“It’s the birthday of the journalist Seymour Hersh, born in Chicago, Illinois (1937). He majored in history at the University of Chicago and then went to law school for a year, but he was expelled for poor grades. He worked at a drug store for a while before a friend told him about the Chicago City News Bureau.

One of the first major stories he covered was about a house that had burned down in an inner-city neighborhood. He arrived on the scene and all the members of the family had been wrapped in tarps and arranged by size. He said, “I had this little image; like daddy bear, mama bear, and little baby bears. It was a horrific, amazing sight.” When he called in the story, his editor asked him if the deceased were black or white. When he responded that they were black, his editor told him to just keep it to one short paragraph in the paper.

It was Seymour Hersh who broke the story that American soldiers had massacred an entire village in Vietnam, killing all the men, women, and children. He followed up on it and broke the story of what is now known as the My Lai massacre and went on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject, My Lai : A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970).

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hersh has been writing articles for The New Yorker on the U.S. government’s response, Middle Eastern politics, and the war.”

I’ve had a few vets tell me confidentially that neutering is one of the simplest procedures they do, and that anyone with a minimal understanding of the anatomy could easily do it at home. (Not that you should try this, Judy.)

even healthy pets aren’t free. ken’s first round this spring - just the basics - came in at $246. he still has to be neutered. and then it’s jax’s turn.
buying powerball tickets, of course.
good luck sue and dave. dexter, that makes me so mad. rest assured people are still rallying that cry. as we now know, it wasn’t just a pet-food problem.

I just returned from a 12 mile bike ride. Yesterday I had the old Schwinn 10 speed out, today I rode the Specialized cross-bike. A great evening for cycling. For luck, I found a quarter. I stopped and picked it up. I won’t stop for dimes…but a quarter, if I am just cruising anyway….what the hell. Once I found $37 frozen into the ice in a parking lot. I dug it out…I have found four billfolds over the years, one had been stuffed with cash; it was my friend’s, and he had left it lying on the change machine. He had just been paid in cash for a cabinet job and that billfold had a few thousand in it. He bought me a jug of bourbon and two cases of beer.
Yard uglies? Here’s one for the books:
Three days ago my Jack Russell started sniffing at a strange thing…it was a white rat, flattened, in my yard. It was the kind they feed huge snakes, I think. How the poor thing ended up in my yard is a mystery, and I am leaving it at that.

As a farm boy, I hear $2600, and I think, “Oh, my god, how much per pound is that?”

Then I think about Marie. It’d be $20/pound for her; German Shepards weigh considerably more than most cats.

And then I wonder what I’d do. It’s not a question of whether she’s worth $2600 to me. It’s a question of whether, if it takes $2600 to fix, would I be prolonging her life, or prolonging her death?

I wondered the same thing about my grandmother, in her final years. She kept having operation after operation for her cancer, and she never seemed to get well before they told she needed another one. I don’t mind the cost of the medical care, but sheesh, she suffered so much.

She wanted so much to attend my niece’s wedding. It was her first great-grandchild to wed. A couple of weeks before then, they told her that she wouldn’t be strong enough to go, and she had better not make plans she couldn’t keep. That did it. She gave up struggling, and died two days later.

I’m so sorry your cat was so sick. I hope she’s enjoying life now. Marie is starting to really get down on cats; she repeatedly will approach cats in a friendly manner, only to get her nose clawed. But she always tries to be friends first.