Wolf hunting.

Wisconsin is having a harvest. We're looking to cull 201 wolves.

Too many wolves...

... in Wisconsin.

Woman stabs a man 300 times — allegedly — in sexual activity that got "out of hand."

The 18-year-old man — according to the police affidavit — met the woman on line and traveled from Phoenix to Milwaukee for some consensual activity:

"Once he got to the residence, he was bound and stabbed numerous times over a time frame of what he described as two days," the affidavit states....

Officers followed a blood trail to an apartment in the 900 block of E. Knapp St, where the door to one of the units was open. Inside, there was blood on the floor and on bedding in a bedroom as well as duct tape that appeared to be a restraint, according to the affidavit.

A 22-year-old woman introduced herself to officers, saying, "I think you are here looking for me."...

When police searched the apartment, they found a book entitled "Werewolf's Guide to Life," a necromantic ritual book; and a black folder called "Intro to Sigilborne Spirits." According to various websites, Sigilborne spirits include female werewolf spirits who engage in sexual acts.

Ow-ooh... Werewolves of Milwaukee.

"Mature, very big, aggressive" lions, bears, and wolves are on the loose in Ohio.

"Schools closed and motorists were warned to stay in their vehicles as officers with assault rifles patrolled a rural area in eastern Ohio Wednesday, a day after police killed dozens of escaped animals from a wild-animal preserve, where the owner was found dead."

Tuesday night, more than 50 law enforcement officials... patrolled the 40-acre (16-hectare) farm and the surrounding areas in cars and trucks, often in rainy downpours. [Muskingum County Sheriff Matt] Lutz said they were concerned about big cats and bears hiding in the dark and in trees.

Here's some video.

Wolf hunting in Wisconsin.

"I would say that, absolutely, people want a hunt... I don't mind when there are a few wolves, but I talk to a lot of people around here and they're pretty much upset with the number of wolves we have here."

"'[C]ertificate of live birth,' the cat-nippy phrase that gets the birthers howling at the moon...."

Oh? Do cats howl? I howl at the computer screen when I see mixed metaphors.

Speaking of howling, did you hear what they're doing to the wolves?

"'Bear-Wolf' Stalks Southern Wisconsin."

Aw, come on. We've got enough problems without Bear-Wolf.

"All I saw was the creature. One paw -- or whatever was on it -- reaching over to grab the deer. The head looked like a cross between a bear and a wolf... It had big pointy ears like a wolf. It scared the living heck out of me. I threw it into drive and off I went."

He said the creature was the color of a bear and had a snout like a bear.

Can we agree it was a bear? Now, settle down.

"Brooklyn is now overrun with rats and opossums."

"A few years ago, officials in Brooklyn, New York came up with a seemingly brilliant idea to deal with the rat-infestation problem in their borough: release opossums into the neighborhood to eat the rats...."

Ha. Of course, like rats, they prefer garbage. No shortage of that.

"The critters have a mouth full of 50 sharp teeth, tend to exude a foul odor, and can occasionally contract rabies... They are nocturnal, and some Brooklynites have become terrified to go into their yards at night."

Oh, Brooklynites! I thought youse guys were tough.

Time to bring in some wolves, I think. They eat rats.

"Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves."

Said Michelle Obama, as quoted by a friend, as quoted by Maureen Dowd, who is writing about how, when voting for Obama, we had the feeling that we were (finally) getting a President who's very normal. How does that work? Raised-by-wolfishness leads to (a semblance of) normality? Solitude fosters a deep longing to be with others and one overachieves in the appearance of normal department?

Maureen doesn't answer those questions. She merely murmurs "he seemed to have come through exceptionally well adjusted. " She quotes an Obama hagiographer's dubious quotation:

“His aides from the Senate, the presidential campaign, and the White House routinely described him with the same words: ‘psychologically healthy,’ ” writes Jonathan Alter in “The Promise”...

Isn't it funny that Alter put "psychologically healthy" in quotes when referring to the words of what appears to be a large crowd of individuals? If anything, that large crowd of individuals sounds a bit deranged, if they were really all mouthing the same mantra about their leader.

So it’s unnerving now to have yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style.

We thought he was so normal that now we're unnerved — we're so unstable! — to find out that, like all those nutty other Presidents — Dowd cites Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon — Obama's got his quirks too.

Hey, Maureen, how about peering into the complexities of the appearance of normal? Whenever I hear the word "normal" used to gloss over things, I think of one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies, Kubrick's "Lolita." It's the one where Peter Sellers, as Clare Quilty, is pretending to be a cop and inquiring into what Professor Humbert is doing at a hotel with that "pretty, tall, lovely little girl":

I said to myself when I saw you... there's a guy with the most normal-looking face I ever saw in my life... It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way....

What was the matter with your wife?... She had an accident! That's terrible! Fancy a normal guy's wife having an accident like that! What happened to her?... I get sort of carried away, being so normal and all....

I could easily have a word with George Swine. He's a really normal, nice sort of guy and I've only got to have a normal word in his ear and you'd be surprised what things could happen.... It's his job to fix you up with something nice. He gets paid for doing that and when he sees a guy like you, all normal... I think you're really normal.... Before you go, I was wondering whether maybe in the morning, you know... me being lonely and normal....

I'm sorry. The word "normal" has had extra texture to me since I saw that movie about 40 years ago.

But Dowd says "normal" and moves on. She describes the emergent quirkiness of the man whose normality supposedly impressed us so much we made him President. (Here's another Peter Sellers movie you need to see, by the way, if you want to fully experience the political chatter around Barack Obama.) Dowd, then:

How can a man who was a dazzling enough politician to become the first black president at age 47 suddenly become so obdurately self-destructive about politics?

President Obama’s bloodless quality about people and events, the emotional detachment that his aides said allowed him to see things more clearly, has instead obscured his vision. 

Oh, but isn't it so much more likely that we were the ones whose vision was obscured? We need to take responsibility. In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

We need to suck it up. We need to see what we've done. We've elected a man, and we need to cast aside our silly illusions and see what we've done. He's not the essence of magical "normal." He's a particular man with skills and limitations, and he is our President for the next few years. Now, shape up, see clearly, and deal with it.

ADDED:

"Leaping wolf snatches photo prize."

A headline that had me picturing the wolf doing a dramatic Kanye West move on some awards show.

Romulus, Remus, and Althouse.

Do you understand the inscription?



"Anno X." Get it?

ADDED: Here's the Smithsonian's info on the statue, which is in Eden Park in Cincinnati:

The original image of this ancient Etruscan she-wolf, owned by the Capitoline Museum in Rome, dates from 500 B.C. (The original Etruscan babies were lost long ago and were replaced during the Renaissance period with the present images of Romulus and Remus, which accounts for the difference in sculptural styles.) The she-wolf is the symbol of Rome and is known as the 'Lupa Romana,' or the 'Wolf of Rome,' because she is credited with saving the lives of Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome....

The replica of the Capitoline Museum's wolf was given to the City of Cincinnati by the Premier of Italy, Benito Mussolini, through the local chapter of the Sons of Italy. The "Anno X" in the inscription refers the tenth year of Mussolini's regime. The sculpture was given in recognition of the fact that Cincinnati is the only American city to bear the name of a Roman hero, the Roman general Cincinnatus.

AND: Let's take a closer look at those breasts:

"President Obama told the Interior Secretary, a comical desert elf in a bolo tie, to review the Bush administration’s removal of the gray wolf..."

"... from the federal endangered species list for certain areas of the US. The Interior Secretary Salazar reviewed and decided to uphold the decision. So basically, the answer is that Barack Obama hates gray wolves because they do not stimulate the economy."

Enough with the pigs, fish, snakes, and lambs... here come the wolves!

It's the new McCain campaign ad, referred to in an update to an earlier post today. Unlike the pigs-and-fish ad (that seems to have become unavailable), the animal imagery here is wolves:



Remember that great old Bush ad with wolves:



Except there, the wolves were terrorists. In this new ad, the wolves are the dreaded opposition researchers.

And now seems like a good time to revisit my favorite old political animal ad, "There's a bear in the woods":



All this animal imagery suggests that politics has descended to a subhuman level. It wasn't supposed to be like this!

2 art exhibitions in NY — one Japanese, one Chinese.

I saw 2 art exhibitions this weekend. One was the bright, poppy Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum:

This survey of Takashi Murakami, the artist frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, has it all: immense, toylike sculptures; an animated cartoon that rivals Disney; and a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique (Brooklyn’s first!) selling Murakami bags. But it also elucidates the trajectory of an artist who began by recycling Japanese popular culture and then gradually figured out how to go deeper, harnessing Japanese traditions of painting, craft and spirituality. The art-commerce, high-low conundrums are fun, but the steady improvement in the paintings is the real heart of the matter. Along with the animated cartoons, which should please aesthetes of all ages, there is a moral component as well.

I loved this show. You should come out to Brooklyn and see it. I've got no photos — they weren't allowed — but there's plenty of video with the artist charmingly explaining himself here.

Then, at the Guggenheim, there's "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe":

This museumwide survey of a leading Chinese artist indicates considerable command of cross-cultural references and extreme appropriation, including a gang of sculptors remaking a classic Social Realist ensemble of life-size figures while you watch. Gunpowder is a favored material, violence a frequent motif. A stop-action installation of seemingly exploding cars hangs in the atrium space. Scores of arrows make pincushions of snarling tigers (stuffed), and there are carved-wood religious sculptures and an entire fishing boat. Videos documenting pyrotechnical land-art pieces go boom. The show has far more than its share of hollow spectacle. The scorched, mural-size gunpowder drawings that combine elements of performance art, Abstract Expressionism and traditional Chinese and Japanese painting are the most believable.

Less color, less cuteness than Murakami, but equally outlandish. To me, there is far more profundity in Murakami, but I got something from those leaping clusters of life-size tigers, wolves, pigs, and cars and those drawings made from exploding gunpowder. No photos allowed here either. Go here for some video.

One quibble, and it's not Cai Guo-Qiang's fault. As I entered the rotunda, the guard handed me one of those audio-tour devices with headphones. "Do I need that?" I asked, thinking the show might have an integrated audio track that was part of the artwork. "Yes," she said, so I took it only to discover it was some earnest pedant telling me what to look at, for how long, and what to think. Ugh! Entering the up ramp — it still irks me that they started putting the shows up backwards so that we must walk up the ramp, instead of starting at the top for a gravity-assisted stroll — I passed the place where they were collecting the audio devices from people who were leaving, and I handed mine in. Those things are horrible. How are you supposed to get any good at seeing if someone is always talking in your ear, telling you what to see?

Pick a movie to design a meal around.

That was the challenge last night on "Top Chef," which this post won't spoil, but there are spoilers at here, where I read about it. (I haven't watched this season of "Top Chef." Maybe I'll catch up with it later. Is it good this time around?) Anyway, Jim Hu, at the link, thinks the contestants made pretty lame movie choices. They should have been less literal, more creative, and more cleverly knowing about the content of a good movie. His choices:

Wizard of Oz: Rainbow trout with artichoke hearts and a poppy seed crackers.
Spartacus. Escargot... and oysters.
Duck Soup. Perhaps an exception to the obviousness rule, but how can you not do this?
The Godfather: Fish baked in parchment.
The main entree could be Dances with Wolves Buffalo steaks. Or you could do Silence of the Lambs, but only if you serve the lamb with fava beans
Citizen Kane Rose sorbet

Commenters, surely you have some ideas! Me? Well, my favorite movie already is about dinner: "My Dinner With Andre." To be creative and knowing, we'd have to get past the potato soup and squab and come up with something from inside the stories Andre tells. Maybe something covered in coarse salt to represent sand — Andre eats sand in the Sahara Desert (and laughs). [ADDED: Actually, he doesn't laugh: "We weren't trying to be funny. I started, and then he started, and we just ate sand, and threw up. That was — that was how desperate we were."

Let me go on to the rest of the favorite movies I list in my Blogger profile:

"Aguirre the Wrath of God." This should not be an opportunity to serve Spanish or Brazilian food. I'd be all about the seaweed. (When they're really hungry they pull algae out from between the logs of the raft.)

"Crumb." The first thing I think of here is a drawing of a can labeled "[unwritable word] Hearts." Next, I think of Maxon Crumb ingesting a long strip of cloth dipped in water (to clean out his innards). Let's skip this movie.

"Grey Gardens." Paté on crackers!

"32 Short Films About Glenn Gould." Pills!

"Limelight." Hmmm. Limes? No, the lime in limelight is not the fruit.

"It's a Gift." Kumquats!



"Dr. Strangelove." To drink: nothing but distilled water. [AND: Pure grain alcohol!] Food: a big buffet table. And every night: a food fight. That's our restaurant gimmick: We encourage the patrons to throw food.

"The Grave of the Fireflies." In this movie, a Japanese animation, children starve. Must skip.

"The Nights of Cabiria." Too easy of an excuse to make Italian food. Nothing specific comes to mind.

"Fast, Cheap & Out of Control." Well, we can't serve lions or mole rats. Robots are not edible. We'd have to come up with some way to make topiary shapes out of things.

"Slacker." Sorting through my memories of this movie, I'm just seeing a lot of coffee.

IN THE COMMENTS: The name Ted Turner comes up, and there's a suggestion that his movie would be "Soylent Green."

They all play the gender card... and Hillary's playing it well.

So says Susan Faludi. What counts as the gender card?

When facing George H.W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis learned this lesson too late, after he failed to fly into a vigilante-style rage in response to the question: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis' reply -- "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life" -- whacked his approval ratings from 49% to 42% overnight and helped deny him the election.

So, the gender card is being played when a candidate doesn't realize he should play it? Or is Faludi patching over her sketchy argument by making it seem as though Bush I asked the "if Kitty Dukakis were raped"? (CNN news anchor Bernard Shaw asked the question in a debate. And no one wanted to see Dukakis "fly into a vigilante-style rage." We just wanted to see some human feeling and not a robotic incantation of his stand on the death penalty.)

The gender card was also played, Faludi argues, in the 2004 election, with Bush II's "Wolves" ad. Here's the ad — which I admit is absurd, but find the gender card:



Give up. Here's Faludi:

In "Wolves," set in a forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read: terrorists), a trembling female voice-over claimed that Kerry had voted for cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." "Wolves" engaged the American terror dream, which the GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger.

Was that woman's voice "trembling"? (It is so easy to accuse Faludi of sexism for hearing a woman's voice and imagining it is trembling.) Really, where is the gender card? Both men and women are concerned about security. And there's nothing in the ad about cowboys. There isn't even an association between cowboys and wolves. Cowboys don't fight wolves.

Faludi also cites Bush II's ad "Ashley's Story." Let's take a look:



This ad is deeply sentimental (and incredibly effective), but again, how is it playing the gender card? It may be that woman are generally more responsive to this ad than men are, but there is gender difference everywhere. Trying to appeal to women with women's voices, images of children, or — God help us — tinkling piana music, is not playing the gender card. Candidates craft messages for various constituents, but it's not playing a card unless you are basing an argument on gender, such as saying, as Hillary Clinton does, that her being a woman is a reason to vote for her for President or that she is being attacked because she is a woman. That is unusual, and that doesn't happen all the time.

Now, let's look at Faludi's other point, that Hillary Clinton is playing the gender card well:

So far, the only person who has a lock on rescuing women is the one female candidate. Her approach departs from the old male version. In the old model, helpless women were saved from perilous danger by men; in the new, women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves.

Soooo.... HC "has a lock on rescuing women" but "women are granted authority and agency to rescue themselves." So is Hillary rescuing us or not? Or is she the one granting the authority and agency to rescue ourselves. If so, what does it mean, and how is she doing it?

And what is "perilous danger"? The opposite of safe danger (or perilous safety)?

Oh, why did I assign myself the task of wading through this morass? Fortunately, I am going to grant myself the authority and agency to rescue myself from this Women's Studies rhetoric and note that Faludi doesn't bother with coherence. She simply swirls up an evocative, emotional verbal melange which, I would say if I indulged in Faludious reasoning, amounts to playing the gender card, since it stimulates the female mind more than the male.

But let's get a grip reason and slog to the end of the Faludi swamp:

Understanding the distinction [between the "old male... model" and the new Hillary model] is essential to an evaluation of current American politics.

Okay. Somehow, Hillary is going to represent individuals taking responsibility — authority and agency — for themselves, as distinguished from the "male model" of expecting someone to rescue us. That doesn't sound like what Hillary normally talks about, but Faludi sees this distinction "on vivid display." Where? Well, Bush signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act ant then failed to finance "women-run nongovernmental organizations in Afghanistan." Get it? And Bush "sought to roll back women's progress on many fronts, from reproductive rights to employment equity to military status." Vivid? Or murky? You decide.

And what's Hillary Clinton doing that distinctly different from the bad old "male modle"? Let's see if Faludi has something vivid here:

This year, as always, the presidential candidates must contend with the rescue formula, complicated by the fact that Bush has so devalued its currency. In this climate, Hillary Clinton can do what her male counterparts cannot. She is, indeed, reaching for the gender card, as her accusers claim. It's just different from the one they imagine. She is auditioning for the role of rescuer on a feminist frontier.

She returned to Wellesley to tell female undergraduates that she was there to free them; she was there to help them "roll up our sleeves" and "shatter that highest glass ceiling." As such, she latched onto a crucial element of presidential races past, and possibly to come -- that at the core of all American political rescue fantasies is a young woman in need.

In the general election, whoever the candidates may be, they will be tempted, perhaps required, to show just those bona fides. Clinton may be the only one who can do so without betraying the signature of a disgraced cowboy ethic.

What on earth does that mean? Is there anything there but the blunt fact that Hillary Clinton is a woman?

The argument seems to be that Bush is a man who ran for President by calling attention to his manliness, then, because he did a bad job, he gave manliness a bad name, so the cure is to have a woman President. If she's saying anything other than that, I can't strain it out of the godawful mud of her writing. And that argument is stupid and offensive. If there is some other argument to be found in there, please tell me what it is.

Annette Ziegler wins the seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Defeating Linda Clifford. Congratulations Annette Ziegler.

The battle between Madison attorney Clifford, 58, and Ziegler, 43, was dominated by attacks on Clifford's lack of experience as a judge and allegations that Ziegler presided over cases in which she had conflicts of interest as a Washington County Circuit Court judge. Clifford faced an uphill climb from the low-turnout, three-way primary in February, where she came in a distant second with 27 percent of the vote to Ziegler's 57 percent....

The campaign was characterized by attack advertising from both sides. Clifford hammered on the conflict-of-interest allegations and charges that Ziegler was soft on sexual offenders. Ziegler highlighted Clifford's work as an immigration attorney in an ad featuring a howling wolf and horror-film-type lettering.

Clifford drew heavy support from labor unions and groups affiliated with the Democratic Party while Ziegler had a endorsements from law enforcement, fellow judges, district attorneys and Republican-affiliated groups in the non-partisan race.

Please note that I did not take sides in this race, though I did say something very critical about Ziegler on Wisconsin Public Radio that got some play in the press.

"A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus."

Chernobyl as paradise, for animals.

As humans were evacuated from the area 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied and species not seen for decades, such as the lynx and eagle owl, began to return.

There are even tantalising footprints of a bear, an animal that has not trodden this part of Ukraine for centuries....

There is nothing to disturb the wild boar - said to have multiplied eightfold between 1986 and 1988 - except its similarly resurgent predator, the wolf....

[T]he benefits to wildlife of removing people from the zone, have far outweighed any harm from radiation.

Does this story make you ashamed of what human beings have done to the world? For the animals, a nuclear disaster is preferable to life with us.

"American Idol" -- San Francisco.

Heidi Fairbanks: She looks like Jessica Simpson, and she sings opera! But she's awful on the pop, and they reject her.

"I've been singing since I was 2 years old," says Shawn Vasquez. Why do people think that means anything? Doesn't every little kid sing? Anyway, he's ear-splitting. And he has this season's male affliction: singing like a woman. "Dude, that was the loudest, weidest..." says Randy. "It is almost non-human," says Simon.

Jose "Sway" Penala: He's good. Simon: "Very soulful!" Lots of yesses follow.

Matthew Paulson: he sees himself as "Clay-like." He calls himself Wolfie because he loves wolves. He sings a horrible Clay Aiken song tunelessly. He's stunned to hear he's terrible. Simon adds the exclamation "Hideous!" Gratuitous!

John Williams -- fresh out of the military -- sings weirdly ("Why does he do me that way?") then rips off his shirt and dances weirdly. He gets through anyway.

Katharine McPhee has a voice teacher mom but she sings "God Bless the Child" really prettily. And she's very pretty too. Simon: "Absolutely fantastic." Randy: "Absolutely brilliant." Paula: "Absolutely beautiful." Simon: "Very, very, very what is happening today." Most positive response to an audition I've seen on this show.

Shalicia Carlisle sings badly then launches into a spoken word performance about a baby crying in the ghetto. She's asked to sing something more cheerful, which she does, picking at her hair and flipping it about. She hits on the unfortunate lyric "What did I do wrong?" which cues Simon to stop her. She says she quit her job for the show, and Simon telephones her boss and gets her the job back. Very cute.

16-year-old Shawna White is adorable, with braids. Simon doesn't like her, but she gets through anyway.

Marcus Phillips, an "all-terrain entertainer." But he's all falsetto, even when rapping.

Jayne Santayana seems to set off a fight. Randy to Simon: "Is there a different radio playing in your head?" This leads to an edited together fake-story of fighting among the judges, which culminates when a woman with very large hair auditions. Her name's Deborah Dawn Tilley, and she says she's 27 but she looks 50. The fight ends up being about something Simon said back in Season 2, which Paula reminds him about. He walks out. It looks fake, but Ryan tells us it's not. Randy and Paula carry on without him. I assume he had some other commitment and this was a way to try to make something cool out of losing him on the panel.

Manuel Viramontes drinks hot sauce to warm up and carries a picture of a Saint Manuel which he kisses to get ready. He sings "Riven [sic] in the Sky" in a bizarre voice.

In sum: Katharine McPhee!

The Smarties tube, an escaped lion, and the relationship between insomnia and my preference for audio novels, two of which are recommended here.

It's funny how sometimes there's something that you've never heard of once and then, within a very short space of time, you hear about it twice. This morning I was checking the most blogged-about news stories and was surprised to run across one informing us that the manufacturer of Smarties candy is going to eliminate its distinctive tube packaging. I had never heard of this beloved-in-Britain candy packaging until just last night as I was going to sleep listening to the third disc of the audiobook of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" and reached this passage where a teacher uses a Smarties tube in an experiment demonstrating that the young narrator did not understand that other people have minds.

It's a great passage, by the way. Go over to the link and read it. The narrator, an autistic boy, looking back on what the teacher demonstrated, tries to understand the human mind and needs to think about computers to work out an answer. The Turing test and saccades are discussed, concisely and brilliantly.

Why am I listening to this book on CD rather than reading it? You might well ask, if you remember that yesterday I went on a bit about how reading is so much better than audio. It's all about insomnia, my friends. What I like about reading is the freedom to think my own thoughts and go at my own pace -- which is, as a consequence, ridiculously slow, as I am usually rather entertained by my own thoughts. (This blog is a testament to that.) What gives me insomnia is thinking too many of my own thoughts. I discovered long ago that listening to an audiobook cures my insomnia, because I can use the unpausing words of the book to supplant the freewheeling thoughts of my own that would keep me awake.

It takes me several months to make my way though an audiobook used this way, because I usually fall asleep in a minute or two. The last novel I listened to was "The Story of Pi," and interestingly, I ran across this story in the newspaper today that called that book to mind:

A large exotic cat, possibly an African lion, appears to be roaming the rural countryside near the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the authorities said on Friday.

Trackers were brought in to hunt for the animal after several sets of tracks, far too large for native bobcats or mountain lions, were found on a ranch not far from the hilltop library. Wildlife officials were bringing in a trap, baited with fresh meat, to catch the animal, said Lorna Bernard, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Fish and Game.

A ranch caretaker reported seeing a large cat, possibly a lion, dart into the brush on Tuesday. At least two other people within a quarter-mile of the ranch reported seeing the cat, which officials estimate may weigh 600 pounds.

"Pi" contains more than one passage about a large wild animal escaping captivity and disappearing into an inappropriate habitat where human beings cannot find it. Here's a passage I especially like (and have blogged about before):

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you'd be amazed at all the animals that would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without being seen by a soul.

Sleep well, read books, and don't get spooked by coincidences.