List XVII

"King Lear
of Levittown"

Rush Limbaugh's
porcine waggle
betrayed us

You'd
run into
the woods, too

Your suitcase
makes
me sleepy

Eating
tuna in the
astral plane

This pile
of blankets
exhausts me

Cunning,
rank, abhorrent,
malingering
spies

Congress eats
wet food
from a dish
served
by phony soldiers

Ordering
iced tea
instead of
stealing hubcaps

Xavier University:
"Thanks be
to Ann Coulter"

Leaf-blower,
yoga mat,
garbage truck,
giant shoes,
washing machine,
vacuum cleaner,
wide awake

"Oscar is
drawn to death"

Roger Ailes, War Criminal

The depraved Roger Ailes flung a squirrel into our apartment. He was enraged that I sent him a copy of Sarith Peou's Corpse Watching. Roger Ailes is probably a step above me in handyman skills, which means he can hammer a nail in straight but that's probably about it.

Roger Ailes's mangy squirrel, with its sweet-rot quivering tail, skittered into the living room and woke me from a deep morning nap.

Roger Ailes is a malfunctioning part of society. The squirrel Roger Ailes flung through the window of Tony's study scattered itself through the living room. Roger Ailes's squirrel froze, its virulent eyes went wide, when I crept from the bedroom.

I chased him with my mouth open.

Roger Ailes is in full swing in Fallujah and never would claim that David Petraeus betrayed us even if he did. I chased Roger Ailes's squirrel and knocked over: a stained glass window, an ashtray, a glass candle holder (it broke), two Costa Rican figurines made from volcanic ash, and an Aztec sculpture (it broke).

Roger Ailes acts in a manner that is outside of conventional social constraints, round focaccia, water bugs, and alabaster bowls -- involving the initiation of physical force or fraud against another party. Roger Ailes is shown to live a "normal" life. Roger Ailes is entitled to a prison term.

The Vatican vs. Gertrude Stein (Part VIII)

THE VATICAN: Hence springs that ridiculous proposition of the Modernists -- that every religion, according to the different aspect under which it is viewed, must be considered as both natural and supernatural. Hence it is that they make consciousness and revelation synonymous. Hence the law, according to which religious consciousness is given as the universal rule, to be put on an equal footing with revelation, and to which all must submit, even the supreme authority of the Church, whether in its teaching capacity, or in that of legislator in the province of sacred liturgy or discipline.

GERTRUDE STEIN: There is no pope.

Tagged (1)

I fell asleep on a pile of blankets and Kimo and Sabi tagged me.

Rules for the meme:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Write some facts about yourself: some random, some weird, some just plain fun.
3. Tag 7 cats (or whatever) at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let those 7 know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

And mine:

1.) I scared a mouse to death on April 18, 2007.
2.) I'm afraid of Peter Criss.
3.) I broke a stained-glass window and an Aztec sculpture chasing a squirrel yesterday.
4.) If Tony does not do a full cleaning of my Tora Bora Box every 7 days, then I squat and drop an Abu Ghraib pyramid in the South Forest of the apartment. Sometimes I do it anyway.
5.) I've licked 4 people on the forehead.
6.) I made Mrs. Alito cry.
7.) I can go up to six weeks without a cat-sitter touching me.
8.) I killed three mice on October 8, 2000 (one of them scared to death).
9.) I used to swat at newscasters on TV.
10.) I'm still afraid of rain.

I tag BrianC, Todd and in Charge, Earth House Hold, Arroyo Chamisa, MadPriest, Lynx217, and Liberal Media Elite (Democratic-Farmer- Kitten).

The Surge

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: As a bottom line up front, Shimmy, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In addition to the wet food you find in your dish every morning, you now get Pounce Moist Chicken Flavor treats at night.

SHIMMY: It is not enough for the administration to counsel patience until the next milestone or the next can of Friskies Salmon Dinner.

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: This chart shows the security challenges in Iraq.

SHIMMY: How come everything still tastes like Enacard?

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: In our recent efforts to look to the future, we found it useful to revisit the past. As a result, Ngo Dinh Diem requested additional forces to enable the coalition to accomplish its tasks and those forces began to flow in January.

SHIMMY: What if Condoleezza Rice tries to steal my food again?

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: I don't know, actually.

SHIMMY: Are you able to say that if we continue what you have laid out here as a strategy, this will make my food dish safer?

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: I have not sat down and sorted it out in my own mind.

SHIMMY: What are you going to do about Sean Hannity? I've seen him on his knees, lapping my water dish.

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS: Maybe if we had taken Sean Hannity when Sudan offered him on a silver platter, we’d be in better shape today.

List XVI

Sancho fell asleep at the foot of a cork tree.

Sancho listened to all of this with a very sorrowful spirit, for he saw that his hopes for a noble title were disappearing and going up in smoke, and that the lovely Princess Micomicona had turned into Dorotea, and the giant into Don Fernando, and that his master was in a deep, sound sleep, unaware of everything that had happened.

Sancho looked everywhere on the floor for the giant's head, and when he did not find it, he said: "Now I know that everything in this house is enchantment."

Don Quixote was dumbfounded, Sancho astounded, the cousin baffled, the page stunned, the man who told about the braying stupefied, the innkeeper perplexed, and, in short, all who heard the words of the puppet master were amazed.

Sancho Panza hung on his words but said none of his own, and from time to time he turned his head to see if he could see the knights and giants his master was naming.

"By God," said Sancho, "I wouldn't pay anything to have somebody tell me what's already happened to me! Who knows that better than me?"

Sancho returned to his packsaddle, having moved his master to laughter despite his profound melancholy and causing Don Diego even more amazement.

"I can't do that," responded Sancho, "because when I leave your grace I'm filled with fear that plagues me with a thousand different kinds of sudden frights and visions."

Sancho had returned in the middle of this conversation and was left very confused and bewildered when he heard that nowadays there were no more knights errant and that all the books of chivalry were foolish lies, and he resolved in his heart to wait and see the outcome of the journey his master was about to take.

"I pass," said Sancho. "I'm going over to that brook with this meat pie, where I plan to eat enough for three days."

And Sancho said that if this went on much longer, Don Quixote ran the risk of not becoming an emperor, as he was obliged to do, or even an archbishop, which was the least he could do.

"Hail once again, O Sancho! So good a cat, / that only you, when the Ovid of our Spain / bows to kiss your hand, smack him on the head."

Thanks, Whoopi Goldberg, for Defending Glenn Beck, Who Killed All Those Dogs

On television, Whoopi Goldberg said that dogfighting isn't that unusual "from where Glenn Beck comes from."

"It's like cockfighting in Puerto Rico," she said. "There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country."

I smelled cicadas, celery stalks, a foothill of catnip, a crowd of ants on a stray NF Formula food pellet, the dog across the hall, cilantro, squirrels, a drill bit, sandalwood incense, the Gauloises that Guy Debord held between two fingers, the bottom of Tony's left shoe, and a broccoli crown.

"I don't understand, Debord. Glenn Beck was born in Mount Vernon, Washington, and went to high school in Bellingham," I said.

"Shimmy, the 'decision celebrity' must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities." Debord's smoke rose from his fingertips and formed a parasol. "Celebrities pass into the spectacle as a model for identification. They renounce all autonomous qualities in order to identify themselves with the general law of obedience to the course of things."

"But Glenn Beck killed all those dogs. The police caught him with a 'break' or 'parting' stick for prying open dogs' mouths during fights and an electric treadmill modified for dogs." I licked my left haunch. A noise came from the back porch. "Fifty-four American Pit Bull Terriers were imprisoned on Glenn Beck's estate. He electrocuted and drowned eight Pit Bulls."

"Being a celebrity means specializing in the seemingly lived," Debord said. He stubbed his cigarette on a dinner plate.

"I am supposed to believe that in the Pacific Northwest, it's a sport to torture and murder dogs."

"The celebrity is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived."