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.
It’s Friday night and time for our pointy eared people to shine. Miss Nightshade Jenny is now fully integrated into the JBoD household. Tito and Kitsy are completely wrapped around her little paws. The cooing and trilling around here is enough to make person ill with the overwhelming sweetness of it all. In other words, they are happy. It’s all good. Our boys were happy before she came home with us. They are happier now.
Tito: I will hug her and lick her and….Kitsy and Jenny having a warm snuggle in the basket
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.
Brown Pelican at Crissy Field in San Fancisco
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!
Today is the birthday of a friend of JBoD. Her blog is Nekoneko’s Movie Litterbox. If you love horror movies from around the world, her site is the place to go. It has great reviews, good humor and the occasional recipe.
Here’s a cool birthday vid for a fellow cat lover. 🙂
Oh, and since you said that your name means “happiness” or “beautiful snow” I thought I would add a vid from Japan that seems to show both at the same time. It’s also food related as it shows white radishes being freeze dried.
Here’s Lastech’s recipe for pappardelle, bacon and cabbage he cooked for my birthday:
there are several variations of this, but the basics remain the same: pasta, cabbage, garlic and bacon.
For the pasta, buckwheat pappardelle’s the best. The texture and flavor of the buckwheat pappardelle really blends with the otheringredients here.
For two people, I used about a third of a pound of bacon and cooked that first. Pancetta’s recommended in many recipes but it feels to fat (bit grisly) to me, and bacon’s a perfect substitute. Save the bacon grease for biscuits and gravy later…
While cooking the bacon, I boiled the half head of cabbage cut in medium strips (to match the wide cut of the pasta) along with two (maybe three) heads of garlic. You cannot have too much garlic… Ever.
While the cabbage and garlic finish softening at a simmer, take the bacon for a quick trip to the freezer. This’ll harden it and make it easier to crumble into the mix.
Pappardelle cooks quickly, between 5 to maybe 8 minutes in boiling water. But since it will continue cooking in the cabbage/bacon/garlic mix, you can shorten it’s time in the water by maybe a couple minutes or so. This way it’ll continue to soften as it absorbs the flavors of the mix and also release its own, without turning mushy.
For best results, use a bit of the bacon grease and melting butter as you stir everything together.
Adding sliced mushrooms adds a lot to the earthy flavors of the dish. Not necessary, but extremely enjoyable. Since we didn’t have mushrooms, I added an onion (caramelized). In addition, Brussels sprouts work great in place of cabbage.
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.
Carnage
I know it was Jenny. I caught her in action and here is the evidence.
More carnage
Albert Camus said it best:
Murder is terribly exhausting.
He was correct.
Carnage complete
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:
Solar slides taken by NASA’s SDO
Now for comparative purposes is a now familiar capture of Miss Jenny’s fart using a mass spectrometer:
Mass spectrometer assisted photographic capture of cat poot.
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”.
Jenny’s fart cloud reacting to photonic emissions from Tito’s peepers
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:
Regrettably, I need to talk about the passing of two of my favorites… Let me rephrase that: the passing of gas by Mazuzu “Mace” Whang and Jenny N.
This is another dimension to the old “fear the cat butt” slogan, such as the one I wrote about in “when the nitty gets real gritty”.
Mazuzu farts, Tito is camouflaged
When I grew up, our cats were indoors/outdoors with a large yard in which to romp. Our current crop of kittounes are housebound, but still get plenty of exercise. So, why they should squeeze out the foulest SBDs* on a semi-regular basis, I have no clue.
There’s no competition to eat, they all have plenty and stress-free nomming sessions.
Peas in a pod, farts in a box...
I have no idea whether Tito ever cuts the cheese, but there is no doubting the other two open up the valves of hell whenever they get heavy petting.
The most foul? Miss Jenny. That’s right, and I can tell when it’s her as the air takes on a different hue and seems to shimmer as in the summer heat. That’s just before the cloud envelops you like an overly friendly drunk who hugs you and won’t let go and follows you all the way to the window.
Jenny's fart photographed with a mass spectrometer
You best start the fan, because the fiendish aerosol hangs about for a while and sounds travels slower through it: in her farts, no one can hear you scream. It even generates its own lightning!
No. There is no silver lining to those clouds… As to Maz, you can hear the faintest “buzz”, a bit like a distant boat motor and get a look of heavy sarcasm: “there’s more room outside than inside”, it seems to say. Then you feel like someone pelted you with rotten eggs and cat food.
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.
Grand Auto Theft
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.
