Mr. Mouse, round 9

Well, the ninth battle with Mr. Mouse took place last night, but on this one, Bert helped. Suzanne and I were trying to sleep, and Bert was making all these little berfy noises and pouncing around on the floor, and then I heard these little outraged squeaks from various places down there. Eventually, Berf hopped up on the bed with a mouse in his mouth, unsure what to do with it. I tried to get Mr. Mouse away from him, but Bert hopped down on the floor and deposited a very drooly Mr. Mouse in the middle of the blue rug. I picked Bert up and congratulated him on being so brave, and saw that while dazed, Mr. Mouse was still alive and not obviously bleeding. Worth pointing out is that because he never developed good tooth-brushing habits, Bert is missing his fangs on the upper jaw.

Suzanne held onto Bert, and I got an empty plastic bottle, dropped Mr. Mouse into it for the trip downstairs, then went out front and emptied him onto the grass in the dark, figuring he'd eventually wake up and wander away. This morning, he was gone, so I guess he recovered and went somewhere. He doesn't appear to be the same Mr. Mouse I teleported across the street the other night (he was a bit fatter) and hopefully he'll get the message and go explore somewhere else. Being gummed by a big moron cat shouldn't be a positive experience.

I'd think.

Suzanne is less and less enthused about the possibility of a job offer from a particular federal agency. These people are involved in trade and things like that and maintain one of those secret lists of "people whose names are evil and it's illegal to do business with them." There was an article the other day in the Washington Post about a guy whose middle name was similar to some nickname of one of Saddam Hussein's sons or something, so he ended up on this list. Of course, like all the shit these jarhead Bushies do, there's no way to find out what criteria they use to put you on the list and of course no mechanism laid out to challenge your inclusion, but unlike some of the other such lists, they do publish it.

One of the great opportunities in working for the government is a chance to make things better. One of the great dangers is that you might end up working with assholes who are working to make things worse. We talked for a long time last night about how in less than a generation the culture of the United States seems to have shifted toward the "everyone a suspect" mentality. Last place that sort of stuff was in such vogue was in East Germany, and you see how well they did with it.

I tend to assume the best of people, even if I complain when I don't find it as often as I should. But I don't regard everyone as a possible terrorist and don't think anyone should.