Last night I confessed on my Facebook page that I love butterflies and dragonflies. I think my love for butterflies is easily understood. If there are any butterfly haters out there, I’ve never encountered one. Dragonflies, for their part, are cool because they’re beautiful in a sleek, deadly, Viking ship kind of way. As an extra bonus, they devour mosquitoes in large quantities. Every time I see a dragonfly, I want to show my support in some way; buy him a drink and say, “Thank you for your service.” Haven’t worked out a way to do that yet.

Did you ever ponder the word “butterfly?” Where does the butter come in? I did some web searches and discovered (to my delight) that nobody really knows. There are, thank goodness, a few mysteries left in our world. Some say that it’s a confusion of the original name, “flutterby.” That seems to me a little precious, and there seems to be no actual evidence for such a word in history. Some think the word originally only designated the yellow ones, and then expanded to embrace the entire genus. Others say that it’s because butterfly droppings are yellow. Take your pick, or make up one of your own.

By the way, the Norwegian word for butterfly is sommerfugl, which means “summer bird.” What a lovely, poetic name. Illogical, as they have lots of birds in Norway in the summer, but apt.

Much summer heat is being generated by Andrew Breitbart’s story on Shirley Sherrod and her speech to an NAACP meeting. I defended Breitbart in a discussion over at Threedonia earlier today, but on consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that he had a fair point, but bungled the story badly. He was trying to make the reasonable argument that the NAACP shouldn’t call other people racist when its own members laugh and cheer at a story of reverse racism. But he went ahead without having the full story, and should have been aware that Ms. Sherrod, who seems to be a decent person, would be caught in his line of fire.

Talleyrand is supposed to have once said of a political assassination, “It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder.” This was worse than a blunder. It was a sin.

I confess I can imagine myself committing the same sin. Doesn’t make it right, though.

Athol Dickson writes on beauty.

Beauty is not always comfortable. Consider forest fires and lightning. Think of the summit of Mount Everest. Are they not beautiful in their own ways? Yet aren’t they also terrifying? Remember the great white shark again, or a black widow or a lion. Some beauty makes us so uncomfortable we feel the need to set ourselves apart from it. And our desire for distance from some kinds of beauty isn’t only due to danger. We were created to care for the garden. To work it. To organize it and arrange it. This explains the impulse many of us feel to make some kind of change in nature. We trim hedges. We separate flowerbeds from lawns. But what of those who take that impulse further? Who set fire to forests simply to destroy them, hunt for animals they do not eat, and fence off land they do not use? Beauty sometimes makes us sense our smallness. It reminds us we are not in control. It whispers “You are only mortal, and none of this is really yours.” Beauty is not always comfortable.