Table of Contents:

General News

• Cat News
• Ryan's Here
• Old Enough Redux

Computer Industry News

• Contentville part 1
• Contentville part 2

Web Site of the Week

• Billionaires For Bush (or Gore)

Humor

• Federal Government Joke Redux

Movies

• Up At The Villa

Letters

• Yet More On That Aphorism

General News

Cat News

Ross Snyder pointed out:

Now of course there are people, including readers of this column, who don't feel I mention them often enough, and they know how to read, but nevertheless, it probably is time for a feline update.

Once again, I'd like to apologize, particularly to those of you in the Bay Area. When Jon Carroll writes about Bucket, or when Adair Lara tackles her cats, you can smell the fur.

Well, I can smell the fur (and brush it off most of my clothing for that matter), but despite my extreme affection for our boys, I'm not sure I can capture their wide-ranging and positive influence on my life and that of my family.

They have become more heliotropic in recent weeks, as we hit the height of summer. They find patches of sunlight in the breakfast nook in the morning, in front of the fireplace in the afternoon and in the master bedroom or Vicki's office in the evening. Jagermeister, the beta cat, sits down first, and Champagne then comes along and, as befits the alpha cat, drapes himself all over his hapless sibling.

Jager has become quite the vocalizer. He yelps all day long--he yelps in the morning (usually about 6 a.m.) when he thinks it is time for his daily tablespoon of tuna. He yelps every time I come into the room.

The boys spend their days with Vicki when she's working at home, or with the girls when they are here. If there's no one else in the house, and I am reading in the evening, they may deign to be in the room with me, but that's about it. Vicki says they are often in the way--I'd like to experience that now and then.

They sleep on our bed every night--on Vicki's side, usually on top of her. And every night when we turn off our reading lights and settle in, they leap off the bed because they are shocked--shocked--that we could be so callow as to adjust our positions in bed, something they've never seen before (except every night they've been here for two years).

They continue to be content and to purr loudly and frequently.

And (did I mention this before?) they seem quite happy with their LitterMaid automatic catbox--the one that automatically sweeps their business out of their catbox each time they use it. This device scares many cats--and I am sure the Boys would be scared too, if it ever went off while they were in it. So far, it hasn't. With two cats, a self-cleaning box is a must, I feel. Alas, we still have to empty it.

Ryan's Here

Marlow's boyfriend Ryan Smee is in town this weekend with his parents to attend a wedding, then will be spending much of next week here as well. Naturally, we're all excited around here to meet him and his family. Coverage of these events will appear next week. I am writing the column on Friday so I won't be tempted to sneak upstairs and work on it Sunday when they're here.

Old Enough Redux

With regard to last week's note about "old enough," Ross Snyder (retired HP PR man, inventor of the SelSync recording technology that enabled tape overdubbing and WW II Army Air Force pilot) writes:

Computer Industry News

Contentville Part 1

Web Informant last week contained an upbeat review of the new site from Steve Brill of Brill's Content called Contentville. Brigitte Weeks concludes:

Contentville Part 2

My colleague Jon Udell takes a somewhat more jaundiced view:

I just happened to stumble across the online version of Brill's Content, at www.contentville.com.

And it wasn't just Jon; a lot of content providers were upset at this apparent appropriation of their intellectual property.

He had this exchange with a reader on the subject, which I reprint because the reader presents a little of Contentville's side (Italics are the reader, roman text is Jon)

Might be true, if the site were a demonstrably superior locator of content. But w/respect to the freely available stuff it aggregates, it isn't. In fact, they don't even fulltext index stuff, so it's actually harder to find stuff there than elsewhere!

Web Site of the Week

Billonaires For Bush or Gore

One of my correspondents, who prefers to remain anonymous, sent me this site, which is both amusing and chillingly accurate. I can't wait to see how the Million Billionaire March goes at each convention.

Humor

Federal Government Joke Redux

Last week, I ran a joke with this setup:

One of my more cynical correspondents offers this version in lieu of the one I already ran:

Movies

Up At The Villa

You want the facts? Go to the Internet Movie Database.

Philip Haas seems to take his time between movies. He had films in 93 and 97, and in-between made the quite memorable Angels and Insects in 1995. Here, he and his wife, screenwriter Belinda, have taken a Somerset Maugham story and turned it into one of those indelibly British films. You've seen a thousand of them. Sean Penn turns in another brilliant performance as the token American, Kristin Scott Thomas is brilliant as the confused Englishwoman with the bad judgment.

One thing I'll say about Maugham, he knew his way around a plot twist. You never know where this one is going until it gets there.

Very slow, very talk, very artsy. I wouldn't take anyone under 17--not for the sex (some), violence (some) or language (none), but because it will bore them to tears. Literate adults, on the other hand, will be tickled to watch clever plotting, literate dialog, and adult actors in adult situations--in the old-fashioned sense of adult.

Letters

Yet More On That Aphorism!

Well, now I know how to generate weeks worth of email. Carelessly misquote a famous aphorism.

This from Miriam Nadel:

Uh, Miriam, I don't recognize your name. Where do I know you from, or how did you find this column?

Larry King chimes in again:

I have read the collection of Ross letters and also recommend it, and I have a copy of the Ross biography on my desk. In fact, I have a half-dozen New Yorker books, and when I finish the last of them, I'll share my opinion.

By the way, the collected letters of S.J. Perelman also make good reading.

Speaking of Larry King, he made a brief remark about female British twits last week:

which drew this response from an anonymous reader:

Send those checks to me, payable to me.

Kent Peterman, one of the few correspondents who has appeared in both this column and Herb Caen, submits this doggerel:

Richard Dalton checks in with two comments from last week:

Alas, there is a reason; the originals of the newspapers have already been tossed out, in most cases, well before the invention of sufficient digitizing technology. That's a shame. Baker is right; they should have microfilmed the newspapers and saved the originals, rather than throwing them out.

Richard's right about the Mechanics Library, although I still wish they'd had a way I could have joined it on the weekend, so I could have whiled away a few hours there instead of in the Marriott Lobby. Well, one of these days.