In a friend’s office.
Before we get started:
I am a huge advocate for pollinators. Often when people think about pollinators, they think about bees, and specifically, honeybees. Unfortunately, honeybees are a relatively poor pollinator, and besides, they are a livestock crop, and so worrying about honeybees going extinct is kind of like worrying about pigs going extinct.
Here in the US, the best bee pollinators are our native bees, including mason bees. And they get relatively little coverage. So, last week I had come across a piece that talked about this in a way that was pretty easy to understand, and it also talked about woodworking, another interest of mine, and people who make a living doing their craft, yet another interest of mine, and so I shared it.
A few of you reached out and told me you had suspicions there might be problems with the company, but I didn’t see those emails until yesterday (I am so far behind on my email). So, I did something I should have done before: I did some research. It seems the man mentioned in the article does not exist, and there are several Reddit threads out there saying that they purchased from the company mentioned and had poor experiences.
I honestly did not think of the article as an ad, although I can now see it was. I don’t generally buy things like this (I was planning on making some to the specs in the article, though) and it never occurred to me to dig very deep, as I knew the bee info was accurate, and that was my primary reason for sharing.
If you bought anything from Craft Folk, I would try to cancel the order if I were you, but if that is not successful, your best recourse might be disputing the charge with your credit card provider.
I feel manipulated, and I don’t like that. And I especially hate that because I shared something, I might have induced you to lower your trust radar.
I’m sorry – I should have researched deeper.
HH
The state motto of North Carolina is Esse Quam Videri, which is Latin, of course and is generally translated as, “To be, rather than to seem.”
To be about it, rather than to talk about it. To be a real one.
I think about that motto a lot. As a native Mississippian, it is much better than our own, which is Virtute et armis, which is Latin for “By valor and arms.” We’re even packing in our state motto, it seems.
But back to North Carolina. Being, rather than seeming. Verbs, rather than nouns.
Dolly Pardon dioed this week. You know that, of course, because the world has gone full on Dolly appreciation, with tributes rolling in from everyone, and from all corners of the globe.
A thing that really struck me is how much they are not talking about Dolly the artist – even though her artistic accomplishments are enough for several lifetimes – but Dolly the person. They talk about her charitable works, her literacy work, her paying for the band kids instruments in Black high schools, the way she treated her employees and her collaborators, what she did with her money, how she stood up for people others would have shamed, how she fought to own her music and her livelihood, how generous she was.
Every single tribute is about what a decent person she was. Much of the good stuff she did is just now coming to light, because it wasn’t publicized, and came with no promotional package.
I have never wept at the death of a celebrity until this week. But I am not alone in this: people who can’t name five Dolly Parton songs were weeping this week because she died.
The best overall obituary I have seen (and I have not seen them all, because they are legion) is this one from Heather Cox Richardson (but also check out the linked article below). Nearly two thousand words eulogizing a great multi-award-winning singer and songwriter and it only names three of the 3,000 songs she wrote.
To be, rather than to seem, indeed.
“Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.” - Dolly Parton
Five Beautiful Things
As a GenXer raised on all things Mr. T, I am super excited about the new Mr. T documentary on Netflix – I hope to get to see it this weekend. Check out the trailer here.
I loved this piece from Salon about how Dolly both represented the best of Appalachian ideals, and also challenged them.
Six seconds of the highest ever resolution images of the surface of the Sun. Terrifying and beautiful all at once.
During the pandemic, many museums began digitizing their archives, but maybe nobody has done more significant works than the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. They have more than 800,000 items in their digital collection, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, and much, much more, all downloadable at high resolution.
Speaking of downloadable at high resolution, this is a reminder that if you are a classic movie buff, the Ransom Center in Texas has a 5,000 image deep collection of movie posters from the classic era. They are all hi-rez and downloadable.
In Case You Missed It
The most clicked link last issue was the poem "What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine" by K.T. Landon
The flooding in Nepal is horrific. I didn’t fully understand the scope until I watched this ~3 minute video of a calm valley getting hit by a wall of water, erasing everything in its path.
A current project I am working on is building an organization to hold what we are calling Peace Labs – 5 day camps for teens to teach the skills of nonviolent social change. Our first Lab was done last month – I wrote about it on my church’s blog, and you can see pictures, a short write up, and a video from me about the experience here. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.
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HH