www.johnwperry.net

7 September 2026

I made this cat illustration for a young female relative in Texas (the state that I was born in) who likes the color pink and who loves cats. I have combined three public-domain (free to use by anyone) graphics by two female American artists and one male Italian artist to make this "pink cat" illustration. Graphics credit: Pixabay.

Google AI (Artificial Intelligence) Overview: No naturally occurring breed of cat has true pink fur because felines lack the genetic ability to produce pink pigment; however, bright pink cats are common in cartoons and video games.

26 August 2026

In the late 1980s, I enjoyed my magazine travel-writing assignments in New Zealand, especially the scenic views of white clouds, which the early Māori, New Zealand's indigenous inhabitants, also enjoyed, naming their picturesque homeland after white clouds — Aotearoa, land of the "long white cloud." I especially like this public-domain photograph by a German photographer of a New Zealand lake, mountains, and "long white cloud." Image credit: Pixabay.

8 May 2025: First posted on my Facebook Profile on 21 July 2023.

Recently, after drinking a bottle of Blue Moon Brewery’s wheat beer and eating frozen blueberries, I thought about blue butterflies, not blue moons or blue-colored berries. Why? I had earlier watched (via DVD) the 2004 Canadian-made film The Blue Butterfly, about a terminally ill, butterfly-loving Canadian boy who, to fulfill his dying wish and accompanied by his mother and a male butterfly expert, travels to a Central American rainforest hoping to catch a large “magical” blue butterfly, the blue morpho (Morpho peleides).

Years ago, I saw, but did not try to capture, a blue butterfly in a rainforest: In the early 1990s, while traveling with a guide in a rainforest in Australia’s northern Queensland, I sighted, at about noontime, a blue Ulysses butterfly (Papilio ulysses), which is a large swallowtail butterfly. In a magazine travel article, I briefly wrote: “During a rest stop beside a creek, I fed bread crumbs to creek fish and wrote postcards to friends in Hawai‘i stamped with an Australian postage stamp decorated with a portrait of the blue Ulysses butterfly. Then I saw it. A flash of iridescent blue, also called ‘electric blue’, zigzagging in midair, a solitary Ulysses fluttering among the green foliage that concealed snakes and flightless birds. The butterfly’s colorful wings mesmerized me: they flickered like a brilliant blue star in the green, sunlit rainforest.” (Happily, it was not a rainy day in the rainforest.)

Illustration: A kaleidoscope (aka swarm, flutter) of public-domain graphics of blue butterflies, mostly fantasy, selected and displayed by me on a public-domain painting, titled Area Broken by Perpendiculars, by the Russian-born artist Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943). Also inserted by me is a tablet-computer-framed, public-domain painting of Australia’s Ulysses blue butterfly and plant leaves. Ulysses blue butterfly trivia: Males are known to be highly attracted to the color blue, and in the wild it is possible to entice males down from the tree canopy with a shiny piece of blue paper or metal. Image credits: Raw Pixel, Pixabay, and PublicDomainVectors.

24 July 2024

I posted this Amelia Earhart text and image on my Facebook Profile on 24 July 2018, Earhart's 121st posthumous birthday, and I am re-posting it here on her 127th posthumous birthday:

Today, 24 July 2024, is the 127st birthday of Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), (To continue reading, touch, tap or click here or on the little V, if visible, at upper right.)

America's so-called "Flying Sweetheart" who mysteriously vanished somewhere in the central Pacific Ocean during an attempted transpacific flight in 1937. Since then, numerous theories about what happened to her have received "breaking news" media coverage: For example, in March 2018 there was a report that her "bones" had in 1940 been discovered on a remote coral atoll in the western Pacific, but, as usual, it had a drawback: "The bones have unfortunately since been lost, and so cannot be analyzed" — meaning no DNA analysis, if possible.

Over 40 years ago, I wrote an article for a Guahan (Guam) newspaper about the various crackpot, lamebrain, and screwball theories about Earhart's unexplained disappearance. I ended the article with these words which are still true today: "What really happened to Earhart, her navigator, and her aircraft, may never be known. Despite books by aviation sleuths, a long list of disappearance theories without any solid documentation, and cuckoo psychics allegedly telephoning Earhart's winged spirit (dial her plane, Electra 10E), no one knows what happened to her. No reliable documented evidence relating to her disappearance has ever been discovered. The truth about Earhart's disappearance, in my opinion, is unromantic and short on mystery: Earhart's airplane crashed in the open sea, far from land, and alive, or maybe dead on impact, she sank with her navigator and her airplane into the deep dark depths."

Perhaps the best The End comment regarding Earhart's fate is Porky Pig's memorable words at the end of cartoons (Looney Tunes) in the late 1930s: "Th-th-that's all, folks!"

Illustration: The photograph shows Earhart in pilot's headgear. I have inserted from my postage stamp collection an 8-cent U.S. postage stamp — airmail, of course — issued in 1963. It shows Earhart and her aircraft. Beside the stamp I have added a stylized drawing of a compass rose — an old-time navigation instrument — clipped by me years ago from an old Pacific-area map for tourists. Earhart photograph credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

21 March 2024

I plan to post this image and text (below) on my Facebook Profile in the near future:

After watching an episode on PBS's Nature about a male human's encounter with a sperm whale, I was reminded of my sighting of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) one evening in 1968 while onboard an inter-island ship (aka "field-trip ship") voyaging among the Pacific Ocean's (To continue reading, touch, tap or click here or on the little V, if visible, at upper right.)

Marshall Islands, where I was assigned as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer.

During the ship's departure from Jaluit Atoll, I stood beside the railing on the ship's stern deck and watched the atoll's receding, oceanside shoreline. Suddenly, the sperm whale surfaced between the ship and the atoll. Its not-so-large left eyeball, about the size of a baseball, eyed the ship (and me) and then the whale quickly submerged, disappearing from view beneath the atoll's deep, oceanside waters. Sadly, we never met eyeball-to-eyeball again.

Illustration: I made this illustration from an assortment of public-domain images: a U.S. map of Jaluit Atoll, the flag of the Marshall Islands, a green sea turtle, a sperm whale submerging at sunset, and a red-haired mermaid riding a yellowfin tuna. (Yes, I like red-haired mermaids and I eat canned skipjack tuna, not canned yellowfin tuna.) Image credits: Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, and PublicDomainVectors.

14 March 2024 (First posted, in part, on my Facebook Profile on 16 October 2019.)

I am thinking today about Hawai'i's Princess Ka'iulani (1875–1899) who died young, age 23. She would have been a queen of Hawai'i if she had lived a longer life, and if, in 1893 (a few years before her death), the Hawaiian monarchy had not been illegally overthrown by a group of non-Hawaiian residents, including citizens of the U.S. who were aided by the U.S. military. This eventually led to annexation by the (To continue reading, touch, tap or click here or on the little V, if visible, at upper right.)

U.S. of the Hawaiian Islands and later U.S. statehood.

Ka'iulani's home in Waikīkī was named 'Āinahau, meaning "land of the hau tree" — an indigenous Polynesian tree. The apartment building that I live in is built on the site of her long-ago Waikīkī home and is also named 'Āinahau.

Illustration: A photograph of Ka'iulani taken in England, probably around 1892, where she had been sent to further her education — her father was Scottish and her Hawaiian mother was a member of Hawai'i's royal family in the late 19th century. She is wearing a Victorian-style dress with high collar and so-called "mutton-chop" sleeves. The photograph is from a late 19th-century book about Hawai'i. Using a Nikon camera attached to a copy stand, I photographed this book-published photograph years ago from a copy in a Honolulu library's rare book collection. Called hau in Hawaiian, the yellow blossom (inserted by me) is a species of yellow-blossomed hibiscus (Hibiscus tiliaceus) that may have been carried to the Hawaiian Islands centuries ago by the Polynesian voyagers who settled in this mid-Pacific archipelago, or hau seeds may have reached the Hawaiian Islands without human assistance by floating across the ocean. Because the blossoms last only one day, hau is often symbolic of the transitory nature of human life, certainly true given the short life of Ka'iulani. This hau print is from the 19th-century Hawai'i artist Isabella Sinclair's Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands published in London in 1885. It is the first book published with colored illustrations of Hawai'i's flowers.

Name trivia: Ka'iulani in Hawaiian means "the royal sacred height."

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