Silence Is the Loudest Meow

What follows is a rewritten version of a piece that first appeared almost a year ago: “Hard Out Here for a Cat.”

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More than once she has given public lectures about the number of chores that occupy a cat’s day. Perhaps you have attended. She tells me that they are very well-attended. (She is seen above with her second-best human, me.)
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‘They are bluffing, and you must learn to bluff too’

In the documentary, Tell Me the Truth About Love, W.H. Auden’s friend Thekla Clark recounts the story of one of Auden’s lovers complaining to him that he thought Auden would be more “romantic,” being a poet, after all. “But you aren’t romantic,” Clark quotes the lover telling the Auden. “You aren’t romantic at all.”

“If you want romance,” Clark quotes Auden replying, “screw a journalist.” (Except the word he used was not “screw.”)

Auden was not one to ruin a good line—or a good night—by spending it an explanation of the difference between the romantic and the sentimental.
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A Mulligan in Time: A Radical Leap

Nothing is perfect, except for the perfect things. It does not take a precise 24 hours and zero minutes and zero seconds for the earth to complete one spin on its axis; it takes slightly longer, but not so much longer that you could even call it a “tick.”

The earth’s rotation each day is only a tiny fraction of a millisecond slower than what we otherwise call a day, but these partial seconds can eventually add up. Twenty-six times since 1972, the international bureau of standards that handles time issues has added a “leap second” to all of our lives. The last year with a leap second was 2015, so if that year felt longer for you, there is a reason: It was. By one second. Clocks everywhere could have read “11:59:60” at midnight the night of the leap second, but they did not because no one makes clocks that do that.

The next leap second will delay the arrival of 2017 immediately before midnight on December 31.
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