Another one bites the sand

Yesterday was a weird news day.

First of all, Muammar El-Qaddafi was reported killed by Libyan rebels who’ve had a remarkable run over the past few months. If true, the world’s a better place for him being out of it, although I’m not sanguine about democracy setting in to a country that has no experience of it.

And it’s appropriate that a dictator who styled himself the über-revolutionary was destroyed by the Arab Spring uprising. Turns out he was a glory that Libya, the Arab nation, the Islalamic nation, Africa and the whole wide world actually could forgo.

But revolutionaries who’ve had an even longer run than the Libyans announced yesterday that they’re renouncing violence. ETA, the Basque separatist/independence movement has called a halt to its campaign of bombings and assassinations that has run for just about the length of time Qaddafi was in power.

They’re going to give peace a chance.

Now, if only we could get Congress to lay down its arms and work together.

Cat burglary, Brit-style

Alright, it’s a few weeks old, but it makes a bit of a change from Republican whack-job tax “plans”, riots in Greece and mega-banks getting risibly low “penalties” for committing massive long-term fraud on their depositors, their investors and the US taxpayers.

The estranged wife of a British Lib-Dem MP has been convicted of catnapping.

No, no—not sneaking a snooze on the job. Feloniously ferreting a feline away from the home of her presumably-soon-to-be-ex-husband’s mistress.

Christine Hemming, 53, doesn’t deny doing it—which would be difficult, as she was caught with the cat on CCTV. She just denies having any clue as to why she would have done it.

I suppose that’s the British equivalent of the “by reason of mental defect or disease” defense. She claims she tried stuffing the kitten, named Beauty, under the fence of a neighbor’s yard—whether in an attempt to restore it to its human or to just ditch the evidence she doesn’t say. But of course, you can’t expect a cat to cooperate and no one’s seen Beauty since then.

I don’t know whether this is a felony or misdemeanor; nor do I know when she’ll be sentenced.

What I really find disturbing is that Beauty has a male littermate, and that John Hemming, MP, named the poor bugger Twinkle.

Now, there’s the real high crime.

Seriously, Netanyahu?

You don’t think this is going to come back to bite you in the butt? 1027 times?

Exercise non-routine

I'm not sure how I feel about this; especially about the claim to have burnt 2000 calories in this short a time.

But I share it anyway.

Express bus to India

You have to understand that Silicon Valley is like Really New Delhi; the South Asian population in this area is upwards of 250K, and a UC Berkeley report indicates that one out of three engineers here is from the Sub-Continent.

Where I am in Sunnyvale, you can’t swing a cat-toy without hitting an Indian restaurant, sari shop or jewelry store. (I need to find out what it is about the jewelry.) And in future I’ll post pix of what I discover around here.

Meantime, I was headed home on El Camino Real when I saw this on the back of the #522 bus, the one running from Eastridge in San José to Palo Alto—right down the backbone of the Valley.

Definitely not in Kansas any more.