Twanda Carlisle, seen here being targeted by a terrorist, tells the Post-Gazette:

That was yesteryear. In 2007, cats are more aggressive than they used to be.

Thank goodness there is finally someone who is willing to speak the truth about the meteoric rise in cat-related violence over the past few years. Once, cat gangs seemed quaint and mostly harmless, but younger felines keep pushing the envelope.

Dr. Dre’s seminal 1992 album The Chronic first drew America’s attention to rising cat on cat violence, fueled by an increased flow from post-Soviet Afghanistan of high-quality catnip, known on the street as “purr dust.” The problem was shunted to the side in favor of high-visibility campaigns against Dre’s “obscene” lyrics:

Who’s the man with the master plan?
A kitten with a motherf***ing gun

Congress only exacerbated the problem with the repeal of the Feline G.I. Bill as a budget balancing measure in early 2004. The result has been a flood of disaffected Felis silvestris catus in our streets, highly trained for combat but without prospects for education.

As a result, many of America’s felines, including decorated heroes of the Iraq war, have landed in prison or been forced into pornography or prostitution.

Despite the intervention of religious leaders, this problem has continued to grow. It is a good thing one of our elected officials is finally ready to step forward and deal with the gangs of criminal felines in our streets. After all, as Dr. Dre said in the follow up to The Chronic:

Mister Kitty Mittens got a shotgun
and he ain’t even strong enough to cock one
F*** tryin to job hunt
Kittens got AK’s, kittens is way crazier
than Dre was back in his N.W.A. days
Kittens spray strays and shoot without lookin

Thanks to Bram and the Burgher for writing about this earlier today.

A standoff between the police and radical Islamist students in a mosque in the capital is in its fifth day. According to BBC news 19 people have been killed since the start of the stand off.
The Islamabad Metroblog has been providing live blog coverage of this event - including minute-by-minute accounts of the situation.

7th July 1:18 AM
SHOTS FIRED! Firing from both ends in the standoff, Lal Masjid have opened fire with the Spec Ops doing the same! Heavy firing heard from the G-6 area as far as G-10. Ambulances can be heard rushing towards hospitals. The Special Forces have made a final move in as it seems. 7.7.7 in the making!?

Additionally, other people are leaving details of the situation in the comments.

Posted by: Harris at July 7, 2007 03:52 AM

all day long in an attempt to disconnect the gas connection , gas company officials were digging roads near Lal Masjid trying to locate the pipe which supplies gas to the masjid.. when they were unable to locate it in the end and got frustrated then they suspended the whole of G6’s gas…

It is fascinating that the internet can provide us with such details of the actual situation in Islamabad. Our thoughts are with our blogging peers in Islamabad.

Post-Gazette:

The public should give three newly promoted Pittsburgh police officers a chance despite the officers’ histories of domestic abuse, Deputy Police Chief Paul Donaldson said yesterday.

George T. Trosky went from homicide detective to commander, despite a 1997 arrest for breaking his then-wife’s nose. The charge was dropped when his ex-wife did not show up in court, but he was still demoted from sergeant to patrolman.

Trosky doesn’t just beat up girls: he also drives drunk and beats up hippies.

We already knew that the City of Pittsburgh would be happy to cover for police who enjoy beating people up, but this is the first hint we have that you can actually get promoted for it. It seems like there is nothing you can do to get demoted.

Except tell City Council about crookedness in the Mayor’s office. That’ll do it.

I think there must be a trophy out there for crookedest police department that the Ravenstahl administration is determined to win. If it looks like a golf trophy, the mayor could use it to get past security.

What does it take to get Pittsburgh-area ladies into the wire services and the pages of the NY Times? Only a little nudity. And a decade or two (or, uh, seven or eight).

Giving sultry looks and sexy smiles to the camera, 12 Pittsburgh-area women recently posed at Monongahela historical sites, baring it all — or almost all — to create a charity-driven calendar. The catch?

The nearly nude ladies are all in their 70s and 80s, driven to adventure by a desire to raise money for a historical society in Monongahela, a small community 17 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

Yep, inspired by the movie Calendar Girls, several local ladies stripped down — to benefit the Monongahela Historical Society.

Does anybody buy wall calendars anymore? Don’t we all have ‘em on our computers, crackberries, and whatnot? Hmm - maybe the calendar-purchasing demographic is made up of exactly those people who would find photos of mostly-naked 70- and 80-something year-old ladies a bargain at $10. It’s a year’s worth of entertainment. And hey, it’s for charity.

photo of Helen Mirren a couple of years — OK, decades — before she appeared in Calendar Girls.

As many as 22 people have died in two shootings today at Virginia Tech. The captain of our metroblog site in Washington DC is a Virginia Tech grad student, and he writes that his university email is down.

“We’re all locked in our dorms surfing the Internet trying to figure out what’s going on,” freshman Aimee Kanode told the AP.

According to a student who spoke to NPR, the rumor on campus was that the first shooting incident occured when an angry ex-boyfriend came to see his former girlfriend, an RA, in her dorm. The second shootings took place in a classroom building in another part of campus. News reports are still sketchy, but apparently a gunman was among the dead.

I am sorry that this isn’t a better picture, I snapped it while I was on a trolley tour of Pittsburgh this weekend with the folks from Craft Congress.
I thought I had heard something about this on the news last week, but now I have seen it for myself. Why is the mailbox dressed like R2-D2.
What is the USPS doing? Why does the Postal Service need to do so much marketing. The mail is the mail, it is an amazingly reliable service that has very little competition. So what is up with all of this elaborate, complex marketing. I like the mail boxes blue and where they are. Here is an article from the Trib where the Postal spokesperson expresses some concern about the mailboxes being stolen by Star Wars collectors. I just want the USPS to stay focused on delivering the mail, not on finding more ways to have it get lost.

I learned the secret to this getting people to answer questions thing: don’t count on e-mail, instead go out for lunch and run into them. That is how I got to talk to Bill Peduto, seen here shortly before the moment when that coffee kicks in and he realizes that he is having a conversation in the middle of the street.

He and I chatted briefly about this contraception thing that I and others have been grumbling about. He expressed support for the availability of both contraception and other safe and legal reproductive health whathaveyou (read: leave women who need abortions alone).

I invited him to characterize oppostion to contraception “creepy” and to compare it to witch-burning, both of which he declined to do. He did say that impressing one’s religious beliefs on others showed a problem with one’s “moral compass” and called any effort to outlaw or make it difficut to get contraceptives to hypothetical “orthodox Jews” outlawing “ham sandwiches.” This may have been on his mind because he was buying what looked to me like a ham salad.

He also volunteered his support for safe and legal “health and beauty aids” from Walgreens in a joke that I did not understand.

Additional ammunition for those who would like to claim that this post is just one East End liberal elitist giving a free lectern to another: this happened at Whole Foods.

Gunpowder fizzler: I still intend to dedicate as much space here as the Mayor, seen here shopping for a Snugli with city police officers, would like to make his positions clear as soon as he gets a minute. Perhaps in addition to answering the questions I put to him by e-mail two fridays ago he can explain why contraception is not like a ham sandwich or come out against ham sandwiches.

No doubt his staff is still sleeping off the celebratory champagne they cracked open after yesterday’s landslide endoresement win, so I don’t expect to hear anything today, or possibly even tomorrow, depending how surprised they were by their margin of victory. I am sure a response will be coming by Wednesday.

If not, I am going to have to begin to consider the possibility that the Mayor doesn’t take me seriously.

Protesters: You are not revolutionaries. You are, at best, an annoyance to the powers that be.

In addition to the protesters chained to the main gate of the center off 40th Street, a tripod of long metal poles was erected to block the way. A Bloomfield woman, 24-year-old De’Anna Caligiuri, was suspended from its point in a harness about 15 feet above the asphalt driveway. It was the first time she had done this, a tactic borrowed from the environmental movement. The device was apparently erected to make it difficult for police to remove without injuring her.

Well, OK, that’s pretty awesome. It still doesn’t make you Patrick Henry.

Police: You are not soldiers. You do not need to dress like you are going into Falujah to deal with a bunch of hippies who have taped themselves to a pipe. I know you have all those cool helmets and tasers and vests with kevlar and lots of pockets back at the station, but you just make yourselves look like idiots when you break them out for this sort of thing.

I dunno, but they are cutting off the tops of people’s heads again at the Post-Gazette.

WDUQ is reporting that construction crews hit a natural gas line near Point State Park shortly before noon and traffic is being re-routed. The Post-Gazette writes that “the escaping gas sounded like a deafening jet engine around the Point.” Yikes!

Sounds like a good time to steer clear of Point State Park. But if you do get caught in traffic there, or happen to be wandering past, take a picture and add it to our Flickr group and we’ll show it off on the site.