They’re saying WHAT about Wendy David? Oh, boy, is mama hot under the collar, and everywhere else, for that matter! That incredible fillibuster-ess, Wendy Davis, who stood for 11 hours in a fillibuster to kill an unfair abortion bill in right-wing, consevative Texas, is now under fire because she allegedly did not give accurate information on...
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Sometimes, I just snooze after a lot of reading…. Well, mama is deep into We Need New Names and I’m listening with baited muzzle because the writer, Noviolet Bulawayo, mama says, should win the Man Booker Prize for lovely, memorable writing about her country, Zimbabwe. And mama says it makes her think differently about the immigrants in Rome,...
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You wanna hear a story? Here’s a story. This is how I came to be, but in mama’s words this time. Here she goes: Sometimes I think that when I write about gardens, I must be nuts. So many of us live in small apartments sans terrace or even a sunny window for a pot of basil, but I have observed that in Europe, especially, many families have a...
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One day, what’s in this bag will be a loaf of crusty bread! See those bubbles? Mama says that’s when the little yeast babies eat the sugar in the flour and fart and help the starter to ferment…hmmmm. Mama has invented a new thing. Well, maybe it’s not new, but it’s new to her, even though she often puts dough in a bag and...
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Bess, after a night on the town! Do all Great Danes have bloodshot eyes? I would love to know! OH, boy—mama and papa went to a wonderful pot-au-feu lunch at a friend’s house on Sunday and came back with a photo of Bess, the Great Dane, who galloped around the house banging into everything like a little puppy and trying to plant slobbery kisses...
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What was that? I keep having these deja vus! With apologies to Fellini—- Well, mama is on an Italian film kick again, specifically Giulietta of the Spirits, which if one of her favorite films of all time. I watched it tonight with mama and papa and man, that guy can really shoot film. Not to mention the music by Nino Rota, which I’ll be purring all...
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Mama, I don’t want my friends to see me like this, okay? I am a French kitty, and French kitties really should wear scarves, as do their anthros in France. A French anthro would not be caught dead without her scarf, and that goes for men, too. They just seem to know what to do with a scarf, and since the weather is not always South-of-France mild,...
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I’m fine. How are you? Now this is really funny. Mama read me a great piece about the difference between Russians and Americans. Mama has always wanted to visit Russia, even if Putin is there, and her brother speaks fluent Russian so he might be able to coach her before a trip, but what’s really great is that Russians actually TELL you how...
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Mama thought this was just so funny when a friend sent it to her–a cat lover, naturally….. Thank you, KuyaON.com for this great photo. But now mama is thinking about growing kitties. Uh, oh! Competition, sibling rivalry, half my food gone when I thought the bowl was full. Oh, boy. Still, it is a great picture,...
Read MoreAmazing writer, Karen Joy Fowler! Mama just finished a really, really good book called We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, who, as a child, actually lived through an experiment created by her psychologist father, but mama says not to say more. “No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with...
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I just can’t cope with these things lately…. What is going on? Are the stars misaligned? A woman in hospital over an affair and another woman dead because of her husband’s infedility. What is the world coming to? I am so glad kitties do not have to deal with these anthro things, but I do read about them and I feel a kind of pathos for...
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Now you remember that I have told you about The Book of Bunny Suicides and other books by that wonderfully ironic observer of rabbit behavior, Andy Riley, but what can I say about the description of our illustrious French leader and his shenannigans (I love that word). It really made me chuckle when mama told me he was called a...
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(Thanks to Purring Paradise for this Buddha kitty) Sometimes when I’m sleeping, papa or mama comes up to rub me just because, as papa says, “Loulou is like the Buddha—you just want to reach out and touch her when you pass by”, but sometimes, too, when they do that, I leap straight in the air out of my kitty-dreams and think “What...
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Mama is a thief. Well, more a perpetrator really. She carries nasturtium seeds, and others, in all of her jacket pockets and then surreptitiously (love that word today) sneaks the seeds into unsuspecting planters all over Rome and Collioure. In front of houses. Next to stores. In the marketplace. Over a fence into the neighbors’ yards! She...
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Oh, boy, mama has gone round the bend. For more than a week now there has been evidence (don’t ask!) that a rodent of some kind has taken up residence in our cave, eating the cardboard boxes containing olives that papa gave mama for her birthday—about a gazillion olives for martinis, cooking, bread, you name it. He/she does not eat through the jars...
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Oh, boy, mama has put out those balls of suet and seeds that everyone around here seems to think they should buy each winter—to be nice to the poor birdies who can’t forage for themselves in cold weather, yadda, yadda, yadda. I think they’re just fakin’ it… Well, from a kitty’s point of view, yeah, sure, it’s like TV...
Read MoreHey, is this thing waterproof? Oh, boy is this a hot one!!!! I was looking over mama’s shoulder at the (what else?) New York Times, and there was this TURTLE with a camera on its little shell and what he does is walk around a Michigan pet shop surveying the scene for what some not-so-honest clients might slip into their pockets or simply...
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“Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm”… (Ezra Pound’s parody of Chaucer’s “Summer is icumen in, Loudly sing cuckoo”) Well, who would know what that means, epecially me, but I do like a bit of Chaucer send-up every now and again, HA HA, and winter is definitely icumen in here. It is very gray and miserable...
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Hey, it’s the OTHER one, tu comprends? Oh, boy, does mama get into trouble with her “mwah-mwahs”. You know the French custom, now world-wide, it seems, that when one runs into a friend or greets on the street, there is the exchange of kisses, either real or air-borne and evidently, there is a very particular way of doing them. Does mama...
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Topinambour/Jerusalem Artichokes/Sunchokes Mama’s looking up etymologies of words, inspired by a friend in Rome who sent her a wonderful recipe for Jerusalem artichoke soup. It seems that Americans called the sunchoke they found in the New World a girasole, which is French for sunflower and girasole got changed to Jerusalem and then it became...
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