Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, 'Liberty, equality, fraternity.' No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all..." -- Francis Bellamy (1855 - 1931), who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, describing the thoughts that went into it. (Spotted at "The Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History"

[Reposted here from note_to_cat ... folks reading here will recognize this as an "oh no, not again". Obviously, I have still not managed to communicate the idea of using the bathtub as a mouse-containment zone.]

Dear Perrine,

Please don't let them get so much of a head start when you let them go so you can chase them again. They tend to get away from you when you do that, you cocky feline.

Please don't bring them upstairs to play with. There's plenty of room to chase them in the kitchen where you find them, even if it means not having my help to move the things they run underneath when you give them too much of a head start. Especially since it means you won't have my help, in light of the next item...

When I've been trying to hard to sort out my sleep patterns, PLEASE don't pick the day I finally got to sleep at a reasonable hour to wake me out of a perfectly interesting spaceship dream by scratching noisily in the papers and magazines at the foot of the bed, then dropping your newest toy in the bed to run across my groin! Yes, yes, this did work to enlist my help in the chase, and I know how you like to have me involved in your sport, but I really had other plans for that time, and all of them involved sleeping more than four hours, dammit!

I'm grateful that you're doing your job, the job I'd considered borrowing someone else's cat for before you decided to move in, but could you please either do it by yourself or do it when I'm already awake? And not in my our bed? When I'm awake, it's fun to watch you work and I'm willing to help, but I really wanted this sleep!

-- Your reluctantly awake hunting partner

P.S.: This morning's mouse is in the plastic container next to the bed (that I fortunately hadn't gotten around to taking downstairs to put in the recycling bag) to be disposed of when I'm more awake. If you notice it there, please don't let it out. And please try not to make so much noise batting the container around that you wake me again if I manage to get back to sleep.

P.P.S.: Please?

(No, I haven't managed to fall asleep again yet. Might as well start my day and hope to get an afternoon nap.)

This is a pretty simple game of "spot the fallacy" (you don't have to know the classical names of the different fallacies, just be able to say, "Bzzzt!" when you spot one).

I think I know how most of my friends will score, but there are a few people whose scores I'll admit to being curious about.

[Edit: There's enough discussion of the problems in the comments that you might want to proceed directly to the test before clicking on the cut-tag if you want to see how you'll do on your own.]

I finally fell asleep again mid-afternoon. I woke up the second or third time my alarm went off to remind me to get up for 3LF rehearsal. I composed most of an entry explaining why I probably wasn't going to be at rehearsal, but lost it when I woke up a little bit more and realized that I had only dreamt that the PDA on which I was composing it was in my hand; the Clie was actually still sitting next to the keyboard, as I discovered when I rolled over.

Damned unreliable dream-PDA. It loses data so much more often than the physical device that it looks like. And there's no warranty and no support website for it. I keep hoping for an upgrade, but the replacement model seems to be vapourware. *grumble*

Yeah, that's about how coherent I felt. Not a good sign. My collection of symptoms was about halfway between a migraine and a hangover (one of which is a more likely explanation than the other, my last alcohol consumption having been eight days ago). I gradually clawed my way to consciousness in steps, first waking up enough to send Fred a text message saying I probably wouldn't be showing up, then a bit later getting to the point of wondering whether I was fit to drive and trying to figure out what time I'd arrive if I managed to get out of bed right then, and finally reaching the ability to climb out of bed and go to the kitchen for food around 21:30, by which time it was clear that I was not going to be attending a rehearsal 35 minutes away that ended at 22:00.

I'm still feeling kind of half-here. Hoping for a better day tomorrow. And no 6 AM mousie.

(Actually, back when I tried to keep a notebook beside my bed to record dreams in before I forgot them, the problem I had was that I'd start to wake up, think, "I should write down that dream," and fall back asleep dreaming that I was writing down the first dream. So I'd wake up again later remembering that I'd had a cool dream but not able to recall just what it was, pat myself on the back for thinking to write it down, and then be confused when the page of my dream notebook was still blank. So the unreliabiity of the dream-PDA is nothing new; the dream-notebook it replaced was just as flaky. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this problem...)