How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful.

Against everybody’s better judgment, we boxed up the cat and took him to the vet for a distemper shot and general inspection today. He was fine in the carrier, he was fine in the car, he was fine in the waiting room. (We has to sit while they reviewed his file, which has “NOT PERMITTED TO BOARD W/US” scrawled on the cover with a Sharpie.)

The fun began in Exam Room Two.

He didn’t start growling right away. The two orderlies, the doctor, Luna, and I discussed the best way to shuck him from his shell in ominous silence. Then they put him, still in the carrier, on the scale, and the room filled with the sound of angry bees. One of the orderlies produced a bright blue Velcro canvas funnel-thing, which turned out to be a combination blinder and muzzle. I dumped him onto the exam table. The bees increased in volume, and incorporated a noise like a helium-powered car with a bad starter. I put my hand on his back, pinning him to the table like a butterfly. (I saw the vet do that once, and it worked reasonably well.) One of the orderlies slipped the hood over his face. She velcroed it behind his ears, and the noises…intensified. This is where Luna had to leave. (”He didn’t sound like my snuggly kitty. He sounded like a velociraptor.”) The vet weighed the cat carrier while two orderlies held the cat down. Then she stuck him with his distemper shot, and everything went to hell.

Do you remember the moment in Lethal Weapon IV, during the fight at Murtaugh’s house, when Riggs briefly gets the drop on Jet Li, and then Jet Li disassembles Riggs’ gun with one finger so fast that you can’t figure out what he did? The cat, Jet Li fast, ripped off the muzzle/mask and his collar, while SIMULTANEOUSLY scratching one orderly and slashing the other. I opened the door to the carrier before he could flee the premises or take a hostage, and he got in so fast I didn’t see it. One second he was on the table, and a blink later he was in the carrier, back to the wall, screaming “EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU! SONS OF BITCHES!”

The discussion in the waiting room as we settled the tab and left:

“He ripped off the MUZZLE. I’ve never seen anything do that before.”

“Me neither! My God. Just tore it off?”

“It was on, and then it was on the floor, and he was in the carrier.”

“That can’t be possible. How did he do it?”

“I don’t know — it was so fast.”

“What was so fast?”

“The cat in that carrier ripped off the muzzle when Shirley gave him his shot.”

“He ripped off the MUZZLE? The BLUE ONE? REALLY? I’ve never seen ANYTHING get one of those off.”

Etc.

Cats are very strange. Right now, the amazing kung fu velociraptor is snoozing on my lap while I type. Couldn’t be more peaceful.

I’m not sure which is a more unanswerable question: What do we see in him, or what does he see in us?

bondgirl, via the Request Line: “I would like a series of brief reviews of the movies that would be made if producers deferred to your opinion on such matters.”

Movies would change thusly:

* More comedies in which the intended humor is more based on bizarre reactions to entertaining situations and jokes delivered verbally; fewer comedies based on stupid people behaving stupidly and farting.

* Less messages in genres that should be message-free. More anti-heroes.

* An end to plot points and characters obviously inserted by Marketing.

* Also, a return to jokes of the type currently being softened and/or deleted by Legal.

* Hardcore pornography featuring Reese Witherspoon and Ali Larter. Separately is fine.

* More movies with talking dogs. Luna loves talking dogs.

* Better villains. I don’t care what CAIR or NAIF says, corporate polluters and rogue CIA agents just don’t get it done. I need mobsters and Russians and Libyans.

Much more importantly, the moviegoing experience will change thusly:

* There will be entire theater facilities designated NC-17. No one under 18 is allowed within 100 yards of one of these.

* There will be two published times for movies. The start of the previews, and the start of the sound-check immediately preceding the Feature Presentation. No one, including uniformed emergency personnel, may enter the theater for any reason after the latter time has passed.

* Putting your feet on the seat in front of you is always permitted, presuming the seat was empty when you chose your seat.

* Previews for movies about girl angst may only be shown before movies about girl angst.

* Movies of greater than ninety minutes will feature either an intermission or an in-theater restroom with the movie’s audiotrack audible.

* Movie popcorn is buttered only with butter. Not with popcorn-scented oil, which gets in the air, makes every inhalation weigh three pounds, and leaves your sneezes tasting like popcorn for two days.

* My power will be magnified into a field that destroys cellphones and PDAs if they are brought into the theater, on or off.

Brand Steakhouse, now open in the Monte Carlo, has on the menu an eight-point-six pound porterhouse steak.

I cannot even think that sentence without seeing in my head me, Notorious, JP, the Doctor, the Mongoose, Big, and Dragon, all dressed to the nines, swaggering through the MC’s casino in slow motion à la the astronauts walking down the tunnel in The Right Stuff.

Notes from a new user of Facebook:

* Even though I know how it works, I find it creepy when they know who I know. I registered, and it reported a handful of my friends to me immediately. I was warned, shrilly and at length, about the Patriot Act, but no one mentioned the capabilities of Facebook.

* I find it disproportionately hilarious when my Facebook friends join groups and it is reported thusly:

I have known the WGP for more than fifteen years. He did not recently become a fan of Scotch. He and Scotch have had their ups and downs, of course, but he “became a fan of Scotch” I think before he became a fan of Shaving. (Ditto j.pal and Beer, Notorious and Democrats, Luna and Shoes, Dwink and Bourbon, etc…

* I have noticed, via some of my friends’ friends, that one can be FB friends with people whose profiles are probably not entirely honest about their likes and dislikes and status and so forth. Let us take the example of Barack Obama. I’ve seen his profile. It’s very polished. What makes me smile is contemplating the double-secret “Arak Borama” page where everyone wrote LOL on his wall when “Arak Borama became a fan of Hillary Clinton” and the statuses are things like “Arak Borama is hoping no one noticed he took a huge dump at Buckingham Palace”.

* Speaking of statuses, Al Surname thinks that his Facebook status updates might be cutting into his blogging, and that he needs to pay more attention to the mothership.

I’ve been listening to the CBC’s podcast series “How To Think About Science”, and I find Simon Schaffer’s below example (in response to host David Cayley’s setup) hilarious. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think it’s a combination of this being a double-tedious election year and me remembering having textbooks that constantly fell prey to the problem described below. (History more than science, but still.)

Cayley: (Describing a study made of scientists in the seventies and eighties.) “Scientists began to look less like oracles and more like skilled carpenters. Their knowledge was not the very voice of nature, but a human product, something that had to be made and maintained. This turned the relationship between science and society upside down. Formerly, science had been seen as social only when it was wrong. Social constructs distorted and corrupted knowledge. True knowledge was immaculate, untouched by human hands. Now, Schaffer says, the sciences began to be understood as inherently social.”

Schaffer: “What people say about the world, in groups, and how they come to agree, and how they find out how things are, has the quality of an institution, and it should be analyzed the way other institutions are analyzed. That meant, for example, that it was extremely unpromising — to put it mildly — to suppose that social principles are only acting when folk get things wrong. So for example, it didn’t look remotely plausible to say that Isaac Newton thought that there was an inverse square law of gravity acting instantly at a distance through empty space between the centers of distant bodies because there is an inverse square law acting instantly from the center of one body to another through empty space, and that Leibniz disagreed because he was German.”