I can’t remember ever cooking food to impress a woman. The idea’s quite cheesy and sort of makes my skin crawl. But I sometimes make a special effort to impress my cats, with chicken liver or something. It’s tricky to know if a cat’s impressed. They might give me a little look, a glimpse at least. That’s cat ownership for you.
— Bob Mortimer
Author: Mr. Breeze
I do be a kitteh. I haz a blog.
The Jersey Devil
Imagine if you will…
You are camping with your friends in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. It’s an early fall evening. There’s a chill in the air and the moon is full.
As you sit around the campfire telling ghost stories, there is a sudden thrashing in the blueberry bushes. Something moves quickly toward your campsite. Wait, were those antlers? Is it a deer this late at night?
No, it is not a deer. It is South Jersey’s oldest cryptid, the Jersey Devil himself!
In 1735, decades before the Revolutionary War, Mrs. Leeds had her 13th child. As the boy was born, Mrs. Leeds cursed him. For a time, he seemed like a normal baby. Then one evening Mrs. Leeds entered the nursery to find her baby had grown hooves, wings, and vicious fangs. With a blood-curdling shriek he flew up the chimney and disappeared into the night!
The Jersey Devil has been sighted many times over the centuries, and he is responsible for many strange goings-on. Campers see glowing eyes in the brush. Children go missing, livestock is killed, and banshee-like wails are heard through the pines. He has even been seen on Long Beach Island cavorting with mermaids.
Today there is a little tavern on Leeds Point. The lights of Atlantic City are visible across the bay. And on stormy nights you may hear the Jersey Devil clip-clopping across the tavern roof.
Quote: William S. Burroughs on Cats as Familiars
Cats didn’t start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.
—William S. Burroughs, “The Cat Inside“
Where To Find Free! Ebooks
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
— W. Somerset Maugham
If you love to read ebooks, but your wallet is thin, there are many sites online for free ebooks. Here are just a few.
- Your local library!
Your local library’s web page probably includes eBooks and audiobooks to borrow. If you don’t have a library card, do get one! It’s free. - Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of over 70,000 free eBooks to download or read online. Much of the world’s great public domain literature is available. Many titles are also available as audiobooks. - The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable ebooks. There is also a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free Internet Archive account. - Open Library
Open Library’s catalog provides links to discover, borrow, and read from the Internet Archive’s collections. Your Internet Archive account can be used to sign-in to Open Library. - Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks provides beautifully-formatted editions of ebooks found in Project Gutenberg. - Ebooks.com
400 of their most popular classics to read, free of charge. - For the Amazon Kindle:
- You can, of course, borrow hardcopy from your local library.
- Use InterLibrary Loan (ILL) to borrow books from other libraries. Ask the librarian.
- OverDrive and WorldCat are both online catalogs to help you locate library books for ILL, including rare or unique hardcopy.
Do you have a favorite site for free ebooks or audiobooks not listed here? Please leave a comment.
Quote: Oleg Gazenko On Laika
Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.
— Russian scientist Oleg Gazenko, 1998, speaking about Laika, the first dog in space.
Quote: Milan Kundera on Dogs and Eden
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.
— Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being“
Quote: Lewis Thomas On Meddling
Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.
— Lewis Thomas, “The Medusa and the Snail“
Quote: H. P. Lovecraft on Cats
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
— H. P. Lovecraft, “Cats and Dogs“, in “Something About Cats and Other Pieces“
Quote: Groucho Marx on Books
Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend because inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
— Groucho Marx
The Anipal Times 