Roger Booth should have licensed his cat with the City of Dallas, and he also shouldn’t have allowed it to run loose outside. But somehow, I can’t help admiring a guy who, with no previous criminal history, will defend his cat’s life with a baseball bat. “Mr. Gray” was taken to the pound by Mr. Booth’s cat-hating neighbor (who apparently has a habit of hauling off neighbors’ cats), and Mr. Booth, a cancer patient, couldn’t pay the $132 fee to retrieve Mr. Gray in time to keep the cat from being euthanized.

According to Mr. Booth, he didn’t actually threaten anyone with the bat. He just carried it with him. If this is the case, then I hope the City decides not to press charges.

The Nebraska Legislature is meeting in a special session to amend its Safe Haven Law, which currently allows parents to drop off any child younger than 18 at any hospital and no longer be held legally responsible for that child. The law was meant to reduce the number of newborns abandoned in dangerous places by panicking young mothers, but it hasn’t resulted in the surrender of a single newborn. Rather, parents have been abandoning teens and preteens in alarming numbers, and the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t appreciate this influx of unexpected clients into the foster care system. They point out that there are plenty of available resources to help families deal with troubled children.

The NHHS is right. It is despicable to abandon your 11-year-old. But consider the alternative: that the abandoned children would stay with a parent or other caregiver who, given the opportunity, behaves despicably. It’s not as if the choice to drop off a child at a hospital and never look back is a decision a caring, responsible parent makes lightly.

I don’t like to see the foster system overburdened more than I’m sure it already is. But these parents are consciously choosing not to take advantage of the more routine services available to them and their children. They don’t want to be bothered any longer. They have more important things to do.

Who can say how much of whatever problems these kids have is due to abuse by the very parents who are dropping them off? Do we really think someone who would drop a child off at a hospital and never look back was ever trying to be a good parent in the first place? There are many forms of child abuse, and not all of them result in emergency room visits.

All I’m saying is, unintended consequences are sometimes good. It might not be “right” that all these bad parents get off the hook with nothing more than a scowl from a nurse as punishment for their misdeeds. But forcing the kids to remain with those parents would be the real injustice.

Congratulations on a landslide victory.

I didn’t vote for you, and frankly, the thought of you as President makes me worry for the future of my country.

No doubt, many of those who joined me in voting for your opponent will stridently declare, “He’s not my President. I didn’t vote for him!” But I won’t. I’m adult enough to admit that my vote alone doesn’t make a President, and I respect the office even when I dislike and distrust the person holding it.

So yes, Mr. Obama, I accept you — however reluctantly — as my President. I will accord that office the same respect I always have, no matter who holds it. But, speaking as a citizen of the country you will soon lead and whose trust you have yet to earn, I do have some requests.

Bring our troops home, yes. But don’t give us another Vietnam, in which we flee ignominiously and precipitously, leaving innocent Iraqis to be subjugated and slaughtered in our wake. I was against the invasion of Iraq at the outset, but that’s been done, and we cannot turn back the clock. We dismantled a government and disbanded a military, and we haven’t finished cleaning up our mess. I hope, Mr. Obama, that you won’t have to learn the hard way that there are no “do-overs” in war or in foreign policy. Not even you are that transcendent.

Don’t be too quick to reverse a foreign policy you clearly don’t fully understand. While I am the first to criticize American foreign policy as it has been conducted over the last eight years (and even earlier), I find your blithe assertions that you will engage the lunatic Ahmadinejad and his evil allies in unconditional talks to be frighteningly naive. The President of the United States, meeting one-on-one with the ranting figurehead of a tiny country that’s actually run by a shadowy cabal of west-hating clerics? The leader of the free world, drinking coffee with someone who presides over the chopping off of the hands of petty thieves and the stoning of women for adultery? You weren’t laughing when you said that, but I sincerely hope you were, indeed, joking.

Pull back from your socialistic notions of “spreading the wealth.” Those who are competent at basic math — 48% of us, it seems — know that you can’t give a tax cut to 95% of Americans when more than a third of us don’t pay federal income tax in the first place. What you really meant by your 95% figure is a redistribution of income from those who work to those who don’t. If you do this, the results for American productivity, and for our prospects of recovery from recent economic calamities, could be catastrophic.

These are far from my only misgivings about you, Mr. Obama, but they are the greatest. Prove me mistaken about you on these points, and you might just begin to gain my trust.

I cried on the way to work this morning.

I wasn’t in an accident. Nothing bad happened at all. Except that I lost a good friend.

Let me explain. I was listening to the end of the audio version of Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, by Vicki Myron with Bret Witter, and well . . . you know what happens at the end of a book about a beloved pet.

But don’t worry; Dewey’s story is far more happy than sad. From the moment he was first heard mewing inside the Spencer, Iowa, public library’s after-hours drop box to the last meeting he presided over there, almost 20 years later, Dewey not only put Spencer on the map. He brought people together and gave them hope, laughter, and love. He gave them the quiet joy that comes from closeness with someone who loves fully and unconditionally.

Capturing the hearts of everyone in one small town wasn’t enough for this most celebrated of all library cats. His beauty, intelligence, and charisma brought him national and international attention. People traveled halfway across the country to visit him in person, and many millions more saw him on television and in the print media.

This was no shy, skittish feline. He quite simply held court at the Spencer Public Library. Its patrons were his subjects and its staff his acolytes. All but one, that is. The librarian, Vicki Myron, was more. She was his mother, and even though he rarely went home with her, he knew he was her boy. When her only daughter left home at 18 and no other family lived nearby, Dewey was there for Vicki. He gave this capable single woman the outlet she needed for the love in her generous heart. He saw her through serious health problems and gave her a reason to go on despite enormous physical hardship. Later, when the time came, she did much the same for him.

Dewey is as much Vicki’s story as it is Dewey’s. It’s not that Vicki shines too much of the spotlight on herself. It’s her personal light that shines through on every page. It was Vicki who pulled Dewey out of that freezing metal box, Vicki who decided to adopt Dewey as the official library cat and got bureaucratic approval for it, and Vicki who made sure Dewey’s food, supplies, and considerable veterinary care were always paid for — even if it was out of her own shallow pocket. Reading between the lines, I saw that it was Vicki’s love and tender care that brought Dewey to his full, amazing potential as a person (OK, cat). Without Vicki, Dewey Readmore Books might well have been just another precocious, outgoing, lovable cat. Less common than average, to be sure, but nothing so outstanding as to bring a profoundly handicapped little girl out of her shell, or merit a visit from a Japanese TV crew.

Though I’m a lifelong animal lover, I’m not usually one for reading stories about animals. I usually find the fictional tales silly and the “true” ones to be hyperbole at best. But I bought Dewey within minutes after first hearing about it, convinced by the reviews at Amazon that it would be my kind of animal story. And I was right. I should add that the audio book narrator, whose name isn’t given anywhere that I can find, was superb, sounding exactly as I would imagine Vicki Myron would sound telling the story herself.

On a side note, perhaps part of my motivation for reading Dewey was that I’ve been mulling the idea of a career as a librarian. Sure, it would mean grad school. But a great many of the few happy times I had as a kid were spent in a small town public library, with a librarian who was similar to Vicki Myron in many ways. (She was even a cat lover, although there was no library cat.) And since I’ve all but nixed the teaching idea, I’m still casting about for a way to influence the younger generations. I could indulge so many of my loves and ambitions as a librarian. And if I could be even a little like Vicki, well, all the better for everyone.

By the time you read this, this guy will have already been hired.

Many grammatical errors stem from words being misheard during speech and the misheard word later being committed to paper by the mistaken listener. Today’s entry is one I suddenly began to notice just a few months ago. Since then, it’s proliferated with amazing speed, both on the Internet and in print.

Leavitt said Hostess is hoping to make more of the 100-calorie products, honing [read: homing] in on their portability since they’re easily taken to the office for lunch.*

The phrase “home in” refers to aiming at a target, as in “homing device” or “homing pigeon.” To hone is to sharpen, and, while I’m sure Hostess would like to whet its marketing approach to a fine, glittering edge, it’s clear that here, they’re trying to home in on a target level of portability for their famous Twinkies.

*Twinkies get slimmed down, CNN, November 3, 2008 (Associated Press)

In today’s Dallas Morning News, a howler of a grammatical error:

The city did not respond to a News 8 request for an explanation about why they aren’t paying her damages but, in general police officers and cities aren’t responsible when bad things happen in the course of them [read: their] doing their jobs.*

In the excerpt, “doing their jobs” is a gerund phrase. Doing is the gerund (a verb ending in -ing that functions as a noun) and their jobs is the direct object of the action expressed in the gerund. Because it signifies ownership — in this case, that of the officers and cities of the doing of their jobs — a pronoun that precedes a gerund must be possessive.

*Dallas won’t pay woman for injuries, damages after hit by police car, Dallas Morning News, November 2, 2008 (Rebecca Lopez)

Not me with my boss.

This past Monday, my law firm moved into its brand new office space. And by brand new, I mean really new, as in construction workers still tramping around in neon yellow vests and hardhats, ogling the secretaries. Our firm’s main break room isn’t even fully operational. As with most of life’s changes, this one brings some positives and some negatives.

The negatives

• We learned that the ridiculous new rules promulgated in connection with the new office space were not just window dressing. Today, two secretaries were called in to HR for eating lunch at their desks. They thought it would be OK since the break room was closed.

• If those rules really were for real, then we also have to get rid of all our beanie babies (guess other stuffed animals are OK?), keep all drinks covered unless they are at that moment touching our lips, and chuck out all but our two very favorite family photos for display on our desks. I also need to rethink whether I’ll be able to have my dorm-sized refrigerator under my desk, as I did in the old office.

• I went from having a more or less private work area to sharing with two other people, one of whom is not exactly my favorite person. And that’s all I have to say about that.
  

  Not my office mate.

• There’s no hot water connected to the coffee bar faucets, which means I have to wash my drinking glass with cold water.

The positives

• The second person I share space with is the coolest! She makes up for the “other” one. I hadn’t realized just how isolated I had become, having my area to myself for so long. It’s great having someone to share the occasional snarky observation with.
• Tons more printers mean the end of print job backups and lost/stolen/jumbled print jobs.
• White noise makes for a much more peaceful environment, even with more people in fewer square feet.
• I have the best desk in my area, situated next to the wall and out of the line of fire.
• The ladies’ room rocks. The stalls are little rooms with real, tightly-louvered doors and better ventilation. It no longer matters that some people in our office have serious digestive issues.
• The new workstation chairs are the same chairs the lawyers got, which means they’re actually comfortable and good quality. What a concept!
• The new office rules also ban ledge food, something that has always annoyed the crap out of me. Good riddance!

The “interesting” stuff

• The ban on beanie babies must not apply to bobbleheads, because representatives from the firm’s IT and facilities staffs have both presented everyone with goofy-looking bobblehead dolls as welcome-to-the-new-office gifts. I’m treating mine like unwanted knickknacks given by a beloved relative: I’ll display them for a few weeks and then quietly sweep them off into the garbage. I’ll be buying beanie babies to take their places, of course.

• The carpet is self-stick squares! The rationale is that it will be a cinch to fix stains; just pull up the stained square and replace. But they forgot how different factory runs of the same carpet color have subtle color differences. A few off-color squares have already appeared in the hallway near my workstation.
• The building is ultra-modern in design, which amounts to an eclectic mix of refreshing practicality and snicker-worthy pretentiousness. Under the latter category, I submit a sculpture in the ground floor lobby: It looks like a row of giant, used latex condoms suspended inside a niche in a wall. Every time I pass by it, I want a cigarette. And I don’t even smoke!

Not our lobby sculpture.

Please don’t let the liberal media convince you that unrepentant former terrorist — and unapologetic current communist — Bill Ayers is harmless and Obama’s connection with him means nothing. Neither of these assertions could be further from the truth.

Still doubtful? Read about Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.

The Georgia Board of Nursing recently decided to reject nursing license applicants who graduated from my school, Excelsior College, because of its non-traditional curriculum.

Way to go, Georgia! Nurse shortage be damned, no one who didn’t graduate from an old-fashioned nursing program is to be admitted into the venerable nursing profession in Georgia. I’m sure neighboring states will thank you for sending all those new nurses — who are considerably more experienced at graduation than are graduates of your precious brick-and-mortar programs — to their hospitals and nursing homes.

Never mind that the Georgia Nurses Association says the Board is barking up the wrong tree when it includes Excelsior in its list of “fly-by-night” schools. Never mind that the National League for Nursing has named Excelsior a Center of Excellence for Nursing Education for 2005-08. Noo-ho. The Georgia Board of Nursing knows better than everyone else.

I wish it could be only the Georgia Board of Nursing that will suffer from this capricious decision. Unfortunately, the real losers are the people of Georgia, whose health will continue to be endangered by a severe shortage of nurses.

The only silver lining here is that the Georgia Board of Nursing has made Congress look smart in contrast.