Lee's Blog

That was the headline on AM New York (free morning newspaper) this morning. That about sums up yesterday’s mock terrorist attack on New York City.

I had the great good fortune to wake up yesterday morning with a very stiff neck. I didn’t feel inclined to take the subway and deal with my colleagues when I couldn’t even turn my head to the left, and I can work just fine from the apartment anyway, so I stayed home and worked.

As a result, I did not make the 43-story panicky evacuation with thousands of my closest friends. Everyone I talked to this morning in the office told me how sore their legs were from the trek (some stayed home this morning because they were too stiff and achy to come in); one told me about the sheer terror she had felt just being told to evacuate. She had not seen it herself as it was on the other side of the building, but the office manager saw it and came running in to order everybody out.

We work in the largest surviving office building in lower Manhattan (so I’m told). If a hijacked plane was looking for a target, our building would be quite inviting. No one was going to wait around for the authorities to tell us to stay or run; too many of us, including me, had friends who didn’t run immediately when they saw the plane hit the first Tower … we don’t have those friends anymore. They didn’t make it out. So when we see a potential terrorist attack, we run for our lives. Any sane person would. Any sane person would expect us to. Of course, that appears to exclude the present Administration.

Here’s what it’s like working in lower Manhattan. In the three years I’ve been here, on two occasions we have heard extremely loud booms. On both occasions everybody froze and asked in nervous tones, “What was that? Did anyone see?”

On one occasion, no one knew what had happened so work came to a complete halt while people ran to the windows and peered all around looking for smoke or damage. When we didn’t see anything or hear any sirens, we went back to work. But that boom, which was never explained, probably brought work to a complete halt for easily half an hour. On the other occasion, someone immediately announced, “It was lightning. I saw it. It hit over there.” So we went right back to work.

This can’t be just our reaction. This must happen all over lower Manhattan every time there’s a threatening sound. And to send a jumbo jet screaming past the windows — that is simply insane.

Incidentally, consider the video of people fleeing from the shore, screaming “Run! Run! Oh my God!” I read some cretin’s observation that those people had no reason to flee. Moron. They saw a jumbo jet screaming in toward Manhattan right over their heads. They saw a fighter coming in right behind it. They undoubtedly thought (I would have thought) that the fighter was going to shoot the jet down right there, where most of the flaming debris would fall in the water — except for what fell on them, of course. Again, any sane person would have run for his life under those conditions. And any sane person would have expected them to.

I would never have believed that any human being who had lived through September 11, would have pulled a stunt like this. Perhaps, charitably, we can assume that The One has seven-year-olds making his policy decisions.

I do not watch television, but I hear about it. I really had thought the network news had reached its nadir when supposed reporters “reported” their sexual feelings towards The One. But, sadly, I was wrong. I have read that the supposed reporters from CNN and MSNBC “reported” on them by making comments fit only for a junior high school locker room when the adults are away.

My knowledge of obscene slang and sexual innuendo has been expanded by the efforts of CNN and MSNBC. I imagine parents hustling their children out of the room so they don’t learn new obscenities from the nightly news. I imagine people trying to explain to their elderly grandparents what the supposed reporters are “reporting”.

I try to imagine Edward R. Murrow competing with his colleagues to use a crude sexual term “at least 51 times in a 13-minute segment”. I fail in imagination.

Update, Saturday morning The CNN supposed reporter who “reported” on a tea party by insulting and shouting down the participants whines that she received emails containing “crude insults”. What, did people quote the network news to her?

I’m not even sure, any more, how I stumbled across this author: Richard Jefferies. His book, After London, or, Wild England was published in 1885, and is apparently one of the earliest post-holocaust novels.

I really did enjoy this, and there were only a few egregious scannos to cause pain to my eyes. The odd thing is that the story just stops at the end: “Felix pushed on, absorbed in thought. The sun sank; still onward; and as the dusk fell he was still moving rapidly westwards.”

Considering that, the last time he pushed on, absorbed in thought, he ended up in the profoundly poisonous ruins of London, and the time before that he nearly got killed twice by Bushmen, that doesn’t really strike me as a hopeful ending.

Since the story is way out of copyright, it seems that someone could write a sequel, but I couldn’t find any online.

Wherein Sooty makes herself at home

I had a cage for Sooty, since it would be fairly difficult to pass her off as a caged animal without a cage. I left it open, of course, since I had no intention of actually treating her as a caged animal. I did put her food, water, litter box, and bedding in the cage, with the hope that she would come to regard it as home and therefore accept being locked in on the rare occasions when we had to act as if she lived in it.

It didn’t work out that way.

Sooty was perfectly willing to go in the cage for food, water, and litter box, but she declined to sleep in it. Connecticut is rather cold and the college was, shall we say, frugal with the heat, so my dorm room was very cold. It didn’t take Sooty long to work out that the warmest thing in the room, other than herself, was me.

Therefore, Sooty wanted to sleep as close to me as possible. If I was awake, she slept in my clothes. While I was wearing them, of course. She would clamber onto the bed (I had no chair so always sat on the bed to study), climb up my shirt, and slither down my collar and into my sleeve. I always wore a sweatshirt or a jacket with very loose sleeves, so she could curl up comfortably and sleep in my sleeve all day.

I never went to class with Sooty in my sleeve, but I would go to the store or run errands with her. The only time this became an issue was when I had to go to the Science Tower for something or other, and got lost. I ended up on one of the Biology floors, the one where they kept the animals. That woke Sooty up, and I had to hasten away, pushing Sooty back down as she tried to climb out of my collar, and hoping I didn’t run into any officialdom that might think I was absconding with a ferret that actually belonged there. Fortunately we escaped without incident.

If I wasn’t there, Sooty slept either behind the radiator in a nest made of my socks (which I kept retrieving for use, and she kept stealing out of my dresser drawer), or in my bed. Because it was so cold, I had four blankets on my bed, along with the flannel sheets, and she slept under the top-most blanket. I worried a lot that she would suffocate, but apparently there was enough airflow through one blanket to take care of her.

One would think that when I was sleeping, she would sleep behind the radiator, but not so. She would sleep in the bed even though I was already in it. Somehow I never rolled over on her. She was under the topmost blankets and I was under the rest, and no amount of thrashing around ever pulled the blankets under me. I made the bed up very carefully to ensure that this was the case.

In the mornings, Sooty would wake me up by walking up my side, planting her delicate little feet firmly on my cheek, and leaning down to lick my nose. At this point she would usually slide off, clutching at my face as she went by. This would assuredly wake me up. As you can imagine, I kept her claws properly clipped, in self-defense.

I require all new comments to be moderated for a reason. I used to get several spam comments a day for drugs. They’re probably legal, I don’t know, but I see no reason they should be advertised on here. I’ve got my spam filter set up pretty well to weed them out — I only get a couple a week now — but now I’ve started getting spam from … maybe I’d better not write out this word or they might key in on my blog even more. Let’s just say that I love animals, truly I do, but not in the disgusting way the spammers think of animals.