"Hillary Clinton’s laugh was criticized, and also called weird. There was a suggestion that it made her seem inauthentic..."

"... which was a bizarre point, since genuine laughter is, if not involuntary, then very hard to fake. Lenny Bruce once dared a crowd to try it four times in an hour. Calling women overly emotional or hysterical is a sexist trope, and there’s a long history of positioning laughter in opposition to reason. Plato warned against a love of laughter, suggesting it indicates a loss of control. Ever alert to the theater of power, Trump rarely laughs... ...."

Writes Jason Zinoman, in "Kamala Harris’s Laugh Is a Campaign Issue. Our Comedy Critic Weighs in. The Trump campaign sees Harris’s laugh as a vulnerability to exploit. But far from a liability, it is one of her most effective weapons" (NYT).

"What does a laugh say about a person? That he or she is human. In a divided country, it’s something we all do and enjoy. And as anyone who has hung out with friends late into the night knows, it’s contagious. That’s a powerful political tool. As the poet Ella Wilcox wrote, 'Laugh and the world laughs with you.'"

Ella Wilcox? She started that? Oh!

I am laughing at the surprise encounter with what looks like the childless cat lady J.D. Vance was talking about.

Here's the poem, "Solitude":

"During the second week of Lent, on 'Cat Wednesday,' cats were tossed to their deaths out of the belfry tower onto the town square below."

"At the time, the animals were seen as a symbol of witchcraft and evil, so their deaths were celebrated. The last live cat was thrown in 1817, but Ieper (also called Ypres in French) developed Kattenstoet in 1937, a tradition to both acknowledge the city’s gruesome history and celebrate cats. The parade, which was held on Sunday, May 12, is filled with elaborate floats, costumes and performances. Afterward, a person dressed as a jester tosses stuffed animal cats from the belfry, down to the onlookers below."

From "A City With a Medieval History of Killing Cats Now Celebrates Them/Cat lovers from around the world gathered for Kattenstoet, a cat parade in Iepers, Belgium" (NYT).

I expended my second-to-last free gift link of the month on that because there are some cool and amusing photographs of the place. And there are still 10 more days — and all that Trump-trial business still remaining! Too bad! Belgians twirling in cat costumes and tourists cavorting in cat ears beat out NYT reporters informing us, moment by moment, about whether Trump's eyes are open or shut.

When the JFK airport scanner revealed a cat inside a woman's luggage, the traveler said it wasn't his cat.

I'm reading "A real cat scan: furry friend in case found by airport scanner" (London Times).

"'An officer called and asked if I wanted to press charges,' the cat’s owner, named only as Alix, told the New York Post. Alix, 37, said the cat, named Smells, had been found in the luggage of her house guest and the official 'wanted to know if there was any reason he was trying to steal my cat and go to Florida.' She assured him that it must have been a mistake. 'Our cats really like to check out bags and boxes and apparently one of them climbed into his suitcase,' she said. 'It was just an accident.'"

ADDED: Here's the scanner photo. I can't believe the person who packed the luggage didn't know!

"Feels to me like living in some kind of Alice in Wonderland where you're up on the real world, then you fall down the rabbit hole and the president is the Cheshire cat asking you questions about crazy things that don't have any resemblance to the reality of anything that has to do with me."

Said Hunter Biden, deflecting questions about his foreign business dealings.



The relevant passage from "Alice in Wonderland" is this:

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.

‘Cheshire Puss,’ she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. ‘Come, it’s pleased so far,’ thought Alice, and she went on. ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

The questions begin with Alice, and it's a sensible question. She gets a sensible answer:

"I never fathomed I’d be where I’m at right now – 30 and in a cat custody battle."

Said Rae Bees, who wrote this Facebook post in the voice of her escaped cat Reggie:

i’m Reggie and i’m lost (again). i don’t have a collar. i coulda been catnapped. i will escape again.

Bees adopted the cat from Feline Friends, and Feline Friends is where the person who found the cat brought it. The cat still had its Feline Friends chip, and when the agency traced down Bees and saw the Facebook post and other evidence that Bees had broke her promise to keep the cat indoors, it declined to release the cat to Bees.

Key legal point:

This month, an Illinois law took effect that allows judges to consider the “best interest” of pets for custody in divorce cases rather than treating them as property.

I would guess that translates into the person with the most money gets the pet (or a pet becomes a useful bargain chip in a dispute where somebody doesn't want the pet all that much), but I can see why lawyers wanted that law passed. Anyway, Feline Friends is putting money into litigation over one cat (rather than taking more care of more other cats) because it wants the power to impose conditions — that is, to have enforceable contracts with the people who adopt cats.

“He wasn’t allowed outside. He was just a Houdini — he would escape,” said Bees, who acknowledges Reggie escaped several times a week. The Logan Square artist goes by Bees but filed the lawsuit under her legal name Rachael Siciliano.

Bees’ attorneys dispute that there was ever a legal contract. “This is not an enforceable contract,” said her attorney, Mariana Karampelas, who said nothing in the document discloses that the cat could be taken away. “It's a list of aspirations,” said Richard Gonzalez, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law who is working on the case pro bono.

So Bees isn't her real name, and a law professor takes the case pro bono. All right.

I see "Animal Law Clinics Become Pet Projects at Law Schools" (Texas Lawyer):

South Texas, the first law school in the Lone Star State to create an animal law clinic, joins Lewis & Clark Law School, University at Buffalo School of Law and Michigan State University College of Law in providing students the chance to learn animal law by representing real (human) clients.

“It’s largely driven by students—the millennials—and the things that concern them, the issues they feel passionately about,” said Catherine Greene Burnett, vice president, associate dean and professor at South Texas....

“Having more attorneys with this experience will lead to better legal protections for animals. When schools offer animal law courses and clinics, students graduate knowing that animal law is a serious social justice issue,” said [Kelly Levenda, student programs attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a California-based nonprofit law firm that advocates for greater legal protections for animals].

How would you resolve Bees v. Feline Friends?

FF must give Bees her cat.

FF must release the cat to Bees on condition that she's sticking to the indoor-only requirement.

FF can keep the cat and follow its own procedures for protecting and caring for it.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

Should Netflix be shaming/mocking/stalking its own customers like this?

To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 11, 2017

I wouldn't assume Netflix is using actual information about its customers. It's just a jaunty reminder that you can get Christmas movies on Netflix, using the trope that Netflix — like Santa Claus — sees what you're doing and judges you.

And it worked really well. Look at all the re-tweets. And it got the Washington Post to write an article, "What to know about ‘A Christmas Prince,’ the Netflix movie that sparked a controversy."

The response [to the tweet] was massive (retweeted about 110,000 times so far) and alternated between amused and scornful: Wow, Netflix, way to shame your own viewers for watching a movie that you commissioned and featured and promoted on your streaming service. Also, it’s a creepy reminder that this company has access to loads of personal data about all of your viewing habits, and probably has drawn some other intriguing conclusions. And it might tweet about them.

Anyway, the “creepy tweet” kerfuffle has been in the news this week, so for those of you who are confused about this thing called “A Christmas Prince” that sparked such a controversy, here’s everything you need to know about the movie. Spoilers abound.

I don't need to know anything about "A Christmas Prince," so I go back to the thing that pointed me to this "kerfuffle" in the first place, a humor riff — linked at Instapundit — "The Sad People Who Watched ‘A Christmas Prince’ 18 Days In A Row Craft A Statement/We've done nothing wrong. But we do need to lay down a marker that watching a good, clean holiday romance every single day of the Christmas season is just good, clean fun" by Mary Kathrine Ham. Sample:

Lindsay: What’s the implication, here, that we’re all lonely cat ladies just because we want to watch a spunky reporter investigate a playboy prince and get herself entangled in some truly royal trouble a couple dozen times??

Martin: I am not a girl or a lady, cat or otherwise. I know I’m outnumbered, here, but really....

Angelica: We do have a lot of cats, to be honest....

Oh! Cats again. Time to reread "Cat Person" for the 3rd going on 18th day in a row:

She learned that Robert had two cats, named Mu and Yan, and together they invented a complicated scenario in which her childhood cat, Pita, would send flirtatious texts to Yan, but whenever Pita talked to Mu she was formal and cold, because she was jealous of Mu’s relationship with Yan....

Before he got out of the car, he said, darkly, like a warning, “Just so you know, I have cats.”

“I know,” she said. “We texted about them, remember?”

Cats take on so much of the blame for what's wrong with us humans. That is, we project our shame onto cats. The cats don't care.

More importantly, what would cats watch on Netflix 18 days in a row?

A man shoots a feral cat that was stalking endangered shore birds.

And he is on trial now, facing 2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

[James M.] Stevenson, 54, does not deny using a .22-caliber rifle fitted with a scope to kill the cat, which lived under the San Luis Pass toll bridge, linking Galveston to the mainland. He also admits killing many other cats on his own property, where he operates a bed and breakfast for some of the estimated 500,000 birders who come to the island every year.

In her opening statement, Paige L. Santell, a Galveston County assistant district attorney, told the jury of eight women and four men that Mr. Stevenson “shot that animal in cold blood” and that the cat died a slow and painful death “gurgling on its own blood.”

She said that the cat had a name, Mama Cat, and that though the cat lived under a toll bridge, she was fed and cared for by a toll collector, John Newland. He is expected to testify.

Whether the cat was feral is the crucial point in this case. Mr. Stevenson was indicted under a state law that prohibited killing a cat “belonging to another.”...

Ms. Santell argued that because Mr. Newland had named, fed and given the cat bedding and toys, the cat belonged to him and was not feral.

It seems to me that Newland is the greater menace, encouraging a nonnative predator in a delicate environment. The idea that this destructive behavior creates ownership is outrageous.

But Texas has moved in the other direction and has changed the law, so that in the future, it is a crime to kill any cat. What absurd sentimentalism about species! The birds are native and endangered. The cats are highly effective predators. And Stevenson has a productive business, which Newland was undermining.

This isn't about whether we love birds or cats more. The article portrays the trial as a charmingly colorful face-off between bird lovers and cat lovers and ends with the punchline "But you see, I’m a dog person... If he had shot a dog, then I’d be more upset."

This is a case about the ecological balance, and a man could be deprived of his liberty because he tried protect the environment (and his business that depended on it).

ADDED: A propos of the stalking cat, here's a stalking man coming in through the cat door. And meeting death. (Via James Taranto, who's mixing up the Turtles and the Lovin' Spoonful.)