Tiger insisted I post his pic too

Resident metrosexual feline, forever under-fed.

Your early evening kitteh

You are such a homophone

Here are nine sound-alike word pairs that are confused and misused, according to cracked.com.

As an English-language nerd, can I say that #9 on the list--mantel vs. mantle--was the only one I paused on to cipher the differences? I knew quickly the distinctions between the rest of the homophones.

I didn't choose the grammar life. The grammar life chose me.

"Silent Spring' turns 50

There's a new biography of author Rachel Carson. Here's a review.

"Carson's particular genius was in making science come so alive that the reader did not think of it as science," notes Mr. Souder. "Silent Spring" was only one of many such polemics, but it is the one that got read. This is an important point. All sorts of people were warning of potential dangers of synthetic chemicals, the science of which was only vaguely understood at the time. Six months before "Silent Spring," Knopf published "Our Synthetic Environment," about chemical toxicity in food and the environment. It sank like a rock.."

Because I am re-discovering that American South bugs can be the size of Cessna single-engine planes in the summer, I can understand why society was driven to scatter deadly toxins in order to kill the common housefly.

I grew up on a swine farm in the 1970s, and let me tell you there were times when my parents would have used anything to knock down the swarms in the hoghouses. Including fogs of DDT.

September 11th, soon

The anniversary of the 2001 attacks is upon us.

Thomas Merton wrote the following prophetic words in 1947. The passage is from Figures For An Apocalypse, VI – In the Ruins of New York

Oh how quiet it is after the black night
When flames out of the clouds burned down your cariated teeth,
And when those lightnings,
Lancing the black boils of Harlem and the Bronx,
Spilled the remaining prisoners,
(The tens and twenties of the living)
Into the trees of Jersey,
To the green farms, to find their liberty.

How are they down, how have they fallen down
Those great strong towers of ice and steel,
And melted by what terror and what miracle?
What fires and lights tore down,
With the white anger of their sudden accusation,
Those towers of silver and of steel?

Down on Music Row

My regular Starbucks barista has a degree in audio engineering, but can't get a job in Music City because the economy is in the toilet, big studios are dying down on Sixteenth Avenue, and the old white men who run that street don't cotton to girls in the workplace no-how unless they're answering phones or fetching coffee.

My barista did brush up against a studio job when she interned at a label. That job turned out to be mostly about delivering Martina MacBride's groceries.

I think the world of country music works this way from top to bottom. (It also eats its young. See: Steve Earle).

Here are some girl singers turned out and down by the Nashville bigwig studios.

Shelby Lynne
kd lang
Mandy Barnett

I've stirred my last batch of gravy

The Big Mac declares independence Southern Baptist-style.

She's on all our prayer lists
She's on all our hearts
As for the Easter cantata
We don't know who'll sing her part