This Is Drivel

The Deadly Affair was probably one of the most enjoyable spy thrillers I’ve seen in a long time. Based on a book by John le Carre, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring the incomparably British James Mason, I enjoyed every scene and can’t wait to get my hands on a second-hand DVD so I can watch it again to get all the dialog I missed the first time around. The film was a restoration and I think they had some trouble getting a good sound recording. And then there was the music.

It was, hands-down, the most improbable musical sound track I’ve ever heard. Not that it was bad, just that the pairing of a Brazilian bossa nova with a British spy thriller seemed way too strange, as if the movie’s makers were trying to be so deliberately weird as to dare viewers to hate it. I didn’t, but I’d welcome a release of this movie without the musical sound track.

Spotted on the way into town last Saturday: There is something not quite right with this picture.

I literally tromped on my brakes when I noticed that this van appeared to be parked abnormally close to the fence around the Dumpster – the little black coupe was not even visible until I circled around into the parking lot for a better look. And I didn’t notice that the van driver clipped the bumper off the Toyota in the right foreground until I stopped to take a picture.

The skid marks on the blacktop make it look like the little black coupe must have been parked at least two spaces back when the van plowed into it and shoved it up against the fence, snapping the fence posts clean off at ground level.

Not only did the van driver shove the little black coupe sideways at least twenty feet into a fence that he broke off and shoved another ten feet or so, he still had enough momentum to push two Dumpsters into the fence on the other side of the enclosure, which he also snapped clean off its posts – and into another car! Hat trick!

It looks horrific, but a couple guys I met in the parking lot said that the driver got out of the van under his own power and was talking with the police immediately after the crash. The wreck made a lot of noise, they said, but nobody else was involved. They weren’t sure what happened to the driver of the van. I’m guessing he spent the weekend in the hoosegow unless somebody came to bail him out.

The day I begin to enjoy getting greeting cards “from the dog” is the day I want you to put a big, fluffy pillow over my face and hold it there until I stop struggling.

Bonkers got his purr back this morning. Actually, he did more than just purr, he went full-goose bozo on me, rubbing his ears against the edge of the table and sticking his hinder up in the air, begging me to pat it, so I did. Even so, I had to pick him up and put him in my lap after he tried to jump up but lost his nerve and just sat there beside me, crying pathetically. Still, it was good to see him more like his old self again.

Bonk’s got something wrong in his head, but we don’t know what. The veterinarians we took him to didn’t know, either. “This is probably something neurological,“ more than one of them said, looking at his blown eye and the way he walked in circles and wobbled when he stood still. Thank you, Captain Obvious. We kept taking him back until finally they did what we in layman’s terms would describe as “tests” where, instead of merely frowning at him and throwing out several opinions, they took his blood and examined it for signs of infection, such as the very scarily-named feline leukemia, or dysfunction, such as diabetes.

Finding none of that, the last vet we took him to said we could shlep him down to the UW vet clinic, where a couple dozen student vets would take turns scanning his brain with the million-dollar equipment they have, then poking and prodding him for a while before showing us the pretty color print-outs that might or might not give some clue as to what’s going on in there. The pretty color print-outs would tell us that a) we would have to fork over several thousand dollars to a cat surgeon, who might or might not be able to cut his head open and fix what had gone wrong, or that b) the problem in Bonker’s head was not fixable. There was also the not at all slim possibility that c) they would find nothing wrong in his head and suggest another round of tests to look for something else.

We were not at all receptive to the idea of turning Bonk into a lab experiment for the benefit of student vets, and paying them for the privilege to boot. He’s sixteen or seventeen years old, which has got to be something like ninety-nine in cat years, a time in his life when our prime concern ought to be maintaining a modicum of dignity for the venerable old guy. I know it’s what I’d want, and I figure he’s earned it. So we said no thank you to a), the brain scan and the cutting his head open.

When we told the vet that there would be no brain scanning, she prescribed some steroids we could shove down his throat to reduce the swelling that was presumably taking place in his head, making him act like he feels loggy all the time. He slept all the time, even more than usual for a cat, and when he got up he could hardly cross the room without stopping to rest for a while. He didn’t meet us at the door when we came home, and he stopped purring. He still wanted to sit in a lap, he just didn’t have the will or the strength to do it.

We were really afraid the steroid they’d prescribed, Prednisolone, had triggered the symptoms in the first place. A little googling turns up all kinds of scary side effects, and a cat we had before had died when the vet prescribed a related steroid, Prednisone, at a stupidly high concentration for way too long. But at this point, Bonk needs relief and the steroid seems to be helping. He’s curled up in my lap as I type these words, happily chasing mice in his dreams, something he was too zonked out to do a week ago.