I thought you'd like this, so I typed it in.  Couldn't find a copy to cut and paste. The Flying Cat by Naomi Shihab Nye (another cat lover) Never, in all your career of worrying, did you imagine What worries could occur concerning the flying cat. You are travelling to a distant city. The cat must travel in a small box with holes.        Will the baggage compartment be pressurized?      Will  a soldier's footlocker fall on the cat during take-off?      Will the cat freeze?   You ask these questions one by one, in different voices over the phone.  Sometimes you get an answer, sometimes a click. Now it's affecting everything you do. At dinner you feel nauseous, like you're swallowing at twenty thousand feet. In dreams you wave fish-heads, but the cat has grown propellers, the cat is spinning out of sight!        Will he faint when the plane lands?      Is the baggage compartment soundproofed?      Will the cat go deaf?   "Ma'am, if the cabin weren't pressurized, your cat would explode." And spoken in a droll impersonal tone, as if the explosion of cats were another statistic!   Hugging the cat before departure, you realize again the private language of pain.  He purrs.  He trusts you. He knows little of planets or satellites, black holes in space or the weightless rise of fear. I love that phrase, "the private language of pain".  Exquisite phrase.

CHRISTINA APPLEGATE I was flipping through magazines at the supermarket this morning, and the cover of the July/August "Hollywood Life" jumped out at me.  Christina Applegate, and from the angle of this cover photo, I do see the resemblance.  It's minor, but there.  You pish-poshed me once before when I said this, but I swear on my family's (and Shane's) graves that you are sooooooooooooo much prettier than her.  It's not even minimally close.  She has a lot of bad angles, and you don't have ONE bad angle, Beauty, not one. Just the truth, for what it's worth ...

You need to read this.   "The message that we give to girls in puberty is important. The relationship between men and women has become highly sexual and that can be found in the media. The focus is on sexualization, being sexy, looking sexy," said Dawn Currie, author of "Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers," a book that studies the changing look of teen magazines.

Today's Golden Oldie: "The Godfather Saga", the chonological one, is on Bravo tonight. Remember when Michael was hiding out in Sicily and he saw Appolonia? His guards said that he had been hit "by the thunderbolt". I know that feeling. That's exactly how I felt when I saw Jenny for the first time. Exactly.

"Even in retrospect, passion thrives on mystery, distance and obstacles." -- Stephen Holden