Grover Vs. Jasper: The Showdown

My brother wants me to compare my cat to his, I think hoping that it will end up being a matchup of the titans. But instead this is closer to the Dream Team vs. Redeem Team argument that bloggers keep bringing up, where people keep ignoring that one of these teams almost lost to a team that started a 17-year old point guard in a game where Marc Gasol (!) was the best big man on the floor, whereas the other team featured Bird, Magic, and Jordan right around their primes. In short, it's not a real argument worth having. Neither is this one (not that comparing cats would ever really be an argument worth having). Still...

Let's do it.

Category One: Name Selection
Jasper's full name is Jasper McBook. His first name taken from a cat character in Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing With Dragons series, one of my all-time favorites, his last is from the fact that a series of expensive surgeries the cat suddenly required (one neutering plus four following surgeries to fix the problems that happened) eliminated all of my laptop budget. Grover's full name is Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president.
Advantage: Grover. Nobody names cats after lesser known presidents with impressive mustaches anymore.

Category Two: Vitality
Jasper spends his days trying to claw my legs apart and his nights running wildly around chasing plastic bags across the floor. Grover is now in his golden years and so spends his days like this:


Advantage: Jasper by a landslide. Though my legs could use a break.

Category Three: Wiliness.
Jasper sometimes tries to sneak up on me. From the front. While I'm looking at him. And then he seems really amazed when I manage to grab him and toss him away. And he tries sneaking up on me in the exact same manner. Grover, meanwhile, once managed to trap one of my brothers under a Christmas tree and claw at his face for a solid six or seven seconds. Admittedly, it was JA who he trapped.
Advantage: Grover by a landslide.

Category Four: Fighting prowess.
As we've determined, Grover is wily. Still, fighting is all Jasper does. It's how he spends his days. It's how he greets new people. It's how he shows affection. It's... actually.... all he ever does. Here's a standard picture of Jasper:

My camera has no zoom, so that picture is actually taken about seven inches from Jasper's face. He didn't notice.
Advantage: Jasper.

Category Five: Personality.
Grover has a clear personality - he's ornery and should never, ever be antagonized, which is why it's great to see JA interact with him, since antagonizing is the ideal way he interacts with anyone. Jasper, meanwhile, is nothing but personality. He's so eager to play that if I haven't gotten up in time, he starts meowing and headbutting the door until I get up. When I do get up, he wraps himself around my legs and gnaws as I brush my teeth and gather my keys until I leave for work. He's nothing but personality.

Maybe too much personality.
Advantage: Jasper.

So, as you see, a clear victory for Jasper. Just as I predicted.

I like it.

Being an uncle is a nice thing to brag about, especially when your niece is this cute.

I am cautiously very hopeful that he cuteness holds up all the way through her teenage years, since my brother and I were both similarly cute when we were younger, until things took a turn for the worst at about 13. I'm hoping she avoids that.

Seriously, look at that. Look how adorable she is.

Sorry, Oliver, but...

Movie reviewers acting in congress alert:
When Oliver Stone releases a biopic on George W. Bush at the height of his unpopularity, with the extreme-left leanings that the vast majority of movie reviewers naturally have, and that movie still doesn't get good reviews, then you can know that the movie is no damn good.

If you skim Rotten Tomatoes review collection, it's full of comments like "George Bush has many flaws, so it's appropriate that W. would, too" and "Yes, it's a mess, but it's a fascinating mess." Comments that scream "I really wanted to like this movie but, gah! Yuck! I just couldn't." And those were from the reviews that RT marked as "positive." Stay away.

Also, reviewer code:
If they refer to you as an "ambitious director" while reviewing a movie, that's code for "a director with indie cred who we love." If the movie's good, all the praise will go to the director, but if the movie's bad if and they absolutely hate it, they will still go lightly on the director. Usually they come down hard on the leading man instead. Making a bad movie with an up-and-coming director can be complete death for a young actor, everyone will blame you.

However, if they refer to your movie as "ambitious," that means that it was spotty and all-over-the-place, and sometimes completely terrible, but they don't want to come down on the movie for whatever reason. Maybe it's an independent film, and they want more people to go to independent films, so the worst insult that they'll give is "ambitious." Maybe they generally really like the director and don't want to come down on him for a movie, even though the plot was completely incomprehensible. Or maybe it's a negative movie about Bush that's a complete shambles. All that to say, a number of reviewers dropped "ambitious" into their reviews.

Palin Fatigue

I'm sorry, I've just got to say it... I'm exhausted by all this Sarah Palin coverage. I just don't want to see anything else about her. I'm done.

She's become a national obsession, and everything new that comes out is just more nonsense. Endless articles about Sarah Palin's moustache. Her latest minor gaffe while speaking. Bristol's ultrasound results. Pundits explaining the odds of McCain dying and her taking office. Various celebrities explaining in interviews how much they hate her. The constant anti-Palin blogging. Conservatives racing each other to jump off the bandwagon first. The Palin-themed porno that's about to be released (really! It's gone this far!). It's gotten unbelievable.

I can deal with the nonsense that might have some connection to whether I want to vote for a candidate or not (Jeremiah Wright), or the things that probably don't but could be considered telling anyway (John McCain's house count). That's all fair game. Let's sort the Bill Ayers from the overhead projectors from the "let's bomb bomb bomb Irans" from whatever else we've got lying around. I can deal with that.

But why did the election have to become a feeding frenzy over Palin? AVI would probably say that it's a tribal difference - the Arts and Humanities crowd recognizing one of what Christian Lander at Stuff White People Like would call "the wrong sort of white person." She hunts and participated in beauty pageants and likes being a mom and has questions about evolution and has probably ironically said "neat-o" several times in her life. She is the sort of person that the A&H tribe pretends not to despise. Unsuccessfully. Or rather, the sort of person that the A&H tribe pretends to hate individually rather than hating everyone similar to her. Unsuccessfully.

The selection of Palin was obviously going to be a controversial one anyway, but not for the reasons it ended up being. The question was supposed to be having a candidate so inexperienced after McCain attacked Obama so consistently about not being ready to be President. Instead, the debate became how McCain could select someone like her to be Vice President.

But naturally, the experience difference between Obama and Palin is embarrassingly small. And people's strong reaction to Palin's nomination should have, but did not, spark a great debate. Why is Obama so strongly considered an acceptable nomination for President but Palin is so strongly not considered one? What qualities does Obama have that Palin lacks? What qualities are we looking for that we're so certain one has and the other does not?

I wish the press debate had been about that. I wish we could have debated what it was about Palin that so divided America. But that was never the discussion. Instead, we talked endlessly about her difficulty with interviews and whether Tina Fey's impression of her would shape the campaign and the shape of her glasses.

And I'm just done with it.