Stumblina

Our most pitiful cat, she’s a manx that we found while out on a hike in a seabird sanctuary. When we found her, we thought she was a goner — her rear end was all bloody and she had no tail; we thought it had been ripped off by a car or something. She hopped around like a little rabbit, because one of her front legs was useless. Turns out that she’s naturally tailless (all manxes are), and she was just sick and dehydrated. The useless leg was a birth deformity. With a little TLC she recovered very nicely, and we had another slightly grumpy little cat. Her name is a play on both “Thumblina” for her small size, and “stumble” for her odd feline gait.

While we don’t know for sure what her history is, I’m afraid it was an example of the worst kind of uncaring stewardship. Most likely her deformity made her undesirable to the family that owned her — and to “solve” the problem, they took this poor little kitten out and dumped her on a sandbar jutting out into the salt water San Diego Bay. Where we found her, there was no food and no water — and she could never have hopped far enough to find either one. She’d have died shortly of dehydration, starvation, or both.

We never recorded the date that we found her, but it must have been in the range of 1987 to 1989. That makes her something like 16 to 18 years old. She’s been a well-loved member of our household for all those years, but only because we were lucky enough to find her…

The picture at right was taken in August 2004. At the moment, she’s in decline (though she rallied a bit in the past couple of days). So far as we know, there’s nothing really wrong with her other than old age, but she’s got the typical feline reaction to not feeling well: she stops eating. She’s the proverbial “bag of bones” now, and of course that hastens the decline. We hydrate her with subcutanaceous fluids when she needs it, and we try every trick we can think of to get her to eat — and the last couple of days, that seems to be working. She can’t make it to the litter box anymore, so we’ve got her in absorbent “diapers” — not particularly cute, but effective at keeping her from wallowing in wet bedding. We keep her warm and as comfortable as we can. But even with the recent rally, it’s clear that someday soon we’ll be mourning her, and remembering the best moments…

Click on the photo for a larger view of this cat who escaped an awful fate…

Good Reason

A senior citizen in Florida bought a brand new Corvette convertible. He took off down the road, flooring it to 80 mph and enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left on his head.

"This is great,” he thought as he roared down I-75. He pushed the pedal to the metal even more. Then he looked in his rear view mirror and saw a highway patrol trooper behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. “I can get away from him with no problem " thought the man and he tromped

it some more and flew down the road at over 100 mph. Then 110, 120 mph.

Then he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this kind of thing."He pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the trooper to catch up with him!

The trooper pulled in behind the Corvette and walked up to the man. “Sir,” he said, looking at his watch. “My shift ends in 30 minutes and today is Friday. If you can give me a reason why you were speeding that I’ve never heard before, I’ll let you go."

The man looked at the trooper and said, “Years ago my wife ran off with a Florida State Trooper, and I thought you were bringing her back."

"Have a good day, Sir,” said the Trooper.

3D Photos

Anaglyphs are images that simulate three dimensional images by supplying slightly different images to your right and left eyes. The most common way to make anaglyphs is to take two black-and-white photos from a few inches apart (as your eyes are), color one (by convention, the left one) red and the other blue, then merge them together. To view them you need the “3D glasses” with a red filter over your left eye and a blue filter over your right eye.

The image at right is an anaglyph that I made this morning, using a handheld digital camera and Photoshop. The image is of a chaparral-covered hillside adjacent to my home. I had to do some “fixing” with Photoshop, as I had aimed the camera slightly differently between the two photos, plus I rotated the camera slightly. But once I fixed that stuff, coloring and merging them was easy — and the results, to my surprise, quite effective. If you click on the photo at right to get the full sized copy, and use the 3D glasses, you’ll be able to easily see how the various shrubs are at different distances. To my eye, these distances seem quantized, as if there were some fixed number of “layers” to the resulting 3D image. I speculate that this is a side-effect of pixelization — the image isn’t “analog” like what your eyes actually see, but is composed of discrete pixels — so the offsets between the images for your left and right eye are limited to integral pixels. Of course in the real world our eyes are doing the same thing, but … there are many more “pixels", and the pixels are not on a regular grid, which I believe would mitigate the quantization to a large degree.

There’s another surprise for me in making this anaglyph: the resulting image, viewed without 3D glasses, looks quite blurred. But with the 3D glasses, all the crisp detail comes back! This I didn’t expect at all…