Ok.  Alright.  How was I supposed to know that my cat Jester was joking yesterday when he said some of my earlier entries were plotting to secede from this journal?  Cat's have such inscrutable faces.  Never play poker with a cat. 
     Never.
     I hate practical jokes like that.  My passion is impractical jokes.  Like moving the pyramids a fraction of an inch on the Egyptians in the middle of a series of nights until they start looking at each other and asking, "Wasn't Cheops' tomb angled a bit differently last week?"  "Quit fucking with my mind, Anwar."
     (Yes, yes - in my imagination all foreigners have filthy mouths.  They get that way from watching too many American movies.)
     Anyway, I've decided to punish Jess by smudging the labels on his hairball collection.
     If that doesn't work, if he doesn't change his ways, if he ever again tries to raise suspicions in my mind about the loyalty of these entries, he'll be back to having to hack up these hairballs on his own instead of relying on me to do it for him all the time.

     In other news...
     I recently mentioned that there were 75,000 dams in the United States.  I got that figure from the July 12 issue of Newsweek - page 46.  Now in the July 19 issue (page 40) I read that there are 13,700 McDonald's "stores" (not "restaurants" but "stores" - that's their word) in North America.  That works out to about 5.5 dams in the U.S. per McDonald's in North America.  That's nuts.  I've seen maybe a handful of dams in my lifetime compared to, like, a thousand McDonald's.  Where are all these dams lurking??  Either the media is lying to me again OR there are an awful lot of major man-made projects going on out there behind my back.  Either way, it's scary....
     This same issue (page 41) tells me that coffee consumption in China has doubled in the last 4 years.  Doubled to one cup per person per year.  This is even more unsettling!  Were a billion Chinese really drinking half cups of coffee 4 years ago when I was blissfully thinking that I was the only one to drink coffee by the half cup?  Do Chinese today really like full cups - but only once a year?  It seems to me to be highly improbable.  If you like coffee, you're not going to stop at one cup a year.  If you don't like coffee, why would you drink it at all, let alone go from half a cup a year to a full cup?
     Excuse me whilst I twitch.

     China made the newspaper today, too.  For continuing a crackdown on that group known as Falun Gong.  It's a cross between a religion and a slow motion aerobics class that was founded in New York by a guy named Li Hongzhi just 7 years ago and now has maybe 70 million members. 
     What struck me was the last paragraph.
     "Followers believe Mr. Li implants a falun, a 'wheel of law' or miniature of the universe, into their bellies, where it spins constantly, releasing and absorbing energy."
     Man, when I wanted to do this in high school everyone told me I needed a license!  Wasn't I the fool??
     Even worse, I've been married almost 17 years now and my wife has never once offered to implant a miniature of the universe in my belly.  Not for my birthday.  Not for Christmas.  Not even as part of our annual October 2 celebration of the 1959 premiere of "The Twilight Zone." 
     When she gets home, we're gonna have to have ourselves a little talk....

     On the bright side: Saginaw, Michigan is offering river rides on The African Queen for the next several days.  Yep, THE African Queen made famous in the Bogart-Hepburn movie of the same name.  Cost for a half hour ride is just $15.  And leech rental is just 10 cents per minute provided you book ahead using that 10-10-321 service.

     On the dark side (and let's face it, that's really what you've been waiting for, isn't it?): Last Sunday, while all of America seems to have been focused on... other matters... U.S. planes bombed Iraq, killing perhaps 14 civilians. 
     No, I don't know how young those civilians were, or how handsome, or how their relatives took the news.
     No, I don't know what funeral arrangements were made.
     No, I don't know if these Iraqis were victims of a curse or merely reckless.
     No, my paper did not print the full text of the eulogies.  In fact, my paper seems not to have mentioned these deaths at all.  The online magazine Slate did.  As part of its regular summary of news making the foreign papers.
     Maybe my paper is saving up all this information for a special commemorative issue?

     But I digress.  Sorry.
     What I really wanted to say today is that I've finally joined an elite club.
     The elite club composed of those people who have made a significant contribution to the world while asleep.
     Robert Louis Stevenson is a member.  He had The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde come to him in a dream.
     Francis Crick is a member.  He had the double helix structure of DNA come to him in a dream.
     Paul McCartney is a member.  He had Yesterday come to him in a dream.
     And last night, at long last, something as great came to me in a dream.
     No, not the Hawaiian woman - that was last week, and she was merely very, very good, not great.
     Last night was when my sleeping brain revealed a sure-fire way to determine which investment firm one should go with. 
     The secret? 
     Always go with the firm that uses two dice to decide what companies to invest your money in instead of the ones which use but a single die. 

     Now all I need is a dream that tells me where to get some money to invest and I'll be rich!
     Woooo-hooooo!!