So there’s this cat…

On Friday, I rode my bike for 16 miles, cleaned up, ate breakfast and then headed out for an early morning appointment with a partner of ours and (hopefully) a new customer. It’s a good 40+ miles into town from here, but most of that is interstate and I can make pretty good time. The night before, the weather had been pretty heinous (heavy thunderstorms, tornado watches, &c), but the morning had broken pretty nicely. I pulled into the parking lot, idled for a bit with the AC running while I checked e-mail and my teeth one last time, then got out of car. I hit the button to lock the doors, which also turns on the alarm.

Chirp-chirp! and then: meow

Wait, what?

I hit the button again: chirp-chirp, and then: meow meow meow meow as regular as can be. My first thought was that the alarm was flipping out. A woman passing by and I looked at each other while the car continued to meow. Oh Lord, I thought, I’ve run over a cat. I looked under the car. No cat. I walked around the car. No cat. The meowing was…in the car. I popped the hood, and the meowing got louder.

There was a cat somewhere in the engine compartment of the car.

I couldn’t see it, but the woman and I could both hear it.

Well, says I, the engine will certainly cool down in a little while and I’m sure Felix, or whatever his/her name is will slink out directly. No doubt the cat wants to calm its nerves after an 80 mph ride up I-24 before slinking away. I certainly would. I lower the hood, assure the passers-by that I will not restart the engine unless I can confirm that the cat is gone. And, of course, I won’t, since I don’t to risk turning the cat into mincemeat should it happen to contact the serpentine belt or radiator fan or whatever moving component is nearby. I closed the hood and went to my meeting.

About an hour later, I come back out and chirp the alarm a few times. Nothing. The cat seems to be gone. One last time: chirp-chirp, and then: meow. The cat is not gone, and the meows are sounding a little…faint. I join  another meeting via conference call and everyone on the line has a good laugh about my predicament:

1. I seem to have a cat, which I cannot see.
2. If I can’t see it, I can’t get it out.
3. If I can’t get it out, I can’t leave, QED.

The woman comes back and the two of us poke around the engine compartment to see if we can get a look. I call some cat-owning friends for advice. I tweet my predicament, which also updates my Facebook page. Internet advice starts rolling in, of varying degrees of helpfulness.

Drop some food, but I don’t have any. Obtain a small dog. Get on the highway and really open it up. Wait it out.

It’s starting to get sort of hot out in the parking lot. I’m starting to form a plan involving a tow-truck, the closest Toyota dealership and lots of wrenches. In a last ditch effort, I start removing the plastic covers that hide the undercarriage beneath the front bumper. Neither hide nor hair of the cat is visible. Suddenly, a paw drops down right in front of my face. Right! I wedge my hand in the crack and start fishing around. After a minute or two, a tiny grey kitten emerges.

I hold it up, and the office people who have been watching me from an open doorway let out a cheer. They donate a box, and some water but – oddly enough – not a home. I haul the cat to our house. Plans form and reform. There’s no way, says I, that this cat could have traveled before secreting itself away in my bumper. Someone is no doubt combing this neighborhood looking for it. We should hang up signs announcing that we have FOUND: A GREY KITTEN and include our phone number.

Which we do, but really, the effort is half-hearted at best because the children have already seen the kitten and the result is a foregone conclusion, to wit, we own a cat. Today the signs came down and I bought some extra strength litter in which she can crap.

We named her Athena, because she is also grey-eyed and also because she too seems to have jumped fully formed from the brow of Zeus and into my car. No one has seen any cats around lately – strays or otherwise. It’s a mystery. So, anyway, we have a cat now.

Update: according to The Google, this whole cat-in-the-engine-compartment is not at all uncommon. Go figure.

Hippie chimps or little killing machines?

Behold the misunderstood bonobo.

On a Saturday evening a few months ago, a fund-raiser was held in a downtown Manhattan yoga studio to benefit the bonobo, a species of African ape that is very similar to—but, some say, far nicer than—the chimpanzee. A flyer for the event depicted a bonobo sitting in the crook of a tree, a superimposed guitar in its left hand, alongside the message “Save the Hippie Chimps!” An audience of young, shoeless people sat cross-legged on a polished wooden floor, listening to Indian-accented music and eating snacks prepared by Bonobo’s, a restaurant on Twenty-third Street that serves raw vegetarian food.

[...]

At Lui Kotal, not long after we had followed the bonobos for half a day, and seen a duiker run for its life, Hohmann recalled what he described as a “murder story.” A few years ago, he said, he was watching a young female bonobo sitting on a branch with its baby. A male, perhaps the father of the baby, jumped onto the branch, in apparent provocation. The female lunged at the male, which fell to the ground. Other females jumped down onto the male, in a scene of frenzied violence…

The New Yorker via aldaily.com

Red in tooth and claw indeed.

Austen, we have a problem.

Only one guy managed to spot the joke, apparently.

Her work has endured for two centuries, sold in its millions and inspired countless film and television adaptations. But would Jane Austen be able to find a publisher and an agent today? A cheeky experiment by an Austen enthusiast suggests not.

David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath decided to find out what sort of reception the writer might get if she approached publishers and agents in the age of Harry Potter and the airport blockbuster.

After making only minor changes, he sent off opening chapters and plot synopses to 18 of the UK’s biggest publishers and agents. He was amazed when they all sent the manuscripts back with polite but firm “no-thank-you’s” and almost all failed to spot that he was ripping off one of the world’s most famous literary figures.

Guardian Unlimited Books (via metafilter)

Bluegrass, quiet evenings out, and the shiny reflective spider-eyes of doom.

I’d intended to take Friday off in preparation for my folks arriving, but ended up at the office all day putting out fires. We spent most of Saturday at the local bluegrass/traditional arts/pioneer-day festival. It was, in short, a blast. Hotter than can be, but that’s what ice cream, lemonade and creek-wading are for. Our oldest wants to learn to clog. Saturday night, my folks took over the brood and we escaped downtown for a quiet dinner away (our first in many months). Dinner was followed up by a walk around the town square and a decent cigar from one of the two (!) tobacco shops. Home again and everyone to bed.

After Mass, Sunday was mostly spent laying around the house, though I did sneak out to get the lawn cut before the rain blew in. The epic contest of man vs. nature had me literally running back and forth across the yard as the first drops fell. I barely made it back to the shed before things opened up.

After we got the kids to bed and cleaned up the dinner mess, I snuck outside to try out something I’d read regarding spiders and flashlights. It happens that spider eyes are reflective, and a handy method of collecting them involves going out into the yard at night and looking for the little pin-point reflections in the grass. Curiosity mixed with horror, I went out and flailed for awhile but didn’t find a single one. I reconsulted the website and realized I’d been doing it wrong. You don’t go out there and sweep the yard like you’re looking for an escapee from Stalag 17: the trick is to hold the flashlight right along the side of your heard. Angle of incidence = angle of reflection, right? You want the reflections to come straight back to your eyes.

It works.

Tiny blue-green pinpricks of light, almost like dewdrops or specks of mica showed up here and there. Until you got closer, that is, and they scrambled under a leaf or turned just slightly so as suddenly go dark. Even the tiniest little guys had reflections. Pretty cool, and a little bit creepy. So if you need to collect spiders for some horrible, nefarious science project, grab a flashlight and do it at night when it’s easiest to find the little monsters.

I will most certainly be showing The Children this tonight.

Speaking of spiders, I noticed the first few large orb-weavers during my morning ride on Sunday, and saw another one last night building its web. I normally associate these with the turn of summer and the slow, delicate slide into autumn. A fluke? Mid-July seems a bit early, but we’re also a bit further to the north than in previous summers. Time will tell.

Reading: The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Censorship devours its own children

LRB | Chaohua Wang : Diary (via aldaily.com)

Eighteen years is not a short time; it’s long enough for a baby to become an adult. On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.

Read about the decision-making behind the inicident-that-must-not-be-named in The Tiananmen Papers. You’ll swear you’re reading bad science fiction. I was fortunate enough to travel to China last year on business, though in fairness, I was told by my native hosts that if you’ve only seen Shanghai, you haven’t really seen China. The only images of Mao I saw were in the souvenir shops, and I still regret not picking up the wind-up alarm clock that had him waving the seconds away. I found a statue of Sun Yat Sen down by the river, and one morning saw about a dozen young men in dress military uniforms marching down the street. But really, that was about it.

Shanghai is glittering, astonishing place in many parts. In other parts, not so shiny. But all of it was big. Really, really big. So big that it sort of defies description. High-rise apartment buildings go on for as far as the eye can see.

I just read recently that the population of the Shanghai municipality has topped 20 million.  By way of comparison, the state of Georgia, our previous home, had a population of just over 9 million in 2005, and that’s spread out over a land area of around 60,000 square miles. Shanghai’s land area is about 2400 sq. miles. No wonder they’re building upwards.

I devour news about China pretty regularly, and commend to you the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, which featured a special focus on China, spearheaded by the excellent James Fallows.

Forth on the Fifth

Yesterday was about as good as it gets. Thus:

The kids spent most of the day in the inflatable pool and, mirabile dictu, managed to avoid putting any more holes in it. I knocked the lawn out first thing in the morning and we spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around the house and preparing food: an iced down watermelon in the cooler outside, a batch of vanilla ice cream, chocolate-oatmeal cookies and – I tremble as I write this – baked beans with bacon and brown sugar. Burgers went on the grill and everyone ate. At sundown, every third house in our neighborhood sent up gigantic fireworks, so everyone collected on the porch or in the front yard and we spent the evening pointing and ooohing. And then to bed. But for Buttercup’s cold, a good time seems to have been had by all involved.

Now, back at the office. Mid-week holidays bite big one. I rode hard this morning and felt great afterwards but am sort of feeling it now. Saw two deer and a family of turkeys. Apropos of nothing, it occurs to me that “A family of turkeys” might make a good name for a blog. Not this blog, of course.

And then there were eight. Grain mills. Will Ferrell.

Everyone returned home safe and sound. There was pizza, the unpacking of bags, and the collapsing of exhausted little bodies throughout the house. Bluebell came back from ATL with a half-dozen Nancy Drew books and a sudoku addiction. Everyone else wandered off to resume the serious work of reading and playing. In short, a return to normality.

Apropos of nothing, we are seriously considering buying a grain mill. Buttercup’s godparents (and dear friends of ours) have been grinding their own flour for some time now and have all but convinced us to give us a try. She swears that many allergies in their family have cleared up as a result of ‘graining’, but I think the foodie aspect alone might make it worthwhile. They buy most of their stuff from The Bread Beckers, which is not too far out of our way when we go a-visiting in Atlanta. Speaking of homemade, the local paper carried a recipe for homemade mayonnaise. Another friend o’ mine has done this, and I think we’ll whip some up this weekend and see how it goes.

Silliness is the rule for this evening’s movie: Talladega Nights. We were walking through an electronics store that had the trailer looping on all the televisions, and stood there laughing like idiots, so onto the queue it went.

The Dangerous Book for Boys

The author writes on the how and why of this marvelous book. We bought a copy for our son. He’s still a bit on the small side for some of the projects, but won’t be for much longer.

In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces

I expected a backlash. If you put the word “boys” on something, someone will always complain. One blog even promoted the idea of removing the words “For Boys” from the cover with an Exacto knife so that people’s sons wouldn’t be introduced to any unpleasantly masculine notions such as duty, honor, courage and competence.

The dark side of masculinity may involve gangs and aggression, but there’s another side — self-discipline, wry humor and quiet determination. I really thought I was the only one who cared about it, but I’ve found many thousands who care just as much.

I know there are women who can lift heavier weights than I can, but on the whole, boys are more interested in the use of urine as secret ink than girls are. We wanted to write a book that celebrated boys — with all their differences and geeky love of knowledge, skills and stories. There just isn’t anything wrong with trying to do that.

Some interesting (and depressing) statistics that relate.

Welcome!

Well.

The last of boxes are nearly unpacked and we seem to have found places for most everything except for all of the now-empty boxes and mounds of packing paper which fill the garage. You know those lists that come out every so often – the ones that detail out all of the most-stressful-events that can occur in a person’s life?

How’s this for a timeline?

• Ash Wednesday – receive an invitation for a job interview out of state
• Two weeks later – receive job offer and list old house
• Three days after that – receive house offer; buyer wants to close in 2 WEEKS.
• A hair-raising two weeks after that – close on sale of old house
• Good Friday – close on new house
• Easter Monday – move to temporary quarters, a 3BR apartment. With 5 kids. And no greenspace.
• Easter Tuesday – start new job
• Two weeks after that – move into new house early, lack of furniture be damned: air mattresses for us but we get a back yard again
• Two weeks after that – baby number six is born

Anyway, homeschooling resumed this week and everyone seems to have welcomed a return to routine. All the magazines are showing up at our new address. The books have been unpacked and re-shelved in their new homes. I swear, it was a bit like welcoming back old friends.

Speaking of old friends, one of the principal reasons we started this blog was to keep all of our family and friends in the loop as to our doings and whatnot. This is a friendly way of letting you know that there will be some occasional insider-yucks. Don’t sweat them.