(from Gawker.tv) For those who are going through Mad Men withdrawal.
Since Mad Men finished its third season, our Sunday nights have felt barren. Until the AMC advertising drama returns, we'll be meditating on Don Draper's philosophical lessons, such as: "Change is neither good or bad. It simply is."
Literally giving new dimension to a Picasso classic:
We tried to go to Langer's for Pastrami on Saturday, but it was closed for Thanksgiving weekend. Instead, we ended up at Cantor's on Fairfax. When I ordered it, I asked for Corned Beef on white bread with mayo and the waitress nearly had a heart attack until I said I was just joking.
It was good, but I don't if it was $11.25 good, if you know what I mean. The sour pickles and Dr. Brown's cream soda were awesome though.
Here's The History of the Internet in a Nutshell which covers the origins of the Internet in 1969 to 2009. Obviously it's not comprehensive, but it covers all the high points. Quite a good read.
This Frontline documentary on the credit card and banking industries is disturbing on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.
I know I'm not my credit company's best customer, and that's fine with me. Not only do I never carry a balance, I make several payments a month, because I want to hold their credit for as little time as possible to limit whatever penalties from fees and interest might accrue in case something happens and I don't make my payment.
But for people who have balances, either from circumstance or conspicuous consumption, the system is really stacked against them. The penalties are harshest for those least able to pay, which makes sense in terms of bank profits, but not in terms of anything else.
What they don't want is customers like me who pay in full or people who don't pay at all. So people get wrapped up in a debt straightjacket and can't get out, which is exactly what banks want. Those are their best customers, namely people who can't pay off their balances but continue to pay.
Meanwhile, even though the economy is crashing around us, banks couldn't care less as long as profits continue to rise. The regulators won't or can't do anything to change the system because, as Dick Durbin said earlier this year, the banks own Congress.
Until our system of legalized bribery that is the campaign finance mess gets fixed, we will never solve this problem. When elected officials worry more about where their next fundraising dollar is coming from rather than doing the right thing for the American people, we're all screwed.
You can watch the entire program online at the PBS website.
[finally getting around to finishing this up - Andrew 5MAY2010]
I had been looking forward to the Thanksgiving trip to LA for a long time. I was excited to see my family and friends, but what I really wanted was a chance to ride my bike over the territory where I grew up.
My family lived in the canyons of West Los Angeles, specifically Roscomare Road through the west gate of Bel-Air. We moved there just after I was born and I lived in the same house until I left for university 18 years later.
It was not a convenient place to live without a car. There was a no public transportation at all. I suppose you could have walked the mile to Sunset Boulevard and waited for a bus. But the ironically named RTD ("Rapid Transit District") was so awful and went nowhere, it was just unthinkable.
There was no place to buy anything within a mile and a half. No shops. No convenience stores. Nothing. We had Bel-Air Foods at the top of Roscomare, more than 2 miles distant up a very steep climb and we had Bel-Air Shop Easy through the wining and dangerous hills to the west near the 405 freeway. Neither was a good option.
In the summertime, trapped in the house and desperate, my brother and I would choose one or the other and head out, sometimes on foot and sometimes on our little banana seat Schwins. Inevitably we ended up pushing the bikes up the hills and fearing for our lives around some of the tight corners. But the bounty of baseball cars, chips, and coke made it worthwhile. Sometimes.
Anyway, I hadn't ridden a bike in Los Angeles in over 20 years and the prospect of rolling around the Santa Monica hills on my Cannondale was compelling me southwards.
I wanted to ride up Roscomare. Plain and simple.
Been feeling very nostalgic lately and two events on Sunday have really fueled my retrospective fire. the first was a documentary about the USFL and the second was the Eagles/Bears game on Sunday Night Football.
When the USFL in 1983, I was in my formative years and hoovering everything sports related. ESPN has just come into existence and I was a hard core junkie. In the early years, which I'll get to eventually, ESPN was bereft or mainstream programming and the USFL might have been the first "major" sporting events that the network covered.
The games were exciting. The teams had stars. They signed three Heisman Trophy winners in a row: Herschel Walker from Georgia, Mike Rozier from Nebraska and Doug Flutie from Boston College. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Jim Kelly played for the Outlaws. Steve Young signed a 40 million dollar contract to play for the LA Express. There was Reggie White, Doug Williams, Anthony Carter, Rick Neuheisel, Billy Sims and many, many more great players that eventually went on to play in the NFL. Jim Mora coached the Stars, Marv Levy the Blitz and Stever Spurrier the Bandits. Walt Michaels coached the Generals. Lee Corso coached the Renegades. Even George Allen coached two teams.
I've taken hundreds of pictures of Fil over the years and even though this one was taken with the worst camera I ever had, the RAZR cellphone camera, it's by far the favorite picture I have of her. Not even close.
Today marks three weeks that she's been missing. It doesn't seem real. It seems like it's happening to someone else. Every time I drive home from anywhere or open the front door, I fully expect to see her sitting there on the porch waiting for me as if nothing happened. Every time I don't see her there, a little part of me dies inside.
Fil's departure has really been a terrible ordeal for me, but it's even worse for Fil's brother Makelani. I have spent many weeks without my cats, but before she left, Mak had never spent a single night in his seven years (with the exception of his first few weeks) without his sister. Fil taught him everything. He didn't know how to use the litterbox or clean himself. He learned by watching her. Fil looked after him, groomed him, kept him calm, mostly.
He's a great little guy, but he's always been needy and now that she's gone, he's become incredibly needy. He cries for no reason. He stares longingly out the window, perhaps waiting for her to return. He's put on a lot of weight.
Of course, I can't explain why she isn't there. It's just something he has to learn to accept. Eventually he will, but right now, it's really tough on him.
Last night, just before 10pm, I got a call from a unlisted number, which often means a Fil sighting. I anxiously answered the phone. Have you found your kitty, the man asked. Sadly no, I said. Well, then can you take down your flyers. It's been three weeks, you owe it to the neighborhood, he said. What? I was stunned. I said I would take them down when I was ready, but I would not take them down now. He hung up.
What an asshole.
I mean, it's not like I live in Piedmont or North Berkeley. My neighborhood is the fucking ghetto where people leave old mattresses on corners and dump crap wherever they feel like. It's full of homeless wanderers dragging shopping cart trains (multiple cart tied together), people walking their pit bulls, cars on front lawns. Having flyers up on the stop signs isn't exactly going to bring the neighborhood down. It's already down. What a heartless asshole.
It's been almost two weeks since Fil disappeared and there's still no sign of her. While I'm not ready to write her obituary quite yet, I'm am getting seriously discouraged. As the days go on and she hasn't returned, it seems less and less likely that she will.
Meantime, I continue with the search and rescue efforts. I've been putting up flyers like crazy, talking to neighbors, visiting shelters, walking the neighborhood, leaving out food and water, and calling to her. In the course of this process, I've met many neighbors, which is good, and been given much advice, which is mixed.
Advice has included anything from working with animal communicators and tracking dogs to opening up my subconscious to Fil by thinking about her right before I go to sleep. Some people have said to leave my clothes out on the deck so she'll smell me and find her way home. People have regaled me with stories of wayward cats who returned after weeks, months and even a year. None of this is helpful. I just want her back now.
While I'm wallowing in grief, I'm fairly sanguine about the situation. Fil is either dead or alive. If she's dead, she was likely felled by one of the many hazards in the neighborhood: pit bulls, cars, raccoons or feral cats. No one has reported her dead to any agencies (to my knowledge) but she very easily could have sustained a mortal wound and gone into the bushes to die. Not a pleasant prospect.
If she's alive any number of things could have happened. She could have wandered into someone's house and the owners have her inside. She didn't have a collar. Maybe they haven't seen the flyers and don't know what to do with her or have and don't care since she's such an amazing cat. She could be lost, wandering around trying to find her way home. But since nobody has seen her, this seems unlikely. She could be out there having a blast, chasing birds, chomping grass and lounging in the sun. If that's the case, maybe she'll come home when she gets hungry and/or bored. Again, unlikely. I really don't know.
I do know that my house is now a very lonely place. My girlfriend has gone back to Brazil to attend her father's funeral, Fil is gone and now it's just me and Makkie. Poor Makkie who had never spent a night without his sister since he came to me, has been spending time alone for almost two weeks. He's always been a very needy cat. He doesn't know what's going on, why Fil is missing. All he knows is that he's alone. I'm sure he sleeps most of the day away, but it must not be any fun. He really relied on Fil for how to act as a cat. She was his guiding light. It must be worse for him than it is for me, if that's possible.
Another awful thing is that people in the neighborhood keep tearing down the flyers. I even found some that had been burned. I don't know what motivates people to do this, but it's really heartless. My own next-door neighbors to the east keep tearing down the flyers posted on the parking sign that is in front of their house. Why? No clue. There's just so much legwork getting them posted in the first place that having to repost them again and again is truly frustrating. If Fil would just come back, I could tear them all down myself.
In my continuing search for my missing cat Fil, I visited 4 local shelters: Oakland, Berkeley, Pinhole and Martinez yesterday. I searched through all the cat holding rooms. She was not in any of them. I filed a lost cat report. It's really the only thing to do other than check back at these places every 3-4 days.
I've been to many shelters and adoption centers over the years. But never before have I visited one as a missing owner. It puts these places in a whole new and very troubling new.
If you're coming to adopt, it's a place of new beginnings. It's the start of a new relationship with an animal that you are rescuing from the worst fate. But as an owner of a lost cat, you can only view these as places of incredible sadness, full of abandoned or lost pets, who don't know that their owners are desperately trying to track them down, and whose owners don't even know that they are safe in the shelter, but only temporarily.
Shelters can't hold on to missing pets indefinitely. They don't have the space and there seems to be a constant supply of incoming animals. So once they arrive, one of three things can happen: They can be issued a stay of execution if they can be found by their owner or adopted by strangers or they can be euthanized. I can't fathom the misery of turning up at one of the shelters in the search for your missing pet only to find that it had been put to sleep before you could get there. Unimaginable.
Similarly, these places keep notebooks full of reported pet deaths. Before they send you into the holding area to ID your animal, you have to comb through the death reports to see if he or she might be listed in there. I held my breath every time I opened one of these books. (In Berkeley, there was a tortoise shell listed as brought in dead on the 2nd, the day after Fil went missing, but it was brought in by its owner. Phew.)
Honestly, I don't know what to do at this point. This, and the not knowing where Fil is, is really the worst. I guess I just have wait and hope she returns, keep posting flyers and talking to people and going for walks around the neighborhood calling and whistling for her. But it really is demoralizing. Damn her for making me so attached to her.
Got a call this morning at 7:08 from some woman. I've seen your cat, she says. I get address. It's on Marshall Street, a few blocks away. We jump into action. Get dressed in record time. Run out to the car. Fly down the street. Find the house. Find the woman. No cat. Nothing.
I call Fil. I whistle for her. The woman says she had her dogs with her at the time so she couldn't grab Fil. She had seen the flyers that we had posted in her neighborhood the evening before.
We went around the block calling her, posting new flyers, returning to the house every so often. No sight of Fil at all.
We posted more flyers in the surrounding streets. We talked to people sitting on their porches, people walking their dogs, runners, drunks, crazy people, anyone who might have seen.
When we were about to give up and go home, I decided to go back to the original address where she was sighted by the woman. The house where Fil was seen playing had Tibetan flags hanging outside and a Buddha statue on the porch. They were probably the sort of people who wouldn't mind a stranger knocking on their door at 8am looking for a lost cat.
Right when we pulled up, we saw the cat. It wasn't Fil. It was similar, tortoise shell, white chest and paws. But it wasn't her. It was demoralizing.
I know it's only been three days and nights, but it seems like forever. The fact that cats can return weeks or months later is not really sustaining me at the moment. I just want her back safe and sound, purring in my lap or on my chest.
My little female cat Fil has been missing since about 2pm yesterday and I'm just sick with worry about her. She's escaped from the house a few times, but I've always managed to catch and get her back in within 30 minutes or so. Last night, we stood out on the porch and called her, left the door open, to no avail. For the first time in the last seven years, I went to sleep at home with Fil. It made me awful.
I went home for a few hours today and Quel & I plastered the neighborhood with flyers, offering a 100 dollar reward. We tried to go down the Oakland SPCA to file a report, but it was closed. I've got ads up on Craigslist both in pets and lost and found. Short of that, I don't know what to do.
I hope that she just wandered into someone's house and since she doesn't have a collar, they didn't know what to do with her. She's such a friendly and precocious love whore, that she can charm anyone. Since she doesn't have a collar, what are they going to do with her? Keep her, of course.
My neighborhood is full of speeding cars and pit bulls, so there's always that, but I think Fil is too smart/scared to get near the roads or the dogs, but she is only a cat, right?
Hopefully the flyers will produce a lead. I already did get two calls from neighbors, but they were both false alarms. Just other tortoise shell tabbies wandering around the neighborhood.
