Cat with 2 heads

The Telegraph UK:

Vets believe the cat, which has two mouths, two noses and four eyes, may have two brains, as one face can go to sleep while the other remains awake and it can blink independently on each one.

"When he purrs it is like he is purring in stereo," the cat's owner said.

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The Independent:


Al Jazeera: 'It's no hangout for al-Qa'ida'

Al Jazeera has been bombed, banned and ridiculed – but its new English language version has accumulated viewers in 100 million homes after barely a year on air. Ian Burrell goes inside its London bureau to find out what makes the station tick

...But Al Jazeera English is far more than Sir David Frost's Friday foray into politics and culture. It is a station that follows the sun as it moves around the globe. Early-morning coverage emanates from Kuala Lumpur, and is transferred at 10am to Doha in the Gulf; the London bureau takes centre stage at 8pm before handing over to Washington at 11pm, Greenwich Mean Time. At all times, the station is attempting to provide an alternative to what it sees as the Western perspective of rivals CNN and BBC World, offering a "south to north" interpretation of the news. In its first 12 months, the network has far exceeded its expectations, reaching 100 million homes, though it is shunned by most cable networks in the US, where it relies heavily on its website stream.

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Micah hides from a hip scarf

First Trick

Or Treat
This is a bit late, but Micah learned the mores of trick or treating for the first time this year.

On the zoo

"At the zoo, that terrible 'zoological garden,' the child see living animals he has never seen before- jaguars, vultures, buffalo, and, strangest of all, giraffes. He sees for the first time the confused variety of the animal kingdom, and the spectacle, far from alarming or frightening him, delights him. It delights him so much, in fact, that a trip to the zoo becomes part of the 'fun' of childhood, or what passes for fun. How is one to explain this common and yet mysterious occurence?

We can, of course deny it. We can tell ourselves that children brusquely led into that garden become, twenty years down the line, neurotic, and the truth is, there's not a child who has not discovered the zoo and not an adult who is not, when carefully examined, discovered to be a neurotic. Or we may assert that the child is, by definition, a discoverer, and that discovering the camel is no more remarkable than discovering mirrors, or water, or stairs. We may assert that the child trusts his parents, those who take him into that place filled with animals. Besides, the stuffed tiger on his bed and the tiger in the encyclopedia have prepared him to look without fear upon the tiger of the flesh and blood. Plato (should he join this discussion) would tell us that the child has already seen the tiger, in the world of archetypes, and that now, seeing it, he but recognizes it. Schopenhauer (still more startlingly) would say that the child looks without fear on tigers because he knows that he is the tigers and the tigers are he, or, more precisely, that tigers and he are of one essence- Will."

Jorge Luis Borges, excerpted from the Forward of The Book of Imaginary Beings

photo: Academy Animals, 2002, Richard Barnes

http://www.richardbarnes.net/

tabitha has always liked exotic fruits like papaya and melon, but i didn't know she likes to nuzzle and be close with strawberries too.