Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Big cat
The best dreams take place in the hour before waking. Or perhaps it only seems that way, since those are the dreams I remember.
I’m walking a trail when a big cat steps out and blocks my path. The cat is large like a tiger, fully capable of taking me out, so there’s really no point in running. She’s midnight black, sleek, glossy.
She paces forward. Without much caution I reach out, stroke her neck. She plops down onto her haunches and I get down on my knees to keep stroking her. She purrs like an Italian sports car. (Yes, I know the big cats don’t purr.) I lie down beside her and rest my head on her neck or shoulder, close enough to hear the purring, and we doze like that for what seems like a long time.
Then we both get up and she licks my hands, arms, face with that great sandpapery tongue. Tiring of that, she stalks off, leaving me to my trail.
Regarding the Times Square bombing attempt, mark my words, this will turn out to be a white supremacist or some other addled person from the Caucasian right. Supposedly the Pakistani Taliban are taking credit, but I doubt the veracity of that claim (particularly since they have a history of making false claims). The attempt had an unusual degree of amateurishness — for example, the perp had removed the VIN from the dash, but not from other parts of the vehicle, and descriptions of the explosive suggest a kluge job.
Law enforcement officials offered a more detailed description of the makeup of the failed car bomb found in Times Square on Saturday night, and said they were reviewing surveillance footage that showed a white man who appeared to be in his 40s walking away from the area as he looked over his shoulder and removed a layer of clothing.
Raymond W. Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, said on Sunday that the materials found in the Nissan Pathfinder — gasoline, propane, firecrackers and simple alarm clocks — also included eight bags of a granular substance, later determined to be nonexplosive grade of fertilizer, inside a 55-inch-tall metal gun locker.
I’m not the first person to think that here at home, we’re more at risk from domestic terrorism than we are from the made-in-the-Near East variety. Don’t make me quote Pogo at you.
D.
Cheetahs purr. The one the zoo near us purrs loud and often, particularly when there are small boys on bikes racing past his cage.
I’ve heard (from some nature program) that the big cats can either purr or roar but they can’t do both.
I’m still sort of amazing at how quickly the Oklahoma City bombing faded out of memory. I suppose a homegrown terrorist is somehow less threatening that furrinurs in weird clothes. The USG should have treated the 9/11 bombings the same way they handled OKC and the blind sheik. Criminals. Not enemy combantants. Not terrorists. At the time no one said the existing court system couldn’t handle them.
It served the Bush Admin to treat it as something different. Hmm . . . if the terrorists are the ones who profit from the terrorist act, I wonder who profited most from 9/11? Reminds me of a story.