Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Second rate reporter says what?

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Petty moves from a petty man.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Let me file that under fuck it.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

You are here: Home / Pet Blogging / Dog Blogging / Bitsy Beg

Reader Interactions

93Comments

  2. 2.

    Laura W

    A Bitsy Beg AND THE RETURN OF THE EDIT FUNCTION ALL IN ONE MORNING?

    This is going to be my luckiest day EVER.

  6. 6.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Singing to pets is one of life’s special pleasures, whether you’re riffing on a real song or making it up yourself.

    I used to do this in a kind of deep growly sing-song to my dear (departed) black cat Hamish:

    I like your FACE and I like your NOSE
    I like your PAWS and I like your TOES
    I like your NECK and I like your PURR
    I like your BACK and I like your FUR
    I like your TUMMY and I like your TAIL
    And I like the place where you used to be a MALE!

  7. 7.

    bey

    Are you talking the oogums to her yet? Once you start talking the oogums and giving them their own songs, it’s all over but the crying.

    I had a cat who had her back feet amputated (long story – mom didn’t chew through the umbilical cords) . If Miss Piggy and Joan Crawford had a baby, it would have been Lois. Her motto was What have you done for me LATELY? Anyway, she had a song sung to the tune of Our House

    Our kitty
    The one who is so neat
    She’s pretty
    But she don’t got many feet

  8. 8.

    Monkeyfister

    I do the same thing for my three cats all the time. It’s funny how Dead lyrics work so well for changing into pet-love songs! It is reassuring to know that I am not the only one who does this.

    –mf

  10. 10.

    Demo Woman

    Daily I have voted for Bitsy. I just know one of these days Bitsy will win.
    Moxie and I dance and sing, not sure why I’m bragging.

  11. 11.

    Laura W

    @robertdsc: You should live with her! Character x 12.
    I posted this on the open thread in response to a question about Little Bitsy, but Annie is in all the ads because she was rescued by the same woman.

    If you can click thru to flickr, you might enjoy her most recent fashion shoot:

    flickr.com/photos/13481225@N03/3933567631/

    @John: Did you sell the blog or what? No longer John Cole’s?

  12. 12.

    Skepticat

    It would be too cruel for me to sing to my cats, especially as their hearing is so acute. Actually it’s cruel for me to sing to anyone/anything.

    Speaking of cute, as ordered I’ve voted for Bitsy this morning (her numbers are looking good) and also for North Shore Feline Rescue at http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com.

    (John, thank you so much for the edit function.)

  13. 13.

    Jackie

    I sing made up verses of jeeper creepers to my dogs. I have no singing skills and they are the only ones who like it when I sing. Their joy in silliness is one of their major virtues.

    By the way Laura W, you have outdone yourself with the
    Bitsy ads!

  14. 14.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @John Cole:

    voted. Bitsy’s doing well this week. glad to see the design is ongoing, but I’m not seeing anything on the individual pages in the banner.

  16. 16.

    arguingwithsignposts

    Also, I hope you’re including a “subscribe to comments” plug-in so we don’t have to refresh the page all the time to see the additional comments.

    BTW, is Sekimori Design doing the redesign?

  18. 18.

    Laura W

    Oh Good Lord you are brave, John Cole.
    FAQ page, where readers ask the questions?
    I’m going for a walk now. Must be disciplined. Must stay classy.

  22. 22.

    RedKitten

    Oh my sweet jumping jeebus, the html buttons are back. Oh frabjous day!

    And a FAQ, where we can ask the questions? I second Laura — that’s just a real invitation to mischief. I’m looking forward to seeing some of the results. :)

  23. 23.

    Bad Horse's Filly

    @Laura W: Ummm, I don’t want to alarm you, L-dub, but by frame three she looks like she might kill you in your sleep.

    (p.s. I’ve hooked onto the L-dub moniker because I’m watching Middle Man on DVD).

    Oooo, see how I did that? Italics and linking. We are BACK people.

  24. 24.

    General Winfield Stuck

    OT

    Win a Lunch With Sarah Palin

    Bids started at 25 large. I just heard the winner was for 63,000. Bet it was Rich Lowry’s bag of Starbursts that one the day.

    Since my roll of plug nickels didn’t get the job done, I am going Galt to lick me wounds.

  27. 27.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Since we got edit and buttons back, to add insult to injury, now my flawless grammer/spell won’t stand out in the crowd.

  28. 28.

    Libertini

    You are not a true dog owner if you do not sing to your dog. I have lots, but the first, and still favorite is Jake, Jake, Jake….Jake,Jake, Jake, such a cutie, scratch his bootie. (KC and the Sunshine band for those of you whose musical life didn’t come of age in the 70s and 80s.)

  30. 30.

    arguingwithsignposts

    There’s a bj dictionary now too. Burkean Bells should be the first definition. Followed by Clown Shoes.

  32. 32.

    arguingwithsignposts

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    so i’m still getting moderation for s-h-o-e-s. I never did get that.

    My original comment:

    There’s a bj dictionary now too. Burkean Bells should be the first definition. Followed by Clown Sh0es.

  34. 34.

    Laura W

    @General Winfield Stuck:

    grammer

    Had I been drinking wine, it would’ve come out my nose.

    @Seanly: I know it’s annoyingly long. We are ending week 7 of 12. If we push her into #1, we can shut up till the semis! Let that be your incentive people!

  36. 36.

    South of I-10

    @Laura W: Hey, I love David Gray! Saw him at the Woodlands a few years back. My iPod obviously wants my house to be clean quickly, cause some Bluerunners just popped up. Best cleaning (while dancing) music ever!

  37. 37.

    Brachiator

    @John Cole:

    The webmistress is doing the long awaited redesign and work this weekend. Did you not notice the top banner is also different?

    Well, one thing. You can’t get back to the main page by clicking on “Balloon Juice.”

    You have to click on “Consistently Wrong.”

    This seems to invite frustration.

  38. 38.

    Bad Horse's Filly

    @Laura W: I like that song. I don’t know David Gray but I may have to get to know him.

    I don’t want to say this too loud, because we know how sensitive John is, but does the banner feel a little off…or maybe asymmetrical…to anyone else?

    And cause we need a little BAD this morning:

    Bad Things

  39. 39.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    BTW- I’ve noticed that since I got pets a couple years back when I got Tunch, song lyrics change. For example, this morning I found myself singing “Oh, sweet Lily, your daddy’s got ‘dem deep ellum blues.”

    Yer an idiot.

  41. 41.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @Laura W:

    @John: Did you sell the blog or what? No longer John Cole’s?

    I’ve been thinking about buying it and turning it into a gay dating site.

  45. 45.

    Trinity

    Wha?….Is this?…..Is this Christmas??

    Lovin’ the upgrades John.

    And I voted for Bitsy too! Is it Miller time yet?

  47. 47.

    burnspbesq

    Hooray buttons!

    But what is the “mippin” thing that is suddenly the only way I can access this site from a mobile device? Me not sure me likee.

  48. 48.

    JenJen

    Thanks for this post, mostly because I vote for Bitsy daily but am really weary of clicking on or anywhere near a Steelers logo.

    John, dog ownership looks [i]so[/i] good on you. :-)

    Plus, the return of comments functions! This is better than Fitzmas!!

  51. 51.

    burnspbesq

    @lost in GA:

    Details of the nefarious plot emerge. Mippin has a WordPress plugin. Speculation is rampant that John Tunch will soon be running his entire global empire from a mobile device.

  52. 52.

    Fred Fnord

    I hate mippin. Please make it stop on iPhone. I have no idea whether I want to read something or not. It shows up ugly.

    The iPhone does not have a mobile browser, it has a REAL browser. Simplifying things for it just makes them uglier.

    At least let there be a button iPhone users can push to see the real site.

    -fred

  53. 53.

    Warren Terra

    So, I’m viewing this on my cheap-ish webphone, a Samsung Instinct, and it has two browsers: the Obigo browser that came with it (slow, badly memory-limited such that in can only show 50 or so comments here, doesn’t always display right, but well integrated into the phone) and the Opera Mini browser I added (fast, displays pages properly, doesn’t run out of memory trying to load long Balloon-Juice threads, sadly poorly integrated with the phone such that I can only use 200 characters in its text box). As you may be able to detect, I vastly prefer the Opera Mini browser.

    Unfortunately, the newly updated Balloon-Juice recognizes Opera Mini, and instead of displaying Balloon-Juice for me instead I get an unholy abomination called “Mippin” (thank heavens, Obigo apparently escapes it). This is bad. Mippin Must Die.

    I’m being hyperbolic above, but it is absolutely true that Mippin completely destroys the site. The home page gives only the post titles, the posts themselves are rendered in a large-font single-column format, and only the most recent 10? comments are shown. And I think the comment I left through Mippin went astray. Nearly every attempt I’ve seen by a site to create a “mobile-friendly” version has been a disaster, a significantly worse version than if they’d just left it alone and trusted the mobile browser, but Mippin is in a class of Awful all by itself.

    We used to give you a lot of grief about our favorite blog, WordPress > Error, but honestly I’d trade Mippin for that in a moment.

  54. 54.

    MikeJ

    You have to click on “Consistently Wrong.”

    Since the “consistently wrong”is now text perhaps new mottoes will be rotating in.

    It is annoying to not be able to click on the logo though. One of the reasons I never read comments at Washington Monthly. No easy way to get back to the main page.

  56. 56.

    Warren Terra

    @ Mike J, #55
    I don’t know enough even to know what a user-agent-string is, so, no. I could learn what it is, I suppose, but I’m not terribly likely to go meddling all that much in the innards of the software.

    The especially frustrating part is that the Opera Mini browser has its own “mobile” mode, which I keep switched off, which could emulate some of the changes Mippin makes in a less damaging manner – but Mippin doesn’t check to see whether my browser is operating in “mobile mode” before inflicting its damage upon the site.

  57. 57.

    licensed to kill time

    Are the FAQ and dictionary pages intentionally blank? Do we have to fill them in ourselves, like a class project or something?

    (Also, I left a variant of this comment over on the Open Thread, where everyone has left, apparently. I tried to edit my comment and it spewed gibberish all over the page. I like to spew my own gibberish, thankyouverymuchwordpress! But it’s nice to have the html buttons again.)

  58. 58.

    JenJen

    Home today but I usually read Balloon Juice on the road… so thought I’d load it up on the Blackberry after hearing of this Mippin nonsense above.

    I concur… it’s awful. The site doesn’t even look like the site. I also use Opera Mini, if that has anything to do with this; Opera Mini takes all the “mobile” out of sites and performs like an actual browser. I’ve never seen it do this, so is there any way to bypass the mobile detection that routes us to Mippin, or something?

    It’s not the end of the world or anything, mind you; I hate bitching about this site at all, and I’m going to stop now. :-)

  65. 65.

    J.

    P.S. The only problem with voting for Bitsy (who seems to have a bit of an advantage) is that I wind up spending waaaay too much time on that site looking at (and voting for) all the other cute doggies. Thanks a lot, @Laura W. and @John Cole. : (

  66. 66.

    Robertdsc-iphone

    Mippin was orange. Was BJ about to become the new Great Orang Satan?

    I like the new features, also.

  67. 67.

    Warren Terra

    @ John Cole, #60
    My undying gratitude for your valorous deeds in the slaying of the accursed Mippin, scourge of the mobile telephone.

  68. 68.

    sylvia

    Thanks to all of you that are voting for Little Bitsy! She was on the local radio station this last week and will be in our local paper this coming week. We are determined to win this thing and couldn’t do it without all your votes!
    Thanks guys!!

  69. 69.

    The Other Steve

    I’m starting a counter-protest.

    Mippin is the greatest thing since sliced bread!

    Bring back Mippin!

  70. 70.

    bago

    User-agent string is what you send in your http Get headers to identify to the webserver what OS, browser, etc, that you are using.

  72. 72.

    Andy K

    …this morning I found myself singing “Oh, sweet Lily, your daddy’s got ‘dem deep ellum blues.

    I wish I could remember where I read it, but there’s a study that shows that 85% of all elderly, spinstress “cat ladies” were once libertarian military veterans. The remainder were characters in the plays of Tennessee Williams. Go figure.

  74. 74.

    bago

    It lets you know what you can do with the request.

    Example:

    User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.590; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30428; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3)

    As you can tell, I might be a .net developer.

  76. 76.

    burnspbesq

    Bruce Bartlett has been en fuego of late. From a well-reasoned take on the life and work of Irving Kristol:

    The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

    There is a now a new journal called National Affairs that aspires to fill the gap left by the demise of The Public Interest. It’s too soon to say if it will do so, but it has done an enormous public service by making all of the archives of The Public Interest freely available on the Internet. I urge people to delve into them. I think they will be amazed that there were once a group of serious conservative scholars in this country who weren’t crazy or completely in the pockets of the Republican Party or some corporate interest.

    capitalgainsandgames.com/blog/bruce-bartlett/1109/remembering-irving-kristol

  77. 77.

    burnspbesq

    Ugh. Blockquote is still limited to one paragraph. The second paragraph above is also from Bartlett.

  78. 78.

    Katherine

    @Libertini:

    I miss singing to my dogs . . . one died about 2 years ago and the other died just last month. Especially my Sunshine (the one who died 2 years ago) . . . “You are my Sunshine” “Here Comes Sunshine”, she put up with my singing just about every day and never seemed to hold it against me. Boy do I miss her . . . singing to cats just isn’t the same.

  82. 82.

    benjoya

    i knew eventually there’s be a thread for my calicos’ theme song: (to the tune of “green acres”):

    Ann Richards is the cat for me
    Ann Richards and Aung San Suu Kyi!
    Ann’s Spreadin out so far and wide,
    almost as fat as Elvis when he died

  85. 85.

    AhabTRuler

    That’s funny, I have never heard of it referred to as a dictionary before. And I really don’t think that John wants to expose this matter in such a public forum.

  87. 87.

    The Saff

    I think a history of Balloon Juice would be helpful, at least for me (you know, an “about” section). I know John used to be on the “dark side” and that he was able to “find the light” but it would be fun to know how this thing came to be.

    And maybe have links open in a new window so you don’t lose your place in the string.

    Oh, and I sing to, and about, my cats all the time.

  88. 88.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    @The Saff:

    I know John used to be on the “dark side” and that he was able to “find the light” but it would be fun to know how this thing came to be.

    John and I had an incredible mescaline trip and when it was over, I was straight again and he was a Democrat. I don’t usually date Republicans, especially the ex-military types that have a hard-on for The Cars but as it happened, The Cars were on the stereo and one of us had a hard-on. Next thing ya know, we’re laying on the futon with the faux aztec throw- a tangle of arms, legs and coital fluids and John says, “Hey, I’ve got some mescaline and Mount Gay rum.” I remember making the obligatory “Mount Gay” joke and we both giggled before going up to the mountaintop and coming back down hours later, both of us changed men.

  89. 89.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    However.. I may be remembering some of the details wrong and there may be someone else out there with a competing narrative to explain the conversion of John Cole………..

  91. 91.

    josefina

    What about nicknames, John? “Silly Lily” is obvious but I’m quite sure you’ve come up with many more, seeing as that’s another thing they don’t tell you about when you acquire a dog. You must come up with several nonsensical variations on their name, as well as cognomens related to their personality, appearance, and/or habits, and use them frequently. (However, the high-pitched baby voice is NOT mandatory and is indeed discouraged.)

    Cases in point:

    Jupiter (RIP): Joop, Joopie-Joop, Doglet 1, Spotty Boy, Skritchy Butt, Macho Dog, Prince Tailio, Egg-Sucking Bastard*

    Rilla: Rillabeast, Rilla-rill-rill, Doglet 2, Yellow Girl, Fetchzilla, Porkina Fatso, Smiley, Old Lady

    *(True fact: He taught himself, in the following order, how to a) open the refrigerator and eat the eggs, b) perform a) then close the refrigerator, c) perform a) and b) then hide the ravaged carton, d) perform a), b) and c) then barrel past me as soon as I opened the door and go sit in his “BAD! BAD!” corner of the deck until I called him in. His ashes rest in an ostrich-egg shell on the shelf above by desk.)

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