Tuesday 3.33: A Cornucopia

We’re three days into this week and it’s already a doozy, so today’s installment returns to a format I used briefly in Tuesday Series 2. From a production standpoint, it allows me to do several things at once and still send something, because I don’t need to maintain a consistent logical or rhetorical thread through the newsletter (not that that’s ever really the case anyway), and from an audience standpoint, I mean, nobody ever expressly disliked the approach, so.

Famous Cat

Orangey rose to fame in the 1951 film Rhubarb. Directed by the guy who created Mr. Ed, Rhubarb is about a cat who inherits a fortune, but after a cursory reading of the film’s Wikipedia entry, it’s unclear whether Orangey plays the titular cat. Either way, he earned a PATSY, which apparently is like an Oscar for animals, for both his role in that film and as the iconic “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Best of all, Orangey, though trained and a capable cat actor, was kind of a jerk. He was known to bite and scratch actors, and would often run away, halting production until he was found.

I’d put a Christian Bale joke in here, but I’m tired.

Orangey died of natural causes, and he’s buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, among people. I support this practice, and it occurs to me that perhaps it should be wider spread. I know it goes against at least Catholic canon, but eternal rest would be so much more pleasant among the beasts.

Running

For anyone who didn’t catch it earlier, I decided to run the distance from my apartment to the Boston Marathon finish line (219 miles) between October and Christmas, and I’m donating $1 per mile to Running Strong for American Indian Youth. As of today, I’ve passed 150 miles, which puts me somewhere around Bridgeport, Conn.

Robot

Runner and cool-name-haver Jordan Marie Brings Three White Horses Daniel shared this neat SMS bot that, if you text it your ZIP code, will tell you what indigenous land you’re on. Give it a try: 907-312-5085. Over in Flatbush, I’m on Canarsie and Munsee Lenape land. My parents are on Pawtucket land.

Nap

Quotation

As an intangible, individualistic, yet strictly white-collar trait, innovation reframes the cruel fortunes of an unequal global economy as the logical products of a creative, visionary brilliance.

-John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism

Longing

I think I’ve finally reached the stage of the pandemic where I miss this stupid shit:

Of course, Covid has taken way more substantive and irreplaceable experiences from all of us, but daydreaming this morning, I had the thought that I’d give up a lot to spend an evening drinking cheap beer in some cramped, sweaty place, listening to nonsense like this. I miss the stupid chaos of New York. I miss baseball games and the smell of people and the feeling of a moving crowd. It took awhile, because many aspects of these things are unpleasant, but while I know one day I’ll leave New York for space and quiet and green-ness, there’s a reason I moved here in the first place, and I miss the version of New York I’ve gotten to know.

Happy Birthday

Today is Margaret Atwood’s birthday. Here’s one of her grim poems, published in the Winter 1990 issue of the Paris Review.

Frogless

The sore trees cast their leaves
too early. Each twig pinching
shut like a jabbed clam.
Soon there will be a hot gauze of snow
searing the roots.

Booze in the spring runoff,
pure antifreeze;
the stream worms drunk and burning.
Tadpoles wrecked in the puddles.

Here comes an eel with a dead eye
grown from its cheek.
Would you cook it?
You would if.

The people eat sick fish
because there are no others.
Then they get born wrong.

This is not sport, sir.
This is not good weather.
This is not blue and green.

This is home.
Travel anywhere in a year, five years,
and you’ll end up here.

Steve Allen

In closing, my extensive Googling of the aforementioned Orangey the cat produced this story about Steve Allen:

When he was 78, Allen was in a minor car accident in which his ribs were broken and his heart was pierced when another motorist backed into his car. He didn’t realize he was hurt, got out amiably and said to the guy, “The things people will do to get my autograph…”

He died of his injuries later that day, napping at his son’s house, and is buried in an unmarked grave in Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

I don’t know much about Steve Allen, but he now strikes me as a guy who had it figured out.