"Cozy, whimsical novels — often featuring magical cats — that have long been popular in Japan and Korea are taking off globally."

I'm reading "In Tumultuous Times, Readers Turn to 'Healing Fiction'... Fans say they offer comfort during a chaotic time" (NYT).

[Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s series, “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,”] — set in a magical cafe in Tokyo where customers can travel back in time while their coffee cools — centers on ordinary people struggling with loss and regret who wish they could change the past....

Recent releases of cozy Japanese novels include Mai Mochizuki’s “The Full Moon Coffee Shop,” set in a magical coffee shop run by talking cats.... [There's also] “The Travelling Cat Chronicles,”.... “The Goodbye Cat,” and... “We’ll Prescribe You a Cat,” [and] “We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat”....

Cats are such a staple in healing fiction that Kawaguchi’s publishers in the United States and Britain added a fluffy brown cat to the covers of “Before the Coffee Gets Cold,” even though, in a break from tradition, cats are not central to his novels....

No mention of Trump (or Vance) in this article, published yesterday, but it's featured at the top of the home page like this... 

... so it's pretty obvious that the NYT is offering this Japanese fantasy material as self-care for its readers suffering from the Democratic Party's blistering defeat. The election that's come to such a bad ending for them featured cats — Trump said "They're eating the cats" and Vance had said "childless cat ladies." So maybe cat offers some charming help for the suffering Trump haters, some balance for that awful squirrel that controlled the American election from the afterlife (as depicted charmingly in a cool fantasy novel to be counted among my unwritten books).

And, yes, I see the headlines on the left-hand side of the page. They're really important, but I'm not blogging in order of importance.

ADDED: I love the framing of Donald Trump inside the coils of barbed wire. It's all that's left of the dream of imprisoning him.

Republicans pounce... on Peanut.

I'm reading "How the Death of a Celebrity Squirrel Became a Republican Rallying Cry/After P’Nut and a raccoon named Fred were taken by wildlife agents and euthanized, Donald Trump and local candidates accused New York Democrats of 'state overreach'" (NYT).

In the frantic last days of an election when candidates are scrabbling for any edge, the death of P’Nut (who also went by Peanut) has been pounced on by some Republicans as something of a fur-covered November surprise.... 

People seem to think this squirrel story is going to get Trump elected.

You've seen this, no doubt: "Peanut the Squirrel, beloved pet and internet sensation, euthanized after being seized by NY state" (NY Post).

On Wednesday, Peanut, and Fred the racoon [sic], were seized by the Department of Environmental Conservation after multiple anonymous complaints about wild animals living in the Longo house.... In a statement to The Post on Wednesday, the DEC said that they were responding to complaints of a rabies vector species that was in the home, namely, Fred the raccoon.

I don't know what happened to Fred. I guess he wasn't Instagram-famous. But the killing of Peanut is becoming a bigger election-adjacent animal story that the dogs and cats that were or were not eaten in Springfield. Elon is seeing to that...

Tiny travel: going for a walk.

I'm reading "How to Make Your Walk a 'Microadventure'/Start small, look up and let your nose guide you" by Jancee Dunn (NYT).  

I like this topic as a contrast to yesterday's inquiry into the philosophy and psychology of overseas travel, that is, moving about the face of the Earth on a grand scale. The alternative isn't to remain stoically immobile, pent up at home, but to move within a smaller scale in your locality. You have not yet seen what is there. You have not seen it every day of the year, every time of the day. Enlarge your powers to go small. There is infinite smallness.

"Don’t whinge, don’t poke, don’t pick the scab of Time. / How long we’ve got, the loving gods won’t say."

Wrote Horace in Ode 11, Book 1, as liberally translated by James Parker in "An Ode to Writing Odes/When the universe gives you a gift, send a thank-you note" (The Atlantic). Parker writes a feature in The Atlantic called "The Odes."

In his ode to odes, he writes about his project:

[O]de-writing is a two-way street. The universe will disclose itself to you, it will give you occasions for odes, it will blaze with interest and appreciability, but you’ve got to be ode-ready.... Respond to the essence with your essence... [I]t gets results. Squirrels have treated me differently since I wrote an ode to squirrels: They give me the nod, those little fiends. And I see odes everywhere now. I see them boiling up from the ground where my dog squats to do his business. I see them poking down through the clouds in fingers of divine light. Your odes, too—can you see them?

From the above-linked ode to squirrels:

The best 6 TikToks for right now, I sincerely believe.

1. Find someone who matches your energy.

2. How to photograph a stranger.

3. What does the squirrel say?

4. A seagull and his meatballs.

5. We need a GPS voice for the sensitive souls.

6. The ginger Christmas countertenor.

I've handpicked 7 TikToks. Let me know what you like best.

1. A scary tower (in Sri Lanka).

2. Nipa palm fruit.

3. Preschool Trump calls "fake news" on the teacher's announcement of "last day of school."

4. Life inside the Arctic Circle — sunlight in the middle of the night.

5. The street artist encounters a drain.

6. "you're breaking up with me but there's a squirrel outside eating at the squirrel table."

7. Hey, everybody, hi... it's the toast rack.

"Take the serious side of Disney, the Confucian side of Disney. It’s in having taken an ethos, as he does in Perri, that squirrel film..."

"... where you have the values of courage and tenderness asserted in a way that everybody can understand. You have got an absolute genius there. You have got a greater correlation of nature than you have had since the time of Alexander the Great. Alexander gave orders to the fishermen that if they found out anything about fish that was interesting, a specific thing, they were to tell Aristotle. And with that correlation you got ichthyology to the scientific point where it stayed for two thousand years. And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for making contact is a tremendous challenge to literature. It throws up the questions of what needs to be done and what is superfluous."

Said Ezra Pound in an interview with The Paris Review in 1962.

I found that as a consequence of reading Larry McMurtry's "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond," pp. 30-31:

"We pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music [with] displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites."

"We are alarmed by the use of social media to really over-proliferate this violence in our communities. This is contributing to the violence that we are seeing all over the country. It one of the rivers we have to dam."

Said NY Mayor Eric Adams, quoted in "Eric Adams urges social media to ban ‘drill’ rap videos for promoting violence" (NY Post).

There are so many songs about violence, often sung from the point of view of a murderer. Indeed, the second one that sprang to my mind was from the sanctimonious promoter of censorship, Neil Young:

 

I don't know rap. Never heard of "drill rap" before just now. So I have no rap-focused opinion. But I oppose censorship, and I understand art well enough to make the distinction between the writer and the story told.

Down by the river I shot my baby/Down by the river/Dead, ooh/Shot her dead, ooh....

And what was the first song Althouse thought of? 

"A sign at a playground in Moraga, a 35-minute drive from San Francisco, advises parents that rattlesnakes are 'important members of the natural community' and to give the snakes 'respect.'"

"Across the Bay in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, an animal shelter has rescued a family of skunks from a construction hole, a chameleon from power lines and nursed back to health 100 baby squirrels that tumbled out of their nests after their trees got trimmed. With the exception of the occasional aggressive coyote, the animals that roam the hills and gullies of the Bay Area — turkeys, mountain lions, deer, bobcats, foxes and the rest of a veritable Noah’s Ark — find themselves on somewhat laissez-faire terms with the humans around them. Not so for the rampaging feral pigs...."

From "The Rampaging Pigs of the San Francisco Bay Area/A proposed California law would make it easier to hunt feral swine, the voracious “super invaders” that are the bane of some East Bay suburbs" (NYT).

"We don't talk about the commerce of squirrels."

Said Meade, just now, long into a conversation that began when he read the previous post, which was published 40 minutes ago.

When the Wisconsinite Reince Priebus was Chief of Staff, Trump would question him about the Wisconsin animal, the badger: "Are they mean to people? Or are they friendly creatures?"

According to "Trump repeatedly asked Reince Priebus if Wisconsin badgers are 'mean to people,' how they 'work,' and what they eat..."  at Business Insider, quoting from a new book, "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington."

Which makes me wonder: Can badgers swim in a swamp or do they sink?

The book is written by Daily Beast reporters Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, and that makes me wonder, does a daily beast sink in a swamp, and what would happen if a badger and a daily beast got in a fight? Would the badger tear the daily beast to shreds or would the daily beast skitter away and scribble scurrilous — squirrelous? — things?

From the book:

The president would also ask if Priebus had any photos of badgers he could show him, and if Priebus could carefully explain to him how badgers 'work' exactly.

He wanted Reince — resident White House badger historian, apparently — to explain to him Wisconsin's obsession with the animal, how the little critters function and behave, what kind of food they like, and how aggressive or deadly they could be when presented with perceived existential threats.

Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a 'personality' or if it was boring. What kind of damage could a badger to do a person with its flashy, sharp claws?

An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of healthcare coverage.

Placating?! Why would Priebus seek to placate in the middle of a hilarious conversation with the funniest man in the world?! What a missed opportunity! And wasn't Trump essentially talking about Priebus when he talked about badgers and whether they have a personality or are boring. I don't know what words Priebus said, but he answered quite clearly: We badgers are very boring and have no sense of humor or inclination toward building camaraderie and having fun. We won't banter and we don't fight. There's nothing like flashy sharp claws or flashy anything. Just dull dull dull, exactly what you New Yorkers expect.

Thanks a lot, Reince. Thanks for representing Wisconsin so well and then padding away to tattle to the daily beast.

Acorns are a superfood fad, and some people are worrying about squirrels starving.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Formed at Seoul's Yonsei University, the nascent Acorn Rangers group polices the bucolic campus, scaring off other humans from swiping squirrel food.... Strolling across campus, Ms. Park, a junior, sprung into action after spotting an acorn assailant: a woman in her early 60s, clutching a plastic bag stuffed with the tree nuts.

"The squirrels will starve!" barked Ms. Park, her voice booming so loudly that other acorn hunters -- human ones -- scurried away. The two argued for nearly an hour....

Over the past five years, there has been a fivefold increase in criminal charges for illegal gathering of "forest products," according to the Korea Forest Service. The few violators ever caught in the act face up to five years in prison or a maximum fine of roughly $40,000....

At Bukhansan National Park, a popular hiking destination in Seoul, a team of 200 employees and volunteers are now deployed to catch nut thieves. One year the confiscated acorns totaled nearly 450 pounds, such a large haul that they used a helicopter to redistribute the loot for the squirrels....

In Wisconsin state parks, the rule is: "[Y]ou may pick edible fruits, edible nuts, wild mushrooms, wild asparagus and watercress for personal consumption." Personal consumption. Not to start an acorn powder business.

We have a huge oak tree in our yard. We can get acorns so easily I wouldn't even use the word "forage."

At the Blonde Squirrel Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"I've been rethinking my spirit animal. I'm not sure how souls are transpositioned when we pass over to the great beyond."

"Perhaps because of my primate heritage I've always been partial to tree dwelling animals. Bonobos look like they have a pretty good deal, but they're a little too hyper for me. Althouse in a previous blog post really blew the lid ofd squirrels. Nothing much to recommend their manic, futile lives...... Of all tree dwelling creatures I'm most enamored of the sloth. They show an economy of effort in their struggles with existence, and their sad eyes demonstrate a zen awareness of the underlying futility of those struggles. I don't know how much say you're given in your choice for the next manifestation, but I would be comfortable with reincarnation as a sloth. Why wait? The way that that Kafka guy became a cockroach, I have evolved into a sloth. I don't cling to a tree branch, but I spend a lot of time on my posturpedic mattress. You can changer the position of the bed without ever leaving it. In some ways it's slothier than a tree branch."

Wrote William in last night's café. What I said about squirrels — in the first post of the day yesterday — was:

Squirrels don't have the brainpower to think of committing suicide. They don't even have the wits to think of not bothering to get food and just to waste away because what is the point of all this skittering around collecting nuts? They don't even think of scampering to another spot on the globe to see if the nuts taste different somewhere out there. And they don't think of throwing themselves off a high limb and ending it all. I have seen from my window squirrels falling from high in a tree. They hit the ground and immediately get up and run. Run run run. Get get get. It never stops until death snatches them. They don't go hurling themselves into the arms of death. It's just not a squirrel concept. I know. I read their mind from my vantage point here at the computer in front of the big window looking out on the trees.

The post had been about how to use all the mesclun from the garden, the potential to make a smoothie, the related need for a frozen banana "squirreled... away in the freezer," and a video of an squirrel — a Viennese squirrel — getting fed a banana. I only brought up suicide in the comments because Loren W Laurent, dragging in the demise of Anthony Bourdain, said:

The squirrel doesn't need to travel the world, compulsively looking for new tastes to satiate the hole in the self of wanting more.

Respect the squirrel....

For the squirrel survival is enough.

The kindness of a banana is magic.

Appreciate magic; don't expect it.

Don't become addicted to it.

Failed junkie.

What to do with the garden's overflowing supply of mesclun.

I had the idea of making smoothies... but what else goes in it? And would it be any good? Googling, I found, "Creative Ways to Use Tender Greens, Because Salad Fatigue Is Real" in Bon Appetit. The first idea is my first idea, the smoothie:

If you put kale in your smoothies, you'd better believe you can add tender greens, too. In fact, greens like mesclun and soft lettuces are sweeter than kale, and combine well with fruits and herbs. We'd steer clear of arugula, though—it can be assertively peppery.

That linked to "The Greenest Smoothie," which is one of those too-many-ingredients recipes. And there's one ingredient — frozen banana — that I think takes over a week of prep time if you haven't already ripened bananas and squirreled them away in the freezer. But I do come away with the idea that ginger and frozen pineapple could go in there. Matcha? Hmm. Why? I suspect Bon Appetit of needing to be special, not normal, and I just want normal.

I think I'm going to blend all that mesclun with some fresh orange juice, because orange juice is what I happen to have in the house. Isn't that the point of smoothies — using up your leftovers? Thought of like that, the blender seems like a garbage disposal. Noisy manufacturers of sludge.

The Olympic squirrel.

WATCH OUT SQUIRREL. pic.twitter.com/rtQ94MQeDj

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 24, 2018

What a life I live, brimming with memories!

"Isn't Thanksgiving more deserving of a naysayer? I mean, really, we eat dinner every day."

"Is it that for Thanksgiving--as opposed to Christmas--you are only asked to give thanks, not presents? To give thanks and eat dinner. But you must give thanks and eat dinner in a way that outdoes the thanks-giving and dinner-eating of other days. I do think there should be a Scrooge/Grinch analog. The Thankswithholder. The Ingrate."

That's what I said on this blog's first Thanksgiving, which I'm reading this morning as I scan old posts under the "Thanksgiving" tag, looking for something to say about Thanksgiving. I want to acknowledge the special day, but I prefer normal days. As I said in 2014, on the topic of refraining from doing Thanksgiving (because your family members have other plans, which had been portrayed in the NYT as a virtuous letting-go):

I love when doing nothing — especially when it avoids a lot of effort — amounts to the higher path. Virtue in not acting. That applies to a lot more than Thanksgiving. As for Thanksgiving, I always appreciated it when my sons' father wanted them over. Thanksgiving is the last weekend of the semester, and there follows a lovely, long winter break. Thanksgiving is precisely the weekend when I am not looking for more of a workload. So I was glad to step back and let the ex-husband have the boys over. If I got extra points — kindness credit — for letting go, that was nice, but I was always openly grateful for the relief. I was glad to do nothing. It's Thanksgiving, and as they say — and I truly mean it: Thanks for nothing!

The second Thanksgiving on this blog introduced a character, the Thanksgiving squirrel: "Find some critter to eat." He was back the following year — "Oh, my! There he is! It's the Thanksgiving Squirrel! Keep safe everyone. Boil your meat well" — but then I forgot about him... until just now. Ah! Just think of all the things we've forgotten. No, you can't. You've forgotten. Unless you've got notes somewhere, like the archive of a 13-year-old blog, replete with tags. But if you're like me and you love the negative space of life and you see the joyful meaning of "Thanks for nothing!," then you can be thankful for all the things you've forgotten.

ADDED: In the stories with a Christmas naysayer, the narrative arc is toward yea-saying. The Scrooge/Grinch of Thanksgiving would find the true (i.e., conventional) meaning of Thanksgiving, in its most essential form.

So he'd begin with remarks like mine: It's just dinner. We have dinner every day.

And in the end, it would be...

He HADN'T stopped Thanksgiving from coming! IT CAME!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!
And the Gurkey, with his gurkey-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?"
"It came with out stuffing! It came without pie!"
"It came without cranberries, and I don't know why!"
And he puzzled 3 hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Gurkey thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Thanksgiving," he thought, "is not about food."
"Maybe Thanksgiving... is more of a mood!"

The Adventures of Blondie and Grayie.

This was just before Blondie suddenly flipped around...



... jumped over Grayie and took off running down the wire...