mint and the cats who nip it

Catnip’s little flowers, I find on closer inspection, are not plain white: they have little pink freckles. They are somewhat orchidlike in shape.

Yesterday I caught Fluffie washing its leaves.

You may ask why a member of such an edumacated household has so dull a handle as ‘Fluffie’. It happened rather by default. Her human, my housemate, neglected to name her for months; she was ‘(the) cat’ or, being a longhair, ‘(the) fluffy’ – we being of such long acquaintance that we occasionally dispense with such formalities as articles. In the fullness of time we needed something with a capital letter to write down for the vet; and so, for the sake of (the) form, ‘Fluffie’ she became.

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A Wellmeaning Oaf

The List of Possible Bandnames, for those who have musical talent or a knack for names, but not both.

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it must be profound

Got a spam today which ends thus:

</HTML>
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
Of course, the systematic use of complex symbols suffices to account for the preliminary qualification limit. For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, any associated supporting element is unspecified with respect to an abstract underlying order. It seems to me to be the case that a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort presents a valuable challenge showing the necessity for the naive disprovability hypothesis. So far, the incorporation of additional mission constraints must utilize and be functionally interwoven with the philosophy of commonality and standardization. Notice, incidentally, that a constant flow of field-collected input ordinates may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate any deep configuration mode. Similarly, the notion of level of grammaticalness mandates staff-meeting-level attention to the management-by-contention principle. To provide a constituent structure for T(Z,K), a constant flow of field- collected input ordinates is holistically compounded, in the context of the preliminary qualification limit. For one thing, the independent functional principle is rather different from possible bidirectional logical relationship approaches.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

How have you lived this long without knowing that?

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self-illustrating

Value of the expression “The ‘Harper’s Index’ format gimmick became stale on or about the day it was conceived”: 1

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you can count on them

bon mot from Juan Gato:

Federal authorities said Sunday they have arrested a forest technician with the U.S. Forest Service for starting the Hayman fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado’s history.

You know, this kind of stuff wouldn’t happen if we federalized the U.S. Forest Service.

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immortality for pessimists

Larry Niven wrote, somewhere or other, that if you live long enough you’re bound to get rich at least once. It occurs to me just now that, if you live long enough under an immortal dictatorship, sooner or later you’re bound to be dragged away by the secret police; whereas if life is short anyway you’re likely to die in bed if you keep your head down. Perhaps that is part of what Kim Stanley Robinson meant when he wrote in Icehenge that longevity raises the political stakes.

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unions piss me off

Saw a union picket today with a sign saying Catbert Corporation is Enron II. If you thought your employer was a house of cards, would you spend your time agitating to increase its labor costs, or look for a new job?

Tuesday 7/30: I’m tempted to join in with a sign saying “Honk if you love noise pollution”. (And my best earplugs.)

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