And they say my friends have no sense of humor.

Look closely at the right side of the picture, around the middle, atop the square concrete post. See that little black speck? That's a cat. A friend of mine who was visiting Italy during the early months of our Bender search sent me this photo he snapped in Rome, captioning it, "Maybe it's not Bender, but maybe it is." Everyone's a wise guy. Thanks, Heywood. ;)

P.S. No clear results from the latest postcard mailing, although a few vague reports of black and white cats.

Postcard mailings . . . third time's the charm!

I received a note last week from a woman who lives about a mile and a half southwest of our house (in the area of Country Run Way in Antelope). She has on a couple of occasions seen a cat matching Bender's description hanging out in a field near a local church - she didn't think too much about it because the cat had a collar and she thought it belonged to someone, but she recently saw our Craiglist ad and thought it might be Bender. That same field is only a few hundred feet from the area of another sighting of a Bender look-alike about a month ago (a woman called and said she saw him sleeping on the hood of a truck near the side of a road). My visits out there never yield anything, but I thought this might be worthy of another (smaller) postcard mailing. Round three, here we come. Wish us luck!

. . . and he threatened to bury the body.

Some folks have asked for more info on the "deaf and disabled police officer/doctor" who "arrested those gangsters who stole (Bender)" and who offered to return him to me for a fee. I corresponded with him for a couple of days to see what his game was, and here's the upshot - he demanded $1,900.00 from me in return for a promise that he would have Bender shipped to me from an undisclosed location. He couldn't provide any info about Bender that wasn't already in the ad, and refused to send me a picture of him when asked (he couldn't take a picture of Bender because he was "deaf," or something to that effect). He finally threatened to kill Bender and bury the body where I would never find it. Pleasant fellow, huh? A little digging revealed that he is the owner of a sleazy little Vietnamese restaurant in southern California, and he has been the perpetrator of numerous Craigslist scams involving lost pets and credit card fraud. Nice, huh?