Jenn brought the two kittens over from the Ellis Truss yard to spend the weekend at our apartment. They’re allegedly there as mousers, but only one of them, Penny, shows any inclination towards hunting down and killing small animals.
The two sisters are, I think, about seven months old, and still very kittenish.
Penny shows her Siamese blood in her startling blue eyes, lack of fear of water and verbalization. She has markings like a snow leopard and six fingers on each paw, which look somewhat uncomfortable (that extra finger is just jammed in there), but she seems not to mind. She’s more reserved than her sister, although that’s not saying much.
Patch, a standard calico, although with Siamese facial features, personality and fearlessness towards water, is an absolute maniac, and she eggs on Penny when they’re together. (“Ooh, I bet we can get into the TV cabinet behind the DVD player!” “Oh, I bet we can get on top of the fish tank and stick our paws down through the opening for the filter and catch the fish that never actually swim to that spot!” “Hey, let’s do high-speed laps of the house for several hours, starting at 2 a.m.!”) I fully expect Patch to get into the liquor when we’re not looking, procure some cigarettes and sit up all night with Penny, calling boys long distance.
That said, when the two are separated, they’re both very sweet. If they eventually make their way into our home full-time, it won’t be a bad thing. But only if they knock it off with the 3 a.m. races.
- Update: The law has been laid down over at the truss yard. These are Ellis cats. Not a bad deal for two kittens, having too many people willing to offer them a home, is it?
Note to myself, since I’ve forgotten all my lesser symptoms the first time I got sick with this:
- Eyes like eggs being boiled in my sockets
- Phantom itchiness on lower legs
- Nausea
- Light-headedness
- General discomfort with clothes, bed linens, etc
- Tender spots on my calves, especially on the back
I saw Liz Phair on the Tavis Smiley Show this week (thanks to the wonders of TiVo), and it turns out her song, “Table for One,” isn’t autobiographical, but biographical:
Tavis: You like taking on really ambitious projects. I mean, “Exile in Guyville� huge, massive undertaking, response to the Stones. I mean, where do you come up with these ideas?
 Phair: They’re really natural to me, and I never got to finish my Stevie Wonder project. And really, it’s kind of one of those sadnesses in my life where I would have liked to have finished that, but that was such an epic record. It was so much to undertake, and the more I got into it, the more it became this kind of, I was missing some of the really important songs like, “Isn’t She Lovely?â€? That was a really hard one to come up with. Something from my own life that would be sort of equivalent.
Like, I don’t try to imitate anyone. But it helps me make a record. ‘Cause I don’t really naturally know how to make records. So I kind of, I go to school. I take on an artist who’s phenomenal, and I try to go to their school. And that’s the way that I look at it. Like for me on this record, I have a song about my brother’s alcoholism called “Table for One,â€? and that was my Village Ghetto Land, because Village Ghetto Land to me is the most devastating song on the record.
It’s kind of bringing dignity to sort of the least appreciated part of life. It’s like shining a spotlight on the invisible and downtrodden. And I kind of tried to look at my own life, and see what was the most devastating thing that I witnessed, or that I thought went unsung in a weird way, and it was, for me, the loneliness that my brother would have felt and like the bottom, when he bottomed out.
He’s sober since then, but that’s sort of how I would do it. I would look at what he wrote about, and I’d think about what in my own life, you know, mirrors this sentiment.
She also waxed enthusiastic about her weekly podcast, Uplands, which is available through her site or via your podcasting software of choice.
Peter, my editor, has made the leap and now has his own blog. Unlike me, he does editorials, so he can feel free to express any sort of opinion that he’d express on the editorial page (which is most of them).
- Although I can’t find the non-ugly URL (Yahoo’s new 360 blogs still have a lot of kinks that need ironing out), former Hesperia Star advertising representative Rodney Lambert also has a blog.
It’s so crazy, it must be true:
Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government’s invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
Hey, they’re from MIT. They must be right.
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