While I'm glad to see that Dr. Kotb is spreading the more authentic teachings of Islam that in sex between a husband and wife, that the husband has an obligation to fulfill his wife sexually and that she has a right to pleasure, she still reflects an extremely strict view of acceptable sexual practices. No sex before marriage, no mastrabation (for women), no homosexuality, no anal sex... one would think that we were reading the usual admonishments from the Catholic Church on sex.

Even with her more "liberal" teachings about sex, it still is troubling that she says that a woman must be a "blank slate" before marriage in regards to sex (so mastrabation, where she can learn what is pleasurable to her is out) and that women do not have the same kind of sexual needs that men do. As for her claims to "curing" homosexuals, in a society where homosexuals are under treat of death, arrest, torture and persecution if caught, I'm not surprised that she has a number of samples to boast about. I'm sure that if Egypt (which has had a number of very public arrests and trails of men caught in homosexual acts in recent years) decriminalized homosexuality, Dr. Kotb would probably find most of her "cured" patients back in the embrace of men before too long.

Well, as I said before, she's a definate step up from the fundamentalist crazies who find women so horrifically corrupting that they would not want one at their own funerals, but it's a baby set up.

A lot of the behavior the LW is writing about is pretty standard behavior for a lot of cats I know. Depending on the individual, cats can be extremely territorial (which is why he views anyone entering the appartment as an intruder), getting into things that you don't want them too and generally being a pain to deal with. To deal with the more extreme behavior, you need to get a behavior specialist involved who will teach you how to deal with these less than charming traits and manage his worst behaviors.

I own a cat myself and as much as I love her and think that she is a pretty well behaved animal she does do some very similar things, though not to as great a degree. She views anyone that is not one of her people as a threat and will either hiss and snarl or hide. When my neice and nephew were infants, she saw them as another animal invading her territory and would jump onto a chair so she could hit them in the head. To this day, she still doesn't accept them. We tried to bring a kitten into the house, thinking that she might want the companionship. After a week we gave up because in between bouts of attacking the kitten she would perch on a shelf in the kitchen and hiss at anyone who came near her - we gave up trying to force the issue because she stopped eating. If I leave my cabinet open by even a tiny amount, she will push her way in and sleep on my clothes, which means everything will be covered in cat hair. There is no such thing as sleeping in on the weekends because she insists on me waking up to feed her breakfast at the crack of dawn, and throwing her out of my bedroom winds up with her sitting outside my door whining. One night after we put up fresh wallpaper, I came in to find her spider climbing the wall! And we've finally gotten vet appointments to be merely unpleasent and not torture for everyone involved.

These are normal behaviors. The trick is knowing how to deal with them. Getting a specialist in cat behavior involved will go a long way towards getting Oliver back towards acceptable behavior.