Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." -- Thomas Jefferson (thanks to blueeowyn)

A news story that a friend pointed out began thus (emphasis added):

A woman was in serious condition Wednesday morning after Orange County deputies said a man deliberately ran her over.

The woman and her friend were apparently walking down the side of the road near Orange Blossom trail and Jordan Avenue late Tuesday night when the accident happened. Deputies said the man responsible wanted their attention and wasn't taking no for an answer.

Disregarding for the moment the much bigger issue of what kind of mental world a man has to live in for it to feel reasonable to run a woman over for ignoring him, and the scarier question of what this does or does not say about ways-of-thinking that may be reflected in other aspects of our culture, mostly because I have little to say there yet that is both novel and coherent ... disregarding the big issue for the moment, I wish to issue a "WTF‽" to the language used by the reporter:

Was it deliberate or was it an accident? Please pick one. Given the facts asserted in the rest of the article, it seems the word "accident" is inappropriate here as there was nothing accidental about it. (I'll concede that it is possible for the incident to have been both deliberate and accidental in the "I only meant to get close enough to scare her, but my foot slipped" sense, but it's clear that the authorities don't think that's likely since they said he "deliberately ran her over".)

Similarly, I do not consider certain road-rage incidents resulting in collisions to be "accidents", if one party deliberately sought to force the collision. If I get careless and walk into a signpost, that is an accident; if somebody beats me up, that's an assault, not an accident. Just because an untoward event involves a motor vehicle, that does not make in at accident. Accidents should be accidental.

Okay, I think I've gotten the worked-up-about-trivial-language-stuff thing out of my system for a while.

Cat-human communication is a bit different from cat-cat communication, and while I mostly rely on the former I do intentionally include a few bits of the latter (I'm not as fluent in cat-cat as I am in cat-human, but like many (most?) cat owners, I've picked up a few useful phrases). Sometimes a cat, when faced with a human attempting to speak the cat's language, will look confused, as though thinking, "I know what it means when a cat does that, but what does it mean when a human does it? Is this human okay?" Other cats simply react as though to another cat, without being troubled by seeing the wrong species giving the signals.

One of the cat-things I do is the friendly "let's smell each other's breath" approach. I'm not sure exactly what it means to cats, but it does seem to reassure them (and can help to convince an unfamiliar cat that I'm friendly, if I'm allowed to get my face that close in the first place). This is, of course, done in the cat "I want to analyze this smell" fashion, with the lips slightly apart and very gentle, shallow, short breaths. (This is apparently related to "flehming", and aids delivery of the inhaled sample to the vomeronasal organ. I was about to add that although I thought this was a special feline organ, I did notice that I get different information when smelling things in this way -- but I paused to google it, and discovered that the vomeronasal organ (or Jacobson's organ) is present in several species, including humams, though it's apparently not connected to the nervous system in adult humans (I wonder how much of the change in food preferences between infancy and adulthood are explained by the shrinking and disconnection of this organ). Wikipedia says that "some researchers argue" that it's functional in some adult humans; this might explain my acting like a "supertaster" in some regards and not in others, or may be completely unrelated to how I perceive taste and why breathing with my lips parted and my tongue positioned to direct air across the roof of my mouth sometimes gives me more information than smelling things in other ways -- it could simply be the pattern of airflow across my tongue that matters, rather than flow to the spot where my vomeronasal organ may or may not still be, that matters. Ah, but I digress...)

Anyhow, one approaches the cat slowly and smoothly, head way forward, lips parted as though one's sense of smell/taste works the same as a cat's, and there's a good chance the cat will react in kind. If you're not sure how to perform this maneuver from my description, just watch two cats sniff each other's breath, or pay attention to how your cat does it to you -- even if you never initiate this, most cats will occasionally try to sniff your breath in this way if they're comfortable with you (and all the more so if you've just eaten something yummy, though very litle of what I eat is yummy to cats). Some cats do it more often than others.

But here's the thing: I suck a lot of cough drops, often containing menthol, to deal with airway irritation not quite severe enough that I want to use my albuterol inhaler but too annoying to ignore (especially when I'm trying to get to sleep, or on high-pollen-count days). I do not initiate the mutual breath smelling thing when I'm sucking on a cough drop, or have just done so, but sometimes Perrine chooses such a moment to initiate it.

And then she flinches back, eyes narrowed and ears back, as if to say, "Yeowch! What did you just do to my smeller?"

Apparently, menthol-breath is worse, from a cat's perspective, than the smell of hot coffee (which in turn is much worse than coffee-breath), but not as bad as the smell of a tissue soaked in rubbing alcohol.

(So, uh, yeah, the whole point of this long entry was the image of a cat trying to be friendly and getting a snoot full of menthol, and looking startled and confused by it. But I'm curious about other folks' sense of smell and how involving different parts of the mouth affects the amount or quality of information extracted from the air being sampled. And, of course, always welcome feline communication insights, and certainly don't mind providing yet another excuse for friends to post random cute cat anecdotes.)

The good: I've got a ride to MTT tomorow morning, and as a bonus I get to see a friend I haven't seen in ages.

The bad: Though all I've accomplished today is searching for a ride, looking for a car, a little LJ, and getting ready to go out, I am exhausted nearly to the point of tears. My body hurts; my head hurts. And I didn't manage to coordinate seeing another friend I haven't seen in ages, who is briefly on this coast. :-(

I also didn't make it to the free concert I'd wanted to go to. But although I really did want to go to that, I didn't have my heart set on it -- so that's just an ordinary everyday disappointment rather than a full-blown, missed-opportunity, full-volume "ARGH!" like missing a chance to hang out with aliza250

The neutral: I have not yet sorted out how I'm getting from MTT to the HCB concert tomorrow evening, nor how I'll be getting home from that, but I'm a little less worried about those actually, and there are a couple of tentative possibilities ... I also have no idea how I'll get back to MTT on Sunday, but I also don't know whether the weather is going to allow the second day of MTT to take place -- I think I'm going to keep an eye out for travel options for Sunday but postpone getting all stressified over it until I see what the weather is going to do.

Let's see whether a spot of dinner and a large dose of ibuprofen make me feel less any less like crying. Then I'll try to finish getting garb&gear all lined up and ready for tomorrow. This is probably a night for comfort-food.

Gotta remember to bring a tarp to protect the bass in case the rain comes early or sorting out a ride to Greenbelt comes late.