So have you heard about this little movie called The Avengers?
I not only saw it — opening day, which is always fun but for the past dozen or so years not something that I’ve been able to count on doing — I’ve written about it as well; that commentary just hasn’t made its way here yet. My actual review of the Joss Whedon jam will hopefully be along shortly after these musings on its revenue and other impressive statistics.
The first time I saw her, Pebbles was basically trying to climb into the sky.
She stood atop one of those several-feet-tall posts made not just for scratching but
for perching, known as cat trees, all stretched out — balanced in fact on the very apex
of it. And this lovely, lithe orange Creamsicle of a kitten actually pushed at the ceiling tiles with her paws.
Her name wasn’t Pebbles then. It was Honey, and her brother’s was Ashley. My wife and I were only too happy to get a package deal — there were two of us; two cats made sense — and the shelter was glad to have the siblings go to the same home, even as we got some grief in passing from an aide there about how people always wanted to adopt the youngest cats.
Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, as we named them, were born on May 15th and 8 months old according to their papers. I believe they lived briefly with another family before going to the shelter, but we didn’t really get much info.
I came up with a dozen entries for the Late Show with David Letterman website’s current Top Ten contest. You probably know the drill by now but in case you don’t there’s an explanation of how it works in one of my first blogposts — although winners no longer get prizes beyond satisfaction and bragging rights.
Categories are usually either seasonal or keyed to something in the news, and this week’s is no different, being...
My Top Twelve Least-Popular 2012 Prom Themes
12. Let’s All Judge Each Other One Last Time
11. Our Favorite Student/Faculty Romances
10. Party Like We’ll All Have Jobs
9. What Would Jesus Dance?
8. A Night Away from Algebra and In-School Day Care
7. Mimes! Mimes! Mimes!
Even with far more time and attention than I have right now it wouldn’t be possible
to do justice to Maurice Sendak with this post.
Sendak passed yesterday, at the age of 83, following a stroke. His career spanned
65 years and nearly 100 books as well as notable work in other media. You can find a timeline of his life and creations at the website of The Rosenbach Museum & Library, whose director also offers a nice remembrance of that Philadelphia institution’s relationship with the Brooklyn-born Sendak. (I recommend a visit to the place if you’re ever in town — its holdings include a large repository of Lewis Carroll memorabilia, James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript to Ulysses, and “over 10,000 Sendak objects, including original drawings, preliminary sketches, manuscripts, photographs, proofs, and rare prints of Sendak books.”)
[Note: The specific links no longer lead to where they once did, unfortunately, nor does the Rosenbach still house Sendak’s papers, although it maintains his rare-book collection.]
I don’t usually have much good to say about the service that hosts this blog. To be
fair and give credit where it’s due, I’ll repeat that in addition to being free — without requiring advertising of any kind, a big plus to me — Blogger’s spam filter works very well. Frankly, I can’t recall a single instance of ’bot messages getting through
since I opted to turn off word verification on comments earlier this year in the wake
of the service’s switch to a much uglier, more onerous CAPTCHA format.
While the blog has in fact been getting more spam than it used to, all of that spam is getting queued up in a virtual folder to await my attention as it should. It seems like more spam comments made it through in the past, too, which leads me to suspect that in a rare instance of foresight Blogger worked to shore up its filtering in anticipation
of users ditching verification after the recent change.
Most of what got through were strings of Chinese hànzì characters that translated to
a vaguely poetic phrase and linked to sites featuring images of scantily-clad women if not outright porn. And porn is, no surprise, still the #1 destination for most of the spam that the filter catches, but for every few “comments” that nakedly hawk pics of nude celebrities there’s one that pretends to be actual conversation with poetry of its own — in English; often broken English to be sure, yet therein lies much of the skewed poetry.
“You can definitely see your expertise within the paintings you write,” one especially lyrical slice of spam read. “The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who are not afraid to mention how they believe. All the time go after your heart.”
I was almost touched.
