Stress continues for me this week (I could really use a book with “Don’t Panic” in large, friendly letters on the cover right now; and yes, “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” from a certain movie is running on a loop in my head right now). So again I turn to something that makes me happy, especially in light of a big, scary election in less than two weeks now (I plan on voting early at my library to get it over with).

Weird news always lessens stress for me. I still remember a story years ago about someone who’d been shot, and maintained that “Fred” had been the one who’d done it. Fred was, if I remember correctly, his basset hound.

Don’t tick off the dog. Or the cat. Take that from a cat-sitter. The grudges may not always last long if you happen to be late with dinner or inadvertently step on a bit of a tail as you walk past, but the glare of death is no fun whatsoever for any length of time if you are the target of it (except in pictures posted on the Internet).

🎃 A Minnesota horticulture teacher has won the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, held in Half Moon Bay, Calif., for the fourth year in a row. Travis Gienger’s 2,471-pound gourd beat his closest competitor by six pounds, according to The Associated Press, but it was smaller than the world-record-setting pumpkin (2,749 pounds) he entered last year. After the competition, Gienger and his family planned to take the pumpkin to Southern California, where professional carvers will use it for a Halloween event.

Forget jack-o’-lanterns. Think of how many pumpkin pies could be made out of that thing, and just in time for Thanksgiving. Pardon me while I look for the whipped cream. Ooh, and cinnamon sugar.

👟 AP also reports a 28-year-old Greek man has been given a one-month suspended sentence in Thessaloniki after being convicted of disturbing his neighbors by sneaking onto their properties … to smell their shoes. Though neighbors testified that he never showed aggression during his nighttime visits, he had been repeatedly asked to stop. He’s been ordered to attend therapy.

My dearly departed Luke sometimes would get in the habit of sniffing my shoes, and occasionally chewing on them, sometimes to the point I’d have to put the shoes in another room. But he was a cat. Therapy would just irritate him.

🫂 An airport in New Zealand is getting attention for a new sign in the dropoff area urging passengers and their drivers to limit farewell hugs to three minutes, according to UPI (they recommend the car park for longer goodbyes). Dan De Bono, Dunedin Airport’s chief executive, told reporters that some goodbyes have been taking too much time. “We’re trying to have fun with it. It is an airport and those dropoff locations are common locations for farewells. There’s no space left for others. It’s about enabling others to have hugs.”

Imagine that: Thinking of others instead of only yourself. What’s next? Voting in the interests of what’s best for the country rather than a politician or party?

🌰 “King Conker” has been cleared of cheating allegations at the World Conker Championships in Southwick, U.K. Dave Jakins was accused of using a steel chestnut in the traditional game played by British schoolchildren in which a conker (the seed of a horse chestnut) is threaded onto a string to try to smash an opponent’s chestnut. Investigators concluded from film and photo evidence and testimony from judges and umpires that “it would be near impossible for Mr. Jakins to have swapped the conkers unnoticed” in the men’s final, AP reported. Jakins kept a steel conker in his pocket to amuse people, and used a real chestnut in the contest.

The losing men’s finalist “accepted defeat with good grace and sportsmanship,” reported AP. There’s a lesson in that. I can assume that Jakins was equally sportsmanlike after he lost the title of overall champion to an American woman, Kelci Banschbach.

🐈‍⬛ You know I’m a sucker for a cat, and a rescue cat in London was spared an announced eviction after public outcry and more than 62,000 signatures on a petition. Defib, who’s lived at the London Ambulance Service’s Walthamstow station for 16 years, was in danger of losing his home because of a change in local management, according to a UPI story. Officials have now decided to let Defib stay, and a message from the petition’s author thanked the public for their support, offering “nose boops for all.”

Awwwww. Excuse me for a moment while I go and boop fur-nephews Ollie and Charlie.

😏 I love a snarky accessory, and have often given friends gifts, like pillows or stickers, with pithy comments emblazoned on them. I haven’t, though, given anyone a pouch that says “Definitely not a bag full of drugs.” The Guardian reports that Portland, Ore., police officers found just that on a traffic stop earlier this month, and that the bag was indeed full of fentanyl, methamphetamine and fake oxycodone, along with a loaded gun, scales and money also found in the car. To top it off, the car was stolen. The driver and passenger were taken into custody and face multiple charges.

C’mon, folks, if people keep doing things like this, snark will lose all meaning.

That’s a bridge too far for some of us.

📖 A woman sorting through her deceased grandmother’s stuff found that granny was apparently a hardened scofflaw, at least as far as library checkouts go. According to UPI, “”A copy of William Shakespeare‘s ‘Life of King Henry the Fifth’ was returned to a New Jersey library 101 years after it was checked out. Paterson Public Library officials said a woman named Cynthia Delhaie found the book while sorting through the possessions that had belonged to her deceased grandmother, Arlene Delhaie, and discovered the tome had been checked out from the library in 1923.” She contacted the library and made arrangements to return the book, printed in 1910, and highly valued by collectors, according to librarians.

“It’s never too late to return overdue library materials,” Corey Fleming, director of the Paterson Public Library, told TAPinto Paterson. Still, UPI noted, it wasn’t the most overdue book returned this year, as a copy of “Ivanhoe” was returned to Poudre Libraries in Colorado 105 years after its due date.

This is why my library-book borrowing is done through the Libby app. If I set a print book down, I’ll most likely forget about it for months. I haven’t had that problem with my iPad.

Of course I have to end with a story about a cat.

🔥 A Michigan homeowner awoke to an oven fire because the family cat had inadvertently trod on the self-cleaning button in the house on Burnt Mill Road in Almira. The New York Post reported, “On Facebook, Brian Adams posted a photo of the charred and melted stove and circled two buttons that the cat had apparently stepped on with its paws, activating the self-cleaning mode.

“’It’s definitely a poor design!’ Adams wrote. Then he explains how the kitty’s paw steps ended up causing a fire.

“’I would have just woken up to a really clean oven, but I cooked bacon yesterday morning and put the pan in the oven because I didn’t want the cat getting into the grease,’ he said. ‘In hindsight, a greasy cat would have been much better.’”

Ya think?

Smoke alarms woke the family, and they had fire extinguishers at the ready, luckily.

A few of the cats I sit have a fascination with the stove, so it’s always a good idea to employ caution. Fur-nephew Ollie has been known to sit on the stove at his soon-to-be-former home and watch the flames under a pan (the new apartment has an electric cooktop). At another house, the pilot light is off on the stovetop because the cats have the tendency to want to explore the burners and check pans for any tasty bits left behind. (Lighting individual burners when needed isn’t that big a deal, especially when you consider the alternative.)

Imagine the trouble if they had opposable thumbs.