Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

We have a new favorite restaurant. Thanks to a tip from a woman I recently met who lives in the town next to ours, we have “discovered” Zia’s - a quaint Italian restaurant in Westford. They serve up the best chicken and veal marsala that I’ve ever had. We’re talking serious Happy Mouth here. Prices are reasonable, too (or perhaps our definition of ‘reasonable’ has shifted over the years; I find now that I tend to be a little more critical of restaurants than I used to be, and am willing to pay a little more for what I consider to be really good food). I’d like to make this a regular spot.

On our last excursion to Zia’s, we found ourselves caught up in an extremely funny-to-us conversation about cat names. When I adopted my two cats a few years ago, a former coworker of mine was terribly keen on the idea of naming them “sed” and “awk”. While these names would have been particularly cute and appropriately geeky had I, a Unix sysadmin-of-sorts, adopted a pair of kittens, they just didn’t fit my HugelyFatAndNeurotic cat and her adopted “brother” (ages 5 and 3 at the time). This fact came up over the course of dinner, and evolved into a discussion of what other Unix commands and utilities would make appropriate names for cats. After much giggling (in part due to the wine, I expect), we determined that there are two lists - “Bad” cat names, and “Good” cat names.

I’m sure we missed lots of others, but these few managed to amuse us greatly for the duration of our dinner (I have mentioned that we’re incorrigible geeks, haven’t I?). Of course, the categorization is completely subjective; in fact, my favorite cat names come from the “bad” list, and I’ve already “renamed” three of our cats:

Leaping, Vulching cat w/ Sensitive Stomach => “yacc”
HugelyFatAndNeurotic cat => “dump” or “ypcat”
FriendlyLikeDog => “bash” or “crack |”

Our fourth cat, Rumpus, will forever be fondly nicknamed Hoagie, but that’s another story.