Entertainment - Something To Lift The Spirits

It's too beautiful a day to mope about the house, no matter what the Chimperor and his Puppetmaster are up to. Yes, I ended a sentence with a preposition. I wish it'd been a proposition, but one settles for what one can get, so there. The Zinge of doom is snoring next to me. Does he care about Boy George? He only thinks about the next bowl of kibble. I'm going out on the hillside to care for my garden. The buddleias are splendid. The Buddleia davidii var. Black Knight is over its bloom - without water, it won't bloom again till next summer. But the lilac and magenta-flowered buddleias are pointing their spears of sweet blossom at the sky, alive with bees native and foreign and bumble, and all manner of other tiny flying things including - oh, joy! - tiny hummingbirds. They're terrible bullies. One seems to have staked his claim to all the edibles in my garden, and ruthlessly chases off all the others. He buzzed me yesterday, hovering right in front of my nose, his little wings helicoptering frantically. The robins are about, and the shasta daisies and yarrow and sweet alyssum and fleabane are making perfect pools of white in which to embed the pink-flowered evening primrose, the yellow cosmos and gaillardia, the blue flax and the stray surviving Nigella. I'm angry and upset about what's going on in the world today, the mendacity of the Cheney administration, the endless assault upon the poor, the defenceless, the environment, the beasts of the field. So I will go down and let the garden comfort me.

Meanwhile, here's a charming story about the perfect wedding.

That wedding list in full:

Rodrigues bats, bush dogs, spectacled bears, bongos, ring-tailed lemurs, capybaras, coatis, chimpanzees, Asian elephants, giraffes, jaguars, lions, meerkats, spider monkeys, orang-utans, penguins, marmots, pudus, red pandas, red river hogs, Californian sealions, black rhinos, tamarins, tapirs, tigers, Galapagos tortoise, Grevys zebras.

Stumble It!