My mother came to visit last week, so I took some time off, expecting a little relaxation. More fool I; my mother, though retired, is still extremely active. We did a lot of walking.

One of the fun things we did was to go to an exotic cat retirement home here in Tampa. (Lions and tigers and bearcats, oh my!) I discovered that stinky housecat litterboxes are quite pleasant compared to the smell of ocelots, and that bearcats emit an odor that smells like popcorn to some people, and Fritos to others. (To me, they smelled exactly the way "Buttered Popcorn" flavored Jelly Belly jellybeans taste.)

I got to pet a Siberian Lynx (which seemed to enjoy it, and licked my hand a lot) and a bobcat (which started purring). We weren't permitted to get near the larger cats, but it's astounding how much their behavior resembled that of their smaller, domesticated kin. Except for the fact that the tigers really loved playing in water.

Saturday night, my friends and I dragged my mother along to a They Might Be Giants concert. The opening band, OKGO, was rather disappointing — though that may have been more the fault of the sound engineer than of the actual band; their vocal mics were set at a level much lower than the instruments, and the tone was extremely muddy as well, so their lyrics were utterly incomprehensible.

The pause between OKGO and TMBG was interminable (as most such pauses are), exacerbated by the hideous canned music (which stretched the definition of "music" to the breaking point). Finally, TMBG came out and put on a pretty good show, even if the vocals were just as muddy as the previous band's (I couldn't even understand them on the songs I knew by heart). John Flansburgh seemed fairly enthusiastic about the performance, but John Linnell looked like he was just phoning it in.

I also discovered that I've spoken to Mossad spies on a couple of occasions. One of the local "alternative" newspapers, The Weekly Planet, printed an interesting article on "Israeli art students" in Tampa who turned out to be spies. And I just thought they were scam artists.