Next time on Cats Who Hoard

"Yeah, I know it's kind of out of control, but when I see something like this old rug I think, wow, I could sharpen my claws on that till they wore down to stubs and there'd still be some left. The table's a little big, sure, but it keeps the rain off me, and on sunny days I can sit on top and see forever.

"Of course, I'm always taking in stray humans, too. I just feel so sorry for them. They can't fend for themselves in the wild . . . "

When Santa brings you lemons . . .

. . .well, I don't know -- stuff your Christmas turkey with them?

Don't ask Santa, he's not feeling very jolly as he makes the lemon run this year.

Note to spammers who want to sell me a diploma

I've already got one!

From my old friends at Dover -- but this time I actually bought the book. (For $2 at a charity sale, but still.)

Speaking of contradictions . . .

"Raise a reader", the front page tells us, on a paper full of stuff you don't want your kid to read, from the fairly mild line "Raw food seduction" to the article about the prostitution laws being struck down, complete with picture of a rejoicing woman the caption ID's as a "dominatrix".

He's talking about environmentalism, but it fits just as well with predicting the end of the world.

We really should be humble. And cautious.
But how can a humble and cautious man say we are "past the 59th minute"?

-- Dan Gardner

25 Words or Less

It wasn't the flu, Mrs. Shady Nook. It wasn't a strike, Mrs. Mud Creek. It wasn't even a vacation. It was just a breathing spell. We can't say funny things all the time. We are not the four Marx brothers. We are just another well that ran dry.

-- Evelyn Ryan, aka the Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio


Another memoir which, like My Life in France, shows that Fifties housewives had more options than we tend to think, especially if they were a little talented.

And resourceful. Mrs. Ryan couldn't afford to buy enough Dr. Pepper to get all the bottle caps she needed for clues to the contest answer, so she sent her kids out to pick up the caps around all the vending machines in town.

The part left to the expert -- Mom -- was coming up with the last line to an ad jingle.

Today, Dr. Pepper's still running contests, but they're nowhere near so artistic. You merely have to decode the yellow-on-yellow raised numbers on the cap, go online and key them into the box, figure out what you did wrong when it says that's not a valid number . . . It's still demanding, just not in a good way.

Grande Dame

I once dreamt that I knew why Julia Child had talked the way she did, but when I woke up, I couldn't remember. While I read My Life in France, I half hoped she'd explain, but no luck. And in the end it didn't matter. She was what she was.

Viewers thought she was drunk -- she was really just big and awkward. (Too big to join the service during WWII. If only I'd been able to pull that off 40 years later.) And she was fond of adding a dash of something to her cooking. I remember one show where she said, "You can add a little cognac if you like . . . and if you don't like . . . well . . ." It was one of the apparently many occasions when she couldn't think of anything nice to say, so she didn't say anything, just swept on to the next bit of fun.

It was all fun for her, as she often says. She seems to have been able to find enjoyment in all sorts of ordinary things. Here's how she describes one good time:

One December Sunday, the three of us drove out to the Fontainebleau forest. The cloudy gray sky broke open and turned blue, the air was vigorously cool, and the sun shone brightly.

She makes you wish you'd been there -- and yet, it was just a hike on a winter day that started out cloudy and turned sunny. It's the sort of thing I've done myself a few times, but somehow I didn't see it with that same -- okay, cliché alert -- joie de vivre.

And now that I've used French, I'll confess to one of the guilty pleasures of this book -- Julia Child uses lots of  French and hardly translates any of it. Gave me a nice, smug, in-the-know feeling . . . connaissance?