Cats and Weather

I got all the cats inside. What a break! The recycler truck was doing his rounds, and Sammy was feeling nervous over the noise and came inside. Ash seemed to be affected by this behavior and she followed suit. Coco was still playing it cool, perhaps wondering what the hell is going on. However, it was not long before Coco decided to join the group. This is fortuitous because we are expecting some pretty good rain this afternoon, and the skies look it, and yo can almost smell it in the air.

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1645

The weather has cleared up so beautifully. It is positively summery. In fact, I just came inside from giving the waning elephant ears a second watering. But there's a catch. The rain is just being called for later, for overnight, with the supposed chances rising to 50 and 60 percent in the pre-dawn hours, and up to 70 percent toward noon tomorrow. Usually, I don't rely heavily on these forecasts and need to see something in the sky, but since I have all the cats inside, and since it is harder to get them inside these days, I am actually going to bet on the forecast and keep them inside overnight. I tell you, though, if that rain does not come through, I am going to be one pissed off dude, especially if I don't get a decent night's sleep because of these cats.

Dog Songs

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins

until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

-- "The Storm (Bear)" by Mary Oliver

Aww, that's one thing Bo never got to do: play in the snow.

Hamlet (4,1) Gertrude and Claudius

It is not long after Hamlet clears out with the dead body of Polonius when King Claudius comes charging into the room with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and finds a very distraught queen. They were probably ready to seize Hamlet already, for his enforced trip to England. Claudius says:

There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves:
You must translate: 'tis fit we understand them.
Where is your son?

Your son. Claudius has distanced himself emotionally, finding the melancholy prince to be neither kin nor kind. Gertrude asks for privacy with Claudius, and Rosencrantz and Gertrude leave the room.

( Read more... )

Perv

We have another interesting excerpt from that new book, "Perv"

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[T]here was the tale of Armin Meiwes. That name might dimly light up in your frontal lobes as a distant headliner best forgotten, but to remind you—and apologies for doing so—Meiwes, a computer repairman by trade, was the German cannibalistic sexual sadist who, in the spring of 2001, found a willingly edible sexual masochist for himself named Bernd Jürgen Brandes. “Looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed,” read Meiwes’s personal ad on the Cannibal Café website (which, you’ll probably be glad to know, is a website no more). And Brandes, it seems, was looking to be thoroughly digested. That old psychopath Cupid couldn’t have arranged for a more tragic crossing of these lovers’ paths. … From the video footage—the whole awful thing was taped from start to finish—it’s apparent that Meiwes (the eater) didn’t coerce Brandes (the eatee) at all. If anything, the coercion was done by the masochist, not the sadist. Brandes even begged a hesitating Meiwes to bite off his penis. …

I’m by no means suggesting that both the S and the M parts of this equation weren’t disturbed men. You don’t need to be a mental health expert to see that. Yet when we try to apply the ”DSM- 5’s” criteria of pain and non-consent, there’s some tension here, since Meiwes had explicitly sought out a consenting adult partner. And when you combine consent with a masochist’s apparent death wish, well, you can see how a forensic psychiatrist’s job can be daunting.

-- Jesse Bering, "Perv"

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