You may remember that around a month ago, M and I took in a stray cat of long acquaintance, a one-eyed little guy whom we named Jack. The vet told us that he was likely eight-to-ten years old, that his bad eye was collapsed due to a puncture and loss of vitreous fluid, and that he had tested positive for the inevitably fatal feline immunodeficiency virus. Putting the cat down would have been a more responsible act than releasing him back into the wild, but we chose the more humane option of adopting him for our own. Actually, we didn’t have much of a choice: we had become terribly fond of Jack during his years in the wild.

We made this decision without consulting Venice, Baxter, Scooter, and Roxy - the four cats already part of the Waveflux pride - but we could easily guess what they would have said about it.

M put up a lockable door leading to the basement to accompany the retractable vinyl mesh pet gate, creating a double-entry that we think of as an airlock. Keeping Jack separated from the pre-existing livestock would have been important even in a situation that did not involve FIV; as it was, we didn’t want to take any chances. jack has been ensconced in the basement like the Cat of Monte Cristo, and while we felt bad about his administrative lockdown, we took some comfort in knowing that he was considerably safer and more comfortable than he had been before we took him in.

In reading up on FIV, however, we learned that the situation left us with more options than we had expected. Because the FIV virus is chiefly transferred between cats via biting and gouging - not though mutual grooming or shared litter boxes - the majority of vets maintain that there is no reason why an FIV+ cat could not be assimilated into an existing feline household, assuming that the household is a stable one.

Thus, our efforts over the past week or two have been devoted to working Jack into the general population. All I have time to share just now is the following video of Jack’s adventures in dining. It is already largely overtaken by recent developments, but still valuable as evidence to anyone who knew about Jack’s story and wondered how he was doing.

Jack wants you to know that he’s doing okay. Now let’s eat.

(Apologies for the small type in the some of the titles. Practice is needed.)

More on Jack in the days to come.

• Jack
• Some kitty pics
• Tales of Homeowning: The mystery of the fourth cat
• Batchin’ it
• Meet the kitties

Not so very long ago, after noting the praise given the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the design of its Saturday tabloid edition, I said:

Now let’s apply this clear, whitespaced, organized approach to STLtoday.com. Please?

Apparently, today is that day. The P-D unveiled a massive revision of its online analogue in a soft launch wherein more changes will be incorporated over time. The result is a website free of the clutter and constraints that hobbled its previous incarnation, one that highlights new media elements adopted by the paper over time.

Here’s the look:

And here’s the comment I left at the redesign introduction post by Kurt Greenbaum, the P-D’s director of social media:

• New look for STLtoday.com
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted for front page design
• Digital ink
• Redesign in progress; remain calm
• Upgrade fever, kind of

On last week Friday, April 18, I closed out the LaVena Johnson petition - an appeal to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to demand a re-investigation of the suspicious death of the young soldier from Florissant, Missouri. I had announced the end of the name-gathering phase of the petition some days in advance, and so replaced the active page with a placeholder around 11:30 pm that Friday night.

About twenty-four hours later, late Saturday night, I reactivated that webpage.

I also added audio clips of the KKFI interview of LaVena’s father, Dr. John Johnson, which can also be accessed here. The LaVena petition is again open for signatures and comments, and will be for an undetermined period. I made an announcement to that effect that evening on the official LaVena site.

I reopened the petition at the request of Dr. Johnson, and was more than happy to do so. While more signatures is always better than fewer, this is not solely a matter of numbers; Dr. Johnson is grateful indeed to the twelve thousand people who have signed the form and expressed their support and concern. It is my hope - and his, I believe - that the petition may serve well for a while longer as a living document, a kind of memorial.

The petition does not exist for its own sake, however; the goal is a delivered document, and that hasn’t changed. As I mentioned in previous posts, I will format and prepare the petition and make arrangements for its delivery to Congress, continuing to add names and comments as they appear on the webpage. When a definite deadline for signatures has been determined, I’ll announce it here, at the LaVena site, and elsewhere.

• LaVena, continued
• Points of comparison
• New LaVena Johnson petition report / Radio interview reminder
• Thank you to The Sloan Ranger Show and Crooks & Liars
• Petition status and other items

Here are three lessons derived from this week’s episode of Deconsructing Obama: Class Edition:

Barack Obama sucks at populism. Obama should have spent more time talking to John Edwards, or else paid more attention to Edwards when he addressed the public. Not that the populist theme got Edwards even to within shouting distance of the nomination, but nobody ever accused him of insulting the very people he was trying to reach, either. Way to reach out, Barack.

Barack Obama sucks at sociology. The glaring flaw in Obama’s read on the non-rich whites of Pennsylvania: If it’s economic disadvantage that motivates people to affirm gun rights or religious faith or to hate foreigners or free-trade arrangements, then how do you explain similar stances of conservatives who aren’t poor? What’s their excuse? Without the negative motivation of relative poverty, they ought to be latte-sipping liberals, yes?

Obama has declared a broad swath of the electorate as essentially irrational in the political choices it makes. When the same charge is leveled at African Americans who support him - that they are voting for Obama out of emotionalism - it’s properly judged as the insult it is. This situation is no different.

Hillary Clinton finds new ways to politically debase herself every goddamned day. For the candidate who once publicly opposed the gun lobby to suddenly depict herself as a sister-in-arms (a rather unconvincing image likely to fool precisely no one) is just pathetic. Even worse is the breathtakingly cynical lunge for the “elitism” brush, lending credence to a right-wing trope which she surely knows will be wielded against the entire Democratic party. It’s worse than merely parroting John McCain because she’s supposed to be better than McCain. If I could take back the vote I cast for her back on Super Tuesday, I’d gladly do so. Not sure what I’d spend it on besides an empty protest vote for Edwards, but still.

Remember when Left Blogistan practically broke its arm while patting itself on the back, chortling over its “three great candidates” good fortune?

Neither do I.

• Three take-away points from Bittergate
• Edwards is out
• Edwards = White people!
• The people they used to be
• Barack Obama, Episode Four?

One morning over three years ago, my wife M took notice of a little black cat in our back yard. M being who she is, she went outside to get a better look at him. The cat greeted her with a plaintive cry - miaooww - followed immediately by a warning - hisssss - and crouched under our decrepit patio furniture and stared balefully at M. Inside the house, our four kitties - Venice, Baxter, Scooter and Roxy - scowled with disapproval at the interloper.

We called him Jack because he had one eye - or one good eye, at any rate. His right eye was not missing but was disturbingly recessed as though it had been cruelly shoved in. Most days the recess glowed red; sometimes it wept a sickly greenish gunk, a sure sign of infection. Jack had two large patches on the back of his head where his black fur had been torn away, leaving mottled gray skin. It was easy to imagine all these injuries having been caused by the jaws of some ferocious dog. He was a scrawny little guy with gray hairs scattered here and there among the back. It was impossible to guess his age. He had a patch of white on his chest. Between that coloration, the eerie eye, and the scolding voice, he put you very much in mind of Poe’s titular feline.

Jack took to showing up in the mornings before we left for work, and in the evenings after we had returned home. His appearances were sporadic enough that we might go for days without catching a glimpse of him, then suddenly there he would be, crying for attention, hissing at any approach. We took to feeding him; it seemed cruel not to. We would fill a bowl with dry kibbles, set it in the middle of the patio, then re-enter the house. Only once we were inside would Jack approach the bowl. He ate with gusto, ever pausing at some sound or other; when he was done, he was done, trotting quickly along the flagstone path to the back of the yard, slipping through the corner where two fences did not quite meet, disappearing.

And then one day, with winter coming on, he stopped coming. By then, we had decided that he likely made some kind of home at a local lumber yard where a number of feral cats hung out. We pitied Jack that year in the same general way we pitied any animal who had no business living out of doors, but felt that we already had a full house with the four rescue kitties in the household.

Spring came, and Jack made a reappearance. We were delighted to see him again, but concerned over his appearance. His bad eye looked awful, and he seemed to have lost weight, if that was possible. We took to feeding him wet canned stuff, as M was concerned that he wasn’t getting enough liquid (he always disdained the water dish we set out). By now, Jack had become relaxed enough to eat while we we sat outside - though a respectful distance away on the back steps. He still hissed in warning, but maybe not as long or often. He was a sloppy eater; often, when he glanced up, he’d be wearing food on his chin.

We felt closer to Jack by then, and talked about taking him in. Jack was still far too untrusting for that, however. One day such thoughts became academic: he failed to appear, and that absence stretched into weeks, then months. A year went by, and we were forced to conclude that he had met his end.

Late last fall, M ventured out to California to visit one of her sisters, leaving me and the kitties to run the ranch without her. On a cold Saturday morning of that week, I paused by a kitchen window, then stared. Jack was sitting on our patio table, waiting rather expectantly. When I tapped on the window, he looked at me and meowed. My second move was to prepare a bowl of food for him. My first move was to grab my cell phone and take a quick picture. When I took the food out to Jack, he actually came to me. He meowed again. He didn’t hiss. He ate, sloppily.

After he had finished his meal and done his usual business in our garden, I fired off the pic to M’s cell phone in California. She called back in moments.

“Sweetie,” she said, “is that an old picture?”

“Five minutes old,” I replied.

Jack was back, and minus the hiss. In the coming days, he allowed M to approach him, even to pet him. Eventually, things progressed to where he would climb in her lap and purr. Not every day was like that, though; he remained fitfully skittish and one expected move by either of us would cause him to bolt. Winter came, with ice and snow and grave worries on our part. One day following a substantial snowfall, I cleared the front walks, the driveway, and an extensive series of paths from the patio to the back corner of the back yard, all with Jack in mind. M thought it was a sweet gesture. So did Jack, apparently; the next morning saw him moving briskly along the cleared path, heading for his breakfast appointment.

Weeks passed without much change in Jack’s willingness to acquiesce to a cat-napping, however. One attempt to bring him inside ended in failure and a rather mistrustful cat. We didn’t see him for a couple of days, and when he did appear, it was clear that he’d gotten the worst of it in a fight. That was a bad day.

We laid plans to adapt the house for a fifth cat. We alerted our vet, who instructed us to bring him in regardless of appointments as soon as we had him. We decided to lodge him in the basement, but the walls there needed scraping and re-painting; that project obviously had to be completed in advance of snatching Jack. We browsed the web and found a fancy extendable gate purported to defeat any cat trying to get under or over it. We installed the gate near the top of the basement stairs, providing a sense of security that lasted less than a day: Baxter, smartest cat in the world, quickly made a mockery of the gate. So too, later, did Scooter. Off to the ReStore at Habitat for Humanity, where we bought a real door for use in conjunction with the gate, making for a double-entry arrangement that we now call “the airlock.”

And then, this past weekend, we grabbed Jack. We set out our largest pet carrier and placed a bowl of food inside. Jack nosed inside - betrayed, as Bugs Bunny would say, by his baser reflexes. M locked him in, and took him to the vet. Jack got the complete workup - urinalysis, bloodwork, neutering, microchipping, five hundred dollars worth of care. We knew the concerns about feral cats and particular illnesses, and had been lucky in the past with former strays Venice, Scooter and Roxy. Jack was not so lucky: he indeed tested positive for the feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV.

The disposition of Jack was never really in question. Out in the wild, he would remain a threat to spread the virus to other cats. Euthanizing him could be argued to be a humane choice, but we rejected that option out of hand. So long as we had the means to keep Jack comfortable yet separated from the other cats in the household, there was only one real choice for us.

So now we have a cat in the basement. He so far disdains the comfortable beds we have provided and sleeps instead on the pipes up near the rafters - in the same fashion, we imagine, that he once slept high up on stacks of planks at the lumber yard. He took quickly to the litter box - though he has marked a couple of corners as he was taught in the old country. He curls on M’s lap, fawning appealingly, and even allows me to pet him…sometimes. (M is definitely the favored custodian). It seems pretty clear to us that he was, at some point in his life, somebody’s cat.

And while it’s impossible to know the circumstances that brought Jack to a homeless state, I find myself these days paraphrasing Baudelaire (as relayed by Lovecraft): people allow cats to wander outside and unsupervised with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.

Either that, or they really, really hate their own cats.

We hope to create a better long-term situation for Jack - if not with us, then with someone who can offer him more than a gray basement, someone willing to provide for a special needs animal. But in the meantime, Jack is warm, dry, fed, and safe - things he could hardly count on before.

Good boy.

• Jack
• The laziest cat in the world
• Some kitty pics
• Late Friday catblogging
• Rabbitproof fence

“Aw, expletive.”

Such was my reaction (somewhat redacted) to the familiar envelope from the local branch of the Missouri Circuit Court. “Time to put your civics pants on, citizen,” the letter said, more or less. The actual wording of these missives is always verbose, the tone always stiff and imperious. Lots of sticks and no carrots at all.

In the course of jury service, you may well accept and appreciate your role in the legal system. You might even come away bearing the bright nimbus of pride, the glow of participation in a cause larger than oneself. This is the kind of halo that is also worn by most blood donors, a few idealistic voters, and one or two Ron Paul supporters. But it’s a hard, stony walk from here to there. For most of us, jury duty starts off annoying and inconvenient and never progresses very far from that point. The hectoring tone of the summons doesn’t exactly help matters.

For the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that I may not always have been as prompt to answer the civic call as I might have been. Let’s say that there may have been one or two instances in the past where summonses may have gone unacknowledged. If such was ever the case, it was surely in part a negative response to the imperiousness of the call to service. Not exactly what the jury supervisor had in mind!

I think it important to hastily add here that I have responded quite diligently to the needs of the court over the last six years, making myself available for voir dire twice and serving once as an alternate. Now yet another opportunity for service presents itself. Do I really have to wait three weeks? Can’t I just scamper down to the court house right-friggin’-now? Yeah, that’s how excited I am over demonstrating my good citizenship, and don’t forget it.

As an invitation to service, however, the summons still sucks. A revision is in order. More flies with honey, and all that.

Whenever you get the call, the question that always comes up among friends and coworkers is “What, again?” Living in the city of St. Louis seems to mean never being terribly far from the next period of service, while citizens outside the city limits seem to more easily evade the civic dragnet. “I’ve lived in the county for decades,” boasts one coworker, “and I’ve never been called.” Before I could properly upbraid her for mocking me, she added that she had served twice while living in the city.

It seems to come down to a numbers game in terms of both population and cases to be judged. Not a whole lot has changed since this 2000 Riverfront Times piece on jury duty.

If you live in the city, chances are you’ll be summoned for jury duty once every three years. (Though it’s called justice, believe this: A lot is left to chance.) If you live in the suburbs in St. Louis County, a summons will be issued about once every 10 years. In rural Missouri, citizens might get called once in a lifetime. The reason city folk are in such demand is simple: There are more crimes and more civil suits per capita. There are jury trials for more than 200 felonies a year in the city and for more than 200 civil suits. Those numbers are way ahead of Jackson County’s and St. Louis County’s, and they’re for a smaller population (about 340,000) with higher proportions of juveniles and elderly.

So this being the case - a smaller pool on which to draw, more occasions to press them into service, we’re all in this together, so on, so forth - and it being unlikely that anything will change soon, the least the local court could do is find a way to ask just a little more nicely. Cheerier jurors are - I think - more disposed to be just. Of course, I have no evidence to support that.

Well. I gotta go find my civics pants. Hope they still fit.

• “You are hereby summoned”
• Exiting the Citadel of Justice
• Doing your bit. Again.
• Just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in
• Fetch a tourniquet, please

There are some weeks, some months - actually, all of 2008 so far - in which the news seems generally more sinister and oppressive than usual.

In this particular week, the news out of St. Louis concerned the murder of an attorney, an assistant counselor for St. Louis County named Luke Meiners. According to authorities, he was killed in a house in the 5700 block of Waterman Boulevard, a house inhabited by one of the men accused of his murder. Meiners’ body was not discovered in that house, but in the woods outside Venice in Illinois.

As the linked Post-Dispatch article states, this would mark only the second time that this house on Waterman Boulevard was connected to the murder of a person whose body was removed to and found in Illinois.

That house was once occupied by a man named Curtis Thomas. In 1993, he was convicted of the decapitation of his wife, Lynn. Her body was discovered outside Litchfield, Illinois; her head was never found. It took three hours for the jury to convict Thomas, who is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. William Stage, a reporter for the Riverfront Times, published an account of the crime.

I knew Curtis Thomas once, though not well. We had what you’d call a retail relationship. Thomas used to run a newspaper/comics shop on Delmar Boulevard in University City; I think it was called “First Edition” or “Final Edition,” something like that. In those days, I was living just off Delmar and had little better to do with my money than spend it on cigarettes and Marvel Comics, and so I saw a great deal of Thomas. I remember him as sociable enough for my tastes, though perhaps a bit prickly.

In time, the shop changed hands. I moved to another apartment farther off the main drag. Life moved on, and I didn’t give Thomas a thought until he appeared in the paper, accused of having killed his wife in grisly fashion.

And I should have been happy to never think of him again, but along came this week, that house, another murder.

Speaking for myself - and keeping the very real grief of Meiners’ friends and family in mind - this has been one creepy week.

It’s a long way, I know, from reasonable and theoretical concepts like “a sense of place” to the horror story trope of homes remembering the deeds and lives that have passed through them, storing emotions and events within their very bones, imbuing the place with an essence of the past. Okay, so it’s a very long way, and superstition never looks good on anyone.

All I know is that that house on Waterman Boulevard is at the top of my list of places to avoid.

• A geography of murder
• Death penalty
• Weekend to-do list
• Blatant appeal
• Mystery man’s errand DeLayed

It’s just not terribly dramatic that WordPress 2.5 is a day past its tentative release date; that’s what tentative means. As your mum and dad doubtless told you years ago, better to do it right than to do it over. It is somewhat more noteworthy that based on the number of open tickets on the WP Trac, 2.5 is just 57% complete. Coming on top of the earlier skipping of 2.4, it is bound to get some folks wondering. Still, there’s a new 2.5 release date - falling on St. Patrick’s Day, interestingly enough - and that leaves more time to check for potential plugin and theme issues before the upgrade. The wonderful theme in use here, Arun Kale’s The Morning After, looks to be fine even without the 2.5 capable upgrade that is in the works. As for plugins, I’m not expecting many problems. This is what test blog installations are for.

Much more interesting (from a pure spectator standpoint) is the recent Twitterfied exchange between WP’s Matt Mullenweg and Movable Type’s Anil Dash, and the subsequent commentary.

The play by play: Anil posted a cheeky invitation to WordPress users to “upgrade” to, ah, Movable Type. Matt called the tactic “desperate and dirty.” Anil replied, essentially, “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” TechCrunch cheerfully recounted the exchange and is hosting comments on it all.

Anil is certainly correct in his own defense: you have the right to tout your own product. He is an evangelist, after all; it’s in his job description. I’d add that you also have the absolute right to highlight perceived deficiencies in your competitor’s product. Of course, it’s surely written somewhere that your competitor also has the right to be mildly irritated when you do that.

However, after having stated in comments at TechCrunch that there was no “juicy attack quote” in his initial post, Anil proceeded to provide something fairly close:

It may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

Now that is as patronizing a comment as you could ask for. “Welcome to the big leagues, rook. There is no crying in blogging platform services. Better pick up your game.” I am so sure that Matt appreciates the constructive criticism. I’m reminded of the tough love given the Obama campaign by Hillary. (I read too many political blogs.)

And that’s your “techmeme drama du jour.” Can hardly wait for the next act.

Speaking of politiblogs, big-time blogger Oliver Willis just made the jump (back?) to WordPress. Like me, he had recently been a Movable Type guy. Like me, he was frustrated by the difficulties of MT 4.0. Things are better now.

• Tough love in Techville
• First upgrade on the new frontier
• Re: MT 3.16 (A request guised as a mild complaint)
• Upgrade fever, kind of
• WordPress 2.5 goes gold

Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday about elements on the right wing who decry the “cult worship” afforded Barack Obama by his supporters while conveniently forgetting their own puerile idolatry:

Listening to this objection from the right-wing movement is the ultimate irony. There has not been a political figure in a long, long time who was revered, worshiped and transformed into a grotesque Icon of Transcendent Greatness the way the Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, has been. For years and years, the Right sustained itself as little more than a glorified Cult of Personality around the Great, Conquering War Hero.

Indeed, the elevation of Bush to Superhero-in Chief has been all but officially sanctioned, as made evident by an entertaining bit of agitprop created by the Republican National Committee during the Great Social Security Wars. While you won’t find it now on the RNC site - the GOP has removed it for the sake of currency, or perhaps out of sheer embarrassment - the memory of the Interwebs is long indeed.

What’s that up in the sky? It’s a bird! It’s plane! No…

…it’s Super Bush!

That is literally made of awe-some.

More documentation of excess reverence for The Decider at Greenwald’s site.

• Cult worship
• Case closed, Rice exposed
• CIA 9/11 report suppressed
• It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…
• “The saga is complete.” Yeah. Sure.

There’s irony somewhere in the juxtaposition of the arrival in the mail a couple of days ago of my newest beloved t-shirt, “Twitter is Useless,” and the arrival in my email inbox of Six Apart’s announcement of Twitter on digital growth hormomes: Action Streams!

Action Streams are a new feature, available now as a free plugin, which give you more control over the websites and profiles you use on the web.

Call it “unified social networking” — much like Facebook’s News Feed, or services like Friend Feed or Plaxo Pulse, Action Streams let you keep track of the things you do on over 75 services around the web. From adding favorites on Flickr to saving links on Delicious or Digg to posting videos on Vox or YouTube, all of your actions can be aggregated, displayed, and shared on your Movable Type-powered site. The Action Streams you publish can be for one person, or an aggregate of the actions by all of the authors on your site. And you have complete control over the privacy of those actions.

Okay, then!

Wow. I feel like I’m crouched in the shrubs under Byrne Reese’s rear window.

This really is social networking writ large, and for people who enjoy that sort of thing, more power to them. I’m not one of them, and why I’m not - considering that I’m communicating this by way of a, uh, blog - is worth a moment’s consideration.

I can’t blame age, exactly. People older than I am have Facebook and Myspace accounts and use them regularly. I have such accounts myself - in both cases prompted by a request by someone else - but I have used them exactly three times in a year and some change. I hope to log into them again only to delete those accounts.

I can’t even hide behind the claim of curmudgeonry, which - grouchy as it sounds - has a faint hard-earned quality to it, which harks back to age. No, I’m not a curmudgeon about networking so much as I am constitutionally less capable of it than others.

I am surprised to admit that I am rather an asocial being.

Not antisocial, I think. After all, this blog has an RSS feed - actually, several. They came with the template. Being antisocial denotes a fairly vigorous opposition to human contact, which frankly sounds like a lot of work. Of course, this implies that I’m simply lazy, which may or may not be true but is wholly immaterial here. Your correspondent is just kind of private…or as private as a person with a blog can reasonably be.

As I pause to figure out what to say next, I can sense a kind of inner Andy Rooney rising up within me, grumbling about all these people, young people mostly, Twittering amongst themselves, and isn’t that a good term for it, Twittering, chirping, not very substantial, idle chatter about some video they saw on the Web or how many lattes they had at lunch or…and then I slap him back down quick, because once you start talking like that, you very well might get stuck that way, and who wants that?

And setting Rooney’s problems aside, this isn’t about other people and their networking. It’s about me, of course, and possibly about an ingrained, old-fashioned, mostly unidirectional view of communication, stemming from traditional models of publishing and the days of three major networks (and you were lucky to have ‘em!), and rotary, landline, heavy-as-sin telephones and other antiques.

Or it could be something as simple as this: I already have - right here, thanks - all the community I can handle.

Yeah. Yeah. It could be exactly like that.

Well.

Glad we had this little talk.

Note: Not that I wish 6A anything but good luck with this venture. I’d have been uncomfortable with it no matter whose brainchild it was.

• The asocial Web says thanks, but no thanks
• Dana Loesch leaves Post-Dispatch
• Not a real blog post
• Falsely accused of sex offences…by MySpace
• “Life is a video game, you’ve got to die sometime”