It's all about me

I know some of you are going to go all Mom-and-Apple-Pie over this and call it grumpy and downright un-American. But I live on an ice-cream-truck street, and the "music" is plain awful. It's not so much that it's too loud. You just hear it day after day, over and over again, until the high, tinny notes start boring into your brain. I don't know how the people who drive these things keep doing it without going berserk. How about a law requiring that the music be reasonable?

Got a letter in the mail this week:

Dear Mr. Morris: In your column of Aug. 13, your topic was cell phones and how many people use the "stupid things." When my children were young and said "that stupid car" or "that stupid chair," etc., my retort: This car (chair, whatever) is an inanimate object and therefore incapable of being stupid. I always got the rolling-eyes treatment, therefore it's OK if you did also. However, I hope you did smile. God bless, Nora Walters.

As a white male, it's always bothered me that I have more trouble than others in being a victim. It's made me rather crabby, in fact. But I'm not just a Mean Old Man -- I have a syndrome! I can be a victim, too, so nothing is my fault:

Cats. In sinks. That's all.

Like most fans of Bob Dylan, I've been trying to figure him out for years. Looks like he has me figured out, at least to the point of knowing where I might stumble across his new album. Of course, a few years ago, he would have had to catch me in a bar or a bookstore. And in a few more . . . suppose they'll have a rack of his CDs at the assisted-living center?

I should be gloating. All those people who have telling me for years that I drink far too much coffee now have to cope with the fact that it's the prime source for antioxidants. But I won't, because tomorrow, some scientist will discover something else bad about coffee. Science tends to move slowly, with lots of preliminary reports, tentative conclusions, further study and revisions of opinions.

One of the Rants in last night's paper was mean to me:

I read Leo Morris' column about class reunions. I think he was a little disrespectful saying the "band geeks" were huddled in one corner and the "school newspaper nerds" were gathered in another.

Tomorrow night, the Biography Channel (which really should probably be called the Celebrity Channel, for the same reason that "The Antiques Road Show" should probably be called "The Collectibles Road Show"), will feature the mother-daughter duo The Judds. The Judds are very special to me, because I finally had to admit I had turned the age corner when they burst upon the scene and I realized I had the hots for the mother rather than the daughter.

Her name was Helen Lee. She was my English teacher in high school, and she wouldn't let me get away with anything. I came into class one day, and she was waving a copy of The Spotlight, our school newspaper, at me; it had one of my articles on the front page. "Why don't you ever write anything this good for class?" she demanded. From then on, I tried to. A friend of mine once asked her why she'd given him a C on a paper when a classmate's paper, clearly not as good, had gotten a B. "You can do better," she said.

I haven't cat blogged since my first week of doing this. (But Dutch and Maggie are doing fine, thanks for asking.) One of the reasons I'm not going to overdo it is that I believe cats should be accorded their essential dignity, which the people who put out this site obviously don't care about.