The Mouser.

 

Sunday, September 17, 1944. Operation Market Garden commences.

According to the Wyoming State History calendar, a cat saved a LaGrange girl from a coiled rattlesnake.

Cat's reaction time is so incredibly quick they can out react snakes pretty readily, whereas humans cannot.

This is not actually a unique event.  In 2017, for instance, a girl in Florida was saved from a rattlesnake by her grandmother's cat.

Pieced together in a remarkably quick time, the gigantic Montgomery planned airborne invasion of the Netherlands, Operation Market Garden, commenced on this day in 1944.  Planned as a series of airborne drops to secure major bridges followed by anground advance, it put the ground forces on a single, often elevated, road.  A field problem in the Dutch military prior to the war had posed the same strategic problem with this solution being the failing solution.

Airborne forces from the US, UK, Canada, and Poland would participate in the offensive.  Ground troops from the US and UK provided the ground spearhead. The operation was a British one in terms of command.

Dutch railway workers went on strike, heading a call made by Gen. Eisenhower.

The Canadian Army launched Operation Wellhit to take Boulogne, France.

The Battle of San Marino began in the tiny independant Italian enclave, which had declared itself to be neutral.  German forces entered it for refuge anyway, and the battle was on.

The Soviets launched the Tallinn Offensive.

A bomb dropped by the RAF disabled the Tirpitz.

The UK relaxed blackout restrictions in London.

The Battle of Angaur began on Palau.

The carrier Un'yō was torpedoed and sunk in the South China Sea by the American submarine Barb.

Last edition:

Saturday, September 16, 1944. "Wacht am Rhein" approved.

Labels: "Wacht am Rhein", Adolf Hitler, Battle of the Bulge, Belgium, Bulgaria, Clothing, Denmark, German Weimar Republic, Operation Market Garden, Red Army, Second Quebec Conference, World War Two

Lex Anteinternet: 18-year-old bodega cat stolen in Queens

Lex Anteinternet: 18-year-old bodega cat stolen in Queens

18-year-old bodega cat stolen in Queens

Truly, he's a bit of a chonker.

18-year-old bodega cat stolen in Queens

The Mouser

Wednesday, April 30, 1924. More tornadoes.

Tige, the Coolidge's cat.

Tornadoes killed 111 people in five southern states.

The lead plane in the transglobal flight effort, the Seattle, crashed in fog near Port Moller, Alaska. The crew was unharmed.

A short-lived rebellion broke out in Cuba under Gen. Laredo Bru.

Last prior edition:

Tuesday, April 29, 1924. The Townsend Fire.

1920s, 1924, British Empire, Casper Wyoming, Disaster, Prohibition, Rhodesia, The American South, Weather, Wyoming (Casper), Zimbabwe

Mid Week At Work. Cat games.

 EXCLUSIVE Travers Smith associate dismissed after complaining that a client 'sold him flea-ridden kittens'

Wild Cats of Hawaii.

Wild Cats of Hawaii.

They are feral, of course, not really wild, and not native to Hawaii at all.

 

Saturday, October 20, 1923. Kittens at the White House, Cover Art, Coolidge and Girl Scouts.

 

Cry Havoc, and let slip the cats of war.

 Ukrainian drone pilot and cat.

I know how.

I have lived in a cramped camper van with my wife and our cat for 8 years. Here's how we make it work.

You never had children, that's how.

The article was from Business Insider, which is on my news feed for some reason, even though I'm not really a fan of it. The headline comes from a blog entitled:

Van Cat Meow

Now, I'll be frank that at my stage of my life, having worked since age 13 and now 60, a life in which I could take my wife in our camp trailer and go annually from Alaska back home, catching the seasons (fish, hunting, etc.) would appeal greatly to me.

It wouldn't appeal to my spouse, so this will be another dream unrealized.

But two young people living as vagabonds with a cat?  Well, it's not for some reason.

Let's be even more frank. This trip is made possible only by the pharmaceutical industry as it's made possible, probably, only due to birth control.  There's something weirdly narcissistic and self focused about it, therefore.

In a prior age, being an adult for most people meant taking on adult things, and that meant for most people, given the nature of nature and what that means, ultimately meant getting married and having children, the second following from the other.  Chemicals made the first possible without the second, which ultimately radically muddled the minds of many as to the true, deep, existential nature of the essential act that goes with that marriage.  In turn, that really gave rise to the "alternative" definitions of everything we have today, as the deep natural nature of that relationship became one for self defined entertainment, although at some level the deeper meaning is never lost.

Also lost, however, that going forward with the true nature of the relationship is deeply adult.

Or, in a former era, for one reason or another, it meant going into adult life on your own, and plenty did it.  But that was a pretty serious affair in and of itself.  People like to say "marriage is hard", which it isn't. Being on your own, as an adult, and as you age, is hard.  Frankly, for most people, it got pretty hard in all sorts of ways by the time a person was in their late 30s.

Traveling by van around Australia?  I'm sure it's fun.  But is also dropping out, in more ways than one, including dropping out of a part of nature while viewing it. The cat?  Probably not a conventional pet the way pets were in prior decades, but a substitute child, that instinct never really gone.

Dropping out, however, also says something about the state of our world.

Some people have always dropped out of the active world, to be sure.  But it's become a sort of post-pandemic pandemic.  Quietly Quitting, Laying Flat, and this. All symptoms of a world we've built that we don't like.

In an earlier era, this very British couple (and I know that one is Australian) probably would have met and farmed.  They seem to be angling for a simple life.

One pretty hard to achieve in our world today.

Related threads:

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

Blog Mirror: Baby

 

Baby

Sunday, August 19, 1923. Ada Delutuk Blackjack.

Ada Delutuk Blackjack was rescued from Wrangel Island.  A Native Alaskan, she had survived alone on the island since September 15, 1921.  The only native member of an expedition to the Arctic island, which sought to claim it for Canada, she had been hired as a cook and because she was good at sewing.  The other members of the expedition died on the remote island or disappeared seeking to walk the 90 miles to Siberia to obtain help.

She was not completely alone. The expedition's cat, Victoria, also survived.

She took the job to raise money for her son's treatment for tuberculosis, and in fact upon her retrun moved to Seattle so that he could be treated there. Divorced from her first husband prior to the expedition, she remarried and ultimately returned to Alaska and died in Palmer at age 85 in 1983.

The object of a Canadian claim to the island was quixotic at best, as it is well off of Siberian Russia.  The large island features flora and fauna, including large numbers of polar bears, but remains uninhabited by humans.  It is believed the world's last surviving mammoth populations lived on the island, dying out only perhaps as recently as 2,000 years ago.  Musk ox and reindeer have been introduced to the island for some weird reason, and wolves have reintroduced themselves.

The best cat we ever had.

Also for International Cat Day. . .

 

By Dantheman9758 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42290827

Because they remember . . . 

Today Is International Cat Day

 Truly, a day worth celebrating:

 A calendar for 1897. Featuring a calico cat and an artist, the way we typically think of the late 1890s. . .right?

Blog Mirror: The Office of the First Cat

 

The Office of the First Cat

Ranch Yard Lion

Ranch Yard Lion

He's very friendly, but he's lived his entire life outdoors.  A true yard lion.

Tuesday, December 26, 1922. Minnie

The Allied Reparations Committee's delegates voted 3 to 1 to declare Germany to have voluntarily defaulted in its Great War reparations, this stemming from a delayed timber delivery to France.

Only the United Kingdom dissented.

Mussolini ordered that Italian coinage be redesigned to bear the fasces.

Fasces.

And this:  1922: Minnie, the the RMS Cedric Ship Cat Who Saved Her Christmas Kittens

Poster Saturday. Keep Calm.