Friday Cat Blogging

Another rebuke to the "No viable mutations" crowd

I'm not quite sure when my wife and I came up with the "It's your turn to choose a cat" thing, exactly, but Larry was my choice. I have a string of choosing remarkable cats that dates back to the mid-60s, beginning with my insistence my dog-loving parents let me keep the farm kitten that showed up in our front yard, the one who became The Giant Cat, 25 pounds legitimate, head the size of a softball and a growl a full octave below your ordinary cat's. My mother, no real savvy pet owner (she has since middle age driven a succession of pedigreed dogs even crazier than they started out) didn't get him neutered until age three, so he fought more career bouts than Archie Moore and would disappear for weeks at a time. He'd bring home full-grown rabbits, and seemed to regard the neighbor's bird feeder as too unsporting to even acknowledge. He'd jump up on the back fence and taunt the neighbor's German shepherd, who'd eventually take the bait and be dispatched with a couple of slashes across the nose.

I've picked from various litters or up off the street a black Siamese smart enough to crack safes, a face-licking albino who caught, and survived, feline leukemia in the early days of the epidemic, the Boy, possessor of blasé street smarts, first-rate mouser, who was once seen chasing a neighboorhood dog down the street, and the Hoover, the Pure White Light of Irritability.

And compared to that lineup Larry went through kittenhood as a definite C student, most notable for the elán he brought to his obsessive-compulsive disorder and his willingness to run headlong into anything whatsoever. He was also the clumsiest cat I'd ever seen, so much so that I figured he had some mild visual deficit. It was not unusual to watch him get tangled up and fall off the ledge of the picture window in the living room just trying to walk across it.

And he didn't grow. He never grew a neck, or much of a snout, and he kept those Japanese anime eyes. He's a chriper and a whirrer, only rarely a meower.

He was smart, completely incorrigible, and a creature of habit even by cat standards. He had taken over the guest room he'd been locked in for the first few days of his stay while he and Stinky adjusted to each other. Now it was his room, and he expected his 10 PM feeding to be on time and the door shut behind you as you left. Otherwise he came back out and started breaking stuff until you remedied the situation.

This was one of the first two clues that Larry was a special talent, though it didn't appear that way at first. I've had cats do all sorts of things to get attention, particularly if it's time to wake you up for a feeding. I had a cat in college who would jump up on me at 5 AM (I got him the year I had the coffee-and-doughnuts breakfast shift at the conference center), start kneading away and drool in my face. The Hat made the alarm clock connection and knocked that off the nightstand whenever he needed you. Stinky's another kneader, but when that is met with a quick sleepy brush-off he walks up and smacks you in the mouth.

But Larry is pure hellion. He figured out early that whatever it was that got you to yell at him also got you to pay attention to him. Anything and everything gets knocked off the nightstand. Feet (mine typically hang over the end of the bed) are a favorite target. My lampshade has been chewed practically in half. And when you scream at him and drag yourself out of bed with thoughts of murder where just moments before was a beautiful dream he never runs for it. He stands there and chirps. You're up, finally. Get breakfast.

And there's the wastebasket thing. His obsession with wastebaskets started early; the door to the downstairs bath has to be kept closed or its contents will be found all over the kitchen. This was the thing that really got my attention: once he dives headfirst into a wastebasket you cannot get him out. You'd have better luck pulling a terrier out of a rathole.

At around 8 or 9 months he took to demanding a twenty-minute Cat Dancer workout every morning after breakfast. It had to begin in the living room with a few jumps and some rug work, followed by a trip to the hallway so he could bounce off the walls. Literally. From his penchant for crashing into things he'd eventually figured out the technique of springing full force at the wall and using that to propel himself upward. He plays the game above the light switch.

And he never seems to tire of it. He's outgrown the clumsiness, and he's capable of some beautiful layout work, but what's truly remarkable is that he'll crash about like this for hours, hurtling himself against walls, into whatever piece of furniture is in his way. You never have to trick him into playing by mimicking prey movements as with other cats. Just open the door to the closet where the thing is kept. He's in it for the pure love of sport.

Then my wife bought this fish-on-an-elastic-band thing for him. I'm not big on elastic band toys. But Larry, evidently, is. The jumping frenzy is now accompanied by the tug-o-war seen above. And he's damned serious, as you might be able to tell from the picture. He's not hunkered down--he's moving backwards. Get him off the carpet and onto the wood floor and you can slide him around. What you can't do is make him turn loose.

Oh, My God. They've Leveled the Playing Field!

“The great problem is that Al Qaeda has moved far beyond being a terrorist organization to being almost a state of mind,” said Simon Reeve, author of a 1999 book on Osama bin Laden and his associates.

"Officials Cite Scale and Complexity of Plane Scheme", New York Times

Name Three

8 p.m. My Name Is Earl (:30) 7861

The lovely Christine Taylor, who to some of us will always be Marcia in the two "Brady Bunch" movies, guest stars as...

--unjustly anonymous "Highlights" writer for TV Week. [Emphasis mine.]

Joe-verboard

Peter Wallsten, NEWS ANALYSIS: "Partisan Crevasse May Be Widening," LA Times, August 10

CRAWFORD, Texas — Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut says he can win reelection as an "independent Democrat." But his primary defeat signaled that the label may be a contradiction in terms: Many Democrats are hungry not for independents but for junkyard-dog fighters who will counter the aggressive tactics they see from the Republican Party and the Bush administration.

That sentiment now suggests that a partisan Washington may become even more divided.

The Horror! Ya know, I've been waiting twenty-five years as the Partisan Crevasse yawned, through the most corrupt administration in history, through the hunting of the "liberal" Bill Clinton, through the near-quadrupling of the national debt under a President who had run--for sixteen years!--on the scandal of the National Debt, through the biggest picking of American pockets in history, through lobbyists and industry groups writing the legislation that allowed them to do that and more, through a sham Congressional "revolution" by "citizen" legislators, through the censure of a Speaker of the House led by a man who then became Speaker himself and did the very same thing, through the filibustering of one President's nominees by a party which, in power scant months later, tried to eliminate the filibuster, through God knows what legislative shenanigans from the most corrupt House of Representatives in the history of the Republic, to a Bush administration for which any adjective of opprobrium is hopelessly insufficient, and I finally hear specific concerns about partisanship only when Holy Joe Lieberman loses a primary. And the irony of that is, by this point I'm in favor of a widening crevasse, or at least no longer worried about it; we've got enough justifiable candidates for Dropping Down One that we'll fill it back up in no time.

Happy Birthday

Ian Scott Anderson
born August 10, 1947

"Abandoned By His Party"

I forgot to set the VCR, what with all the excitement of Jane Powell Day on Turner Classic Movies, and...no, wait. It's Jane Powell Day on Turner Classic Movies. The thinking man's June Allyson. This is, I believe, the third August's worth of Star of the Day, a promotional schtick designed to prove there are very few stars whose careers include more than three movies you'd care to watch, and almost none you can take for more two in a row. And that list emphatically does not include Jane Powell, not that you'd try.

So I forgot to set the VCR and I can report on last night's CBS Evening News only from what's left of my memory. I was curious about how they'd cover the Lieberman story, or rather I was curious to see if their Lieberman coverage would be as bad as I assumed. And it was worse, which was a real accomplishment since my assumption was already that it would be worse than I assumed.

To begin with, though it was apparently coincidental, Harry Smith was guest anchor. Harry Smith is that rarity among teevee news hairdos in that a) he has no hair and b) he has actually gotten worse as time goes on, not through ego or insertion of a personal agenda but as a direct result of Image Consultation. Whatever they did to him to make him morning-show compliant was indeliable. He's now a sort of Urban Midwest Charles Kurault. Which is a major problem, because Midwesterners in this day and age cannot be folksy, especially if they've elbowed their way through the crowd at CBS all the way to the guest anchor chair. The American Middle West is a place where most every kid with a modicum of brains aspires very early to lose the local color, as much as possible, and it's damn near impossible to reverse the process and seem anywhere close to genuine. The War put an end to it. Call it the Herb Shriner Line.

Anyhow, they gave Harry the interview with the President of BP, and you could actually see the moment, after the response to his first softball, when he remembered that he wasn't interviewing the guy about his new movie. But it didn't help.

Lieberman was the lead story, just as I figured, which is about all you really need to know about the coverage, considering what else it bumped from that spot. It's a frickin' primary election. In Connecticut. Okay, okay, so an incumbent got bumped off. Sure, he was a VP nominee, more's the pity. But referendum on the war? On George W. Bush? Don't we already know what people think about those atrocities? This had all the distinct news scripting value of a junior-high student hiding behind an open door to find out what her boyfriend said about her when she wasn't around.

And to that end they gave the story to Trish "Kneepads. Literally, Kneepads" Regan, the former Miss New Hampshire, who uttered the memorable phrase which gives us our title. I'm sorry I can't do a transcript, but here's a recap: Blah, blah, blah, Democratic stalwart. Blah, blah, anti-war. Blah, blah, November elections, blah, bloggers, blah, blah, Far Left, blah, here's Tony Snow. Regan closed by noting that Lieberman going independent might be a positive note, since there are more registered Independents in Connecticut than there are Republicans or Democrats.

And that's no shit, if I may borrow Herb Shriner's old radio catchphrase.

Fight, Team, Fight! Oh, Wait.

Assuming that your memory, unlike that of the idealized news consumer, actually goes back five months, you might recall the story of The First Little Columbine of Spring, where an overheard remark on a Johnson County (IN) school bus led to the timely arrest and conviction of four international terrorists teenaged homicidal maniacs fifteen-year-old boys, three of whom had fallen in with one who was disturbed enough to fantasize about killing his principal and holding the school hostage. In case you don't, the story pushed everything else off the local news for 72 hours; the county prosecutor announced within a couple hours of their arrest he'd seek to try them as adults; the boys were said to be upset at student athletes for making fun of them; having failed to turn up any weapons to go with the plot, the local Sheriff told the press that at least one of the boys "had access" to guns, a newly-discovered criminal act; the principal professed not to know too much about them; and the fact that three of them were special education students didn't crop up in news reports until a couple of weeks later.

Three of the four, all except the supposed mastermind, were quietly released, and by "quietly" I mean "without local media owning up to having sensationalized a story that wouldn't have sold nearly so much soap if they'd actually uncovered, and reported on, the basic facts of the matter from day one."

Well, wouldn't ya know it, just five months later and they've learned their lesson:

Police: Center Grove teen assaulted in locker room

August 6, 2006

Police in Johnson County are investigating allegations that a Center Grove High School freshman football player was assaulted in a locker room by his teammates.
According to a police report, a 15-year-old boy said he was attending football practice and "horsing around" with some other students when they ganged up on him.
The boy said another youth pinned him to the floor and told others to take a "free shot." Several team members then allegedly struck and kicked him.
The boy also told police that another boy dropped his own pants, then rubbed his buttocks on the boy's head.
Finally, the boy said that while he was pinned down, an unknown upperclassman placed a 2-foot round metal rod next to him and said, "Defend yourself." The older boy then allegedly attempted to insert the rod into the youth's rectum.
When the boy screamed, which alerted coaches, the teammates scattered.

Because this story wasn't sensationalized, oh no. No screaming black ink on the front pages for this baby. It appeared next to the obituaries in the Metro section. In other words, on the inside back page.

Oh, sure, the Conspiracy Freaks will claim that this one gets buried because there's a double standard which lets athletes get away with sexual assault while students with autism are threatened with hard time for some other student's notebook-scribbled fantasies. But I say if we equate the two then the terrorists have already won. Wait, does that still work?

Anyway, innocent until proven guilty, blah blah blah. Honestly, I have no real opinion about what happened, just about how the story plays out, and how the school is reacting. Tuesday's Star brought new details:

Johnson County Sheriff's Maj. Steve Byerly said that once the school turns over the results of its investigation, the case would be submitted.
High school officials were preparing to file their police report late Monday, said Superintendent Candace Milhon-Baer.

So, the Sheriff is waiting for the school to investigate. An interesting choice, especially since the school didn't bother to call the sheriff. The boy's father did.

The incident should be classified as "bullying," Milhon-Baer said Monday. She said administrators have met twice with football team members about bullying and other actions.

And we've met twice with team members about bullying, this despite the fact that bullying by student athletes was the supposed reason for four students trying to blow the school up and kill the principal last spring. Well, at least they're avoiding message fatigue.

But lemme go out on a limb here. Sure, the incident could be classified as "bullying". But no, it "shouldn't". If it happened as the victim alleges it should be classified as a physical assault, and if the details are correct--I include here the application of one's buttocks to the "head" of an individual who is being forcibly held down, not just the supposed attempt at rectal penetration--then it's sexual assault, and the prosecutor should be making noises about trying that in adult court. This is one of the ways this sort of thing gets dismissed as "PC bullshit"--halfhearted mutterings about "bullying" used to defuse a situation the school doesn't want to publicize, as opposed to March's all-out Columbine offensive, which it did. Regardless of the facts in the case, if it determined that an assault took place, anything beyond a teenaged shoving match, the school should have acted immediately by forfeiting the first game of the season. That's before we determine individual culpability. And the coaches--blameless or no--need to be reminded that they are there to supervise a group of fifteen-year-old boys, not to conduct a training camp for NFL wannabees. And just how is it they come upon the scene after the perpetrators "scatter" and they don't immediately grab every last kid and make him tell what he knows? That's second nature for a teacher.

(Geezer alert): Okay, I was a high school athlete, and a certain amount of shenanigans went on, but if there was any bullying it was mostly confined to the field. I think a couple of freshmen got stuffed into lockers along the way, but just in fun. The hallway and lunchroom bullies were no-account JDs. If you had a reputation for hooliganism you were drummed out of the athletic department. And that was in the days before you had to keep one eye on the weird-lookin' kid doodling skulls n' shit all over the cover of his notebook.


We've had thirteen murders in Indianapolis in the last four days, and I didn't expect this sort of thing to push that sort of thing off the front pages. What I do expect is that it be given the proper amount of attention given all the excitement last spring. Your kid and my kid are a lot more likely to be bullied at school than they are to be blown up by autistic pipe-bomb builders. But that's not the way the newspapers think you see it.

Same Shit, Different Sunday

David Brooks, "Talking About Terror"

Maybe the Islamists have simply come up with a conceptual breakthrough that makes them difficult to defeat. They've grasped that the more the endanger their own people and get them killed, the better it is for them politically. Israel or the U.S. gets blamed. That's like a superweapon in the media war.

The word that springs immediately to mind is "Wow." The phrase that follows is "the most disingenuous thing I've ever read in my life."

In fact it's hard to decide what layer of dishonesty to peel back first: the "conceptual breakthrough" of a centuries-old concept? The reduction of Israel to Robot State, incapable of preventing itself from actions not in its own interests? How 'bout Post-Vietnam Excuse Mongering, Volume 26?

Okay, coin toss. Heads. Conceptual breakthrough.

I dunno about you, but where I was educated, in the public schools of the previous century, word managed to leak out that the stories of all those Hun atrocities which had led us into the Great War were, well, occasionally unverifiable. And further reading suggests that the technique was what you might call Old Hat by 1914.

How is it that matters of insurgency, guerilla warfare, even--dare I say it?--terrorism so fully confound folks like David Brooks, folks on the True Intellectual end of our political spectrum? This country clings to the sacred (tho' false) notion that it was created by an insurgency, that American patriots defeated the Mightiest Army of Its Day by fighting "Indian style" while the lost-in-the-17th-century Brits marched out in their bright red woolens to easy slaughter. We celebrate it in everything from the faux-Cavalier traditions of the Late Rebellion to the comforting fables of the vanquished Noble Red Man, right on through Merrill's Marauders and the partisans in France and the Philippines in WWII, to today's special forces.

But turn the tables and use those techniques on us, or on the "us" the neocons mistake Israel for, and suddenly it's barbaric, inhuman, and just plain bad manners--and wholly unforeseen for some reason. (And what is that reason? The fact that neoconiacal hubris created an insurgency in Iraq?) Our enemies aren't supposed to have "superweapons". We have the superweapons. So if we're thwarted in some way it must be unfairly.

This is the Vietnam defense as it's known today to the Burkean masterminds of Brooks' party (we lost because the media convinced us we did), but it wasn't contemporary. At the time--when the public, whatever side of the argument it lined up on, was so well aware of the string of broken promises and claims of sporatic lighting at the end of various tunnels that the idea that the Times had lost the war was simply risable--the argument was "we weren't allowed to win", apparently as a result of there being rules of engagement. But the media meme won out in the long run, because the other argument was untenable, too, and the rewriting of history took care of any factual objections. So that it is now sufficient, if you're David Brooks, merely to point in the direction of The Media to cast a special Reverse Bad News spell, though that's somewhat surprising considering how Brooks earns a living.

I lived through it in the Vietnam years, and that was enough to convince me that the conceit would never go away. There's too much invested in it for people like Brooks, the skybox-dwellin' war fans for whom any and every defeat now means the refs cheated us. Interesting how easily that bunch went from promising to restore decency to insisting we all ignore it.

Happy Birthday

Felice Bryant (born Matilda Genevieve Scaduto)
August 7, 1925--April 22, 2003

Castrogasms

So...is it just me, or is there a distinct odor of crashing Saddam statues, Van Halen-blaring-at-the-Panamanian-Presidential-Palace, and prewar victory celebrations circa March 2003 about this? And a soupçon of chickenhawk? Third-generation dispossessed petit-nobility, none of whom has any intention of returning to Cuba, none of whom knows any more about Cuba today than about Cuba in the 50s.

Okay, you're 20 years old. Fidel is 80. Unless the state of Florida begins executing people for bad taste (and what a slaughter that would entail) you're almost certain to outlive him. Celebrating a polyp seems a teensy bit overdone.

And look, the US of A didn't give a shit about how Castro treated dissidents, anymore than we cared how Batista did, right up until Fidel started appropriating the property of United Fruit and offering compensation based on the absurd valuations it had placed on its holdings for tax purposes. Get it? The source of our disagreement with Fidel was actuarial tables. Frankly, that the expat Cuban community in south Florida has cried for Castro's head for fifty years while saying nothing whatever about the exploitation of Cubans by foreign companies before he came along was a good enough reason to ignore it.

And yes, that's an oversimplification, just as there aren't really all that many camera-hogging Mambo Revolutionaries out there, and even some strident anti-Castro Miamians have condemned the parading. But it's also the sort of thing the US government plays to in announcing it will "aid the transition to democracy in Cuba" with $80 M above the table. And the Cuban patriots among us should bear in mind how many soccer balls that money'll buy, and how many schools it'll paint, assuming everything goes well.

Happy Birthday

Ernest Taylor Pyle
August 3, 1900--April 18, 1945

Storm, Meet Port

I saved the story, partly as a talisman, partly because it was so tough living through it I couldn't think of writing it down. Still can't, not the whole story, not a round by round recap. The important thing is that a few hours after I post this Mom and I will walk into one of the nicest assisted living operations in town, and then one of us will walk out, presumably me.

Two weeks ago she came for an unscheduled weekend when she refused to join my sister's family at The Lake, followed by the rest of the week with me as my sister started her new job--she's a professional cog--and my wife went north for a summer course. I was already pissed at my sister for the argument, convinced that avoiding conflict as much as possible was key, while she and her husband seemed to be taking every opportunity to say, "Mom, you are now old and out of your head and you have to let us decide." I was still thinking this about 45 minutes after my wife left, when my dear old gray-haired mother swung a pick-axe at me. I came to understand that when she wants an argument she will get it.

She wanted to go to Florida. Now. Off to the airport. Now. Don't tell anyone. You can come back in two days.

I tried ignoring her. Then I tried calmly changing the subject, then even more calmly explaining why I couldn't suddenly disappear into the swamps even if I wanted to. And all the while she got nastier and more hurtful.

And this essentially went on for four days, with her sleeping for hours in between bouts and me not sleeping at all. By Monday morning she was calling her Florida bank every half-hour and telling them she was being held prisoner. Thank God she was such an obvious lunatic. Monday afternoon, when I went upstairs and caught an hour's sleep she put post-it notes all over the house. Tuesday morning her bags were packed and placed at the front door, and she was poring over the Yellow Pages for "Airport Transportation", though she seemed to have no ability to actually dial the numbers correctly. I unplugged the downstairs phone and told her the battery was dead. She managed to let Larry escape, a fact I discovered about an hour later, though fortunately he was still on the deck. Then she refused to eat, and by Wednesday morning she was refusing to speak to me, either. Her bags, which had returned to her room, were now in the hallway by the bathroom, and she was going through the Yellow Pages again. I fixed some breakfast and took it in to her, hoping she'd eat once I left, but no dice. I deadbolted the doors and got another hour's sleep.

When I came downstairs she was still giving me the silent treatment, so I went outside and watered plants. I came back in, walked across the kitchen, and she was out the back door like an 80-year-old flash.

And so was Larry, who decided now was a good time for a backyard game of Catch the Cat, and as I went after him I caught in the corner of my eye my dear old arthritic mother hoofing it down the deck steps, out the gate, and down the driveway. Our street's pretty quiet, and anyway at this point if I was going to lose my mother or my cat it was going to be the one my wife wouldn't blame me for for the rest of our lives. I concentrated on the cat.

She was 600 yards ahead of me by the time I got to the street, chugging away in the 90º heat with her purse tucked under her arm, darting surreptitious looks back to make sure I was following her. I marched her back without much concern for the pace. Back home, she called her lawyer and told him she'd gone out for a walk and I'd come after her and threatened to knock her down. "But I don't think he'd really do it," she added.

And, totally unexpectedly, that broke the fever, and coincidentally solved the problem. The lawyer--who'd handled granting my sister power of attorney and who was an old friend of hers--told her she couldn't go anywhere until her doctor visit, then set up a meeting with us for the next morning. Mom went to sleep for a few hours, and when she woke up she told me, "You have a lot of nice birds in your backyard," and asked for a cup of coffee.

The meeting was infuriating. The guy started right in with "You have Alzheimer's. Even though we don't know that you do, it's almost certain, and you have to let your children take care of you." This was precisely what I had been avoiding saying to her, because we do not know yet. The Alzheimer's thing is an extrapolation (by my sister) based on one of the drugs she's taking and what the children of Mom's late husband said. The very word panicked her. She has an appointment in three weeks time, and once we get the results we'll know what's behind her condition from a clinical standpoint, but until then my focus was on insisting she needed security. And here I think I'm going to a meeting, and we'll be discussing things, and this guy starts in with the "you've got an incurable brain disorder" business.

And the goddam thing was, she sat there and took it. She started to lash out at him and then stopped and listened. And then she "got it."

And that was all the law-talkin' guy was interested in, and he'd pretty much gotten up to leave when I said, "Wait a minute. She can't go back to Florida right away, we need to get her into assisted living. Which I thought would be the whole focus of the meeting.

"One thing at a time," he says to me, sotto voce, and I'm about to go sotto voce all over his ass, when Mom says she thinks that's a good idea. And lawyer guy talks about his own mother, and mentions one of the places I'd looked at, and now Mom is rarin' to go see it.

And so it hasn't exactly been smooth sailing since that moment, but we went on the tour and she put down a deposit on a one-bedroom, and my sister reports she's remained excited about moving in. She goes this morning to stay for a few days gratis, as a try-out, and we hope she'll find it a lot of fun and the constant barrage of events and daily trips (Euchre three times a week at the Y; I have to find out if they play for money) and the new companions will do her some good. The place wasn't my first choice (that one had an indoor pool), but it's highly thought of and she likes it. Plus there's a wise-cracking receptionist with a heart of gold. Really.