As I occasionally mention here, I feed a veritable zoo of stray creatures in my backyard. Above is a photo I snapped a little while ago of two of the four cats who turn up nightly to enjoy the complementary offering of Friskies.

The cat on the right is a slow-moving, elderly animal who seems to have trouble seeing and who somehow got an awful gash on the side of his/her head. It seems to be healing but the cat has a heightened sense of danger. If I so much as cough within earshot, it sprints for the hills. It has never been particularly friendly but I don't think it was that nervous before the injury.

The kitten on the left was equally antsy when it began showing up in my yard around the end of June. It was tiny then. As it's grown larger, it's gotten a bit more friendly and actually allowed a bit of petting one night last week. For the most part though, it acts terrified of everyone and everything.

Two months ago, the kitten had quite an ordeal. The morning my friend Carolyn and I left for the Comic-Con in San Diego, I was loading my car in the garage when the kitten wandered in. It saw me, panicked and ran for a hiding place behind some debris in a corner. I chased it out, continued loading the car and then when we left, of course, the garage door was closed and locked. I was unaware that at some point, the kitten snuck back into the garage and hid. When we left, I was unaware I was trapping the kitten inside.

That was on Wednesday morning. Sunday evening when we returned and put the car back in the garage, we noticed that a bottle of water I'd left on a counter was now on the floor and empty. There was also cat excrement about. The kitten had been in there for about four and a half days.

There was no food available to it in my garage — actually, there were sacks of grub but they were in the packaging and in a cabinet — but fortunately, I'd left a bottle of drinking water out with the top loose and the kitten managed to knock it off the counter and dislodge the cap. In spite of a lack of chow, the little cat did not seem harmed by the experience. It was panicked when we found it in the same hiding place it had used on Wednesday and it ran madly around the garage, eventually finding the open door. We immediately put out a large dish of food which was quickly devoured.

The kitten — we won't be able to call it that much longer — still comes around every night and some evenings, it seems to be acting as a kind of Honor Guard or Protector to the older cat. I don't see any family resemblance between the felines. I think it's just a cat thing.

One of the New York Times magazine sections is featuring a "slide show" of past residences of Stan Lee. Of special note is Photo #7, which is of Stan writing in his backyard. The caption says he's about 30, which would make this photo 1951, which I don't think is right. Looks later to me. Anyway, thanks to Tom Galloway for letting me know about this.

The 2007 Chabad "To Life" Telethon airs this evening in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and on this website, where I bet the streaming video won't stream so well. Chabad Telethons aren't the same without Jan Murray as host but they still put on a darn good show for a worthy cause. Here's a two minute commercial for tonight's extravaganza…

Michael Kinsley on the way in which a candidate's religion ought to matter to the voters.

Several friends of mine have all had the same catastrophe lately. I won't bother telling you what it is since you'll be able to figure it out from the following advice…

Do not store your e-mail on someone else's computer. I know it's sometimes easy to leave it all in the box on AOL or Hotmail or GMail or wherever it arrives. Do not leave it there. Use an offline e-mail program and download it to your computer. Read and answer it offline and then send your replies from there.

The program I use (I'm a P.C. guy) is called Forte Agent and it's very good. Most of you would be better served by Mozilla Thunderbird, which is a terrific program and it's free. The most popular e-mail programs seem to be Eudora Pro and Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. I tried but didn't like Eudora and I don't see what it does that Thunderbird doesn't do better and without cost. The Outlook programs were okay but I'm wary of having my ten tons of e-mail so integrated with my massive calendar and gargantuan contact lists and such.

But whatever you use, use something, for God's sake, to download your e-mail to your computer and then you must also maintain backups of it all. Because if you leave your past e-mails (incoming and/or outgoing) on some service, you will go there one day and find they are gone. And no one at that service will be able to help you get them back.

Over in this item, I explained the difference between the Popeye foes Bluto and Brutus. Over on his weblog, the gifted artist Stephen DeStefano shows you what this means in visual terms.

The jury in the Phil Spector/Lana Clarkson trial says that the case will go to the jury on Monday. If justice works the way it probably should, the jury will be out for about eight minutes — just long enough to vote once, hit the lavatories and gripe about how they could have returned the same verdict on Day One — and then they'll march back in and declare Spector guilty of second-degree murder. He will then be sentenced to fifteen years in prison and a lengthy, expensive appeals process will begin.

Since we all know how often justice does not work the way it should, I'm planning my killing spree. As I mentioned, if this guy doesn't get convicted, it's highly unlikely I would be. I'm white. I have some money and a couple of great lawyers. I'm in show business.

My friend Buzz Dixon wrote to ask, regarding my upcoming killing spree, "May we make requests?" The answer is no, Buzz. This is my killing spree, damn it. You're in show business. Arrange your own.

I'm going to try to make this my last Bush-related posting of the weekend. But Fred Kaplan has a good article up that asks the musical question, "Just Whose Idea Was It To Disband the Iraqi Army?" It seems to have been the single-biggest mistake of the whole occupation if you don't count occupying in the first place…and everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else. It'll probably turn out it was a leftover policy of the Clinton Administration.

Of all the things George W. Bush has said lately that strike me as unfortunate, I think the topper may be his recent claim that we're "kicking ass" in Iraq. Obviously, one can make a pretty good case that we're not kicking any asses but our own — but even if Bush is correct, it's a horrible way to look at the situation…like this whole operation is just about America proving it can beat anyone in a bar fight. Sadly, I think a large chunk of Bush's support on this war really only cares about that. The cost of the war in both human and financial terms can be ignored and so can the reality of Iraq's future. Just so long as we convince ourselves we're tough…and, oh yeah — that we weren't wrong to get into this war in the first place.

Joe Conason with more about the statistics out of Iraq and the way they're being juggled to make "The Surge" seem to be working.

From 1931: It's Jack Benny in a ten-minute short subject called Taxi Tangle. Benny's early film appearances are interesting because he was just beginning to develop his stage/screen personality — the cheapness, the clueless vanity, the expertly-timed exasperation, etc. He had a nice film career from the moment movies could talk but he really didn't become Jack Benny until the radio program.

The guy playing the cab driver in the beginning of Taxi Tangle is Tammany Young, a one-time supporting player in silent comedies who went on to countless bit parts in talkies, including roles in almost any movie that starred W.C. Fields. Hal Roach once told me that when talkies came in, only about 15% of the actors who'd appeared in silent films were able to make a transition and still have real careers. Young was among that 15%, though he rarely got much more dialogue than he has in this short.

George Packer pens a gloomy assessment of what's ahead with Iraq. What will happen if we withdraw sounds awful and what will happen if we don't sounds worse.

We may be only days from a verdict in the Phil Spector murder case. Yes, I tried to not pay attention to it but it's hard when you go to websites and in the margins, they have these intriguing News Headlines about the case. I'm proud to say that I didn't waste a lot of my life following this one but ashamed that I wasted any, and that I'm about to waste yours for a paragraph or two.

Admittedly, if you follow a trial via news broadcasts and articles, you hear a very different case than the jury hears. You hear all the stuff that the judge excludes. You hear about witnesses that he won't allow to testify. You hear about all the arguments that are specifically conducted with the jury out of the room. And of course, you're relying on brief summaries of the testimony and you don't actually hear the words or see the faces.

Still, I have to say: If this guy is acquitted, I'm going on a killing spree. Because it'll mean no one gets convicted of murder, especially if they're in show business.

We're going to be hearing a lot next week about whose statistics on Iraq casualties and progress are skewed and cooked and disingenuous. Here's Karen DeYoung to explain some of the possibly-misleading numbers that are presently framing the debate.

The annual Chabad Telethon is this Sunday night. If it's not being televised in your city, it's probably because not enough Jews live there. I'll post a link later to where it'll be streaming on a website, though that's a crummy way to enjoy it.

Among the performers this year and almost every year is Mordechai Ben David, who is sometimes called The King of Jewish Music. Well, okay. It's not like John Tesh is going to challenge him for the title or anything. I know very little about "M.B.D.," as he is also called, but I've always enjoyed him on the telethon and on a couple of tapes that I bought years ago for my car and keep meaning to upgrade into CDs. Here's a rousing (if overedited) music video of M.B.D. performing one of this bigger hits, "Moshiach."