RevSpork

There will be food

Did I give Jack a piece of turkey from my turkey sandwich?  Yes I did.  Am I spoiling him rotten?  Yes.  But in my defense, it's so cute how he begs. 

A million years ago, cats were powerful, evil creatures, ripping out the throats of any unlucky soul unwilling to offer bits of their turkey sandwich.  By the 21st century, cats gave up their strength and intelligence but never their desire for cold cuts.  So instead of ripping my throat out, Jack - a direct descendant of these terrifying creatures - instead embarks on a series of activities passed down over thousands of litters:

1. He hears Daddy rummaging in the fridge, hears the "cat sign" (the crinkling of the cellophane housing the cold cuts) and casually ambles over to the kitchen.  He never runs; that would be seen as desperate and uncouth.

2. He then looks up at me with his big yellow eyes as if to say, "Hey...ummmm, dude!  (He never remembers my name.)  How's it going?  Haven't seen you in a while.  I see you got some processed meat there, my man.  What a lucky guy!  Say, I don't suppose you could spare some of that, hmm?  You know, I heard on NPR the other day that cold cuts are unhealthy for a human digestive system.  Makes you run to the litter box more, know what I'm saying?  Didn't say anything about a kitty's digestive system, so I'm guessing I'm okay."

3. He then rubs himself against my leg.  I've lived with cats before, they all did this, and I find the practice utterly pathetic.  You squirm and try to run away when I skritch you and show you some genuine affection, but when I'm preparing a sandwich, then I get the love?  Screw you, feline.  I tell him to bugger off.  Jack knows this initial approach will fail, but he hasn't played all the cards in his paw just yet.

4. Jack flops down on the floor, offering his belly.  "Really!  I love you, what's your face!  You are the sunbeam of my life!  Don't you love me as well?  You wouldn't chase me down the hallway or wake me up during the day to skritch me if you didn't!  Now gimme some turkey, dammit."  Again, I've seen this crap before; mother cats no doubt teach begging to their kittens before their eyes are even open.  I'm unswayed.  But Jack's not done yet.

5. At that point, Jack presses his head against the floor, then performs a somersault.  This is beyond cute.  In my opinion, this took time, practice, and - most importantly - hard work to pull off.  Mimi, for example, couldn't pull off a somersault if she got a whole salmon out of the deal.  So Jack did something cats don't normally do: worked hard to refine his begging technique.  Sufficiently charmed, I pull off a piece of turkey and hand it over. 

6. After nom-nom-noming his treat, Jack will look up at me, resuming his begging stance until I give him another piece or walk away with my sandwich.  But he will not do the somersault again.  He knows well enough not to overuse his talent. 

Now Mimi - that's a different story.  If both my wife and I are in the kitchen, then Mimi must complete the threesome.  But she's too much of a diva to do anything she considers beneath her station.  She'll just sit there and look up at us.  So she's not rewarded as much.  And you readers out there, don't think you can get a piece of my sandwich by performing somersaults.  Jack does it naked on a hardwood floor: let's see you try THAT.

Twenty years ago today

As I type this blog entry, I'm wiping the sweat off my forehead.  It's a typical Midwestern August, warm and humid.  I don't have air conditioning in the office; the apartment's layout makes keeping the entire apartment cool close to impossible.  The a/c we do have is a room unit, cooling off the bedroom so that my wife and I can sleep without drowning in a pool of sweat.  So I sit in the office, sweating and typing, taking in as much coolish air from the tiny fan in here as possible.  It's not too bad; in fact, it's almost homey.

I wished I had the little fan when I first walked into my dorm room twenty years ago today.  I remember the heat even then; the dorm building itself was very warm except in the stairwell.  When I first received my dorm room assignment, I hadn't given much thought to cooling the room.  I had lived in my grandparents' uncooled attic for the previous six years; anything was an improvement. The dorm itself, a 50's-style minimalist concrete bunker, held in heat like a kiln, and my bunk bed happened to be about a foot below an plaster-covered (and probably asbestos) pipe that added to the warmth.  To say it was as hot as hell in that dorm room is an insult to hell.  And that's where I started on the road to adulthood.

Given, it was my start on the road to adulthood.  No student is a grownup in college, no matter how restrained or mature they appear to be.  I certainly wasn't, and I showed it early on.  Within three weeks, my roommate, a nice guy from a small town in rural Illinois, ran away, begging the resident hall director to reassign him to the non-psycho section of the floor.  He was apparently genuine in his pleas: the resident hall did not replace him, so I had my dorm room all to myself for the remainder of my freshman year.  Had I the social skills and good looks to attract the ladies, this would have been heaven on earth, but since I was an out of it dweeb, I spent most nights doodling on the computer in my underwear.

(Oh yes, there was a computer in my dorm room, that lovely year of 1989.  Provided by the university, it boasted a monochrome monitor, a floppy drive, and enough memory to download entire kilobytes of whatever you wanted.  It wasn't my first time on a computer (that would have been a TRS-80 back in '79; can you imagine home computers and disco existing at the same time?  Wowzers.), but it was my first brush with the Internet.  I fell madly in love.)

I can say, without hint of exaggeration, without that computer in my dorm room, I would have had far fewer friends in college (and adulthood) than I ended up with.  Within that little box were nerds, freaks, geeks, outsiders, techies, Trekkies, and other social reprobates of all shapes and sizes, all connecting with each other in the form of ASCII characters on the green screen.  It was an amazing little world that was opened up to me, this local network of people just as weird (but not quite) as me.  It took folks some time to get used to the likes of me, but many did. 

It blows my mind today that the server I logged on to could only handle 36 students at a time.  We had internet access, but indirectly through another, larger university.  (Posters to usenet groups had addresses that looked like this:  bradley!bucc2!***@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu)  The World Wide Web didn't exist; it could take hours to download one badly-altered nude photo of Madonna; the majority of students didn't have an e-mail address; many students at my school still typed their assignments with... typewriters.  By the time I graduated five years later, none of that was true. Think about that.  Do you think technology evolved that fast for the typical college student between, say, 1925 and 1930?  Or 1971 and 1976?  It was as if we had climbed into a slow-moving car that suddenly sped up to a hundred miles per hour.  And it's only accelerated since.  When I look at my computer, my cell phone, my iPod, 1989 seems much further back than it really is.  And it really isn't that different: for example, as I finish this blog entry, I'm  sweating in my underwear in front of my computer.  Some things never change.

The real conspiracies behind Obamabwahahahahahacare! ---er, health care reform

As the health care reform bill continues to percolate, so too do the conspiracies.  The most common criticism from the right wing is that the reform bill - particularly in regards to the public option -  will cost a ton of money and cripple an already-crippled economy.  Fair enough.  I disagree because I believe that even if the public option does eventually lead to an increase in taxes (due to its popularity, perhaps), the expenses will be more than canceled out by the money saved from having to spend less on a private medical plan.  Or, for that matter, the medical costs dealt to the uninsured souls unlucky enough to get sick or injured.  But yes, it will be expensive, so that criticism is legit. 

However, various conspiracies lurking about the internet - from the very loony (the bill would euthanize old people and mandate abortions) to the batshit crazy (the bill would mandate free sex change operations) - gave me pause.  So I decided to peruse the House version of the bill - HR 3200, all 1017 pages of it - and I have to admit, not only are the conspiracies all true, but there's a lot more to soil your underwear about.  I'm fully aware that exposing these more controversial parts of the bill may lead to my immediate assassination, but I feel it is my duty as a Patriotic American to lift the Burka of Doom from this evil.