kittens and eggs

I think i had my first computer with internet in the early nineties.  What a wild and crazy place the internet was then.  Anymore it's just a shopping center.  It's worse than a shopping center because you don't even leave your own house.  Well that was back in the day before super phones.  Oh let's keep the morning young and not get me started on that subject. 


I suppose getting out of the house is not so much fun if you have to get into a car which is practically like being indoors with the added hassles of traffic and finding a parking space and having to get gas and all that crap.  But walking outdoors, weather permitting, is nice.  You see people, you see things, it's always interesting.  And if i have to take a train that's even more interesting because things and people move by even faster, and even though i am indoors sort of, and I don't have to worry about traffic or parking spaces or getting gas for the damn thing.

Stores are nice too, because once again you have people and things only now you have both more close up.  You can have a conversation about the weather too if you please.  The internet will tell you what the temp is but it will not pretend to be interested in how you feel about that.  And it's always better to see the purchase in person rather than some jpg, and nicer still when the transaction is done you leave, size permitting, with the object in your pocket and not in some distant future from fedex amid a slew of packaging garbage that makes a mess of your frontroom and eventually of the world.


My mother, who grew up in Berwyn, told me that the male cat will kill the kittens.  We had a couple cats that had kittens in our basement and we kids were horrified at the thought of some homicidal tom prowling in the gangway and backyard at night trying to figure some way into the house to do his dastardly deed. 


I have heard since then that the tom does destroy a lady cat's kittens by another father, but i think that is when he first adds her to his harem.  I have a mental picture of some guy going to his girlfriend's house with a box of chocolates and a gun and while she is trying to figure out which one is the chocolate covered cherry, he says excuse me, and goes up the stairs to shoot the kids.  That's kind of funny, except for the shooting of the kids part.

Frankly i think my tuxedo cat, BC, was just too much of a gentleman to kill kittens.  But even if he had been, he would still have remembered those days of wine and roses.  I think it's just when a cat takes over a lady cat from another tom that the kittencide takes place.

I've read that when those lady cats nurse another cats kittens they will nurse the kittens of their sisters first, and then maybe their cousins and so on, before kittens that aren't family, but they will do unrelated kittens too, i guess when they still have some milk left.
 

Now I am curious about that pbs show.  Maybe over the weekend I will do some internet research, but you know how grueling that can be.

You know my grandfather was a chicken farmer and my dad grew up on a chicken farm, but now I have to wonder about those unfertilized eggs.  I guess the chicken farmer keeps the hens away from the rooster unless he wants more chickens, but why does the chicken lay unfertilized eggs anyway?  Does any other bird do that?  Well I'm sure it has been bred into them, like those milk cows that have to be milked daily, but how did it even get started?  Were they just these birds that the first people to move beyond hunting and gathering noticed would occasionally drop the infertile egg and then bred them for it.  But again, why would it even ever lay an infertile egg?


More internet research?  My plate is already pretty full.  Maybe my northern pal will know the answer.  Maybe he saw it on some tv show or read a book.  Were you ever a fan of Kurt Vonnegut?  In one of his novels he uses the gimmick where some guy keeps saying that he read something in a science fiction book sometime.  Were you ever a science fiction fan?  What sort of books did you read as a teenager and a young man?


I notice on fb thing are getting het up between the Bernie Babies and the big girl followers.  Here is a thing that I think happens a lot.  It's only a small percentage of the Bernie Babies that dis the big girl, and only a small percentage of the big girl people who dis Bernie.  But the Bernie Baby troublemakers pretend it's all of the big girl people who are dissing Bernie and the big girl troublemakers pretend it's all all Bernie Babies who are dissing the big girl.  I think this is the way a lot of conflicts are fueled.  I think it has a lot to do with the rift between blacks and whites.


Maybe I'll get into that on Monday.  in the meantime I have a lot of beer to drink and a lot of internet research to do.