Cats and Dogs

Yesterday I dismantled the tomato forest on the patio, it was still fruiting but looking mightily bedraggled.
As though the new autumn had been waiting for precisely that cue, this morning the temperature was lower than it has been, around 11° and there was thick fog to the south of the city. Everything looked more beautiful behind its treacherous veil. Had I been alone, I would have stopped and taken pictures of the water and the mountains, but Kevin had to get to work.

Monday is two DVD rentals for $4.50 day at our local video store. It is small and you are slightly at their whim. I am still waiting for them to get a film that Canadian Karen recommended about six months ago, but most weeks I can find something to entertain. Things have been a bit fallow of late however, until this past week, when I was able to rent two brilliant movies.
The first one was 'The Squid and the Whale'. Austen had seen this and said how much he and Sue had enjoyed it, and it was indeed a very well observed sketch of human behaviour in what is a common scenario. And superbly portrayed by Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels and a well put-together cast.

The second film was 'Lucky Number Slevin'. Now this was one of those brilliant films that come along once in a while that catch you up in their spell from the opening sequence and spit you out at the end. It was completely absorbing and thoroughly satisfying. There is a leitmotif throughout the film, of utterly awful wallpaper. It is clearly deliberate, it doesn't distract from the action, but it does amuse and I think it may be making a statement in some way that I haven't quite thought through yet.

There was a truly horrible story in the news yesterday about two Rottweilers who attacked and killed a five-month-old baby in Leicester. The two dogs have been put down, but those parents will never, ever recover from the horror of seeing their child literally torn apart by two large dogs. The stuff of fevered nightmares.
And as though that weren't enough for one family, in an unrelated incident, the baby's grandfather was stabbed and his partner murdered just a few hours later.

British Airways crew members have delivered a baby on a flight from Heathrow to Boston. This is the sort of thing that you expect air crews to be able to deal with, however the only time I was ever on a flight when a medical emergency occurred, the Air Canada crew seemed totally non-plussed by the situation. A woman fainted at the front of the aircraft, but no-one seemed to know what to do and this worried me a lot. Eventually I think they found a nurse on board.

I find it interesting that the MoD have over the years, gone to such lengths to cover up their investigations into UFO sightings. It's almost as though they feel a little embarrassed at being involved at all, but then they are the Ministry of Defence and if there is a threat, they would be the ones who would have to deal with it, so they need to get over that really and delve a little deeper into the phenomena, and they also need to be a little more honest. I realise that their brief is tough, they have to plough a middle path between frightening the public and really assessing whether something is going on that we don't yet understand. All this 'weather balloons' nonsense doesn't help either case.

So now, should we be up for boshing out a little over two grand, we can own our very own living, breathing hypoallergenic cat. How wonderful, every home should have one for Christmas. I wonder if they come in colours that would fit my decorating palette.