Pi is Infinite

So, we now own a $7,500 kitty. Bertram should be coming home this weekend after Friday surgery for an intestinal blockage. Thankfully, no resection was needed - the offending hairballs were able to be squeezed back into the stomach and removed via an incision.

Luckily, we caught his behavior change very quickly and hopefully minimized damage. Crow noticed he didn't want his 3pm feeding on Thursday, and we saw he was getting progressively more withdrawn to where he was wanting to hide by 7pm. He had also puked up bile 4x. That's when I made the call to take him in. He got surgery less than 24hrs after that first symptom we saw.

Cats are pretty horribly engineered on the inside. Urinary and intestinal blockages can kill within 24-48 hrs. Missing just 3 days of meals can destroy the liver with a 90% mortality rate. The FIP genetic mutation can take months to trigger after an uneventful bout of kitty coronovirus and kill within days.

Cats are so good at hiding pain, so you must take other behavioral changes seriously - lethargy, vomiting, not eating, and anything else that feels "off". Lots of people think animals can just sleep off and tough out health issues; a cat will not recover on its own from any of the aforementioned issues, all (except FIP) which are common.

This little man is not good at regurgitating hairballs, so with his long fur, we're going to give him supplements + a teddy bear haircut. But first thing is his road to recovery.

For other cat owners, just always be aware if anything has changed your cat's routine. Regular feedings/treat times are a great way to monitor eating. When you clean the box, take note if it is suspiciously absent of pee or poop. And of course, if kitty is being weird, that can be a sign of a health emergency. Familiarize yourself at least with the signs of urinary and intestinal blockages, as these are the common problems that are ER emergencies.

These treatments are pricey, too. It is also worth researching pet insurance and Care Credit options now, before any crisis.

Bertram has been a little depressed during his recovery, so I brought in some enrichment he can use without hurting himself (his mouse toys would encourage him to kick too much). He's loved lounging on his scratcher and I absolutely did not mind being woken up by the clack clack clack of his wooden ball set at 3am.

Part of his struggle has been that he has a strong scruffing reflex. The cone disorients him and a recovery onesie makes him not want to move. This soft collar has been the best for his mobility, but I remove it briefly when I want to entice him to eat on his own.

It's been a challenge getting him to eat & drink -- he is on anti-nausea and an appetite stimulant now. We've had to do a lot of small feedings with a syringe, spoon, and even via my hand. Bisques, gravies, and stews have been a godsend to keep him hydrated, and he has graduated to proper wet food, albeit in small portions. Unsurprising, given he had an incision in his stomach, and his small intestines were inflammed, plus had to be manually manipulated.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

"Is this yours?" he asked. "May I borrow it?"

"You want to be a seal?"

"No, but when I take it off, I'll be a woman, right?"

Okay so "Columbo is actually a fae" is a sort of joking headcanon a lot of people devised watching the show. I remember thinking it while watching episodes then going onto tumblr and discovering other people had the same idea lol. I think it's one of those "no one's taking it that seriously" theories, but also... it does kinda work.

Basis for this is such things as: Columbo never gives his full name, even the first name on his badge isn't right. The fact that in general we never learn anything about his life, even his fellow police officers never recognise him. He always appears at just the right place he needs to be (and phone calls always reach him no matter where he is). He doesn't carry a gun (which would be made out of iron. Just in general it's his whole demeanor and uncanny knowledge just makes him feel like a trickster spirit who's arrived to deliver justice to the powerful and influent.

He is referred to in one episode as a goblin sitting under a toadstool (or is it gremlin I haven't seen that episode in a while).

For me I think this got solidified in my mind when I finally saw the first episode, and his original appearance is him this wide is left distraught thinking her husband is dead, all the police ignore her. She goes to grieve and then Columbo appears from the shadows to comfort her. It feels like he was summoned by her and that's how he came into this realm. That's now my heacanon, I can't be convinced otherwise.