howl, yowl, or maybe plaintive wail
and a really good movie

October 6, 2001

Adopt these cats at Merrimack River Feline Rescue Society

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Sun Woo Kim I think or was that yesterday?

Today's Reading:
The Unveiling of Lhasa by Edmund Candler, Autumn Across America by Edwin Way Teale

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Photos:

Bigfoot

Cuddles

Ike

Lola

Yoshi

As expected I got a phone message from Dawna yesterday about Jaguar... I cried a lot last night and a little this morning. I knew he wouldn't live forever no matter how many times I said to him "I love you, Jaguar. Please live forever." He was a much loved cat. Jaguar sort of epitomized what the MRFRS shelter is all about. When my feelings are less immediate, I'll try to write a suitable memorial.

And so...

Foolishly this morning I got an early start to the cat shelter for picture taking and whiteboard transcribing. There's a reason I usually wait till after 11:00 in the morning. The cats are impossible while the cleaning crew is still working, not to mention the photographer (that would be me) gets in the way of the cleaning crew. So what was I doing there at 10:00? Beats the heck out of me. It was a mad house.

Yoda got returned. I couldn't believe it. He's the sweetest, friendliest, coolest cat we've had here in ages. Well, BigFoot who just came in is the sweetest, friendliest, coolest cat since Yoda. Anyway, apparently Yoda and his person were simply not a good match. The person like to hold him tightly a lot so he scratched her. Some people just don't pick up on the cat's body language until it's too late. Watch out for that twitching tail (unless you are with Wilbur whose twitching tail means he's happy, satisfied, contented - anything but on the alert like a normal cat) and the flattened ears.

Cuddles was all over me. I had to get one of the AM cleaning shift volunteers to take the picture cause I couldn't get enough distance for her to be in focus with her crawling all over me. So you get to see my ear and an alarming amount of gray hair as an added attraction. You too can volunteer to have cats like Cuddles crawl all over you.

The folks at Angelina's gave me the hot peppers for my veggie sub on the side and hence gave me about three times as much as I usually get. Fool that I am, I ate them. You see, I love hot peppers on my veggie subs. Yes, I do. Later this afternoon, I regretted my intemperance with the hot peppers. Oh well.

As if I were not already in a mood to howl or yowl or plaintively wail, I decided this was the afternoon to buy a laptop finally. See, I've been struggling with how to be able to work off site whether it be at home or in Rhode Island or wherever and not be so tied to the wilds of Acton (that's where Starship Startup is). So did I do the normal thing and buy the cheapest Dell or Compaq or whatever and face living with Windoze? Nope.

I realized I can write the infamous book on whatever platform I choose cuz FrameMaker runs on everything. Hmm, that makes it sound like an inexperienced Red Sox base runner... but anyway, it's totally cross platform. So I bought an iBook. The first place I went, a Mac specialty store, had no iBooks in stock and weren't going to for a week. They also told me the PowerBook is not available with a CD-RW (essential for my sneakernet plans with the office) so I'd definitely have to buy the iBook, which of course they didn't have.

Undaunted, I went to CompUSA, which is entirely staffed by 13 year old boys with really bad acne who say they'll be right with you and then disappear. Finally one of the ten thousand teen-age boys actually did reappear within a reasonable amount of time. He too informed me that the PowerBook does not come with a CD-RW. So I was pretty much restricted to the iBook. He ran off to check if they had any iBooks in stock. I lucked out and got the last one. Then he tried to sell me CD-R discs instead of CD-RW discs, asking me condescendingly if I knew the difference. When I demanded CD-RW discs he told me my music wouldn't sound as good and most people only buy iBooks to burn CDs of their MP3 files. He was very surprised when I said I had no intention of doing that. You mean people do real work with Macintoshes? Unheard of!

Then it was off to the bus station to fetch Nancy for our long-anticipated night out to hear Yat-Kha performing live to accompany the classic Soviet silent film Storm Over Asia at the Harvard Film Archive. Yat-Kha and rarely seen footage filmed in Tuva - what could be better?

Storm Over Asia has only recently been restored with censored footage restored. Pudovkin must have been a genius. This film really stands the test of time. The footage that Pudovkin and his crew shot in Mongolia and Tuva before they became part of the Soviet Union is chock full of vintage ethnographic stuff, with Buddhist ceremonies and dances and all sorts of priceless insights into Central Asia before Sovietization. Besides all the fantastic Central Asian scenery and ethnography, there is actually a plot revolving around a young Mongolian trapper who is cheated by a foreign (i.e. white) fur trader and falls in with some Russian partisans (reds or whites was hard to follow) based on a novel by (I think - should look it up) Osip Brik. From the get go, everybody who sees this fur is trying to steal it. And the fur keeps recurring at each new plot twist. Then, just when he's been left for dead by the British occupiers, they discover a scroll in his amulet pouch that reveals him to be a direct descendent of Ghenghis Khan. They try to set him up as a British puppet government. The fur reappears. Massive upheavals ensue. To say anything else would spoil the ending, which is one of the most intense film endings I have ever experienced.

I was totally blown away by Yah-Kha's music and by Pudovkin's genius. I can't remember the last time I had such a powerful movie experience. Oh how I wish I could write well enough to convey it.