A Cat Fight in Key West

In the category of bizarre stories comes this one in USA Today from Key West, Florida. Turns out the Hemingway Museum there has about 50 cats, many of them descendants of the six toed Snowball, who lived at the residence with Hemingway and his family during the 1930's. One of the museum's neighbors has complained to the US Department of Agriculture that the museum is not keeping these cats out of trouble. So, in an excellent use our our federal tax dollars, the USDA has launched a federal investigation of the museum. Gum shoed investigators have rented rooms in an adjacent motel, and spend their days videotaping the movement of these 50 cats. Turns out that -- horrors of horrors -- one of the cats scaled the museum wall and went out into the street.

Another sign of the decline of Western Civilization. When simple disputes require a federal investigation to resolve we must be losing our collective common sense, wouldn't you say ?

I'm not sure what this says about me or about Hemingway's writing, but I haven't been able to make it through one of his books since high school. At 15 I was a Hemingway fiend, reading at least a dozen of his classics. But as an adult, his prose seems contrived and his heroes seem shallow and one dimensional. Does anyone else feel the same way about Hemingway ?