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November 2014

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Alrighty, then. At the risk of turning this site into Weird Cat Blog, I have two new CatCat phenomena to report. I hope such details will eventually enable investigators to piece together exactly what this critter is and how (and why) she arrived on our planet.

Number One: CatCat is not afraid of vacuum cleaners. At all. All of our cats are at least a little afraid of vacuums, and even the most placid among them will walk in a dignified manner to the nearest exit when one starts. Most of them run for their lives, even though they’ve never had an actual scary experience with one. But you can run a vacuum cleaner right up to CatCat’s front paws and she won’t blink. That ain’t normal.

 

Artist's conception of space cat

Number Two: liquids. CatCat drinks lots of water from her bowl, and will sit sedately on the edge of the sink while you run the tap. She appears to be familiar with liquids. But last week I took her a plate of canned cat food with a little can-juice (whatever) on the plate. It was one of her favorite flavors. When I set the plate down in front of her on the floor (which slants slightly, as does the whole house), the liquid flowed around the edge of the plate, seeking the low point.

This is Life on Earth, Chapter 1, right?

CatCat was terrified. Completely flipped out. She stared at the liquid as if it were alive, crouched in alarm and backed away, stared some more, tracking the slowly-moving fluid in wide-eyed horror, and then ran out of the room.

Um, wow. This is not a kitten. The vet estimated that she’s at least four or five years old. And she’s never seen this before? Riiight.

Tell me more, Earthling.

And then there’s the fact that she likes to look at herself in the mirror (unusual in a grown cat), but she does it very intensely, like she’s checking her costume. She’s also a very deep sleeper, and you can tell when she’s running in her dream because her legs move. Maybe she’s just a very small, very strange dog. From Mars.

Onward. Until a month or so ago, Netflix Streaming offered the first nine years of Law & Order, Original Recipe, Lennie Briscoe Edition, which I think is absolutely the best cop show ever produced (apart from The Wire, which was a very different kind of show). Unfortunately, Netflix pulled it from their lineup  before I made it to the end, but several basic cable channels are carrying reruns of the entire series, so there’s that. The fun of seeing Briscoe and Logan/Curtis/Green for me (apart from the plots “ripped from the headlines” and Jerry Orbach’s quips) is seeing Manhattan in the 1990s, when we lived there (having migrated from Brooklyn). In episodes centered on the Upper West Side (which is to say many of them), I got to revisit our old neighborhood and even caught a glimpse of the guys from Zingone’s, our favorite deli (@ 82nd & Columbus Avenue), standing on the sidewalk in the background of one long scene.

The Man.

Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe is a classic performance, of course, but judging from a few retired NYPD detectives I knew, still in the ballpark of realism, including the sardonic humor. I actually have a “Certificate of Appreciation” around here somewhere from the NYPD Detectives’ Endowment Association (essentially the detectives’ union), but I can’t for the life of me remember what I did to deserve it. I probably wrote something for their magazine.

The notable difference between L&O in the 90s and cop shows now is the prevalence of sadistic violence and gore in current shows. I’ve never been able to take any of the L&O spinoffs and copycats (SVU, CSU, NCIS, et al.) for that reason, and even L&O itself veered sharply in that direction after 1999: more lingering shots of slashed throats, mutilated models, etc., ad nauseam, not to mention the rise of the ludicrous mannequin-cop (both male and female). The whole supercop/serial killer/autopsy shtick, as Lennie might say. I gotta say that I don’t understand the popular mania for serial killers in movies and TV, and I really don’t understand how anyone can voluntarily watch this insanely repetitive and moronic — and usually intensely misogynistic — drivel week after week. I sat through a full episode of SVU while trapped in a waiting room last year and it made me want to leave the country.

What else. Oh yeah, I have chronic optic neuritis, pretty much standard issue with MS, which produces blurred vision, transitory blind spots, pain in the eyes and flashes of light. Even on a good day it’s like watching an old TV with lousy reception, and I often see little white lights running up the edge of my field of vision, as if a film had jumped its sprockets in a projector. Very weird. Last week we were sitting on the couch, watching House Hunters on HGTV, and I noticed that there were suddenly strings of tiny colored lights running across my field of vision. Quite festive, actually. I guess my visual cortex was in the holiday mood. Anyway, there have been quite a few days lately when I couldn’t read much of anything, so there may be more than the usual delay in processing subscriptions, etc.

As always, your subscriptions and contributions keep this rickety boat afloat.

And now, on with the show

1 comment to November 2014

  • Charlie N

    Law and Order was the best, especially with Jerry Orbach. Does everyone know that he was also a Broadway musical-comedy star before TV? He was in the original “42nd Street”, “Chicago” and many others.

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