Introducing Marmite and Söt

Friends, I have found a new blog for us to follow. It is the pictorial record of the adventures of two toy animals. Marmite is the monkey.

These two have a clear passion for life and embrace their new enthusiasms. The photo I have selected here is titled: Marmite & Söt's Favourite Film

They are on a trip right now. Perhaps to England. I suspect that careful analysis of these photos will teach us much about life.

Message to R---Lose the Nightlight!

I am pro-R. I love his red hair. I love his soups, his dishwasher purchase, his gregarious nature. I love that he married Musie. I love what this relationship has done for Musie. Marriage may not be for everyone, but it is certainly is doing positive things for Musie. Hurray for R!!!

But R needs to lose the nightlight. That is not something Musie should have to put up with.

Feeding the Hand that Bites You

So once again, the nation’s capital is caught in a storm of controversy regarding animal welfare. I sometimes wonder whether this town is a world-class city what with the media obsession with anything furry (sorry, Coyote).

The latest brouhaha involves the local Humane Society’s procedures regarding the assessment of adoptability of pets. Both the Citizen and the CBC Radio covered the story extensively this morning.

The big controversy revolves around one particular test, that being the animal’s response to a fake hand on the end of a stick poking at it while it tries to eat its food. Failing this test apparently sends Fido to death row. While I don’t want to debate the merits of this test on dogs, I can relate to it when it comes to people. I can think of at least two girlfriends that I would not have put my hand anywhere in their vicinity while at the all-you-can-eat buffet. It was just plain stupid.

I just wish I knew about the fake hand test prior to some of those courtships. For one thing, I’d be much better at playing the piano today.

Fall

In the promising light
of a cloudless morning
rich in symbol
in early September
a city's hidden vertigo
dances out between
rippling waves of heat
shaken
by improbable fire
and much more basic
imponderables
until
mirrored towers shiver
sway
tremble
lurch against gravity
like drunks
on their morning way
home
groan
then fall
to the curbstones
raining shattered glass
steel
and life
down to the streets
boiling chalky choking dust
out from the centre.

Dazed night falls too
as people pick
frantically
uncertainly
through the
still smoking shifting
heap
of what once was
for survivors
where there are none
under emergency lights.

That first night
at the edge of their glare
one camera's
recording eye
gropes blindly
past a billboard
from a
jauntier time
lost only hours before
still standing
impossibly
on the rim
of ground zero:
"A hit from
way
off Broadway..."

Plutonic relations

Pity poor Pluto. For more than 75 years it held the enviable status of ninth planet from the sun. Then the International Astronomical Union comes along and demotes Pluto to dwarf planet (no offence, Dwarfie). And the space scientists compound the humiliation by assigning the once-proud sphere the nondescript identifier 134340.

It must be unsettling to go through life thinking you are one thing, then waking up to find you have been pigeonholed by others as something else entirely.

We may not be able to guide our personal fates, but we can sure try. So when the Muse picks herself up, dusts herself off and makes a new go of it, that is to be applauded. In crafting a life with R she has surrendered a measure of control over her destiny. But she has embarked on a journey in the hope of something better. And no one can take that away.