RIP Lion Kitty

The sweetest, best kitty ever, Lion Kitty has gone to meet her maker and I miss her.  I don't know where she came from--perhaps someone tossed her out in the park. I was convinced she had been somebody's cat before.
For most of the time here she lived outside and with such a fur coat was well able for it, but most of last winter she stayed in the house, as she was clearly getting older. Often, I thought of how wretched I would be when she passed on, and I am. She was an extraordinary animal who did her very best to keep out of people's way. She was afraid of most people, so I always figured

somebody had treated her badly, which was something I could never understand. She never walked on the tables or the counters, she only sat on the chairs I told her she could sit on.
I never saw her play, though this spring, after Jeff M. plowed the garden, I looked out the kitchen window and she was running back and forth the length of the garden, rolling in the new-plowed loam, having the time of her life.  It looked like so much fun, I didn't yell at her for doing it. Her other favorite thing was sitting with me in the chair at night watching TV.  I  always
thought then how much I'd miss her.

Which is just how much I do miss her.
It was such a good, good summer and one of my fondest dreams has been realized, but I am heart- broken missing the sweetest kitty, who graced my life for eight or ten years, because when she showed up, starving, wretched, hair coming out in clumps, who would have ever thought Lion would be the best kitty ever.
Forever, my Lion.

Re-recommendation

May I again recommend the magazine Free Inquiry. Last year, I subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer, a guarded magazine with too many footnotes and too many university-based writers.

            Small wonder that the public doesn’t trust the media because shrieking about the environment—rising CO2 levels, melting glaciers and disappearing polar bears—without decrying the main cause, human overpopulation, is illogical. But you can hear/read  that hourly/daily in the media. 

            The editor of Free Inquiry, however, respects his audience enough to confront the issue head on, for which I wrote and thanked him last issue as honesty is rare.  (My letter is in the current issue.) Equally culpable are environmental organizations: World Wildlife, Sierra Club, none of which will decry human population increases or draw the correlation between disappearing animal habitat and burgeoning human population.

            Arguably, the top prize for ludicrousness goes to IPTV, which aired an hour-long program in which a handsome Indian scientist (you must look good on TV!) talked about salvaging chimp populations by letting chimps move back and forth between forest spaces by creating woodland areas. How long before human populations encroach on those? Not long, thinks the critical eye!

Reneging+Disparity In America=Gun Violence?

Over the weekend another fringe-edge wacko went out and shot a slew of people at a Walmart. I cease to be surprised both 1) because of the frequency of gun violence in the US, and 2) disparity of America’s reneging on its promises to people.

Yeah, those Life-Liberty-&-pursuit-of-Happiness ones. Virtually every young person I know with a job is working more than 40 hours a week in order to earn a 40-hr a week salary, and some are doctors, lawyers, engineers, health technicians and mid-level managers.

While the French expect the month of August off, most Americans, according to the statistics, don’t even take the two weeks’ vacation they are entitled to. Other experts question whether Americans ever leave work given the realities of cell phones and email.

So much for the pursuit of civil life, not to mention happiness.

Financial types are still equivocating: there appears to be some evidence that wages are going up, but it is muted and for the most part, immigration and other influences keep minimum wage right where business want it—well below a level that would even allow people in big cities to live where they work, forcing them into expensive, time-consuming commutes.

Meanwhile, stopping to smell the flowers is hardly an option, now is it?