Oscar & Harry

Thursday, Jul. 26, 2007 - 12:41 a.m.

Here's some excerpts from an article about Oscar, The Hospice Cat:

Oscar seems to have a knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die and curls up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live. "He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

. . .

The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses. After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

. . .

No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause . . . [perhaps] the cat notices telltale scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him . . . [But] nursing home staffers aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying.

Oscar recently received a wall plaque publicly commending his "compassionate hospice care."

All together now -- Awwwwwwwwwww....

The above link leads to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

But there's a better picture of Oscar, and a different writeup, over on Boston.com.

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The new chain for my pentacle is gorgeous.

It's 24 inches long and it doesn't become tangled in my hair like the twisted s-chain always did.

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And verily a small but very determined set of screams have been heard throughout the land:

Seems the publisher was in too much of a rush to get the last installment of J.K. Rowling�s smash hit Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ready for distribution that they forgot one small thing: page count.

The Associated Press reports that Scholastic said that of the twelve million books printed, several hundred have pages missing.

"Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising that some books would have printing errors," Scholastic spokeswoman Sara Sinek said in the AP article.

The article also reports that chunks of text were missing from various spots in the book. One woman discovered that after page 306, the next 33 pages were missing. The article also tells of another woman who was missing pages 19-50.

The publisher has announced it will replace any book with missing pages. In the mean time, many Potter fans are keeping their distorted copies as a memento of this huge event.

Somebody at a printing press has lost their job.

The pages of books are printed on a web press, on gigantic sheets of paper, with sixteen book-sized pages on each side of that great big sheet of paper. Then those giant sheets are folded and cut and sewn by machines. Each of these 32-page stacks is called a 'signature'.

On a great big web press like the kind that the Harry Potter books have been printed on, many hundreds of signatures are processed every hour.

All it takes is for something like this to happen is one unfortunate QC employee who takes an unscheduled smoke break and doesn't check the machinery to see if there's enough paper on the roll to survive a ten-minute absence.

Excuse me -- make that a FORMER employee.

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I think that's pretty much it. Have a good Thursday!

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