I knew my cat was dippy

More than half of all cats over age 15 are bloody senile!

Most, if not all, mammals, can suffer age-related conditions normally associated with people, and in the case of cats, the main difference is that a 15-year-old individual can be compared to an 85-year-old person. (About half of all octogenarians show signs of dementia.)

The Journal of Small Animal Practice states that behaviors associated with senility in cats range from acting disoriented to changes in their social relationships, to shifting sleep habits, inappropriate vocalizing, forgetting commands, breaking housetraining, pacing, wandering, sluggishness, unusual interest or disinterest in food, and decreased grooming and confusion.

Danielle Gunn-Moore, head of the Feline Clinic at the University of Edinburgh’s Hospital for Small Animals, also says “They get confused with things, such as forgetting that they have just been fed.”

So now we know, domestic cats develop Alzheimer’s, just like their owners.

I knew my old moggy was a bit dippy, he’s taken to stealing my fish oil capsules. It’s enough to make me screw the top on my sherry bottle tighter.

Developers win again

A huge Chinese Developer has finally won and defeated little home owner, pensioner Wu Pin.

For more than 3 years this home has been stuck in the middle of a construction site in a pit in Chongqing city.

The developers want to turn the area into a $40m ‘Broadway’ square, including apartments and a shopping mall, and there’s no room for an ordinary house in there. They sued Mrs. Wu and pleaded for the court to issue an order to bulldoze the house. Finally the judge at Chongqing Jiulongpo district court decided that Mrs Wu must leave her villa, and it’s now been demolished. I would have put up a longer fight but who can ever win against those bloody developers?

Such a neat little cottage too, a bit like mine really, but with a better view. Mind you, it’s a lot easier for me to get to my local shop for a bottle of milk.

Lock up your livestock

Beryl, who goes to Bingo with me, firmly believes in the recent sightings of Blessed Virgin Mary, but she’s worried that her framed velvet Mary art and hot pink plastic rosaries won’t save her budgerigars from the Chupacabra.

Granted, the reports of mysterious Goatsuckers in my neighbourhood are few and far between, but all the same I intend to keep my Border Collie inside at night.

Dreadful attacks have been perpetrated by the Chupacabra, which always involve slain livestock with telltale marks on their necks. The victims, most often goats and chickens, are reportedly drained of all their blood, but are otherwise left intact.

I tried to tell Beryl that these creatures only plague various regions of Puerto Rico and other faraway places of a similar rural nature, but she says the Chupacabra has kangaroo-like qualities, so they must be local.

I may borrow a set of rosaries myself.

Suspicious smiling

I know what to do about the poor soldiers in the impenetrable forests of giant marijuana. No one has told their superiors that marijuana combats Alzheimers disease. The effects are only beneficial for older people, or so I’m told, and that explains the preponderance of smiling old ladies you see around such dense forests.

THC, the psychoactive substance in marijuana, has been used for some time to help reduce agitation and increase weight in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And now researchers have shown that cannabis can help older subjects perform better on a spatial memory task.

I wonder where these tests have been carried out? And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the ladies at my Lawn Bowls Club have been subjects in this research. A couple of them are always smiling. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?

Soldiers going potty in Afghanistan

I’m a bit worried about the soldiers. Apparently Canadian troops fighting in Afghanistan have encountered an unexpected and potent enemy — almost impenetrable forests of 10-feet-high marijuana plants.

These forests are used as cover for both sides, soldiers slip in and out and armoured cars are camouflaged with giant plants. They tried burning the foliage but successful incineration has its own drawbacks.

“A section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and we decided that was probably not the right course of action,” said an Army spokesman.

Ill effects? Perhaps nobody wanted to do any more fighting.

It’s true, I didn’t make it up

More on alien abductions.

They are tiny. They are tall. They are gray. They are green. They survey our world with enormous glowing eyes. To conduct their shocking experiments, they creep in at night to carry humans off to their spaceships. It’s quite a disturbing trend these days.

Back when I was young we had to make do with the occasional flying saucer sighting. Nothing fancy like abductions and the ever-present probes.

The saucers didn’t worry us too much, we would just yell Will U kindly F.O. However I understand that the younger generation have nastier experiences.

Have you been abducted lately? If you live in Germany you can hire a lawyer like Jens Lorek, who pursues state compensation claims for abductees. “There’s a demand for legal advice here,” says Jens Lorek. “The trouble is, people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court.”

I wonder why.

Do I seem cruel hearted to you? I had to ask my ne…

Do I seem cruel hearted to you? I had to ask my neighbour to remove a comment from my blog about the Virgin Mary on a Pool Stick. Some frenzied soul slapped down a scathing post accusing me of making fun of and being cruel to the ignorant innocent people who find these amazing apparitions of Mary everywhere. It was even suggested that I invented the whole thing! Let me tell you, I was a trifle shocked and had to sit down with a little glass of sweet sherry.

I assure you I am of a kindly nature, and to show that I didn’t make it up, I include the description from eBay. Word for word. Verbatim. As it is. Well, the first few lines anyway, it rabbits on a bit.

To those who could be interested in this wonderful appearance I will tell them that this is not one more appearance of Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. This is a fact, which had not occurred before in history, that an object had a similar manifestation. And you will be ocular witnesses of what you will be discovering. I assure you with all humility that is a divine creation, fulfilled with simbology and history

There you go, what could be clearer? You are an ocular witness.

Virgin Mary on a Pool Stick. And by the way, what is a Pool Stick?
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Virgin Mary on eBay

She’s turned up again. The BVM just can’t help herself from manifesting to awestruck mortals the world over.

Not content with recreating her appearance in melted chocolate, potatoes and rancid fat, she has given the world a new face on a “pool stick”.

I’m not sure what a pool stick is, but this one has a starting price of $20,999,999.00 on eBay. (In fact I’m not even sure what the object in that photo is.)

If any reasonably endowed person can actually see the BVM on the whatever-it-is then it’s odds on that someone may just be mug enough to make a bid.

She may be popping up with dreary regularity, but searching for a cowled female shape on mundane objects certainly makes a change from all the alien abductions we saw a few months back.

Virgin Mary and child on a Pool Stick

The truth about safety pins

Absolutely anything could be inside your kitchen drawers, I had a good look inside mine this morning. For 10 seconds. That was quite enough, thank you very much. I can live with the mothballs and the old cat collars, but it’s the safety pins that concern me.

I have a theory about the safety pins but I’m jumpy in case my Council Home Help Girl gets wind of it and reports me to the District Nurse as slipping into dementia. (She interferes like this all the time).

My theory is that safety pins breed in my drawers. Believe me, this actually happens. The common or garden safety pin is the larval stage of the coat hanger!

For years I wondered why I would have a drawer full of safety pins and nothing to hang my cardigans on, then, seemingly overnight, the safety pins would disappear and my wardrobe would be full of coat hangers.

Check it for yourself. Have a look in your own drawers.

Not cotton-picking fingernails

How do you stop chewing your fingernails, overeating, smoking, and picking your nose? My renter, Ghost Works, has a whole heap of people with questions of this nature. In the case of Lee Redmond, nail-biting should be actively encouraged.

If I had nails like that I wouldn’t be announcing it to the world. It seems she became bored with cutting her nails back in 1979 and decided to grow them just for a jolly lark. “It’s strange how they become you,” she said. “It’s almost like it’s your identity.”. Well it would be, wouldn’t it.

I’ll just have a small glass of sherry and gather the courage to ask my renter a question about long fingernails and toilet paper.

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