Silicon Valley Redneck

Side effect?

I think this started, at a low level, Tuesday morning: Southmoon has been behaving very aggressively toward Huckleberry.  Hissing, growling, chasing him around the house, that sort of thing.  This is entirely out of character; Huckleberry has occasionally been aggressive toward Southmoon in the past, but this week he hasn't been doing anything to provoke her.

Last night, it got intense.  This morning, she seemed perfectly normal, right up until Huckleberry jumped down from my desk and landed sort of near her - and then she went into evil mode.

I just checked the package insert for the Revolution, and I see nothing about causing hallucinations in cats.  And yet, she's acting like she found the special glasses and can now see that her brother is actually a pod creature from Neptune.

I'd suspect that the flea treatment made him smell different, except that she's also been doing the "who are you and what have you done with my brother" thing from the far end of the hallway.

May have to call the vet this morning.

Update: I'm guessing it's psychological, not pharmacological, and that it's a side effect of Sunday afternoon's flea bombing - or, rather, of the frightful two and a half hours spent in the back yard.

Top Hat (who spent most of that afternoon cowering between shed and fence) remains happy to bound out the door and explore the yard.  Huckleberry, normally the bold one, takes a while to venture beyond the patio, and (uncharacteristically) comes scampering back in at the first suggestion that the door might be about to close.  Southmoon, who's always been quick to dart through an open door, now seems afraid to get near the door when it's open.

So, maybe she's getting territorial because she was dispossessed (along with the rest of us) for an afternoon?

Update 2: ... Or maybe it was the Revolution?  Thursday night, Southmoon slept in the bedrooms-guarding spot on the hallway floor, the better to keep the back of the house safe from the forces of Huckleberry.  In the morning, I found on that spot a slightly-chewed cardboard box - I don't know where she found it - which had once contained 6.5x55mm ammunition.  Well, at least she didn't have live ammunition, nor a Swedish Mauser to use it in.

Twelve and a half pounds of unpredictable cat with PTSD.  Great.  But she seemed fine this (Friday) morning (beginning sometime in the middle of the night, when she came bounding into the bedroom), up until she caught sight of Huckleberry, and the growling and aggressive behavior started up again.

Update 3: Later Friday morning.  Got home from walkies and errands; Southmoon came bounding up to greet me like a little golden retriever (and not armed for moose).  I unpacked a new toy from the shopping bag and commenced waving it around; Southmoon and Huckleberry seemed to be OK in close proximity, even when he waved a paw in her face while swatting at the toy.  But then she started sniffing his neck, and the growling started up again.  Hm?

O-kay, then.  Moisten a paper towel, and give Huckleberry's neck a good scrub (after consulting the Revolution instructions and confirming that it's fine to give the critter a bath after a couple of hours).  Southmoon seems calmer now.  Interesting.

I follow the funny papers, but not the Comics, so...

... I was only vaguely aware, e.g., that somewhere along the line Thor (he of the big red beard) had gotten shaved and bleached, and Mjölnir* had gotten transformed from a half-hammer, half-boomerang battle weapon into a smith's metal-bashing implement.

And now, it seems, Thor has, as they said back in the 60s, "gone to Sweden."

Or maybe he didn't go to Sweden and she came back.  After all, deities can pretty much assume any form they feel like, right?  (Though it's mostly tricksters and philanderers who actually do that sort of thing, and it's usually temporary.)

Apparently, though, this is part of a trend whereby, instead of creating a brand-new superhero with a character appropriate to the person inside the suit, the franchise owners kill off or otherwise retire an existing superhero, and have some new diversically-correct person inherit the costume, role, and character, even though the character was written for someone else entirely.

It's what happens to the process of creative destruction when it's commanded from on high, and the parties responsible are incapable of the "creative" part.  If they were creative, they could create new characters, phase them in, and allow the old ones to head off to Commander Goodbye's Superhero Retirement Home.

(And, yes, it bothers me that Frank Gorshin's "Riddler" was once played by John Astin.  Astin deserved his own supervillain character on that show, dang it!)

 

* The spelling checker thinks I mean "Miniskirt."  Noooooooooo!

Wait, did California secede?

I'm browsing the new products at Mouser, and an awful lot of them, including things like Bluetooth modules, come up with:

Restricted Availability

Due to US Government export regulations, Mouser is unable to sell this product in your country.

Er.  This continues after I log in.  My account information says "United States".  My shipping address is in California, which, last I heard, still claimed to be in the U.S.; did I miss something?

Did a convention of the states do like I've been suggesting, and banish DC, California, and a few others around the edges?

Did Texas secede, and Mouser hasn't gotten around to updating the export-restrictions message yet?

Oh, well.  The only things I'm actually trying to buy this morning are inoffensive items, not subject to export restrictions.

Afterthought: TOR is turned off, so it's not like I was using the IP address of an Iranian exit node.

Interest rate WTF

Just seen in somebody else's sidebar:

Wait... how does a 15-year, fixed-rate loan have a lower interest rate than a 5-year adjustable?

And what kind of monetary policy leads to this?

War is peace, freedom is slavery...

There's this thing called the "Federal Open Market Committee".

It meets in secret.

Presented without comment.

Speaking of negative indices on the Clue axis...

A more-or-less-serious mailing list brought a link to this.

Wack-job tin-foil-hattery, plus:

The nighttime launch will be visible along much of the eastern seaboard. At some point during its flight, the rocket will likely suffer a so-called “cyber-attack”, resulting in a massive EMP-like explosion, knocking out electricity on the East Coast of America for good.

What is this I don't even...?

How does a cyber-attack turn a chemical-fueled launch vehicle into a megaton-range nuke?

Or does the cyber-attack involve physically replacing the payload with a bloody huge warhead?

I gotta get me some of that gooooood tinfoil!