Asides

I’ve gotta confess that my boots, much as I love them, got nothin on these.

(Via BoingBoing, natch.)

I can’t stop watching this video. Kitten, computer, cuteness: dear reader, it’s like happy YouTube crack, with fur.

Kitty kitty!

And I love the kitten’s tiny thin-furred rat-tail. Somewhere in the Atlantic Northeast, my attorney — who has a similarly-endowed skinny-tail cat named Bird — is smiling.

You and I went to the National Zoo. You couldn’t talk, so I’d brought pens and paper. It was a wet Spring day.

We parked in the lot near Rock Creek and walked across the bridge. We stopped, and I asked you where you wanted to go. You smiled and nodded, but you couldn’t talk.

You were dying. And you were losing your mind. You were so smart — your thesis on Hannah Arendt, your work on Proust and Gadamer and Joyce and Heidegger, your graduate degrees in Comparative Literature and Library Science and Management — and you made me want to be smart, to be like you, and you brought me home all those books. And then while you died it was cartoons and Andy Griffith while we funneled protein shakes into the tube that went into your belly. Because you were losing your mind and cartoons were what made you happy.

It was a wet, gray day. I asked you what animals you wanted to see. And I gave you the pen and the pad of paper and you were laughing at me in that silent way with your mouth open. And you wrote your answer and I remember the green of Rock Creek Park and the Zoo all around and you laughing because you were teasing me, because you were having fun with me, and you knew it. You gave me back the pen and the pad of paper.

BATS, it said.

And you laughed soundlessly when you saw me read it.

So we went and saw the bats.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I miss you.

David lets me know I owe him a letter, which I’ll send out to him on Monday. According to his third-generation paraphrase, the parole commissioner at the file review hearing said something like, “I seldom see a case like this that is as well thought out and deserving of immediate parole.” The parole hearing itself has been moved to June, and David writes, “I’ve been down nine years; another month won’t kill me.” Along with the letter, I’ve got a box of comic books packed to ship his way: he likes David Mack’s Kabuki and he’s curious about the direction Marvel’s X-books are taking, as craptacular as they’ve lately been, and I’m still trying to convince him that Brian Michael Bendis is turning into a solid writer, pacing issues aside.

David’s lately been doing that prison-stereotype work, pushing mowers on the highway median strip and weed-whackers by the guard rails. My friend Jason has dropped off David’s resume at a few places. David’s returning to a community where his crimes gained him considerable front-page notoriety, and that complicates matters. He wants to be a chef, he says; to eventually have his own restaurant.

I’m hopeful for him.

According to the good folks at Cornell, “a one-year-old cat is physiologically similar to a 16-year-old human, and a two-year-old cat is like a person of 21,” and “For every year thereafter, each cat year is worth about four human years.” By that math, Tink and Zeugma’s three-year birthday today makes them twenty-five in cat years. Tink’s celebrating by experimenting with the eject key on my computer’s keyboard; Zeugma is chattering at the chickadees, sparrows, titmice, and nuthatches who come to the back deck’s bird feeder.

How am I celebrating the day? Well, I’ve got a few options:

1. Erect a large symbolic phallus in the back yard and get the neighbors to help me plait brightly colored ribbons around it in observance of Beltane’s celebration of the amorous act.
2. Light a bonfire in the back yard commemorating the 1886 Haymarket Riot and celebrating the rights and contributions of workers (including immigrant workers) everywhere.
3. Revise a dissertation chapter and work on my CCCC proposal.

Sigh. Yeah, it looks like I’m going with option 3. Which is not to say, however, that Julie Andrews singing Lerner and Loewe won’t make it onto the cd player at some point.

It’s May, the lusty month of May
That darling month when everyone throws self-control away
It’s time to do a wretched thing or two
And try to make each precious day one you’ll always rue

It’s May, it’s May, the month of ‘Yes, you may’
The time for every frivolous whim — proper or im-
It’s wild, it’s gay, a blot in every way
The birds and bees with all of their vast amorous past
Gaze at the human race aghast
The lusty month of May

The menu of the day:

Corned beef?

Check.

Cabbage and leeks?

Check.

Potatoes?

Well, I’m not sure how kosher his favored sweetbreads were in 1904 Dublin, but latkes were probably Irish enough for Leopold Bloom.

Right?

Meetings on my side and theirs interfered with communications about the position today — phone tag, essentially — but I’m hoping that things will be finalized when we talk tomorrow afternoon. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that all goes well; it’s a place I like for lots of different reasons.

Other things are shaping up nicely as well, thanks to one colleague’s kindness and the writing skills of two other colleagues, and to top it all off, I was fortunate enough today to be able to turn in a glowing letter of recommendation for a former student. One of those days to make the past five months seem not quite so ambivalent and anxiety-ridden; one of those days to make “professionalization” seem not like such a vexed word.

(Don’t you dare jinx it for yourself, now, Mike.)

Ah, Hogmalion.

Good to see my favorite swine once more in business, albeit with a reduced inventory.

So I watched the SuperBowl with my attorney, and we were both struck by the even-more-sexist-than-usual tone. Bill DeGenaro has already had smart things to say about the sexualization surrounding the game environment itself, but even my relatively unenlightened sensibilities were amazed by all the advertising violence against women’s bodies, explicit (the Mission Impossible commercial) or implicit (Burger King says women are tasty in sandwiches), and all the ogling and leering. On the other hand, my attorney was pleasantly surprised at the fact that the Steelers don’t have a cheerleading squad. I don’t want to come across as some grim, puritanical sourpuss here — I definitely got a kick out of some of the advertisements’ surrealism, and I’ll confess to a weakness for women in knee-length skirts and calf boots — but I gotta ask: was it just us, or was the misogyny in this SuperBowl’s advertisements even more over-the-top than usual?

My dad got me Gramophone magazine’s The Classical Good CD & DVD Guide 2005 for Christmas, which I’ve been enjoying flipping through, but here’s what I’ve lately had in heavy rotation on the CD player.

Gogol Bordello. These guys proudly proclaim themselves to be “Gypsy Punks,” and that’s about as apt a description as you’ll find. Imagine the Clash getting together for a jam session with the Moldavian gypsy-brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia and some accordion and fiddle and saxophone and several crates of strong Ukrainian vodka thrown in for good measure and you’ll have an idea of what these folks sound like. Totally infectious, over-the-top, exuberant stuff, and it doesn’t hurt that the singer has the sort of Eastern European accent usually only heard coming from James Bond movie villains. They’ve got these stomping Romany rhythms and some fierce guitar, but you’ll also hear bits of ska and flamenco in there, and they’re far too good to take themselves too seriously.

Firewater. Ever since New York alt-metal band Cop Shoot Cop dissolved (they had an almost-hit in 1993 with “$10 Bill” but I was always more fond of the creepy, operatic “Room 429” and the bitingly funny “It Only Hurts When I Breathe”), I wondered what had happened to vocalist/songwriter Tod A and his gargle-with-razors voice and wickedly sharp lyrics, and then I heard him singing a cover of “Folsom Prison Blues” on the radio a while back and had to immediately find the album. As it turns out, their first effort, “Get off the Cross… We Need the Wood for the Fire” is the album to have; Tom Waits-style cabaret and klezmer are obvious influences, especially with the instrumentation (bazouki, djembe, saxophone, clarinet, accordion, violin, in addition to the usual drums-bass-guitar), but you’ve really got to hear “Bourbon and Division” for its relentlessly catchy, swinging nihilism. And my personal favorite, “When I Burn This Place Down,” is a wonderful tango (a tango!) with the pricelessly bitter line, “And baby if you were drowning / I’d throw you a funeral wreath.”

Secret Chiefs 3. Members include Mr. Bungle veterans Trey Spruance, Trevor Dunn, and Danny Heifetz, so you know what you’re getting into. Think freak-out Middle Eastern / West and South Asian techno beats and instrumentation mixed with thrash-metal guitars and achingly lush Ennio Morricone arrangements and melodies performed by an amazingly tight band. “Book of Horizons,” “Book M,” and “Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws” are all brilliant and really, really strange.