It's Fat Tuesday!

Today is the last day to "live high on the hog" prior to the 40 days of Lent, if one is Catholic. Lovey is drooling on me; Banichi is prowling in the backyard; the sun is shining, and we're expecting highs in the 60s today. At 9:15, I'll head over to see the Irish kids, and then I'll go to Suki and Boo's, to stay with them until tomorrow night. So I'll be walking four large dogs and feeding and sleeping with two again. I will, of course, return for several hours tomorrow during the day, so the kits can run outside. - Sunday night, watching Nature's "In the Valley of the Wolves," I was at first worried that the cats would react to the wolf and coyote howls. Lovey and Banichi slept peacefully through the first 40 minutes of the program, then when Casanova's pack returned triumphantly to the valley, Lovey awoke to the howls, brushed up twice her normal size, flew to the top of the bookcase, and then searched intently for the source of the hunting howls. I had to suppress a chuckle.

Not much else going on, so I thought I'd share a few news tidbits that caught my attention:
~~A 21-year-old man wanted by the U.S. Army for desertion was arrested in Boulder over the weekend. He was ticketed for allegedly resisting arrest, a misdemeanor, and taken to Boulder County Jail. Jail staff found three pairs of panties in Mauger’s shirt pocket and said he was wearing a woman’s thong underneath his boxers. He refused to tell jail staff where the undergarments had come from and why he had them, police said.
~~A bizarre deep-water fish called the barreleye has a transparent head and tubular eyes. Since the fish's discovery in 1939, biologists have known the eyes were very good at collecting light. But their shape seemed to leave the fish with tunnel vision. Now scientists say the eyes rotate, allowing the barreleye to see directly forward or look upward through its transparent head. They are being studied off the coast of central California and are found in the sea at depths of 2,000 to 2,600 feet.
~~Mysterious UFO sightings may go hand in hand with a puzzling natural phenomenon known as sprites — flashes high in the atmosphere triggered by thunderstorms. The dancing lights have appeared above most thunderstorms throughout history, but researchers did not start studying them until one accidentally recorded a sighting on camera in 1989. "Lightning from the thunderstorm excites the electric field above, producing a flash of light called a sprite," said Colin Price, a geophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "We now understand that only a specific type of lightning is the trigger that initiates sprites aloft."
(If you want more info on the last two items, check out the Science section at www.msnbc.com)

Enjoy Fat Tuesday, and for those of you at Mardi Gras or Carnivale any where around the world - party a little for me!