Quantifying Cute

A look at BuzzFeed's Beastmasters. [Link]

Will I dent my already shaky authority here if I admit that I have no idea why this is so, why people are so drawn to photos of cats and other animals just sort of sitting there, not really doing anything? That—to risk once more the horror of my new Beastmaster friends—I am not only mystified but a little disdainful of this thing that most humans on this planet behold with a pure and uncomplicated joy? Do I lack love in my heart? Compassion?

I was wondering this stuff aloud one afternoon in the office of Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's boyish and sleepy-eyed editor in chief. BuzzFeed and its Beastmasters are so widely read, he said, in part because they've figured out that while sports and service-y packages about jeans and even politics are all essentially niche topics, aimed at some infinitesimally small percentage of the population, animals are the great universal subject, the Esperanto of the Internet.

"Your possible audience for something about cute animals," Ben said, "is the entire human race, minus the sociopaths."

So what you're saying is, if I don't respond to the cuteness...

"Yeah, that's a problem you might run into," Ben said.

That I'm a sociopath?

"You're a magazine writer," he said pityingly.

Okay, so: sociopath with a job to do. I began familiarizing myself with the virtual animal kingdom, which is effectively infinite. As with Internet porn, certain star performers recur, but otherwise there is an unending supply of aspirants, one-timers, and weird new scenes from foreign countries. Certain animals go in and out of vogue—"Hedgehogs were big like a year ago," Summer says, but the animals of the moment are quokkas, "these Australian things that always look like they're really happy." Only cats and dogs never really fade, in part because they're what people have in their own homes, and in part because, Internet-wise, cats and dogs are where it all began.

With cats, in particular—historians of the animals-online form date it, more or less, to the circa 2005 rise in popularity of LOLCats, photos of various mischievous cats with various mischievous captions ("Sup, bro?"). After that it very quickly became a free-for-all of outsize animal celebrity and species one-upmanship. I learned about the sugar glider, the little arboreal possum who became a wildly popular blog subject a few years back, and the slow loris—that tiny-bodied, huge-eyed primate, cute as a fur-covered button.

Cat & Bird Lovers

Modern Hatfields & McCoys. [Link]

All winter, Peter Marra’s children had been pestering him to get a cat. It was ironic, he thought as he walked up the snowy path to his modern farmhouse in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Especially now, when the country’s cat lobby had him pegged as the Josef Mengele of felines. In his years as a research scientist at the Smithsonian Zoo’s Migratory Bird Center, Marra had produced many studies on different threats to bird life, like glass buildings and wind turbines, but none received as much attention as those featuring cats. Since its publication in the January issue of the journalNature Communications, his team’s paper, “The Impact of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” which placed the number of birds felled by felines at 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion per year, had been picked up by most major media outlets, including the New York Times. Marra was proud, although when he saw the front-page headline, “That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,” accompanied by a photo of a tabby with its jaws clenched around the neck of a rabbit, he braced himself for an onslaught.

Sure enough, the reaction from Alley Cat Allies, the country’s most powerful cat group, was swift and furious. “This study is part of a continuing propaganda campaign to vilify cats,” railed the group’s president, Becky Robinson, in a press release that, to the Smithsonian’s intense displeasure, made use of an incident in which one of Marra’s researchers was accused of cat poisoning to bolster a long-running claim that his group’s work was “a veiled promotion by bird advocates to ramp up the mass killing of outdoor cats.”

Within hours, comments on the Times’ website numbered in the thousands. There were the unabashedly ignorant: “I’m sorry. I must have missed the news flash that we’re having a shortage of birds.” The crazies: “My best friend is a CAT. How dare you suggest that CATS are killers.” The conspiracy theorists: “This stinks of anti-cat sentiment.” And the truthers: “If this is so, where are the close to 15 billion eviscerated carcasses?”

All day, hate mail had been pouring in, and as Marra opened the door, he glanced cautiously over his shoulder. “You cat-murdering bastard,” a late-night caller told the author of a similar study. “We’ve got you in our sights.”

Inside, his children were watching television. “Daddy, look at the cute kitty,” his daughter said, twisting toward him as a kitten appeared onscreen, playfully batting at something with its paws. Ah, yes, America’s favorite pet.

I love cats, but indoor cats, spayed and neutered cats. Feral cats are a nuisance, just like Muscovy ducks are.

HTTP Status Cats

Awesome. [Link]

Collective Nouns

List of collective nouns. [Link]

This is a list of collective nouns which can be sorted by subject or collective term. Collective nouns are words used to define a group of objects. Although primarily applied to animals, collective nouns can be used for people, inanimate objects, concepts or other things.

General collective nouns that can be applied to any subject, such as group, collection or aggregation, are not included in this list. Other collective nouns, such as herd, flock or pack, can be used for many subjects, while yet others are specific to a single species of animal or other object. Some are even more restrictive, and are only used for creatures in a specific environment, for example the term "a skein of geese" is only used when the geese are in flight.^[1]

Why I found this hilarious:

A glaring of cats.

Emily was not amused.

Driverless cars coming to Nevada

Or at least laws regarding driverless cars. [Link]

This week, the state passed a new law that will require its Department of Transportation to "adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada." More specifically, the DOT will have to cook up a set of safety standards for self-driving vehicles, and designate specific areas in which they can be tested.

Cats in Tanks

Cats in Tanks from Whitehouse Post on Vimeo.

When cats have thumbs

They'll come for us.

This reminds me of Emily far more than it should

Emily before she mellowed out. And as a super-villain. [Link]

Kittens

From Althouse. [Link]

Ninja Kitty

Corolla commercial with cat-fu fighting. [Link]

Toyota typically doesn't go out of its way to be creative when advertising its cars for sale in the U.S. (Saved by Zero, anyone?), but that doesn't mean the Japanese automaker lacks a sense of humor. Toyota's new commercial for the Australian-spec Corolla hatchback contains bi-pedal kittens kicking ass Jackie Chan-style.

The Canonical Bacon Page

Pure, cured pork genius! The Canonical Bacon Page

It’s entirely my fault: I taped bacon to my cat a couple of years ago, thus apparently signaling to the whole of the Internet that what I really wanted to be was the guy to whom everything related to bacon was forwarded to. Indeed, there has emerged a “Scalzi’s Law,” which is a consonant variation of Godwin’s Law, and it goes as such:

Any conversation on the internet will eventually include bacon in some way. And then be forwarded immediately to John Scalzi.

Find bacon related things and post them there.

That's no moon!

And we thought Bailey was big. At 26 lbs, he doesn't come close to Princess Chunk. [Link]

Princess Chunk, a 44-pound cat from New Jersey, was found wandering waddling around the streets of Blackwood this weekend. She's only 2-pounds shy of the Guinness World record.

Helloe Kitty Jet

It's cute. Very cute. [Link]

I know someone who has a brother who works in Taipei, Taiwan. He travels to Japan often on business, and one day he needed to fly to Tokyo on short notice. He instructed his assistant to book the next flight from Taipei to Tokyo.

This is what he got. (Warning: Contains strange music.)

That's right. His assistant booked him on Hello Kitty Air, initially a daily flight from Taipei to Fukuoka, but soon extended to a second run to Tokyo. Everything on this plane is Hello Kitty. The paint scheme, the flight attendants, the boarding passes, the luggage tags, the chopsticks, the sugar packets, the in-flight meals, even the barf bags. I'm told that most people who take this flight are women who are way too into this Hello Kitty thing.

Anyway, he learned his lesson. Now when he has an urgent meeting in Tokyo, he tells his assistant, "Book me the next flight to Tokyo, but not the Hello Kitty one."

Cat Playing the Theremin

Cute. [Link]

Talking Cats

Sarah and I believe Emily (the cat in spin the cat) understands English. At least to some degree anyway, but not to this:

Two Great Tastes...

That taste great together: LOLCats and Cthulhu.

Cat reaper

Cat who lives in hospice facility predicts death more reliably than staff.

In the dementia wing at Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, the cat has foretold the deaths of over 25 patients by curling up beside them in bed within four hours of their expiring. It's gotten so that if Oscar lies down with someone, the nurses hurry to call the person's family, he's that unerring

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He’d sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours. [...]

[Dr. David] Dosa[, a geriatrician at Rhode Island Hospital], said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. “This is not a cat that’s friendly to people,” he said.

Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill.

And this really gets me.

Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, "What is the cat doing here?" The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, "He is here to help Grandma get to heaven." Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices. [...]

Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone.

The detail I highlighted was omitted from the MSNBC story, but it seems key. It is hard to avoid the impression that Oscar feels compelled at least to try to warm, and even more so to comfort, a dying person.

This might seem more bizarre to me if I had not witnessed a cat doing it for another cat. Max and Lucky were rivals in our household, usually irritated with each other. They'd "box" often and occasionally get into a real brawl Yet when Lucky was 16, blind, deaf, emaciated and dying of kidney failure, I was amazed and touched to see Max casually but deliberately lying down in contact with him, hindquarters touching. A cat does not do that by accident, least of all with a cat he is not friendly with. It looked as if he was trying to comfort and orient Lucky, to not let him feel alone. I've actually called him Dr. Max since then.