and wider and brighter

I'm going to take a break from the class war today in order to pay tribute to Armagideon Time HQ's resident feline matriarchs...

...Little Baby Setzer (the gray and white tabby) and Nubby (the tuxedo cat). They started visiting our house in the summer of 2005 as part of a quartet of feral kitten sisters. When we brought the entire group to our vet to be fixed that following spring, we were informed that both Nubby and Setz had already been knocked up and that they were too far along to safely abort.

(Maura and I have since been told that was bullshit by someone from the local feral cat spay and neuter group, but what's done is done.)

We took the pregnant pair of felines into our home, and they gave birth -- two days apart from each other at the end of April 2006 -- to two litters of four kittens each. While she carried out her maternal responsibilities to the letter, Nubby wasn't enthusiastic about motherhood and let the more dedicated Setz pick up most of the slack.

Unlike their non-pregnant sisters (Money and Princess) who couldn't wait to get back outside after the post-spay observation period, Nubby and Setz embraced the housecat life style and never looked back. We ended up keeping four of their kittens (Jem, CooCoo, and Carmen from Nubby's brood and Witch Baby from Setz's), the other four (Tyra, Beezo, Ultima Morpho, and Gizmo) were placed in good homes.

The Cure - The Lovecats (from a 1983 single; collected on Staring at the Sea, 1986) - Staring at the Sea being one track and the Atlantic Ocean removed from Standing on a Beach which I own in LP format. It was the first Cure album I bought (at In Your Ear's Harvard Square location, along with a copy of PIL's Album, in the January of 1992), and I picked it up because I thought the girl I was dating (a very strange woman named Maura) was a big fan of the band.

Even though confused my past and present tenses -- she had been a big fan, but became disgusted with them after The Top -- the purchase was a mini-watershed moment that shook me loose of punk purist attitudes concerning music.