Author: photog
06OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat.
John Selden
Winter, Bah, Humbug!
Dunwich is settling into fall. We had a week of rain and wind. We had one day of summer where it reached the mid-eighties and now it’s back in the sixties. The clown parade of weather men and girls have done their best to confuse their forecasts beyond human understanding but I could glean that we have about a week or two before the first real frost.
So today I went to store away the pool furniture and accoutrements. And while I was inside the pool fence, I saw a female preying mantis trying to warm up enough to remember how to trap insects. But there really aren’t many insects left. Well, there are but I think the mantis is waiting for the bees to frequent the flowers that she was stationed under. And the bees were nowhere to be found today. At least not on that side of the yard. There was a grasshopper hiding under a branch about three feet away from the mantis but it might as well have been on the dark side of the moon as far as the predator was concerned.

I took some photos of both. I was temped to catch the grasshopper and try to lure the mantis into grabbing it with her claws. But I remember last year when I “brought” a mantis in at the end of the season. It died in about two days. It was like something out of a 1930s Universal Monster movie. I had delved into things that “Man was not meant to meddle in.” So, I waved goodbye to the grasshopper and the mantis and got back to the work Camera Girl wanted me to meddle with.
On Tuesday the battery in my car died and Camera Girl loaned me her car until the AAA guy came the next day. I gave them the make and model over the phone and they said they had the right battery so I expected a quick replacement. But the gods conspired to complicate my day. It seems that Toyota uses a special smaller battery to fit in the crowded footprint of the engine compartment. So, the poor guy had to travel almost an hour in each direction back and forth to his shop before finally finishing the job. Two hundred and forty bucks for the darned thing. Gee, I remember when a battery was fifty, sixty bucks. Well that probably says as much about how old I am as it says about the unbearable expensiveness of everything.
But I’m being greedy. The thing lasted seven years. That’s a pretty good battery life and at least it had the good grace to give up the ghost in my garage so I didn’t have to wait around in the middle of nowhere hoping for the tow truck guy to rescue me. But I guess it’s really the time of the year I should thank. Last week was the first large drop in the ambient temperature since last year. And that change in temperature probably decreased the voltage of the old battery below the minimum needed to crank the engine. So as unnatural as it is for me to be grateful for the end of summer, I guess I should be. Bah!
05OCT2026 – Photo of the Day
05OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do.
John Selden
04OCT2026 – Photo of the Day
04OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain.
John Selden
03OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
Wise men say nothing in dangerous times.
John Selden
03OCT2026 – Photo of the Day
Medea and Company
It seems all that the news is filled with these days is stories about women committing horrific crimes and the American public (well at least a lot of disgusting women) crying out for these women to be shielded from the rightful penalties they should pay.
Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose trial was underway this summer. She strangled her three young children in January 2023. Eleven out of the twelve Massachusetts jurors voted to find her not responsible for the murders because post-partum blues and anti-depressant drugs made her do it.
Now we have Christa Pike, a fifty-year old woman who has spent the last thirty-two years in prison waiting to be executed for the torture murder of one of her classmates. She even kept a part of her victim’s bashed in skull as a souvenir of the atrocity. In fact, bragging about the killing is what got her caught. And yesterday when all appeals were finally exhausted Pike was given a lethal injection. In fact, she was given two lethal injections and survived! She was given two doses of pentobarbital, remained alive and was heard snoring, and was taken to a hospital where she recovered! Now this is the second lethal injection failure in a row in Tennessee. And because of this incompetence or sabotage this monster will probably sponge off the tax payers for another thirty or forty years instead of being carted off to potter’s field. And the mother of the murdered girl will see justice for her daughter denied altogether.
Well, I guess this is the end point of the degeneration of our society. Women who are supposedly the empathetic, gentle half of our species have now become monsters. Lindsay Clancy is a modern-day real-life version of the Greek myth of Medea, the witch that Jason brought back on the Argo and married. When hatred against Jason aroused her, she murdered their children and taunted her husband with their bodies.
And Christa Pike is a thoroughly vicious creature that should have been put down like a mad dog long ago. But now her defenders tell us that she is the victim of bad parenting and sexual abuse. You know what? Sure, all those things are probably true. She comes from a depraved background. But we who try to obey the law and raise our children to be good people have to share this planet with these monsters. Let’s take justice out of the equation. Let’s just be practical. People with such low impulse control and inability to refrain from violence are completely incompatible with a functioning society. They cannot be a part of the same world as normal people who allow this society to function. And for this reason alone, people completely unable to avoid violent crime need to be eliminated. And that doesn’t mean prison. Housing homicidal maniacs for decades at a time is too expensive and dangerous for society to consider it as an alternative. These people need to be calmly and skillfully put down in the same way a mad dog is put down. Sure this is the fringe case. Most criminals aren’t homicidal maniacs. But there needs to be a policy for those that are and the answer is death. Sorry girls.



