Last night someone appealed on Freecycle to have a stray kitten taken off his hands. Our perennial talk of adding a kitten to our roster had recently become more serious; so, in short, we are the new guardians of a scrawny black tomkitten named Pillow.

We had heard that it’s good to keep the new and incumbent cats separated for a few days until each is accustomed to the presence of the other’s scent; so Pillow is temporarily confined to the master bedroom, the rest of the apartment remaining Fluffie’s sole domain for the time being.

Another trick we’ve heard of is to smear butter on the kitten’s head and get Fluffie to lick it off, thus tricking her into a bit of maternal bonding.

Thursday: Vet says he’s three months old, though tiny for that age. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how he can be so neglected and so tame. (He hisses and struggles when I pull him from his hiding-place, but then is quite content to be held.) Though afflicted with fleas, roundworm and a respiratory infection, he is happily free of leukemia/immunodeficiency virus. His isolation will continue for a couple of weeks.

I hope you like the new look, though I’m still tweaking it.

“Why did you bring me thyme?”

“Because you told me to get thyme.”

“Did I say thyme? In future, if I ask for thyme, just get me basil.”

As I may have mentioned before, I arrange my Netflix queue mostly by date. Since I caught up to my own birth, the number of movies per year has grown sharply, so this may be my longest post yet. ( . . more . . )

I’m looking at a banner ad that says

Q. Which is not like the others?

63

57

98

01

I saw quickly that none are prime (1 is usually not counted as prime, so that each integer’s prime factorization is unique) and then that two of the four are divisible by 3, and then a long pause before I saw that only one is even. Does that say something about me?

Over in Volokhia, Jim Lindgren (cited by Tom W Bell) points out a presumably unintended consequence of the atrocious Kelo decision: if commercial activity is “public use”, then it’s not taxable. Hee hee.

“I think the world has been run long enough by well-meaning professionals. We might give the amateurs a chance now.”

—Carol Fisher in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940)