It’s Furious Balancing

When I heard of “The Game,” my first thought was of Thomas Tryon’s book The Other.  “The Game” referred to the twins’ ability to psychically project their awareness outside of themselves and into another.  For me, there’s all sorts of malevolent overtones to the phrase.

However, The Game I’m writing about today is wholly different, completely innocuous, and gives me something moderately interesting to post on the blog since I can’t think of a damned thing to write about this morning.   The Game is an Internet Flickr meme that I discovered on Pierre, The Yarn Snob’s blog.

What you do is:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions in the Flickr search feature.
2. Pick an image on the first page of the search results.
3. Copy/paste the image’s URL into the Mosaic Maker, using whatever layout you desire — providing it shows the 12 images.

You’ll wind up with something like this (Click for biggie size.  It looks much better) :

So, here are the questions (with my answers).

1. What is your first name? [edited out for privacy reasons]
2. What is your favorite food? Chocolate
3. What high school did you attend? [edited out for privacy reasons]
4. What is your favorite color? Cobalt blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Michael Kitchen
6. What is your favorite drink? Latte
7. Where would your dream vacation be? Paris
8. What is your favorite dessert? Ice cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? What?
10. What do you love most in life? Quiet
11. What is one word you use to describe yourself? Introverted
12. What is your Flickr user name? Laiane (I find it terribly amusing there’s a supermodel out there somewhere who shares my name.)
    

Et voilà.

Here’s another version of The Game where you keyword search (your answer) + sign.  I think I like this one on a more aesthetic level.

There are some fun things you can do with Big Huge Labs and your uploaded photos on Flickr.   I’ve posted a mosaic of my raindrop laden irises, and here’s a mosaic of my yarn pr0n pictures.  Well, my valiant attempt at yarn pr0n pictures.

Ooooo…..shiny.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, cats and kittens.  I’m off to do some knitting.

I haven’t done a meme in a long time, but this one caught my eye. I think the last meme I did rated my chances of surviving The Zombie Apocalypse. I was much better at this one.

70 words

Speedtest

I love mindlessly surfing the Innernets. I truly do.

If you look closely, you’ll see a woolly bear caterpillar between the pawsitude.

And, just because I haven’t thrown a meme in here in so long, and because I’m sure you’re just dying to know what kind of yarn I am…

What kind of yarn are you?

You are Mohair.You are a warm and fuzzy type who works well with others, doing your share without being too weighty. You can be stubborn and absolutely refuse to change your position once it is set, but that’s okay since you are good at covering up your mistakes. Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Once again, I cannot get the spacing right on these “copy and paste” meme thingies.

I recall what one of the nuns at St. Tom’s used to say: “You have other gifts.”

I have determined that it is, indeed, possible to get a hangover from overindulging in books.

The Husband and I came home from our Saturday shopping to find an amazon.com box on our doorstep with Books Six and Seven of the Harry Potter series, and I vanished for the rest of the weekend, finishing Book Seven around 12:30 a.m. on Sunday night. I’m estimating 1,500 pages in less than two days.

I think I hurt myself.

I’m in the process of re-reading Book Five at the moment, and I will then go through Books Six and Seven again. Since I flew through them at the speed of sound, I’m certain I missed many details. Plot, for instance.

A few (spoiler-free) observations:

• The Harry Potter fans — the ones I know both on the Internet and in Real Life — have been fabulous. Several people commented how they wished they could be reading the books again for the first time since they remembered how exciting it all was. They never talked about spoilers, and if they were posting online, they gave ample warning they were about to do so, like STOP READING NOW. Part of their fun in sharing the story with me was watching as the plot revealed itself and I put the pieces together or speculated on the fates of certain characters. I know I amused one of my co-workers no end with my hypotheses on Dumbledore and Snape.
  
• My favorite Hogwart’s student was Neville Longbottom. Even though I hate to say this (because it’s such a trite expression), he definitely “grew” the most during the course of the seven books. In terms of my least favorite, I would have to say Pansy Parkinson in Slytherin House, mainly because she seemed more like a cardboard cutout than a real character to me. I mean, we were offered little glimpses of the personality or family life of other minor characters (Lee Jordan, Seamus, Dean), but we only saw Pansy laughing maliciously at other students.
  
• I haven’t quite figured out Snape yet. I knew by Book Four that there was more to him than meets the eye, and I was surprised by the revelations in Book Seven about him as a young boy, but there are still missing pieces. I’m sure those missing pieces are all in the text; that’s just what happens when I read so quickly. I’m thinking he would qualify as my favorite Hogwart’s professor. McGonagall and Hagrid were cool in their own way, but Snape had a certain je ne sais qua.
  

• Ravenclaw needed a better representative than Luna Lovegood. It’s not that Luna was a bad example; I just don’t recall seeing a Ravenclaw student that exemplified their House’s emphasis on intellect. I was always sorted into Ravenclaw in the umpteen online quizes/memes I took.

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!



Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose intelligence is surest.”

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron’s affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine’s editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

 

Hogwarts Sorting Hat: Based on Myers-Briggs Personality Typing

 

You are a RAVENCLAW!As a Ravenclaw and as an NTP, you are intellectual, independent, and value excellence in yourself and in those around you. You have a strong sense of curiosity, and in general can see many aspects of a single issue or debate. You have a strong drive to acquire knowledge and set very high standards for yourself and those around you. You enjoy being challenged, and can accept constructive criticism without taking it personally. You are probably at least somewhat unconventional, and will not usually follow authority for its own sake; instead, you will consider the issue at hand and make a decision for yourself.
Take this quiz!

Quizilla |
Join

In any event, it’s almost Caturday here, so that means you lucky folks get a Friday LOLCat. I’ve had this one for quite a while, but never had a reason to post it. It’s one of my all-time favorites.

Have a splendiferous Friday, cats and kittens.

I love online personality tests and memes. I prefer personality tests. It’s all well and good to know that the foreign city I greatest resemble is Paris and that I am 65% misanthropic, but I prefer the solid standbys of the Myers-Briggs, the Bem Sex Role Inventory, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. No, scratch that last one. I seriously doubt the MMPI is online

In any event, I found a nice version of the Myers-Briggs that churned out a spiffy badge for your blog or myspace page or whatever, so I thought I would give it a whirl. I love spiffy badges. I will probably need to create a separate page on this blog to contain them because if I put up all the spiffy badges I found it would look a tad chaotic over here.

I went back this morning to take a look at their Multiple Intelligences Test. I was interested because it measured different scales of intelligence, e.g., verbal, musical, mathematical, kinesthetic, and so on — a nice change from the run of the mill IQ tests, which measure verbal/analytical and spatial relations skills alone. I knew I would score highest on the verbal, but wanted to see how the other scales stacked up (especially how low I would score in the categories of “musical” “spatial,” and “kinesthetic,” all forms at which I, to be blunt, truly suck).

So, here’s the results:

There’s nothing too shocking here. “Verbal” off the charts and everything else median or lower, some much lower. Pretty typical for me. I’m not at all surprised that “musical” is all the way at the bottom.

Since everyone likes to be told things they already know about themselves, I clicked to read the definition of verbal/linguistic intelligence. Just a sampling:

• Loves words games (Oh, yes.)
• Often speaks of what they have read (Too much, I’m sure some people think.)
• Notices grammatical mistakes (Most of the time, not all of the time.)
• Enjoys writing (A yep.)
• Cherishes their book collection (”Cherish” is a mild word to use, but acceptable.)
• Likes to use “fancy” words (I beg your pardon? Back the truck up, mister.)

[I'm going to degenerate into some snarky commentary here. If you don't like my snarky posts, I'm going to suggest you go to Cute Overload and look at pictures of widdle kitties and bunny wabbits and come back when I've calmed down and am writing about cats and yarn and computer games.]

Still with me? Moving along.

Likes to use “fancy” words? Putting quotation marks around “fancy” contains a little too much condescension, don’t you think? “Oooo, those verbal/linguistic people use ‘fancy’ words to show off how smart they are. They can’t be normal like us; they have to be ‘fancy’.”

I went on to look at the defining characteristics for the other categories and the only other uses of quotation marks I found were:

• Has a mind “like a computer” (logical/mathematical intelligence)
• Learns by “doing” (bodily/kinesthetic intelligence)

Not quite the same tone, is it?

And what exactly is a “fancy” word? Something with more than two syllables? A word that a person with a steady diet of People magazine, American Idol, and Fox News wouldn’t recognize? But I digress.

A more apt and appropriate description would be “has a large vocabulary.” Geez Louise, how hard is that to come up with? There’s not a “fancy” word to be found in it, either.

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of humor here in that a verbal/linguistic person is rewriting the description of verbal/linguistic intelligence.

I’ll leave you on that (less snarky) note. Enjoy the rest of your day, cats and kittens!

Even though they are trite and silly, I enjoy blog memes, especially the ones the get me a big, brightly-colored widget-button-thingie.

40%

[Yes, I KNOW THE SPACING IS OFF. I've been playing with it for half an hour now.]

Deconstructing the test, my chances of survival appear to be based on my Save My Own Bacon First mentality and a copious supply of canned goods and ramen noodles. My percentage could be higher if I owned (and knew how to use) a firearm, lived in a less urban area, and was in better physical condition. All righty then, if I can’t run from zombies, I can hide from zombies, and I’m smart enough to know not to go to a hospital or mall when the chips are down and the undead are marching.

Next up, a parental guidance warning!

My references to pain, hell, and torture put me in the PG category. My post that included erotica, sex, and lesbian cheerleaders didn’t even show up on the radar, nor did my link to Susie Bright’s (Not Safe For Work) Journal..

And now, Cadavers!

$3440.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating

I can’t recall if I would be of more interest to medical research if I was an albino. I might need to retake this one. This is a moot point since my goal is to donate my body to the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, and they are welcome to have me at no cost.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Watch for zombies.

You Are 65% Misanthropic

Here’s the truth: Most people suck. You are just lucky enough to know it. You’re not ready to go live alone in a cave - but you’re getting there.

I’m just tidying up the sidebar this evening (and playing around with a new template), and this was one of the memes I wanted to save. The self-test doesn’t truly measure misanthropy — more like “meanness” or “irritability” — but I’m saving it anyhow since I’ve always called myself a misanthrope.

Along those lines, I like to think that I have a much higher tolerance for being alone than a vast majority of other people. I like to be surrounded by quiet and space — it’s a buffer zone, of sorts. You know all those books/movies/whatever that have people wandering around some post-apocalyptic landscape, going crazy because there aren’t any other people around (I Am Legend (1); The Stand; etc.)? If I had food, shelter, and books, I could hold out fairly well, I think. Well, longer than others.

Being alone doesn’t scare me — “being alone” meaning being solitary by choice, not “being alone” walking down a dark street by myself. There’s a difference. Solitude in and of itself does not scare me. There are so many people who are uncomfortable being by themselves; they have to have a television or stereo blaring just to take the edge of the “aloneness.” Meh. Sounds pretty limited to me, as if they’re scared of being inside their own head. If you can’t tolerate yourself, if you can’t entertain or amuse yourself, then you’re obviously not very bright.

****
(1) Wowza. I just discovered on Wikipedia that they’re doing the (third) film version of I Am Legend, and Will Smith is going to be Neville! I thought that was a surprising casting choice for Neville, but once I thought about it, I think Will Smith will be very, very cool in that role. They’re setting it in Manhattan, though, instead of Southern California. /shrug

~

Yes, I’m very, very psyched that they’re making The Golden Compass into a movie, but I have to say that I’m disappointed by the hairstyle they’ve given Lyra. Curls?! Shirley Temple-esque CURLS? Good gravy, people, Lyra isn’t a foo-foo girly-girl.

That won’t stop me from going to the film, though.

~

I thought a Bible quiz on Sunday was apropos.

I’m an uninspired blogger this week — still recovering from whatever-it-was that hamstrung me on my vacation, and sinus infection/allergies. I hate spring.

My Personality

Neuroticism	66
Extraversion	10
Openness To Experience	43
Agreeableness	2
Conscientiousness	31

You are introverted, reserved, and quiet with a preference for solitude and solitary activities. Your socializing tends to be restricted to a few close friends. Stressful and frustrating situations can often be upsetting to you, but you are sometimes able to get over these feelings and cope with these situations. A desire for tradition does not prevent you from trying new things. Your thinking is neither simple nor complex. To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual. People see you as tough, critical, and uncompromising and you have less concern with others’ needs than with your own. You like to live for the moment and do what feels good now.

Test Yourself Compare Yourself View Full Report Click here to take the most insightful personality test.

Three Things I Do Well

1. Fill out forms. Federal income tax forms. Probate Court forms. Questionnaires of all types. I’m currently filling out forms to open education savings accounts for one of the firm’s clients. Now, while I balk at doing this sort of menial labor for coddled rich people, I do find a certain enjoyment in telling them that every box and line must be completed, and there’s no getting away with this “using a business address or P.O. Box as their residence address” nonsense. My own special brand of passive-aggressiveness – just another service I provide.

2. Word games. Scrabble, crossword puzzles, that sort of stuff. I have no skills whatsoever in the visual or performing arts, but I know and love my words. It’s a very strange place I inhabit, and I’ll have to write more about it one of these days. For the moment, I’ll leave the description of my internal landscape alone.

3. Procrastinate. At this I excel.

Three Things at Which I Absolutely Suck

1. Sports, especially team sports. I was always one of those kids picked last for the team in gym class.

2. Math. The math part of my brain reached it’s limit my junior year in high school in Algebra 2 with Mr. Bomeli. I got an “A” the first semester, and a “C” the second (with a “D” on the final exam). My little head just couldn’t hold any more than that and just gave up, I suppose.

3. Keeping up with High Maintenance Hair. I keep my hair short for a reason. All those clips, combs, braids, up-do’s, ribbons, mousses, gels, and sprays simply don’t work for me. My only styling product is water. I think that any woman who spends more than 10 minutes on her hair in the morning (including drying time) is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. That time could be used on many other productive activities. Sleeping, for example.

Three Things I’m Trying to do Better.

1. Develop a “poker face.” My role model for this is Bud Cort in Harold and Maude. I’m setting the bar pretty high. I want to develop the perfectly affectless look. I do pretty well at not laughing at the absurdities I hear almost daily at work. There was quite the pot-kettle-black thing going on at lunch the other day, but no details here. Who knows who reads my blog? (/wave at Queen Frostine).

2. Stick to a budget. I decided that it was high time I brought down my credit card debt. I’m not going to say exactly what that amount IS, but let’s just say I’m above the average amount reported in the news stories cropping up these days about Americans’ problems with credit. I’ve got an above average FICO score too — 800+. [I've always had to be above average. /sigh ] In any event, I copied the budget spreadsheet from Crazy Aunt Pearl’s website, and plugged in my own amounts and categories. I like to think that I’m the only person in the world (well, the only person in my immediate neighborhood) who has a budget with line items for “comic books,” “yarn,” and “Sweetwaters’ coffee cards.” The simple fact that I have a budget is already limiting my spending. It’s like keeping a food diary when you’re dieting. If you have to write down every bite you put in your mouth, you don’t eat as much. If I have to record every spontaneous purchase, I don’t spend as much. I spent many years without credit cards and bought everything with cash, including a trip to Paris. If I stick to my budget, I can get rid of all my credit card debt in two and a half years.

3. Design mods for Morrowind. Like I said somewhere up above, I have no “artistic” type skills, so I’m not doing new meshes and textures; I’m not designing armor or creatures or weapons. I can, however, write dialog and journal entries and quests and similar things. The strange top-down dialog trees make sense to me (most limited entries first down to the most generic). I can’t remember which modder in the online community — one I respected highly for her excellent visual mods (armor, housing, texture replacers) — wrote that dialog intimidated her. I was stunned. It seems so easy to me, but I know I can improve. I want to finish the “Cats of Ulthar” while I’m on vacation next week. I have one more quest to go. I finally found a texture for Carter’s silver key.

[The "Ten for Tuesday" blog meme list, and I can't get this bloody thing to format properly. Trust me; it's driving me nuts.]

I think what a person surrounds herself with can be quite telling about her personality. I realize that I’m reaching on some of this to make them fit into the definition of a “collection.” Deal with it. My blog, my rules.

1. Comic books. This started around 1995 (or 1996), when I walked into Vault of Midnight and met one Curtis Sullivan (and his wife Liz, and friend Steve). I’ve since fallen off in my reading to an embarrassing extent, but I’m quite proud of my messy, in-desperate-need-of-sorting collection. The highlights include Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (the FIRST printings, thankyouverymuch) and original artwork from Transmetropolitan (on loan to The Vault).

2. “Real” books. See recent blog post below.

3. Maneki nekos. Japanese “lucky cats.” Most of my collection is from eBay, but one of the attorneys visited Japan a while ago and brought me back an authentic neko. I have about 40 of them in various sizes and colors.

[Items 4 and 5 are side effects from working in the "death care industry."]

4. Grim reapers. I suppose this is a memento mori thing. I have a pewter figurine, a small wind-up walking toy, a rubber stamp, and a fully poseable plush (with plush scythe) at my desk at work.

5. Funeral home paraphernalia. Nothing too sick, although I know I have a mouth former somewhere in one of my boxes in the basement (this keeps the mouth of the corpse from collapsing/receding). No trocars or embalming equipment, but I do have a metal box (circa 1940’s) for the decedent’s personal effects (A.P. Acquavella Funeral Home, Brooklyn, New York); several ballpoint pens (in need of refills) from mortuaries and embalming services in Springfield, Missouri; a metal coffin-shaped key chain from the Batesville Casket Company; and a coffee mug from the United Casket Company (”Dedicated to Quality and Service”).

6. Stuffed animals (tigers and cats). I’m 12 years old on the inside. Really.

7. Yarn a/k/a The Yarn Stash. Knitters are strange creatures. They collect vast amounts of yarn that has no immediate discernable purpose. “Ooooo, that’s pretty. Let’s buy a few skeins and knit up….something.” I read somewhere that Tracy Ullman has a room of her home dedicated to holding The Stash. My own stash is quite small in comparison. Along with that beautiful cotton chenille from City Knits (see blog post of January 7th), I have:

* 6 skeins of Noro Big Kureyon, brown-cream-gray-orange colorway (A20), bulky

* 2 skeins of fluffy Peruvian cotton, sport/DK (for washcloths) orange and yellow, and ½ skein hot pink

* 4 or 5 skeins of assorted eyelash yarns shades of turquoise and blue

* 2 skeins of Paton’s Chunky Shetland, bulky (like the gray basketweave scarf)

* 1 skein Lion Brand chenille, bulky, dark blue

* 2 skeins Peruvian wool, worsted, hot pink (Kitty Pi Version 1)

* 2 skeins Australian Corriedale wool, super bulky, peacock (Kitty Pi Version 2)

* 1 skein Mango Moon viscose, red-orange-yellow-magenta colorway and matching textured twist, rayon

* 1 cone, approx 400 yards, of undefined origin, navy worsted wool

* 1 cone, yardage unknown, light blue/grayish cotton chenille, sport/DK or lighter

8. Husbands. This doesn’t quite count as a collection; it’s more of a series. Let’s just say third time’s a charm and I’m happy with the current one.

9. Knowing how to order beer in a foreign language. German, Czech, and Swahili. One never knows.

10. Ranger characters. It’s actually the same Ranger character, just different games. Laiane Wolfsong was born in the first Everquest. Then there was Morrowind, EverQuest 2, Oblivion, and now Vanguard. I don’t like characters that can’t sneak, hide, and cause obscene amounts of damage from a distance. “Security” features (in the Elder Scrolls series), tracking, and animal companions are definite pluses. There are downsides, though. I remember in the original EQ all that time in Jaggedpine Forest doing the root and shoot (with the snakes) and the snare and scare (with the griffons/griffawns). Most of my high 40’s to lower 50’s were a long, agonizing line of griffon butts.

I was surfing the innernets, as I am prone to do, looking for memes to jazz up my blog. I say that I have the World’s Most Boring Blog; it is in definite need of “jazzin’ up.” Since I don’t have a tremendous amount of material in my own life, I look elsewhere for inspiration and motivation — whatever it takes to get me typing about something.

I found a few book-related memes. Being an avid reader, I thought that might be one way to go, but I didn’t find any topics that quite “fit.”

One of the memes I looked at said to list the books in your TBR (To Be Read) Pile. I don’t HAVE a TBR Pile. I have a TBR Bookcase. Now, admittedly, it’s a small two-shelf’er and one of the shelves has my fitness/nutrition non-fiction on it, but most of it is Stuff I Haven’t Gotten to Yet. There’s also a small TBR Pile making it’s home on the sectional sofa in the living room, and a smaller one on my nightstand [The nightstand books are ones I'm currently reading; they tend to fall by the wayside every now and then and sit there for a while, so they're more of a To Be Finished Pile.] There are also assorted piles on the bedroom floor that are in some liminal states of Being Read, Should Be Read, Reference, and Why Haven’t You Shelved This Yet?

My name is Laiane Wolfsong, and I am a Biblioholic. (All together now, “Hello, Laiane!”)

There is no such thing as too many books — just not enough bookcases.

I decided - for the heck of it - to post some pictures of The Laiane Wolfsong Not-Yet-Memorial Library, and a few selected items.

To your left, Ladies and Gentlemen, are the eight stacking bookcases comprising The Fiction Collection. It appears that Ms. Wolfsong has a penchant for the classics. Austen, Tolstoy, Proust, Marquez, Trollope, and Shakespeare are well represented, with a smattering of Melville, Borges, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Dante, and Hugo thrown in for good measure. There’s also a great deal of space given to one of her favorite writers, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (The Dream Cycle collection and the first volume of The Annotated Lovecraft are absent in that photo; she attests they are “somewhere” in the residence).

Here are two small gems for your consideration.

The first, “Most Expensive Used Book” — H.P. Lovecraft’s Something About Cats (First edition, 1949, Arkham House, August Derleth, editor). $130, not counting shipping and handling, brought this beauty into The Collection. Worth. Every. Penny.

The second, “Best Beloved Book, Judging By Its Cover” — Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (79th printing, 1976).

Here I have to lapse back into the first person narrative. I got Anne’s diary when I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old. I have read it dozens upon dozens of times. The pages are yellow with age, and many of them are falling out. Of course, I bought The Definitive Edition (new translation, originally edited out bits added back in) when that came out in 1995, but I would never toss out the first book. Sacrilege! No other book in The Collection comes near the well-worn-ness of this book. Okay, maybe my paperback version Richard Adams’ Watership Down, but it’s not THAT close.

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I have, in my study, two shelves of children’s books and fantasy, and well as The Non-Fiction Collection: Human Sexuality, Eastern Religion, Western Religion, Women’s Studies, Art/Photography, History of World War II, Marilyn Monroe, Women’s Health, Adventure, Death and Dying, Travel, Cats, Humor, u.s.w. There is also an entire closet of my comic books and graphic novels.

I really need to catalogue all of these. The task is just too daunting. I can’t even begin to estimate the sheer number of books in this house.

I have a deep connection with my books. They have sustained me during all the circles of hell through which I have had to travel. Homesickness. Divorce. Pain (physical and emotional). When I look at my shelves, I see more than paper and bindings and words. My books give me a sense of solidity that nothing else can. The written word is my lifeline.

You Belong in Paris

You enjoy all that life has to offer, and you can appreciate the fine tastes and sites of Paris. You’re the perfect person to wander the streets of Paris aimlessly, enjoying architecture and a crepe.

I need to get back to Europe. About every four to five years I begin to get underwhelmed with this so-called American culture.(1) Mini-malls, 238 channels of cable television, Starbucks (the Walmart of Coffee Houses), Fox News, u.s.w. The Husband and I are planning a trip to the British Isles this fall (we got our passport pictures taken today), but I could seriously handle another jaunt in the City of Lights. /sigh.

In any event, the main purpose of this blog entry was not to have me sigh over baguettes and Le Tour Eiffel, but to post a Cat Picture. A Cat Picture of a DIFFERENT CAT. So, I present in all his glory, Mr. Gregor KafkaCat:

Gregor’s Nicknames:
1. Mr. G
2. Mr. Squeakypants
3. Daichi Neko (big number one cat)
4. Boogercookie (This is relatively new, and has a rather lengthy explanation behind it that I’m not even going to begin to attempt)
5. Mama’s Boy

**************************
(1) I feel another Gandhi quote coming on:

Interviewer to M. Gandhi: What’s your opinion of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.