Various & Sundry: Macho Obituaries and other entertainments

I'm puttering this morning. And this video captures Saturday morning puttering better than anything I could say.


Yes, it is a cat dressed as a shark riding a Roomba chasing a duckling. Thanks to anibundel for finding and posting this.

I mean, seriously, do I need to go on? Oh, all right. There's more.

It was a week of Macho Obituaries. If it came to a face-off, who do you think would win: Fred "Nosher" Powell, a bouncer, bodyguard, and Bond stuntman? Anna Merz, who founded a rhino preserve after her retirement? Or Jake McNeice, a member of the "Filthy Thirteen," better known in Hollywood as the "Dirty Dozen," which was actually up to 18 men involved in demolition behind enemy lines in WWII? To be honest, I suspect they are all drinking together and sharing stories. Goodness knows they have a lot of them.

As a lover of your basic paperback mystery, I thought this list of 30 things to tell a book snob was good. Although I think #19 sums up my snobbery about snobbery ("Snobs are suckers, because they have superficial prejudices"), #12 does the best job of capturing why snobbery is bad for snobs and for all of us:

12. You are one of 7,000,000,000 people in the world. You can never be above all of them. But you can be happy to belong.

I see some potential for a mystery series in Internet Sleuthing. This article argues that the Internet is actually good at fighting crime (by which it means internet users, of course), and directed me to a site called WebSleuths, which encourages its members to take on real cases of missing persons and the like. Nero Wolfe would have loved this.

I'm salivating at the thought of Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart on stage together at Berkeley Rep. I don't care WHAT they're in, as long as they're together, though it happens to be Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. Which I fully admit means nothing to me. It's Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart! I mean, c'mon!

In other entertainment news, KCTV News in Kansas City reports that "A central Kansas woman likely won't remember her first circus for the clowns or performances — it'll be the tiger in the bathroom."

The big cat had escaped briefly after its turn in the ring Saturday at the Isis Shrine Circus in Salina. Staff members blocked off the concourses at the Bicentennial Center as the tiger wandered into the bathroom, where one of the doors was blockaded. 

About that time, Salina resident Jenna Krehbiel decided she needed to use the restroom. When she walked in the door that hadn't been blocked off, she found a tiger standing about 2 feet away, The Salina Journal reported. 

"You don't expect to go in a bathroom door, have it shut behind you and see a tiger walking toward you," Krehbiel said.

Oh, if I had a nickel for every time that had happened to me...