It’s not one of mine, I swear!
Oscar is a two-year-old cat adopted as a kitten by Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, RI, where I be at (Providence, not a nursing home. Not yet, bucko). Oscar isn’t an especially friendly cat. Doesn’t seem to like people that much, in fact.
Every morning, Oscar makes the rounds of the dementia ward, checking up on everybody, just like a real doctor. Say, Dr Kevorkian. Because, every once in a while, Oscar will hop up on the bed and curl up next to somebody. And when he does this, that old coot is going to die today.
So far, he’s gotten it right upwards of 25 times, which is a better track record than the doctors. When Oscar cuddles up to somebody, they call that person’s family and a priest. One ungrateful wretch asked that Oscar be put out of the room while he said goodbye to his mom. Oscar paced up and down the hall, mewing.
Sender-inner thinks they’re overlooking the obvious explanation: when no-one’s looking, Oscar bumps people off (presumably by the classic feline method of breath-stealing). Me, I think it’s adequately explained by the “special relationship” between cats and the Man in Black. The one with the sickle, not the one with the guitar. Eh. Either one, at this point.
July 26, 2007 — 8:43 am
Comments: 23
They get the last LOL
There’s been a certain amount of hatin’ on the lolcats lately. But check out this Business Week article on blogs that make money (Cheezburger is the third one in the slideshow). BW estimates Cheezburger is pulling in $5,600 a month in ad revenue.
Now, that’s not a spectacular amount of scratch for the big blogs (witness some of the others on the list), but Cheezburger only started in January of this year. And it’s entirely driven by user submission. Who’s LOLing now?
My promise to you, my faithful minions: I will never sell out. Not unless I really, really need the money.
July 19, 2007 — 4:30 pm
Comments: 22
“Everybody loves cats and banjos”
— Old Mama Weasel, deceased
Cats and banjos. Pure blogging gold.
It was the day before 4th of July, and the minions were frolicking, happy and congenial. I just couldn’t bear to post some angsty political think piece and ruin the mood.
Okay, you know what? I had nothing on my mind today. Enjoy!
July 3, 2007 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 10
What this blog needs is more gosh-darned catblogging
Charlotte’s got that whole cowl thing going. With the pointy ears and the slitty green eyes, she looks a right Batman. In truth, she’s a sweet and stupid animal who stands with all four feet in the litterbox and somehow manages to piss all over the floor.
Damien, on the other hand, is an evil little fucker. I bet if you shaved him, he’d be covered in gang signs and six-six-sixes.
Some day, let us shave him.
Usually, when they find themselves this close together, it results in fuzzy chunks of free-floating catskin (hers, mostly) and the sound as of earth’s mighty tectonic plates grinding together. If tectonic plates were made of cats and razorblades.
Here, the dog next door has caught their several eyes and evoked a rare moment of feline solidarity.
June 20, 2007 — 6:20 pm
Comments: 45
Londinium or bust
What does the “or bust” construction mean, exactly? “If I do not reach my intended destination, I will physically explode in some way”? I don’t know. I’ve never known. Forget I said it.
I had hoped work would be a leisurely stretch before my holiday, but some stupid piece of shit job blew up in my face this morning and I chased it the rest of the day. Oh, well. A quick note before I retire, then.
Most Boston-to-London flights are overnighters, arriving right in the teeth of the London morning commute. That sort of flight is easier to catch on the Boston end, but hell on the London end. I don’t sleep well on planes; I showed up punchy and fizzy and spent the whole first day hoping that more than usually tactless things don’t come out of my mouth. Tactlessness is, as you might imagine, a problem for me.
Finally, we found a flight that leaves in the morning and arrives at Heathrow around nine at night. Perfect — just enough time to drive home, settle in, drink a bottle of fizz, eat a meal (toad in the hole. My favorite!) and fall into a deep, weaselicious dream.
But the Boston end? Not so nice.
Still, I prefer to front-load my pain. Who was it said that drunkenness would be moral if you could endure the hangover first? It wasn’t me, but I fundamentally agree: payment first. Then pleasure.
My flight leaves at nine. Not bad. But I have to get a bus to the airport, per their schedule. And I have to get a cab to the bus. And the cab company won’t let me pre-book because it’s a short trip, but they won’t guarantee me a cab because I don’t pre-book. (Yes, I have friends. I wouldn’t dream of waking them in the wee hours to drive me, which is partly why they’re still my friends. Despite that whole tactlessness thing).
So here’s how it goes down: alarm goes off at three in the morning. I get dressed, pack my toothbrush and call a cab for 4:30. The cats begin acting especially cute but very sad, the knowing little bastards, so me and my luggage move out onto the lawn to wait. The cab is late. It is always late. They didn’t take my number, so there’s no way I can know if the cabby is lost and I’m screwed. This is — this ALWAYS is — the low point of the day. I treat myself to a dram of stomach acid. And possibly half a milligram of Xanax.
The cab arrives and drives the short hop to the bus station. (A cab ride all the way in to Logan would add several hundred bucks to the round trip. I could do it, but it would hurt). The bus station is dark. There’s usually a moon. And a pair of young lovers, or a very old lady, or scruffy college students, or all of these things waiting for the Logan bus. It feels poetical. I miss my stupid cats.
The bus ride into Boston is dark but sparkly. I feel like That Girl. I take a lot of artsy, blurry photos out the window. The line at the ticket counter…well, this isn’t Christmas, so maybe not so bad this time. I’m starting to enjoy myself, but I miss my stupid cats.
I saunter around the Gate 33 area. Have a nasty cup of Starbucks airport blend. Borrow a cup of electricity from Massport to charge up all my shit, if I can find an empty outlet. Start to get excited. Miss stupid cats.
The flight East is magic: you fly into the planet’s rotation. The flight is six hours, but the clock says twelve. So the whole day is compressed into cartoon time. They feed us a lot; keeps us quiet. So we go from the rosy fingers of dawn to the scarlet imprint of twilight in less time than it takes to work the morning shift.
Get me! I’m a jet setter!
Miss my stupid cats already.
This is going to be great!
May 14, 2007 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 7
Damien communicates with the mothership
I tend to fire off dozens of photographs at a time and then evaluate them solely by thumbnails. As a result, I often don’t notice oddball images like the one above, taken when Damien was about eight weeks old. Directly above his face, just out of the shot, is a two-bulb fluorescent desklamp of the kind once used by draughtsmen (I got it from work when they shut down our ink-and-paper drafting operations), but with modern warm fluorescent bulbs. This light frequently confuses automatic exposure controls, which seldom get the white balance right for it. I take a lot of very yellow pictures under this light.
The cats are oddly fascinated by it. Charlotte in particular — who experiences the world largely through her nose — greets this lamp by starting at one end and smelling carefully down its entire length. And sometimes all the way back up again. I suspect it smells like delicious houseflies.
March 27, 2007 — 5:54 am
Comments: 4
Chinese cat cries its own name when frightened
If you’re guessing they named him “Meow” — well, no. They named him “A Gui.” From the video, it’s a little hard to tell when it’s the cat and when it’s the people, but somebody’s saying a lot of “A Gui.” And also “pooossy.”
The owner, surnamed Sun, named the two-year-old cat A Gui. To his amusement, the cat started crying its own name in a voice not unlike a human child’s one day two years ago when it was placed into a basin to have a bath. Since then, the cat cries like that whenever it is frightened, Sun said.
I’m guessing “A Gui” is Chinese for, “Dude! Water! Not cool!”
March 26, 2007 — 11:39 am
Comments: 4
Watch for falling cats
Hey, look what I found in a forgotten corner of my hard drive (I clean my hard drive to relax; I’ve had a molten asshole of a day).
This was the very first placeholder graphic on my very first corner of the Web — that free meg of space ISP’s gave you. I figured out early on I could cram in much more art per byte by sticking with monochrome. Small file sizes were, of course, seriously important then.
“Then” would’ve been, maybe, 1994? I think that’s the year I first saw the Web. I had read Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web concept paper via Usenet in 1990 and thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. People creating content for free, and letting other people link to it? Pff! Stupid hippies!
But then, a few years later, a friend showed me the Web in action, and then I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Seriously, the early Web was lame-o, lame-o. Until there was a certain critical mass of content, it wasn’t good for much at all. It wasn’t even that fun. And it was ugly.
Except for Find the Spam (lovingly reproduced with historic exactitude here). I thought Find the Spam was the most hysterical thing I’d ever seen in my life ever. Like, ever. Odd, though…when I laughed, dilithium crystals shot out of my nose.
Anyhow, I wish I could remember where this drawing is. I think it’s much better than it looks in this grievously squoze-down version. The odd part is…how did I get it in the computer? Monitors of the era were capable of much better graphics than you usually saw on them, because there was no way to get pictures in. It was way before digital still cameras (we had a video camera that could frame-grab; the whole setup cost around a hundred grand). I think it was before those horrible little hand scanners (remember those?). Maybe we had desktop scanners at work by then.
Cat blogging. I been doing it a long, long time.
March 22, 2007 — 5:33 pm
Comments: 4
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