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Archive for the ‘Biography’ Category

Diary #826

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on April 27, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Though I’ve opened the nursery every morning for over a week now, the pullets are still largely uninterested in coming out yet. This is not unusual; there was a flurry of activity on the first day which resulted in one of the pullets going missing, but since then they have stayed where they feel safe.  That includes the missing one; Wednesday I needed to drive into Seattle, so I planned to let them stay in the nursery that day. But when I went out to check their food and water, whom should I find wandering around the chicken yard but the missing pullet, very hungry and very vocal, but otherwise none the worse for wear.  I was able to catch her and put her in with the others, and there she has stayed since.  I have no idea where she went; I spent over an hour looking for her the day she vanished, to no avail.  My best guess is that she managed to get through the narrow gap under the ramp and had been hiding under the house for three days; even though I crawled under there with a flashlight as part of the search, it’s a large area and even a thorough, hours-long search wouldn’t have sufficed to peer into every space under there large enough for a pullet.  I’m just glad I didn’t lose her, and choose to view her mysterious return as a good omen for this year.

 

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Links #825

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 26, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The myth that memory is a video recording playing in a private theater in your brain is one of the biggest lies about hypnosis.  –  Penn & Teller

It was very difficult to pick a song with which to send off Moya Brennan, so I finally decided on a live video of one of their early, more traditional songs rather than their more pop-influenced work of the ’80s and ’90s.  The links above the video were provided by Anarres Ansible, Shiv Ramdas, Jesse Walker, Radley Balko (x2), and Popehat, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Diary #825

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on April 21, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Somehow, within three hours of letting the pullets out on Sunday, one of them managed to vanish.  As you can see, one hasn’t left the nursery and two are huddled in the corner fretting (not an unusual behavior for the first week or so after they’re out).  The turkey chick is more bold, wandering around the entire chicken yard.  But there’s no sign of the fourth pullet.  She’s not anywhere in the chicken yard, nor nearby outside, nor under the house, and I neither heard a ruckus nor found feathers which would indicate that something got her.  My guess is that she managed to fly over the fence and ran off to hide in the underbrush, but I have no evidence for that; I reckon it’s just one of those things that happens when one keeps poultry.

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In the Tweet of the Night

Posted in Biography, Current Events, History, Miscellaneous, Music, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 20, 2026| 1 Comment »

Change one single vowel in this headline, and it would be a VERY different story.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-20T01:59:52.797Z

Probably the same way that holding a knife to a child's throat can open a guarded door.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-20T18:03:29.896Z

Beware of Davros.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T03:17:35.675Z

#3 is a very, very bad idea.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-25T17:50:01.254Z

Spring this on family members in New Orleans, and they may not stop at disowning* you.*And disowning people is mighty difficult under Napoleonic Code.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-26T17:26:22.068Z

It's fascinating to watch men with severe, easily-recognized mental illnesses publicly blaming others' mental illness on behaviors that the speakers are incapable of due to their own undiagnosed, untreated psychopathologies.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-27T17:09:35.827Z

My teen self would be confused by this.1981 Maggie: So there are new "Star Trek" shows all the time, but you haven't watched one in 20 years?2026 Maggie: CorrectM81: Ditto "Star Wars"?M26: YepM81: Plus all kinds of D&D fantasy stuff?M26: Right again.M81: I DON'T KNOW YOU

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-28T17:19:00.870Z

Reporters: doing something willfully is not a "failure", regardless of what politicians call it. If a party refuses to comply with some illegal diktat, that party has not *failed* to comply with said diktat; he has REFUSED to comply. The former is an omission; the latter an active rejection.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-29T16:55:44.729Z

This monster's face appears to have been designed by Jack Pierce. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm06823…

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-30T17:38:45.538Z

"Dabbled in cross-dressing" makes it sound like alchemy or some other occult practice.(Yes, I know about the shamans and mystery religions; this isn't that, so let's not)

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-03-31T17:37:38.961Z

Oh please, PLEASE let them use a chatbot as architect, so we can have a "Galloping Gertie" moment on live TV soon after it's done.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-01T17:35:58.519Z

This is how partisanism warps minds.Distrust of politicians *in general* for wholly rational reasons is subjected to the duopoly's Procrustean bed, then for 21st century readers must be trivialized & infantilized. So anarchists & true libertarians are described by the asinine tag "double haters".

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-03T17:28:10.591Z

WAAAAAAAAAH! I'VE POOPED MYSELF AND I DEMAND SOMEONE CHANGE IT! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-04T17:16:42.139Z

Please, people, I beg you not to rely on spellcheckers at the cost of your own vocabulary skills.Trade languages have nothing to do with birds.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-07T17:10:46.810Z

Meanwhile, books on my shelves which were published as far back as the 1920s, and which I purchased as far back as the 1970s, are still 100% readable. And all I have to do to access them is walk over to my bookshelves.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T17:13:17.853Z

Due to the high volume of "You were right all along" emails, I will not be responding to them individually. Thank you for your understanding.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T17:29:33.587Z

A friend who grew up on Country/Western was unfamiliar with Zeppelin, and when "Ramble On" came on she asked me what it was about. I replied, "A dude who gets his girlfriend stolen by Gollum."

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-10T07:34:41.637Z

Trump is someone who consistently cheats at Solitaire and still repeatedly loses, and when he's done the deck only has about 49 cards. And some of those are from kids' game decks, like one with a picture of an old maid.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-12T17:44:13.156Z

 

We need Captain Kirk.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T03:26:13.653Z

If you want to reveal a crypto-authoritarian, just start him talking about virtually anything to do with cars.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T17:21:33.262Z

THIS.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-16T17:53:47.686Z

Your regular reminder that it is 100% legal to fictionally depict murder, rape, and mayhem in movies.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-17T17:19:44.529Z

I especially love that the stupid thing flew apart on impact.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-17T19:17:10.473Z

First Palantir came for the sex workers, but nobody cared because "sex trafficking".Then Palantir came for young minority men, and nobody cared because "gangs".Then Palantir came for migrants, and nobody cared because "illegals".Now it's coming for you, and I think you know the rest.

— Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-04-19T17:28:11.213Z

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Links #824

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 19, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Hold the bus!  –  The Banana Splits

Since I’ve already featured the H.R. Pufnstuf theme and Land of the Lost theme before, I decided to feature the opening & closing to The Banana Splits Adventure Hour, the first Saturday morning show to feature the Krofft puppets.  As a wee lass my mother enrolled me in the Banana Splits fan club, and I had the various club materials for years after the show went off the air.  And it was not unusual for Grace to use one of their catchphrases, “Hold the bus!”  The links above the video were provided by Franklin Harris, Ryan Marino, Jesse Walker, Ryan Cooper, Walter Olson, Radley Balko, and Jessica Pishko, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Throwback Thursday X

Posted in Biography, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Sexless escorting is mostly a fantasy of white bourgeois American women which is not found in nature.  –  “More Delightful Conversation”

Sex is really a very poor reason for two people to live together.  –  “Silver”

The chief danger of a “tolerated” system is that cops or politicians can suddenly and without warning decide to be intolerant.  –  “Legal Is as Legal Does (#1428)”

Americans as a group wanted extremely stupid people in charge because they themselves are extremely stupid, and their idea of “democracy” is rule by people like them, ie extremely stupid.  –  “Their Heart’s Desire”

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Diary #824

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on April 14, 2026| Leave a Comment »

For the past two weeks, the pullets have lived in their nursery in the henhouse; the heat lamp is still on 24 hours a day, and every day about noon or so I top off their food and change their water.  This was taken immediately after doing that, which is why you can hear the water burping as the tray fills up.  The reason it’s up on the cinder block is to keep them from clogging it up with shavings when they scratch; at this stage it’s the feeder which gets clogged instead, but as long as I clean it once a day it isn’t bad enough to stop them from eating.  You can see that the turkey chick has now caught up with the pullets, and by the time they’re out of the nursery completely on May 17th, it will be noticeably larger.  The next change, however, will be this coming Sunday; the heat lamp will go on the timer so it’s only on at night, and in the daytime I’ll open up the coop as it is in this video, then herd them back inside every evening.  Every two days I’ll shorten the timer by half an hour, so their hours of darkness will slowly increase until it’s time to shut off the lamp for the summer, and by that time the hens will have stopped trying to harass them, and we’ll be settled into our routine until it starts to change again in late September.

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Endless Sunday

Posted in Biography, tagged on April 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »

When I was a schoolgirl, Sundays didn’t really feel like days off.  It wasn’t just that I had to go to church, although that was certainly a factor; it was mostly because there was a school day looming over Sunday afternoon like a beetling cliff above a mountain meadow.  Even if I didn’t have homework due, my mother still enforced an early bedtime on school nights, and even after I escaped the house the knowledge that I would not be free to spend the next day as I pleased was enough to cast a pall over Sunday activities.  And since none of the jobs I had after 1987 had traditional Saturday-Sunday weekends, that inability to feel free of looming responsibilities eventually seeped into every day off, aggravating my lifelong characteristic inability to relax into a lifelong Sunday-shaped pathology: unless I was actually under the influence of a drug, whatever tasks I might have to accomplish were always lurking behind me, impossible to ignore regardless of my efforts to pretend they weren’t there.  But now, five years into my retirement, I’m at last starting to have a little success in convincing myself that there really aren’t any obligations haunting my free time.  Sure, I need to go to town once a week for groceries, and several times a year I need to go into Seattle, and occasionally I have some other responsibility to deal with (beside my daily blog work and household chores, which are never completely done).  But other than that, it matters very little if I choose to spend a few hours reading for pleasure, or occupy my time in some frivolous but interesting pastime, or finish my next book in September rather than July.  And maybe sometime in the next few years, I’ll be able to exorcise that Sunday haunt once and for all.

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Diary #823

Posted in Diary, tagged , , on April 7, 2026| Leave a Comment »

As you can see, the chicks are in the nursery now.  And even though the turkey is two weeks younger than the chickens, she’s nearly as big already.  They’ll be confined full-time for two more weeks, then starting on the 19th they’ll be allowed to roam around the chicken yard during the day and only confined at night.  Since they’re faster than the adult hens they can get away from aggressive hens in the daytime, whereas at night the door is closed so they’re cooped up in a small space.  But after being near them for seven weeks, the adults generally lose interest, so I don’t have a pecking problem.  And despite the turkey being younger, her (?) size will soon protect her.

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In Search of Boole

Posted in Biography, History, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , , on April 3, 2026| 1 Comment »

The search bar replaced the reference desk without replacing the skills behind it.  –  Hana Lee Goldin

When I was in library school in the early ’90s, the internet was very young and largely accessed by libraries, universities, and research corporations via several companies such as Dialog which charged by the minute for access.  Because of this, it was considered important for librarians to learn how to formulate effective Boolean searches which would return roughly half a dozen good, solid articles on the topic.  It was recognized that a search delivering dozens or hundreds of results was a poor one because it would take too much (expensive) time and (professional) effort to sift through all that to find what one was actually looking for.  And I was really good at it; I excelled at crafting “Goldilocks” searches which would return a manageable number of relevant articles, neither too many nor too few, usually on the first try.  Then two things happened: AOL started offering unlimited connection time, and Google came up with its non-Boolean search engine which delighted non-librarians by returning thousands of items in the pretense that more is better.  And so an entire generation of people has grown up with absolutely no idea how to craft an effective search, leaving them helpless in the face of Google’s rapid enshittification, and therefore easy prey for its predatory and typically-wrong chatbot.  As Google has rapidly decayed I’ve tried several other search engines, but none of them are remotely as good as classic Google was.

That’s why I was so excited to discover this article by reference librarian Hana Lee Goldin, explaining not only how to get around Google’s loathsome practice of dishing up swill instead of what you ordered, but also how to use Boolean operators which have apparently always been hidden in the system.  Goldin explains the reason for her article concisely:

Google…constantly…swaps in synonyms, personalizes results based on your history, and decides what you probably meant rather than returning what you typed. Most of the time that interpretation is invisible. These tools are how you override it.

Beyond that, I’m not going to quote her excellent article because you should read it all.  The link above is to her Substack blog, but to head off the possibility of link rot I’ve also backed it up.  And if Hana happens to read this: from a retired reference librarian, thank you!

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