Nocturnal Cats

It's almost eight. I finally let the cats back inside on this cold morning. I mutter after them, "You got to let me sleep. If you don't let me sleep, life gets tougher." Unlike past winters, I've been letting the cats meow me out of bed to let them go outside, in part, because they no longer always use the litter box, and I'd rather let them go out to relieve themselves as they seem to prefer. And, because it is cold, I am anxious to let them back inside as soon as I can. But this has put me in a bad place. They will meow me out of bed every hour of the night. I cannot put up with that.

Reading Life

I regret paying that extra five dollars for expedited delivery of the T. S. Eliot biography. It arrived yesterday, and I am kind of anxious to get started, but I still got a good week to go before I finish my Webster-Clay-Calhoun book. However, I am in no jeopardy of cutting short my reading. I love my Webster book.

I was just looking for a deep backgrounder on the Lincoln history, but I got so much more. I did not expect the de facto tutorial on the national bank and the debates over the protective tariff and the sectional tensions that existed before the conflict over slavery took over center-stage. And, oh, I absolutely love the exposure I got to Andrew Jackson. I wasn't expecting that at all. I am coming away much more familiar with Jackson than I did when I read one of the recent biographies on him. And the book even reads about as friendly as a good novel. In short, I now count it among my Lincoln 're-readables'.

Ah, but the pages turn so slowly. I age faster than I read.

Trump World

Michiko Kakutani tweeted: 'This is Orwellian: Trump admin gives CDC, the nation's top public health agency, a list of words/phrases it is prohibited from using. Words/phrases are: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based" & “science-based”.'

She goes on to give the Orwell quotation from "1984": "Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc"