rain_gryphon | Entries tagged with flaster

It's been uber-hot here. I actually got to the point where I ran the air-conditioner over the weekend, more for Flaster than myself, as I was gone most of the time. He enjoyed the cool, but he was kind of unhappy because the window was closed, and he couldn't smell and hear what was happening outside. He doesn't really understand how that all works.

*****

The other night I watched a professional wrestling show while I was waiting for the replay of the British Grand Prix to start. The villain was a Frenchman, who entered the stadium with a poodle on a leash. The poor dog came out all happy and enthusiastic, and you could just see him shrinking as everyone started booing. He pretty obviously thought he'd done something wrong, and hadn't a clue what.

*****

I'm kind of surprised at the paucity of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" fanfic and art on the internet. There's vast amounts of toys and decorations (I'd have loved to have had the Reindeer action figures as a child), and oddly enough, a handful of essays deconstructing the plot, some well-written, some not.

I loved that show, and I still do, maybe even more than "Bambi" or "The Lion King". That's saying quite a bit. There's something magical about that show. That's inadequate, but it's the best I can manage. I've never been able to define exactly what's going on in there to my satisfaction.

I *do* know that Rudolph's a lot nicer than I am, and a lot more emotionally stable. At the end of the show, he's offered what he's been wanting the whole time (acceptance) and he's smart enough to realize that everyone's sincerely sorry, so he takes Santa's offer. I doubt that I'd have done so, especially when I had Santa over the barrel like that. I'd have sunk Christmas to pay the fat bastard back, then later when I was alone I'd have cried bitterly because what I /really/ wanted to do was to have just said yes, and helped pull the sleigh. I'm so fucked up. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not that I know myself this well.

Okay, I need to see this. I love this kind of stuff. It's also not terribly far out of my way when I go this weekend to see the Grand Prix :)

http://ballofpaint.freehosting.net/

*****

A discussion about synthesized music on OhioFur has revealed the disconcerting datum that a lot of people think that the best thing to do with a synthesizer is to use it to make exact copies of traditional acoustic instruments. This is their standard of a good synth operator, that he can make his instrument sound indistinguishable from an acoustic instrument.

Personally, I like electronic instruments. There's nothing on earth that sounds quite so strangely exuberant as a Selmer Claviolina or a Hammond organ with Leslie rotary speakers. You can't get that kind of sound out of acoustic pipes or strings.

*****

We're reaching the crunch time for Morphicon, and I'm going to be away all weekend. I really do wish that the Speedway had stuck to their September date for the USGP.

*****

Flaster likes to have his ears rubbed. He doesn't like to be held. When I hold him and rub his ears, he purrs while he's struggling to get away.

*****

I finally got motivated and worked out how to get my USB card reader to mount as a linux volume. The card reader works, but is acting - strange. I checked in /mnt and there wasn't any automatic volume there for it. I mounted the volume manually as /mnt/sandisk. Lo and behold, once I'd done that, I also acquired a volume /mnt/memory_card, which was empty and inaccessible. I'm guessing that Mandrake tried to load it up automatically, but didn't really manage it for some reason.

Now, for whatever reason, I can see and work with the contents of /mnt/sandisk from the command line, but not from the graphical file browser. The GUI tells me that I don't have permissions, regardless of who I'm logged in as, or what I set the permissions to. It'll tell me how much of the volume is in use, but won't let the GUI see anything else. Command line behaves normally. Regardless, it's not a major inconvenience. All I ever do in that volume is clean it out and move everything to my hard drive anyway.

*****

It's hard to beleive that Butterfluff won't be on Spindizzy anymore. Still, that's the way it goes. There's a memorial service for her next Wednesday, which should be comforting.

The Butterfluff has died. I was sure it was coming, but I hadn't expected it quite this soon. I never met her in person, but she was a friend anyway. I've never been good at writing eulogies. Austin's done that better than I'll be able to. My cat Flaster's wondering why I'm crying, and is giving me as much comfort as a cat can manage. Anyway, she was a friend, and will be missed.

Current Mood: sad

Martha Stewart matches have been recalled because they explode. Of course, I never bought any, and now you can't :P

*****

The Yankees have decided that they're no longer going to sell Crackerjack at their ballpark. I don't really like baseball, nor do I consume vast amounts of Crackerjack, but this still annoys me, for some reason. I used to get taken to the ballgame on a fairly regular basis as a child, and I always ate Crackerjack there, just because.

It's always interested me that at the Speedway, when you go for the Five Hundred you get normal racetrack food - hotdogs, hamburgers, nachoes, etc. When you go for the Formula One race, they've got stuff like lobster and spinach wraps.

*****

I've been assigned a British movie rating...

My life has been rated:

See what your rating is!
Created by bart666

*****
And more Qat Tales for Blither...

I buy soft toys for Flaster. This is because he has a habit of putting them in my bed while I'm asleep. It's bad enough rolling over and getting a wooly stuffed mouse in the ribs - I don't want spiky balls or the like in my bed.

He still beats Cat from Hell in this regard, as she used to bring me dead mice while I slept. I recall one occasion where I woke up disgusted because I thought I'd drooled on the pillow, only to find that the cold wet thing pressed against my cheek was a mangled mouse. Cat from Hell was sitting there looking pleased with herself, of course, waiting for me to wake up and find my present.

I've eaten more than one breakfast with a mouse corpse on the edge of my plate, waiting for the cat to be distracted so I could toss it into the disposal while she wasn't looking.

When I was maybe ten or so, there was a streetlight near our house where crickets would gather. It was one of the old blue-green mercury lights, and on summer nights that dim pool of light would just be swarming with crickets, literally thousands of them. Chairman Meow was just a kitten at the time, and we'd go out there so he could eat crickets. He'd spend half an hour or so crunching up crickets before he got full. He grew up to be a huge, 20-pound cat, not at all fat, but just plain big. I always sort of thought it was from all the crickets that he ate as a kitten.

Chairman Meow was a good cat, but not especially bright. He loved Lipton's instant chicken soup - any time I made that, he had to have some. As soon as I started making it, before it was even ready to eat, he'd begin crying because he didn't have any soup. The whole time his portion was cooling, he'd be sitting there fussing. Once I gave him some soup that was still hot, thinking that he'd learn something from that. He lapped at it, then howled because it was too hot, then lapped s'more, and howled s'more. This went on for a minute or so before I took the soup away from him to let it cool. Then Chairman Meow started crying again because now he didn't have any soup.

Flaster's not much of a cat for eating leftovers and such. Now and again he'll clean the leftovers off a plate, especially if it's cheese sauce or tomato sauce, but mostly he sticks to his cat food.

Cat from Hell, on the other hoof, eats just about anything that she can get ahold of. She has a strange (for a cat) passion for peas. My mother found out the hard way that you can't leave your peas unguarded while the cat is around. She also likes hot peppers.

When I go to the bathroom, Flaster will follow me and use his litter box.

When I take a shower, Flaster sits on the toilet, and swats at the shower curtain, unless I don't bother turning on the bathroom light. If the light's not on, he doesn't swat the curtain.

When I go to sleep, Flaster usually comes into the bedroom with me, and lies down with me. Sometimes he changes his mind and goes away before I'm asleep. If that's the case, he makes a sort of 'prrt' sound as he stalks away, just to announce that he's leaving. If I 'prrt' back, he raises his tail over his back like a kitten - otherwise he keeps his tail low, in the 'adult' way.

Flaster has a habit of sitting in my swivelly computer chair if I get up for a few minutes. Actually, he'll wait until I've returned and am ready to sit again before jumping up at the last second to sit there himself. I think it's a sort of cat humour. It usually results in a wrestling match.

Anyway, the other day he did this, and on a whim I spun the chair around. He seemed okay with that, so I spun it even faster, like some sort of cat centrifuge. After about 30 seconds or so he leapt off and rolled when he hit the floor. He then flattened out and dug his claws in, obviously vertiginous. He'd slowly swivel his head to the right, then snap it straight, repeatedly. Now I was sorry. He recovered pretty rapidly, but it took about a week before he wanted to sit in that chair again.

*****

One of my favourite anomalous objects has been pretty solidly identified as a type of seldom-seen deepwater sponge:

http://www.larryhatch.net/ELTANIN.html

It was always pretty obvious that it couldn't be any reasonable sort of antenna (something that short isn't going to transmit through water very well) but it just looked weird and mysterious sitting there. In a way it's good to know what it is, and in a way it's disappointing.

*****

Here I sit, looking at live webcam images of traffic in Istanbul (not Constantinople). I should be more impressed with this than I am I suspect. Not too long ago, when something happened, you tuned into the news a day or two later, in expectation of seeing video. Live video was for big, pre-planned events. It took effort to get a live feed from the other side of the world. Here I sit now, looking at pictures of Turkish cars driving along the street, for no particular reason.

FlasterCat has a new hobby. My shower has two curtains - an inner clear plastic one, and an outer patterned cloth one. He's discovered that he can sit on the side of the tub between the curtains, and watch me shower without getting wet himself. He sits there and swats at me though the curtain. For some reason the shower has always fascinated him. Before he figured out about the clear curtain, he used to stick his head around the end of the curtains, only to promptly withdraw if he got splashed.

Last night (early this morning, actually) before going to bed, I stumbled over a small television set on the floor of my room. The TV somehow sliced my foot open, apparently with the sharp edge of the antenna mount. The odd thing is that it didn't really hurt, even though I kicked the TV hard enough to startle FlasterCat. I didn't realize anything was wrong until maybe ten minutes later, when I realized that the carpet under my foot was wet.

It made a nice deep wound under my toe, that bled all over the place. I finally got it stopped by packing it with toilet paper, and putting a sock on over it, making a sort of compression bandage.

It seems to have closed up okay today, and didn't bleed in the shower or anything. It still doesn't hurt very much.