If I may step away from kittens for a moment (okay I forgot to bring in the newest pictures), I want to do something actually blog-related for once, namely link to a couple sites that merit attention.
First up is Vice Magazine's blog. Vice's main site is blocked when I'm at work and generally I'm pretty sick of the magazine and the way its record label automatically ruins any band it touches. But its blog, which is just on a Typepad subdomain, often has good stuff. Case in point, brief interviews with Indians representing each caste of its society. The Indian Caste system is something that's always fascinated me, especially since in the US, we're not supposed to have such delineations. But of course, we totally do but we're not supposed to speak of it. Capitalism is supposed to smooth all of it over, but all it does is build resentment in my estimation. But India, with its rigidly defined classes (and many subclasses), whenever you ask somebody there how they feel about it, they're always like "Oh, it's great! Everybody loves it!"
Secondly is Cracked Magazine. You may know this magazine from your youth as mostly-lame ripoff of Mad Magazine (which was itself a lame ripoff of the Kurtzman-era Mad Magazine). But the web version (I dunno if there is a print version anymore) is replete with mildly amusing articles that appeal to the Baby-Bust generation. At least males from this generation. Some hit that pointless ranking gene that seems to be present in guys, ie, "The 7 Most Underrated Movie Henchmen" (including that "Kill Frogs" guy from The Muppet Movie). Some are actually pretty astute, despite their sophomoric inspiration, such as "The 5 Biggest Pricks in Congress."
"…kill frogs…"For sheer day-wasting, Cracked is doing its darnedest to please (see Hateful Stereotypes Behind 5 Lovable Cereal Mascots). I prefer this to the reading-the-headline-only Onion. The content on Cracked is much more in line with my type of mind-wandering, where I'll be doing some vaguely work-related, say, editing PDF file names to match my arcane filing techniques and it'll occur to me, "I wonder how many other famous people are Scientologists that I don't even know about." Voila! The Top 10 Secret Celebrity Scientologists to the rescue!
Last time Decatur was around a cat with kittens, she bolted and I didn't see much of her for over a month. I didn't know if this was the same situation or if she was really lost; she had never been out front before, and this weekend had been fraught with stuff to scare both cats and humans. Friday night there was some huge to-do down at the far end of the block; we heard what may have been shotgun blasts and soon the street was full of people, cops, ambulance, fire trucks. Not sure what the story was there but it was a bit unsettling. Saturday night as we were entertaining friends with discussions of how Bushwick is really much nicer than its reputation suggests, some dipshit started shooting a gun right outside our house. I'm still not sure what that one was about, I checked outside afterwards but saw no one in evidence, shooter or shootee (the next day the cops came and placed tiny orange cones next to each bullet casing; the bullets had shot out the rear window of an SUV).
So I thought Decatur might have been so spooked by the commotion that she had gotten herself really lost. Anyway, we kept up the searching and the fretting, I made flyers and posted to lost-pet web sites. But things wrapped up pretty much 20 minutes after I put up the flyers.
Anyway, she's back home and she's being sweet again, so all is well. We have the house on lockdown so nobody's coming in or out for once. We're not sure what to do about the pregnant cat, I'm hoping to relocate her to the backyard, but she seems to be fine with living in the lot across the street. That may be the most ironic aspect of Decatur's sojourn: if she left because she didn't want to share space with the pregnant cat, why then did she move herself to that lot, where the very same cat spends most of her time? This is the logic you get from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut.
