I was awakened by a voice: “How cute!” I opened my eyes to find the Little Demon perching on my chest.
Last Sunday we found evidence that Pillow had accidentally been locked out the night before (though I thought he could get in by another way). He hid under the bed all that day. Monday he emerged, still nervous. Wednesday I noticed that his abdomen had a lemon-sized abscess. We took him to a vet, who remarked that his (minor) wounds did not look like the result of fighting with another cat; he asked whether there are raccoons in our neighborhood. (Yes.)
With his belly shaved, and bits of rubber hose poking out of it, Pillow from some angles looks like a cow. But I’m not gonna say that to his face.
without questions there can be no answers
Is there a standard Unix shell command to pause for a given amount of time? One wouldn’t use this from the prompt, of course, but it might have its uses in scripts. Mine is to open a large number of files (local or Web), but not all at once:
cat list-of-files | xargs slow-open &
where slow-open looks like
#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
do
open $i
pause 60
done
It seems like unnecessary overkill to write pause in Python.
In unrelated news — I’ve heard that you can discourage vermin from stealing your pets’ food by setting out a sample spiked with emetic. Have you tried this, does it work? What drug is appropriate for a cat? A neighborhood tom has recently found our cats’ dish, and drops in every night as if he owns the place (if I’m not watching).
Pillow can generate a remarkable volume of purr when he puts his mind to it. I thought of asking him, “Is that a frog in your throat or are you just happy to see me?” but it could so easily be misconstrued.
Pillow has a new ambition: to liberate the thick white string that crosses the space between two bookcases — i.e. my Ethernet line.
I have an idea for an automatic cat-teaser. (Too bad I haven’t tried to build anything since childhood.) It consists of a double pendulum driven by two perpendicular oscillators.