Everything I learned about war I learned from my cats. (Joao Silva, NYT)
A snip:
But that lay ahead when I arrived at the Baghdad airport one recent summer day with the crate carrying the four cats. Getting them that far had been a saga, finding Iraqi health officials ready to issue and counterstamp fit-to-travel documents; negotiating the 12 hazardous miles to the airport through an obstacle course of checkpoints where soldiers and policemen have been trained to destroy on sight any “suspicious package”; and persuading wary airline personnel to clear the cat crate for loading.
The process took hours, and left me exhausted, sitting on the terminal’s marble floor beside the cats, as the time for boarding approached.
All about was hubbub, with hundreds of angry, fearful Iraqis struggling to secure their own passage out. The cats seemed terrified, so I fell once more into my anthropomorphic mode, offering them a quiet discourse on what lay ahead — the 3,000-mile air journey, detention in the quarantine center and, ultimately, liberation into a green and pleasant land where they would be full citizens, never again wanting for shelter, warmth and food.
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Speaking of cats, a tiger once believed to be extinct in the wild in China has been spotted.
I don't mean the tiger is spotted instead of striped, but that it has been seen for the first time in more than twenty years.
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Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier 60 years ago.
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Since NONE of the area surrounding Lake Tahoe, whether in the north or in the south, in the east or in the west, EVER should have been allowed to have been developed in the first place, it's no surprise that even the allegedly "blue-collar" South Lake Tahoe is being turned into Incline Village South.
Most of the homes in the south shore area are now vacation homes, according to an article sometime ago in the San Francisco Chronicle (about 60 percent).
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