I was chatting with a friend from high school this evening and she recommended that I look up a mutual, long-lost friend on Google. So I checked out Piper Kirk.

She was in all the musicals in high school and, if you click on her links, you will hear her original, country music songs which I am relieved to say are pretty good (well the one about Black Stetsons that I listened to was good).

Killer analogy AND personal revelation from the website:

If there's anything I recognize, it's a man in mid-life crisis. And I think that's exactly where Nashville is right now.

Also, Piper mentions this fact which she nails more succinctly than I have ever managed to do:

And by the way...Appalachia is spoken with short "a" sounds. The Cherokee had no long "a" sound in their language. Ya get high-falutin' like the weather channel does, and ya show your ignorance.

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There have been several stories in the Chicago papers lately about crazy cat ladies, all of which I have intended to link to but I didn't so you'll just have to take my word for it. But I would like to point you to an older story, by Susan Orlean, about a crazy cat lady who keeps tigers rather than house cats. The term for this is animal hoarding and, according to Orlean, cats are the most commonly hoarded animals "although dogs, birds, farm animals, and, in one case, beavers, are hoarded as well. "