Taking a cat to the vet shouldn't be a two-person job. It wouldn't have been, if I could have gotten him into the carrier on my own. And of course when we got there, he had completely resigned himself to it all, and was perfectly behaved through an exam and three shots.

If someone called me a bossy cow, even as a joke, I would not take kindly to it at all.

I did not know Carol Channing was black. Ish. Huh.

I didn't know Carol Channing was white until I was in college, I think. Then I felt stupid.

I think "bos" or something close was Latin for "cow" and that's what started it.

I hear that the mixed race student association at Berkeley does it as an icebreaker called "What Are You?" Because that's the weird question they have to deal with on a regular basis. Of course, it's different when you're among people that have the same issue. Insider/outsider etc.

I get asked that all the time. (Although, now that I think about it, I can't remember anybody asking me that since I moved to Pennsylvania. Are people here just way more polite? Everywhere else I've lived, people asked me stuff like that a lot.)

I hadn't heard of Carol Channing until I got to university, so I had a late Carol start.

I knew about Carol Channing as a kid, because of Free to Be, You and Me! And probably some crappy variety shows, if not Hollywood Squares or something.

I think that's how I was aware of her. That, and possibly the Muppet Show?

Google+ to allow nyms.

well, they have had a lot of criticism and people leaving Google+ in droves so they had to do something.

She also seemed to appear on random things singing "Hello Dolly" all the time. And I think she might have been on the Muppets.

In the fun facts department...

In case you didn’t already know that IQ is not (at all) set in stone, this is a good article about a recent study: [link] Check out the difference--we aren’t talking a couple of points.

This is very much related to research done for years by researchers such as Carol Dweck about growth mindset. I don’t know about all of you, but learning that IQ isn’t fixed was a revelatory (and humbling) discovery for me when I first read about it. Dweck wrote a great book about fixed versus growth mindset ( [link] ), but this article about how not to talk to kids is a great snapshot: [link]

Can you tell I was in an education class all day today? When I saw that NPR story, it made me want to share again. Sorry if I’ve linked to the Dweck stuff before.