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Friday Cat Blogging – April 24 2015

Mother Jones

While Kevin is undergoing treatment, we’ve invited lots of exciting guest writers to stop by in his honor. But there’s no reason the hospitality can’t extend to another species, is there?

This week’s Mother Jones affiliated cat is Max, who joined reporter Patrick Caldwell last summer as the fifth (and only feline) resident of his Washington, DC row house. Here’s a shot of Max exploring the dark corners of his realm.

So amazed to discover the underground territory

A photo posted by Patrick Caldwell (@patcaldwell) on Jan 13, 2015 at 7:02pm PST

Max’s background is almost as shrouded and mysterious as that crawl space. How old is he? No one knows. How many people have cared for him before Pat and his roommates? No one’s quite sure about that either.

As the story goes, Max has been bequeathed from shared home to shared home like a well-loved futon as his keepers have, one after the other, moved out of the beltway. And while that might make him sound like a very mobile cat, Pat reports he’s quite sedentary in most respects. His favorite form of play—swatting at things just above his head—can and usually is performed while reclining on his back. This Thanksgiving, he gave the humans a brief scare by slipping away while they were out celebrating. But true to his nature, when they came home Max seemed to have whiled away the hours just a few yards from the window they’d mistakenly left open.

Unlike Hilbert and Hopper, Max can’t count on Southern California’s sun to keep him warm, so over the winter his roommates cleverly rigged up a cat bed right above a radiator. Ready for a nap?

I feel ya buddy

A photo posted by Patrick Caldwell (@patcaldwell) on Feb 21, 2015 at 10:34am PST

With the roommate most responsible for Max heading to Kansas City for medical school come fall, this peripatetic puss’s future is a bit unsettled. Will he stay with his current community, or will he head west? If he stays, what if the new roommate is allergic, or—as hard as this may be to imagine—not a cat person? Yes, there may be yet another loving home in his future.

Whatever happens, there’s no doubt Max will land on his feet. Cats always do.

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Friday Cat Blogging – April 24 2015

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Q&A: Ken Burns on Why Memorizing the Gettysburg Address Matters

Mother Jones

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Since it was founded in 1978, the Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, has required its students to memorize and publicly recite the Gettysburg Address every year. In his new film, The Address, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns follows the students at this small, all-boys school as they grapple with internalizing Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute speech. The twist: All the kids have learning disabilities, including speech and language deficits, that make their struggles and—spoiler alert—triumphs all the more poignant.

Think of it as Ken Burns’ Spellbound. The 90-minute film, culled from three months of footage of classes, dorm life, and kids goofing off, is not a typical Burns project. Though, he explains, “You’ll know it’s a Ken Burns film: It has all the old photographs, it has the ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’ playing, but it’s something different.” Instead of enlisting actors, Burns got students at the school to narrate the film, speech impairments and all. “It’s not full-on cinema verité,” he says. “But for 320 hours of footage reduced to an hour and a half, it’s cinema verité!”

Making the film inspired Burns’ side project, Learn the Address, which is encouraging as many people as possible to learn Lincoln’s words by heart. So far, the project has collected hundreds of videos from everyday and celebrity orators.

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Q&A: Ken Burns on Why Memorizing the Gettysburg Address Matters

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Congress members ask EPA to reopen three fracking investigations

Congress members ask EPA to reopen three fracking investigations

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A crew of Democratic House members are calling on the EPA to do its damned job — specifically, to investigate potential links between pollution and fracking in three states where groundwater has been mysteriously poisoned.

Rep. Matt Cartwright’s (D-Pa.) letter, sent Tuesday to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy with signatures from seven other lawmakers, follows the agency’s disturbing decisions to drop three investigations into possible connections between fracking and water contamination.

In mid-2012, the EPA dropped an investigation into water pollution in Dimock, Pa., despite internal warnings from one of the agency’s scientists that methane levels jumped in aquifers following drilling — “perhaps as a result of fracking.” In early 2013, the agency dropped its investigation into water pollution in Parker County, Texas — despite lacking confidence in the quality of water tests conducted by the frackers themselves. And in the middle of last year, the EPA dropped its investigation into water contamination around Pavilion, Wyo. — despite findings in a draft report that fracking chemicals were likely to blame.

“Each community was grateful when when the EPA stepped in to help deal with their water contamination issues, and disheartened when the EPA dropped their investigations, leaving them with polluted water and little explanation,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter.

“We are writing to urge you to take any and all steps within your power to help these communities. … Members of these communities currently do not have safe, clean drinking water and need EPA’s help to address the ongoing water contamination issues in their homes and get EPA assurance once their water is clean and safe.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Congress members ask EPA to reopen three fracking investigations

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Elton John Is Getting Married: "We’re Living in Extraordinary Times."

Mother Jones

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Singer/songwriter Elton John and filmmaker David Furnish are officially getting hitched. The couple, who have been in a British civil partnership for nearly a decade, announced that they intend to marry in an English registry office in May, in an intimate ceremony, with their two young sons and a few friends.

In an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Furnish referred to the recent legalization of gay marriage in England and Wales (Saturday was the first day gay couples could legally marry in England):

We don’t feel the need to take an extra step legally. But since we’re committed for life, we feel it’s really important to take that step, and take advantage of that amazing change in legislation. We all live by example…We’re living in extraordinary times. My god, 20 years ago, when I started seeing Elton, if you asked me if I’d be able to get married, if I’d be able to have children, it was unthinkable, literally unimaginable.

You can click here to watch Elton John denounce Russia’s anti-gay law during a Moscow concert last December.

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Elton John Is Getting Married: "We’re Living in Extraordinary Times."

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