Some news can drive a critter to drink.
I REALLY JUST READ THIS:
“DELAY CHIEF OF STAFF JOINING TIME WARNER”
“Time Warner is tapping a tapped-in Republican to help make its various regulatory cases in Washington. Tim Berry, chief of staff to House Majority Leader Tom Delay, is exiting to become a lobbyist for Time Warner.” MediaChannel.org
HE REALLY JUST SAID THIS:
“In an amazing demonstration of accountability so rare in public life, the president has admitted responsibility for … Katrina …” — Chris Matthews, the two-headed host of SOFTBALL on MSNBC
PHOTO ABOVE: Courtesy of a wildlife rehabber on the Yahoo Raccoons list. Visit a raccoon FAQ, and a wonderful, concise wildlife FAQ site from a rehabber on Vancouver Island, B.C., Canada.
I REALLY JUST SAW THIS:
ABOVE RIGHT: The Yahoo front-page top news stories. Here’s the story: “Neighbors Say Kids Found in Cages Polite.” (My daughter spotted that one.)
O P E N T H R E A D
The spouse forgot to fill the ice cube trays…guess I’ll check Hell and see if they can spare a few…
Guess Bush realized that it’s not like he can run for re-election…
[cuuuute photo, BTW…]
yes, cuuuuuuuuute…. a smaller version of the teenage raccoons who visit me every night with their mom. They love the “swimming pool” — a big rectanuglar plastic tub — filled with water, in which I drop lots of grapes and those small Italian plums.
They sit in the water. They play with it. They fight with each other over getting in the water. They bob for the fruit.
Things I’ve noticed … they don’t like the skin of the plums. They leave bits of skin all over the yard, which I pick up in the mornings and toss towards the back road so the crows can have the skins.
And they don’t like peaches! WTF! They have geographically based diets — that’s what the rehabber on Vancouver Island told me. They will only eat foods common to their areas. A raccoon in the South will eat sweet potatoes but not one up north here. Which is why, after someone recommended I bake sweet potatoes for the raccoons, they’d have none of them, and I threw them out for the birds.
I think I saw one smoking a joint one night and then downing some red wine. 🙂
Oh, what a precious little punkin that raccoon is! I currently have 3 wild juveniles about the size of a smallish cat that visit every night. They eat the leftover catfood from the day crew (my cats) and I know I should not let my cats eat from the same bowls. Aw heck, it takes 5 extra minutes to scrub the bowls in the morning. They are so much fun to watch… feet in the water, dunking catfood, playing. They are a riot. Great pic, Susan.
Put out some grapes for them. They’ll love you forever more….
I leave the grapes on the stems, and they can easily pick it up with their dextrous “hands.”
Peanut butter sandwiches too .. although the mom and babies don’t go for peanut butter. Just the old lame raccoon who comes by too.
I can attest to the fact they like grapes 🙂
and they totally dig dogfood too… grrr. LOL
Pssst I’ve seen them eat popcorn, too. But only once and I think it was a teenager… they’ll eat anything 😀 (JK)
Know what you mean about cleaning … they get into my cat’s food bowls that i put in his big outdoor cage. So I just wash them with hot water, soap, and a bit of bleach …
I also put an old table cloth and sheet on top of my cat’s cage in the daytime so he doesn’t get sunburned.
They like to drag that off the cage at night, and I find the tablecloth in the oddest places.
We also put out these hideous stuffed toys my mom gave me that she’d gotten for giving a donation to the Diabetes Society. They LOVE those stuffed toys! We find the toys in the trees, under shrubs, and they’re very, very dirty (of course).
We’ve been leaving out a water bowl for the cat who has adopted the underneath part of my deck a few days of the week. Some asshat had tied packing tape around it’s belly and luckily it’s gone now. But he sticks near my place now… I know it’s a dude because he has these humongous hairy ones you can see when he runs away from you… Anyways he is doing very well and the hair is no longer matted in his mid section as before. In fact he now looks MUCH better… anyways
Been leaving him a water out front and we’ve noticed fairly large rocks in it. 🙂 Racoons will wash anything, man.
in the mail from tampopo for the hurricane survivors in the area!!
Wow — thank you so much, D.!!
She even enclosed $20 for me to pay for gas — there are ALL kinds of things in these boxes that will be of use to the families here in Austin!
Thank you again for your kindness — it is doing my heart good to take these donations out into the community!
xoxox
c.
WOWWWWWWWWWW! How exciting, Brinnaine … and won’t you have fun delivering those items.
Hugs, and thanks for what YOU are doing too.
Thanks, Susan — Ethan and i were so excited to take the backpack (stuffed full of Barney) to school today….I wish we could have seen the little girl’s face when she received it, but they are understandably trying to protect their privacy the best they can!
They’ll have to create a new word in the dictionary for how wonderful you are 🙂
DJ, you’re too kind — any kind of word that described me would have to include the raving bitch I can turn into on occasion as well!
😉
She is! I loved calling her home and having one of her little boys answer the phone … he was so sweet.
Ya’ll are going to swell my head all big and what!
Ethan is a great screener of calls — he always seems to know if it is someone I really want/need to talk to or a telemarketer!! When he was four, he approved an alignment for our car (silly silly person who called though she was talking to me!?!?) — we got the alignment free! heh!
😉
“In an amazing demonstration of accountability so rare in public life, the president has admitted responsibility for … Katrina …” — Chris Matthew
I told Kitty this and she went and hurled…
(((Brianne)))) Hooray for you and Tampopo!!
Susan, I heard from a Chef at some Sonoma resort-notorious… that their racoons LOVE bananas. 🙂 Some area had a problem with rabies. Problem was getting the coons to eat the medicine so they had all these brainiacs find out what coons like best… they did some sort of test and found that coons like banana flavor. So they air dropped all these banana flavored – med-filled biscuits over the area. No more rabies.
Of course, he could have been bullshitting me… 🙂 Cute pix 🙂
George W. Bush admits that blue is a color. In a related story, he also states that ice cream is better eaten when it’s chilled. Amazingly he admits that fire hurrrrrts yer fingers ifin youze plays widdit when youze aints supposed tuuuuu.
Keepers of Bush image lift stagecraft to new heights
This article was written by Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times in May of 2003. The version here, includes photographic examples, added by media educator Frank Baker. You may have seen this article when it first came out, but I think it would be timely to revisit it now, and spend some time discussing it this week as Bush prepares to make a speech from New Orleans on Thursday evening.
More here:
http://shadowbfa.blogspot.com/
Is anyone excited about the season premiere of HOUSE tonight?
Never seen it before but read an article and I’m intrigued. Is it on CBS or ABC? Without cable I can’t watch anything else, though supposedly the NBC affiliate is putting up a transmitter closer to my home.
It’s on FOX.
I’m taping the premiere of “Bones” on FOX for Darcy right now … an anthropologist at the Jeffersonian Museum .. works with the FBI on a case. Seems alright… not listening that much.
Hugh Laurie makes House great. The cases are sometimes quite interesting too.
I saw it, Susan. I’ve liked Hugh Laurie ever since he played Bertie Wooster. He is a hoot on House.
Bush regime “crime in progress”, heres PNAC chief and leading neocon gasbag Gary Schmitt disparaging the political process in Iraq as part of his pressing the neocon case for more war and violence there. (His op-ed in WaPo here.
His last 3 paragraphs sum up the neocon war agenda;
The neocon’s appetite for other peoples blood to be shed is indicitive of their own detachment from reality, their disdain for human life, and the cowardice of their academic arrogance. Schmidt’s irrationality and fractured logic epitomizes all these things.
Traitors all!
If anyone is interested. I am taping it, will just watch the section he is on. Otherwise it is just too much. Show is on now, but hubby says he is not on yet.
Was he already on? I just switched the promo said something about finding registered sex offenders who escaped from the flood …
Good interview. I don’t know if they repeat the show. He was kind of quiet, but said it was time to tell the truth, did not back down.
Pointed out that now reports say Blanco did everything she could.
He shrugged off Bush’s apology like it wasn’t even important. He said he did not think Bush was racist, but that his actions caused things to happen that affected minorities.
He is on, of all shows, The View on ABC on Thursday. I can not wrap my head around his being on there, but I bet it will be interesting.
This is a good interview!
And he is just on with Combs … not that nutsack Hannity.
I confess to a perhaps unreasonable fear of raccoons. They’re cute and all, but there was this time I was chased down the road by a pack led by a monster raccoon as big as a dog. And another time eating dinner at a twilit campsite we were swarmed by a family led by a one-eyed old coot who gathered below my toddler daughter’s legs dangling under the table. They wouldn’t leave and we had to flee to eat dinner in the car. A raccoon in town tore my cat’s neck artery and it was spurting blood everywhere. And then there was the raccoon taking a shower outside my bedroom window. It sneered at me! It did!
I had a big one messing with one of our cats one night outside the back door. I opened the door to save the cat and took a step towards him and yelled as I stomped my foot down. Little freak didn’t even flinch. In my astonishment I could have sworn he stood up and cocked his right while indicating with his left to bring it on!
I looked at the cat…the cat looked at me…and we both beat it inside! LOL
My limited experience tells me that they only become more audacious — not aggressive, but daring — when they are truly hungry.
Toss them — with a good swing of your arm — some food, and they ‘ll run right to where the food lands, and won’t bother you further.
My neighbor tells me that Valerie Pi., the mom with three teenagers, came up to his door at 400am and scratched on his door … he’s up at that hour, and she seemed to know that. He threw out some bread, with peanut butter on it, for her and her teens, and she bothered him no further.
I don’t want my nightly visitors coming close to my door — for a lot of reasons (including their own safety in case they should come to trust people too much).
So I scatter their food — before nightfall — around the yard, especially the back part near a big hedge. Most of their food, I put out at least 20 yards or more from my back door.
I also put some under bushes because there’s an older lame raccoon who is afraid of the younger ones, and I want to make sure there’s somewhere safe he can get to the food.. (Well, all I can do is hope he gets to the food, but scattering it under several different big shrubs increases his odds.)
I meant to type Valerie P… she’s named in honor of the CIA agent 🙂
P.S. Dog food is the best, most nutritious thing you can give them. All the rehabbers advise against cat food, but if I have nothing else, I give them that because it at least has protein in it.
A rehabber on the racoon list just posted this statement, which I find unbearably painful to read and utterly true: