Bugged Again

My husband put on Fox News to find out where the thunderstorms were moving, in case we should not have power at 11 to watch the real news, and there was our rabbi from Chicago Sinai Congregation, Howard Berman, getting married in Boston, where he moved shortly after we left Chicago. He has since been an activist for gay marriage both nationally and within Judaism, and although I have had no contact with him in years, he presided over our older son's naming and I am thrilled for him.

On a related subject, seen in several places but linked most recently from , 's How the Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment should be written.

We the conservative wing of the Republican Party, the moderate wing of the Republican Party that has forgotten our oath to pursue a smaller government for the people, and the Democratic party held hostage by our fear of a poll where 1000 Americans are taken to be representative of all 300 million, do in deliberate ignorance of such eloquent language as "all men are created equal" and "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" and in bold defiance of Amendment 14, specifically the clause " No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" do hereby and forthwith amend the U.S. Constitution to institutionalize a fallacy that has not existed since millions of Americans died quelling a rebellion, that some citizens of the United States are less worthy of liberty than others, that their rights are heretofore abridged and that, while expecting full payment of yearly taxes and full compliance with State and Federal Law, such citizens as this amendment affects are deemed in our judgment; as guided by our Biblical teachings, to be lesser citizens of the collected States of America, that they shall be barred from entering into the legal contract of marital union, be denied the right to share property, the right for hospital visitations, the right to make medical decisions no matter how long said persons have been partnered, the right of survivorship, the right to be recognized as equal; and we do thusly forevermore blur the lines between ecclesiastical and secular power within these United States by allowing religious organizations to define a legal institution, and that institution, marriage, shall be defined as between one man and one woman, as nature intended it, in spite of the mounting evidence that nature might not have intended it exclusively, we do now with blindness and ignorance and in full failure of our duties as representatives of all the people of the United States, ratify this into law.

Meme from : What color is your username? Mine is cruisedirector! (<font color=username><b>username</b></font>)

provided this link to every form of fan fiction, which amused me greatly.

For this evening we have a couple more aquarium pictures -- giant rays and a sea turtle -- but first, a lesson about a different kind of animal, entitled "How To Torture Your Cat." The most important step is to have children; in fact, if you have children, you do not need to torture your cat, as they will constantly come up with ingenious ways to do it for you.

The next step is to wait for cicada season...so you lucky people in the northeast, like myself, are all set! The third step, naturally, is to make certain, when your children bring in their bug jars full of cicadas -- as they are sure to do, no matter how many times you tell them that the jars must stay on the deck and the bugs must be set free after dinner -- that the jars end up the low table in the living room. (You can guarantee that this will happen by insisting that the table is the one place where they must not leave their jars; it works equally well with the kitchen table.)

From this point on you need take no further steps, for your cat(s) will discover the large bugs crawling around and will spend the next hour mewling and batting fruitlessly at the outside of the jar(s), trying to figure out how to get at the cicadas. Even after your children have let the cicadas go, your cats will spend many pesked hours batting at the empty jar trying to figure out what has happened to the bugs. Incidentally, if you have been wondering where Jack and Stephen -- the squirrels of my icon -- are, they have not been on our deck recently, though we see them down in the yard below; we think the cicadas must have thrown off their birdfeeder-raiding instincts.


Rosie finds herself dreadfully pesked by a cicada.


It crawls! It climbs! Obviously it must have world domination on its mind.


And without opposable thumbs, there is absolutely nothing a cat can do about it.


Now, the rays at the National Aquarium probably do not have world domination on their mind.


However, some of them are spotted, some of them are nearly white, some of them are big, beautiful and dark, and none of them seem to mind the sharks that share their tank.


The tank also contains a sea turtle that lost a flipper in a net, was rehabilitated, and will probably live out its life in this aquarium tank.