after 11 years, not likely you are still reading.......BUT......if you are, i saw your cat on sept 23, 2018 in sidney, ny. not far from Walton. On a golf course of all places. It was pawing around a small drainage ditch on the hole next to the one i was on. then climbed on some rocks that were hiding a culvert pipe under a cart path. Now, it might sound like smoke up the but but i normally leave my phone in the truck when i golf so no pic. I was able to shoot it with my range finder at 70 yards (about 200ft or so) and with the magnification zoom, which isn't much but definitely came into focus very clearly, it was without question a big black cat with a long tail and green eyes. I saw it before it saw me but once eye contact was made, it trotted off the course and into the weeds, heading north, toward the susquehanna river. Looked like some sort of freak giant house cat. roughly 18" tall, 24" long, and maybe 24" tail. just guessing. Much larger than my boston terrier. I plan on asking around the next time im there.

Linelle - His name is "Boojum", from the Lewis Carrol poem "The Hunting of the Snark". A boojum is an especially dangerous and rare variety of snark. How do you train him to not hiss at you and claw to claim your territory as his? A combination of ignoring his drama and tantrums while making sure hands were out of the way or working in gloves (welder's gauntlets!) but not backing down, spray bottles of water when he absolutely had to be evicted, and slowly getting him used to the idea that detente and peaceful co-existence with 2-legged animals was a better way of life. If he wanted a door opened, and he hissed and slapped at my hand when I reached for the knob, I walked away ... so he learned to not slap at hands that were opening doors. BTW, he's NEVER slapped at a hand that's holding a food dish. We also stopped using "teasers", those feather on a string toys, because they encourage swatting with claws out. We use wine corks with feathers stuck in them and throw them. He's gone from trying to grab them out of my hand to waiting several feet away to catch them and play cork-soccer with me. And drugs! Very much because of alcohol-free extract of valerian mixed in tuna, twice daily for several months at a relatively high dose. It's an "anxiolytic" and lowered his anxiety level to the point we could have some calm interactions, which made him less edgy around us, so we had even more good moments ... it built on itself after a while. We tapered off the dose after a few months, but he still needs it on windy days, because they make him very on edge and grumpy. He's past not being hostile into being social - we have a cold house and one sunny spot on the bed where I read and he's welcome to sleep near me and the other cats. So he does. Does he ever scare you? Of course! That's 16+ pounds of fanged fury there, should he care to use it. Like I said - if you don't have scars, you aren't rehabbing :) Scares me less than he used to because he's learned we can take hints. He'll give a warning nip if I'm making him uncomfortable now, or a claw-free slap instead of sinking fangs into me or slashing me. Servals hiss and growl to communicate far more than domestic cats do - his hiss can mean "Whassup, dude?" as well as "I'm going to rip your face off" as well as "I have dibs on this shelf!" He seems to like lying in wait and letting off a steam-engine hiss as someone walks by, just to see them jump. Snarling at or near a door usually means "open this door for me" or "get out of my way, I'm coming through".

Oh, absolutely! Maggie Smith was/is and forever will be Jean Brodie in my mind. I also think young Pamela Franklin as Sandy Stranger was outstanding. I saw the film first back in 1969 and was so blown away that I wanted to read the novel immediately. But, for some reason that I can't recall now, I was unable to locate the book so there was a several-year gap between my seeing the film (two or three times) and my actually reading the book. I found Muriel Spark's style of telling the story rather annoying: She would jump into the narrative and start relating what Sandy Stranger was doing a quarter of a century into the future, in other words foreshadowing without any of the subtlety in which that technique is usually used. I later learned that this was something that Muriel Spark did in some of her other novels -- it was almost a 'signature' of hers. Well, I didn't like it...at first, perhaps because the film adaptation left that 'device' or 'technique' (or whatever is the proper literary term) completely out and instead told a straightforward, though somewhat telescoped, story. I also noticed that some of Miss Brodie's set, the crème de la crème, were missing from the film. There were six girls in the book, but they were conflated to four for the film's purposes and three of the girls (besides Sandy) were composites. For example, it wasn't Jenny in the book whom Miss Brodie said would be "known for sex." But I don't think the conflation of the girls in the film really matters. Neither does the restoring to wholeness of the one-armed Teddy Lloyd (the art teacher) in the book. A two-armed actor playing a one-armed part is sometimes not very believable -- and can be distracting -- so I think that was a good call of the filmmakers. I have a bit of a harder time with what happened to Mary McGregor in the film that was completely different in Spark's novel. I've puzzled over that change for years. The only way I can reconcile it is to say: Well, it happened one way in the book. It happened another way in the film. They both work. I guess I'll have to compartmentalize one from the other. And that's what I've done, basically, for forty years. Has something similar happened to any of you, either with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or some other book/film combo? Well, I was almost certain that the books and films I listed above were ones that I remembered RPers discussing in other conversations and reviewing in monthly threads. I still think they probably were, but the discussers and reviewers must not have been presently posting members, because the only bites I've got so far are about Out of Africa. Are you sure none of you have read or seen The Age of Innocence? :\-)

Always write as you "find it" Vee. It makes for a much more interesting discussion! :) Yes, even Nao made much of her name being pronounced Now and how it related to the time theme. Read the link I posted on bullying in Japan. Nao was an outsider who barely spoke Japanese after coming to that country from the states when she was a teenager. She had American customs and not Japanese ones, so of course whe would have stood out from the pack as a non-conformist. There is a racist remark that I have heard here where an Asian/American/Cdn who has lost his heritage is referred to as a banana, yellow on the outside and white on the inside, and that term is usually used by other Asians. That link explains why some teachers tolerated the bullying as a way to help the one picked on conform. Bizarre, I agree. The Jungle Crow? He too was blown off course and ended up far from home, just like the freezer bag and its contents. We do get birds like that here, and then the birders and their cameras camp out in some poor persons backyard so they can see the exotic visitor and cross it off their lifelist of birds. But in the novel there was some sort of bafflegab symbolism going on there, I am sure. Like I said earlier, I was in Ruth's area a little while ago and stayed on one of the islands. On a Friday night, they had what is called an 'open mic' and the villagers show up with musical instruments. Some brought tea, coffee, home made desserts and all were put on a table for everyone to share. At least 100 people showed up to listen. You just sign up if you want to display your musical talents or whatever and it goes in that order. Believe me, there were quite a few eccentric people, including a former US draft dodger who sorta twanged an electric guitar and then gave a stand up comedy routine which was, well, interesting. Some guy from Iran gave a speech on the human race, a native girl sang a song she wrote about bullying, a couple of guys had banjos and played some stuff they wrote. Lots of others, some were really good. Finding someone who speaks French is not hard at all, and there are plenty of Chinese and Japanese as well. The Japanese fisherman actually were an integral part of the fisheries during the 1920's to the 1950's. After Pearl Harbour many of them were gathered up and sent to internment camps, at least 145 of them from one cannery near Prince Rupert, causing the cannery to just about shut down. People on the coast are often aware of currents, especially after the tsunami. I think that was Oliver's specialty, wasn't his brain wired for things like that? Where I was staying, a couple of retired people beachcombed as a hobby. The woman found a Japanese fishing boat washed up on shore and using the numbers, she researched it and determined its original owners and confirmed it was from the tsunami. She actually visited Japan and eventually visited the elderly owners who had lost everything (the fishing...