This cat sure appears to be having a fun time. Read the rest

If I lived in Japan, I'd totally buy whatever cat food is being shilled in this (surprisingly suspenseful) "Cats and Domino" video. Bravo to the folks behind it!

screengrab via Cat Navi Desk/YouTube

Thanks, Julie! Read the rest

Above, watch the first episode of Cats, biologist, naturalist and TV presenter Roger Tabor's wonderful BBC documentary series from 1991 that explores the history of the house cat around the world.

And a bonus below, Tabor's 2011 short "The Secret Life of Cats: Report and Documentary":

(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

This purrito cat is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and she is a Ragdoll/British Short mixed Munchkin Female who was adopted 3 years ago. Read the rest

The replacement of Lamp Cat's jaunty YouTube Music Library track with Era Ameno turns a stupid feline warming its head under a lightbulb into the seraphim Baraqiel, its ceaseless gaze bearing the eternal fire of God's light. Read the rest

This video depicts a cat comtemplating at considerable length whether to bop a dog on the head. Read the rest

Is it real, or is it Memorex?

screengrabs via CuteVN Animals Read the rest

You've seen This Cat Does Not Exist, now behold Hopefully This Cat Does Not Exist, whereby the failings of generative adversarial networks become their horrifying strengths.

I'm a big fan of the ones where GANs try to write meme captions and ends up with this ... abyssal syllabary. AI text generation naturally focuses on creating readable phrases, but training it on the appearance of text is where the cold magic springs.

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We have three cats. We bought this large heavy duty scratching post in December 2015 and all three cats used it countless times throughout the day. By February 2018 it was pretty thrashed so we bought a replacement. They never get tired of using it. They also like to jump onto the little platform at the top to survey the room. We bought a second one for the upstairs. Highly recommended. Read the rest

A cat prohibited from entering the Tescos grocery store in Thorpe Marriott, England, has defied the ban, reports the BBC. One shopper photographed Pumpkin, a six year-old ginger tom, relaxing on a checkout scanner.

The six-year-old cat had been a regular in the Thorpe Marriott branch for well over a year before the shop took action last November, saying "although we love the little ginger cat who visits... a food store isn't the best place for a cat to be, so our colleagues gently encourage him to go out when he tries to come in". A spokesman said it was not really possible for a store to ban a cat and admitted Pumpkin would probably continue his visits. ... Pumpkin's owner Jo Harding often pops to the shop after work and finds her wayward moggy outside. She tells him to "come home for your tea" and he will trot after her.

The photo above was posted to Facebook by one Annabel Fields. Pumpkin Harding now has his own Facebook group, should anyone wish to join the rebellion. Read the rest

"We thought she was sick, turns out she's just a jerk." That's how the Mitchell County Animal Rescue began the brutally honest adoption announcement for an unsavory cat in their care named Perdita.

The Spruce Pine, North Carolina organization continues:

Meet Perdita, not for the faint of heart. LIKES: staring into your soul until you feel as if you may never be cheerful again; the song Cat Scratch Fever, the movie Pet Cemetery (Church is her hero), jump scares (her specialty), lurking in dark corners, being queen of her domicile, fooling shelter staff into thinking she's sick (vet agrees...she's just a jerk) DISLIKES: the color pink, kittens (yuk they are so chipper), dogs, children, the Dixie Chicks, Disney movies, Christmas and last but NOT least...HUGS. She's single and ready to be socially awkward with a socially awkward human who understands personal space. FREE ADOPTION ;) If interested please go to www.mitchellcountyanimalrescue.org to fill out an application

The News & Observer:

Shelter Director Amber Lowery says 4-year-old Perdita came to the shelter on Christmas Eve like the Grinch and quickly asserted dominance...

“I’m looking at her right now, and she’s rolling around in her little bed, looking all sweet and cute, but the minute you try to rub her, she slaps you. We thought she was in pain and took her to the vet and he said: ‘No, this cat is just a jerk’.”

Since then, the shelter has had to warn visitors that Perdita’s shy, kitten-like attempts to draw passersby to her cage are, in fact, a ruse that will end badly.

Rob Sheridan, one of the creators behind DC's upcoming High Level comic series and NIN's former art director, swallowed an unmeasured handful of 'shrooms before heading into see the "disasterpiece" known as Cats. He soon regretted it.

Cannot overstate what a terrible idea this was. Thought it’d be funny but it was HORROR. The shrooms exacerbated every grotesque whisker & furry crotch of this garish atrocity of a film. I still feel dirty from it, like it touched me inappropriately and told me to keep a secret. https://t.co/xEefUMaJ39

— Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan) January 3, 2020

Birth. Movies. Death. then interviewed him on the experience:

As a masochistic connoisseur of bad cinema, I knew since the Cats trailer came out that I needed to see this hideous disaster, in a theater, and very high. I was visiting with family for the holidays so I didn't get to see it right away when everyone on Twitter was shrieking in horror about what they'd just experienced. So after New Year's, the full Cats experience became a priority. On Monday I have to dive heavily back into work and start a whole health kick, so this strange post-holiday week was pretty much my last chance, and I decided I was going to go all in. Instead of taking an edible as I'd planned, I remembered some mushrooms someone had given me a while back and felt like if there was any chance I was going to enjoy Cats on any level, it would be melting into a psychedelic trip – just get weirded out and giggle and maybe make it fun.

A sign for our times. Read the rest

I'm like, eighty percent certain that this kitty's going to kill whoever it is holding the camera, just as soon as it figures out that it can survive crossing a hallway filled with aluminum foil. Read the rest

“What is this sorcery?” Read the rest

The above GIF was created from new 3D scans of the bullets that killed president John F. Kennedy. The GIF shows two bits of the bullets that killed the president along with another mostly complete bullet plucked from Texas Governor John Connally's hospital stretcher. The National Archives temporarily removed the historic projectiles from the vault so that the National Institute of Standards and Technology could create digital replicas of them at microscopic resolution. Next year, the digital replicas will become part of the National Archive's JFK Assassination Records publicly available online. From Smithsonian:

These bullets now enter the National Archives’ digital collection alongside three others thought to hail from the same firearm: two discharged as test shots, and another from an earlier failed assassination attempt on Army Major General Edwin Walker. All were imaged with a specialized microscope that scanned their surfaces, charting their features much like a satellite recording the topography of a mountain range. The pictures were then stitched together by NIST ballistics specialists to generate a vivid 3-D rendering detailed enough to show grooves left by the barrel of the gun.

Read the rest