The campaign trail runs through Seattle

The Kerry campaign celebrated a five-state primary victory in Seattle tonight, and I was there at the downtown Sheraton with my mom and several hundred others ranging from the wildly pro-Kerry to the definitely-leaning-in-that-direction.

Kerry's campaign had manned the phones Monday night to invite folks to Tuesday's rally at the Sheraton, something they probably regretted 24 hours later as the event overflowed from the grand ballroom into two other event rooms and hordes clogged the vast hotel lobby.

It was a nice opportunity to get a look at the crowd, a mix of mellowed-out old radicals, prosperous-looking yuppies, well-heeled gen-X-ers, and folks from various unions. It was not nearly as ethnically diverse as I'm used to seeing in Seattle, which led me to suspect that Dean is likely attracting the more artsy, diverse and hip contingent.

Prominent Democrats in Washington state have flocked to support Kerry in recent days. (Everyone loves a winner.) The festivities opened with an introduction by Governor Gary Locke, who, bless his soul, gave us a economic analysis of Bush's malfeasance before bringing on the candidate to the beat of Hendrix's "Fire." (I'm wondering, is this the campaign theme or a nod to Seattle's musical heritage?)

Kerry came across calm, upbeat, and intelligent, making a speech that ran down a list of campaign themes. Support for veterans and unions got a lukewarm response; education, jobs, and healthcare a more enthusiastic reception; and the crowd went just wild for environmental protection, the restoration of first amendment rights, tax reform, and crackdowns on corporate greed. Yup, this was Seattle, not Spokane.

Kerry invited us on a journey to rediscover America, and most in the pragmatic audience looked like they were packed and ready to go. I may be better aligned with Dean on the issues, but I'll be at my neighborhood caucus Saturday at 10, casting my vote for John Kerry. The man's a winner, and that's just what we'll need in November.

Friday again, already

The FridayFive asks:

At this moment, what is your favorite...

1. ...song?
Brudda Iz doing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World"

2. ...food?
warm sauteed greens and goat cheese on a toasted onion roll

3. ...tv show?
Firefly (on DVD)

4. ...scent?
cedar

5. ...quote?
"(He) began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist." (Terry Pratchett, Strange Gods)

Wisdom of the Web

In this past week's issue of The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt (of Mother Jones fame) writes about tracking her ex-boyfriend online after he walked out on their seven-year relationship. She uses her personal experience to write, wonderfully non-judgmentally, about what the Web has done to enhance our ability to find out about people, and yet how unsatisfying and even surrealistic that information can be. There's plenty of humor (she unexpectedly gets an online view of his new sweetie's apartment, complete with some of their old furnishings) and wisdom. If someone asks me in 25 years what the Web was like in the "olden days," I'll pull out this article.

A belated response to the recent Friday Five

The Friday Five asks:

1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails?
Mac OS X mail lets you keep a whole library of signatures, specify defaults, and apply alternates at will. My favorite, particularly for communicating with arrogant Luddites, is:
"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
--Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it?
We didn't have quotes in our yearbook. We did have a senior will, in which we left things to people. I'd love to find a copy of that...I remember leaving a particularly obsequious underclassman kneepads "for more comfortable groveling." Yes, I was mean.

3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read?
Not sure. Nobody would notice, anyway--my 1980 Honda Civic stationwagon has so many bumperstickers.

4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?
No engraving. Just books with autographs...

5. What would you like your epitaph to be?
"Enough, already."

Back to the wallpaper

Rant mode: ON...

Today's Wall Street Journal (sorry, paid subscription required) has a article in the Personal Journal section reporting the return of wallpaper. It's not your mom's flower-sprigged guest room wallpaper, either. This is wallpaper with glass-beaded surfaces; layers of loose, flapping paper; and even a loofah texture.

This is wallpaper for people who don't have to clean their own houses and, who, let's hope, made enough in the market this year to afford the additional cleaning staff required to keep up with these wall coverings. Ever tried to get hair out of a loofah? Now imagine cleaning a room-size, slightly humid, loofah covered with house dust. The mind boggles. The nose twitches. The allergist beams.

The music of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

He started out in the 1970s with a group of friends playing "Jawaiican" music--a hybrid of traditional Hawaiian folk songs with reggae. From the short monologues on his records, and his nickname ("Brudda Iz"), you immediately sense the connection of the two subcultures.

Kamakawiwo'ole's disarming medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" was included on the iTunes Music Store's album of Essential Covers, and quickly became one of the top 10 downloads on the Apple site. (You might recognize the track, from his Facing Future album, from the movie Meet Joe Black or from the 2001 season finale of "E.R.")

"Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World" reached #4 on the iTunes Top 100 Downloads today. That means a Hawaiian singer/ukelele player--who died in 1997--is brushing aside the latest singles by Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake and challenging OutKast, No Doubt, and Norah Jones. How did this happen?

Give a listen; there are four of his albums in the iTunes store. I recommend the operatic track "Hawai'I '78."

Public service announcement

You look at government these days and you have to wonder who in their right mind would want to wade into that cesspool of corruption. Some would argue that it wasn't always that way, and I suspect they're right. I grew up in a D.C. suburb in the 1960s and 70s. Many of my friends' parents were mid-level federal officials. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing (some of which caught up with them later) but even many of the wheeler-dealers were operating on the belief that the means justifies the end. I think in particular of the late Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana, who took enormous political and personal risks to get civil rights legislation enacted and who early on opposed the Vietnam War.

In the early 1990s I worked on contract for United Way of King County, organizing workplace fundraising campaigns and training volunteer campaign coordinators. As the manager of the state employees' campaign in King County, I reported to the (then) United Way Executive Director, Dick Thompson. A huge national scandal (National President William Aramony was fired in March, 1992, and convicted in 1995 of conspiracy to defraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, transportation of fraudulently acquired property, engaging in monetary transactions in unlawful activity, filing false tax returns and aiding in the filing of false tax returns) had cast a shadow over regional United Ways. Thompson, who had spent much of his career in Washington state government, came to the King County organization at a time when it was trying to distance itself from Aramony. He was a superb choice: a public sector veteran long on patience, strategy and diplomacy, and short on glitz. I remember Thompson greeting incoming staff and volunteers with a couple of stories: One was about his recent month-long volunteer stint in the crumbling capitol city of a country that was trying to establish a central government in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union; the other was about his appointment as an adjunct professor at a college in Washington state. He told how his young daughter had gone off to look up "adjunct" in the dictionary and reported back that it meant he was "not required."

Working for Thompson was a delight and a pleasure. He never ducked questions, even if the answer he gave you wasn't the one you wanted to hear.

Today I opened the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to see that
Thompson has been appointed the interim Athletic Director at the University of Washingon,where coaches, team physicians and, now, longtime Athletic Director Barbara Hedges, have sidled out the door as part of a seemingly endless housecleaning. UW has picked the right guy for the job if they want things fixed quietly but effectively. Thompson's not the sort who gets his picture on the front page in an expensive suit (even the announcement of his appointment was on page C3), but that's just as well. As British author Terry Pratchett observed,"The people who run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done."

Deaf white cats and Innotek pet locator

White cats with blue eyes have about a 50 percent chance of going deaf shortly after birth. For white cats with green eyes, the chance of deafness is about 25 percent.

Fortunately, deaf white cats are spectacular pets--under the right circumstances. Raised in a good home, they are frisky, friendly, pettable, and affectionate. Obviously, they can't be allowed to roam out of doors because they can't hear cars and predatory animals. They do well with other cats and dogs if they are introduced to the other animals while they are still kittens. Adult deaf white cats, however, can be extremely aggressive with other cats and dogs, so if you get a adult DWC, things will be far more peaceful if it is the only animal in the household.

I speak from experience, as we have a five-year-old DWC (Sheba), and I was a member of a now-defunct online DWC owners group. People shared tales of DWCs' fascination with water (one cat turned on the shower every time her owner left for work, flooding the apartment); yowling (they're loud); and desire for domination of multi-cat houses (several of us had divided our houses into zones to protect our other cats from the DWCs).

We finally negotiated a truce among our four cats (one of them actually likes Sheba) but we caved to Sheba's insistance on going outdoors. We moved to a dead-end street and we take her out several times a day, employing a transmitter system, the Innotek Puppy Trainer/Locator, to keep tabs on her. The system, formerly sold by Drs. Foster and Smith, but now discontinued, consists of a transmitter carried by the owner and a collar receiver worn by the pet. The owner uses the transmitter to make the receiver give off either a clicking noise or whooping siren sound. For a hearing pet, this could be used a signal for training. With Sheba, it serves two purposes: It warns all the other cats in neighbor that she's out and they need to hide before she spots them and attacks, and it enables us to find her--under shrubs and porches, inside tarped boats, in the bathroom of a neighbor's house (she dropped in through an open window) and on the roofs of houses and sheds (she's a climber).

These Trainer/Locaters, which we call "Sheba beepers," are about $50 a set, and the tiny battery-powered receiver mechanism, in a plastic sphere housing, is fragile. Sheba doesn't help matters by dipping it into our outdoor fountain when she takes a drink. We go through two or three receivers a year, and try to keep an extra on hand. Sheba without a beeper means hours of patrolling the yard until she takes pity on us and emerges from wherever she's been hanging out watching us. Keeping her in the house is not an option, as the claw-carvings on our kitchen door attest.

We were down to our last beeper, living dangerously, when the new Drs. Foster and Smith catalog arrvied with the Trainer/Locator on sale for $19.99. We ordered four of them.

If you have a deaf white cat, or know someone with one, we highly recommend the Sheba beeper. We've used it to locate Sheba in the heater ducts, trapped in the dresser, or just plain sleeping somewhere obscure. (Calling "Here, kitty, kitty" isn't an option with a DWC.) The only downside is when my husband is looking for Sheba in the basement or garage and she's peacefully asleep in bed with me. The beeper shrieks, he can't hear it, he keeps beeping, it keeps shrieking, I wake up and start yelling "Stop it! She's here! Upstairs! Stop!" Sheba, of course, sleeps through it all.
[NOTE added April 19, 2006: Here is some information on a new type of cat beeper from Cat Locator.]

Blogging from down the hall

My TiBook has taken ill and my iMac is busy trying to fix it, so I've moved down the hall to use my husband's G4. This office feels oddly familiar. It has the old birch desk Jim Howe and I built 18 years ago when I lived on Evanston Ave. in Greenwood and used a Mac SE. And my custom bulletin board is on the wall! Hmmm...this is an extremely nice office. If I'd know when we moved in here that I'd be working from home, I'd probably have lobbied to get this one, with the bay window overlooking the mountains and Sound, instead of my current digs overlooking the back garden. My office does, however, have a huge closet for storing office supplies, software, all my chargers, books, and a small wine cellar--plus my dance clothes.

Speaking of feeling at home...thanks to my .Mac membership, all of my Safari browser bookmarks are accessible online even though I'm using someone else's computer. Very cool!

Bisque

Look for the recipe for a particular dish on the Web, and you often find the results you get quickly divide into two or three categories: People who use pignolis in their pesto, and people who use walnuts; people who put egg in vanilla ice cream and people who just use cream; people who roast the turkey breast down, people who roast it breast up, and people who turn the bird midway through.

Now try looking for a recipe for seafood bisque. There's lobster bisque, crab bisque, shrimp bisque, and every-imaginable-combination-of-seafood bisques--including several recipes for catfish bisque. Hmmm. They range from short versions ("Just combine canned mushroom and tomato soups, milk, and that surimi stuff, hon!") to excruciating versions that involve flaming shrimp in brandy, grinding shrimp shells in Cuisinarts, using eight lobster bodies, cooking in sherry, pureeing in blenders, straining through cheesecloth, and flavoring with Madeira, m'dear.

The version I created by combining the most adventurous recipe with some common sense was, nevertheless, something out of a Flanders and Swann routine. I ended up with crab shells in the dish strainer, shrimp shells in my hair, and warm pureed bisque all over the counters. Plus the kitchen was swarming with cats. I didn't use the brandy in the bisque itself, but it came in handy for after I cleaned up the mess.

Here's my recipe, if you're game:

Melt 2-3 tablespoons of butter or a light olive oil in a large, deep skillet or Dutch oven and sautee half an onion (chopped), a chopped carrot, a chopped celery stalk, and a minced clove of garlic.

Toss in two pounds of shellfish (anything but mussels or oysters), rinsed and patted dry, in shells. Hint: If using shrimp, buy large Gulf shrimp. If using crab, look for frozen split crab legs—these refinements come in very handy where you reach the point in the recipe where you are shelling all the cooked fish.

Sautee, stirring, until lobster or shrimp turn pink, scallops and clams open, or whatever.

If you used a skillet to sautee, transfer the sauteed shellfish to a Dutch oven or a stockpot. Add to the seafood 2 cups clam broth, 2 cups chicken broth, 2 cups tomatoes (pureed work well), and one cup white wine. Using either all clam broth or all chicken broth, plus the tomatoes and wine, is also an option.

Bring to a boil, then decrease heat to a simmer (very low) and cover, cooking for 20 minutes.

Now the fun part: Fish out the stuff with shells and remove all the shells and dispose of them, far from any cats. Reserve two or three cups of the shelled shellfish, chopped in small pieces, and refrigerate it.

Return the rest of the shellfish meat to the liquid, and puree in a blender or Cuisinart. In small batches. Seriously: Only fill the blender halfway unless you were planning to hose down the kitchen later anyway.

You can refrigerate the puree for a day or two if you want. By that time you should have removed all the tiny bits of shrimp shells from the cabinetry and the smell of boiled shrimp from the kitchen. When you are ready to serve the soup, heat the puree, slowly stir in 1 cup of heavy cream, and all the reserved shellfish meat. Heat extremely gently (if it gets too warm, the cream will separate out and look curdled!) and season with salt and pepper.

Add a splash of Madeira, or serve with a small pitcher of warm sherry as an optional add-in.

The psyche of the geek

I'm a geek, a girl geek, with electronic gadgets, a woodshop, and those just-bordering-on SCA hobbies like gardening, cooking, and folk dancing. (The folk dance community is predominantly a mixture of male geeks and females in the helping professions--healthcare, social work and education--which is pertinent to where this blog entry is headed. Patience.) For more than a decade I've been a member of a computer user group and its related BBS.

Today's Good Morning Silicon Valley by John Paczkowski ends with a link to Five Geek Social Fallacies, a slightly overwritten but very insightful piece on the principles of geek society. It would be fascinating to see this writer's analysis extended to cover behavior in geek-driven (as opposed to marketing department-driven) workplaces.

Range wars

I like raving about things that are great and ranting about things that stink. I don't like talking about things that are just vaguely creepy. Like our new Kitchen-Aid stove.

I've always taken stoves for granted. As a child, I grew up in houses with gas ranges. They had pilot lights, and at Cape Cod we kept all the crackers in the oven so they wouldn't get soggy in the damp sea air. I think there might have been crummy electric stovetops in a few apartments I rented after college, but mostly there were old gas ranges and they were great. When I finally bought a house 15 years ago--an old bungalow in Wallingford--it had a cheap but adequate gas range.

About 12 years ago I was out for a walk along the Cut (aka the canal between Lake Union and the Ballard Locks leading to Shilshole Bay) with my friend Bob, whose many-faceted career at that point included several years as a chef. We stumbled upon a yard sale in a warehouse occupied by an odd artist and his even odder girlfriend. "The stove," Bob hissed, pointing at a beautiful old range in the corner of the warehouse. It had a nickel-plated cooking grill, big black grates, and a folding cover that either folded down on top of the burners or arched over the range to form a shelf. As it turned out, the stove was not for sale. "Leave your name with them," Bob insisted. "Offer $500."

I did, and two months later I got a call that the stove was, indeed, for sale. My friends John and Jim moved it (Bob was no longer in the picture) and the cooking adventure began. The stove was an O'Keefe and Merritt, one of the Cadillacs of the World War II era. I had the chrome re-chromed, the copper grill re-nickeled, and the grates re-enameled. I learned about gas fittings (in fact, I shipped some of the piping off to The Homestead in Skykomish to be re-done, as well). It was all worth it. That stove really cooked! It made farinata and pizza just as wonderfully as the wood-burning ovens in Italy. The grill was perfect for six grilled cheese sandwiches (you scraped the grease into little trays that could be cleaned later). The gas jets adjusted from a little interior circle of blue flames for melting butter to a roaring inferno for quick frying.

Two years ago we moved to a beautiful house in Ballard that had only two drawbacks: Uncontrolled bamboo in the sideyard and no gas line. Despite pleas from us, and from three of our neighbors, the gas company has no interest in extending the gas line from any of the surrounding streets. Thus, when we built our new kitchen nearly two years ago, we installed an electric stove. It's a Kitchen-Aid, and it wasn't cheap.

I loathe it. I've learned to compensate for the unresponsive electic stovetop by moving pans around to two or three locations to "adjust" the heat. But I can't compensate for the oven, which is pathetic. It roasts and broils adequately. But baking? Everything comes out dry and hard as a rock on the exterior, and raw on the interior. Pizza is pathetic. I've tried using the convection settings, pizza pans with perforated bottoms to let the air circulate, and baking stones that you preheat for an hour. Nothing works. Nothing even helps slightly.

The only clue I have to the situation is that the temperature in the oven fluctuates quite a bit--set it to 375 and it goes back and forth between 350 and 400. That certainly did not happen with my old gas oven. Yet when I called the appliance store where I purchased it, and Kitchen-Aid, the polite reponse was that they'd never heard of such a thing and had no idea how to adjust it. My reading on the Web indicates that oven temperature fluctuation is considered normal in run-of-the-mill ranges and that I'd need a quasi-professional one, or an older model like my O'Keefe and Merritt, to avoid that.

On Wednesday Kitchen-Aid will be sending a repairman out (for $60) to "test" the stove. I'm not expecting much. I suspect they'll tell me everything is normal and I'm crazy. But I'm going to put up a fight, anyway. I just bought two frozen pizzas and am going to bake one before they arrive to illustrate the problem. If they can get one the second one to come out edible, and tell me how they did it, I'll be content. Otherwise, my next call is to the gas company.

Late Friday

The site fridayfive posts five questions for you to answer in your blog. After posting, you leave a link to your blog for others to visit.

1. List five things you'd like to accomplish by the end of the year.
• Survive Thanksgiving
• Get the holiday letters out on time
• Take some real vacation days with my husband without being "on call" to my boss 24/7
• Wander around town and discover some new bookstores, thrift shops and cafes
• Have coffee or lunch with friends I usually talk with only at dances, parties or online

2. List five people you've lost contact with that you'd like to hear from again.
• Steve Litt
• Patrick Henry
• Miren Etcheverry
• Harriet Moss
• Harry Guffee

3. List five things you'd like to learn how to do.
• welding
• basic woodworking
• the North Carolina shag
• African dance
• play bluegrass bass

4. List five things you'd do if you won the lottery (no limit).
• Pay off the mortgage
• Take a year off to write fiction
• Hire an au pair for Sheba (our rambunctious deaf white cat)
• Make anonymous contributions to charities
• Order expensive, exotic ingredients for cooking

5. List five things you do that help you relax.
• Pet the cats
• Garden
• Shop (but only in thrift shops and consignment shops)
• Contra dance
• Read mysteries and science fiction

The Matrix Reviewed

(We saw The Matrix Revolutions Saturday. Brady, who was seeing it for the second time, had the following commentary, which I asked permission to republish here. Please note: It contains a minor spoiler about the plot that might upset a fanatic Matrix fan—though such fans, presumably, would have already rushed out and seen the film by this time.--MT)

The Matrix Revolutions was released this past Wednesday with very little fanfare, in sharp contrast to the hooplah that preceded The Matrix Reloaded last May. Raking in $24 million in the US/Canadian market ($47 million globally), Revolutions is enjoying a doubtless short-lived status as the 3rd-highest first-day gross in history. The first weekend figures are similarly impressive. The film has brought in an estimated $50 million in box office receipts, catapulting it to the number 1 spot.

The first Matrix film zoomed to the number 1 spot the day it opened and kept that position for four weeks, staying in the top 10 for more than four months before beginning a rapid descent. The Matrix Reloaded, the second film, also opened at number 1 but stayed there for only a week and dropped out of the top 10 after seven weeks. The Matrix Revolutions has once again opened at number 1. I anticipate that its fate will be much the same as that of The Matrix Reloaded.

What the Matrix series is not
The Matrix is not, and so far as I can tell was never intended to be what many critics complain that it is not: A deep, introspective, philosophical science fiction film with a bit of action and a few special effects tossed in to enhance the story. Anyone looking for a film of that sort should rent 2001: A Space Odyssey or the original Solaris.

The Matrix series contains little if anything that is new or original. Without doubt the themes of the film are new to moviegoers with only a casual exposure to science fiction, but in reality the film (or films, if you prefer) brings no new or creative concepts to the screen. Instead, it is simply a fast paced, action packed retelling of a story based on a theme well known to science fiction fans.

Computers taking over the world? Hardly new. The first film treatment of that idea that I recall was Colussus: The Forbin Project in 1970. In science fiction literature the idea dates back at least to Thomas Ryan's 1977 book The Adolescence of P-1.

Humans "jacking in" to enter a computer generated, wrap-around reality? William Gibson brought that idea to life in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. In fact, most of the concepts at the core of the matrix are found in Gibson's works. The idea of a cyberreality indistinguishible from "real" reality is hardly new either. Tad Williams' 1996 Otherworld series is one of the latest iterations of this theme.

Well then what about the idea of humans creating machines that "wake up," frighten their makers into trying to pull the plug, resulting in retaliation by the machines and all-out man versus machine war, the near destruction of humanity and the desperate attempts of a small number of militaristic humans on a ravaged Earth? Can you say Terminator? A good argument can be made the underlying idea of this theme dates back to the 1950s and Fred Saberhagen's berserkers.

So what does the Matrix series offer us that is really new? Not much. In fact, I would say nothing at all apart from the fact that it has popularized a theme previously limited to science fiction afficionados.

What the Matrix series is
If the Matrix series is short on story and offers little or nothing that is new to science fiction, what is it? What does it offer that has thrice made it a box office winner?

The Matrix is a special-effects and action extravaganza with shallow but likeable characters. It is a diverting two hours for fans of that genre. For fans of Hong Kong kung fu cinema the martial arts sequences are very recognizable, high-tech versions of kung fu sequences in many films of that genre. In fact, the Wachowski brothers hired Yuen Wo Ping, well known to fans of the kung fu genre, to train the actors and choreopgraph those scenes. Wo Ping's entire career before the Matrix series was with Hong Kong and Chinese kung fu films. His highly stylized choreography is a pleasure to watch. Pitting human kung fu against software agents is one of the few novel and original ideas in the Matrix series.

Revolutions departs from this theme until the final battle, focusing instead on more technological battle. The battle for Zion is fought not in the matrix, but in the real world; not with hand to hand combat, but with heavy artillery reminiscent of the oddball machines of the Star Wars world. This part of the film is less interesting, but far louder than the hand to hand scenes. I found that while I could easily and uncritically lose myself in the beauty of the kung fu scenes, during the seemingly unending battle for Zion I was wondering why the machines weren't returning fire and why, despite their obvious technological superiority, they were not using any projective weapons. If the electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMP) were so effective for the humans, why would these intelligent machines not simply drop one into Zion, disable all of their defenses, then follow it up with an invasion of projectile-vomiting, gravity-defying infantry?

In sum
I found Revolutions to be a fitting and well-done ending to the Matrix series. But then, unlike the authors of many reviews I have read I never expected more than a fast-paced action flick with lots of wonderful computer generated special effects.

Little in the Matrix series is award-winning material, unless it be perhaps for special effects. Nonetheless, the series including the final installment is a wonderfully entertaining diversion that is well worth seeing.

Credit where credit is due: The facts and figures about sales and performance of the Matrix series are thanks to http://www.boxofficemojo.com/.

News from the cat wars

Domestic cats are supposed to organize themselves into a pecking (clawing?) order, with one cat serving as the alpha. Our cats are confused; three of them think they are in charge. The fourth one, Socks, doesn't have any idea what's going on and the other three don't seem to think he's even a cat.

Sheba, the deaf white cat, is a narcisistic little tornado. She thinks she owns the house, and tries to shoo all the other cats off her territory by hissing. Interestingly, she realizes that she doesn't own the yard, and treats her indoor rivals with deference when she's outside.

Smokey, the Russian black, doesn't fight because the Russian blues (and blacks) just don't fight--even when attacked. But he's awfully good at annoying Sheba and Betaille. He likes to get into Sheba's cat bed and watch her glare at him. He delights in running up and leaping high in the air over both Sheba and Betaille. But if he's in a room with me, getting petted, and Betaille marches in, he slinks out immediately and defers to her.

Betaille, the 14-year-old Himalayan Abyssinian, views Sheba with alarm, and clearly thinks Smokey is nuts. Betaille is probably too old to clobber Sheba—but she has taken a few swats at her.

While the three would-be alphas maneuver around each other, Socks, the tabby ragdoll, pads blithely about. He goes wherever he wants, frolics with Smokey, follows Betaille around outdoors, and even sleeps on the bed with Sheba, who lets him kiss her nose and never hisses at him. Perhaps he's on to something.

One percent magic

Ninety-nine percent of writing is practice and hard work, but the one percent that's magic is important, too. The Oct. 27 issue of The New Yorker has an article on the career of Toni Morrison. The article closes with Morrison showing the writer where she writes—not in her office, but on a rustic Norwegian wood table in her kitchen. That makes perfect sense.

Content for the thing contented

This morning I went to the bakery and ordered two croissants to go. The barista placed each one in an individual wax paper bag (for the prices they charge, she should have placed them in gift-wrapped boxes). Then she asked me, "Would you like a bag for the bags?" I said yes, and she produced a real bag of heavier paper and put the two croissants in.

"I feel so funny every time I say 'Would you like a bag for the bags?" she said. "It guess it's tautology."

"I think it's more like a paradox," I suggested.

It occured to me as I left the store that what she was really grappling with was metonymy, a grammatical (actually, rhetorical) concept James Thurber immortalized in his essay about his English teacher, Miss Groby ("Here Lies Miss Groby," from The Thurber Carnival.) Metonymy is when you say "The iced tea is great; can I get you a glass?" What you really mean, of course, is can you get the person some tea, but the container (glass), stands in for the thing contained (tea).

You could read about metonymy and its subcategory synecdoche at World Wide Words. But you'd get much more out of reading The Thurber Carnival.

My closet obsession

Having lived in a series of vintage houses, I've been fighting for closet space for more than 25 years. When we added a second floor onto the first Shady Rest in Wallingford, we included the most enormous walk-in closet you can imagine, with a cathedral ceiling, dressing room area, south facing windows, and a birdseye-maple door with Cotswold glass. It even had an attic storage closet off the dressing room. We took the glass door with us when we moved to the Shady Rest West, but unfortunately couldn't take that closet. The walk-in closet here (more of a walk-thru) is only half the size and has terrible track lighting (though not as terrible as the bare bulb that illuminated it when we first moved in). As a result, we have clothes in the attic, in the laundry room, and in a storage locker. Neither of our recent houses has had a closet in the entryway, but the current house does have a tiny closet (2 feet wide by not quite 2 feet deep) in the main floor hall outside the bathroom. Until last week it had a rod made from a broomhandle suspended between two loops of wire, an enormous fir shelf up top that kept the coats in permanent dimness, and a musty odor. Finally, after putting up with that for two years, we attacked!

I ripped out the shelf and rod and assorted hardware and Zorg painted the interior a soft yellow. I installed a natural wood rod, centering it between the back of the closet and the door and raising it up four inches from the previous rod so the coats were no longer squished or dragging. Over the rod I set a shallow white wire shelf. Even though I don't usually like wire shelving, this maximized the amount of light from the hall entering the closet, plus made it possible to see what's on the high shelf from below. Zorg's caps, two dozen of them, had been thrown on the old shelf and had pretty much been lost for two years. Now they're on a special long oak cap hanger attached to the inside of the door--cheesy, but practical. Parallel to the cap hanger is a hemlock 1"x3" strip with brushed nickel J hooks where I'm planning to hang winter scarves. The last piece of equipment, scheduled to go in tomorrow, is a thin bathroom towel rack, 24" long, that we had left over from the upstairs bath refurbishing project. It goes in the back of the closet, about 2-1/2 feet up the wall, so we can hang umbrellas by the handles instead of having them falling over the floor of the closet.

The downside to this project involves our cat Socks. Previously, the squished coats made it difficult to close the closet door securely. This made it easy for Socks to pry open the door and sneak inside, bedding down in the forest of drooping coats for the day. From his viewpoint, this just another case of a neighborhood ruined by overdevelopment.

Grape news

One of the few beverages I actively dislike is grape juice. My mother says it goes back to an unpleasant experience at a birthday party as a child. So while I'll happily drink coffee, tea, citrus juices, all manner of ghastly carbonated drinks from RC to Yahoo (I grew up calling them tonic), and I have a secret fondness for Hawaiian punch, my lip curls involuntarily at the site of dark purple Welch's grape juice. In a word, yuck.

Grapes, I like. I don't even mind the ones with seeds. So when we bought our current house two years ago, I was pleased to see a young grapevine twining over the arbor. The first year it didn't do much, but last year it had plenty of reddish grapes that I turned into delicious raisins. This year, after I followed Martha Stewart's advice to prune the vine back to a few leaders in February, it simply exploded with big red grapes. More than enough for my raisins, so I made...grape juice. (Put the grapes in a pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, cool and strain through cheese cloth.) The result was a startling, nearly day-glo pinkish-red juice. It tasted amazing: tart, sweet and powerful.

This grape juice had no resemblence at all to the sickeningly sweet, monotonous, dark purple stuff that comes in bottles.

I realized immediately that this is why people drink grape juice. Our grandmothers used to make it: Picking the grapes off the vines, removing the annoying little stems, cooking, straining, and bottling (I froze mine). It was delicious. It was a pain. Grandma probably sighed with relief when the first commercially-bottled grape juice appeared on the shelves down at the local market. "Doesn't taste near as good as yours, Hattie," Grandpa said the first time she served it. I suspect she didn't give a hoot. No more purple stains on her aprons. And, in all likelihood, bottled grape juice in those days probably tasted more like real grape juice.

Next time you hear an elderly woman muttering about how some things just don't taste as good as they used, don't go getting her started on grape juice.

Get fresh with me

Part of my job producing web content is to write blurbs on new pop music releases. It's discouraging how quickly you run out of fresh adjectives and verbs to describe pop tunes, most of which will be forgotten by the time the next Grammys roll around.

Tonight, driving back from the airport, I was listening to the BBC World News and was reminded how vivid the language of good sports reporting can be. Coincidentally, I've been reading David Haberstams Summer of '49, his account of the bitter pennant race between a fading Yankee team and the perennially hopeful Red Sox. The reporting is inspired, and the writing fresh. This got me thinking about the best writing teacher I even had—Tim Cohane, the former sports editor of Look magazine. At the end of my sophomore year I enrolled for the summer at Boston University to take journalism and photojournalism classes—neither of which were offered at Ivy League school I'd been attending. By some extraordinary stroke of fortune, I was assigned to the last newswriting class ever taught by Cohane, who retired at the end of that summer. On the first day he said he'd be teaching newswriting, not reporting, and he invited people who wanted a trendier, high-level approach to the trade to step across the hall to the other section, led by a shaggy-maned Carl Bernstein wannabe from the Boston Globe. Many did. I stayed and received the best writing training imaginable. "Blood, sweat, and rewrite!" Cohane would bellow, turning from the blackboard to rap an accompaniment to his words on the desk. He wasn't joking. I wrote six drafts of one three-page story before he would accept it.

A web search for Tim Cohane reveals that several of his books are still in print. And it turned up two recent recollections of that BU newswriting course by other students he had inspired. I saved every handout he gave us that year, and all the writing exercises, vowing that some day I will offer that same class and be as unconcerned as he was by the number of students who turn their backs on basic training.