For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the death of cats …
— Shakespeare, Richard II
(if it had been about cats)
I come not to bury Mr. Blue, but to praise him.
— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
(if it had been about Mr. Blue instead of J.C.)
… and our little life is rounded […]

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About two and a half years ago, I adopted a big blue talkative cat named Mr. Blue (aka Barabajagal). Below the jump is the email I sent out to my cat-friendliest friends announcing his arrival.
I didn’t have a blog in those days, but I wanted to post it here to document it, and provide […]

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I’m starting to worry that Ocelopotamus has become like that stock old-man character from sitcoms and things, who falls asleep for a while and then wakes up sputtering and tries to pick the conversation up wherever it was five minutes ago, as if no time has passed.
On the other hand, it’s heartening that I […]

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I’m hereby abandoning hopes of posting any of the 87 things I had wanted to post before getting on the bus for the ceremonial voyage to Peoria, where I’ll be for the next couple of days spending the holly daze with my parentals and watching a Doctor Who DVD marathon with my mom.
In the […]

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The most entertaining Norman Mailer story I’ve read since the wake began:
“The stories of his macho posturing are legion, from the time he dismissed America’s leading women writers as ‘fey, old hat, quaintsy and dykily psychotic’, to the day he encountered a passing punk while walking his poodles in Brooklyn. According to Peter Manso’s biography […]

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In order to keep these roundups fresh as a spring daisy, I usually discard any links I’ve been keeping around that are more than a week old. But since this is OcPot’s first roundup in more than six weeks, I’m extending the freshness window slightly to include a few things that were just too good […]

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OcPot is still on hiatus for at least a couple-few more days. But yesterday, down in the comments to the hiatus post, Miss Rubbery Nun asked how I was doing and I thought I’d repost my answer here for anyone else wondering how the move went:
Survived. Just barely. No thanks to AT&T, who, in […]

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As you can probably deduce from Kiwi’s guest post a few days ago, the packing operations have escalated from Major to Serious. It’s now less than a week till the movers come, and all holy heck is being unleashed. Mountains of books, CDs, and various other items are indeed being dismantled and certain dodgy pieces […]

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Disturbing changes are taking place in the world, and we do not know what they signify. We are afraid that something terrible is going on, some fundamental destructive process that is entirely outside of our experience. You can read this in our wide-eyed stares, our defensive crouches, our tendency to go into hiding for longer […]

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Next Wednesday, September 19, I’m going to be participating in a way-fun event called The Nod, in which some of Chicago’s best bloggers will be reading posts from their blogs live at the Uptown Writer’s Space.
And for some reason they’ve asked me to be on the bill, as well. Possibly to make the rest of […]

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Scary stuff: There’s a lot of buzz and speculation that starting just after Labor Day, the Bush administration is going to be rolling out a major PR campaign to pave the way for war with Iran. See here and here for starters. Grand Moff Texan at DKos says the Bushies will be using the same […]

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A few video clips from the past week: First up, here’s a scary video compiled by documentarian Robert Greenwald showing how Fox “News” is beating the drum for war with Iran … watch them repeatedly engaging in the same kind of propaganda and scaremongering they used during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in […]

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Bush has suddenly decided that the Iraq occupation is kinda like Vietnam after all, but of course he’s careful to draw the wrong conclusions from the comparison. The article quotes American University historian Allan Lichtman as saying that Bush’s spin on the situation “is not revisionist history. It is fantasy history.”
On a related note, […]

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Haven’t posted any cat pictures in a while, so…
First up, here’s Mr. Blue — who wants you to know that he prefers the way you look upside-down. It does so many good things for you.

Really, you should just start walking around on the ceiling and save him the trouble of correcting your appearance.
And here’s Kiwi, […]

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