Barney Cometh

This is Barney. He’s a cat. He’s the reason why Lisa and I are having an extra long ride on the emotional rollercoaster that is Christmas time. For a long time we’ve wanted a pet that we could cuddle with. Fish just don’t come when you call them. So we decide that since Lisa was taking a few days off this week we’d get a kitten. The idea was that we’d both be around to make sure it learns to use the box properly. It turns out that the Monday after Christmas is the worse time of the year to go looking for a free kitten. We made a few calls to local shelters and they were either closed for the week or had no kittens. We ended up at an animal shelter in Salem where they didn’t have kittens but did have one 8 month old cat. Thinking we had our heart set on a kitten we decided to look at him anyway. We walked into the room and he stood up in his cage. He put his arm through the cage bars and swatted at Lisa’s long hair. I knew instantly that he was our cat.

He was originally with a family who had to give him up because of allergies. He spent two months with a foster family who box trained him and did a fine job of teaching him to stay off the kitchen counter. He’s neutered and vaccinated so at $80 bucks he’s a bargain. I’ve always said only a fool PAYS for a cat but I don’t mind making a tax deduct able donation that’s less then what a vet would charge for that kind of care.

Barney spent his first night in our master bathroom where he inspected all 144 square feet before he decided he liked the dirty bathmat the best. We let him out on Tuesday where he wandered around our bedroom and discovered he likes to terrorize the fish. We let him come downstairs and encouraged him to take full advantage of all the wonders that our McMansion has to offer. He likes to stand at the top of the entrance hall and look down on us as we walk by. He’s picked out a chair in the living room that he can call his own. He really likes to swat at the fish.

Late Tuesday afternoon we noticed his left eye was bothering him. After an hour it started to get weepy. We called my parents vet. I figured any doctor that can keep Elvis, my moms cat, alive after fighting raccoons and losing is the man to see. It turns out Barney has an eye and respiratory infection. The doctor gave him a good thorough checkup. The checkup included a very scary feline leukemia and AIDS test. The shelter had given him one and told us it was negative but that was when he first arrived at the shelter. Lisa almost broke down crying when the doctor ordered the test. Imagine falling in love with your pet and finding out you have to give it up right away. Luck is on Barney's side, the test was negative. To be on the safe side, he spent last night in the bathroom again. He spent this morning sleeping on our bed and now is wandering from room to room like he owns the house.

He’s still very much a kitten and likes to chase round balls, the kind with a bell inside and heavy golf balls. He prefers the surlyn covered golf balls to those covered in balata. Which I find odd as I would think the balata covering would be softer and give him better contact with the ball. I know it’s more time aloft with the surlyn covering but balata offers so much more control when putting out. He doesn’t like mouse shaped toys or the feather on a string but loves ribbon and Lisa’s long hair. The laser pointer is something he has to be in the mood for, even the brighter green pointer. He loves looking under things and into holes, under the counter, where the cushions in the couch meet, under the bed and so on. He’s not afraid of the robot vacuum cleaner and he’s not afraid of the Aibo robot dog. He likes to swipe at the Aibo’s tail as it wags but the ears clicking up and down sometimes startle him.

So we’ve finally got a cat and to see it get sick on the first day really gave us a scare. In 24 hours we went from pure elated joy to absolute fear and back to joy. I have no idea what we would have done if his feline leukemia test had come back positive. Luckily we’ll never face that possibility. Barney will be an indoor only cat.

A mosquito, my libido

Courtney Love is going to sell off the Nirvana back catalog. She's asking 100 million dollars. Now put your pinky to your mouth and say that. ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. I haven't thought about Nirvana's music in forever but it does bring up a funny anecdote.

It's about a midlife crisis. OK not mine. Back in '94 I worked with a high rolling stock broker who was dating his former assistant. The one who broke up his marriage. She was in her early 20's and he was well into his 40's. Now when Curt Cobain shot himself there was a candle light vigil for him on the Boston Commons. That day he shows up for work all decked out in black and he's trying to tell me how hip he is since he's going to the Curt Cobain vigil with the girlfriend that night. I was in my early 20's and a big fan of Nirvana but even I knew to let it go. The next day I asked him if he was the oldest guy there by like 30 years. He didn't want to talk about it.

Talkin bout my motivation

My priorities are to rile up my generation and get our voice in gear so we can do some fixin of the ramshackle messes that our parents generation is leaving us with. The boomers have had 60 years to do something with this world and I see them leaving it a mess, full of half completed projects and outright frauds. I would like to avoid the day when they all vote themselves special entitlements to my children’s future. I think Douglas Coupland said it best when he said that the last dollar of Social Security would go toward installing a Blaupunkt into Robin Williams' jewel encrusted walker. So if I focus on negativity it's only because I'm a problem solver at heart and you can't solve a problem until you identify the problem.

If anyone doubts how much damage the baby boomers have done need only remind themselves that George Bush is a baby boomer.

Two things

Firstly welcome all my new fans. For a while there I was really big in the Netherlands and now I seem to be picking up steam here at home.

And secondly, here's a linky that illustrates what I was saying yesterday.

More on March Madness

So OK, it's official. The dollar is useless. Spot Gold is going through the roof, up about $100 over per ounce prices last year and rising. Now Russia and China have signed a mutual defense treaty. This comes just in time for Putin to announce that Russia will be the "protector" of the muslem world. Israel is threatening to blow up nuclear reactors in Iran, an act of war that will result in the slaughter of our ground forces in Iraq. Why are American soldiers threatened by a skirmish between Tel Aviv and Tehran? Look at a map. They're sitting directly in the middle of the two countries.

Now why is the month of March so important here? Remember we're going to stop reporting the M3 money supply. Oh and Iran is going to stop pricing their oil in dollars and start pricing in euros. Both these events are sceduled for March. Sometime after that our national debt is going to come back and bite us in the ass. Unless we can stop Iran from changing over to the euro. The last oil producing nation to switch to the euro was Iraq in 2000. See how well that worked out for them.

Israel is picking a fight with Iran backed up by their nuclear arsenal that will ultimately put us at war with Russia and China. Now they have ballistic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads just like we do. I'm not saying we're headed for a nuclear conflict but we are much closer to World War III then we were when Ronald Reagan outlawed Russia and threatened to begin the bombing in 12 minutes.

I am vindicated

Check this out. As long as the link lasts.

Shaken not Stirred

A Martini is eithor vodka or gin with or without vermouth in the proper coctail glass garnished with eithor an olive, onion or twist. Vermouth may be sweet or dry which imparts differing tastes to the alcohol involved. There is no fucking such thing as a Chocolate Martini!!! I don't care what you see on the bar menu. What you are ordering is a Chocolate Coctail. That goes double for all the other made up flavor pairings. Cucumber and Flan Martini??? Not a real Martini!!! IT IS A COCTAIL!

And another thing, if you need a list of what kinds of drinks to order when you sit down at the bar you don't belong in a bar. Leave the drinking to the professionals. And for godsakes, don't go out on the two amature nights, New Years Eve and Saint Patty's Day.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

I hate it when Bono gets all preachy. OK I should mention that I saw U2 last night at the Banknorth Garden which I think used to be called the Fleet Center. I don't care if they're calling it the Garden now it will never be "The Gaaaaahdin". OK so Vertigo is the right name for this tour. We were in section 311 of the balcony. I hadn't been above the boxes before last night so when I got to my seat I had the uneasy feeling of falling out of my seat. That isn't the bands fault so much as the architects. So the show was good. We skipped the opening act which I find goes a long way to helping me put up with hard plastic seats for 2.5 hours. Again not the bands fault.

U2 came out and rocked. They seem to like playing in Boston. They had a really cool light effect. There were these curtains of individually addressable Christmas lights that gave the effect of looking at a TV set up close. They were able to make all kinds of trippy patterns and even, from where we sat, photorealistic images. It was an engineering feat. I applaud their lighting designer.

The music left a lot of their old classics out in the cold in favor of playing mostly new stuff. Nobody cared about the new stuff. That’s not why we were there. I know they’re not going to ever play my favorite U2 song, “Out of Control” but how can they think they’d get away without playing “New Years Day”? Bono did sing “Miss Sarajevo” which I hadn’t heard performed live. He nailed the Pavarotti part pretty well. Boston seems to have gotten some bonus John Lennon songs thrown in at odd moments and an encore that included “Instant Karma” which didn’t appear on the set lists for the other shows. Bono also included some Clash lyrics into “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. Unfortunately it was “Rock the Casbah”. I think Too Much Joy said it best with “Every great band should be shot before they make their ‘Combat Rock’”. If Bono wanted to be cool he would have chosen something off of “Sandinista”.

Bono got preachy about Christians, Jews and Muslims all being “sons of Abraham” and they should mellow out. This seemed kind of like a strange fantasy coming from a man who grew up in a town murderously torn apart by two Christian sects that couldn’t get along. Get your own house in order before you go telling the world how to act.

The show was entertaining but not one I’d like to see twice.

Peace Man!

You god damned baby boomer hippies are all alike. You have to have me believe your childhood was so much better then mine. You offer no other evidence to back up your anecdotes then I read about it in a book so I must be telling the truth.

Oohh when I was a kid we took drugs and played with dynamite legally. So what. You wouldn't have survived ten hours trying to keep up with us in the age of AIDS and DARE. You want to know who's the real rebel? Who's really HARDCORE? It's not you. It's the kid who manages to get his leatherman pocket tool past TSA by placing it standing up as his bag goes through the XRAY. It's the kid who cooks his own meth out of cold pills and matchsticks.

But But But I was at Woodstock and at Altamont. No you god damned weren't. There were only 450,000 people at Woodstock. Then your hippy minstrels added 50,000 people to the count by pulling numbers out of their ass. By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong. No you were more then two standard deviations off your figures. Then in the 80's as your generation started to go bald you all started claiming you were there. Like I'm supposed to be impressed. You know what I was at the first Lolapalooza. It was the US festival of the 90's.

So cut off that damn ponytail and move out of Santa Fe. Maybe you won't be such a god damned cliche.