The amazing return of Kika the cat

Regular readers of this page, should there be any, have already met Kika the cat in a previous post. She's an incarnated homebody, a somewhat shy yet majestic cat that is used to live indoors in an apartment on the third floor in the city of Hertzliyah. It was therefore even more of a shock when she disappeard one fine morning, over three months ago. You see, she had an appointment with the vet, but managed to wriggle out of the cat carrier and escape, much to the chagrin of her owners Ilanka and Shani. A thorough search was conducted, as is customary in such cases, but Kika was nowhere to be found. After many weeks of sorrow, worry and despair, Ilanka and Shani were hitting rock bottom. They decided therefore to adopt another cat, a ginger fellow called Henry, to fill the void left by Kika. However, Henry had no intention of settling down in Hertzliyah of all places, having far greater ambitions in life, and he was making no bones about it. In the following weeks, Ilanka and Shani were frankly bullyragged by malcontent Henry and hence saw no other option than returning him to his owner. More time elapsed, days turned into weeks and weeks into another month before something quite extraordinary happened: Reports were coming in to headquarters about Kika roaming around the yard and the wider yardage of the street. Now even more timid after long months of freedom and deprivation, she never paused for smalltalk with her owners or the neighbors and was quite impossible to detain for a longer discourse. After a week or so in that manner, Shani summoned a professional cat catcher, who was equipped with a special carrier a cat would care to investigate and before she knew it, therein sat Kika, to the delight and great happiness of her owners. In the ensuing weeks, Kika was still not her old self, but the word is, she's catching up and is much more at ease these days. A truly happy ending this is, and may it stay that way! 

Old man sea

I'm an old man now, but the sea was wasted on me. I've never liked it much, though it looks great from every angle and is always ready for a photo op. I still recall my first encounter with a red hot Medusa and the escape from someone with a sexual orientation in the toilets on the ferry Ask and how I landed on Omaha Beach under steel gray skies and howling bullets. I really like the most Rema-1000 vanilla ice cream-boats, those with the crispy chocolate coating and the thin chewy waffle that Jesus' disciples sailed into the Mediterranean, all the way to Laodicea and Colossae. I never cease to regret not having acquainted myself with the Delphinidae family, and all the pebbles I mistook for amber.

Life unto life

Nothing quite compares to the smell of a well disinfected body M/W in the morning. The fragrance of life unto life (Corinthians 2:16).

Life is like...

Life is like a rubber band. Stretch it in one area and the other areas become lax. Stretch it in all areas and the rubber band snaps or else loses completely its limberness.

A review of a Stollen cake from Lidl

The first thing that strikes one is the size of the beast. It is really a big and heavy log that weighs down the shopping basket. You blush a little when you place it on the conveyor belt, hoping that people are busy thinking about the fast approaching Christmas, while you yourself, with one last agonizing effort, fumblingly and bashfully pour it onto the belt. The size also raises some quality concerns. Good products (and good people) are mostly found in the more modest size ranges (because real confectioners and God don't fritter the ingredients away). But here Lidl surprises.Their Stollen cake definitely holds up and can match up with its namesake from Aldi. Truth be told, I haven't held a blind tasting and my last Aldi Stollen was ingested a couple of decades ago, but I seem to remember that Aldi's was heavier and drier, while Lidl's is generously provided with a sticky mass that is supposed to be made of marzipan. My only cavil at the Lidl cake is, there's too much icing sprinkled on top of it and it spills all over the place. The idea behind that could be, that it is meant be noticed that a Stollen cake from Lidl was eaten here. To sum it up: This is a sizable and affordable cake that could sustain an Irish family through a long and cold winter. But a little disspiriting is, it's called a Stollen cake. Rather, it should be called a Christmas cake. For unter uns, what is a Danish Christmas without the proud Stollen cakes from Germany?

Zed and Kate

Zed Spector# was a diligent contributor to the sites FanFiction.net and archiveofourown.org. He wrote especially about some of the more outlandish and psychopathic side characters from the paranormal and panoramic book series Harry Potter and A Game of Thrones. It actually went very well with that. He had gradually produced dozens of short stories which attracted a small but faithful entourage of readers. With his growing experience, he was able to predict with quite good precision how many reactions a narrative would generate and whether the criticism would be laudatory or denunciatory. One day he came to the idea to send his stories to a number of publishers under a pseudonym, ie. under his legal name, Mark Sparrow. But he never got any response. In his despair, he called one day a publishing house and asked for a clarification. A young editor explained to him patiently that there were already lots of similar stories freely available on the web on the same topics, i.a. by a certain Zed Spector#, and that his short stories were devoid of any originality. Zed got really upset and decided to remove his contributions from the pages of Fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org He also changed the names of his fictional characters and deleted any trace that could link them to the originating stories. He also hired a writing coach online and started entirely from scratch, so to speak, to rewrite and edit his texts. A year later, he emerged as Kate Marlow ESQ., and the stories were now mostly about intimate if inanimate relationships between different genders of the same, opposite or other. He submitted once again his collected works to a number of publishers and this time he seemed to get his hook into something. Two small publishers sent replies and wanted to set up a meeting. Kate became all excited. He hurried to tell his mom about it. After all, he was only fifteen years old at the time, and it meant the world to him, to make her happy and proud. A few weeks later, he began hearing his stories trumpeted on television and radio. This was rather unexpected and almost too much of a good thing. He thought a lot about how this could have eventuated. At first he thought, his PC had been hacked. Later, he thought, a publisher had stolen his works. To this very day, he is not entirely sure. What he does know with great certainty, is, it's difficult to protect ones privacy in the modern world.