Category: Errata

Parade for My Cat

If I were to put on a parade for my cat, I’d make sure no other cats were invited. He hates them. His whole body bristles up into furious ball and he screams like nothing I’ve ever heard. And that’s just when the cats stroll through our backyard. Other than the HVAC repairman, I can’t think of anything that Norman hates more. If I were to put on a parade for my cat, I would make sure there were a lot of feathers. He loves feathers. I’d make sure that there were feathers hanging from strings. I’d shoot feathers into the air out of mighty feather cannons and they’d be gloriously quiet. So that many different colors of feathers would drift down from the sky. It would feel like a sea of puddles. (I’d hire street cleaning trucks to come by later to sweep them up, never fear.) I’m talking big feathers! Like peacock feathers and ostrich feathers and albatross feathers. I’m talking little feathers! Like chickadees and whippoorwills and hummingbird feathers. There’d be no dogs at this parade I think it goes without saying, but oddly my cat seems ambivalent about dogs. At least he doesn’t mind watching them walk by peering through the screen door in our front door. You know that Smellovision? Well, I’d make sure that there was just a constant aroma of tuna and salmon and just assorted fish smells. Hey! This parade is for my cat. I recommend nose plugs. So anyway, there’s gotta be some chicken smells in there plus maybe some beef, because he likes all that stuff. And then I’m thinking this parade has got to be on a very sunny day. No rain allowed! So I’ll get the top meteorologists on the case to make sure the date and time means only sun, no rain. Fortunately I don’t think that my cat is big on calendars or even clocks, so probably if we have to reschedule, he’ll be fine with it. But better to be safe than sorry, you know? He’s pretty punctual when it comes to breakfast, so maybe he’s got a thing for calendars too. So, anyway, I’m thinking: centerpiece of the parade is just a whole pile of cardboard boxes and paper bags (arranged tastefully!) because I’ve never met a cat that likes paper products so much. Hey, let’s throw some cardboard tubes in there as well, but preferably big enough for him to crawl inside. That’s the ticket! Also a cat tree. And a comfy chair or three. We’ll clear the roads for miles around, wending our way through the city, so that thousands of people can come out to see the parade. I’ll hand out flags before hand with my cat’s face on them so that people can wave them in his honor. Then after long months of planning and a long day of parading, we’ll take a nap in his honor. Which is what he’ll probably have done throughout the whole parade. It’ll be the best parade for a cat this town has ever seen!

Links, Links, Links (Nebulous Nightcrawler Edition)

Lidless Links (Undying Umbrellabird* Edition)

Some things I stumbled across lately or not so lately.

  • Whoever’s behind Kicks Condor is definitely more into blogging than I am–with a level of seriousness I just can’t muster. I appreciate the energy behind this deliriously visually expressive site. I’d be happy to see some of that early 2000s blog energy come back though!
  • Kicks Condor has this cool tool called Fraidy Cat for keeping track of a bunch of stuff (blogs, twitter, instagram, etc) in once place. Me, I just use Netnewswire (have been since its beginning), but I’ll give Fraidy Cat a whirl.
  • Communion of Saints is a 77 track album (it almost needs some other word…) of songs that commemorate 77 of the canonized saints. Haunting and mesmerizing. (I’ve been streaming it. I’m on track 39, Jessica Way – Daughter Of Light (St Philomena)). I’m mostly just impressed with the scope and execution of this project. (Found on The Last Blog.)
  • “Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die” by Craig Mod. As a bibliophile, I always enjoy reading what Craig has to say about books and the book industry. Looking at things, historically, from the perspective of the book can lend some intriguing insights, as this essay does. “A printed book is an object over which no third party has agency once in your possession.” Contrast this with [fill in the blank with a modern technological contrivance, such as a smartphone].
  • Related to the above: “Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction” by Mairead Small Stead. For me, reading books was often a distraction from other things, so it’s weird to have so many distractions now from reading books. Beautifully put: “The gift of reading, the gift of any encounter with art, is that this time spent doesn’t leave me when I lift my eyes from the book in my lap: it lingers, for a minute or a day.”
  • Sometimes I recall books and then can’t remember their titles. I find this deeply frustrating, but sometimes I manage to track them down, like Stephen Elliot’s book Happy Baby. I saw him read from this book at Powell’s Books a long, long time ago.
  • This visual essay about maps on Lapham’s Quarterly is beautiful and worth checking out.
  • That’s all for today.

* I found it on this list of animals that start with U.

Lotsa Loose Links (Bilious Baboon Edition)

I’ve been thinking about weblogs a lot lately. Not sure why. I’ve had mine for quite a while now. Originally, blogs or “web logs” were a way to keep notes on things you saw on the web. Just lists of links, I guess. At least that’s my memory of it. In that vein, here’s a bunch of links from my recent aimless wanderings through the internet.