Our cats are locked in the bathroom with food, water, and a cat box
The trap is armed, and baited with wet food, dry food, and catnip.
I still think that RP is going to find a way to embarrass me.
Wish me luck.
Took me the whole evening to get the apparatus together, and since my prime blogging spot is near the trap, I am signing off.
The regular reader(s) of my blog may be aware of my travails with RP the feral cat.*
The short version is that we caught her in a Have-a-Heart trap, and brought her in.
When I let her out she freaked, and ran into the basement ceiling, but not before biting me and giving me puncture wounds through oven mitts.
The next day, I saw her outside, so she figured a way out of the house.
When we got our cats, RP continued to come into the house somehow, and eat our cats food. (Video here) We still haven’t figured out how she does that.
A few weeks after that, RP fell out of the ceiling, and I caught her, and she peed on me and clawed the hell out of me. (I did not blog on that particular affront to my already limited dignity)
I even made a cat shelter outside in the vain hope of giving her an alternative to going into the house. No such luck.
Well, this morning, I got a call from Sharon†. RP was in the house, and had lured our kitten Destructo into the ceiling.
The kitten had gotten stuck (or maybe just confused)and was panicking, and my wife and kids had to reach into the suspended ceiling to get him out.
While this was going on, RP was watching with what my wife describe as smug amusement.
It’s on. It is totally on.
I’m halfway through cobbling together a trap made from the cat travel cage and the aforementioned Have-a-Heart trap, and if it works, we will either try to tame the cat, or take to a shelter and get it the f%$# out of our neighborhood ……… and my house.
I do realize that I have been channeling Robert Redford playing John Dortmunder in the 1972 film, The Hot Rock
Dortmunder: Not me. I’ve got no choice. I’m not superstitious. And I don’t believe in jinxes, but that stone’s jinxed me and it won’t let go. I’ve been damned near bitten, shot at, peed on and robbed. And worse is gonna happen before it’s done. So I’m takin’ my stand. I’m going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me.
Considering my record with this cat, I can only conclude that the chances are remarkably good that it will get me.
There is a part of me that fears I am so going to get killed or maimed by this f%$#ing cat.
*RP stands for Rodentia Phage, or Ravage and Pillage, or maybe just RP. I don’t know for sure, but it is a cat, so it does not come when it is called.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Remember when I complained about ruining my shirt by leaving an uncapped pen in my pocket?
My dad, who follows my blog, sent me a bunch of dark colored shirts, including a black dress shirt.
Without thinking, I put on the black shirt today, and also grabbed a pair of black slacks.
I got comments on my style sense from about 5 people at work, the best being, “Johnny Cashing it today?”
I think that this is the closest that I have ever been to being fashionable in my life.
So, Michelle Bachmann is under investigation for campaign finance violations, one of her staff has been charged in petty thefts in other Congressional offices, and now its been revealed that aa Conservative Christian group mailed vibrator to Michele Bachmann:
.Hundreds of pages of email and text message correspondence made public last week shed new light on the infighting and organizational disarray that have plagued America’s leading conservative Christian political consulting firm in recent months.
As BuzzFeed reported in June, the Columbus-based Strategy Group for Media — which has represented dozens of tea party and religious right Republicans, including Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich — has been mired in lawsuits and internal tumult since last spring, when seven of the firm’s managers staged a religious intervention with their CEO, Rex Elsass. After the managers made their demands in a dramatic meeting that culminated with them laying hands on their boss and praying for his soul, Elsass fired three of his top lieutenants, including his longtime protégé and Strategy Group President Nick Everhart.
The series of emails and text messages, made public on the Franklin County Court website in the ongoing lawsuit between Everhart and Strategy Group, adds further detail to that meeting, and shows the extent to which the company’s managers were worried about Elsass’ psychological and spiritual health. They also reveal potentially embarrassing anecdotes for the company, including one incident in which an executive said Elsass accidentally mailed a “female pleasure machine” to Rep. Michele Bachmann.
………
And an email thread from May 29 — after the three managers were fired — featured Strategy Group’s former voter-contact consultant P.J. Wenzel making reference to Elsass sending “female pleasure machines” to Bachmann. The emails don’t elaborate on the incident, but one person familiar with the story told BuzzFeed that Elsass had intended to give Bachmann a vibrating head massager to help alleviate her migraines, and that the employee he sent to buy the gift accidentally purchased something that more closely resembled a sex toy — and sent it to her office.
Tyler said the item in question was purchased at Brookstone and was not a sex toy, but he declined to provide further information about the product. (Brookstone announced in 2011 that it had begun selling “pleasure objects.”)
The person familiar with the story said the firm successfully retrieved the gift before Bachmann could open it.
Seriously, have you noticed that when a political figure’s career is in a death spiral, that there suddenly emerge a plethora of stories that are even weirder than before?
By this benchmark, I think that Michelle Bachmann will be sent to Gitmo.
There have been rumors of a corruption investigation f Representative Michelle Bachmann for some time. Well, now a senior staffer of hers has been arrested for petty thefts from other Congressional offices.
Have you ever noticed that just before a political figure is frog marched out of the building in handcuffs, their staff starts getting busted for the weirdest crap?
Well, it looks like Bachmann is on the hit parade:
That’s Javier Sanchez back in June of this year with his then-boss, Michele Bachmann. [Not bothering with the picture here] They’re headed for a closed briefing on the NSA disclosures. Javier Sanchez was a high-level legislative director for Michele Bachmann, assisting her with issues such as immigration reform, the farm bill, and her oxymoronic assignment to the House Intelligence Committee.
On July 11, Mr. Sanchez was arrested on charges that he burglarized several offices belonging to other House members. From news reports, it appears that some thefts took place back in 2012 and others in 2013.
It has been noted that, “Sanchez has been charged with Theft II,” which is for amounts less than $1000.00.
If this is the indicator that I think that it is, then Michelle Bachmann is toast.
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it. Authorities, forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane because he was suspected to be carrying Edward Snowden to Bolivia:
The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia was rerouted to Austria on Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the country’s foreign minister said.
Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca denied that Snowden was on the plane, which landed in Vienna, and said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane.
“We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Choquehuanca said from Vienna, where the plane landed.
………
“This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments,” said Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight.
Choquehuanca said in a statement that after France and Portugal canceled authorization for the flight, Spain’s government allowed the plane to be refueled in its territory. From there the Falcon plane flew on to Vienna.
He said the decision by France and Portugal “put at risk the life of the president.”
They f%$#ing interfered with the f%$#ing flight of a f%$#ing diplomatic f%$#ing flight carrying a f%$#ing President of a f%$#ing sovereign f%$#ing nation, almost certainly as the result of a fairly explicit request from the United States.
This is insane. I’m beginning to think that Snowden knows a lot more than just the fact that the NSA spies on Americans and ignores the law and/or uses a completely obedient FISA court as a fig leaf, because this level of pressure is a clear disaster for both the reputation and the foreign policy of the United States.
Seriously. What ……… the ……… f%$#?
When you are making Vladimir Putin, who is saying that Snowden has to stop leaking if he wants asylum in Russia, seem like the only sensible person with an ounce of compassion in this entire affair.
Seriously. Vladimir Putin? What ……… the ……… Oh, never mind.
Then this is Microflaccid’s biggest case of jumping the shark since ……… Windows 8.
Damn. How the f%$# does this bunch of morons stay in business?
H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
It’s now official. Paul Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator originally accused of being the Mississippi ricin mailer, has been exonerated, and Wayne Newton impersonator James Everett Dutschke has been indicted:
A federal grand jury has indicted a Mississippi man suspected of sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other officials, according to an indictment made public Monday.
The 5-count indictment charges 41-year-old James Everett Dutschke (pronounced DUHS’-kee) with developing, producing and stockpiling the poison ricin, threatening the president and others and attempting to impede the investigation.
………
George Lucas, an attorney for Dutschke, said he had not yet seen the indictment and had no immediate comment.
Dutschke is the second person to face charges in the case.
Paul Kevin Curtis, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator, was arrested on April 17, but the charges were dropped six days later.
So yes, the Wayne Newton impersonator attempted to frame the Elvis impersonator, and he got caught, and now his lawyer, George F%$#ing Lucas is waiting for the details.
This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Daily Show or The Onion.
Background here.
Archeologists have found a massive buried structure beneath Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee):
The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.
It’s thousands of years old — a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.
The problem is — it’s at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.
The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.
“It’s very enigmatic, it’s very interesting, but the bottom line is we don’t know when it’s from, we don’t know what it’s connected to, we don’t know its function,” said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. “We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual.”
A massive ancient structure underneath a body of water full of historical and mystical overtones.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Not exactly my line, Molly NYC made an abbreviated version of this in thee comments for the linked article.
One of the putative “good guys” in Syria has been caught on tape eating a dead soldier’s heart:
A video which appears to show a Syrian rebel taking a bite from the heart of a dead soldier has been widely condemned.
US-based Human Rights Watch identified the rebel as Abu Sakkar, a well-known insurgent from the city of Homs, and said his actions were a war crime.
The main Syrian opposition coalition said he would be put on trial.
The video, which cannot be independently authenticated, seems to show him cutting out the heart.
“I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog,” the man says, referring to President Bashar al-Assad as he stands over the soldier’s corpse.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Abu Sakkar is the leader of a group called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, an offshoot of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Al-Farouq Brigades. He insults Alawites, the minority offshoot of Shia Islam to which Mr Assad belongs.
“The desecration and mutilation of a killed person is definitely a war crime,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. “This one particularly disturbing because of the sectarian nature of the language used by Abu Sakkar.
Seriously, does anyone now think that it’s a good idea to choose sides in this clusterf%$#?
Well,. anyone without a history of insanity, or members of the Senate with the last name of McCain, anyway? (But I repeat myself)
Carla del Ponte, a former war crimes prosecutor, and a member of the UN commission investigating possible war crimes in the Syrian civil war, has given an interview stating that there was evidence that the Syrian rebels may have used chemical weapons.
Yes, you heard right, she has suggested that the rebels, not the government, might have been using chemical weapons:
A leading member of a United Nations investigatory commission says there are “strong concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that Syrian rebels have used the nerve agent sarin.
Carla del Ponte, a former prosecutor for U.N. tribunals investigating war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, made the comment in an interview Sunday with a Swiss television channel, the BBC reported.
The U.N. panel, known as the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, emphasized in a statement Monday that it had reached no conclusions about the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.
“I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got … about the use of nerve gas by the opposition,” Del Ponte told Swiss Italian broadcaster RSI.
She said the evidence emerged from interviews conducted by investigators with victims, physicians and others in neighboring countries.
Del Ponte did not rule out the possibility that President Bashar Assad’s government may also have used chemical agents on the battlefield.
The official response from the UN was to deny this:
U.N. war crimes investigators have reached no conclusions on whether any side in the Syrian war has used chemical weapons, the inquiry commission said on Monday, playing down a suggestion from one of the team that rebel forces had done so.
Investigator Carla Del Ponte caught U.N. officials by surprise on Sunday when she said the commission had gathered testimony from casualties and medical staff indicating that rebel forces had used the banned nerve agent sarin.
“The independent international Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic wishes to clarify that it has not reached conclusive findings as to the use of chemical weapons in Syria by any parties to the conflict,” it said in a statement.
It seems to me that something odd is going on.
Certainly, it is not outside of the realm of possibility for the rebels to have deployed Sarin, after all, a significant portion of their arsenal used to be the Syrian government’s arsenal.
Why someone like Carla del Ponte would make a public statement like this is not clear to me, particularly since since, by her own admission, the evidence is sketchy.
I’m wondering if this is push-back against pressure to make a definitive statement against the Assad government.
Certainly commiseration’s response to her statement would indicate that if there was any move to early judgement, there isn’t now.
Maybe it’s an honest mistake, but I sounds like some weird sort of wheels within wheels stuff.
The head of the US Airforce’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Branch has been arrested on sexual assault charges:
A key point in last year’s Academy Award nominated documentary “The Invisible War” was that the military was structurally incapable of adequately policing sexual assault in the armed services. As if to bolster the filmmakers’ case, the Air Force officer in charge of its Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Branch has been arrested and charged with sexual battery.
“The DoD estimates that, on average, there are more than 50 sexual assaults involving military personnel each day. The only thing unusual about this particular assault is that the accused was actually arrested and charged, and that senior officers in his chain of command cannot intervene to prevent his prosecution,” Kirby Dick, the director of “The Invisible War,” told CQ Roll Call. His film’s key tenet is that the military does not follow standard criminal justice procedures in sexual assault cases, keeping them within the chain of command, and that this has helped lead to an epidemic of sexual assault in the armed forces.
Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski was arrested by Arlington County, Va., police on Sunday in a Crystal City, Va., parking lot, as first reported by ARLnow. According to the police report “a drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police.” Krusinski was arrested, charged and held on a $5,000 unsecured bond.
I am not particularly surprised.
The US military has long history of (at best) indifference to issues of sexual assault, as evidenced by the recent spate of get out of jail free cards issued by senior officers.
Seen on Facebook.
Jon Stewart was positively ecstatic last night about the whole ricin mailer thing (see video).
You remember, how Paul Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator, was framed for mailing poisoned letters to President Obama and Senator Wiker? Well they have now fingered an enemy of his, Everett Dutschke, for the deed, and he is a Wayne Newton impersonator.
Remember what the Chinese say about living in interesting times?
Well, for Jon Stewart, this makes his job pretty easy.
So, it’s a pitcher, huh?
Well, not exactly it’s an all-in-one Jewish worship aid. It’s:
Like I said, it’s trippy.
You know that guy who is alleged to have mailed ricin laced letters to Obama and Congresscritters?
Wanna guess what his day job is?
He was an Elvis impersonator:
An Elvis impersonator named Paul Kevin Curtis who lives in Corinth Mississippi was charged Thursday for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wiker (R-MS), and a judge in Lee County Mississippi. Court documents released by the Department of Justice show Curtis was charged with one count of sending a letter “containing threats to take the life of or to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States” and a count of sending a letter “containing a threat to injure the person of others.”
We are living in very strange times.
Buy them a safe that fits into a mattress:
If you arte going to put your savings in the mattress, this is the way to go.
The Judge in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes is requiring that he be dosed with “truth serum” if his defense team chooses to plead not guilty by reason of insanity:
Legal and medical experts are questioning the decision of a judge in Colorado to allow James Holmes, the suspected gunman in the Aurora cinema shooting, to be tested with a “truth serum” should he plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a “narcoanalytic interview” would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year.
The precise identity of the drug that would be used has not been released, other than a statement that it would be “medically appropriate”, but it would most likely be a short-acting barbiturate such as sodium amytal.
William Shepherd, chair of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association, whose members include both prosecutors and defence lawyers, said that the proposed use of a “truth drug” to ascertain the veracity of a defendant’s plea of insanity was highly unusual in the US. He predicted it would provoke intense legal argument relating to Holmes’s right to remain silent under the fifth amendment of the US constitution.
Gee, you think, Mr. Shepherd?
And then there is this:
The proposed use of a “truth drug” has also prompted a critical response from medical experts. Dr August Piper, a Seattle-based psychiatrist who has used sodium amytal to treat patients who were mute or in a catatonic state and who has written research papers on the subject, said that this was “not a royal road to the truth”.
“First of all, people can still lie under the influence of amytal. More importantly, the person under the influence of the drug is susceptible to outside suggestion.”
Piper also questioned whether such a method could be used to find out the truth of what happened retrospectively. Though short-acting barbiturates might be beneficial in illuminating Holmes’s current state of mind, by opening him up to greater communication, it would be of doubtful use in determining his state of mind at the scene of the shooting eight months ago.
“To try and do this would be unlikely to yield useful information, and could pervert the course of justice by rendering the defendant susceptible to pressure,” Piper said.
This is bizarre.
What the f%$# is the judge thinking? They don’t even pull this crap at Gitmo or the CIA torture gulags.
*George Orwell.
We went to Barnes and Noble to celebrate Charlie getting into a magnet program.
We got some books, and picked up some snacks.
Charlie wanders off and browsed some books, and he decided to glance through the erotic novel 50 Shades of Gray.
He opened up to a random page, and was rather nonplussed about what he encountered.
I wasn’t upset. This sort of exploration is all a part of growing up.
But when I looked at him, and I made a most unhelpful suggestion:
How about you do a YouTube based on this.
You do a takeoff of 50 Shades of Gray based on the Smurfs.
You could call it 50 Shades of Blue.
Charlie’s response was to complain that he could not get that image out of his head. (I am afraid to Google it)
I am a bad, bad, parent.
For those of you who are not aware of the classic definition, “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan,”
Well, Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford has come up with a new and improved definition:
But Mark wanted more than just his ex-wife’s disavowal of interest. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, he installed Jenny as his campaign manager. He did this for reasons of economy—“You’re free,” he told her at the time—but she proved a natural at the job. She blossomed into a shrewd political strategist, running Mark’s subsequent campaigns and becoming his top adviser. Will Folks, a former Sanford press secretary, says, “There’s absolutely no way he would have ever won the congressional seat or been governor without her.”
According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,” he said. “We could put the team back together.”
Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.
“I could pay you this time,” he said.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
You leave her, you publicly humiliate her, and you want her to run her campaign?
If I were Mark Sanford’s parents, I’d worry.
H/t Talking Points Memo.