Benny and the Cat Club

One of my summer projects was to find a little brother or sister for Doc, badly in need of a playmate after the loss of Sophie, an incomprehensible divorce, and the I-Want-to-Be-an-Only-Kitty truculence of his older sister Phoebe.
So here is Lord Tony Benn, formerly 2nd Viscount of Stansgate, known as Benny, a graduate of Kalamazoo Animal Rescue. By the second day of his arrival, he and Doc were practicing cat-fu and grooming each other. Even Phoebe is willing to let the kitten share one corner of the bed or walk past her in the hall without hysterics-- some of the time. Benny is a sunny little guy who litter trained instantly and taught himself (and me) to play fetch. He's still enough of a kitten to suckle noisily on a paw or a blanket and knead my tender flesh when he naps by my side, purring and oblivious to my screams. Most wonderfully, he has Sophie's talent for making me laugh at least once a day.

I was amazed to hear from Kalamazoo Animal Rescue that it's more difficult to place black cats; I would've thought they were everyone's first choice. My cat vet, Dr. Seeley Rotigel, put me in touch with KAR and they really are a bargain in addition to their virtues as animal rescuers: Benny arrived already neutered, wormed, de-flead twice and with all his vaccinations, at a cost much lower than I could have managed adopting on my own.

Benn (two n's please, in keeping with his namesake, the great British Labour MP Tony Benn) is shown here only after some difficulty, as he insisted on coming closer and blocking the lens every time I took out the camera. For the uninitiated, the other Tony Benn is shown here below, and in spite of his inability to jump five times his own height from a crouch, he talks beautifully about democracy, the health of the citizen, and the ways of the world in general. Ees a life-ah changer.

CURRENT READING

PRINCETON, NJ–According to the latest Gallup Poll, conducted Monday and Tuesday of this week, nearly three out of four Americans can no longer believe this shit.
(The Onion)
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"It's very interesting to me that some ex-communists in the Labour party have been able to shift from Stalin to Blair and it hasn't been much of a shift... the shift from Stalin to Blair is a minor adjustment."
(Tony Benn)

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“Like most premodern societies, the Maya conceived of history not as the linear passage of time but as a series of cycles — they called them “world age cycles” — that would repeat over and over. To capture these cycles, the Maya employed what scholars call the long-count calendar, a five-unit computational system extending forward and backward from their mythical creation day, which is calculated to have fallen on either Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. or Aug. 13, 3114 B.C. All the current hoopla is due to the mathematical fact that the current world-age cycle on the long count, which began in Aug. 3114 B.C., is about to reach its end, 5,126 years later, on a date given in scholarly notation as 13.0.0.0.0 — which falls, not quite exactly, on Dec. 21, 2012.”
(Benjamin Anastas, on what’s inspired current millennial fever among “New Age” personalities )

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“There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called "popular culture" or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both "relevant" and "contemporary" while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly— ‘Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.’"
(Christopher Hitchens)

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Do Rome and Carthage know what we deny?
Death only throws fixed dice, and yet we raise
the ante, and stake our lives on every toss.
(Robert Lowell, "The Ruins of Time")

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“It's a little-studied chapter of Reagan's career, but perhaps the most formative. As chronicled in Thomas Evans's The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Reagan was employed by GE first as a spokesman and later as a kind of employer-to-employee ambassador. With management facing a restive labor force, an obscure PR guru named Lemuel Boulware hatched the idea of using the emerging techniques of public relations to turn factory-line workers against their own unions. Reagan would be the vessel for this message, and it was in the hours he spent propagandizing the working class about the benefits of free markets that he forged the distinctive Reagan appeal: hard-right economics delivered in the sunny cadence of an amiable uncle.”
(Christopher Hayes)

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“Lucidity is the wound closest to the sun.”
(Rene Char)

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“... Most women didn’t know how to interpret the wildness of men... These women weren’t looking for danger, they were looking for the alpha male. They were looking for the guy who would subdue the other males, rule the pack. The man with initiative, drive, a will to power. The trouble was, civilized men didn’t express their drive the same way the brutes did, and a lot of women never caught on to that. They saw the masculine display, the casual violence, and thought they were seeing just what the estrous baboon wanted. What they got was another baboon. While the real men, the kind who built things that lasted, who cared for those under their protection, those men had to search long and hard for a woman who would value them.”
(Orson Scott Card, Homebody)

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“’Sukeban Deka’– literally translated as ‘Juvenile Delinquent Girl Detective’–is essentially the Japanese version of ‘21 Jump Street’, except that instead of sending Johnny Depp to high school to deal with teen pregnancy, it’s about the Dark Director recruiting a teenage girl to battle sinister high school-based terrorism by beating the living hell out of people with a huge metal yo-yo. It is, therefore, infinitely superior.
(Chris’ Invincible Super Blog)