There is a time for many words and there is a time for sleep

That headline quote comes from Book XI of Homer's The Odyssey which chronicles Odysseus' descent into hell. In my view a second helping of cat bait is justified to counterbalance the gathering global gloom. I took the photo in Essaouira, Morocco where a resilient mystical, musical and feline culture has reassuringly survived the never-ending foolishness of man. An observation by John Tavener is relevant to this image:
There is something deeply mysterious about cats. I think they 'know' things we don't have access to.
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A Philippa Schuyler moment

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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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