5 Thoughts on a Thursday

1) Coraline - the cat - and I have been spending a lot of time together lately. Is it mentally healthy for me? Probably not. But it has made me aware of those instances that account for a cat's "moral dilemmas." For example, she loves having her belly rubbed. But what makes having her belly rubbed even more splendid is biting, literally, the hand that rubs her. In order to stop her from doing this, I sternly say "no biting", and, strangely enough, it works. The best part, though, is that I can see on her face the turmoil within her tiny walnut brain as she weighs the consequences of continuing her biting. I mean, she definitely wants to bite me; but she also doesn't like it when I make that horrid "no" sound. So what ends up happening is that she stops herself right before her teeth dig into my fingers, her fangy mouth wide open and drooling, and her eyes moving back and forth in her head as she does the closest thing that a cat can do to making an ethical decision.

2) R.A. says that I should mention that we just finished an inebriated conversation about how if she ever left me I would most likely go crazy and become an old cat-lady and collect an entire army of cats and pretend that they constituted a tiny cat parliament, with the black cats being the communists and the calicos having a staunchly anti-immigrant platform. Also, it should be noted that this entire conversation was conducted in French.

3) Football season is coming up. I'm not too excited about professional football, but the college version definitely gets me going. I'm not exactly positive why - it might have something to do with the copious amounts of co-eds in the stands, and the merciful lack of bare-chested Buffaloans with beer helmet on. Maybe it's because Oregon has a college football team (two!) but no professional team. R.A. thinks I don't like pro football because it is "boring and stupid." But really, college football is superior because of its incredibly archaic and overly complicated ranking system. All of my friends complain endlessly about the need for college football to instigate some kind of playoff system in order to determine a champion, and to that I say: Balderdash! For someone who loves statistics and spreadsheets as much as I do, I would be lost without the end of season excitement of counting out all of the possible BCS match-ups, and of figuring out the odds of the Fiesta Bowl picking the WAC champion over the second-place Big 12 team because the Big 12 champ finished second in the national rankings and has to go to the national championship game, and what implications that would have for the Sugar Bowl and their burning desire for an Oklahoma-LSU match-up, and so on, and so forth, et cetera, et cetera...

4) Book club, anyone? Like I said, I am currently slogging through Henry James' "The Golden Bowl" right now, and am playing with the notion of maybe picking up a copy of "The Ambassadors" when I am finished, although that may be a while at this rate. R.A., meanwhile, is revisiting Jane Austen. She just finished "Sense and Sensibility," and is now moving on to "Emma." So you happen to be itching to read some 19th English novels, we are your man. And woman. (P.S. - I have been noticing some of James' bad habits creeping into my writing, like an overabundance of semi-colons and one rambling, run-on sentence after another.)

5) From a Pew Research Center poll released today:

Some Americans are having a change of heart about mixing religion and politics. A new survey finds a narrow majority of the public saying that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters. For a decade, majorities of Americans had voiced support for religious institutions speaking out on such issues

Basically, the report found that in 2004, 51% of Americans thought that churches should express their views on social and political matters, and in 2008 that number has dropped to 45%, with the most radical change in amongst registered Republicans. So... does this mean anything to someone like Rev. Warren? Or even someone like John McCain?