It’s been a bit quiet on the R and R front this Fall but I’ve not been entirely idle. I have a piece coming out in Intrepid Ed News next week so that’s something to look forward to along with Thanksgiving. It takes a rather jaundiced eye on the topic of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and how our obsession…
So much gloom, doom, and disaster that it’s important to find counterbalances. Here are a few recent bright spots. Glasgow and Bristol and the USA By all accounts, the Standing For Women event in Glasgow went extremely well. The videos show that the turnout was strong and many women were able to tell their stories. The opposition to women speaking…
Poems by Charles Simic (1938-2023) January Children’s fingerprints On a frozen window Of a small schoolhouse. An empire, I read somewhere, Maintains itself through The cruelty of its prisons. The Election They promised us free lunch And all we got Edna Is wind and rain And these broken umbrellas To wield angrily At cars and buses Eager to run us…
Cats and Dogs Dogs have owners; cats have staff. That’s now a familiar saying but just as accurate nonetheless And while dogs can be trained to follow orders, sit up and beg, it is the rare cat that will even give such attempts the time of day. Which is as it should be. Dogs are very good companions and serve…
Optimized for full cable reception, BlueTooth and wi-fi. The Hat on the Cat – Inspired by all the Amazing Hats at The Three Muses.
Shadorma – that wonderful bogus poetic form that is such fun to write – is perfect for the paean to the feline companion, the international cat of mystery. It’s also handy in keeping the basic arithmetic sharp. Six lines of 3, 5, 3, 3, 7 and 5 syllables. And done. She thrashes Her tail annoyed to Have to share my…
Apparently it’s International Cat Day (where do all these days come from?) So – as I live with an international cat it seems like a good opportunity for a profile of said animal companion.
A favorite place for a walk is the Hudson Valley Rail Trail. There’s at least one stretch north of Hopewell Junction that is regularly infested with religious messages of fear, doom and gloom. Eternal damnation is predicted for us all. The trail starts at the old railway depot at Hopewell Junction and connects with the Walkway Across the Hudson in…
There’s a cat sanctuary in the grounds of the Pyramid in Rome. This rather incongruous Egyptian style pyramid was built in 30 BC as a tomb. It was later incorporated into the section of the Aurelian Walls that now border a cemetery designated by one guidebook as being for “non-Catholic cults’. The graveyard is also known as the Protestant.cemetery or the English cemetery although…
Sleeping is one of the things cats do best. Which is lucky because it limits the number of minutes and hours in the day that the cat plugs into the socket and goes on a wired rampage of electric energy. Sleeping one of their better qualities and most advanced skills. Cats, it seems, do not suffer from insomnia and are capable…
Caravaggio is one of the bad boys in the history of art with a biography so outlandish it reads like fiction. When he arrived in Sicily in 1608 he was wanted for murder in Rome and had brawled his way across the Mediterranean. There a story of his entering a church in Messina where he was offered a bowl of…
As Donald Trump spirals deeper into madness and depravity the toll on the collective psyche just grows. Fortunately help is at hand in the form of the example of Hillary Clinton who recently demonstrated her tremendous problem-solving and self-calming abilities. We all know that cats saved the internet. Now it seems they are saving people from the stress of this…
The flying cats of Borneo – apocryphal? Hyperbole? Fantasy? Jungle legend? Imaginary animals? In response to a request from a professor at The University of Iowa I provided one piece of the story of Operation Cat Drop backed by the official record. When I first heard of this improbable story and the ridiculous claim of 14,00 cats parachuted by the…