A Day of Appreciation

Starring Draymond, The Velveteen Gargoyle, Ruler of South Broadway (Albuquerque), and Sir Roo Longtail, Gentlemen Pirate of the High Desert

Caught on camera:

Two dogs, small & large, facing each other, eyes glowing in night vision/photo. They talk: “So Big Guy, you rea-“ “Turkey smells SO GOOD!” “Roo! Focus!” “Sooo good!” “Really?! Never mind.” At bottom: HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Villainy thwarted once again!

But, seriously…

Small dog & head of big dog snuggled together, with writing, “Giving Thanks and Love!” To side are names Deb, Jeff, Dray, Roo, and Zappa
No words needed!

However you celebrate this day or choose to spend time this long American weekend, I hope you can find a moment to love and appreciate yourself! And a moment to love and appreciate another!

Slavery Summer Camp for White Kids

Are you worried about outside influences on your children’s quality education in the summer months? Tired of your kids coming home from summer camp laden with friendship bracelets and an autonomous sense of self, having learned no useful skills by way of adversity and trauma? What better way for White children to truly learn about all the benefits of American slavery than to experience it for themselves? In our exclusive* Slavery Summer Camp White Christian children will finally get to immerse themselves in the learning experience hitherto reserved for The Blacks.**

Upon arrival, your beautiful White Christian children will be stripped naked and all possessions destroyed before being sold on the auction block. Each child’s new owner will give it a new name and just one set of clothes for the duration of camp.

Hence, no worries about non-conformist self-expression or identities here! Plus, you won’t be receiving any homesick letters or complaints about problematic behavior, as there will be no communication at all. You can relax and live your summer as if you don’t have children. As if they were taken away from you, forever. As if they were dead. Enjoy!

Color drawing of hawk by effinbirds with caption, “who does shit like this?”
Rather depends on what shit you’re talking ‘bout!

The newly designated slaves will be kept to a strict schedule of beneficial skill acquisition; we’ve included a non-exhaustive list below. All disciplinary issues will be handled by our camp personnel (masters, overseers, patrols), all of whom are trained in authentic corporal punishment techniques, proven effective over the centuries.

A sampling of the Beneficial Skills of Slavery Summer Camp:

⁃ Back-breaking hard labor 12-16 hours/day (Builds stamina!)

⁃ Crop harvesting without use of machinery

⁃ Animal slaughtering with dull knives (Safety first!)

⁃ Road construction from scratch, including use of explosives to clear the way, mixing cement, and working with bubbling hot tar

⁃ Networking through shared hardship — with & without singing

⁃ Carpentry, from shanties to master bedrooms (Hammer like Jesus!)

⁃ Old-Timey Dentistry: really, just tooth pulling

⁃ Enduring dehumanizing conditions and torture (Builds resilience!)

⁃ Metalwork, such as making Jeffersonian iron nails (a matter of pride for the founding father)

⁃ Old-Timey Medicine: bone setting, wound & burn care, minor surgery

⁃ Sugar refining, salt mining, seed oil extraction, etc. — using only well-researched methods from the good old days of slavery

As you can see, crop harvesting tops the list. The immigration crisis is connected to a crop harvesting crisis, which is exacerbated by the brutal summer heat of the climate crisis. So, enrolling your children in our exclusive camp not only baptizes them in the saving graces of slavery, it also lets them serve our exploitative agricultural practices, while willfully ignoring any and all efforts toward ethical, sustainable solutions. That’s a win-win!

For your children’s education, your stress-free summer, and our country’s productivity, enroll your kids today in Slavery Summer Camp for White Christian Children!

[Currently, we operate only in those states in which enlightened politicians have relaxed child labor laws.]

Small digital home weather station shows date, time, outside temperature of 117.3° and 6% humidity, inside temperature of 78.4°F and 34% humidity
15 July 2023, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA: unofficial temperature 117°F (≈47°C) — officially a mere 110°F (≈43°C) — and 6% humidity. No worries; gonna be a dry Apocalypse!

*Not for Jewish kids, as they have that whole Holocaust thing to draw on. And we know you don’t want your children realizing you’ve been feeding them nothing but lies about Jews this whole time.

*Not open to disabled kids, because, like, what’s the point? Also, we are church-affiliated, so we thrive in that gaping loophole of the Americans with Disabilities Act that exempts all religious organizations from accommodating any of God’s children that God clearly decided weren’t worth the effort to make right.

**By which we mean imported Africans and their descendants, ignoring the odd Injun. We’re also disregarding modern-day slavery-adjacent shenanigans, like prisoner and migrant worker exploitation, sex trafficking, etc. (As if you could care less!)

You Knew Roo Turned Two, Didn’t You?

The esteemed Sir Roo Longtail celebrated his second birthday on or about June 13, 2023. We freed our little Roogele from the hoosegow on August 5, 2021. He’d been wandering the streets, homeless, hungry, and had been attacked by a ruthless gang of bloodthirsty ticks. Now he’s the tall, dark, and handsome defender of Bunnytown from all things cat, skunk, bird, lizard — Wait! Did Draymond just bite my lizard friend’s tail off? Oh, it’s okay? It can just drop off its tail like that? Whew! Dray, why do you have to be so mean?

Black and white toy cow “sitting up” and missing one forelimb and head.
BetsyMoo at her most inspirational moment?
BetsyMoo was a cow
Betsy cannot speak just now

BetsyMoo has lost her head
Betsy is what we call dead

Once a well-crafted toy
Made to bring a child joy

Purpose served, sweet BetsyMoo
Was loved to pieces by our Roo



©️2023 DÅL|é, inspired by Roo-in-nation
Face of large dog sniffing mutilated cow toy
BetsyMoo and Roo before the next round of violent joy
Black dog with white bib and golf ball in mouth. Eyes and mouth have been magnified, distorting face. Red arrow points to enlarged sickle-shaped white area in dog’s left eye. Text: “When the QUARTER MOON hits your eye … Your human does this kind of thing!”
Thankfully, Roo refuses to check out my blog ever since the host/platform changed its name from WordPress to whatever the lightning bolt thing stands for, I forget. Dogs are amazing and incredibly forgiving and I adore them, but truly unconditional love? Nope. Roo should never see this, y’all!
Handsome black dog with white bib and golf ball in mouth, facing camera.
You can’t help but see the moon in his eye now, eh? That’s a golf ball in his mouth, btw. If you could just throw it without him letting go, that’d be great!
Black and white dog lying belly up. A dotted line of lights roughly bisects him from chest to lower belly.
Massage along the dotted line, if you would. Thanks.

What I Learned From Twitter

For the sake of my mental, physical, spiritual, and chronometric health, I am departing the platform formerly known as Twitter. As friends and family know all too well, I am not one for social media. However, the hubs convinced me to join Twitter in April 2019 and I found a couple communities there that sustained me through some very hard times. Those communities are gone; only a few individuals remain. The platform now known as X reeks of musk, a smell I have always found nauseating. Admittedly, I am hypersensitive olfactory-wise. I have nothing to learn from X. But I did learn lots from my stint at Twitter.

◦ BM (Before-Musk), this was the house Black Twitter built.

◦ 140 characters demands pithiness. 280 — not so much.

◦ Piss off the right/wrong people and you’ll pay! BM, you’d know why.

◦ The terms “gatekeeping” and “centering” and “virtue signaling” …

◦ Not pursuing a career in academia was the right decision for me.

◦ Disability Twitter was da bomb, BM! A welcoming place for freaks like me!

◦ White women suck ass, collectively! And not in a good way.

◦ There is an art to the long and cogent yet entertaining thread. Very few have mastered it.

◦ Public shaming is an act of violence.

◦ The modern abolitionist movement is well thought out and constructed. And named. I am for liberty. I am an abolitionist!

◦ I am neurodivergent.

◦ There is no end to the list of problems with white women.

◦ Indigenous people can be seen and heard on the platform, unfiltered, but you do have to actively seek them.

◦ Damn! Yes, I do have a lot of internalized ableism!

◦ It is unwise to assume a fellow Tweeter is from one’s same hemisphere.

◦ Antisemitism is so normalized that this here neurodivergent Jew often didn’t recognize it.

◦ Doom-scrolling is a real compulsion. (Not an addiction.)

◦ Book-burning white nationalists will make strange bedfellows with Black antisemites, Asian transphobes — just about anyone on an individual basis.

◦ There are some honest-to-god atheists a-tweeting!

◦ If you give Twitter access to your photos, you give Twitter access to your photos.

◦ The space between tolerance and acceptance is a chasm.

◦ If it weren’t for cats, dogs, and other critters, our timelines/Twitter feeds might never be cleansed.

◦ I don’t really know what it means to have my timeline cleansed.

◦ Did I mention how much white women suck?

◦ I could say it was nice while it lasted, but nothing about Twitter was ever nice. Informative, misleading, funny, maddening, confusing, supportive, hilarious, irrational, revolutionary, international, hateful, joyful — yes! But ‘twas never nice!

Bizarro comic titled, Loboe: Under full moon, one wolf stands on hind legs playing oboe, while another wolf on all fours says, “Can’t you just howl at it like everyone else?”
As the Kinks sang, “I’m not like everybody else!” So, no.

Methinks She Doth Protests Too Little

Squeak, O Round One! Squeak!
What repair doth thou need?
Unbroken be thy circle
Well seeming thy axel, too
Utterly dry though it be

Squeak, I say! Squeak now!
Unto thee shall be delivered
The grease thee doth so lack
For silence doth beget neglect
The mute bide forever parched

Squeak loudly! Yes! Squeak!
Surely thou canst this do
And thine greasy reward granted
A most good and quiet wheel
Mayest thou be once again


©️2022 Debra Landau

Wait! What? But … Didn’t I …?

I posted this on December 7, 2022, according to WordPress, now JetPack. Except, only as a draft it seems. Then again two months later, with the Hello section added below. But that was just a draft, too?! Ahh!


My Blue Room by DÅL|é

Hello, DÅL|é !

Some time in the early months of year two of the pandemic (you know the one), I gave myself the gift of a lifetime membership to a photo editing and drawing app. I then decided to sign my artwork with a representation of my grandmother’s nickname for me when I was a kid, “Dolly.” (She was the only one who could get away with calling me that, so don’t even think about it!) My initials are DAL — A for Anna, after my German (other) grandmother, pronounced with schwas coming and going. I drew my new art signature first and discovered it has a tail. In written/typed form, the tail became an e. I added diacritics and a line for visual effect. And because one of my favorite artists, Salvador Dalí, would have approved. Thus, DÅL|é.

Maybe 18 months later, my photo artsy app rolled out a new feature, free for us lifers: DALL-E*, the user-friendly, AI-driven digital image generator. Having given it a test drive, I do not call it an art creator. Many of the images are indeed entertaining, some hilarious, some surreal … depending on the prompts of the user. Most images are astounding in their intricacies and precision! All are well done. Indeed, they are perfect. There are no happy accidents. No mysteries. No hidden agendas. No inconsistencies. No je ne sais quoi. So, no relation whatsoever to Dalí! Nor to DÅL|é!

That, my lovelies, the side by side development of DÅL|é and DALL-E, is a real-life coincidence, an example of convergent evolution of names for tangentially related things. Only significant connection is from my perspective.

OpenAI, please, don’t sue me!

*Just like WALL-E, but without all that soul! (Or Disneyfied fatphobia.) Or how most folks mispronounce Dalí (yeah, I said it); again, without all that soul! And mustache wax!