Yes, it’s just a commercial, but without hope, there is nothing.

So I’ve been sick with a cold for nearly 2 weeks now, and despite having the alarm clock blaring as loud as usual in the mornings, I’ve been sleeping through at least half an hour of it every day this week. As my cat is used to me getting up and turning off the horrid rock station soon after it starts, she’s resorted to clawing at my face as an added wake-up technique. I guess she doesn’t like Kings of Leon on repeat, which pretty much describes that local radio station in the mornings.

Sadly because cat spanking requires two hands (so you can get both sides equally and not tip her over) I am unable to film this, but believe me, it’s as ridiculous as is necessary.

I must be hormonal this week because when I started looking through Average Cats I laughed so hard I cried. I guess the only thing funnier than a lolcat is an anti-lolcat:

In case you missed this last week, check out the chart entitled 17 Things Worth Knowing About Your Cat. Even though it’s not about your cat so much as cats in general, since your cat wasn’t around when Sir Isaac Newton invented the cat door (which is so much more useful than calculus or laws of motion). Did you know that kitties are not impressed by cupcakes? I didn’t!

I’m heading to Vancouver tomorrow so let’s hope my cat can survive two and a half days without me, or spankings.

Thanks to my friend Jaime for pointing this video out to me, and to the website Everything is Terrible for editing this video from the original*. I wonder if spanking is covered.

That’s all I got for cat links this week, I’ve been working hard at my database twiddling and have neglected Her Highness, who luckily has managed to keep herself amused by being in the fucking way. She’s so giving.

*By the way, it’s my birthday in a month. Hint. Hint.

I think the conversation then drifted briefly onto ferrets and someone suggested that maybe the reason why they were affected by the virus was because they were rather humanlike in behaviour already, such as their ability to grab things in their paws. I then mentioned the existence of polydactyl cats, some of which have that same grasping ability due to their “opposable thumbs”; but the guys thought I’d made it up until I produced pictures like this one (though at first they did wonder if it was photoshopped).

I guess people in Kelowna don’t ever see polydactyl cats. Huh. Maybe there’s a market for them here since they’re so exotic; too bad the cat whose feet are in the picture above was fixed years ago. One workmate, perhaps in the excitement of having discovered a new life form, kept referring to these cats as “pterodactyl cats”, and refused to be corrected because he liked his name better.

Of course, since the internet is omnipotent and complete in all universal knowledge a google search on “pterodactyl cats” produces actual results, one which is a Yahoo Answers page where the person means polydactyl but is stupid since you automatically become stupid once you post a question on Yahoo Answers, if you weren’t already. Another link is a Youtube video of a cat making scary noises. Oh, and here’s a picture of a cat and a pterodactyl, despite the fact that’s not really a pterodactyl.

I don’t know if I mentioned before that one of my workmates has a cat that likes to be spanked, but I have been spanking kitties since I moved here. Someday I should make a video because it is silly. It’s also a bit disturbing, though, how much the cat likes it, so I feel dirty afterwards. Then I come home and try it on my cat and she leaps away in horror. Typical that you’d only get that kind of pussy with a stranger.

What we see is not the sardonic, complicated, talented cat of my longtime acquaintance, but a sweet, thin, red-headed doll of a thing who watches old episodes of The French Chef with her head pertly cocked, as if to echo the words of her owner, “Julie Powell,” regarding Julia Child: “Isn’t she adorable?”

Yes, anytime you see a movie where the cat seems to give a shit then you know the screenwriter’s taken poetic license with the story. In which case they should’ve written in a dog instead.

Sadly, Julie mentioned at the beginning of the article that her cat Maxine just died at 17. Sigh. At least that is a good age for a cat; my late cat wasn’t quite 15. Shebang turns 6 this fall.

In other news, this is a month old but I forgot about it: some dude arrested for child pornography on his computer said his cat did it, not him. Yeah, a cat walking across your keyboard is going to open your browser, point it to a pedophilia site, download a bunch of photos and save them all to a particular folder. Totally plausible, sure. Once Mom’s cat Spooky sat on my keyboard and messaged a friend of mine with “mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmSome coherent sentence that I’d copied earlierzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”. Seems her fuzzy butt was capable of a Ctrl-v, but not in operating the touch-pad, so sadly I found no unexpected nudity in my image folders.

That’s it for the cat links this week. Shebang’s going to be so mad at me come Monday, because I’ll be leaving her alone for over 3 days while I spend the long weekend in Vancouver. Hopefully the crazy antics of my neighbours in the parking lot will keep her entertained while I’m gone.

The view is down into the parking lots of this and nearby apartment buildings, which gives her lots to look at, what with all the ghetto action going down. Did I mention there was a drug dealer in my building?

There’s not much more to say about The Bang, who’s currently sitting on my lap, purring and licking my arm because longpig is so tasty. On to the links!

I snorted at an inappropriate place and time this week after a friend sent me a link to this commercial:

A new Simon’s Cat cartoon came out a few weeks ago. Yet again his work imitates my life in such an extreme way I wonder if someone’s webcamming me for ideas.

Also a few weeks ago I saw this news piece going around saying that cats can modify their purrs in such a way as to control their owners’ minds. Something like that. Yes kitty, whatever you say kitty. Like, they might add a little mew in the purr so you feel sorry for them and give them stuff. The scientist to come up with this idea is Dr. Karen McComb and here’s a random article on the subject. I figure she’s probably right; when I think about it, why the hell am I so nice to my cat, when she in turn tap dances on me while I sleep? If it’s not brainwashing or real time mind control, it’s a brain parasite making you dopey.

Happy weekend everyone!

But what’s really weird and worth mentioning here is that when I followed the link, the picture that showed up at the top of my screen looked awfully familiar:

She’s actually been lolcat’d before, but here’s this trollcat posting. Man, that’s so creepy. It’s like when you turn on the TV and there’s you on the screen (which has strangely happened to me a couple times): you click a link and there’s your cat. I tried showing the photo to Shebang but she doesn’t really pay attention to the internet like some pets do. Besides, she’s been famous before. Oh Shebang, get your paw out of your kitty zone!

Speaking of cats and zones, my new slave drivers are paying to move my cat to their zone. I’m sure Shebang approves.

What would your cat say about moving to Kelowna?

It just goes to show you will never be 100% prepared for an interview, so I suggest you formulate your answer to this in advance of your next job search, just in case.

Getting to the cat links, I swear to God I was being all intellectual and stuff and reading a Neuroscience blog when I found this Youtube video of cats getting stoned on a music keyboard:

Supposedly if you map your brain waves to music, that’s what they sound like. Which begs the question, what do the brain waves of stoned cats sound like? I’m guessing Nickelback.

This comes just a week after BoingBoing posted an educational video of cats strung out on the ‘nip from the BBC series Weird Nature:

Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream…

Unlike the turtle-humping-inanimate-objects video genre, these ones I can actually reproduce, that is, once I contact a high-grade catnip supplier and get my keyboard out of storage downstairs. Surely I could get my cat to say anything I want about Kelowna after 10 minutes of her writhing in A minor.

But I don’t want to upset you all the time, so here’s something sweet and innocent involving a turtle with absolutely no simulated sex in it whatsoever:

So beautiful, so sad. The turtle loves the kitty, but the kitty couldn’t care less. Maybe because the turtle humped it earlier, who knows?

I don’t remember why I was searching for this but earlier this week I was wondering the chances of my cat eating me, should I unexpectedly die and nobody notice for a while. According to a Straight Dope article: very good. “In a day or two”.

It seems your dog would wait several days before feasting on longpig, but your cat is obviously going to toss aside any pretend feelings towards you and consider you dinner, should they run out of regular cat food. Which seems like incentive to make sure the pet food dish is always topped up, though really, what would you care, you’d be dead.

I’m actually more worried that given my cat’s sensitive stomach, she’s unlikely to digest me that well, as I’m hardly Grade A meat. And being found half-eaten by your pet somehow doesn’t sound as bad as being found eaten and then puked up again.

I hope my family members, upon hearing of my death after the landlord finds me due to my nasty corpse smell, wouldn’t mistreat my cat for eating me. It’s “postmortem predation”, yo. The cat’s gotta be fed. Consider it my dying wish.

Honestly, I’m not in a morbid mood. It was just a weird question that had an answer online, that I’ve given far too much thought to. Happy Friday, people. Have you pet your animal today?