Interim, or, The Obvious

The punctuation in the title of this post is dedicated to my cataloging students.

Last night I dreamt that I was walking around Brooklyn, and kept tripping over writers I knew of who were hipsters. All of them were in conversation with someone about how much they hated hipsters.

I went downstairs, and found my cat staring intently at the gap under my stove. He wasn't even interested in his breakfast. He was rewarded about a half an hour later when he came marching into the living room with a mouse hanging out of his mouth, still alive. He slammed it around like one of those criminals you see brought in for questioning by the tough detective in the movies. I managed to pick up the mouse with a rag, and put him outside. He stood up, shook himself, and then promptly walked into a railroad tie that has a bee's nest in it. Adds to my theory that mice as a group should win a Darwin Award.

While looking through RSS feeds, I saw the following article on vacations. Basically--the idea is that you are happier on vacation than you are at work. I rate the usefulness of this study right up there with last year's study of Santa Claus's health and the effects of HDTV on octopi. They don't even consider variables--such as vacations involving annoying friends, spouses, or relatives. I've been on a few of those kinds of vacations, and work never looked so good. In general, though, these are the kinds of explorations that make you wonder how much spare time and money these newspapers have.

And speaking of overpaid psychologists--I saw this article on Fark about the murder trial of a Manitoba man. A psychologist testified, saying he might have been motivated by "rage". Really? I would have thought anything but that. I've never heard of a murder motivated by rage. Oh wait...

Finally, to round out the conglomerate of the blindlingly obvious, here is an article on "manners that time forgot". How much time has elapsed since we forgot, if you're including such things as Internet flame wars and not answering your mobile phone while out with a friend? But memories are short-term these days as well, so maybe the "time" part is relative. And civility is hard to come by these days. But that doesn't make it any less sad that someone wrote this article.

Anyhow--sorry for being away for more than a week. I'll try not to do it again.