Technology is here to help us. Yeah, right.

I was today years old when the USB-C revolution came for me.

***

It occurred to me this past week, when I was finishing a book for the IU Summer Reading Challenge (update on that in a sec), that my Kindle Paperwhite seemed to be running awfully slowly. Page turns weren't as crisp as they should have been, and searching for a book in the online store was pretty much a nightmare. 

Do you remember that meme about Microsoft Explorer? There are several variations, but here's one: Someone is leading a cheer amongst Firefox, Explorer, Opera, and Safari. The first question is, "What are we?" "Browsers!" three of the browsers reply. "What do we want?" "More speed!" the same three browsers say. "When do we want it?" "Right now!" those same browsers say. And Explorer finally yells out, "Browsers!"

Shopping the Kindle store on my Paperwhite was like that. 

So I checked my purchase history on Amazon. Come to find out my device was an 8th generation Paperwhite, purchased in 2017. (I also recalled that I bought it then because someone had swiped my previous Paperwhite off my desk at the law firm, but never mind that.) The newest Paperwhite is generation 12.

It then occurred to me that maybe I hadn't been so keen on reading lately because my old Paperwhite was making the process less than pleasant. So I shelled out for a new one.

It arrived yesterday. It's a titch bigger than my old one, so I've ordered a new case. And I discovered something else when I went to plug it in for a full charge: the plug is different. My old Paperwhite has a micro USB port. The new one has a USB-C.

Micro USB on top, USB-C on bottom.
Lynne Cantwell | June 2026

I vaguely recalled Apple being in a kerfuffle with the European Union a while back over its proprietary Lightning port. Seems the powers-that-be in the EU got tired of needing different cords and chargers for different devices, so they forced Apple to switch over to USB-C as of 2024. What I missed back then was that the new law applied to other tech devices, too -- including Kindles.

I regarded the new cord for a minute, and then I texted my daughters. I'm the only iPhone user in the family; they both switched to Android several years ago. And they confirmed that their current phones take USB-C cables. "You'll be using that, too, next time you get a new phone," Kitty said.

She's right. The new iPhone models all come with USB-C ports. Thanks a lot, EU.

Don't get me wrong -- I am all for standardization. It's just that I've gotten whiplash from all the tech changes I've lived through: for audio, vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to vinyl again; and for video, Betamax (anyone remember that one?) to videocassette to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming to the gods alone know what will come next. And that doesn't begin to cover all the different connectors for different devices and purposes.

If USB-C is the final iteration for chargers and cables, okay. One port to rule them all! I just hope it stays that way. I'm tired of buying new tech just to keep up.

***

I am going to have to keep at least one micro USB cable, though; my ancient Anker five-charge portable battery still needs one for recharging.

***

Oh, right. The reading challenge. I have finished two books this week! And that was on the old, slow-as-molasses-in-January Kindle, too.

(I debated whether to resurrect the Rursday Reads blog for this project, but it hardly seems worth it for only six books.)

First, Heinlein's The Door into Summer: Published in 1957, this is sci-fi for fun. The novel opens in 1970. Dan Davis is an electronics engineer who is a genius at developing robots that make life easier for human beings. He hooks up with a partner, Miles, who has a head for business, and they get along swimmingly until they bring in Belle Gentry to be their bookkeeper. Belle pulls a grand con on both of them, swindling Dan out of his share of the company. Dan drinks himself into a stupor, then decides that he and his cat Pete should take what's called the Cold Sleep -- suspended animation -- for 30 years and wake up in 2000. Belle screws that up for him, too, or so it seems; Belle reengineers Dan's plans and Pete runs away. When Dan wakes up in 2000, he discovers he is flat broke. It takes him a while, but he hatches a plan to time-travel back to 1970, rescue Pete, and make sure Belle doesn't get all his money, after all. 

Here in 2026, it was entertaining for me to see what Heinlein got right about 1970 (not much) and 2000 (even less). This was written well before his Lazarus Long period, so while there's misogyny in the book, it's not as bad as Heinlein got in his later years. I ended up enjoying it.

The second book I read was Wok Walk by Melissa Bowersock. This is volume 50 in her series featuring an ex-LAPD detective named Lacey Fitzpatrick and her husband, a Navajo medium named Sam Firecloud. Together they investigate cases in which a dead person's spirit stays earthbound for some reason; between Lacey's research and Sam's talent for contacting those spirits, they are able to get them to move on to the next world. In this volume, the client is a family who own a Chinese restaurant. The patriarch is shot to death, out of the blue, on the back stoop of the restaurant while on a smoking break; as Sam discovers, even the victim doesn't know who killed him or why. The police, too, are stymied. Eventually the truth is uncovered, the shooter is not who I expected, and the family members are able to get closure on more than just the patriarch's death.

I'm not gonna lie: One reason I like this series is because the books are short. They are more like novellas than novels. But I also enjoy the dynamic between Lacey, Sam, and Sam's children, and it's fun watching the kids grow. And the horror is usually minimal. Plus Melissa is a friend and fellow Indies Unlimited contributor, and she writes well. What more can you ask?

***

So that's where we're at. Next up is a book recommended to me by Kay Robinett, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews. I'm not sure whether I've read anything by Andrews before, but Kay loved the book, so I'm going to give it a whirl. I'll report back. 

***

These moments of technological blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. I promise to keep reading if you will.

Tricking myself into reading more.

I have a confession to make -- a terrible one for someone who used to write books and read all the time: I've fallen out of the habit of reading.

I don't exactly know when it happened, but I think I can trace it back to when I went full-time for the Legislative Council Service three years ago. Reading and correcting hundreds of pages of other people's documents per day, a lot of them pretty dense legalese, makes reading for pleasure less fun. Instead of picking up a book, I've been doomscrolling all day and watching TV every evening.

This is not healthy, I know. It has also made me less fun (I am not going to go back and count the number of blog posts I've written about stuff I first learned about on Facebook -- I just know it's a lot). So when my alma mater, Indiana University, sent me an email about the university's first-ever summer reading challenge, I clicked the link for the kit before I could overthink it. 

Stolen from IU's website. Somehow I don't think the school will care.

The kit contains the rules, a page of bookmarks you're supposed to print on cardstock and cut out, a log for keeping track of the books you've read, and two bingo cards: one for kids and one for adults. Here's the one for adults: 

Also stolen from IU's website.

Hopefully you can embiggen that enough to read the prompts. One of them is "A book by an IU alum"; I considered filling that square with one of mine, but that seems hardly sporting. I also think it would be cheating to use one book for multiple categories, but the rules don't explicitly prohibit it (I expect they will next year -- I can't possibly be the only person who has thought of it).

You can get bingo several ways: the traditional across, down, or diagonal, or all the red spaces to make a trident. I think I'm going to go for the diagonal that goes top left to bottom right: a book set in Indiana, a book you meant to read last summer, a book about time travel, a slow-burn romance, a fantasy novel, a travel memoir, and the free space (let's not get crazy - I'm easing back into the habit). I've already got my fantasy novel lined up -- my friend Melissa Bowersock's newest, Wok Walk (the primary category for her series is detective fiction, but there are plenty of fantasy elements, too) -- and for the time-travel novel, I'm using Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, which Amazon says I bought for my Kindle in 2014 but I don't think I ever read it. I started it yesterday, and it's not ringing a bell. (Then I looked over the challenge rules and realized, whoops, I'm not supposed to start reading 'til tomorrow. I didn't get that far into it, I swear!)

As for a book I meant to read last summer, my Kindle is chockablock with books I haven't read. I'll just pick one of them for that category. Surely I meant to read them all last summer, right?

That leaves: a book set in Indiana: a slow-burn romance: and a travel memoir. I could ask Mama Google for listicles, but I'd rather know what you guys are reading. So if you have a favorite that would fit any of those three categories, let me know.

***

I mean, I could cheat and use one of my books for the one set in Indiana. Or reread one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. But I should probably read something new.

***

"What the hell," you ask, "do a trident and a buffalo have to to with a Midwestern university?" 

The trident is the shape of the IU logo (which I had never noticed before this, and certainly not when I was a student there in the late '70s).

The buffalo, I believe, comes from the state seal of Indiana, a description of which is set out in statute as follows (we here at hearth/myth are determined to provide more information than you ever cared to know): 

Indiana Code: IC 1-2-4-1

Sec. 1. The official seal for the state of Indiana shall be described as follows:

A perfect circle, two and five eighths (2 5/8) inches in diameter, inclosed by a plain line. Another circle within the first, two and three eighths (2 3/8) inches in diameter inclosed by a beaded line, leaving a margin of one quarter (1/4) of an inch. In the top half of this margin are the words "Seal of the State of Indiana".

At the bottom center, 1816, flanked on either side by a diamond, with two (2) dots and a leaf of the tulip tree (liriodendron tulipifera), at both ends of the diamond. The inner circle has two (2) trees in the left background, three (3) hills in the center background with nearly a full sun setting behind and between the first and second hill from the left.

There are fourteen (14) rays from the sun, starting with two (2) short ones on the left, the third being longer and then alternating, short and long. There are two (2) sycamore trees on the right, the larger one being nearer the center and having a notch cut nearly half way through, from the left side, a short distance above the ground. The woodsman is wearing a hat and holding his ax nearly perpendicular on his right. The ax blade is turned away from him and is even with his hat.

The buffalo is in the foreground, facing to the left of front. His tail is up, front feet on the ground with back feet in the air, as he jumps over a log.

The ground has shoots of blue grass, in the area of the buffalo and woodsman.

(Formerly: Acts 1963, c.207, s.1.)

There's been a lot of discussion about the imagery over the years. Here is what I can tell you: the tulip tree is the Indiana state tree; Indiana entered the Union in 1816; and the rest of it seems to be in honor of the nation's westward expansion, with the pioneer fellow chopping down trees and chasing the buffalo away. (There actually were bison in Indiana at one time.) Describing the sun as setting rather than rising has been a topic of discussion since the state's inception; one fellow in 1819 insisted the sun was meant to be rising east of the Allegheny Mountains, which pioneers had to cross to get to the state. 

Sure, Jan. If those mountains are the Alleghenies (which are part of the Appalachians), that bison is running toward Minnesota.

Here's the seal. Judge for yourself. 

Alancotton | Dreamstime.com

***

These moments of habitual reading blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yay, reading!

How to tell that an "investigative journalist" really is one.

First, I hope all my US readers have had a great, relaxing Memorial Day weekend. Mine has been busy, which is why I'm posting today instead of yesterday. The last day of a three-day weekend always feels like Sunday, anyway, right?

The reason for the day, of course, is to honor those who died in service to our country. So let's take a moment to do that -- and to hope that we never have more war dead to remember.

sframe | Deposit Photos

***

Now then.

Y'all have no doubt heard about the Jeffrey Epstein connection to New Mexico. He owned a ranch in southern Santa Fe County dubbed Zorro Ranch, and reports are that terrible things happened there, including possibly the murders and burials of two girls. It's been known for quite some time that several top New Mexico politicians, including former governor Bill Richardson, were Epstein associates. At one time, the state attorney general began an investigation into the goings-on at Zorro Ranch -- but in 2019, the US Department of Justice asked the AG to stop its investigation and hand over all of its evidence so the DoJ could combine it with their investigation. The New Mexico AG was supposed to get the evidence back when the federal probe was over.

The feds then proceeded to bury their investigation. To date, New Mexico has never gotten its evidence back. In February of this year, at about the same time that the New Mexico House of Representatives' Special Investigatory Committee looking into Epstein's connections in the state held its first meeting, the current AG reopened the state investigation. 

All that is easy enough to confirm with a web search, looking at legitimate websites and reports from legitimate journalists. That's what I just did. Alas, some folks who are opining on the Epstein investigation are kind of sketchy.

There's a woman who's been making a splash on Facebook by posting stuff about the Epstein connections in New Mexico in the "I'm just asking questions" vein. I am not going to share any links to her Facebook page or Substack -- I don't want to give her any more publicity than she has already received -- but her first name is Alisa, and I bet if you did a little spelunking yourself, you'd find her.

From what I can tell from what I have read of her work, she is doing Google searches, using them to make connections in her brain, and publishing that as truth without confirming it with anybody.

Folks, real investigative journalists won't publish this kind of thing. The rule has always been that you need at least two sources to confirm a rumor before you publish it. I know that got kind of lax during the era when reporters were essentially assigned to the Twitter beat -- i.e., they would read Twitter all day long and write news stories based on newsmakers' tweets -- which is why I hated that trend so much. It's lazy journalism.

But at least tweets from newsmakers come straight from the horse's mouth, as it were -- not from somebody making associations based on results from web searches and publishing them without verification.

Here's when I knew she was full of shit: My employer, the Legislative Council Service (LCS), released a request for proposals (RFP) on March 13th with the aim of hiring a law firm to "provide legal and support services" to the committee. Now, I work in the Proofing Department. We proofread proposed legislation all year long -- but we proofread other documents, too, including letters, legal memos, contracts, and RFPs. And what we do is confidential, which means we can't talk about it unless and until it's made public.

The RFP (you can read it yourself here) set the timetable for accepting proposals and picking one or more offeror. Here is Paragraph 2(E) of the RFP (it's on page 4 of the PDF):

E.  Selection of Offeror.  The final selection of an Offeror shall be made by the LCS.  That selection will be publicly announced on or after April 10, 2026.  Offerors selected to perform the work and those Offerors not selected will be notified in writing via email by the LCS.  Selection does not constitute an obligation to contract with an Offeror.  The LCS reserves the right to contract with the second choice and then the subsequent choices if contract negotiations fail with the final Offeror. (emphasis mine)

Here's the thing with contracts: Let's say you want to buy a house. You find one you like and put in your offer to the seller, right? The seller can refuse your offer for any number of reasons, but let's say your offer is accepted. Do you sign the contract that day? Of course not. The acceptance of the offer only starts the contract negotiation process. Your mortgage company checks your credit; the title company makes sure nobody else owns the house and that there are no outstanding liens against it; you get a home inspector to go through the place with you and tell you what needs to be fixed; and so on. It can take weeks. And at any point in the process, either you or the seller can say nope, the deal is off for X reason.

That is what is going on with this paragraph of the RFP: Selection was planned for the week of April 6, and then the contract negotiations started. The parties could decide whether or not to accept the terms as offered, or they could continue to haggle. No announcement would be made that it's a done deal until it's a done deal -- in other words, until the contract is signed by both the successful offeror and the LCS. And the LCS said right there in the RFP that if the deal with their first choice fell through, they could contract with somebody else. I mean, they could even say they didn't like any of the offerors and send out the RFP again.

So. About two weeks after the April 10th deadline for selection, I read a Facebook post by Alisa complaining that it's been two weeks and there's been no announcement and I'm just asking questions but WHY HAVEN'T WE HEARD ANYTHING?

By that point, at least one iteration of the contract had come through our department. So I knew three things: 1) an announcement was likely imminent; 2) either she hadn't read the RFP thoroughly enough, or she didn't know enough about contract law, to know that two weeks is nothing in a contract negotiation; and 3) she was just causing trouble to have something to write about. 

Oh, and she also called a guy on our staff the LCS's "Chief Procurement Officer", when in fact his official job title is Project Coordinator. (This is a ridiculously easy thing to confirm; the job of every state employee is listed on the state's sunshine portal. Including mine. I'm a Proofreader II.)

Since then, she has gone on to attempt to besmirch the reputation of at least one committee member. She has also complained that nobody official will talk to her and has suggested that because of that, something nefarious is going on, the committee is just political theater, and (I'll let you fill in the rest).

I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but it's possible nobody official will talk to her because she's already proven herself to be, dare I say it, full of shit.

In a Substack post on May 12, she claims that her Substack is in the top ten rising for US politics. I have no way to confirm that, but I can tell you that as of today, it has dropped to number 26. Not the direction you want to be going, I don't think.

The Special Investigatory Committee is having its next meeting at the Roundhouse next Monday. The agenda states the members will meet with the media after the meeting is over. I'd be interested to know if Alisa shows up. As a real journalist, that's what I'd do.

***

If she gets wind of this post, I hope she contacts me. I'd be happy to put my resume up against hers. Heh.

***

These moments of bloggy bullshittery have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay sharp!

Ancient paganism in a land of orthodoxy.

Athena and Poseidon fight to be Athens's patron deity.
Lynne Cantwell | Athens, May 2026

I'm back from my refreshing two-week break. Folks who follow me on Facebook already know that I spent most of it gallivanting on a ten-day bus tour of Greece (although "land tour via motor coach" sounds classier). Unlike the European river cruises I've been on, this one was sparse on churches, partly because the country is mostly Greek Orthodox (their churches don't seem to feature the ostentatious wealth of European cathedrals that Americans like to goggle at) and partly because the country is rife with ancient pre-Christian ruins.

We toured a lot of those ancient ruins. Like, a lot of them. It seems like you can't dig anywhere in Greece without hitting the remains of an old Greek temple or Roman villa or something from an even older culture. But at every site we visited, there has been an effort to save at least a semblance of a temple to a god or goddess. Clearly the gods were important to the ancient Greeks.

Which is why I was shocked when our guide at Olympia, the site of the original Olympics, baldly stated that nobody in ancient Greece ever believed in the Greek gods. She said that the gods embodied the virtues that each person was supposed to aspire to, but people didn't actually believe they existed.

Seriously? Then why go to the trouble of building all this?

The Parthenon in Athens, dedicated to Athena. Other temples on the 
Acropolis are dedicated to other gods.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Hera at Olympia.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Zeus at Olympia. Hera's temple was built first.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Info about the temple of Athena at Sparta. There's not much of the temple left.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of two structures the Romans didn't destroy.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

These people went to so much trouble to carve, shift and stack thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and marble to honor beings they didn't think were real? Are you crazy?

At first I thought maybe what our guide was implying was that the ancients were misguided and only the Christian god is real. But now I think she was coming from a Christian-centric view not of the gods' existence, but of the nature of religion.

John Beckett has said many times that in its broadest sense, religion is about what you do, who you are, and whose you are. Christians have their Bible, Jews their Hebrew bible, Muslims their Koran; those books lay out the official tenets of their religions. The ancient Greeks didn't have anything like that. For them, moral authority came not from a religious text but from artworks, stories, and plays about their gods. 

The photo at the top of this post is of a sculpture that once adorned the Parthenon. It tells the story of how Athens got its patron: Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, vied for the job. Poseidon brought up a spring of salt water, which the citizens deemed useless -- it wasn't like they could drink it. Then Athena caused to grow an olive tree. The citizens were thrilled -- they could eat the olives, use their oil for all manner of things, and use the wood for homes and tools -- so they adopted Athena as their goddess and named their city Athens. Using John's definition of religion, residents of the city were Athenians (who they are). Athena was their patron deity (whose they are), and so they honored her (what they do). They didn't need a bible to lay all that out; instead, they had things like this sculpture on the Parthenon. 

And they had theater. Although of the 1,000 or so plays written by Greek and Roman authors, only 83 survive, 46 of them Greek. Some we know about only because another author mentions them. 

Modern Pagans don't have a bible, either. What we have is what's left of the ancients' stories and plays about whichever gods and goddesses we follow. Like the ancient Greeks, we're not obsessed with what we need to do to get to heaven; instead, we're focused on doing the best we can in this world, right now.

***

I am a Pagan polytheist and animist. I follow and honor gods and goddesses from several pantheons: Mokosh, the Slavic goddess of the earth and of weaving and spinning; Brigid, the Irish goddess of weaving, smithcraft and poetry; Lugh, the Irish god of light; Morrigan, the Irish goddess of sovereignty and war; Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and justice; Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. 

***

The only Greek god I follow is Athena. But I poured a little offering of water at each temple we visited anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. And I think the gods appreciated knowing that some folks still honor them.

***

Three observations before I wrap up: 

1) I found it interesting that Athens, the ancient city-state that prized democracy and the arts, is now a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta, the ancient city-state that prized military order, has a population of only about 20,000 people today. The modern city is built atop the old one, and what remains of ancient Sparta is not well preserved; the Bronze Age site of Messene is better developed, and extensive excavations only began there in 2007. It almost seemed to me like the Greeks don't care to emphasize Sparta's violent past.

2) While touring all these ancient sites and seeing so many big chunks of temples in pieces, I thought of all the home-improvement TV shows in which some guy screws something to something else and says, "That's not going anywhere." I could almost hear the ancient Greek stone masons, echoing down the ages, saying the same thing. (In the case of the Acropolis, it didn't help matters that the occupying Ottomans were using the place to store gunpowder; the attacking Venetians lobbed a mortar shell into the building in 1687, blowing out pillars on one side and destroying the structures inside.)

3) The Acropolis Museum in Athens is worth a stop on its own. Of course, the topic of the Elgin marbles came up during our tour. In the early 1800s, the seventh Earl of Elgin "acquired" from the occupying Ottomans a bunch of statuary from Greece, including a haul from the Parthenon. He eventually sold everything to the British government, which put it on display in the British Museum. Our guide in Athens was confident that the marbles would eventually be returned. Negotiations over an elaborate swap of the marbles for other Greek antiquities have been ongoing since 2021, but the sticking point is that the Brits say they were legally acquired, while the Greeks say they were looted. Personally, I think the Brits are stalling.

***

These moments of opinionated Greek tourism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. C'mon, England, give that stuff back to Greece already.