Magic Cat

I swear, this cat is magic.  If I turn to go one way, she's running ahead of me.   Then I turn to go the opposite way, and—guess what?—she's running ahead of me again!  How does she do that?  When I finally sit down, she magically appears on my lap, and I'm supposed to pet her.  It never stops. I so want to show you a photo of her, but I have decided no photos, and I'm sticking to that decision.  (Kitty is scowling at the phone in severe disapproval while I'm typing, but at least she's letting me type this morning.) 

But it was such a battle getting breakfast this morning, with the dog following me around licking his lips even after I had fed him.  And then there was the magic cat business. 

If I briefly use the toilet, when I come out, they're both looking at me with great interest: can we come in with you?  That's so weird.  I guess cat people take it all in stride.

Their peeps are coming home at lunchtime. 

Kay

Cats and Dogs

Last week I was again looking after my favorite animal friends.  I'm so thankful that, as a kid I wasn't up to my neck in pets, because I can enjoy the experience so much more now!  Of course, I'm sure there are many adults who grew up with animals, and who now, as adults, have pets for the sake of their children, and they're quite happy.  But I think they get a little jaded; they can't quite go absolutely bonkers about their pets the way people who have been pet-deprived in their childhood do!

I'm sure people who have grown up in a farm, say, look at the silliness of adults losing their cool with kittens and puppies, and just feel pity for them!  (When I say 'farm', I mean any household with pets; it's just easier to write 'farm.')

My friend, the owner of the animals, had bought a little dog-bed for her dog.  He sleeps anywhere except in his bed.  There are exceptions, but he generally sleeps on furniture, in front of the fire, all over the place. 

Somehow, my friend never got around to getting a bed for her cat.  The cat sleeps all over the place, too.  But if she happens to notice the dog bed, she walks up to it,  cool as you please, and hops into it and falls asleep. 

At first, I saw the dog march up to the dog bed—currently occupied by the cat—and growl.  The cat just calmly stared at him.  That's all; they can't show any feeling in their faces, all they can do is stare.  After a brief minute of growling, the dog walked off.  (I can guess that this has happened before, and maybe the cat swatted at him, with her claws out, or something.)

Everybody knows that dogs want to be fed at all times of the day; if you feed them, they'll happily eat, until they burst.  In complete and utter contrast, the cat is fed at some convenient time, and she eats a little of it, and then does something else.  She proceeds to eat from time to time from that same bowlful, until it's gone, at which time she climbs into my lap, and sort of does some low-pressure pestering of me.

At first I thought she was getting very fond of me, and I was flattered!  After a while, I realized that perhaps she wanted something.  I asked her: what do you want?  She looked puzzled for a bit, and then she marched up to where her food was given to her (where the dog couldn't get at it, otherwise he'd eat the whole thing in a second), and then turned round and looked at me!  See, she seemed to be saying, it's empty!

I was in heaven; we were communicating!!  I'm not sure how excited other people would have been if this had happened to them!  Farm-raised humans—you know what I mean; not wild-caught humans—would have expected this, or even anticipated this problem, and said to themselves: her bowl must be empty.  But I had to learn; and she taught me!

The moment her bowl was filled, she settled down to chow down her usual two mouthfuls, and moseyed off to look at the birds through the window. 

Obviously this routine has taken place a number of times, and I'm no longer surprised by it; I just think about how much the real 'mommy' of the pets is missing, by taking it all for granted!

Kay

Dressing Sexily

Wow.  Has TikTok made this happen? : Just some of the TikTok clips get on Facebook, and some of the chicks there really dress sexy.  I guess each individual Fb person has to set her filters, so that these ultra-sexy clips don't find their way into our feed.  But if I'm unhappy with them, imagine how much Whassername Taylor-Green would hate it?

In an ideal world, nobody would care how anyone dressed.   At first I cringed when women wore tights with tunics; then I got accustomed to it.  But then girls began to wear crop-tops with tights or leggings.  I know they're quite different things, but I haven't figured out the difference.  (The first step is to start wearing the damn things.  I've lost a little weight, so I could do it, but for whom am I doing it?  Rest assured I'm not going to post a photo of myself wearing those things on here!!)

But the more everyone shows skin, the more the presumed targets of this sexy dressing will be de-sensitized to exposed skin, etc.  Between yawns they'll think: 'Ho hum, there's another half-dressed chick.  She ought not to wear clothes like that with her goofy body,' etc, etc.  Everyone is a critic. 

Gosh.  Practically every girl seems to want to get themselves recorded, pirouetting around on TikTok.  I'm getting jaded. 

Kay

Odds and Ends

After I had blogged about Barbie, I suddenly wanted to get several things off my chest.  (I'm glad I managed to be critical of the movie without completely dumping on it.  I think it will be an influential movie for years.  Greta Gerwig seems to be trying to nudge the degree to which a film makes demands of a movie audience in the direction of more.  But remember that we have to absorb the sense of the movie in real time!  The ability to do that depends on a number of things; if a moviegoer loves the movie enough to watch it a second time, it could make a huge difference in their understanding of the movie.)

I was looking for information about something on Google, when I came to the bulleted list of previous queries.  OMG.  Let me just say that the typical user of Google is quite unable to formulate a grammatical question.  Let's see whether I can get you a screenshot ...

Nuff said.

It's an interesting puzzle.  An ultra- conservative, or  Tea Partier would probably assume it is an immigrant; at any rate, it is certainly a question from someone whose native language is not English.  But this person is interested in a hymn—a Christmas hymn, in fact—and in locating it in "Methodist", the Methodist Hymnal, I would guess.  All he (or she) had to do is to look it up in the alphabetical index at the back! Is this person new to hymn-books?  It is a whole pile of interesting questions. 

To be fair, there's no basis to assume this person is a typical user of Google; in fact this was the second of several items of this sort, and the other items were phrased reasonably intelligibly.  (I don't want to sound ignorant, but as a teacher I know that confusion between 'intelligible' and 'intelligent' just has to be expected.  Intelligible means easy to read (if it is text, or easy to understand, if it is spoken).  Intelligent is probably what you think it means; I can't do a better job of defining that word. 

But wait, there's more!

Now, my Facebook feed has started showing me trivia about figure-skating as well!  This is how I learned about a Russian skater called Yulia "Sunny" Lipnitskaya.  This is a pint-sized beauty whom I'm half in love with!  My enthusiasm was greatly dampened when I saw a photo of her receiving a certificate from our good friend Putin, and when I read that she had given her blessing to her husband to go fight the Ukrainians.  I would have put up a photo of her (and her adorable little baby girl) if not for struggling so much with the blogger software.  OK; let me try ...

Sunny Lipnitskaya ❤️

(You probably think that she looks a little like me!  Actually, she looks like the fake picture I put up as my portrait, which in turn only looks a tiny bit like me.  I wouldn't mind looking like Yulia—now calling herself Julia—except that I'm liable to get looked up by Vladimir.)

Barbie

OK.

I thought Margot R. was excellent for the Barbie role.

I thought all the Barbies were cast beautifully, acted brilliantly, and were an awesome ensemble team. 

I think Ken did really well, but I couldn't comment on the role, because, honestly I couldn't really get my head around the plot.  This gender-roles thing makes sense to me, but at the upper echelons of the "Patriarchy" psycho-babble, I tend to lose my grasp of what they're saying. 

I thought America Ferreira was just perfect, and the girl who played her daughter was brilliant, but that could just be me thinking they were really cute. 

I really love Greta Gerwig, but I did not like her Little Women as much as I liked the Winona Rider film; maybe I haven't figured out the Calculus of the gender war really well.  To get into the advanced levels of the gender dialectic, you have to be able to understand certain arguments really fast, but I couldn't.  They were going by too fast for me to grab. 

That Kate McKinnon is beyond brilliant!  She could persuade me about anything!  Will Ferrell was excellent too, but he wasn't involved in advancing the argument at all; he was just a placeholder.

In the end, Greta G's plot was a little too complex for a movie audience to pick up on the fly, though it probably made sense for those who have been involved long term in the gender wars (which I haven't).  Even while I was dismayed by the failure of the plot of the movie, I was giggling at the comedy of the screen action!  It really is funny. 

I shudder to think that about fifty guys will want to pressure GG for the rights to the story with a view to doing a better job of it, and only succeed in screwing it into the ground.

Kay

An Observation ...

I stayed the night with friends.  As I was being dropped off, I noticed something; the roofs of some houses were adorned with dish antennas. 

I realized that TV was a large part of the entertainment of large chunks of the population.  Writers have been deploring this fact in the past, but I haven't seen much groaning about it in recent years.  In fact, when I'm forced to watch TV at the home of other people, I groan.  But obviously having a TV in the house is super important for lots of people.  In stories I read, some people just leave the TV on, but don't sit and watch it.  I, in contrast, have to scroll through various apps on my phone, often unsatisfied with what I see there.  (Of course there's always ballet reels on Facebook, and lesbians kissing on DA.  If you join DA, you won't necessarily be forced to watch pictures of lesbians kissing; I have been caught approving—or liking—these kissing pictures, and that's why I'm blessed with so many of them in my 'feed'.  Can't complain.) 

Kay.

P. S. : So anyway, DA is only showing me (1) Redheads, and (2) Lesbians, kissing.   It's a little like only eating ice cream all the time, you know?  My guess is that the guy (or gal) who maintained their algorithm asked for a raise, they got mad and fired him, and they replaced him with a part-timer who just continued with the basic, very basic, choices for each member.  I need my vegetables.  I need my fiber!  Oh man, nothing goes the way I want it ...

Kay

Another Two Pairs of Sound-Alikes

"Mel quickly returned from stuffing the garbage (bag) down the shoot."

Most of my readers probably know that, what an apartment-building dweller stuffs their garbage bag down is not a 'shoot', but a 'chute'.  Chute is also the word you use for one of those slides kids go down, at a kids' playground.  And there are "Chutes and Ladders," the game, and so on. 

The sentence was taken from an excellent book that I'm 📚 reading.  There is even an adorable seven-year-old who's on the (autistic) spectrum, and a trans person, and someone who's non-binary.  The 'them' pronoun is a pain, though I see why some people prefer it <sigh>.