They look so bright and perky. Give a cat a paper bag and they're wild about it.

Maybe they were "labradoodles"--of sorts. Mutts are often the best and smartest dogs, though like Rodney Dangerfield they often "get no respect." I bet Whiskey and Sara got yours! I've seen several articles over the years that talk about "What kind of dog is best for you?"--and then assign a certain breed depending usually on your occupation, the amount of space you have, whether you have kids, and even what sign of the zodiac you are. These articles _never_ say something like, "A mixed-breed dog would be just right for you." It's weird. Although my Hubert was mostly Persian (obviously) he had no "pedigree" and was probably a mix of many cat breeds,

I'm more of a cat person than a dog person, but I've known some dogs that were just outstanding. Hubert and the dog next door were on very friendly terms--that particular dog ("Patches") was also wonderful and very smart. Just a kind of "mutt" that looked like he may have been a little beagle, a little Dalmatian, and little of this, and a little of that. Then the family of one of my closest high school friends had a wonderful St. Bernard--a very gentle giant.

Paxton looks like another very soft furball, like my Hubert. My Mom wouldn't tolerate the cat on the table, though, and she managed to train him not to jump on it. Even so, he would always "push the boundary": whenever we ate, he'd take his place on "his" chair, with his two front paws on the table and the back paws on the chair. If we gave him a piece of meat, he'd reach for it and put it in his mouth with a paw--he thought he was people!

It's funny how cats have similar likes and dislikes. Hubert loved to be on cars and under cars--but he hated to be in cars! It's really hard to lose a pet like this. At least Purry lived to a ripe old age. Hubert lasted only 12 years--he was having problems with an ulcerated tongue, but then he got into a bad fight with another cat and was pretty messed up. Mom took him to the vet, who found out that he also had a tumor--operable, though. The total bill would have come to well over $1000--in mid-1970s dollars--and Mom decided enough was enough for a 12-year-old cat.

A correct opinion, well expressed, with perfect grammar and paragraph form, but very bland. No zing whatsoever--and that practically gives the game away.

The original drawing is almost certainly "lifted" from a Taiwanese poster--the kind you find in outpatient clinic waiting rooms explaining benefits, procedures, and the like. The Chinese words on the door mean "Examination Room" and are written in the traditional character forms, not the simplified forms used in the mainland, and the drawing style is almost "standard generic" for Taiwan.

The Lord is my cat; I shall not train. He maketh me to pay down the vet in green backs; he leadeth me away from any water. He restoreth my anxieties; he drives me down the paths of humiliation for his kitty litter's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of pointy ears, I will fear no claws, for he purrs by me.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of how Sam Kinison roasted Christians ... like Jim Bakker here: Sam Kinison - Thoughts on Reverend Jim Bakker He actually worked as a tent revival preacher once, developing skills that he later put to great use as a comedian. He stopped the preaching because he realized it was all BS anyway.

This definitely appeals to my inner geek. As a child, I took astronomy courses at the local museum and spent many night hours at the telescope. Back then, the geeks would carry slide rules; by the time I got into college, we wore calculators on our belts and thought programming with FORTRAN was cool ...

Good job! StrumpetVine67 and DocTock have the distinct advantage of being in the West. The landscape around where I live has no mountains to speak of, though there are hills and lakes. I should dig around from my old photos from my years in Asia--plenty of mountains there. Those were all taken in pre-iPhone days.

I'm in virtually the same situation as you. I'm in my mid-60s, had Covid in mid-September, but it was fairly mild, thanks to being double-vaxxed and boosted. I've scheduled my next booster for early December.

I like Sen. Johnson's predictions, but one puzzles me: "Endemic and pandemic disease is ignored, eventually resulting in a fitter, younger worker population." Seems to me that ignoring pandemics (or vaccines) would result in more workers with compromised health, or more workers needing to spend too much time taking care of family members with compromised health. Also, Covid most severely affected the elderly, but the 1918 flue pandemic hit young adults hardest. It's hard to predict which form the next pandemic will take.

I hope your prediction is correct. Are you sure that's their new flag, or was that just something drawn by "Bennett" for Chattanooga Times Free Press?

I'll have to check this out tomorrow (it's past midnight!). Another science fiction device that may become a reality someday is the "ansible" (coined by Ursula LeGuin in the 1960s)--which would allow simultaneous communication across large distances in space. Now we know it's theoretically possible through quantum entanglement.

Excellent! Yup, certain things about the future are pretty solid: The sun will rise in the east. Shit will happen. At one point or another, everyone will hit that 100% individual mortality rate. I will never win the Powerball lottery.

Nov. 6, 2022 I'm a pessimistic liberal, so I hope for the best but expect the worst. It's far better than being an optimistic liberal, which would mean being horribly disappointed time and time again. At least, being pessimistic means that when things go wrong, I can say, "I told you so!" and if anything goes the way it should, then I'm very pleasantly surprised. Being pessimistic also means that when things go wrong, I remain relatively unruffled, though I've been known to hurl caustic invective and half-eaten meatballs at the TV screen. So here's my gloomy predictions. I do look forward to the occasional pleasant surprise, but ... Murphy's Law rules. US domestic: 1. In the coming election (Nov. 2022), the Republican Party will take control of Congress. 2. After the election, but before the "lame duck" session ends, there will be a last-ditch effort to indict Trump on various charges. 3. In 2023, the Supreme Court will, through its ruling on the Moore v. Harper case, make the "independent state legislature" theory the law of the land, thereby effectively making state legislatures the ultimate arbiters of all elections in their states and eliminating the power of the popular vote in presidential elections. 4. In 2023 and 2024, Congress will impeach Pres. Biden as "payback" for what happened to Trump, but the Senate still will not be able to convict and remove him. 5. In 2023, and 2024, Congress will also launch "investigations" on Hunter Biden. 6. Congress meanwhile will set up various committees to "investigate" and "verify" that the 2020 election was "stolen." 7. In 2023 and 2024, Trump will be convicted of one or another set of charges, whereupon the Republican-led Congress will seek to impeach relevant justices and DOJ officials. 8. In 2024, Trump will be named the Republican candidate for President, whether or not he has been convicted of a crime or is in the process of being tried. 9. He will also be elected president. 10. One of Trump's first acts after his re-election, if not the very first, will be to pardon all of the Capitol rioters. 11. In 2025, the new administration and Republican Congress will pass an anti-abortion law at the federal level. 12. In the same year, they will also introduce a bill to ban contraceptives, but it will not pass the first time. The bill will be repeatedly introduced thereafter, until it passes in the more distant future. 13. They will also gut Social Security or eliminate it entirely. 14. The new administration and Republican Congress, with Supreme Court approval, will designate Christianity as the state religion. 15. A ban on all immigration, either temporary or permanent, will be imposed. 16. The Republican Party, led by conservative zealots, will achieve complete domination, having redesigned the election system to make it impossible for them to lose Congress or the Presidency at any time in the foreseeable future. 17. By 2030, the world's first trillionaire will have emerged. International (Asia): 1. China in 2024 will see the Republican victory as heralding a period of internal upheaval in the US, so it will launch into its final preparations for invading Taiwan. 2. China will invade Taiwan in 2027, one year before the end of Xi Jinping’s current term. President Trump will talk big and make a show of responding, but delay the actual deployment, giving the Chinese the advantage. 3. Republicans will try to pin the blame for the loss of Taiwan on Biden and any remaining Democrats. 4. During the invasion of Taiwan, any one of the "interested parties"—China, the US, or Taiwan itself—whether by accident of war or by deliberate action, destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities, thus plunging the world economy into a severe, prolonged recession, if not an outright depression, because the resulting shortage of advanced semiconductors will make it impossible to produce automobiles and a host of other products. 5. During the invasion of Taiwan, China will also attack US bases in Guam and Okinawa. Japan will respond swiftly once its territory is attacked, and Australia will also join in the defense. 6. The outcome of the struggle will be that: (a) China gains control of Taiwan; (b) a massive number of Taiwanese flee the island and settle elsewhere, mostly the US and Canada; (c) China-US trade is severed, and US and other Western-aligned businesses lose their investments in China, as they did in 1949; (d) world trade becomes polarized, as China-dominated East and Southeast Asia and Russia form their own trade bloc separate from the rest of the world. 7. China will begin mandating that each married couple produces two children. International (Europe): 1. The 2022-23 lame duck session of Congress will budget for a large amount of aid to continue going to Ukraine in the following fiscal year, but the Republican majority in 2023 will do its utmost to prevent any of that aid from reaching Ukraine. 2. Ukraine, after several years of holding out against Russia, will be left suddenly "high and dry" when the US becomes preoccupied in the Pacific in 2027, after which it will fall. When that happens, the Republicans will blame Biden and any remaining Democrats for it. 3. Russia will then march on to retake the Baltic states and Moldavia. There! Those are my worse-case scenario predictions for the future. I hope they are all wrong, and that I can look back on these and have a good laugh at them ... but I'm not optimistic.

Love Maine Coons. If I ever get another cat, that's the kind of beast I'll get.

I live in a condo complex where nearly 60% of the units are being rented out, but it's one of the few in town where pet ownership is accepted. This makes it a very popular place, and if any unit opens, it's gone within a day. What blows me away is that quite often, the smallest units have the most pets. Three dogs in a tiny one-bedroom is a bit bonkers. I love animals, especially cats, and I've had a cat in the past. Some people around here, though, you wonder about. Upstairs there was a couple in a one-bedroom unit with two dogs, both large. One was a seeing-eye dog (the Mrs was mostly blind and could only see through a very narrow "tunnel"), and, of course it was a beautiful, well-trained animal. The other was a large English bulldog they got as a puppy, but it was never trained properly, probably because Mr was working long hours at his factory job, and Mrs couldn't see what it was up to. Anyway, it was up to Mrs to take the dogs out for walks, first one, then the other. The seeing-eye dog was no problem, but on two occasions I saw the bulldog bolt at something or other, and poor Mrs wound up getting dragged behind him, holding onto the leash for dear life. When I moved here in 2016, Mr was driving a fairly new Dodge Ram pickup, but after they got the bulldog, he sold it and got a new one with an extended cab seating six--and all the bells and whistles beside. I complimented him on it, and he explained that the extended cab was needed for the dogs. I thought to myself, man, that's a lot of dough to blow to accommodate a dog that drags your wife around, but I kept my peace. Then they suddenly got saddled with the care of a niece (4) and nephew (15): Mr's brother and sister-in-law got thrown in prison for extended sentences (drug-dealing). The extended cab proved to be needed after all, but now there was a couple, two kids, and two large dogs in a one-bedroom. They lived like that for three years. When they moved out, I discovered that the unit was actually owned by Mrs' elderly parents, and they had been renting it out to their blind daughter at a steep discount. I met them, so I learned that Mr and Mrs had bought a house, and the elderly parents were having the old unit renovated before selling it. I led gradually into the topic of the dogs, and commented that I had twice seen their daughter getting dragged. They both did a classic eyeroll, "Yeah, we've seen it too, can't figure it out--and she's so defensive about it, you can't say anything bad about it, even though it's uncontrollable and has chewed up practically all their furniture..." I think everyone has a tale or two about people who are just a little too nuts about their pets.

I think the best choice of animal isn't an animal at all: it's didymo. This is a kind of diatom, popularly known as "rock snot."