On Death and Hairballs

“If they really wanted to kill us, don’t you think it would have happened?”

―Mikel Delgado

Look, I know it’s (ahem!) just a cat but, really, she’s nineteen years old, and do you think maybe, just maybe there might be a better time to talk about how her age peer’s health declined shortly before death, and how awful that other cat looked right before it died, and how we’re going to change the room we’re sitting in after the cat is dead than while you’re holding the cat in your lap?

Yeah, you know, it might be one of those stupidities of capitalist press, but I really did like the suggestion that cats want us dead. There are, after all, days when we shouldn’t wonder why.

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Image note: Meow ― Detail of frame from FLCL, episode 3, “Marquis de Carabas”.

Hanson, Hilary. “No, A Study Did NOT Find That Your Cat Wants To Kill You”. The Huffington Post. 5 November 2015.

Trolling for kitty

Okay, so … shake off the cobwebs, confess to a couple of slow weeks, and get on with it. I mean, you know how it goes, right? It’s an election year, politics are tiring, and I can only make so many jokes about Budweiser.

Really, you should have seen my attempt to make a joke about red and blue states. Maybe you will. If, that is, I ever finish the post.

Yeah. Talk about things getting out of hand.

And speaking of things out of hand, there comes this gem via News.com:

Saudi Arabia’s religious police have banned selling cats and dogs or exercising them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women.

Othman al-Othman, head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in Riyadh, known as the Muttawa, told the Saudi edition of al-Hayat the commission had started enforcing an old religious edict ….

…. The reason behind reinforcing the edict now was a rising fashion among some men using pets in public “to make passes on women and disturb families”, he said.

Mr Othman said the commission had instructed its offices in the capital to tell pet shops “to stop selling cats and dogs”.

One of the great challenges of diversity is the question of whether it should be self-nullifying. In other words, what respect do we owe an asshole who won’t be happy until everyone else is an asshole, too?