Well, I'm trying to stay away from cat pictures for a while. The two new guys are settling in well upstairs. I'll drop it there.

Aimlessly wandering over the internet, I found two fabulous vintage Jaguars up for auction somewhere in Europe, and thought I'd drop there here for posterity.

Among the lot is one of Jaguar's 53 C-Type race cars, a 1952 model that was thought to have been lost to the ages after being unaccounted for in the mid-1960s.
It was eventually found in 1997, and is now presented here gloriously restored.

Also in the collection is possibly the most historically significant car the brand ever made, the 1935 S.S. 90 prototype which was the first sports car it ever produced.
It essentially launched the brand's successful foray into motorsport, all before some Austrian guy's bad actions [Hitler !!] forced the company to change its name from "S.S." to "Jaguar."

They are both beautiful, but that SS90 is a dream.

If you want to dream and drool (sp?) or put in a bid : Vintage Jag Auction

Just in from Loretta. She is teaching crochet-ing at a local craft shop ("Strokes of Creativity"). She looks the perfect Southern arts-n-crafts lady here in this picture.

Birth of a Nation (the movie) / The KKK

Never watched DW Griffith's movie, The Birth of a Nation, before. I am now about 2/3 of the way through it, while I check Wikipedia for historical accuracy of various things in the movie.

It's always been hotly protested that the movie glorifies the (original) KKK; but I am beginning to see it's not such a simple topic. The end of the Civil War, the defeat / destruction of the South and the post-war "Reconstruction" era make up a long, complex story (that I will not discourse here).

What I am re-waking to is the "Reconstruction" era, the influx of northerners, nothern soldiers, carpetbaggers into the South. The north treated the southern states as "conquered colonies", not as states in the USA. White people were forbidden to hold public office (!!) and black people - bitter, revengeful and uneducated - were installed in public office; it was virtually a complete reversal of what had been before the war. Of course white southerners resented it (esp coming from the dictates of the northern victors).

Anyway, the southern white guys got pissed and formed the KKK as a band of heroes rebelling against the evil empire. If you look at it that way, the original intent of the KKK is not as terrible as legend has it. It was formed as a reaction to what the post-war invasion of northerners was doing to southern white people.

(The 20th century resurrection of the KKK is most likely a very different story.)

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I finished watching The Birth of a Nation, and indeed the story it tells in the last half makes champions and heroes of the KKK. So I called up Wikipedia and did some reading. Their description of the 3 incarnations of the KKK (1860's, 1920's, post 1950's) is very critical, as we are accustomed to hearing.

So .... take the movie version of the KKK with a dash of salt and a full glass of water. They are a hateful lot of people.

How to Obtain Italian Dual Citizenship

One of my favorite websites is the pleasant Italy Magazine. Nice stuff. And this week they have an article on this topic: Italian Dual Citizenship

It's a bunch of work, expensive and time consuming. Happily, back when, Mike is the guy who went through all of this work to secure our (mine and his) his Italian citizenships. Since this article popped up this week, I thought to post it here, and highlight this website.

King of Jazz

Created in 1930, lost shortly after, rediscovered and restored 1970. A massive dose of Art Deco and Surrealism - liked it so much I bought the DVD.
It resonated with me last night (Turner Classics). The imagery is .... well .... surrealistic art deco. The colors are other-worldy Hollywood Silver Screen.

Goings On Around Here

Not much exciting. Getting the new cats accomodated to a civil lifestyle (they are doing well).

Had my first appointment with an Aural Pathologist today. She plans to help me (over the next 20 weeks) identify sounds better and understand conversations in noisy environments and people talking on top of each other.
I (74) am skeptical. She (about 30) is hopeful. (It's an age thing).

To be honest, she knows her stuff about deaf people and how much of the hearing process is a brain issue, not an ears issue. Most of my current hearing problems are actually brain related, not ears related She says she can help with this. (Hope springs eternal!)

Electrified Street Trolleys - I mean 3rd Rail Type Electricity

I never knew this. Trolleys (and some buses) in my childhood (Brooklyn) were powered by overhead wires. But in the late 19th century, some trolley routes were electrified by a 3rd rail - actually a conduit under the ground - between the wheel rails !

You can see it in this picture of Manhattan. (The horse-pulled trolley was still in use and traveled over the same path as the new electric trolleys.)

Conduit current collection was one of the first ways of supplying power to trams but it proved to be much more expensive, complicated and trouble-prone than overhead wires. When electric street railways became ubiquitous, it was only used in those cities that did not permit overhead wires, including London, Paris, Berlin, Marseilles, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague in Europe, and the New York City borough of Manhattan and Washington, D.C. in the United States.

In some old photographs, two "slots" may be seen between the rails. In New York City, sometimes one slot was used for a cable line [trolleys] and the other for electric cars.

The Shed at the Wildlife Sanctuary (Today)

The weather was finally nice enough to get me out of here and look for a pretty picture. I left without my boots, so no trekking, but I had a zoom lens, so that lucked out.

The Boston Flower Show (Yesterday)

It was kind of fun. Much of it was landscape vendors that set up these lovely backyard garden scenes. Tremendous amount of work - real stones and granite and fountains where needed. Great plantings. Lots of yard ornament vendors there too and some very pretty table art using flowers.

The Institute of Contemporary Art (Today)

"Art" being very casually defined here.
Actually, the less I say, the better. But this is my second visit there and it's been pretty disappointing.

St. Patrick's Day ("Today everyone is Irish")

The first [modern] St Patrick's Festival was held on 17 March 1996. In 1997, it became a three-day event, and by 2000 it was a four-day event. By 2006, the festival was five days long; more than 675,000 people attended the 2009 parade. Overall 2009's five-day festival saw almost 1 million visitors, who took part in festivities that included concerts, outdoor theatre performances, and fireworks.

Every time that I open the door to the "cats' room", Luka tries to slip out. He made it down a few steps yesterday until I yelled and he bolted back in. So we think it's time to open the door and let them out, which I did about an hour ago. Blue stuck his head out then quickly back in and stayed under the bed in his box. After 15 minutes, Luka tip-toed out and sat on the top step fo a bit. Then he ducked back in too.
Door's open but they'll come out if and when they are damn good and ready I guess. Cats !!

The short version: So the new cats would not panic, every day I have been carrying their carpets down to the basement to vacuum down there, then carrying them back upstairs. They get skittish and hide even when I just move the carpets.
Today, Deb went into the "cats room" and started up the vacuum cleaner, which is a loud sound that all our cats have run from. The new cats ran into the corner under the bed.
"Back to day one" is what I thought. I flipped out and yelled at Deb until I had to stop and catch my breath and go back downstairs. Definitely my papabear hormones had kicked into overdrive.

Well, it's all settled down now. The cats are coming round and Deb and I understand what happened.

I'll tell you .... caring for pets can be as testing of your character as caring for kids.

I have not been doing anything worth reporting, except feeding cats and tidying the basement, but Deb has been creating art with her coloring books ... (I'll take credit for the fancy background on this one.)

Investigating Hillary's email /
Investigating Trump's campaign hanky panky.

What our federal politicians do most of the time (rather than doing their jobs of actually governing our country) is investigating the slimeballs that thrive in the other political party. That behavior makes them feel like our guardian angels and it makes the grumbling population of diehard Democrat and diehard Republican voters feel protected from "those other evil slimeballs".
The media plays this same pathetic game ..... let's shit on the guys that the other channel is making heroes (because our commercial sponsors are paying us to do that).

300,000,000+ people in this country and we can't dredge up 500 people to govern the place properly.
Shit.

Okay. I'm done. Just needed to put that on the table.

Decided to go ahead this year with an implant in my other ear, so yesterday we did 2 hours of sound booth tests. "You're deaf" she said. "Well" I said "that explains why I can't hear you".
Had to make charts and graphs to forward to the insurance people. I see the surgeon next week, make a few hardware decisions over the summer and do the surgery probably Sep or Oct.

Aside from that we also turned off the "noise reduction" software in my present implant. Sound is now much more realistic and identifiable. It's very tricky business dealing with ears and brains, I'll tell you.

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Today my other doctor (how many are there now?) checked out my heart and told me I'm doing just fine. I already knew that. He's a decent sort. Told me eggs are not so bad - "keep it to 5 eggs a week and you'll be fine". Also told me that avocados are great for your heart !! That was news. And of course olive oil is the best. So I am feeling "heart safe" (he said as he gasped, keeled over and died).

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The new cats are doing well. They are deeply entrenched in the upstairs room - won't come out even with the door wide open. That's the best environment they ever lived in and damn it "were stayin' right here". Well, actually, Luka will venture down with eyes wide open, and he runs back up at the slightest noise.

A "kitchen event" reported in The New Yorker, happened in Brooklyn to promoted "waste free cooking", and it clearly attracted a special kind of people - they who obsess, really obsess, over waste. As always, such focused social concerns have the best intentions, and as always get carried to silly extremes. I'll extract some quotes here:

• "She's best known for fitting six years' worth of trash into a single mason jar."
• Looking up at the ceiling: 400 tulips hanging (with the bulbs still attached) upside down by a wire (that he found in the street). The bulbs will be replanted later, so no flowers died to do this.
• The celeriac was treated like a leg of lamb and he made beetroot molasses. "Does anybody wanna try some" and he passed out small droplets of the stuff.
• She uses the same utensils everywhere. She opened her totebag to show them and said "It might be a little gross, but at this point I just never wash them. Is that taking it too far?"
• Someone looked in the compost bucket after dinner and noticed discarded bits of toast. "Tristam makes ale out of bread bits, so next time save these for him."

This reminds me of the TV comedy series "Portlandia" - intelligent people taking good intentions to stupid extremes. (My favorite was when Fred and Carrie worked for 5 years on a cage-free chicken farm to decide if ordering a chicken dinner was inhumane.)

Well, Catherine sent me a surprise book in the mail (over there on the left). It gets rave reviews on the food circuit and it's a different spin on the talents of cooking. Very different. And, we set up weekly video conferencing (Sunday night) to chat through it chapter by chapter and maybe later on prepare some of the dishes (though it's a kind of anti-recipe, "be a food artist" kind of book).

We had our first video tonight, after me stumbling with the website/software (ZOOM) between my netbook and cell phone and we decided she should set up the meetings from now on.
It was really wonderful and we both enjoyed it. Can't wait 'til next week.