Clearly I mean to write more about this later, but I got to take a tour of the White House last night, courtesy of the connections I made during President Bush's visit to Tanzania last February.

There is a First Cat running around the West Wing, or so they say. My tour guide swears she has never seen him, his litter box, his hair on the furniture, nothing. She wonders if there even is one in reality. In a way, the First Cat of the Bush White House is kind of like the Christian God: no one knows that he actually exists, and there are three names for one entity.

(But he's black.)

"India, Willie and Kitty," my tour guide from Dallas said, before pre-emptively answering the question I had already started to ask.

"The President calls it 'Kitty.'"

Oooooooof course he does.

*If you read Kitty's bio on the White House website, it lets you in on the origins of its name:
"Named for former Texas Ranger baseball player, Ruben Sierra, who was called 'El Indio'."




Ooooooooof course he is.