Normally I don’t post links I find at blogdex, but this one I’m doing as a public service for second-born siblings everywhere, like my brother. While I’m at it, this link here lets you view the top 500 most-popular sites according to the blogdex listings, instead of clicking down through pages, if that’s something you’d ever want to do.

Yes, we’ll always miss his acerbic wit.
At least, that’s what we thought.
But can we be so sure? Was the recent report of his demise an exaggeration? Or is something altogether more sinister going on?
You have, I am sure, by now already heard the odd rumors of Punk sightings. At first, they were no more than hysteria, reported only in the fringe press and taken seriously by no one.
Except those of us who knew the Punk more closely.
Who would believe a vision of the Punk in toast? On a tortilla? On a bedsheet? But meticulously, those of us who knew him collected and shared the proof. Then, the appearances grew more… concrete. A previously-unrecognized face on the Easter Islands. The Two Heads of the Punk, previously unnoticed, in an old photograph of a mushroom cloud. And again in a photograph of the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas. Is this the Punk, dispassionately observing Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald?
What does this all mean? What does the Punk want to tell us? Does he come from the Past or from the Future?

Using state-of-the art search programs, we have scoured the Internet for further proof.

Ultimately, we found it. In a photograph of the Dalai Lama: that is the Punk in the background, posing as a Tibetan monk. But why? What does he want to tell us? May peace prevail? From the Bulletproof Punk? I think not.
Then this turned up: slowing down the imagery on the Internet’s most recent – and some say most disturbing – meme, we discovered just what makes it so frightening.
Following a hunch, I loaded up my photographic equipment and took to the Austrian hills outside Salzburg. That’s where the signs seemed to be leading me. Exhausted after a day of rough hiking, I was ready to throw in the towel when I finally saw him, with my own eyes.

Or were hunger, cold and fatigue merely causing me to hallucinate?
You decide.

Before you discount what I say here as the ramblings of a notorious fraud, go visit these other sites of people claiming to have seen the Punk. Yes, I sorely miss his acerbic wit. If only… if only…

Two-thirds of my cats did not mysteriously appear on my roof yesterday. That is a pretty good percentage.

Let me tell you about our ladder. It is a long wooden thing, and nearly, but not quite, reaches to the edge of the roof. So when I got home, my father-in-law, who was babysitting, had build a rickety Rube-Goldbergish contraption out of sawhorses and boards upon which to stand the ladder so that one could climb up to where the little red cat stood in the gutter, shivering and meowing, while my mother-in-law and youngest daughter stuck their heads out the skylight a few feet away and rattled a box of catfood and said “here, kitty kitty,” while the same little cat observed them closely yet failed to get the message.

I also failed to coax him in, so I climbed up the ladder and carried him down, roundly cursing him and holding him securely by the scruff of the neck like one of those little European purses for men European gentlemen carry, assuming said purse was full of something valuable yet fragile, like a donor kidney, and – still with the purse metaphor – if same purse at the same time also had four feet all with sharp claws trying to get a good hold on my chest, and had just done something very stupid, yet amazing.

Mr. Zappa on politics:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.”

Underground Movement
About 1510 A.D. the Turks were besieging Vienna. They assaulted the walls of the city with all their might but to no avail. The walls held and other means had to be taken by the ingenious invaders to take the stronghold. They hit upon an underground movement-they decided to tunnel under the walls. This had to be a night job, of course. Drilling and moving the dirt-shift after shift of soldiers worked on the project…

The Pretzel Story.
[Via uren.dagen.nachten]

For days now I’ve had the urge to post something long and soulful instead of these dumbass jokes all the time. But now, staring lamely at this blinking cursor, it strikes me that there is a difference between having an urge and being in the mood. And I am simply not in a soulful mood. Maybe later. Maybe I’d be in a soulful mood right now if I’d had any sleep the past two nights, but Alpha is away for a week leaving me to deal with cats turning the night into day all by myself, and Gamma’s getting up several times a night to pee or drink or come into the big bed. Beta, at least, thank god, sleeps like a stone statue of a sleeping goddess.

So I give up on soulful. Caffeine-addled maybe. Maybe a decent rant, but, eh… how can you say anything funny about the president anymore, when he’s carrying out these pre-emptive humor strikes? Feh.

What is it, Tuesday? That’s all? Double-feh. And yet…

How beautiful are the eyes of my beloved.