Man turns dead cat into helicopter.
Video here.(h/t Greg Laden)
(Not embedding because it creeps me out. You’re welcome.)
Maybe I’m overreacting, but this seems like a Bread and Circuses data point: an example of what happens when a culture basically gives up, leaving the stage to children in fully grown bodies.
Alternatively, I’m becoming Grandpa Abe Simpson, and shouting at the kids (and their catcopters) to get off my lawn.
You make the call.
Image: Francisco de Goya, Las gigantillas, 1791-1792. (’cause we haven’t had enough Goya around here lately)
Southern Beale
I am not clicking on that. Someone else can give me the details.
Steeplejack
The cat helicopters are not laughing.
Cheryl from Maryland
No Saturn Devouring his Children?
gardenia breath
saw it on twitter. that’s just messed up. it’s things like this that make me despise artists who think they are oh-so-provocative and clever just because they are offending standard sensibilities. the whole thing is designed to make you laugh at some poor dead animal who must have mistakenly thought it was loved. but this is how they make $. i guess Mitt would have made Seamus into a copter if he thot it would get him the presidency.
and, oh yeh, i get the “brilliant”, visionary, “amusing” irony implied here: “if he could have flown he wouldn’t have got hit” — big effin’ woop, i could have thot of that in my sleep
Tom Levenson
@Cheryl from Maryland: Used it before. Will again.
scav
Pursuit of celebrity, no publicity is bad publicity, blah blah. They’ve always been around, in the back of classrooms, tearing heads off chickens to impress the chicks. Web, 90-gazillion to fill tv channels and celebrity culture a la Paris Hilton just encourages them and gives them a larger stage.
jon
I think it’s funny to reincarnate a cat into a flying squirrel. The owner didn’t do a good job, however, as it didn’t fly well.
Brachiator
I do believe that one is allowed to swing a dead cat.
This is just the high tech version.
Legalize
The fuck?
gbear
I’m off work today due to a bout of depression. Visiting Balloon Juice today isn’t helping. Not at all.
joes527
Here I went looking for some metaphorical dead cat (dead cat bounce becomes dead cat helicopter)
Nope. It was a dead cat helicopter. Not a very good one either.
Wait – Inane video is inane. Tom, have you heard of the internet?
Frankensteinbeck
You are wildly overreacting. Tom, you’re a historian, aren’t you? You know damn well this not only isn’t new and unusual, there’s probably less of it now because people have amusements other than tying rats’ tails together.
Which is not to say it’s not ‘yuck’, just that rumors of the death of the republic are greatly exaggerated.
joes527
@Frankensteinbeck: Very true. I’ll take dead-cat-helicopter-videos over bear baiting* any day of the week.
* or even the contemporary equivalents: cock/dog/bull fighting
celticdragonchick
A helicopter attachment for your live cat would be one thing…and pretty damned funny to set it off chasing birds.
The video of a dead cat with propellers was just creepy and sick.
Lojasmo
Needs moar tail rotor.
jl
@Frankensteinbeck: Yeah, I agree. Maybe the reactionaries will bring more of the good old days back. Bear and badger baiting, animal fights. I read once that torturing dogs and cats to death used to be a fine pass time in Europe when things were slow, and that some old French king attended a truly epic cat burning festival once.
Thanks for the Goya. He will come in handy if things continue to go South.
You’ve posted the one of Saturn eating his children once, right? You could have found a reason to put that one up a couple of times a week for quite a while now. I expect that situation to continue.
Edit: In fact, I remember reading that some corrupt old rich men’s club in London used a man in some baiting thing, back the day. Forget whether it was the guy and a bear, or some dogs. Even back then, that was going too far, and they got in trouble.
Clime Acts
@gbear:
I hope you are getting good professional help with that.
Been there.
Tom Levenson
@Lojasmo: The internets will be delivered to you shortly.
Tom Levenson
@joes527: It’s that thing they had in Paris with forced air and tubes, right?
@jl: Oh yeah.
Clime Acts
I saw the dead cat copter story earlier today and clicked on by after becoming faintly nauseous and depressed by it.
Seems important to remember that social media, the 24/7 news cycle, and the Internet in general means that horrible/moronic aspects of society which have always existed are now in our faces on a daily basis.
Whatever other factors apply, the most disturbing aspect of this particular story is that this “artist” claims to have done this to a beloved pet. I hope that is not true. I have two dogs I adore and to desecrate their bodies after their passing in such a way would be unthinkable.
I’m hoping this freak just found the dead cat or otherwise obtained one,and then made up the pet part. Ick.
Aet
@celticdragonchick:
No, it would be animal cruelty. Cats do not belong in helicopters.
A genetically engineered flying cat, on the other hand, that’s just progress.
There must be something seriously wrong with me, because I think this is macabre, but more stupid than cruel. Bumpkins have been doing things to animal bodies since fire.
runt
Oh, come on. It’s not like this guy shoved a helicopter up a live cat’s ass. The cat is dead. He’s passed on. This cat is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker. He’s a stiff. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. If this guy hadn’t nailed him to the helicopter he’d be pushing up the daisies. His metabolic processes are now history. He’s off the twig. He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. THIS IS AN EX-CAT!
Are you going to start screaming at people who wear a strip of cow skin around their waste next?
ferd of the Nort
It is a horrible vile picture, which is why I circulated it around the office.
As runt (22) says, The Cat is DEAD. The cat was dead before it was re-assigned to aviation duties. Big whoop. In the third world, it could have been eaten. FIRST WORLD PROBLEM: respecting the dignity of dead things.
Big hairy deal.
Chasseur
In the land of idiot boys
there lived a cat, a phenomenal cat
…then an idiot boy grew up and turned him into a helicopter.
jl
@ferd of the Nort:
” The Cat is DEAD ”
Which is why it was lame, and I only watched 2 seconds.
Now a live cat jazzing out in a one cat helicopter harness with tail activated steering mechanism, hovering over the kitchen counters cruising for snacks it could pick off, now that would be cool.
But it was like a dead cat rug stretched out on a frame with propellers. Just lame and weird, IMHO. Not sure how much there is to occupy the time wherever these people live, so I will withhold judgment (well, actually, spending any time thinking up a wise doom upon it is too much trouble.)
chopper
hey, if a guy’s going to fuck with a corpse, at least it’s a cat and at least he’s turning it into a helicopter. try to see the good side of this.
gaz
Max, my maine coon sleeps like a drunk, so if I mounted him to a helicopter, I could probably get 10 minutes of airtime before he even noticed. In fact both cats are snoring right now… hmmm… I suspect Groucho would probably enjoy it.
But the dead cat is just sort of creepy.
And no, FTR I would not do this to my kittehs because I love them dearly, despite the fact that they snore terribly.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i see this as a step forward in the attempt to quantify how much room it really takes to swing a dead cat.
science!
Jebediah
@runt:
Leather colostomy bag?
The Red Pen
It’s “art.”
If we can survive a crucifix submersed in pee, we can survive a tragically-killed cat turned into a toy helicopter.
Roger Moore
@The Red Pen:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but “Piss Christ” is actually a pretty good work of art. IMO, it’s mostly considered offensive because people who like to be offended have chosen to consider only the most superficial interpretation of the work. It’s just as easy to see it as a criticism of the people who are figuratively pissing on Christ.
Amir Khalid
Good gravy. Is there no more respect for the dead? Tsk, tsk. Und so weiter.
peorgietirebiter
I just finished Eric Larson’s In The Garden Of The Beasts. Interestingly, he comments on how incredibly sensitive Germans were to the treatment of their animals. That animal abuse was a serious crime in Nazi Germany and… Hard to say what the appearance of a cat corpse abuser might say about us.
nastybrutishntall
We Are All 4Chans Now
The Red Pen
@Roger Moore:
Well, yeah. It’s much more difficult to find Deep Inner Meanings to a work of art that conflates a beloved pet with a toy helicopter than it is in a work of are that conflates the sacred and profane.
That said, conflating the sacred and profane is so easy, it’s actually a pretty lazy way to generate meaning and elicit emotional responses.
sdstarr
So, how big would the rotors need to be if we wanted to provide (a still living, of course) Tunch with a cat copter for chasing birds?
middlewest
Large crowds of people in bright daylight used to do similarly terrible things to the corpses of dead humans, just because they had the same skin color as our current president. I’ll never understand the impulse to pretend that evil just showed up this weekend.
The Red Pen
@sdstarr:
Tunch isn’t capable of self-powered flight?!
gardenia breath
i thot BJ people loved their pets. it’s not any funnier to me than roadkill, the carcasses of the unloved and unwanted, treated like just so much trash.
unloved, it’s just not funny.
Yutsano
@The Red Pen: Tunch is his own center of gravity. I think relativity has some play into this.
Al
As the husband and father of the family it was my responsibility to take our cat to the vet to have her euthanized. I cannot for even a fraction of a second even imagine doing this to a beloved pet. Wrong is wrong, even if it isn’t the most wrong thing we’ll see today.