What's wrong with this picture? If you own a cat or two you know without me telling you. This cat show is a performing at the local theater. Cat owners know it's an accomplishment to get them to even pose with the instruments. I doubt that they actually play them.



I just finished reading the book "I Heard You Paint Houses." Here is an excerpt from the New York Times review:

"It's not easy to warm to books written by or on behalf of avowed murderers, and that goes double for the subgenre of Mafia-turncoat memoirs. If it's not upsetting enough that one is contributing $25 to benefit a criminal, buying a snitch's book amounts to a tacit partnership with a person who not only garrotes his peers but betrays them. You know, the whole omertà thing. One hates petting a rat.

Which is one reason I was surprised to so thoroughly enjoy the book written on behalf of the man who claims he killed Jimmy Hoffa, '' 'I Heard You Paint Houses.' '' A longtime Teamsters official and Hoffa aide who for years was suspected of having a hand in Hoffa's 1975 disappearance, the elderly Frank Sheeran, we now learn, gave hundreds of hours of tape-recorded interviews to one of his former attorneys, Charles Brandt, before his death last year.

The book Brandt has written gives new meaning to the term ''guilty pleasure.'' It promises to clear up the mystery of Hoffa's demise, and appears to do so. Sheeran not only admits he was in on the hit, he says it was he who actually pulled the trigger -- and not just on Hoffa but on dozens of other victims, including many, he alleges, dispatched on Hoffa's orders. This last seems likely to spur a reappraisal of Hoffa's career. The book's title, in fact, comes from the first words Sheeran says Hoffa ever spoke to him. To paint a house, Sheeran explains, is Mafiaese for killing someone, from the blood that splatters all over the, well, you get the picture.

'' 'Houses' '' is a cut above the usual Mafia memoir. Brandt keeps the focus tightly on Sheeran and Hoffa, quick-marching the reader through Sheeran's rise from carnival gofer to klepto-trucker to union organizer to trusted assassin. The story is told mostly in Sheeran's voice, with Brandt intervening to provide chapters on Hoffa's career and the legal troubles that sent him to prison. Sheeran doesn't have the eye for detail of a Henry Hill, the oily suburban Judas whose memoir served as the basis for the movie ''Goodfellas,'' but he makes up for it with cool, silencer-smooth prose.

The best thing about '' 'Houses' '' is the hits themselves. Sheeran's tales of each killing are shiny pebbles of minimalism. Take the 1978 murder of Salvatore (Sally Bugs) Briguglio, the minor Mafioso who drove the car that took Hoffa to his death. Sheeran and his own driver, John (the Redhead) Francis, simply approached Briguglio on a street in Little Italy: ''I walked up to him and said, 'Hi, Sal.' He said, 'Hi, Irish.' Sally Bugs looked at John because he didn't know the Redhead. While he was looking at John for an introduction, Sally Bugs got shot twice in the head. He went down dead.''

Martin Scorsese is making the book into a movie starring Robert DeNiro, something to look forward to. It was a very interesting book, and as you can see in the excerpt, Sheeran doesn't say "I shot him" he says "he got shot." It wasn't all about Jimmy Hoffa, though, it also deals with the evolution of unions, Watergate, and the Kennedy assassination.

The trade unions went a long way to make better working conditions for all of us, but they were/are corrupt as hell, and the working people were/are just pawns in the game the mobsters play(ed) to extort money from the management of the companies. And we've all paid for it through higher prices for consumer goods and services.

I also took a look at Sarah Palin's book - someone left it on the free bookshelf at the post office. There are photos of Miss Cutsey Pie standing over a dead caribou, on a fishing boat, etc. I really couldn't stand to read it - she (or whoever the ghost writer is) writes like she talks, shallow and self-serving. Most memorable is her remark to visiting vegetarians at the governor's mansion: "If God didn't intend us to eat animals, why did He make them out of meat?"