sisu

Armed and dangerous ...

"Let Facts be submitted to a candid world," from the archives July 4, 2008.

Little Kitteh in Toyland

The kitteh was nestled all snug and well fed …

While visions of ornaments danced in her head.

Arrangement in Gray and Black

"Arrangement in Gray and Black Fur," popularly known as "Little Kitteh" by Sissy Willis. Digital image. Click here for full size.

"Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1," popularly known as "Whistler's Mother" by James McNeill Whistler. Oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Have yourself a merry little blogiversary: Now we are eight.

Little Kitteh, above, trips the light fantastic in our Christmas card, now in production. The message inside: "Let your heart be light." Next year all our troubles will be out of sight?

In celebration of our blog's eighth anniversary tomorrow, December 12, we proudly republish our very first post ever, "The tidings that dare not speak their name." It features our Christmas Card of that year, an image of the homestead festooned with the lights fantastic, and a fearless, politically incorrect challenge to those who would wilfully misrepresent the Establishment Clause of our Constitution's First Amendment. An early stirring of the Tea Party spirit that would rise up to disintermediate the powers that be via the internet?

"Chelsea-by-the-Sea at Christmastime"

December 12, 2003. We wish you a Merry Christmas!

As we wrote last year, that was it, a blogpost of exactly 68 characters that could hold its own today in the fast-moving, 140-or-fewer-characters world of the Twittersphere. We were delighted to note that Glenn Reynolds has more or less declared victory in the war this Army of Davids was waging back then:

I GUESS THE "WAR AGAINST CHRISTMAS" HAS BEEN LOST, THEN: Obama lights the National Christmas Tree, says ‘Merry Christmas’ three times.

Not that there aren't still some air-headed holdouts.

Update: Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit — the fellow who named the blogosphere — sends "Best Wishes To An OG Blogger:

Happy Anniversary, Sissy!

You’ve made a difference!

Update II: Fun and funny Chris Muir of Day by Day in the comments:

We need wonderful writer young'uns like you! ;)

I am Little Kitteh. You may pet me now.

Through a glass brightly

Little Kitteh! Little Kitteh! burning bright, In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Was it the will of the Master of the Universe alone that gave life to man? Or did Adam — in the manner of LK above, gazing with longing through the seemingly impenetrable window that separated them — reach out to slip the surly bonds of earth to put out his hand/paw and touch the face of God/Tuck?

Update: Wordplay in the comments:

Chickelit: Heh. I am FeMale (iron man).

Connecticut Yankee: Actually, cats are a compound of iron, lithium, and neon: FeLiNe. (They're strong, they're great mood stabilizers, and they certainly light up our lives!)

Update 8 years later: Simon's Cat on twitter likes our post! #CatMenDo

The course of true love never did run smooth

"Heh. Is that Earl Grey and Little Kitteh?" twittered Stout Cat this afternoon re Simon's Cat's latest comic strip, excerpts below:

"The course of true love never did run smooth." Click here for full strip.

"Funny you asked. They just had their first nose-to-nose this very morning. She chirped and he responded with friendly body language," we twittered back. In fact, she ran right up to Tiny's one true love, intoxicated with his alpha-male pheromones [?] and planted a series of exploratory kisses on his beautiful mug.

Earl seemed intrigued. Does he remember his own true love, our angel baby? He still stops by most days and hangs around a bit, sometimes but not always taking a nip of the weed.

This was the first day he's come by when Little Kitteh was running free outside. Will she comfort his aching heart as she has ours?

When words fail

Little Kitteh's camouflage fits naturally into her surroundings, Persian rug to the left, Tuck's Dunham work boot to the right.

"LOVE the post, LOVE the Van Goghian Paintings Graphics, BUT..." writes our imail correspondent re our previous post:

She: I worry so much about losing our skills. Going to the Internet for all the answers is pretty dicey.

We: Oh. Not to worry. I find that I hone my skills. When I can't remember something, finding it out there reinforces my memory for lost details. But definitely a legitimate concern. Especially for people who never knew anything to start with, such as today's brainwashed students.

Our new Annin American flag from the totally awesome Accent Banner in Medford — found out about it online, drove over there and got a heart-warming personal tour of the factory plus lots of good advice about the proper fittings for remounting our flag — hung between the central columns of our Greek Revival manse. Complete with new swiveling pulleys from Westerbeke Marine across the Creek in East Boston.

"If the internet died tomorrow, due to Global Warming [Yuk, yuk] ....you and I might remember where to go for information, but the kids taday won't have a CLUE":

She: I APPLAUD the Internet … have had so much fun with typing in, "whatever," and there it is, BUT… if the Internet goes down, you are left with a couple of generations who go "DOH."

We: They would anyway thanks to the Gramscian march through the institutions.

In the ongoing project of sprucing up the terrace the other day, we were about to trash a dead leaf still clinging to our Super Mammoth Elephant Ears when we happened to turn it upside down to discover a precious moth revving up in there, about to take flight for the adventure of its lepidopteran life. Talk about camouflage! Update: We've put in an ID request to the folks at the totally awesome Butterflies and Moths of North America. Update II: It's Halysidota tessellaris: Banded Tussock Moth or Pale Tiger Moth, accepted and now listed in the BMNA database! They're so cute — and fuzzy! — when they're little.

"The Internet is a very valuable tool," she continues:

She: ...it should NOT supplant knowing how to look up a word in a dictionary, find a geometric proof on one's own. If we had had the Internet in MY day, I would have ACED both geometry and chemistry.

We: LOL. Maybe, maybe not. Today, as I understand it, there's so much teacher-enabled cheating out there that everyone's a winner. Not. 

Nature red in tooth and jaws

Little Kitteh had us in the emergency room over a little misunderstanding on Sunday. She was trying to clear the property of "vermin" — the concept, Tuck explains, that our feline companions use to categorize birds, small mammals, insects, spiders, slugs and other cats — with the exception of Earl Grey, of course — who would invade their territory. Lover of all things bright and beautiful that we are, we were trying to rescue a precious baby Gray Catbird from the jaws. But our timing and hand-eye coordination were off. In a violent face-off complicated by the dense undergrowth of the lilac out front, we lost the fledgling — or was it a pre-fledgling that had fallen from the nest? — and a lot of our own blood: Final score: LK=2, Sissy=0.

The parents were frantic. Their calls and fruitless attempts to misdirect Little Kitteh's attention away from their helpless offspring will haunt our dreams. We can't hear them now without remembering the horror. Puncture wounds on back of right hand and left thumb. Profuse bleeding. Chelsea Mass General emergency room across town delivered. We accepted a tetanus shot but asked for no antibiotics if not absolutely necessary, remembering the havoc they can wreak on the digestive system when they kill your body's beneficial micro-organisms together with the bad stuff. Next morning we regretted not having gone with the antibiotics, though: Angry red, painful and swollen hand and thumb made it almost impossible to surf the internet, let alone blog or tweet! It's those darned germs in cats' mouths and the deadly delivery system of their canines:

A cat has small sharp teeth, so when it bites the puncture wound can be quite deep. There are some infections a person may get as a result of bacteria commonly found in a cat's mouth, like pasteurella. Then there are other diseases that come from a cat's being infected by other pests, such as fleas.

Little Kitteh didn't hold our attempt to thwart fulfillment of her turf-defending duties against us, and how could we be angry with her for following her nature? On the good side, the antibiotics are doing their work — swelling and pain subsiding by the day — plus the doc turned us on to a "wonder drug" we'd never heard of: Probiotics. With "20 billion active cultures per capsule" (according to the package description), they help "maintain and modulate your body's natural microflora."

On the road again