"Kittens where kittens go yet do not belong", (C) Sean M Puckett 2014

These are the siblings we added to the menagerie last year. They're bigger now but this is the best recent photo I have of the two of them at once. It took a long time to be able to tell them apart and even now we're just at 95%. Easiest way at first to be certain was to either see the splotches on Vash's cheek or haunch, or by touch; Vash's fur is coarser while Spike's is quite silky.

These days they're almost trivial to differentiate as Vash outweighs Spike by a couple pounds and it seems to be all muscle, which you might think is an advantage in wrassling except that Spike is whip-lithe and has at least twice as much energy. 

Twenty internet quatloos if you can give me their full names.

Stress can promote creativity.  My sister in law had a stroke last night and right now me and Ami are focused on getting through the day so we can drive up to Austin to check in on her. 

During this time, I managed to record an audio track for the Stars and Garters Burlesque show stuff (two spots - one commercial for "Tobias the Adequate Magic TV Cards" and one where I argue with the announcer about whether I'm going to do a really dangerous trick or not in the second half) and get that sent off. 

Whee. 

My goals for today: clean sheets, vaccum, shower and get out of the house. If I am successful, maybe I'll even come back and add to this post.

What are your goals for today and how far are you?

• My skin is kind of sort of brownish
• Pinkish yellowish white.
• My eyes are greyish blueish green,
• But I'm told they look orange in the night.
• My hair is reddish blondish brown,
• But it's silver when it's wet.
• And all the colors I am inside

• Have not been invented yet.

In my social media "folly" I've (the Married White Progressive of the post title) been attempting to reconnect to my roots in small town Connecticut in part as a way of having conversations with people who have totally different political views from my own.  This experiment has blown up in my face over the past week.

I'll admit that I may have been overzealous in my attempts to engage on political posts from my "friends" but I did always try to be polite when pressing for clarity on some stances that appeared innately inconsistent.

This anthropologist learned that a large number of people who post political content don't actually want to talk about it (I guess it's more emblematic to them than interesting) and aren't interested in adding to or adjusting their views beyond what they already think they know about the world.  I find this troubling because it doesn't bode well for democratic process (whether the people are progressive or conservative).  The people I've been speaking with seem to base their conservative politics largely on the "character" of people they feel haven't earned help because they are lazy or undereducated.

Here is where the bear trap snapped on my foot... I'm a social scientist.  We are a misunderstood lot of rag-tag academics.  We aren't scientists, per se. Social Scientists have done a poor job of convincing the public that you can actually study human behavior, culture, and society and come up with "facts". Additionally, since everyone makes observations about people in their day to day lives, people assume their experiences are as representative as the research of Social Scientists.  They're not.

This is where I began to feel like an a-hole. People I was engaging with I don't think understand that college professors are also researchers, not just "teachers". As I said to a friend in a heated and unsuccessful moment of weakness, "It's like me telling you that I know as much about nursing as you do because my mother has a long-term illness". Anthropologists are trained to think about their social position in relation to others they are interacting with.  I am way over-educated in relation to the folks I was engaging with.  When I spoke of the "facts" I have studied, they took it as me thinking I was telling them they were stupid or uneducated.  We were in the gray zone where social science analysis of patterns of poverty and poor communities was being looked at as my opinion as a progressive, just like their idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy was their opinion.  Frustration set in for me. There are things that are provable if you look closely at them.  My assertion of proof was taken as an attack on intelligence.  I had been called out with comments like, "you paid too much for your education" from folks who had joined the military and never completed college. I couldn't respond in kind because I think it would be wrong to tell this person that our public school had failed him and he never learned to make an argument where evidence built upon itself to a conclusion.  He was all over the place when we talked politics.  I always liked him as a person when we were in school together.  He was kind in a school full of pretty mean people. But it turned into a trap.  This social scientist's disciplinary insecurity (but these are FACTS!!! Why won't anybody LISTEN TO ME?!?!) turned into what I wanted to avoid (Anne has become an over educated, Brooklyn elitist who thinks she knows more than anybody else). I will say that through it all I never resorted to the name calling that was hurled at me, but in all this has been a failed experiment. If anyone knows an "over-educated" conservative who actually likes to talk about politics, send them my way.

Rapeseed in bloom, Huron County, Ontario. Photo (C) Sean M Puckett 2014. 

The name "canola" was chosen by the board of the Rapeseed Association of Canada in the 1970s. The "Can" part stands for Canada and "ola" refers to oil. Thanks, Wikipedia. I'm midly allergic to it & other plants related to Brassicae, so I have to avoid most commercial foods cooked with Canola oil as an ingredient. Which is most of them these days.

Rover is getting old.

She's 12.  (Actually, she's now 12.25.  I suppose that in the twilight of life, those fractions of a year start to matter again, much as they did when we were children.)

She sleeps through so much now.  And she's underfoot even more than before; she doesn't hear when warned to get out of the way, and then gets stepped on, or she forgets that 15 seconds ago she was exiled from the kitchen. 

And she doesn't have the bladder control she once had, meaning that the loveseat she used to sleep on had to be disposed of, despite my having owned it for 19 years.

Still, she's cute, she's enjoying her dotage, and she's just as snuggleable as ever.  I fear that the next few years of pet ownership are going to be tough.

Last night we set off on a mission of mercy. An old friend has a problem: someone keeps entering her apartment, taking shit, and wrecking shit.

The intruder is vindictive. They squeezed an entire tube of expensive eye cream all over her bathroom. They cut off the bottom of her pants. And they stole half her professional wardrobe, something she can't afford.

Our friend is older, so she feels particularly vulnerable.

This person is breaking in during the day, and there is never any sign of forced entry, so I strongly suspect building staff has something to do with it; she lives in a high-rise apartment building with a gorgeous view. Just the sort of place you're happy until some lunatic starts gaslighting you and you start to wonder if you're crazy, amirite.

So despite being a technophobe, she bought some security equipment, and asked us over to help set it up. And I spent three hours wrangling the gear— a security camera and a "cloud DVR"— which almost works at this point.

Everything works, actually, except for uploading the video "to the cloud." Or at least sending her pictures by email when the motion sensor triggers. Or something. Because if the only evidence is in the apartment, I have no confidence we'll catch the bastard.

Unfortunately the cloud bit is sticky. The email feature has no test button and doesn't seem to work. The "cloud push" feature is... what? What the hell is cloud push? The FTP feature is tempting, but I'd have to figure out a way for her to know it was happening and browse the results. The whole setup is a pain in the ass; somebody slapped as little code on top of Linux as they could possibly get away with. Mutter mutter.

Is there a drastically better solution for a simple task like monitoring the front door and capturing incriminating pix of whoever's coming through it?

Alternatively... does anybody know what the hell "cloud push" is?

'I Ain't Marchin' Anymore' by Phil Ochs.  Also, 'Santo Domingo', also 'Here's to the State of Mississippi', also 'Outside of a Small Circle of Friends' and so many more.

I am on a Phil Ochs kick because he was very passionate about human lives, about freedom, about not only his right to speak out, but our responsibility to speak out and beyond that, to act.  Where are the Phils of today?  The last one I remember was Bono, and that was a long time ago.

Jack is a cat of our aquaintance. (He lives here, in the house, and we're responsible for him. For the record his full name is Dr. Isaac Ezekiel "Jack" Jones. Our cats get names. But I digress.)

We're not sure of his specific provenance, except that he came from the cat rescue. He's a brown tabby of middling size with a few notches out of his ears and a slash on his nose. His colouration is different than other tabbies, though -- he has brown "points", like a Siamese. His ear tips are dark, his feet are dark, his tail is dark. I suspect, but don't know, that he's half Siamese.

I don't know all of the attributes of Siamese cats; I've never made their acquaintance in person that I can recall. But the rumours are that they're very talkative. Vocal. You know. Saying cat words and cat phrases. A lot. And repeatedly. But I think because Jack has some Siamese in him, that he is also predisposed to being vocal. Although not to excess. Except sometimes.

What it comes down to this: Jack mutters. 

He wanders through the house at times, asking questions of doors, of shadows, of doorways, of shafts of light, of furniture, of stairs, of landings, of the middle of rooms, of hallways, of closets, of foyers, of bathrooms, of bedrooms, of clutter, of dust bunnies, of the absence of dust bunnies, of almost everything.

Which is why sometimes you might hear me say "Jack, shut up!"  Because sometimes he will go on, and on, and on, and on. And talking to the muttering cat usually works to stop him muttering, at least for a while.

Because the question he seems to be asking, when he's muttering, is "am I alone? Where is everyone?"  

And sometimes, when we can say it truthfully, we'll answer him, "We're upstairs, Jack, in the bed!" 

And then he'll trot up the stairs and jump up on the bed and purr.