We’re naming the next one Mr Whiskers
Question: How do you make an authentic Texas chili?
Answer: There’s no doubt that the quality of the beef is an issue, whether ground beef or steak is used. First, brown the meat thoroughly in very hot bacon grease and pour off the excess fat.
Most importantly, however, before you begin cutting up the peppers and onions, make sure you rub the surface of your cutting board vigorously with a cat’s rectum.
March 16, 2007 — 1:45 pm
Comments: 3
Nineteen white, fuzzy cat bellies
It felt like Spring yesterday, which compelled Charlotte to leap out the back door, fall to the ground and wave her stuff around in the air. This is the tragic consequence of teaching your cat that her white, fuzzy belly is the most beautiful object in the whole wide world.
This was not at all the image I was originally going for. I was headed for a straight-up montage of cat belly photographs. But because she’s black and white, Charlotte is an especially strange and wonderful object to play with in Photoshop.
When you ctrl-click on an image layer, Photoshop automatically selects the brightest portions of the layer. So I did that and made a mask of the white parts and saved it, then I inverted the image and made a mask of the black parts and saved it. This theoretically gave me a combined mask that would cut around the outlines of Charlotte and save me the trouble of manually erasing or blending the backgrounds (on account of, I am lazy), since the background is largely gray. But, of course, the darkest part of the white fur and the lightest part of the black fur are gray, too, so when I subtracted the mask from the photo, this was what I got. Well, after some fussing.
It looks like one of those old masters drawings. The ones on gray paper with the ink and chalk. I tried adding a paper texture, which looked cool but not cool enough to justify tripling the file size. To be economical, .gif files rely on large areas of totally solid color.
Please enjoy my cat’s white, fuzzy belly nineteen different ways. She would want you to.
March 14, 2007 — 8:09 am
Comments: 3
Invasion of the Waschbären
Oooh, I did not know this. Germany has a raccoon problem. They deliberately imported the first breeding pair in 1930 for the fur, which was both prized and expensive, and being diabolical evil freaking genius animals, raccoonlets soon escaped into the wild. The Krauts call them “Waschbären” (wash bears), because they wash their food with their hands (and their clever opposable thumbs).
How big a problem? In Brandenburg, the area around Berlin, hunters killed 41 of them in 1990 and 5,712 in the most recent season. A total of 30,000 were killed in the country at large — that’s triple six years ago. But being the diabolical evil freaking genius animals that they are, the raccoons packed up and moved to the city, away from the hunters. Now there are far more urban raccoons than country ones.
We kept several as pets when I was a kid. It was legal then. Easily the smartest animal I’ve ever handled, including monkeys, most small children and all my relatives. Scary smart. There aren’t many latches those evil little fingers can’t pick.
The raccoon I got when I was 16 was raised largely on raisins and scrambled eggs and other delicious people food. When he was fully grown, I wanted to switch him over to dry dogfood, but he hated it. So I tried mixing raisins in with his dry food. He took one sniff, dumped the bowl on the floor, picked out the raisins and ate them, and swaggered off, leaving me with a mess to clean up.
Raccoons open latches, love people food, live anywhere, carry diseases, are incredibly destructive and — bonus — adorable.
Jerry? You are so screwed.
March 12, 2007 — 11:42 am
Comments: 13
Tell me a story, Dr Fang
Okay, now I feel bad for dissing scientists. The ones I’ve known all share at least one excellent characteristic: they’re natural born explainers. No scientist would dream of letting me draw something until he was sure I had a basic grasp of the science.
This probably does result in a slightly better illustration than they could’ve squeezed out of me otherwise, but I don’t think that’s why they do it. They do it because they can’t stand to be around ignorance. And for the sheer joy of explaining things.
To do science takes all sort of depth and, like, math and stuff. But the underlying concepts are usually pretty accessible. All you need is one excitable scientist with a pencil and a lunch napkin. Some of the top scientists in their respective fields have sat at my workstation and told me stories. Lordy, I love that.
My favorite scientist was an elderly Chinese. Call him Dr Fang. Everyone hated to work with Fang, because he was a high-strung chap with a completely impenetrable accent. And yet, he was a popular public speaker on the science circuit. That’s because he was fizzing with excitement. Old Fang was chuffed to buggery about science. But it was especially important for him to have good art, because otherwise no-one could tell what he was gabbling so happily about.
I always got stuck with him, because I have a good ear for Chinglish (and Indianglish, for that matter). Being, as most Chinese are, a fun-sized human being, Fang could barely peer over my head as I sat at the work station and he stood behind my chair barking instructions.
“Make it blue! No, make it yellow! No, make it green! No, blue! No, delete the whole thing! Ahahahaha! No, bring it back again!” That last order was especially off-pissing, as the software we had then didn’t undo.
I never heard how Fang got to the States. But the first time he was allowed back into China to visit his family, they had been disappeared. People, furniture…everything gone. Nothing was left but empty houses. Next trip, everything was back where it should be and no-one would talk about it. Spooky place, China.
On one of those trips, he brought me back this piece of artwork. He says these are ubiquitous in rural homes in China (he didn’t actually use the words “ubiquitous” or “rural” — I think his soft palate would’ve exploded). It’s a thin, translucent sheet of black and white marble and something that looks very like a Chinese ink painting of a landscape can be picked out of the dark streaks. An appropriate poem is painted on them. I asked what my poem was, and Fang said, “Ohhhh, I dunno. Rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
He carried that thing in his hand-luggage all the way from China so it wouldn’t break. Very touching.
Dr Fang died this year. I was shocked. I didn’t even know he was ill. He retired several years ago, but he kept an office in our building and he was working on a book. I’d seen him around.
I hope he finished his book. I wouldn’t be able to read it, but he knew more about the thing he knew about than anyone in the world, they say.
Goodnight, Dr Fang. I shall forever hear your voice in the “rain, somethingsomethingsomething.”
March 9, 2007 — 8:20 am
Comments: 4
Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist (episode two, hydrology)
Damien is an ordinary gray stripey tom, but it’s interesting how much he shares with bengals. Bengals are a mix of some South American wild cat and ordinary gray stripeys…but I wonder how many of their famous weirdnesses they actually owe to the domestic side of their heritage? Damien’s fascination with water isn’t quite as powerful as a bengal’s, but I have to scrape him out of the sink to brush my teeth.
There’s a Norwegian guy on YouTube who’s filmed his bengals a lot. He caught them making peculiar chattering noises at birds out the window. Damien does this, too. I think of it as mimeenking — it sounds like he’s saying “mee…mee.” The “M” sound is rather hard for cats, as I learned when I caught my mother trying to teach the family cat to say “Mama.” It’s a noise Damien makes when he knows he can’t reach something interesting; like a fly buzzing around at ceiling level, or me, tapping on the window from outside. It’s a frustration sound.
March 6, 2007 — 8:06 am
Comments: 17
What did YOU do at the office today?
I built this thing. It’s not the only thing I did today, but it’s the only thing I did today that made me go “eee!” It’s a ripple displacement. I’ve never done one with this software before. “eee!” (If it’s making you nuts, right click and uncheck “play”).
This would be an intermediate step in most 3D animation, this slightly off-white, textureless place. I call it Milkworld. A lot of the things I build never make it out of Milkworld; I’m usually called upon to explain stuff rather than re-create a photorealistic scene.
I’d like to live in Milkworld — it’s very soothing here — but I’m such a slob, I’d probably get some color on it.
Have a good weekend. I’m going someplace with my new camera. “eee!”
Update: Huh. Doesn’t work in Opera or Firefox. Just IE. That’s odd because Damien’s Jaunty Balls works fine.
Update II: There. Don’t know what was wrong, but I fixed it by paring the embed code down to the minimum. Of course, now you can’t right click and uncheck “play” — you have to watch it loop. Bwahahaha! Wait! What? Close this window…? Nooooo!
February 23, 2007 — 2:21 pm
Comments: 8
Damien Weasel, Cat Scientist
Poor little bastard was set up. She went out first and planted herself at the foot of the stairs. They are arch enemies, so his only escepe was to take a flying leap over her head. The walk was covered in an inch of smooth, melty ice with a skim of water over the top. This is his first Winter and we haven’t had a good freeze yet, so he doesn’t know from ice. He took his leap, hit, made it all the way to the end of the walkway on his ass in one smooth, wet, flailing pinwheel of knees and paws and elbows and turned around with this amazing “whoa! d00d!!1!!” look on his little mug.
Imagine if he still had balls.
February 19, 2007 — 6:15 am
Comments: 8