the audacity of spelling

While crashing in Boston until my apartment is ready in New York (I somehow have a claim on an affordable room right near Columbia Med School, thanks mostly to Adrienne), I've been passing the time with a lot of editing. And because I have a borrowed bike, a fantastic Australian messenger bag, and a fearlessness borne of cycling the streets of Amsterdam, I do much of that editing at Toscanini's in Central Square.

Perhaps the best way to describe the clientel of Tosc's is to relate this exchange, overheard today between a patient young mother and her ice cream-covered five-year-old:

Child (reading a poster on the wall): I... F... F...
Mother: Good! That stands for "International Film Festival." They show lots of movies from all over the world. What's that next word?
Child, haltingly: B... O... S... T... O... N.
Mother: Do you think you can you sound that word out, Abby? It's a word you know.
Child, at once, triumphantly: Barack Obama?!
Mother: Nnnnnnooo.

Io must have had powerful gams

The domestic cat would be, as a species, in big trouble if it weren't for humans. I base this assertion mostly on the behavior and weaknesses of my cat, who—I am perfectly willing to believe—is a particularly feeble-minded example of his kind. Icky is slow at adapting to new surroundings, terrified of benign objects like brooms, and pretty bad at balancing. He has only recently reached a grudging truce with the dustbuster; like a human toddler, he will attempt to eat any small-ish object he comes across on the ground, which means his snacks tend to be small scraps of paper and balls of his own hair mixed with dust.


Much of this may be particular to this cat, but cats in general are still in a pretty bad way. They clean their outsides by removing all dirt to their insides, a process that is not helped by the weakness of their stomachs. Anyone who has heard the dreadful hrrrrruk-ing sounds of a hairball on its way up has had occasion to marvel that cats have survived so many millennia of evolution despite being poisonous to their own selves.


These were my ideas about cats, but I discovered how wrong they actually were during my last week in Amsterdam, which I spent mostly in Istanbul. (I've left Amsterdam, by the way. More on that, possibly, later.) Istanbul, besides being the fourth largest city in the world in terms of human population, is probably the first or second in terms of feral cat numbers. Istanbul has cats like Trafalgar Square has pigeons and Harvard Square has squirrels: they are bold, they are hungry, and they would overwhelm you in a fight with swiftness and ease, if it came to that.


There was a lot to Istanbul besides the cats, and I may get to the monuments and mosques and museums later. But my first and most striking impression was of a feline city incidentally inhabited by humans; the cats there, on the whole, are doing pretty well for themselves. With a few notable (and gross) exceptions, they are thin but not emaciated, hungry but not starving. Sometimes shopkeepers seem to put out bowls of water for them, but mostly they seem to be able to fend for themselves. Turkey must have the lowest population of rodents and small birds of any European city.

The cats in the western half of the city probably have no idea about the equally scrappy population on the Asian side: the two halves of the city are connected by a couple of bridges and several ferries, neither of which is a favored transport route for kitties. The Bosphorus Strait is much wider than I had been lead to believe by the myths. I don't think even an enchanted cow could cross it under her own power.