In the News – Page 40

The Real January 20, 2009 Post

January 20, 2009 by John 4 Comments

In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously.

It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether he”ll be a good President, let alone a great one.)

And yet, and yet…

I’ve been with my current employer since 1993; until today, they’ve never offered the use of conference rooms and video facilities to watch an Inauguration — except possibly for the simple but godawful swearing-in in November 1963.

And truthfully, I have not been able to stop smiling.

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Everyday Heroes

January 20, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Like nearly everyone seems to be, I’m caught up in what might be called Onauguration Fever.

And — coincidence? you be the judge! — Warner Brothers and Fox recently settled their legal tussling over the upcoming Watchmen film, allowing its release as scheduled on March 6.

Under the circumstances, the time seems right to celebrate the existence of real everyday heroes, nay, superheroes.

I do not speak of policemen, firemen, teachers, even soldiers. I speak — of course! — of those officially designated as such, at least by themselves, in the World Superhero Registry (slogan: “Coming Out of the Phone Booth”).

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No Saturday Post

January 17, 2009 by John 7 Comments

We lost a great cat today.

(Bye, Dilly — we’ll see you later!)

Placeholder Post: Update on Caboodle Ranch

January 15, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

Those of you who read the “Extreme Ailurophilia” post of last week and worried about the long-term fate of Caboodle Ranch’s hundreds of cats might find comfort in two items:

Nanette, of Pet Palaces in North Carolina, offered a couple of reassuring comments to help explain why some of the worry is misplaced. She comes down once a month, for 7-10 days at a time, to give Craig Grant a hand with the ranch. She and her husband build the “gingerbread houses” for the cats and, she says, are effectively in training to take over for Grant in the event he can’t continue to do the work himself.
At the time my post went up, the article I’d read about Caboodle Ranch had not yet been posted at the magazine’s site. It has now. (Also note the two sidebars, offering more information about feral cats in general.)

[A “real” post coming later today, the gods of the clock willing.]

The Culprit

January 13, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I couldn’t wait for the plumber to arrive.

Just for him, I’d cleaned out the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and put a bucket under the trap. I’d emptied the (dirty) dishwasher. I’d spread a towel on the floor, thinking that his knees — even more than mine — might appreciate the cushion. I’d left the cabinet door open, and I gestured at it and the sink when I led him into the kitchen. “There they are,” I said, as though he might might have expected more than one sink and drain in the kitchen.

He took in the scene, nodding vaguely at my tale of frustration and woe:

The tale extended back in time hours, days, weeks, to the dawn of time, and it involved gallons of Liquid Plum’r and first a 25-foot and then a 50-foot auger, or “plumber’s snake.” (Perhaps that was the creature which had defeated Adam in the Garden.) The tale involved a dishwasher frothy with gunk-dissolving chemicals, a dishwasher run through multiple (brief) rinses and drain-and-dry cycles. The tale involved mopping and sweeping and more mopping and it merited, by God, a little manly sympathy.

The plumber walked around the kitchen counter and pointed with his thumb to the sliding glass door to the deck.

“All right I use this door?”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure, no problem.” Like, I didn’t know — maybe he and his partner would need to… um… trace the line or something. I pictured the two of them criss-crossing the yard, with GPS units in their hands and pipe-clog-detecting electronic sounding gear strapped to their backs and heads. Plumbing had obviously embraced the 21st-century World of Tomorrow. I opened the door, showed them out, and sat at the kitchen counter to watch.

No plumber(s) for a minute or two. Maybe I’ll just run down the hall to use the bathroom for a few secs, I thought. On my way through the living room, I glanced out the picture window at the driveway. Yes. The two of them were getting their gear. Probably emptying the little van.

As I returned to the kitchen, I heard a metallic clatter and crash out on the deck. What the—?

It was an extension ladder, propped up against the wall outside the kitchen window. The assistant plumber even now was climbing it, in his hands an industrial version of the apparently puny one which I’d spent so much loving, thrashing, cursing time wielding over the last few days.

A pause, the world in suspended animation. From the kitchen ceiling, suddenly, the sound of diamond miners drilling through our roof.

I went out onto the deck. And there I saw the culprit.

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Surprising the Audience

January 9, 2009 by John 4 Comments

[Above still from director Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), which sounds like one of the most
interesting films I’ve never seen. Click image for more info.]

My regular Friday post inspired by the mysteries of the past seven days’ entries at the whiskey river blog. This one’s a little more complex than most — one or two more selections, and a small cluster of strangely relevant associations from elsewhere around the Web.

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Fire and Paper

January 8, 2009 by John 5 Comments

A project pretty easy for a writer to empathize with: rebuilding another writer’s house, post-fire, brick by brick by brick.

Coming as this does on the heels of yesterday’s post about the cat man of Caboodle Ranch, I’ll just say: I know, I know. So many needs… I’m embarrassed to have overdrawn a check recently myself; I know what things are like right now.

But this just feels different — sharper and even more personal — to me. I’ll get back to the regular business of RAMH, whatever the hell that is, later today but in the meantime wanted to deal with this.

You may remember that Toni Morrison lost her house in a Christmas Day fire some 15 years ago. In an interview with Salon, she replied to a question about the fire:

It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know — the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost … I write by hand … I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at “The Bluest Eye” — seven versions, in hand, of it — again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

Travis Erwin, whom I don’t know, would probably happily insist he’s not a Toni Morrison. Nor am I. But philosophic though I might be about it (as Irwin is), my skin crawls now when I think of how much can be lost when someone who lives by paper experiences a fire.

[Heard about this from MoonRat’s blog yesterday;
Janet Reid followed up with her own thoughts.
Travis’s own account of the fire made it truly immediate.]

Extreme Ailurophilia

January 7, 2009 by John 15 Comments

Cats tend to push people to the outer limits of response; very few people I know can simply take ’em or leave ’em.

The Missus and I are squarely in the cat-loving circle. Except that she developed severe respiratory allergies to cat fur and dander in recent years, we’d probably still be hosting nine or ten of the little beasts instead of letting the supply, well, dwindle. (We’re down to two now.)

The current issue of a local magazine, though, has a story (not yet online) about someone who really cares about cats. His name is Craig Grant, and he’s the proprietor of something called Caboodle Ranch: a 30-acre chunk of the North Florida woods functioning as a sanctuary for feral or otherwise unwanted cats.

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“… 3… 2… 1… 0… I Said ZERO, Dammit, ZERO!”

December 31, 2008 by John 11 Comments

[This post’s title alludes to this little tidbit of news: 2008 will last
a second longer than most years.]

The New Year, per usual, calls to mind resolutions about what we hope will come within the next 365ish days. I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, though, I want to note that whatever else it stands for, December 31 also marks the anniversary of a pop-culture phenomenon’s passing. I speak of the final Calvin & Hobbes strip, December 31, 1995.

The frames reproduced in this post aren’t from that last strip. Its creator, Bill Watterson, had for years fought with newspapers about the constraints imposed on cartoonists by conventional newspaper page size and layout. Eventually he won that battle, at least for his Sunday strips, and the final one (like many others preceding it) shows the result: a gorgeous sprawl of irregularly-sized and completely non-rectangular moments in his characters’ lives, much of the space simply blank. The idea of either (a) reducing the whole strip to fit RAMH‘s layout or (b) slicing it up for the same reason, well, it just felt blasphemous.

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The Case of the Missing Human

December 27, 2008 by John 2 Comments

All men are dogs, they say. But not all dogs are men.

And I should know. My name’s Sophie. I’m a private eye. And yes, I’m a dog. But I’m a bitch.

****

Things were looking pretty good that Friday morning when That Woman came into the back room of my office. I don’t let just anybody do that, but That Woman and I have a history, you might say.

“Good morning,” she said.

I said nothing, just yawned and looked at her. That Woman knew what do and she did it. Made a fuss over me like she does. I took it like my due, because it was, and then I led her from the room. She didn’t simply follow; she trailed along in my wake. Oh yes, she knew what to do all right.

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