It's funny. Last time, I let Paul write the afterword. And then later, after it was already uploaded,he obsessed over the fact that he referred to the current season as "spring" when it was already, in fact, summer.So, just out of curiosity, I would like to know if ANYONE noticed.

I have an essay about Comic-con, but it'll have to wait until I'm done editing it.

If you look at the "end" bullet, you see a little mouse eating...something. This is meant to indicate that the mouse got away from the cat -- this time. It's funny about cats and mice. I like cats. I like mice. Mice are more of a hassle -- cats don't get into my wall and scrabble around all night and come out to chew on flour sacks and leave droppings in the kitchen.These are things mice did a lot in the original goth house. We were plagued by the same kind of adorable, tiny, gray mice that we saw in some of the London tube stops when we were there in 1995. It gave us something to watch while we were waiting for trains.Little mice running everywhere, almost the same color as the floor so that you weren't quite sure they were there at first,then, you realized there were dozens and dozens of them. It was a little horrifying. Except the mice were so cute.

The goth house mice were like that. Annoying, but cute.

Like most people I know, I grew up watching cartoons. Cartoon animals present a weird semi-anthropomorphized view of nature, where ananimal goes back and forth between being an animal (running on all fours, engaging in instinctual behavior), and being a "human"(ability to manipulate objects with paws as if they were hands, speaking English, etc.) You also have weird conventions, wherebyPluto, Mickey Mouse's dog, can be a regular animal dog, and then Goofy can be a person-dog, and none of the other cartoon animalsseem to think anything is weird about this. There's never...you know, non-talking-animal liberation fronts or anything. And so you have cats being cats, and wanting to eat mice, and sometimes you identify with the cat, and sometimes with the mouse. Or you have cats and mice that form little alliances, like Tom and Jerry, where nobody seems to want to eat anybody.

This morning, I watched a nature program where somebody fed a live mouse to a snake, and then another mouse to a froggy sort of thing. These were full-sized mice. They dangled them in by their tails. One of the more disturbing things I have ever seen was a baby mouse(still blind) being fed to a snake. The mouse was just put in there, and it was squeaking pathetically as it looked around blindlyfor its mother, or its littermates, or something. Then the snake ate it.

I guess, I don't really know how I feel about this whole food chain thing. And I'm not even a vegetarian.

So, as a present for the mouse, this time he isn't eaten by the cat, and instead, he gets to eat the last crumb of food left in Goth House.