all innovation came from Africa and white people just “stole” it.

The worst part is that the narratives from the top will keep not only fragmenting, but becoming crazier and more disconnected from reality as the once-dominant pseudo-elites try to get back in the saddle. the 1619 project is already a symptom of extreme crazy from above. And the crazier they get, the less they’re believed, and the more they will give rise to crazier and stranger theories that can’t be denied because at least — most of them — are more believable than the mainstream.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how a civilization loses its history, buried in a mud flood.

Apres nous, le deluge.

There is a persistent legend — yes, from Portugal, too, but I’ve heard it echoed from Italy and other places — of villages swallowed by earthquake and tsunami where the submerged church bells ring with sea storms.

Here, before I get into the post proper, I must make two things absolutely clear:

The first is that if I ever had any right to complain about how Portuguese run their own affairs, it was while I was one of them, before the age of 27 or so. I have absolutely no right to complain about how things are in Portugal now. It’s their country. I just visit, for increasingly brief periods further and further apart. And I’m not complaining. I’m observing, and some part of me is mourning, a little.

The second it’s that although I always felt out of place in Portugal — out of place enough to have bought Stranger in a Strange Land on the title alone, before Heinlein’s name was a must buy for me — there were parts of it, and aspects of it I loved. Mostly I loved the village I grew up in (my parents would be outraged to hear it called a village, since in Portugal at the time that meant an isolated settlement of maybe ten families. But it was a village in our terms. And worked like a village) and the woods around it. And I loved Porto, where I started spending most of my days from the time I was about 12 and went to high school.

Look, it was a vast, dirty port city with old crumbling buildings (and some well preserved ones) intractable traffic snarls, filthy sidewalks, crazy people who’d pursue you calling you names, and– But it was also a city of fogs, of dream, of coffee shops open in the early morning hours, pouring out their scent into the sidewalk, of forgotten little alfarrabios (yes, an arabic word for used book seller, but really, much more aromatic and textured. It has the implication of century old books, which some of these stores in fact had in their less noticed corners) where you could find a first edition Verne or Wells for pennies, because no one had touched it since it was first stocked. It was a place where I could find what I wanted at the time almost as though it had come into being because I wanted it. I’m still not sure I didn’t hallucinate the little shop that sold vintage pre-WWII stockings at pre-WWII prices into being when I was in my “Dress like a femme fatale” kick.

This is the place where I first learned I was myself, and who myself was, distinct from who I was in the village, which came freighted with centuries of my people living there, and people expecting me to be a certain way, because I was an Almeida female. In a way it was the first tentative steps in the journey that would eventually lead to where I am.

Over the years, going back, since at least 15 years ago, I find the city I loved receding further and further away from me.

It’s not as obvious as the village, which no longer exists in any sense of existing. It’s been submerged under stack-a-prole concrete high rises and “urban” planning roundabouts (So many roundabouts) and highways that crisscross it. Grandma’s backyard, the center of the universe, where I first explored the galaxy in a spaceship that had a startling resemblance to a little red tricycle, has been cut to 1/4 its former size by a highway. The corner where we buried the cats and dogs who shared my childhood is now under several tons of highway. And that’s fine. It’s not my place any more. And I do realize, in the sane part of my brain, that as much as I loved it, the village was a hardscrabble place, inimical to man and beast, comfortless and unhygienic and well… There was a reason that waves of disease swept through it on the regular. Also most people who live there didn’t live there back then. A lot came from the villages in the hinterlands but a lot more came from all over. All over? Well, all the former Portuguese colonies, including Brazil, but also everyone who escaped Eastern Europe and ran as far as they could till they hit the sea, and also– well, people from all over. So the village doesn’t exist anymore, and it doesn’t hurt, really. My attachment there was my grandmother’s house, and that’s passed out of the family and been remodeled so it no longer exists. Visiting the site doesn’t much matter. There are no memories there. Oh, the way the light slants on certain mornings. The song of certain birds. The way the fog descends….

But Porto…. Porto is bewildering and it…. hurts. The plant is still there. Oh, sure, it’s being torn up as they’re installing a subway. But I know where things are. It’s the same streets and roughly the same buildings that were there when I was little, going downtown with dad to watch the city being decorated for Christmas.

It’s just the alfarrabios are gone. Heck, the bookstores are gone, save for one in the mall.

And the entire plant is overlaid with…. strangeness. Like one of the days we went downtown, all I heard was German.

And the purchases we made…. one of the shopkeepers spoke only Spanish and a little French. The coffee shop waiter had a strong Brazilian accent. Even the “locals’ meaning the people who live there, aren’t locals, but people from somewhere in the world, who knows where….

Which means the interactions, the behavior is wrong in subtle ways and my back brain keeps throwing up alarms of the “mommy, in the kitchen, eating live snakes” type: ie. the familiar and the bizarre intermixed so it’s never comfortable and you never relax.

Oh, some things are better. They cleaned up the old medieval streets. Sure the price for that is to fix the old buildings and sell them piecemeal as condos to foreigners, but it’s better than their being slums quite literally submerged in sh*t. And the museums and statues are cleaned up and sometimes they even remember to label them.

The fine fellow above they didn’t. More on that later.

But the old church I used to duck into for a quick prayer on the way to college had a line out the door, of tourists wanting to gawk at its baroque splendor, so I couldn’t go in. And my favorite street in the entire town has one side entirely boarded up, the facades crumbling. (I’m not sure why, or what sense it makes, since it otherwise seems to be expensive real estate. But I don’t live there.) Also most of the beautiful tile murals are crumbling, some of them literally, with the tiles apparently having been hit by a plague of tile-specific woodpeckers. I don’t know why.

And then there’s the fine fellow above. He’s on the way down from the Cathedral and I was struck dumb staring at him. I couldn’t remember any warrior in Portuguese history rumored to have gone to war with a dragon on his head, as metal as that sounds.

It took a bit of research to find who he was and realize I wasn’t in fact amnesiac. He didn’t use to be there, but in a location I didn’t often go to. (Or ever, really.) And he’s the city of Porto personified.

…. As it used to be. You know. Fine strapping young fellow, in armor, rocking dragon on his helmet, and striding off his plinth to go do some damage.

We took a picture. For that moment — just that moment — I caught an echo of the city I used to love, before it was submerged in tourism and internationalism and EU immiseration of poorer countries. For a moment, for just a moment, there was an echo of the old Porto, proud and more than a little bit strange.

A submerged bell tolling the oncoming storm.