I don't know how we've been lucky enough to avoid it for so long.

Oscar is our 2-year-old male. He's entirely white from head to tail. He's not albino, as he has blue eyes. But white fur, pink skin, blue eyes -- he's a bit short in the pigment department. And apparently for cats, pigment and key brain lobes are coded on the same chromosome, which Oscar lacks, because he is DUMB.

Actually his stupidity is kind of endearing. Mostly he sits around looking dumb, but sometimes he looks confused or even puzzled. It's nice though, because he's so dumb that he thinks he's a dog. He'll come when called (actually, when you call any cat, he'll come) and he'll play fetch with cat toys.

He also drinks out of the toilet.

He claws at the glass-fronted hutch (that belonged to my wife's grandparents) when he wants out. This is because he believes the glass doors on the hutch to be exterior doors.

Anyway, until last night, he had never abused a roll of toilet paper. But as we were bedding down, Oscar was finishing his evening ablutions in the toilet bowl. (SLURP, SLURP, SLURP.) Then he stood up on the toilet seat and eyed the toilet paper roll. Certainly he was seeing it for the first time. He batted it exploratorily. It unrolled a little. He batted it some more. It unrolled some more. I pointed this out to my wife. We rolled our eyes at each other. Then he stopped, so we forgot about it and went to bed.

This afternoon I found that the nearly-finished roll of TP that was doing kleenex duty on the kitchen table had been knocked down under the table and unrolled. Could have been an accident, I thought, rolling it up.

Three-quarters of the way down, the roll was ripped to shreds.

No toilet is safe.

Yahoo! News - Canadian Senate Urges Legalization of Marijuana

But U.S. politicians have expressed unhappiness with the idea of Canada in any way easing its stance on marijuana and some say if Ottawa did relax its rules, this could lead to a clampdown on the countries' long joint frontier.

I am in awe of this quote.

Okay, really the last addition to this non-debate. Colby sez:

but I missed the leap to sentence three. The First Amendment says that Congress may not prohibit the free exercise of religion. The argument seems to go, "Therefore, Congress is positively required to provide chaplains for religious Congressmen at the public expense." Is that what the free exercise of religion means? Is my freedom inhibited because my place of work doesn't allow me to have--much less pay for--a shaman at my elbow?

The leap to sentence three is: Congress has decided to waste (ahem! spend) our money on providing religious services to religious members. We aren't all blessed (sorry!) with an employer so willing to spend the its money on fringe benefits. I mean, who in the private sector gets unlimited free postage and has a special electric train that goes back and forth between their office and their meeting room?

But suppose Congress decided to fund a Congressional shooting range and gun cabinet. (Okay, get up off the floor, stop laughing.) Would that offend those members who chose not to exercise their 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms? No, because the rights of those people who choose not to exercise a right (e.g., by not owning any firearms) are not offended by someone else's exercise of such a right.

There certainly is a libertarian argument against the provision of taxpayer-funded chaplain services to congress members, but it's the same as the libertarian argument against the taxpayer-funded provision of a building to hold sessions in: it's not necessary; let them fund it out of their own pockets if they want it.

Please realize that this is all based on the "religious services" line proposed originally by Ehrbar. If the chaplains are opening sessions with prayers and calling for blessings on the legislative houses, then there is a grave risk of ACLU lawsuits on the grounds of establishment. Clearly if we're going to let the Protestants pray and the Catholics sprinkle holy water, we have to get the Greek Orthodox guys in there waving their censers, and I don't even want to think what the Animists, Pagans and Satanists would want to do to bless the place. (It would make the comment "Congress keeps making new stupid damned laws." technically accurate, I suppose.)

The correct thing is to let the stupid issue die. But I can't.