Cat hospital
For gentle entertainment, I recommend Cat Hospital, a documentary TV series from Ireland. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Cute kitties; cute pet owners; cute veterenarians and volunteers; cute Irish accents. Lots of greenery.
Cats look funny when they’re anaesthetized.
Sometimes, Karin & I try out a movie or a show, and after fifteen minutes we decide it’s trash (tonight’s disaster was The Staircase, with Toni Collete and Colin Firth). To recover, we watch a nice episode of Cat Hospital.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I finished reading The Premonition. I got madder the more I read. Is it very widely known that the Trump administration flew illegal immigrants from Texas to California to strain California’s public health system? I guess it is (though perhaps the story wasn’t previously told with quite the same emphasis). I’d never heard of this travesty; then again, lots of important news gets past me.
In this book, this episode is just an aside, a minor misdeed.
The book really is about the characteristic failings of bureaucracies. Two chapter titles summarize a couple of the key points.
“The L6”: The person who is capable of solving a problem is buried at the sixth level of the hierarchy (give or take a couple of levels).
The person at the top is pretty useless.
“Plastic Flowers”: Lots of effort goes into “dressing up” a bureaucracy, hiding its deadness, making it look nice. Making the top level look nice.
I already have another COVID book on my docket: Peter Baldwin’s Fighting the First Wave.
Cats look funny when they’re anaesthetized.
Sometimes, Karin & I try out a movie or a show, and after fifteen minutes we decide it’s trash (tonight’s disaster was The Staircase, with Toni Collete and Colin Firth). To recover, we watch a nice episode of Cat Hospital.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I finished reading The Premonition. I got madder the more I read. Is it very widely known that the Trump administration flew illegal immigrants from Texas to California to strain California’s public health system? I guess it is (though perhaps the story wasn’t previously told with quite the same emphasis). I’d never heard of this travesty; then again, lots of important news gets past me.
In this book, this episode is just an aside, a minor misdeed.
The book really is about the characteristic failings of bureaucracies. Two chapter titles summarize a couple of the key points.
“The L6”: The person who is capable of solving a problem is buried at the sixth level of the hierarchy (give or take a couple of levels).
The person at the top is pretty useless.
“Plastic Flowers”: Lots of effort goes into “dressing up” a bureaucracy, hiding its deadness, making it look nice. Making the top level look nice.
I already have another COVID book on my docket: Peter Baldwin’s Fighting the First Wave.