Another Friday night has rolled around and it’s time for our pointy eared people to have the spotlight. Ok, it’s only Friday afternoon, but what the heck. Here they are enjoying their favorite pastimes. We have always had happy kitty cats. I think they are even more happy since Jenny’s arrival.
Now we would like to share this happy dog video. I think happy is an understatement.
Our kittehs don’t want you to think they are snobs when it comes to dogs. Today, they are presenting you with a couple of stories that have wonderful happy endings. We and the pointy eared people hope you enjoy them.
The first video is of a guy out kayaking. If kayaking and fishing are something you enjoy, please go see his Youtube page. This vid has no fish in it, as you will see.
While this story had a happy ending for Barney, it didn’t for his human. You can read about it here. It does more or less solve the mystery surrounding the vid.
This other video is just plain old cute and adorable. wiggly puppies are wonderful. bltmic’s Youtube page can be found here.
I know that pelicans fly. They’re kind of made that way. After all, they are a giant sea bird with wings. An incredibly graceful bird in flight and on the water, they have a big appetite to go along with that massive wingspan.
I never knew that devil rays went airborne. The footage of the pelicans in this video is stunning. Equally stunning are the devil rays flying, filmed in the Sea of Cortez. When I was young, we used to travel the coast of Baja and we saw plenty of the brown pelicans, but never a ray. Enjoy!
We have always said that our kitties earn their names. As a result, we don’t normally name them right away. In Miss Jenny’s case, we did it differently. Her name at the SPCA was Nightshade, a perfectly poisonous, yet wonderful plant. It can be so deadly and yet it gives us potatoes and eggplant, not to mention chile peppers. The name Jenny came from the Three Penny Opera and the Pirate Jenny song. Miss Jenny has now shown her true colors and her name is perfect.
Don’t let her innocent face and lovely blue eyes fool you. She can be murderous. We have found the evidence. It’s appalling, I tell you. We didn’t really do anything for the holidays. We did get something for our pointy eared people. It was a couple of catnip fish with feather tails. I’m sure they are designed to totally confuse the kittehs, but that’s another story.
I awoke the other morning to total carnage. Miss Jenny had wreaked havoc upon the toys. The destruction wasn’t quite complete, but it was awful.
I know it was Jenny. I caught her in action and here is the evidence.
Albert Camus said it best:
Murder is terribly exhausting.
He was correct.
To see why the Pirate Jenny song is so perfect, just follow along below the fold to read the lyrics.
My argument is that science often attempts to recreate naturally occurring phenomena by technological means, and that the results often are subject to the “law of unintended consequences”.
Over the past several decades, Hollywood has been instrumental in ‘gently’ opening the lid of the Genie’s bottle, through movies and television series designed to familiarize people with what was just over the horizon. Today, web instruments, like memes for instance, are used with similar intent.
We see hints poop up everywhere until they tend to coalesce into messages picked up and disseminated further by mass media.
Case in point, as we’ve all read and heard: the internet is made of tubes… The internet is made of cats… Fear the cat butt… Photos of cats’ eyes glowing in the dark “assuming direct control”… And now, cat farts. Why? To get a sense as to where this all might lead, let’s first have a look at NASA’s recording of solar events to analyze their occurrences and effects, using technology developed at LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The technology, developed to improve computer chips’ manufacturing specifications and performance, was used to great effect by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Below is a photo montage of slides taken by NASA’s vehicle:
Now for comparative purposes is a now familiar capture of Miss Jenny’s fart using a mass spectrometer:
While there do appear to be similarities, the shapes and energy releases (swirls and lightning) in the cat’s fart seem to display a more organized pattern, maybe even a design. But I’ll leave the potentially religious considerations to proponents of either Ceiling Cat or Basement Cat, and concentrate on the science.
The releases of energy, discovered by the LLNL scientists have been analyzed in conjunction with a researcher at Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and have been shown to be ‘influenced’ by emissions of light particles popularly (and erroneously) referred to as “laser eyes”.
Notice the realigning of molecules and energy. An instrument developed jointly by LLNL and SLAC is used to measure the pulse by pulse levels of energy of an X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL).
Now, the XFEL’s ability to capture atoms and molecules in motion with minimal disruption led to another intriguing discovery at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) program: molecules in cats’ farts are imprinted with data and react to photonic emissions from their eyes (the cats’, not the molecules. And if you don’t stop cracking jokes in the back, you’ll get to stay after class).
My theory is that a cat farting on a human is simply an attempt to fully communicate with us, by ‘flagging’ all of our senses, and making us inhale information, so to speak. This process, or more accurately ‘collection of processes’ is now the subject of study for applications ranging from data storage and management to renewable energy (they cannot stop farting, it seems). So if the law of unintended consequences does apply, we may well end up with complete world domination by cats and find ourselves in the litter box… Remember:
Item one: Maz Whang wants to be featured for at least all three summer months, get this, without a shirt on… And despite the fact that he does need a male bra…
Item two: Miss Jenny would do one of the winter months, being a snowshoe and all, but her papers show she’s, ahem, not of age. And this ain’t a “Little Miss Sunshine” contest.
Item three: Tito has no interest in these pursuits, still perfecting his “Scanners” routine of making heads explode on Tee-Vee, or “s’plode” as he likes to say. For an example, see here.
Naturally, Mazuzu is the one who came up with the calendar idea, and if he had his way, it would be his calendar, all twelve months of it. Ham.
Cats have appeared in art throughout the ages. The ancient Egyptians had statues and paintings depicting cats. They even mummified their cats so as to have them by their side in the afterlife. These days, cats as art has been taken to a new level. Rather than statues or paintings, the living cat(s) have become the art. I hope you enjoy Still Life With Cats.
Recently, Rudha-an posted about traveling by air in winter by air and its dangers. We know of a Sphynx cat who died from exposure in the cargo hold of a plane, a devastating experience for its new humans.
It’s said cats don’t travel, they are creatures of habits and the risk of escape is just too great.
On the other hand, I also remember watching this guy on the main road to Yosemite, stopping to take a picture (on timer) of himself with his cat next to the park’s entrance sign.
He was driving a Subaru Outback wagon, so if this sounds familiar, give us a shout, this was sometime around May 2008, and dude, you got me thinking…
The notion of hitting the road with three cats may sound nutty, but we do live in strange times… And I love road trips, which kind of limits how far we do go, and for how long since we can’t leave the Pointy Eared ones home alone too long. Three hours into our day-cation, one of us will ask “I wonder what [insert cat name] is doing?”
A few chuckles later, thinking about their antics, the next question will be slightly more serious: “I did close the front window, didn’t I?”, “did you refill the water dish?”, and on and on.
It’s not exactly paranoia, but well yes it is. Not enough to ruin the enjoyment but spoils it just that little bit.
I’m not sure when the notion occurred to me, maybe after watching Tommy Lee Jones in “the fugitive”: it should be possible to select the right vehicle and secure the rear compartment to transport our precious cargo in comfort and safety without possibility of escape. A little bit like Scooby-Doo and the gang but with a cage in back, draped in velvet, and probably with a DVD player playing “Winged Migration” in a loop.
Beyond the fold is NSFW due to a profanity in the video title.
Another Tuesday rolls around and it’s time for a bit of holiday music. The first piece is Carol of the Bells by ThePianoGuys. The second is a tribute to Hanukkah, which begins this evening.
This should have occurred to me sooner but didn’t because I live in San Francisco and it doesn’t snow here. I want to share a bit about winter travel with pets. In particular, the warning is about the cargo hold of an airplane. The cargo hold is only heated while in flight. Before or after takeoff it is unheated and may even have the doors open. Regulations require that animals cannot be kept in the hold or on the tarmac for more than 45 minutes. However, even that can be too long. There are many horror stories about pets dying from hypothermia. I know I would be devastated if anything like this happened to my furkids. I’m sure you would be too.
For more about travel with pets, the Automobile Club has an excellent page about it. You can read it here. Have a happy holiday and travel safely