Vintage Caturday: A Girl and Her Kitten

My parents got me a kitten when I was about 4 years old.  Her name was Rainbow.  We got along swimmingly.

Surely the People are Sheep

The people are but sheep. They graze on catch-words, and they go to their slaughter.

~R. A. Lafferty

The other day, I had the misfortune to be entrapped in a conversation I really did not want to be a part of, revolving around the need for USians to have more guns.  As is usual in such conversations, the reasoning for guns was entirely based on fearmongering.  The reason this conversation stood out rather than being the one I'd heard many times before was that my interlocutor maintained that the U.S. is full of sheep at the mercy of armed wolves; the US is the only country in the world in which people don't know how to defend themselves.   Look at those children who are not subject to corporal punishment and never learn to fight back!  

I mentioned most of Europe, as an excellent example of a place where most people don't have guns and yet somehow are not typically subject to mass shootings and made my escape.  I didn't really want to discuss the corporal punishment thing, since I'm not sure what exactly to say.  Back in the 1800s, when it was legal to beat children a lot in school and in other places, there are recorded incidents of children bringing guns to school and retaliating against the corporal punishment from their teachers by shooting them.  Would that be considered by this person speaking to me a non-sheeplike and therefore good thing, as it is teaching children to fight back?   I know there is a school of thought, though the only names I associate with it are those of James Dobson and Michael Pearl, that says that bullying is good because children will naturally form a hierarchy and should learn to be strong in that hierarchy.  I tend to regard this school of thought as barbarity.  And at the end of the day, is this proclaimer of the sheepiness of the U.S. really going so far as to advocate that we arm children?  When Africans do that we call it an outrage and an atrocity, and besides which, it just never ends very well.     

As far as just asserting sheepiness of people who aren't us in general, well, I think XKCD can retort better than I.  

Alan Turing discusses a polite convention in which, although we cannot ever fully know such to be true, we yet assume and act on the assumption that other people think the way we do.  I vote for extending this to a polite convention in which we assume other people both think and aren't sheep.

Poetry Tuesday: Night Lights

Ever as I steal along the rice-field path to meet my lover,

The firefly kindles a light to show me the way.

~Anonymous Japanese

Snake Oil!

To cure the consumption, the ebola, the diarrhea, and the stupid!  One low price!  Also good for oiling one's snake.  Give me all your money!

Found at an amusement park in Valdosta, Ga.

Caturday Post: Thermal Expansion Kitten Is Approximately Linear

Poetry Tuesday: Ogden Nash on Having a Job

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,

Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance. 

In Which I Lament the Vapidity that is the U.S. Notion of the Pinnacle of Artistic Achievement

I bought shoes recently.  For Argentine tango, in which I am taking classes.  This requires me to dance in heels, which in turn requires me to purchase good heels.  The sort with good thick leather soles.   I described my needs to the helpful sales clerk with the reason thereunto, the tango that is.  Her response, which I think was supposed to be a compliment, was that maybe I'd be on Dancing with the Stars.

No.  Terrible television shows are not why we dance.  At least, not why I dance.  As long as people who dance love their dance, who am I to judge, but television shows are a horribly vapid reason for dancing.  Please do not ascribe such to me.