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Pets Make Us Human: Beloved the blind cat, by his human, Teresa.

David Oliver found the kitten feeling his way around a building at the University of Sharjah campus over the summer. The kitten appeared to have a bad eye infection. David scooped him up and took him to see Jim Bolssens at the Europets Veterinary Hospital in Sharjah. Jim could tell immediately that the kitten was blind. A neuter-and-release was obviously out of the question, so there seemed to be only one option: euthanise. Reluctant to make this decision, David asked Jim to give him the weekend to find a home for little blind cat.

I saw the kitten that weekend when I took a colony of strays in to be sterilised. Unable to stop thinking about him, I called David early Sunday morning asking if the kitten was still alive. David managed to get through to Jim just before the kitten was due to be euthanised and told him, “Wait!”. The rest is a happy ending. I called the kitten “Beloved”. He manages to get around quite well on his own and loves to be held and cuddled. He feels the face of the person holding him to get a sense of who it is.

Keep sending your cat and dog adoptions stories to saffron.safin@gmail.com.

Current offices of the Knights Templar

From the Times of London: Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican

Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years. . .

Jean Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows

Nigel Andrews on the 50th birthday of the Nouvelle Vague.

The French New Wave, 50 years old today, was the greatest criminal enterprise in cinema history. A gang of filmmakers led a raid on the Bank of Tradition. They emptied its funds with the sole purpose of closing a near-bankrupt heritage, so that a new art could begin. Drawing aid from their own fund of resources (literature, Italian neo-realism, vérité documentary, the Hollywood B-movie), they created a new syndicate in screen culture. Cinema, almost overnight, became an organised bandit art, united in sedition, steadfast in rupture, forthright in innovation, enduring in immediacy. The following is a Who’s Who of French cinema’s legendary Gang of Seven, its reservoir auteurs. . .

Anna Karina in Pierrot Le Fou

Guardi’s Tobias and the Angel

The Book of Tobit is one of the Apocrypha left out of the official Bible (they’re also known as Deuterocanonicals; they are printed in a third section apart from the OT and NT). This book is about Tobias, who travels to the land of Media accompanied by a stranger who unbeknownst to him is the Archangel Raphael. They have all sorts of adventures, not necessarily the goody-two shoes kind, getting into brawls and casting devils out of beautiful women.

The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ. To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times.

“If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”

When All You Have Left Is Your Pride by Benedict Carey in the NYT.

Yay The Tudors are back! Review your royal history at Pop Tudors. After watching the first episode of season 3, go to Raucous Royals to compare the historical Tudors with the TV Tudors. Judging from the Holbein portrait, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ waistline is only slightly smaller than the real Henry VIII’s ankle.