Kitty filler


Grad school is kicking my ass right now, so have a complementary photo of Pixel:

y u play with computer and not me?!

EDIT: I made this post before I realized Crommunist had thrown down the gauntlet and claimed my cat fascination is due to mind control parasites. OH IT’S ONNNNN.

Comments

  1. E.A. Blair says

    I just had a house call from my vet. She said that my elder cat, Kveldulf, is doing pretty well considering his age and his infirmities. He got his blood and urine sampled, and I’ll get the results from those tests tomorrow. At least this vet home visit went better than the last one. The last time I had a kitty house call scheduled, I went to the door expecting the doctor and instead got a cop and a minister informing me that my wife (who had earlier called me from a hospital ER and said she’d call back when she was ready to come home) had died.

  2. E.A. Blair says

    P.S. I can sent you a picture of Kveldulf if you’d like to post it. He would appreciate some cybercuddles.

  3. Lofty says

    Lap wars! Get that thing off your lap!! That’s MY spot!!! (says kitty boss)
    My kitty loves sitting on my laptop when I’m not at my desk,(well its warm you see) I have to close it when I wander off or the paws have written some weird stuff…

  4. LaPlace says

    I was a secondary school teacher for a generation.
    When ever I got bored I would just ask the class. “Which are better? Cats or dogs?”

    This also works with teenage males and Spiderman vs Superman.

  5. gussnarp says

    I recently read a pretty interesting article on Toxoplasma gondii and I was a bit annoyed with it as a piece of scientific reporting, particularly since it really seemed to hype up the effects on humans and the level of confirmation of those effects. It even took the lone, maverick scientist approach, which usually tells me to wait for broader confirmation of his results.

    But all this led up to a conclusion that was actually much more circumspect, namely, that in the U.S. the rates of infection with Toxoplasma gondii in humans are very low, that most indoor cats don’t actually have it and even outdoor cats who do get it only actually shed the parasite for a brief period when they’re first beginning to hunt, and that while we may see a difference across a large sample in people’s behavior, the effect on any individual is likely to be very small and undetectable. Someone without the infection may behave more like the average of a sample of infected people than one individual with the infection. Oh, and bad sanitation and eating under cooked meat seems to be far more of a factor in human infection that cat ownership.

    But the big punch line, and I loved this, was that we’re all chock full of microorganisms and we really have no idea how much of our behavior and mental state is being driven by the effects of those organisms on our brains.

  6. gussnarp says

    Ah, I found it, it was the same article Crommunist cited, so now I’m disappointed in him because he focused on the hype part of the article. OK, not really, he did it mostly for humor, and it’s fun thinking about it anyway.

    I find it most fascinating thought to think that the microorganisms that are already make up more of the cells on and in our body at a given moment than human cells are also calling some of the shots. As if we’re more colony of organisms than just a “human”.

  7. 'Tis Himself, OM says

    For geeks of a certain age, you can ask “could Buffy kick River Tam’s butt or vice versa?”

  8. Azkyroth says

    And yet, I suppose a few of her critics will be bleating that “Jen has some pictures of herself up on her blog right now and you can see quite a bit of fur between her legs!” >.>

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