TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")

A "fish nest"

2026-09-13T11:28:32.639-05:00

Third Place, Conservation Hope. A male white-spotted puﬀerfish creates an intricate spawning nest in the sand. The fish carefully shapes a two-meter-wide radial pattern using only his fins. Built over several days, this structure and its subtle details reveal the extraordinary eﬀort this small fish invests in reproduction.

This was one of the winning photographs in the Ocean Photographer of the Year competition, from a gallery in The Atlantic. Photo credit Yuta Shigeno,

Mashup of the movies of 2023

2026-09-13T11:19:28.729-05:00

A time-tagged list of the many hundreds of sources for these movie clips is available at the Sleepy Skunk tumblr page. When I view these rapid-fire mashups, I like to keep the list open in a separate window so I can click back-and-forth to identify movies that might be worth checking out from the library. And since everything in the mashup is of necessity out of context, I find it useful to turn on the closed captions icon to clarify the dialogue.

The quotation cited at 0:48-0:53 is one of my favorite passages from Charles Dickens (originally in Our Mutual Friend). The dialogue at 0:23-0:37 is from Past Lives, which I reviewed and rated 4+ last year. And the Dennis Quaid quotation is laugh-out-loud funny in this context.

$5000 checks offered by a politician in 1935

2026-09-13T11:10:05.155-05:00

What do we call this? Coincidence? Foreshadowing?

Modified manhole cover, Copenhagen

2026-09-13T11:07:40.996-05:00

United States "Space Force" uniforms

2026-09-13T10:45:47.013-05:00

Trump stated that the new uniforms were inspired by "Starship Troopers" uniforms. But the film, based on the classic Robert A. Heinlein novel, can be viewed as a warning against fascism, militarism, and nationalism. And the parallel to these uniforms is striking:

Images via Comic Sands.

"Rosie the Rock Snake"

2026-09-10T19:49:38.552-05:00

Today while on a butterfly hike at Badger Prairie County Park (Verona, Wisconsin) I encountered Rosie the Rock Snake. This was clearly a community art project, presumably initiated by a local teacher, parent, or scout leader. I was delighted to see that it has apparently not been subject to thievery or vandalism (remembering that Wisconsin is a state where local farmers leave corn on the cob, pumpkins, and other produce out by the road and invite passers-by to take the veggies and leave some money). I was also impressed by the quality of the painting on many of the rocks.

Locals who would like to see the artwork just need to find your way to the highest point in the park (where the old water tower used to be). If you plan to do so, consider bringing a painted rock...

I would also note that today the Monarch butterflies were literally "too numerous to count" because this is the migratory season and the Madison area is under the flyway for legions of Monarchs heading south from areas up north.

(This sort of reminded me of the "ditch ducks" in northern Minnesota)

Aurora over an Icelandic waterfall

2026-09-08T11:44:44.056-05:00

An Astronomy Photo of the Day, from NASA.

Dragonflies migrate long distances

2026-09-08T11:40:46.230-05:00

How do I get to be 80+ years old and not know basic facts about nature? This week I learned that dragonflies migrate as far as some birds and Monarch butterflies. I shared my summers with dragonflies up at Leech Lake in northern Minnesota, finding the nymphs and their empty shells on the shore and welcoming their emergence as mosquito-catchers. But I didn't know they migrated.

When it’s back-to-school time, North Shore naturalists such as Joe Walewski at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in Finland, Minn., know to watch the skies for green darners and other dragonflies soaring overhead on their fall migration journey...

Like southbound birds that funnel along the North Shore to avoid Lake Superior’s open water, dragonflies also pass by Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth — especially on sunny fair-weather days between late August and early September.

Last year, Sept. 1 was clearly a favorite day to fly as Hawk Ridge counted 57,000 dragonflies. On Thursday, they counted 35,000, said Sean McLaughlin, lead counter for Hawk Ridge...

Counters do estimates by 10s or even hundreds at a time when dragonflies are moving through quickly. Sometimes they’re dense enough to show up on radar like a rain cloud over Duluth.

At 3 inches or longer, green darner dragonflies are usually the most numerous and easy to spot, with their vivid green thoraxes and bright blue abdomens. They’ve also been the most studied. Scientists have put tiny trackers on their bodies and learned the insects can cover 70 to 90 miles a day on their way to Gulf states or as far as Panama.

More than a dozen species of dragonflies migrate, including white-faced and autumn meadowhawks, wandering gliders, black saddlebags and spot-winged gliders...

Like monarch butterflies, migrating dragonflies only travel one way. They mate and lay eggs at the end of their journeys. Eggs hatch into nymphs in both southern and northern states, overwintering in ponds and waterways until they emerge onto land with wings to follow seasonal migration routes.

You learn something every day. Photo via Wikipedia.

"Narluga" explained

2026-09-08T11:21:39.592-05:00

I didn't know this creature existed. Saw it mentioned recently and had to go back to a 2019 article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic for an explanation.

Belugas and narwhals are the same size, share the same Arctic waters, and are more closely related to each other than to any other species. Individuals from both species have been found swimming among each other’s pods...

By analyzing DNA extracted from one of the creature’s teeth, a team led by Eline Lorenzen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark showed that it was a male, born to a beluga father and a narwhal mother. Most of its DNA was a half-and-half mix between the two species, but its mitochondrial DNA—a secondary set that animals inherit only from their mothers—was entirely narwhal. “A while back, we presented our findings at a conference of 150 people who are very into belugas, and you could hear a pin drop,” Lorenzen says. “None of them were familiar with hybrids between those two species.”

Lots more science at the link, but this paragraph is particularly interesting:

A brief digression: When naming hybrid animals, patriarchal conventions dictate that the father’s species comes first in the portmanteau. A cub born to a male polar bear and a female grizzly is a pizzly, but one with a grizzly dad and a polar mom is a grolar. So, technically, the skull from Larsen’s toolshed is a belwhal, not a narluga. But the latter name might well stick because it’s been called that for decades and, as Lorenzen says, narluga just sounds better.

So now I know what a pizzly and a grolar are. You learn something every day.

"C'mon, C'mon" - Joaquin Phoenix reads "Star Child"

2026-09-08T11:11:42.798-05:00

Have I not reviewed this movie before? I thought I must have, but this week after seeing the above trailer on Facebook I looked for my blog post about it and found nothing. I saw the movie back in 2022 and rated it 4+ (worth watching again). Haven't done so yet, but after seeing the trailer, I've requested the "Star Child" book from the library.

The sound on the trailer is a bit muffled; viewing closed captions may be helpful.

"Reawakening"

2026-09-08T11:00:38.143-05:00

"Reawakening" is a remarkably well-performed movie. Jared Harris and Juliet Stevenson portray a British couple whose 14-year old daughter left home and disappeared 10 years ago, presumably because of problems related to recreational drug abuse; now a 24-year-old young woman arrives at their home.

That is the entire "plot." There are no special effects, no nudity, no explosions or car chases. For about 75 minutes the film takes a deep dive into personal tragedies, grief, obsession, and coping mechanisms. The final 20 minutes resolves the matter in what to my mind is an ultimately satisfying way.

This is not a "happy" movie, not a fun movie to watch as these characters struggle with their emotions. It is instead an opportunity for the viewer to watch skilled actors at the peaks of their careers. I did not record it as a 4+ movie (one to watch again), but it clearly rates 3.5 on my scale (well worth the time, and worth recommending). (I think the term "thriller" in this trailer image is a misnomer. This is a conventional drama).

Readers' viewpoints are invited in the Comments.

Condom made from a sheep's appendix

2026-09-03T16:31:16.737-05:00

As reported by The Guardian:

A 200-year-old illustrated condom will go on display with Dutch golden age masters in Amsterdam this week, after the 19th-century “luxury souvenir” became the first-ever contraceptive sheath to be added to the Rijksmuseum’s art collection.

The condom, which was probably made of a sheep’s appendix circa 1830, is thought to have come from an upmarket brothel in France, most likely in Paris. It features an erotic etching depicting a partially undressed nun pointing at the erect genitals of three clergymen, as well as the phrase Voila, mon choix (“There, that’s my choice”).

The Rijksmuseum curator Joyce Zelen said the composition of the etching deliberately alluded to the Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris, in which a Trojan prince is asked to pick the most beautiful of three goddesses. “So we believe that whoever acquired the condom would have been fairly sophisticated and well-educated,” she said.

Minneapolis has a "Buckthorn Removal Singles Club"

2026-09-03T16:25:07.567-05:00

When we moved into our present home 25+ years ago, I spent the better part of three summers grubbing out invasive buckthorn from the small woods behind the backyard (in subsequent years, native wildflowers have emerged in the same soil after the canopy-creating and water-stealing rascals were removed). I later volunteered at the University of Wisconin Arboretum nearby for several buckthorn-removing projects. So it makes perfect sense to me to see that in Minnesota, this worthwhile and productive activity has been turned into a social activity.

Cooke had recently noticed buckthorn overtaking a local park. It reminded him of how dating apps have invaded the social scene, choking out more natural methods of partnering up. What if he could entice singles to do habitat restoration with the prospect of meeting other eco-minded eligibles?..

The BRSC’s collectivist concept resonated in a post-ICE-resistance Minneapolis. It paired fun with education and do-gooderism, like other quirky, homegrown social events such as the Great Northern festival and the Wedge Cat Tour. Unlike bars and clubs, prowling with apex predators, the BRSC was a safe space where participants might unashamedly tuck pants into socks.

More information at the Minnesota Star Tribune (photo credit Richard Tsong-Taatarii)

"The Grab" is a quite remarkable documentary

2026-09-03T16:03:19.577-05:00

This is an actual documentary about the real world, not a fictional docudrama about an alternative earth. The trailer is fairly explanatory. For those who want a single sentence rather than a 2-minute watch, this is about ultra-rich people and government entites gaining control of the food and water resources of the world.

The scary part: the maneuvers being employed worldwide are legal. For example, someone buys large holdings of land in Arizona, then puts down wells capable of withdrawing water from the aquifer at a rate of thousands of gallons per minute, uses the water to grow a crop, and send the crop to a waterless country elsewhere. Arizona has no law forbidding the taking and using of their aquifer. People want cropland - they go to Africa, bribe or strong-arm a tribal elder to take land that has since forever been held in common by the peoples there, and install megafarms, displacing the indigenous inhabitants to the sprawling cities.

Not fun to watch.

Mr. Beaver's advice

2026-09-03T14:58:14.548-05:00

"But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet."

The passage is from Chapter 8 in C. S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It has been cited frequently in recent years in relation to the development of artificial intelligence. I wondered about the original intent in 1950 in a book written for children, and I found this commentary in a literary stackexchange in 2017:

But what does makes sense is that Lewis is foreshadowing the central role that humans play in the history and salvation of Narnia. Remember that there is a prophecy that Jadis' power will be broken when two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve sit on the thrones of Cair Paravel. Only a human being can validly rule Narnia. By stressing that the witch has no human in her, Mr. Beaver is pointing out that she is not the true ruler of Narnia. That which looks human and is not is a pretender to the throne. Only a true human can occupy it.

That idea of the imposter, the thing that looks human and isn't runs through much of Lewis's work. It is there in Men Without Chests (part of The Abolition of Man) and it is there in Out of the Silent Planet where Ransom tries to explain to the Malacandrans what is wrong with Weston. It is there in The Last Battle, where Shift dresses as human and gets Puzzle to dress as Aslan.

From a theological point of view, Satan is the great imposter. Christ is the new man: that which it truly and fully human.

So no, this is not about the uncanny valley, it is about imposters, those things that set themselves up as good and true, as rightful rulers, but are not.

That was then, this is now. I'm going to apply the rule to AI.

The sinuous journey of a "leaf miner"

2026-09-03T14:46:09.150-05:00

An outstanding example, nicely documented in Marcy O'Connor's absolutely outstanding Prairie Haven blog. This is one of the photos for August 2026. I encourage readers who are interested in the natural world to explore Prairie Haven, both in the monthly photo collections, and in the comprehensive listings of the "farm inventory" (wildlife) seen at this location over the past 26 years as it has been "unfarmed" back to its natural state. (The "people" section includes a photo with me in 2016 for a butterfly survey)

Tater tot hotdish - quintessential Minnesota cuisine

2026-09-03T14:33:13.606-05:00

Water strider

2026-09-03T14:25:17.103-05:00

Google Maps August 30

2026-08-30T08:12:33.490-05:00

“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,' those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in its statement.

I also checked the San Andreas Fault. There were rumors he was going to call it "Biden's Fault."

Blogcation again

2026-08-26T14:41:19.272-05:00

(deleted)

Back in about a week

Vindication for Elizabeth Bathory

2026-08-26T14:26:27.124-05:00

I first learned about Elizabeth Bathory 40 years ago when I was researching the manifestations of sleep paralysis in literature and folklore. She and her servants were accused of secretly murdering hundreds of young woman, an accusation that later morphed into bathing in the blood of the virgins.

This outstanding book meticulously examines and interprets the historical record - no small feat, considering that the primary source documents are in Hungarian, Latin, and Slovak, and because translating seventeenth century idioms and grammar requires specialized knowledge.

I have previously blogged one page from this book describing the general ambience of Hungary in the 1600s. Elizabeth Bathory was a leading member of the most powerful famiily in Hungary, rivaling the Hapsburgs in wealth and prestige. But this era was also characterized by extensive discord arising from invading Turkish armies. social unrest triggered by the rise of Lutheranism challenging the established church, and even climate-related crop crises from what is now referred to as a "Little Ice Age."

The wealth and power of the Bathory family constituted an existential threat to the Hapsburgs. In 1605 Elizabeth controlled 17 castles and reinforced manor houses, and properties extending over about five hundred miles - but she lacked the protection of any male relative - father, husband, brother, or adult son - and thus was an attractive target.

Shelley Puhak's research for this book (25 pages of bibliography plus an additional 30+ pages of endnotes) convincingly documents that the charges against this lady were fabrications, and the "revelations" by the servants about murder and cannibalism were elicited after torture by authorities, all for the purpose of others securing control of her landholdings.

My assessment of the book is similar to what I expressed in my review of Island at the Edge of the World [the history of Rapa Nui]. Both books are scholarly works that correct longstanding myths and misunderstandings, but both are "too much information" for the casual reader. As much as I loved the subject matter discussed here, I wound up having to skim through detailed explications of the politics of the 1600s. But I'm glad I found it and I'm happy to share my thoughts with the few readers here who might also find it of interest.

Dolly Parton for President

2026-08-25T16:58:36.282-05:00

Reposted from 2023, when I wrote this as a serious post. Irrelevant now because of her death, but it seems appropriate for me to re-express my tribute to her. Imagine how totally different American lives would be nowadays had we elected a nonpolitical, education-funding, vaccine-supporting, people-loving, compassionate brilliant businessworman to be president of our country.

Dolly Parton is the only person who can unite the brutally divided partisan voters of this country. She is eminently qualified to represent the values this country claims to hold dear.

Allow me to anticipate the potential objections:

"She wouldn't have the right qualifications for being president of the country"

Constitutional requirements for the president: a natural-born citizen at least 35 years old and a resident of the country for at least 14 years. Box checked. Moving on.

Duties and responsibilities of the President, as defined at the U.S. Senate site:
As chief executive, the president presides over the cabinet and has responsibility for the management of the executive branch. With the advice and consent of the Senate, the president also has the power to make treaties and to appoint ambassadors, U.S. officers, and judges to federal courts. He is also the commander in chief of the armed forces. The president signs laws and can veto bills that have passed Congress.
We all know that every previous President has delegated those duties or fulfilled them based on recommendations from advisory committees (although Eisenhower may have been a real-life commander-in-chief). No problems there.

"She has no political experience"

Exactly. An asset, not a deficiency. Dolly is the antithesis of a politician.

"She is not part of a political party"

Exactly. She has carefully avoided aligning herself with either the Democratic or Republican party. She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom offer from Trump (twice) and from Biden; she felt that if she accepted it she "would be doing politics."

Here's a discussion of her recent "World on Fire" song lyrics:

“Don't get me started on politics, Now how are we to live in a world like this, Greedy politicians, present and past, They wouldn't know the truth if it bit 'em in the ass.”

These are the words read back to Dolly [by a host on the Today Show], who laughs as a response. She’s then asked which politicians she’s talking about.

“All of them. any of them.” She replies, plainly.

She then adds, “I don’t think any of them are trying hard enough… They worry more about their party than they do about the people.”

Dolly added the better approach would be “If we just do what we felt was the right thing rather than who’s going to lose or who’s going to win this, or who’s going to look better if they do this.”

Absofuckinlutely right. Here's the video of that conversation. And most Americans will agree with her.

This comment about her own politics, as cited in Woman and Home:

As for her own political views, she knows what they are and that’s good enough for her. “I’ve got as many Republican friends as I’ve got Democrat friends and I just don’t like voicing my opinion on things,” she says.

“I’ve seen things before, like the Dixie Chicks. You can ruin a career for speaking out. I respect my audience too much for that, I respect myself too much for that. Of course, I have my own opinions, but that don’t mean I got to throw them out there because you’re going to piss off half the people.”

Here's the full video of her performance of "World on Fire" at the American Country Music Awards. Listen.

She gets a standing ovation from a room full of cowboy hats after performing what can reasonably be described as a climate change anthem.

She wrote the lyrics.

"Liar, liar the world’s on fire

Whatcha gonna do when it all burns down?

Fire, fire burning higher

Still got time to turn it all around."

It’s difficult to say whether Dolly explicitly intended “World on Fire” as a climate song, though people are hearing it as such. But that’s how many of Dolly’s more “political” statements and artistic work come across — they tap into the zeitgeist without making any explicit political statements. Dolly is an expert at this.

Note also that the performance is a crossover of country music and rock and roll. Dolly bridged that gap like no performer in history, recently accepting induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after a lifetime of country music and Grand Old Opry.

Her new album, due out later this year, will include a cover of Prince's Purple Rain and duets with Sting, Steven Tyler, and Elton John, as well as a combined performance of "Let It Be" with McCartney and Ringo (see video above). This from the most acclaimed "country music" artist of all time, because she believes in music and the lyrics of music, not in the politics of country vs. rock.

This was Dolly Parton's comment regarding the Trump/Clinton presidential debates many years ago:

As far as she’s concerned, she said, it’s time that both Trump and Clinton stopped talking about each other.

‘Let’s talk about what we really need — taking care of us. I think people just want to have a feeling of security. It’s just like political terrorism right now, they got us all scared to death about everything,’ Parton said.

----------------------------------------

A pause in this nomination post. Anyone who has ever written anything knows that it is easier to write the long version rather than a concise version. I'm going to take the easy way out for the moment because I have so much to present, by inserting extended extracts from a variety of sources I've bookmarked over the years. Later I'll need to come back to weed, summarize, correlate etc. So here we go with some of the source material...

From The Washington Post:

“She is beloved across so many demographic groups because she really transcends politics,” said Lance Kinney, an advertising and public-relations professor at the University of Alabama. “And her magic lies on being a cipher onto which you can graft whatever political agenda you prefer.”

The allure that rings from honky-tonks in the rural South to gay bars in large coastal cities has everything to do with the persona Parton has meticulously cultivated since the 1950s, Kinney said. On the one hand, there’s the conservative-appealing story of Parton’s origins — or how she managed to pull herself up by her bootstraps after growing up poor in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. On the other, there’s the glitz and glamour of her towering wigs and acrylic nails, and the feminist anthem she created with “9 to 5,” an iconic song about workplace discrimination.

In recent years, Parton has turned the Imagination Library, her literacy-focused nonprofit, into a 2 million-book-a-month international operation and also helped fund Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine. She has supported the LGBTQ+ community and endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement — breaking with “the guardrail in country music of not talking about racial injustice in the present,” said Joel Schwindt, a music history assistant professor at Berklee College of Music.

“Dolly Parton, much like country music, is a paradox,” Schwindt said. “But I think she can get away with it because of her authenticity and also because she’s reached founders’ status in country.”

Regarding controversial issues, per Gizmodo:

She’s acknowledged, for instance, the role of the LGBT community in inspiring her stage persona. Yet when Tennessee banned public drag performances, she kept quiet. She publicly attested her support for Black Lives Matter with a spate of other country musicians as artists reckoned with the genre’s long silence on racial justice. Her speaking up came two years after she changed the name of her long-running dinner show from Dixie Stampede to Dolly’s Stampede after much criticism of its Confederate nostalgia. Parton insisted the original name was chosen out of “innocent ignorance.” (This move did divide some fans.)

In interviews, Dolly has certainly expressed support for environmental causes, in her down-home oratory style. “We’re just mistreating Mother Nature,” she told National Geographic last year.“That’s like being ugly to your mama.” ...

But Wilkerson feels that Dolly, and her companies, don’t own up to their part in damaging the region’s climate resilience or contributing to environmental catastrophe through the cumulative impact of all those cars and private jets. “It’s been the ruination of the Smoky Mountains,” Wilkerson said bluntly.

From Vox in 2021:

But Parton knew what she was talking about when she suggested to the New York Times last fall that people were starting to get sick of her. She has now achieved the sort of hysterical and highly trendy adoration that can shade into overexposure in the blink of an eye — even for a legend with a reputation as durable as Dolly Parton’s. The pressure on Dolly Parton to be the single person who can unite a fractured America is so high, there is a slow and uneasy creep of incipient backlash all around her...

But in recent decades, everything that makes Dolly Dolly has swung back into trend. “One reason Parton’s approval rating is so high, though” Lindsay Zoladz posited in the New York Times in 2019, “is that all the attributes that used to set her up for criticism — the outrageous, hyper-femme style; the unapologetic business savvy needed to pull off her late-70s pop crossover; even the so-what acknowledgment of her own cosmetic surgery — are no longer taboo.”

Dolly Parton often explains that she modeled her look after the town tramp, who as a small child she thought was the most beautiful person she’d ever seen, and that she knows straight men don’t find it attractive and doesn’t care. “If I was trying to really impress men or be totally sexy, then I would dress differently,” she told Playboy in 1978. But why bother? “I’m already married and he don’t mind how I look.”..

For decades, this acknowledgment played as tacky or trashy. But in the 2010s, it came to be seen as empowering, even feminist: Dolly dresses for herself, not the male gaze. And Dolly’s self is a celebration of the artificiality of femininity and glamour, a finding of authenticity in what is fake. That’s downright avant-garde...

In 2008, Roger Ebert returned to his 1980 Dolly Parton profile, noting that it had missed something he considered very important: her presence, which he writes “enveloped” him. “This had nothing to do with sex appeal,” he says. “Far from it. It was as if I were being mesmerized by a benevolent power. I left the room in a cloud of good feeling.”

Ebert adds that when he spoke with his writing partner Gene Siskel about Parton the next day, Siskel reported the same feeling: “This will sound crazy,” he said, “but when I was interviewing Dolly Parton, I almost felt like she had healing powers.”

Lots more good information at that Vox article, including insights into the Dollywood Dixie Stampede dropping the term "Dixie" at her request, her refusal to join Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in disrespecting Donald Trump, and the weaknesses inherent in embracing both sides of an argument.

In 2020 The New York Times offered "The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton":

Only as an adult did I see how widely and warmly (if sometimes ironically) Parton has been embraced by people with little else in common. Her ability to navigate social and conceptual divides helps explain why this is: She is country without being retrograde; a friend to the outcast whose basic political philosophy, that people should get paid to do what they do best, is uncontroversial. She is beautiful without making beauty look easy; feminine but not fragile; white but not precious; principled but not hardened or fixed...

Most accounts of her life, of which there are many, begin with Parton’s humble origins as the fourth child of 12 born to an industrious sharecropper and a musical mother in the mountains of East Tennessee. Extremely poor, but confident and creative, Parton wrote her first songs at age 5 or 6, got her first guitar at age 8 and appeared on a local radio and television show at age 10. The morning after her high school graduation in 1964, Parton left her small town for Nashville. That day, she met her husband, Carl Dean, to whom she has been married for 54 years...

Parton addresses the wealth she has amassed through these ventures with predictable nonchalance, but she clearly knows the value of money, in a way familiar to those who have grown up without it. She supports several family members (she does not have children), and has donated millions to the Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in 1990; to East Tennessee residents whose homes were destroyed by a 2016 wildfire; and, this spring, to Nashville’s Vanderbilt Medical Center, for Covid-19 vaccine research...

The word that you’re going to have to use over and over when describing her is ‘work,’” Summers tells me. I admit I have gleaned this from Parton’s description of how she “gets more done than most people do all day” by working every morning from 3 to 7 a.m. on her spiritual practice and any one of several projects she keeps lined up in plastic bins before her workday officially begins. Parton says she “lives on creative and spiritual energy” — and the more she talks about “rising above” her physical self to meet the demands of each day, I see she means this literally: She subsists on energy instead of typical amounts of sleep (she gets no more than six hours a night, and is fine on three)...

Even her gleaming exterior can be seen as a function of her working girl’s pragmatism. “I’m really not that ‘high maintenance,’” she writes in the new book, “I can put on my makeup, costume and wig and be ready for anything in 15 minutes or less.”..

She remains true to country music’s historical role, not as a bastion of conservative patriotism (as it was rebranded when it was aligned with Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” in the 1960s) but as an inclusively populist, working people’s music meant to give outsiders a voice. Hence her decision to write the song “Travelin’ Thru” for the 2005 film “Transamerica,” about a trans woman’s attempts to connect with her son; and, in 2017, to join Miley Cyrus on the pro-gay anthem “Rainbowland.”

The Imagination Library videos on YouTube, where Dolly reads bedtime stories to you (or your children) from the books that she gives away free to children every month in order to promote literacy.

Re her childhood poverty and dietary preferences, from Rolling Stone in 2003:

Despite all the modern trappings of her fame and success, Dolly Parton is a living link to what seems like an impossibly remote past. She was born the fourth of twelve children in a log cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The doctor who brought her into the world was paid with a sack of cornmeal. The Partons didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, and her dad, a tobacco farmer, supplemented the family’s diet by taking his shotgun and heading off into the woods.

“People hear me talk about eating squirrel and groundhogs, but in the mountains like that, you really didn’t have much of a choice,” says Parton matter-of-factly. “There were twelve of us kids. We never ate possum — I remember Daddy saying, ‘That’s like a damn rat.’ But we ate everything — turtle, frogs. I just remember the big old groundhogs — whistle pigs, they called them — and you’d cook ’em with sweet potatoes, and you’d have different ways of making some of that gamy taste go away.”

“Look,” she says triumphantly, throwing the cabinet doors open. It’s magnificent: cans of corned-beef hash, tins of Spam, loaves of white bread, a Costco-size brick of Velveeta. “I have to have my Spam,” she says. “And look at this!” It’s a pig-shaped ceramic jar. Inside is a baggie of bacon grease, neatly labeled with a date. “The people who come to clean my house every Thursday have to fry up bacon, so I have bacon grease to cook with. I have to have it in all my houses.” She brightens. “You want some Velveeta?” She saws off an orange hunk and offers it. “You didn’t believe me, did you?” she says. “I grew up with that stuff and I never got over it. Good, ain’t it?”

She was the first in the history of her family to graduate from high school. Lots more at the link. [note to self - extract more later,

From the New York Times in 2019 "Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes. Dolly Parton":

The first episode of “Dolly Parton’s America” centers partly on the “9 to 5” songwriter’s reluctance to call herself a feminist. Earlier this year, Parton’s own sister, Stella, said she was “ashamed” of Dolly for not speaking out more about the #MeToo movement. In response, Parton told The Guardian: “I don’t feel I have to march, hold up a sign or label myself. I think the way I have conducted my life and my business and myself speaks for itself.”..

Like Cher, another 73-year-old multihyphenate icon, Parton has over the past few years ascended to a rarefied level of intergenerational celebrity: a saucy grandmother of social media...

Both-sides-ism rarely feels as benevolent as it does when coming from Parton, but that’s nothing new. When asked, in 1997, how she was able to maintain fan bases within both the religious right and the gay community, she replied, “It’s two different worlds, and I live in both and I love them both, and I understand and accept both.”..

Parton was born in January 1946, to parents so poor, they paid the doctor who delivered her in cornmeal. Their home at the foot of East Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains had “running water, if you were willing to run and get it” — one of Parton’s many, oft-repeated “Dollyisms” that makes light of her hardscrabble upbringing.

As a child — one of 12 — she had no exposure to movies or television, rarely even magazines, so her earliest ideas of glamour came from two seemingly disparate sources: the glittering kings and queens she heard described in fairytales and Bible verses, and from the “streetwalkers,” and “strumpets and trollops” she’d see when her family went into town. “I was impressed with what they called ‘the trash’ in my hometown,” she later mused. “I don’t know how trashy these women were, but they were said to be trashy because they had blond hair and wore nail polish and tight clothes. I thought they were beautiful.”...

For all the musical legends we’ve lost in the past few years, it’s heartening to see this show pony get her victory lap while she’s still around to bask in the glory. Not that she’s planning on going anywhere. Whenever she’s asked how she’d like to be remembered 100 years from now, Parton trots out one of her best Dollyisms: “I want ’em to say, ‘God, don’t she look good for her age!’”..

[In the WNYC podcast series "Dolly Parton's America,"] Abumrad narrates from his position as a relative outsider to what he calls the Dollyverse, presenting “Dolly Parton’s America” with the aesthetic language of the modern podcast: snippets of interviews, tonally appropriate background music, and the inviting, conversational voice of a man guiding you through his thought process as he travels down various rabbit holes of his own curiosity. Parton granted Abumrad quite a few sit-down interviews, and although seasoned Parton fans will find little of what she tells him to be new information, “Dolly Parton’s America” is a genial, compulsively listenable crash course in Parton’s lasting appeal...

And that will serve as a segue to my earnest suggestion that those wishing to understand Dolly Parton should listed to these podcasts. The full 8-part series of podcasts is here [transcripts are also available for those who want to skim quickly]. In the "Dixie Disappearance" she explains why she modified Dollywood's chief attraction - the "Dixie Stampede" after learning it offended people:

Well, there's several reasons that we changed the name or a few reasons. Maybe I should say a couple of reasons. One being that out of ignorance, people do things you don't know. A lot of my things that I do wrong, just out of pure ignorance really, because you grow up a certain way and you don't know. The Dixie, we always thought way down in the land of Dixie, it's like a Dixieland or Dixieland music, Dixie. You know, I just thought of Dixie as a part of the, part of America. And it was offensive cause like I say out of ignorance, you don't know that you're hurting people, never thought about it being, about slavery or any of that. But when it was brought to our attention, and some woman wrote about it and I thought, well Lord have mercy, I would never want to hurt anybody for any reason. And being a business woman, we didn't really have that many people say anything about it.

But I thought, Lord, if I've offended one person as a business woman, I don't want to do that. So we completely cleared all that out and started over that. But we, I just wanted to fix it cause I don't want to ever hurt or offend anyone. And so I did it as a good faith effort to show that it was never meant to cause anyone any pain.

Back in 2019 after listening to Radiolab's introduction to "Dolly Parton's America," I posted a summary of the podcast, including this:

JAD: Like, she tore right through all of that noise. Through the general election and beyond. And I kept bumping into people who would describe the experience of being at a Dolly show as, like, standing in an alternate vision of America than what was unfolding on the TV.

JESSIE WILKERSON: I remember just standing out in the lobby and just people watching, because it was the most diverse place I’ve ever been. I was seeing a multi-racial audience. People wearing cowboy hats and boots. I was seeing people in drag. Church ladies. Lesbians holding hands. Little girls who were there with their families.

WAYNE BLEDSOE: You had a whole audience of people who absolutely their philosophies were in opposition to each other co-mingling, and everybody is polite to each other.

JAD: So that was one thing that caught my attention. That in this very divided moment, Dolly seems to maybe be a kind of unifier. And after doing a little poking around, the data does kind of bear this out. If you look at her global Q Score, this is a measure of how well people think about your brand, globally. What they do is they assemble a very diverse sample of people, they ask them a bunch of questions, and out of all of these different brands that are out there, all these different performers, she is in the top 10 globally in terms of everybody's favorites. But she's almost number one when it comes to lack of negatives, if that makes any sense.

That's what the United States needs right now

-----------------------------------------

O.K. That's the end of the multi-course dog's breakfast of my archived Dolly Parton links. Now back to the "presidential nomination" part of this megapost.

First, I would like comments from international readers re what your reaction would be were the United States to nominate or elect Dolly Parton as U.S. president, and how she would play out on the world stage. Björk had this to say back in 2003:

“Oh, Dolly’s big in Iceland,” says Björk. “Her voice is immaculate, really powerful. Her character is so warm and human, and she has a great sense of humor.” To Björk, Parton transcends her musical genre. “All my friends love Dolly, and most of them are people who would never listen to country music,” she says.

But that's one talented musician talking about another one for a music-centered Rolling Stone magazine. How would "regular people," diplomats, and other world leaders react? Personally I can envision her attending a major international conference in the Hague, walking up to an obscure foreign minister to say "Hi - I'm Dolly," and him responding "Yes, I know. My people back in Eastern Rumelia just love you." "I'm so pleased to hear that. Let's talk about this climate mess."

Second, we need to ponder a vice-presidential running mate. Many years ago when Donald Trump was running for president, I thought the Democrats should counter with Tom Hanks, but at their convention they disastrously chose Hilary Clinton. Now I would suspect that Tom Hanks would be too "woke" for this centrist new party. Readers may have some reasonable suggestions, but in the end likely Dolly could come up with her own pick. And what to call the party? (again, she can decide. She built a multimillion-dollar business from scratch; she's good at this stuff).

The biggest problem is not getting her elected, but getting her to accept the nomination. It would probably only take three degrees of separation for someone reading this post to ask someone they know to ask someone who knows Dolly personally to tell her that she needs to offer herself as a presidential candidate. She will of course immediately decline.

I have no doubt that the idea of being president has been suggested to her many times in interviews. The difference would be that this would be a serious appeal, not clickbait for a media video or post. It needs to be emphasized to her that she needs to do this for the good of her country. Dolly Parton probably has more true patriotism than all the congressmen combined, and she might well make sacrifices for that goal. But her reply would probably also be a serious declining of the offer, because I believe her husband is probably in failing health.

Dolly has said that she would continue her music until her death and the only thing that would take her away from that would be if she is needed at home. She has recently announced that she will no longer be touring - just doing occasional appearances, because she wants to spend more time at home with her husband.

The response to that would be an acknowledgement of her situation and the counteroffer that she can stay at home for the process. She won't need to do any campaigning. Just a simple 30 second video inserted during the upcoming Trump-DeSantis flame wars and during the Democratic staged "debates" in which she says "Hi - I'm Dolly, and I am also running for president. Please write my name in on the primary ballots. Thank y'all so much" would be sufficient to confirm her viability.

And as president, she could also spend her time at home (except for those international conferences), Zooming with her cabinet. This is the way business is done in the modern world. What else does a president do in real life? They go to tornado/hurricane/flood sites to hug victims and then get back in their motorcades of black SUVs back to their helicopters. She could do that much much better. And do it sincerely.

What can we do in the meantime? Discuss this with friends and family as a serious matter, and start writing her name in on every online poll. I've not been able to find her included in any FiveThirtyEight surveys, except for this casual aside: "these days it’s difficult to get 58 percent of Americans to agree on anything except perhaps distaste for airline travel and love of Dolly Parton." Somebody over there please take notice.

I will offer this for her campaign song/theme video:

TLDR: An intelligent, hard-working, compassionate businesswoman who puts people above politics is the best available representative for the United States at home and on the world stage.

Photo embedded at the top from the Associated Press, via a Los Angeles Times article on Dolly's receiving of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.

Addendum: A Bloomberg article about Dolly Parton's business management techniques.

2026-08-25T14:09:18.914-05:00

Dolly Parton has died

2026-08-25T13:57:33.053-05:00

In a video posted to Parton’s X account 15 minutes ago, her nephew Bryan Seaver announced the death of his aunt, for whom he acted as head of security.

"This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago, before I fully absorbed it as a future reality.

As her head of security for more than two decades, a role my father, Larry, held before me. I have imagined the heaviness of this moment but haven’t truly felt it until now. It is an honor, an honor that is mixed with absolute pride and great sadness.

But sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the heavens.

I first went on the road with Dolly as a kid, getting a taste of the road life in the early 1980s. Dolly opened doors not just for me, but for her entire family to reach the potential we didn’t even know was possible. Dolly also opened doors for generations of singers, songwriters, musicians, and dreamers from every walk of life and across every continent. By her example, we believed that anything was possible. She never saw a door she couldn’t open, and the doors she opened made and changed history.

My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you. She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD, and on your phone playlist becoming an extended part of your family, whether you liked it or not. Our family and the team she has entrusted with her legacy will work diligently to ensure her spirit will live with us for ever.

Dolly was a farmer, just like her daddy. He farmed the soil; she farmed songs and happiness. Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.

Rest in peace, Aunt Dolly, Aunt Granny. Gigi. May God bless Dolly Parton and may God bless you all. She will always love you."

TYWKIWDBI is deeply saddened and truly in mourning for the passing of this wonderful lady. I will be reposting my tribute to her later, but for now this simple announcement will suffice.

A postcard from 1955

2026-08-24T14:37:48.623-05:00

Found while going through some family archives today. I sent this to my aunt and uncle when I was 8 years old. She kept it for 60+ years, and then it cycled back to me as memorabilia when her estate was settled.

There are several interesting features, including the postal cancel "Fight infantile paralysis. Join March of Dimes." In 1955 I was in the recovery phase from paralytic polio, so that coincidence is quite striking. There was of course no ZIP code (introduced 1963), my misspelling of "resolution" at that age is probably understandable, and my admonition to the mailman that the contents of the card is "private" is of course laughable.