Cat Cafes come to these shores

So, it's been several years now since I first heard of the Cat Cafes in Tokyo, where you could sit and have a cup of tea while petting the shop's cats. I've been waiting for them to take root over here, and have seen them pop up here and there but never anywhere close enough to visit one. Now looks like they've finally reached the Seattle area. Here's a news story about Seattle's new cat cafe, and another link to the cafe's website. May be a while before we get downtown to visit this, but it's definitely on the list of things to do in 2016.

http://www.king5.com/story/news/local/pets-and-animals/2015/12/19/seattle-meowtropolitan-cat-cafe-opens/77651816/


https://seattlemeowtropolitan.com


Meanwhile, closer to home, here's a relatively brief cat report of how things are going in the Tukwila cat room.

We’re currently at five cats: ZOE, FLURRY, MYLES & BILLY, and HOUDIN (Houdini)

Sorry that HOUDINi’s adoption failed to take, but I’m glad to have him safely back with us again, and with his energy and curiosity and playfulness undiminished. FLURRY stayed inside most of the morning, so her path and his did not cross much, which is just as well for both. ZOE came out and claimed her favorite spot, from which she reigned all morning. MYLES came out as well and, after a spat or two, tried to play with Houdin. When Houdin wouldn’t play, Myles started stalking him, trying to figure out what was wrong with him and why he wdn’t play. His scrutiny was rewarded: towards the end of the morning my fellow volunteer, who does the shift after mine, had them both playing with the same ping-pong ball, batting it back and forth between their sides of the room. BILLY had it the roughest of everyone, since staying in his cube didn’t keep him from Houdin’s coming in and hissing at him. Poor Billy! He did better when I moved him up to the cage-tops, but seems to prefer his cage best. 

Flurry also stayed in most of the morning, aside from when her place needed cleaning, welcoming attention from inside her safe place. Towards the right kind of toy she’s a fierce little predator on her own ground but also very affectionate and gentle. Her snug place in exile turns out to be the basket on the bench; she esp. likes it if you drape a blanket to shield her from the inside (and worry about the other cats) while giving her a good view of outside the room (thanks to my fellow volunteer for sharing this tip with me).

Four out of five cats had a walk (everyone but Flurry). They were nervous and tended to be vocal, but think Myles did the best. I was impressed when we rounded a corner and saw a big black dog not far away with its owner: he simply sat down and waited for it to move along, which it did.

Flurry continues to love the peacock feathers, and Zoe thinks yarn just may be the best thing ever. Sorry to hear she had another of her hissy fits Tuesday; she was on her best behavior on Wednesday, welcoming attention (up to a point) atop her favorite cat-stand. Flurry continues to be a little sweetheart and Myles an all-around great cat. Need to spend more time with Billy next week; he’s so quiet it’s easy to neglect him while dealing with the problem cats, which is hardly fair return on his good behavior. Think Houdin will calm down some after he’s been back with us a few days and gotten used to the other Residents.

Health issues: Zoe has cat acne on her chin, but that’ll improve if we all try to take a little off day by day. She’s starting to get a tangle in the fur on her chest, but it didnt’ seem bad enough to upset her over, so thought I’d wait and deal with that next week. Didn’t check anyone’s ears, but suspect Myles’ cd use some attention.

—John R.

The Cat Report, and a cartoon

So, here's a brief Cat Report I wrote up last week following my session with them Wednesday morning (the 30th), followed by a cartoon I wanted to share.

Happy to report that things are much calmer in the cat room this morning. Zoe wanted petting, then went up atop her cat-stand by the cabinet and ignored all the other cats for the next three hours. Flurry stayed in her cage with the door open, coming forward to be petted several times, and enjoyed playing with her feather. The Boys (Myles & Billy) came out and explored the ground level; Myles went everywhere and flirted with every visitor, while Billy investigated the possibilities of various hiding holes. I had the big gloves out and ready for use, but they weren’t needed. 

Zoe did kick up a fuss when I made her go back in her cage at the end of my shift; aside from that she was well behaved other than a tendancy to be a bit standoffish (swatting when disturbed). After all the rest had gone in she had a string game and the room all to herself for about fifteen to twenty minutes, dashing back and forth in pursuit of yarn: think the one-on-one time with her favorite game did her good (we did the same thing last week, and she seemed to enjoy it just as much then).  

A fellow volunteer came by and gave Myles a walk, and I gave him another: he was a bit nervous but did pretty well. I offered Billy a walk, somewhat to his surprise, but he didn’t stay out long: too much noise and scarey stuff, he indicated.

Flurry was very sweet, grooming me while for my part I cleaned up her eyes. She loves canned catfood* and the feather game (a peacock feather swished along the ceiling or side(s) of her cage). She spent a lot of the morning sitting atop her little stand, looking v. regal.  Query: is her eyesight okay? Thought she might be really near-sighted: she seems not to track on things further away than the edge of her cage. Or maybe she can see but just ignores everything outside.

Everyone got a healthy dose of catnip, which went down v. well indeed.

—John R.

*they all did, something I forgot to write down in the record book.

P.S.: Happy to hear that things are going well with Mr. Dermot. Congratulations to Linus for finding himself a home of his own after all this time. Also glad to hear about Brie — it took me a while to figure her out back when we had her in our cat-room, until I realized that all she want was to have things her own way. Commiseration for poor Houdini; hope he finds another and better home to make up for the one that didn’t turn out.

UPDATE: turned out Brie's adoption didn't stick: her new owner brought her back and un-adopted her after just three days. Poor Brie.

So much for the slice-of-life of specific cats in a specific adoption room of a local no-kill shelter; I also wanted to share the following cartoon, which gives a wider picture. And yes, just about all the reasons it gives for why cats wind up in shelters I can confirm from cats who's passed through the Tukwila cat room during the time I've volunteered here.



http://www.breakingcatnews.com/breaking-cat-news-special-report-shelter-cats/


Or, to sum it up another way: people can be incredibly thoughtless and lacking empathy, and people can be thoughtful and kind.  Most cat-shelters are started by the latter trying to limit the damage caused by the former.

--JDR

Happy Tolkien's Birthday

Once again it's time to celebrate JRRT's birthday (January 3rd, 1892).

So far as state-of-the-Tolkien goes, there are still top-notch books coming out with material by and about Tolkien (most recently THE ART OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS)and good venues for publishing scholarship on Tolkien (e.g., the newest volume of TOLKIEN STUDIES having just come out about two weeks ago).  So that's all good.

So far as the non-specialist public goes, Tolkien's popularity remains undiminished, so much so that what would once have been a note in a fanzine (e.g., the discovery of a hand-annotated LotR map) becomes a News Story and runs with a big headline.

As for pop culture, the movies have now run their course, so things shd quiet down a bit for now, until the Next Big Thing in Tolkien comes along, whatever it turns out to be.

So, a quiet time; a good time to pull some of those new purchases from this past year off the shelf and read them. And, of course, to plan for what Tolkien events I can make it to in this coming year.

So, a Happy Tolkien's Birthday to all.

--John R.
current reading: Eratosthenes & Hyginus, constellation myths (tr. R. Hard).

The Return of Poke-em-with-a-Stick Wednesday (Franklin Graham)

So, today saw the news that Franklin Graham, son and heir of the late Billy Graham's evangelical empire, has give up on Republicans, Democrats, and Tea Party-ers alike. Instead he's calling for Xians to run for local office. The goal seems to be to urge "godly men and women" to seek secular power in order to impose a kind of Xian sharia law  (or, in his phrase, "uphold biblical values").

To put it another way, his goal is to unseparate church and state. To subordinate the political to the religious. Which, to my way of thinking, wd be disastrous for the church side of the equation. Trying to channel faith into the pursuit of political power hasn't worked out too well in the past. History has shown pretty clearly that Xianity shows its best side under adversity and has been at its worst when it held temporal power. Do we really want to go down that dark road again?

Here's the link:

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/franklin-graham-quits-republican-party-217077

--JDR

A Day at Elliott Bay

So, while mourning bookstores lost, it's good to also celebrate good bookstores that are still with us. And in the case of Elliott Bay Books, which wd certainly have to go on anyone's list of Seattle's best, they seem to be thriving in what I still think of as their new location, atop Capitol Hill. Despite being inconveniently located for us down here in Kent, I make it a point to visit at least once a year, usually around my birthday.Their fantasy/science fiction section is fine, but what I really go for is to look through their shelves on prehistory, early history, and mythology, all of which are excellent. I never fail to find some intriguing book I didn't know about on their well-stocked shelves. This year's new acquisitions are a nicely mixed group:

I. THE SPECTACLE OF THE LATE MAYA COURT: REFLECTIONS ON THE MURALS OF BONAMPAK by Mary Miller & Claudia Brittenham [2013]. A huge coffee-table book, lavishly illustrated, with extensive commentary describing the murals and putting them in context. In many cases they reproduce images twice on the same page: once in color (to see the beauty of the artwork) and once in black and white (for better clarity of seeing what's being shown, given how badly the murals are damaged). Not so much a book for sitting down and reading through as for leaving open and mulling over, occasionally dipping in to read sections and slowly absorb the whole.

II. ROYAL CITIES OF THE ANCIENT MAYA by Michael D. Coe (text) and Barry Brukoff (photography). Another coffee-table book, but this time of a more manageable size. Again it was really the pictures that attracted me here: I've never seen a book on Mayan ruins that so strongly conveyed what it'd be like to be in each of these places. This one is text-light and about half the weight and size of the previous book, so I'll definitely be reading it as well as enjoying the images.

III. LONDON FOG [2015] by Christine L. Corton. A rather odd topic for a book: the great London Fog, particularly during its height in the last half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, when millions of coal fires in homes combined with river mists and industrial pollution to create  a toxic yellow smog, so thick that at times when out walking in it you wouldn't be able to see your own feet. The book is full of really striking photos and paintings depicting what the fog looked like. both from within and without. Looks to be an interesting read.

IV. CONSTELLATION MYTHS by Eratosthenes and Hyginus, tr. Robin Hard. Ever wonder where all those stories about who became what constellation and why came from? Me neither, but it turns out that at least part of the answer is these works. This one was frankly an impulse buy, thinking it'd be a good book to read in snatches spread out over as long a period of time as it took.

V. A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION: ROMAN BRITAIN, by Peter Salway. Background reading for my current project; I was drawn by a brief discussion of curse tablets, something that's directly relevant to the Nodens evidence. I've started in reading this and already come across a number of interesting things I didn't know, so picking it up was definitely worthwhile.


In addition, there were some runner-ups wh. I might have picked up had the above not already strained the budget: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION TO CELTIC MYTH (which on a quick skim didn't look to contain anything I didn't already know about Nodens), AFTER YORKTOWN (which focused on the two remaining years the international wars we think of as 'the American Revolution' continued after we dropped out of it), and YURIE: THE JAPANESE GHOST (a look at a spooky bit of folklore that sometimes impinges on various anime or manga but which I don't know first-hand other than in obvious sources like Lafcadio Hearn).


And then aside from the Elliott Bay books, some other new arrivals came by post: two 'C. S. Lewis Mysteries' by Kel Richards: C. S. LEWIS AND THE CORPSE IN THE CELLAR (retitled here 'The Corpse in the Cellar') and C. S. LEWIS AND THE COUNTRY HOUSE MURDERS (retitled just 'The Country House Murders'). I learned of these through David Bratman's posts (which I'm no longer able to find the link for, unfortunately). Each attempts (and, I think, fails) to both present a mystery novel in the mode of the 'golden age' while alternating the mystery-solving with theological discussions between CSL and the callow narrator. Richards apparently is fond of writing mysteries using real-life people as his detectives: in addition to this C. S. Lewis series (of which a third has either been published or is soon to be so, and a fourth on the way) there's also at least two books in which his version of G. K. Chesterton solves mysteries. Plus he has several Sherlock Holmes books to his credit (or otherwise, as the case may be), some of them supernatural. And one or two books of apologetics without the fictional guise.

In brief: not the worst Inklings-as-characters novels, but in the bottom half of the list.

The only other new arrival is TOLKIEN AMONG THE MODERNS, ed. Ralph C. Woods. I'd ordered this thinking it'd be interesting to see Tolkien treated as a Modernist (like Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, et al) or anti-Modernist (like Orwell, Larkin, &c). On first glance, however, I can't seem to grasp their definition of modernism -- one essay compares Tolkien to Cervantes (a contemporary of Shakespeare, and hence 'modern' only by a very generous definition); another deals with Nietzsche (later nineteenth century), another with Iris Murdoch (a younger contemporary of Tolkien's who's actually closer to Postmodern than Modern, if we're going by how academia breaks up English literature). There is one piece on Joyce and Tolkien, which is pretty much the only example of the sort of essay I thought wd make up the entire book. In the end I have to admit that a quick glance has left me at a loss as to their definition of Modernism is or how it relates to Tolkien's work. Perhaps a more thorough examination later on will bring clarity.

--JDR
current reading: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION [to] ROMAN BRITAIN.
current Kindle: CARTER & LOVECRAFT by Jonathan Howard.
current viewing: various old DOCTOR WHOs.

Bookstore Lost (Milwaukee's Renaissance)

So, thanks to Janice (and also Doug) for sharing the news from Milwaukee that the city's years-long struggle to condemn the legendary Renaissance Books has finally succeeded.


http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/city-moves-to-demolish-renaissance-book-shop-building-b99621709z1-353064321.html

This is sad news, since that's long been a Milwaukee landmark and was the last of the old, run-down, over-stuffed,  jumbled bookstores that downtown Milwaukee was well-stocked with when I first moved up there. Renaissance Books, in an old warehouse alongside the river, was four floors of shelves with books everywhere, many of them decades old. Here's where I stocked up on misc. volumes of James Branch Cabell and filled out my working library of Dunsany books from the library discards on their shelves (the latter appeared a few days after a library sale in which they'd snatched them up for a nickel a volume at the very start of the library sale, then offered them for sale the next week at $10). They also had a smallish area of records, at which I got one or two albums (I think the two Danny Kirwan's solo albums I have came from here).

All this was great, but leaves out the other side: that the building was basically derelict. "Ramshackle" barely begins to describe it: leaning walls, sagging staircases where the steps were only attached on one side, having come off the other; cracks in the wall, floors that tilted. In its latter days, things got worse: books spilling off shelves to lie scattered on the floor and I think they put the top floor off-limits as too unsafe to walk across.

And then there was their bizarre policy of not putting prices in books. Instead, they'd make up a price when you brought the book up to check-out. You'd hand them whatever book(s) you wanted to buy, and they'd glance them over, size you up, and come up with a price. Sometimes it sound fair and sometimes not; I put a lot of books I wanted back because I thought they were asking too much. The whole practice might have fitted in well in a Moroccan market, but I found it endlessly annoying in a Milwaukee bookshop.

All of which made it all the more amazing when Renaissance opened up a branch in the Milwaukee airport (Mitchell Field). It was full of interesting books, like the motherstore, but here they were well-organized, well-shelved, and priced, all in a clean and well-lit room. It quickly became my favorite airport bookstore anywhere, bar none: I stop in there every chance I get when passing to or through Milwaukee.

So, I guess the cry shd be: Renaissance Books is dead; long live Renaissance Books.

But I do hate the thought of all those old books being bulldozed and ending up in a landfill.

--John R.
current reading: Kel Richards' THE COUNTRY HOUSE MURDERS [2014]

Book Thought

The Book: N. K. Jemisin's THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS.

The Thought: This book reminded me of TWILIGHT, but not in a good way.

--John R.