For the first time since they've been counting, more American households have kittens than have puppies.

And it's because dog ownership is declining, WaPo reports.

The number of American households with dogs has dropped 5 percent since 2019, while cat ownership has held relatively steady. Dogs still dominate America — roughly 71 million households have dogs compared with 53 million that own cats — but that is changing quickly...

Why the change?  

The notion of the "death triad" is, I think, disrespectful, so I mostly refrain from pointing them out.

 But here we have a Death Triad of Disgrace, so disrespect is already in the cards:

1. Dennis Hastert, whose death was noted in this post yesterday morning. He rose to Speaker of the House and was ruined by his admission that, when he was a high school wrestling coach, he had sexually abused a young boy.

2. "Jim Bakker, Television Preacher Felled by Sex and Financial Scandals, Dies at 86" (NYT): "In the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye Bakker, rode to fame and riches preaching the gospel of prosperity, the notion that those who embraced genuine Christian faith would reap material rewards....The Bakkers’ world came tumbling down in 1987 with a revelation that in 1980, when he was 40, he had sex with a 21-year-old secretary in his Assemblies of God ministry. The woman, Jessica Hahn, claimed she had been raped...."

3. "Jeffrey Archer, Novelist Whose Real Life Rivaled His Thrillers, Dies at 86/In a life of achievement and disgrace, he wrote best-selling novels with themes he knew intimately: ambition, self-promotion, misbehavior and scandal" (NYT): "A political Houdini, he survived many vicissitudes, including a perjury conviction in 2001, when he was found guilty of creating false diaries and concocting a story to win a trial over whether he had slept with a prostitute to whom he paid hush money."

"We have to understand... that these violent hierarchies, these systems, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, economic exploitation, have colonized our own minds."

"... especially for the white educators..."

James Talarico telling White teachers on a zoom call that "white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy have colonized their minds"…

This guy is not a moderate.
He’s full woke 1.0 insanity. pic.twitter.com/FxSTb7opT2

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) October 5, 2026

I'd like to see him asked why he used this jargon and if he was sincere at the time and would he stand by it now. Perhaps he can restate language like "violent hierarchies" and "colonized minds" in a way that mainstream Texan voters can relate to. Ask him!

I asked Grok to write Talarico's answer to my question and got this: "I taught in a poor school where the kids were mostly not white. A lot of us who grew up middle-class, including me, walked in with assumptions that didn’t match what those students were dealing with—family stress, neighborhood crime, schools funded by local property taxes that leave the poorest districts behind. If you’re going to help those kids, you have to notice your own blind spots instead of pretending the system is already fair. That’s all I was trying to say.”

Sunrise.

"Magical and electric."

Brewers react to Jackson Chourio’s Game 2 walk-off hit! Unforgettable. https://t.co/S8spy7KaL4

— Sophia Minnaert (@SophiaMinnaert) October 5, 2026

And here's what he — Sal Frelick — did, scoring the winning run:

"Indeed, there’s an active scientific debate over whether newborns possess consciousness."

"Resolving it could help solve one of science’s most stubborn mysteries: what consciousness is, how it emerges and how we can know if another being possesses it.... Amid all the uncertainty, there’s one fact that everyone can agree on. In each of our lives, there was a time when our brains were still too rudimentary to support consciousness, and there was a time when that changed. Even if we can’t say when babies gain consciousness, Dr. Austin said, “one thing we can be certain of is that they will become conscious.”

From "Are Babies Conscious?" (NYT).

From the comments over there: "My first memory is waking up in my crib when I was 3 years old. I recognized everything around me and it all felt familiar but I had no specific memory of anything. In reflecting upon this as I grew older I felt like this was the moment I became conscious."

Also there's this quote from Charles Darwin: "There is no trace of consciousness in very young children."

"The towering irony of Mr. Hastert’s fall was that his rise to high legislative office was cleared by his apparent moral rectitude amid a morass of sex scandals in late 1990s Washington."

From "Dennis Hastert, ex-House speaker whose sex abuse admission upended legacy, dies at 84/The Illinois Republican helped spearhead President George W. Bush’s legislative agenda before his career ended in disgrace" (WaPo)(gift link).

Small Boulder the size of a large Boulder.

On the NYT front page right now:

It's the first Monday in October, and the Supreme Court is back.

The front-page teaser goes here: "A Supreme Court Battle Over Climate Change Begins/The justices are about to hear a lawsuit that could determine whether the oil industry faces billions of dollars in liability for damages caused by global warming."

Nearly a decade ago, the outdoorsy, liberal enclave of Boulder, Colo., sued two oil companies over their role in climate change.... A win for Boulder would likely clear the way for dozens of similar lawsuits nationwide aiming to extract billions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry to fight global warming....

ADDED: The NYT quotes lawprof Todd J. Zywicki: "What this case is about is a bunch of one-percenter hippies in Boulder County who want to tell the rest of us how we have to live." 

"Recently, Liam and his wife accompanied the boys’ Little League team to a Major League Baseball game... and the team got rowdy and disruptive during the game."

"'Not violent, but that loud posturing, trying to assert dominance, that kids do,' Liam explains. 'The boys were in a group initiation to see how far they could push things. The coach wasn’t doing anything to stop it. Without boundaries, without anyone stepping up, it would have devolved.' Liam and his wife warned their sons that they needed to calm down, but they couldn’t control the whole group. 'On the way home, my wife asked the kids if they knew what hazing was,' says Liam. 'So we talked about that.'... [He] recalls that when he was applying to colleges, his parents had made a deal with him: They would pay his tuition in full on the condition that he not join a frat. 'My dad framed it as that whole culture was outside of the values I’d been raised with,' he says."

From an article in The Cut that has an unfortunate title: "What Are Fathers Telling Their Sons About Cornell?"

Are fathers supposed to talk about gang rape to little boys?! The photograph shows a man with 2 boys who look like they might be 3 and 4 years old. I'm seeing mockery on line.

But the article is making a good point that I think everyone basically agrees with: Parents should teach their children, from the earliest age, to respect others and not to be selfish monsters. The exact forms of monstrous behavior are not detailed. You don't tell the story of the Cornell orgy/rape. You read "Where the Wild Things Are" — things like that — and talk about what's going on there.

I prefer high-quality children's literature, but there are some really on-the-nose books that some people might choose: "C is for Consent," "Don’t Touch My Hair!," "Hands Off, Harry!" The list goes on and on:

Sunrise.

"Pandemonium in Milwaukee."

JACKSON CHOURIO WINS IT. PANDEMONIUM IN MILWAUKEE. https://t.co/WJ0muePo1D

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 4, 2026

"I don’t know about anyone else, but a table full of very distinguished people just told me that they HATE, immediately after a mandatory time change, going home at night – and it’s DARK."

"It’s depressing! One of the gentleman stated that, 'I just hate going home in darkness.'"

Writes Trump, who seems to believe Daylight Saving Time is a valuable political issue.

Who cares about the delicate feelings of the distinguished gentlemen arrayed around Trump's dining table?

Who were these guys? AI billionaires? I'm more concerned about children forced to get to school in the morning while it's still dark. Guys in their cars feeling melancholic... that's not a hot political concern.

And as long as I'm reacting to Trump's Truth Social account, there's this: "If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America, $5,000. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and I look forward to signing those checks!"

Just awful.

"To understand the religious dynamics of the Texas race, it’s important to absorb the true depths of the 'God gap' in American politics."

Writes David French, in "The ‘God Gap’ Is Narrowing in Texas" (NYT).

That gap isn’t just about white evangelicals (although it certainly is partly about them), and it’s one of the Democrats’ chief obstacles to obtaining a durable political majority. Any discussion of the God gap does have to begin with white evangelicals. Their numbers are vast (far more than twice as large as Black Protestants, the most loyal religious Democratic voters), and they vote in lock step. In 2024, white evangelicals voted for Trump by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. Trump lost all other voters by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent....

"I never liked that term, 'guy's guy.'"

Said Meade, reading the previous post, the one about the man who shot the rooster named Nixon.

That sounds like one of those sentences that makes me think I'm experiencing another bout of transient alexia.

What's wrong with the phrase "guy's guy"? I'd ask Meade but he's watching that video I sent him, the one with a guy named Larry listing a lot of things he's not going to do anymore now that he's 72.

Left to my own devices I went looking for "guy's guy" in my blog archive. I believe I've only used the phrase once: "Now, if everyone would please dial down all the criticism and let Obama get on with his un-self-conscious guy's guy agenda, it will all work out just fine."

That was in an October 26, 2009 post called  "Obama's White House boy's club." And I was using the phrase jokingly echoing something the NYT had written: 

"The [rooster] was named Nixon, after the former president, 'basically because he was a jerk' said his owner, Bill Leimgruber...."

I'm reading "The Chickens Came Home. So Did the Roosters. In Vermont, a single bird set off a feud over what, exactly, constitutes farm country, mirroring a battle dividing communities across America" (NYT). 

Last fall in Merrimack, N.H., a former town councilor infuriated by one bird spent months pressing for an ordinance with fines that climbed to $500, prompting one 40-year resident to ask: “We’re an agricultural town. If people moved here and now, all of a sudden, don’t want to listen to the noises of the deer, and the roosters, and the raccoons and the loons, why did they move here?”...

Because of the covid lockdown and because of the rising price of eggs, a lot of people were buying chicks, and some of those chicks grew up to be roosters. 

Fluky quirk of baseball deemed heavenly intervention.

"Ueck decided to put his hand on it, swat it down, so Chourio could catch it. Thanks Ueck." 😂 - Pat Murphy https://t.co/nYnasQhATv

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 4, 2026

A more down-to-earth look:

So I'm sitting almost right on the line in the pressbox, my initial thought was that Ty France's ball was going to either hook foul or if it stayed in play it was gonna be caught near foul territory. Balls hit at 49 degrees or higher usually don't leave the yard. Trevor Megill said postgame he thought it was going foul, Jackson Chourio thought he had a shot at it off the bat.

— Russell Dorsey (@Russ_Dorsey1) October 4, 2026