I R Not A Gurl

Drumwaster posts this awesome lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger.  I admit in his comments to being addicted to ICHC and CuteOverload, and confess my fears that I am, indeed, a female.  Buzzion comes back with this:

Nah, its just due to the fact of your complete masculinity.  Its just so strong that the only way to let out your sensitive emotional side, is through looking at stuff like that.  Thus allowing for you to remain at your proper level of dude-itude normally.

Best.  Rationalization.  Ever.  Buzzion, you win.  Whatever game we were all playing, you are the winner.  That’s pure awesome and it’s now my reason for liking cute pictures of fuzzy animals.  I am just that much man that I have to look at this stuff to keep my man-parts in check, or I might just start fornicating with every living thing around me and then start a war.

Posted by JimK at 02:42 PM on August 02, 2007
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Categories: Humor,  Personal,  Things With Fur,  The Blogosphere

Are rats ticklish, and does it make them laugh?

Aristotle declared that humans are the only animal to laugh, but then, he never saw this video of Jaak Panksepp tickling rats.

When you play it, you’ll hear the tickled rats chirping — an ultrasonic noise that’s audible thanks to the special equipment that enabled Dr. Panksepp and his colleagues to discover this phenomenon. Young rats make the same chirp when they chase and play with one another, and they like to hang out with other rats who chirp at this frequency (50 kHz). It seems to be a happy sound: rats will run mazes and press levers in order to be tickled, and they’ll emit the same chirp when the dopamine reward circuits in the brain are stimulated.

Some researchers still aren’t sure these sounds qualify as animal laughter, but Dr. Panksepp, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, has been systematically gathering evidence of the parallels to human laughter. He hypothesizes that our most sophisticated forms of verbal humor tickle ancient brain circuits like the ones in the chirping rats.

Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humor, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick. Even if adult rodents have no well-developed cognitive sense of humor, young rats have a marvelous sense of fun. We have already bred rats that exhibit playful chirping, and thereby hope to track down some of the genes for joy. Perhaps we will even stumble on new molecules to alleviate depression as well as some excessive-exuberance disorders.

The Mins in my pocket

Posted by JimK at 01:42 PM on March 21, 2007
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Categories: Personal,  Things With Fur,  Technobabble (Technology)
Tags: rats science animals laughter

No 24 tonight for me

No big 24 recap tonight.  I’ll be getting wired up right around then for my overnight sleep study, after which I need to wait two weeks to have the doctor I don’t like tell me I need a CPAP machine and another overnight so they can fine-tune a CPAP setting for me.  All to tell me I need a heated machine with humidifier set to between 12 and 15 cm pressure.  Mouth mask, not nasal, due to allergies and the fast that most nasals only offer 10cm of pressure.

I know , I know, I have to go through the process.  I’m just bitching.  I’m actually looking forward to wearing the MIG fighter mask.  People who get them say they feel like a million bucks almost immediately.  It’s like all your life you’ve been getting an hour’s worth of sleep, and literally overnight someone teaches you how to get 8 hours.  It’d be nice to wake up not fleeing like I spent the night pushing a big rock up a hill, chewing parts of it and swallowing them, then doing it all over again.

I’ll miss Jack though.  NO SPOILERS!  NO SPOILERS!  Hell, no internet for me until tomorrow, so what the frig, spoil away.  ;) Recap tomorrow night.  Unless Idol takes it out of me.  In which case I’ll do something Jack-ish, like snap Simon Cowell’s neck with a flying wall-jump headlock.

Oh!  My “overnight” bag?  The Jack Bauer messenger bag in black.  I’m a guy.  Why would I need more than that?  A shirt, underwear, a hat, a brush (and that barely made it in) and then of course my iPod, portable DVD player, PocketPC, cell phone and all charging cables.  Also a book, gum, some chapstick and a tactical folder.  Yup.  I’m ready.

While I’m off doing that, Preston is back at the vet.  He may need an ultrasound, he’s still not eating or drinking even a tenth of what he should, although the vomiting has stopped.  He’s still running a fever.  Poor guy.  They said he was pretty dehydrated again, and currently he’s hiding under a blanket inside a big dog cage in the treatment room.  Last night when we tried to medicate him, he went pretty violent and mean on me.  He’s not good with true challenges to his superiority, I think that on some level, the little bastard thinks he’s alpha above me.  He tried to take my arm apart when I attempted to get his pills in him.  Hopefully I won’t have to do that very often...I’m hoping they can figure out what’s wrong soon!

He’s half-evil, but I love him.

Posted by JimK at 06:01 PM on February 05, 2007
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Categories: Television,  24,  Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: 24 Jack Bauer

Inspiration

While I’m up…

Life is a struggle.  It’s a struggle to be heard, to listen, to be loved and to love.  It’s a struggle to provide safety and to feel safe.  Life is a never-ending struggle against the enemy that no one has ever defeated, death itself.

If at times you find yourself overwhelmed by this notion, and you are feeling like you just have to give it all up and pull out of the rat race, I want you to remember one thing: this cat made it, and with his damn feather duster too.  His name is Meitarou, and he’s awesome.

As Churchill once (sort of) said, we shall carry our feather duster, whatever the cost may be.  We shall never surrender.

Posted by JimK at 06:18 AM on January 17, 2007
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Categories: Humor,  Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: Meitarou

RIP Morgana

She didn’t make it.  The strain was too much, and she may have gotten a sever infection from too much open bowel.  My poor little baby...the vet said that everyone was doting on her all last night and early this morning.  Reports were that she was even loosening up and being sweet to them - a rare thing for her, she was known at Ridge Hill as a “WILL BITE.” :) Apparently she even purred for the techs and the doc.

I will miss her so much.  She’s been with me every single day since before she was even really mine - I got her and Gwynnie from this couple that lived downstairs back in Albany, NY...I knew her when she was around 3 weeks old.  She picked me long before I even knew I was getting a cat.  I’d go visit Bryce & Carrie and she’d run up to me to be picked up or play.  Once she fell asleep on her back, literally in the palm of my hand.  I sat down on the couch and watched something on TV for the next two hours, holding my hand up so the little kitty wouldn’t wake up.

Over the years she turned into a caregiver - if you were sick, she knew it.  Dizzy?  She’d be right there to purr you back to stability.  Crying?  She’d lick your face clean.  Freshly showered?  Eww, that’s not how you smell.  Gana knows you should smell like family, so she’d lick any bare skin you’d let her until you smelled enough like her to be right.  She especially loved to lick my elbows.  She always knew when Donna was going to have a seizure and would stand guard, until she got too old to fight Preston off anymore and then she let him take the job.

Half of Preston’s personality he learned directly from watching her.  He does all that stuff now.  He drinks water like her, with this weird paw motion that I have only ever seen the two of them do.  They could not be more unrelated.  Hell they never really got along...but he watched her because it was clear that we favored her.  So he did what she did, and now he runs the house like she did.

Morgana...she was a hell of a cat.  Gana, don’t worry about me and Mommy.  Gwynnie is watching me day and night and Preston guards Mommy like his life depends on it.  You rest, baby girl.  You deserve the break.  You earned it.

We’ll miss you.  More than you can imagine.

Posted by JimK at 10:58 AM on January 03, 2007
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Categories: Personal,  Things With Fur

Colon Watch

How do we start 2007?  Waiting to find out if poor little Morgana will survive colon surgery.  I think I’ve slept something like 4 hours in the last two days over this.  Before the holiday She was in the vets for a couple of days getting enemas and high doses of steroids because she hadn’t pooped in so long and was all sorts of backed up.  Not the first time this has happened, but this is the first time she hasn’t responded to treatment.  They sent her home thinking the motility drugs would move things along and finish what the enemas hadn’t, but she was stopped up worse than a sink full of concrete.

Wish my kitty well, she could use the help.  Poor thing had two different ruptures in her lower colon and had to have almost a foot of literally rock-hard material removed by hand, which means they had to slice her upper colon open and pull it out.  No wonder she hasn’t pooped in two weeks!

It’s just a roll of the dice with cats if they survive this kind of surgery, and so far she’s doing OK - no signs of infection, no sepsis - but her body temp isn’t rising, and that’s not good.  On top of that, her colon is the wrong color and “paper thin” as the doc put it, so no matter what happens she’s at risk.  Amazingly, the vet found evidence of an old rupture that was sealed by Morgana’s fat belly!  How she survived is anyone’s guess.  Hopefully she’s got a lot more survival in her.

All we can do now is wait to see…

P.S. - This is gonna (and has already) cost a small fortune...now, the recent influx of traffic (due to Miss Nevada’s titties)has resulted in a lot of new BlogAds for me, so if you could, can you click on them and visit their sites?  If I get a few more ads I can pay for a good portion of the surgery and recovery that way.  The better performing the current ads are, the more attractive I become to new advertisers...everyone wins!

Posted by JimK at 06:37 PM on January 02, 2007
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Categories: Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: cats

And now for something completely different

Too much Saddam.  Time to lighten things up.  Cat macro time…

More

My cats:

Alternate for number 2:

Made for others in the cat_macro LJ community:

Less

Posted by JimK at 08:08 PM on December 30, 2006
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Categories: Humor,  Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: cat macros

im in ur blogz, postin cat macros

jo-jo clued me in to the existence of a Livejournal community devoted to nothing but these stupid cat “im in ur” photos.  I can’t stop looking at them!  Now I’ve made some.  First, two I’m happy with:

More

Now for these, I can’t make up my mind.

or

This face lends itself to a couple of choices:

or

I must be tired because these are hilarious to me.  If I take a nap will they still be funny?  Who knows.

Less

Posted by JimK at 03:28 PM on December 26, 2006
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Categories: Humor,  Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: cat macros

I blinded her with science

Sent to StuffOnMyCat.com and to Thomas Dolby:

Cat: Morgana
DVD: Thomas Dolby’s new concert DVD “The Sole Inhabitant”
Cute factor: Magnified due to the Dolby Sphere of Prosperity.  Little known fact, but all things can be improved with the addition of Dolby.  It’s just simple…

...SCIENCE!

SOMC slogan: Cats + Stuff = Awesome. My remix: Cats + Stuff x Dolby = Awesomer.

You can get Thomas Dolby’s new DVD or the CD at CDBaby.

Posted by JimK at 06:09 PM on December 10, 2006
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Categories: Entertainment,  Music,  Humor,  Personal,  Things With Fur
Tags: catblogging cats stuff on my cat Thomas Dolby

I WILL PULL THIS COUNTRY OVER AND GIVE YOU SUCH A SMACK

Do you know what the blogosphere looks like to me since the election?  Oh hell, since the 2004 election?

“YOU STARTED IT!” “NO YOU DID!” “Nuh-UH!” “YUH-HUH!” “Nuh-UH!” “YUH-HUH!” “Nuh-UH!” “YUH-HUH!” *SMACK* *SMACK BACK* “QUIT IT!” “NO YOU QUIT IT!”

Why don’t you all shut the fuck up for five minutes already?  Go outside.  Have a glass of wine.  Smoke a bowl.  Get laid.  Step away from the news for a day.  The world will not end and neither will you.

Trust me...you’ll feel better about things if you take a wee short break from the 24/7 news cycle of doom, despair and blame.  Here.  Look at something cute:

Posted by JimK at 04:44 PM on November 10, 2006
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Categories: News,  Politics,  Personal,  Things With Fur,  The Blogosphere
Tags: blogging politics