News

Hercules Revisited

This morning we revisit our favorite fat cat in the news.

Local TV in Porland, Oregon, paid a visit to Hercules at home, and found both the generously proportioned cat and his human friend Geoff Ernest doing well. Lots of pictures, like the one to the right. Not surprisingly, they have been approached for promotions, such as Purina's diet cat food…

In addition to happy and heartwarming photo-ops, the follow-up news coverage included this opinion in The Oregonion about the importance of spaying/neutering pets:

Let's consider the other side of this heartwarming story: that of a nice cat, who because he was not neutered and was let outdoors, acted with predictable behaviors of fighting, mating and becoming a stray.

The heartache of Hercules' ailing person thinking “he was dead” would have been prevented had Hercules been taken care of as a beloved pet by being neutered and preferably kept indoors. How many unwanted kittens were produced because of this one stray tomcat's life on the streets?

Although Hercules' story had a happy ending, it easily could have ended much worse. I can't imagine what it be like to come home and find Luna potentially “lost forever.” That's why she enjoys her warm spring afternoons safely indoors…




Why the pet market?!

Even with the daily violence we hear about from Iraq, this one hits home:

Birdcage bomb kills 15 pet lovers in Baghdad

A bomb disguised as a birdcage killed 15 animal lovers in a Baghdad pet market today, in the latest attack apparently designed to disrupt a city-wide security crackdown.

From the BBC:

The blast ripped through the Ghazil market in the city centre, a popular destination which sells dogs, cats, birds and other animals.

It's heartbreaking to hear about peaceful persuits, especially my own in music, art and animals, being specifically targeted. Why go after the pet market and animal lovers? Certainly, markets in general are common targets of violence, where large numbers of people gather. But maybe some markets or gatherings are more vulnerable than others:

The open soukh is a popular attraction for Sunnis and Shias alike, farmers and pet store owners are drawn by the reptiles, tropical fish and other exotic animals in a city where open air attractions are rare.

However, some extremist Islamist groups in Iraq have issued edicts denouncing the ownership of pets as 'haraam' – prohibited under Islamic law. This is not the first attack on the market – it was also hit eight weeks ago.

So do pets come under the same heading as music for these extreme Islamists? Or even just having a little bit of enjoyment seeing and interacting with the animals when there are so few options for brightening one's day? And what did the animals do to deserve any of this?

Death, destruction and suppression of joy – why would anyone want to follow these people?





SOTU in situ

Listening to W's latest state of the union makes me wistful for the days when I could respect the residents of the White House:

No gems this year like last year's call to oppose human-animal hybrids.

He did get nu-cu-lar in there a couple of times, though. I could have had some fun with State of the Union Bingo from Drinking Liberally, but I'm not drinking tonight.

Not a single word about that little situation down on the Gulf Coast. You think the man who two years ago thought steroid-use in sports was a national crises could spend a few minutes on the recovery effort. Did he forget? Or maybe if he doesn't mention it, it doesn't exist…

People have given Bush some credit for actually mentioning climate change, and even proposing an increase in fuel efficiency standards. But take a closer look at what is being proposed:

Environmentalists noted that the proposal could lead to an average fuel economy of 34 miles per gallon in vehicles by 2017, but it would not require the industry to increase the fuel economy of their new cars.

Huh? My car, a non-hybrid from 2001, gets better mileage than that! So it's really not much of a plan at all. I guess I shouldn't have expected much. There was also no mention of the increasingly popular idea of CO2 costs within products and processes. For cars, that could be adding the cost of fuel inefficiency into the sale price (as opposed to adding the cost to the fuel itself). In fairness, having such a proposal in the speech would have meant he would have to explain it…






Fat Cat in the News


All I can say is, “man, that it one fat cat!”
He has actually made quite a name for himself since getting stuck in a dog door while scavenging for food. The owners of the garage (and the food) were hoping to catch the culprit but did not necessarily expect the 20 lb “Goliath,” as he became known at the Oregon Humane Society, where he was taken after being freed from his little predicament.

You can watch a video of “Goliath”, whose actual name is Hercules, below.

Happily, Hercules was reunited with his family – you can see a nice picture of him and his human by following the link. One sad note to the story, however, is that Hercules was diagnosed as having FIV (feline immunodeficiency, similar to HIV for humans). But that should not stop him from returning home to lead a happy and contented (very contented, it seems) life.

Cute as such a fat cat might be, pet obesity is increasing in the U.S., similar to the obesity epidemic among humans, and can carry many of the equivalent health risks. Fortunately, Luna and I have both managed to avoid this trend so far – we are both naturally quite thin. Here are some resources for those who are interested or concerned with issues of obesity in their feline friends:

OBESITY IN CATS at the pet center
catnutrition.org




Super brrrrrr!

If we thought Saturday morning was cold, check out what showed up on Dashboard this morning:

It feels like the cold mornings back east that I thought I was getting away from. This is just incorrect! And ironically the northeast has been having a warm winter. Put it all together we're having some freaky weather. Are we seeing some of the effects of incipient climate change?





Zip visits MacWorld

I had an opportunity to visit the big MacWorld Expo this past Friday, and of course Zip came along.

Of course, the big news this year was the unveiling of the iPhone. Here it is:

Can you see it? No? Well, neither could I. There was never a moment when there wasn't huge crowd surrounding the poor little device.

We decided to instead focus our attention on the well established and ubiquitous iPod:

You can barely stretch out your hand at MacWord and not come in contact with an iPod or something attached to an iPod. Indeed, much of the exhbition floor was devoted to iPod accessories and peripheral devices. I was most impressed with a device from Belkin, a six channel audio mixer that can record directly to an iPod (as well as to a computer if one so chooses). They expect to release it sometime later this year.

Among the more prosaic iPod accessories were numerous speaker systems:


Aesthetics and good design are key to Apple/Macintosh experience, so the emphasis is always on appearance and personality. This is true for speaker systems as much as for carrying cases and fashion accessories.

I quite liked the design of this offering from Harmon-Kardon:

And of course the extremely cute iWoofer from Rain Design:

This seems as good a time as any to discuss the use of the letter “i” for anything and everything at MacWorld. This is not only true for software and hardware offerings from Apple, but from the accessory vendors as well. You cannot escape the “i” in either the product names or the marketing surrounding them.

In reflecting on the “i”, I found myself thinking back to a favorite story of mine, Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar…. The community in which much of the story was set was called iDEATH, complete with leading lowercase “i”. There was also the somewhat villainous character inBOIL.

On the subject of modernist art and culture, there was also this ad from the good people at Roxio for the latest versions of Toast, which evokes the art of Lichtenstein and Warhol:

HP also offered modern-culture icons at its large digital photography presentation, including large-scale prints from photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Among them were several photos of 1970s New York. New York in the 1970s epitomized the crossing of high culture and urban decay, and the photographs capture that mix of the sleek and modern and the slightly rundown…

…but time to get back to the expo. I suppose I did get bored with the whole “digital lifestyle” thing, but I would be remiss if I closed without mentioning our friends over at Creative Technologies. They made a big push into the iPod and Mac space this year with several “designed for iPod” gadgets, including the oddly named Xmod. It seems that even when Apple makes it embarrassingly easy or accessory makers to be hip, Creative refuses to get it. Note to the folks at Creative marketing: the “i” is supposed to go at the beginning!

I do have to give them credit for letting E-MU Systems at least have one table at the show to present its Macintosh-compatible products, including the 0404|USB and 0202|USB with recently released Mac drivers.

It's actually a pretty decent audio interface for the Mac, and of course certain people busted their $#%es to make it OSX compatible, so you should check it out.

Well, that will wrap it up for our brief visit to MacWorld. I would try and leave you with some pithy remarks, but I'm still stuck on my whole “nostalgia for the big city” line of thought, and on the intersection of high and low culture afforded by Apple's vision of “digital lifestyle.” I doubt this is the last we at CatSynth will have to say on such matters…






George W. Bush's Acrockalypto

A friend forwarded this cartoon to me today after seeing it in The Mississauga news. (For the geographically challenged: Mississauga is a suburb of Toronto, Canada).

This cartoon is from Canadian cartoonist Steve Nease. Check out some of his other work.

It's interesting how cartoonists capture W's ugly inbred features, like his beedy eyes and pointy ears. Oh yeah, and his failed war policies, too…





Weekend Cat Blogging #82: Black Pride

This New Years edition of Weekend Cat Blogging is being hosted by Champaign Taste. We wish all our WCB friends, feline and human, a happy and healthy new year!

Our contribution this week continues our tribute to James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, who is a hero of ours here at CatSynth; he passed away this past Monday. In addition to his music (which is playing in the background as I write this), he made contributions to civil rights and the “Black Power” movement, through his efforts to promote African American ownership of the distribution of music on records and radio, and of course his classic anthems such as “Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud.” It is in honor of this anthem that Luna strikes a proud, stately pose this week, reminiscent of the iconography of the Egyptian goddess Bast:

The connection between black cats and civil rights isn't entirely gratuitous. Consider the well-known symbol of the Black Panther Party. Although founded in Oakland in 1966, the story goes that the party took its symbol from the Lowndes County (Alabama) Freedom Organization:

We chose for the emblem a black panther, a beautiful black animal which symbolizes the strength and dignity of black people, an animal that never strikes back until he's back so far into the wall, he's got nothing to do but spring out. Yeah. And when he springs he does not stop.

Getting back to James Brown, I would be remiss if I did not also recognize one of my former cats Morty, the original “Supa-Bad Kitty”:

He got his nickname for his constant mischief, like sitting on the dining room table, but remainingly devilishly lovable. Plus, he could shake his money maker like no other kitty I've met. I miss him – he was taken by a former girlfriend and although I haven't seen him in many years, I hope he is doing well.











RIP James Brown (1933-2006)

I cannot let the passing this morning of the Godfather of Soul go unremarked. The music that James Brown launched remains among my favorite popular music – funk and soul from the 1960s and 1970s have a special place in my heart and my CD collection. In particular, I return the 1970s era with the original JB's, funker, grittier and with just the right amount of slop. Indeed, the track “Turn It Up or Let It A-Loose” from the 1970 collection Funk Power was included in the research for my dissertation. I probably have the only PhD dissertation in Computer Science that includes a reference to James Brown in the bibliography. I suppose that's my tribute.