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The Cats, a Dog, and a Regret: Me and Nyshia C ats and Dogs are the most common household pets and they are both used in a number of our idioms. The literal English translation for Los Gatos is “The Cats”. That name may make you think of the animal but for me because I read it as “The Cats” and not just plain “Cats” I think of the expression “The Cats” that Barney Fife, from the Andy Griffith show, used to describe his girlfriend Thelma Lou. “The Cats” is a sort of 50's truncated version of the “Cat's Pajamas” from the '20's or possibly from another like kind expression like “The Cat's Meow”. I had always liked Los Gatos and thought of it as being a pretty “cool” place. Tucked up against the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains next to the highway that heads over to Santa Cruz it has a bit of a Bohemian vibe. Maybe not compared to places like Boulder Creek or Ben Lomond, but there's a clear difference when compared to the nearby Silicon Valley towns Ca...

  I Couldn't Make it as a Punker: T hat's the last line in a 1982 song by The Vandals, a punk rock band, entitled “Urban Struggle”. OK, I was not really trying to be a punker and there did not seem to be a lot of people from the 60's in the punk crowd but I was into punk music. The back half of the 70's for me were to rock what the early 60's were to rock-n-roll. For me, in the mid and late 70's much of the rock music I was hearing had became bloated, more self indulgent, and rather boring. Sure there was still some edgier good music coming out of the rock world but there was an awful lot of music acts like Foreigner, Styx, Eddie Money, Boston, Hall and Oates, Captain and Tennilie and Journey, not to mention all the disco music. There were certainly some good songs but in general their music was not particularly interesting to me. There was still music from the likes of Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Doobie Brothers, Elton John, the Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie N...