{"id":991,"date":"2017-07-15T17:07:31","date_gmt":"2017-07-15T17:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=991"},"modified":"2017-07-15T17:07:31","modified_gmt":"2017-07-15T17:07:31","slug":"my-favorite-animal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=991","title":{"rendered":"My Favorite Animal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A lot, or at least some, of Claire&#8217;s friends are fond of cats. I have stated (correctly) that I&#8217;m not a big fan of cats. When I tell people that, they usually assume, or say, that I must be a dog person. That&#8217;s not necessarily true&#8230; I <em>do<\/em> like dogs, but I wouldn&#8217;t say I&#8217;m a dog person. When I&#8217;m asked what my favorite animal is, my answer is always a mongoose. Then I invariably get the question, &#8220;why a mongoose?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Well, not that I have to have a reason, but I have a couple&#8230; the plural of mongoose is mongooses and I like to say that word. Mongooses aren&#8217;t afraid of snakes and battle them to the death, with the mongoose usually winning&#8230; even against the king cobra. Who wouldn&#8217;t like somebody that could do that? And&#8230; even before the immigration ban, mongooses were banned from the United states \u2014 you can&#8217;t even see one in a zoo. that makes me a little sad and enhances my sympathy vote for my favorite animal.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve only seen a real mongoose in a couple of zoos in foreign countries, but probably the real reason I&#8217;ve always liked them started in about the second or third grade, when I read a story about a mongoose, named Rikki-tikki-tavi (The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.) That was always one of my favorite stories&#8230; I don&#8217;t remember either one of our kids being especially interested in it, but it always was (and is) one of my favorites.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, mongooses don&#8217;t get the respect and credit they deserve&#8230; Egyptian tombs contained mummified mongooses along with mummified human bodies. If you&#8217;re an artist, a really good artist, you probably have some paint brushes made from the fur of mongooses. They are very expensive and can&#8217;t (legally) be sold in the US. Add to all this the fact that mongooses have horizontal pupils and it&#8217;s easy to see why I chose them as my favorite animal&#8230;.<br \/>\n\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A lot, or at least some, of Claire&#8217;s friends are fond of cats. I have stated (correctly) that I&#8217;m not a big fan of cats. When I tell people that, they usually assume, or say, that I must be a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/?p=991\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":992,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jimmy.ekota.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}