Tell us what is on your mind. Found this pic while going through my old facebook photos and it made me laugh:
Just a magnificent fat bastard. I’d kill to plunge my hand into his pudgy and plush belly.
Pens are on now, then the WVU women at 9:30, and leftovers for dinner are on the agenda.
*** Update ***
Of all the things I love most about his fatness is the fact that he was my gateway pet:
Abo gato
What a fabulous meatloaf Tunch is!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Pete Williams on the Tweety show talking about the “religious views” of Hobby Lobby. If the absurdity of his phrasing occurs to him, he shows no sign of it.
ETA: and for a balanced view, Tweety turns to a lawyer for Hobby Lobby and the ostentatiously professional Catholic Melinda Henninberger, who works for Timmy Dolan by writing for the Washington Post.
srv
Hovercat is hovercat
The Dangerman
What is “only a beanie and a blue bib away from Mr. Stay Puft”, Alex.
TaMara (BHF)
Magnificent beast.
Ash Can
What a wonderful kitty he was. And thank goodness for Steve.
inkadu
I just moved into a basement apartment. I don’t have reception *or* computer speakers *or* a TV so I have no idea what the hell’s going on in the world unless it’s FP’d here.
Are we at war in the Crimean yet?
Chicken cooked in sunflower seed oil seasoned with kosher salt and Kirkland organic no-salt seasoning. Yes, the seasoning is from Costco. And it’s delicious and I can make a 1/16″ layer of it. So there.
inkadu
Tunch passed? Sorry to hear that. I haven’t been here in a while. Is Brick Oven Bill (or was it Bob) in the ground too?
kc
Tunchie! Such presence.
D58826
Poor guy looks like he hasn’t eaten in a month
I thought the idea that we were discussing contraception in the 21st century was depressing but corporations having a religion? To think that SCOTUS would even dignify that absurd idea with a hearing is disgraceful. If Roberts and company decide for Hobby Lobby it will rank at the bottom of the barrel along with with Bush v Gore and Dred Scott. At least Citizens United has a thin veneer (very very very thin) of respectability in that corporations do ‘speak’ in the public square. If Hobby Lobby wins I’m waiting for the first husband who kills his cheating wife to claim the Old testament allows for the killing of adulteress’s.
Truly a sad day
ranchandsyrup
Pourin out a Bartles and Jaymes for the demise of the Gwynneth Paltrow/Chris Martin marriage. Hoocouldanode? Maybe Coldplay won’t be as awful any more oh who am I kidding.
Fantasy baseball draft and trying to decompress from a day full of meetings that accomplished nothing by making paper airplanes with the little ones.
geg6
When I saw this on FB, tears welled up in my eyes. Pretty crazy for a cat I never met and for a dog person.
Leftovers here, too. Yummy roast chicken, roast garlic potatoes, and carrots, onions and fennel that was roasted with the chicken. One of the sweet ladies who works in the campus food court, The Bistro, gave me a bottle of inexpensive Asti Spumante a few months ago because she loves me and knows I like wine. She just doesn’t know what to buy, poor sweet thing. Neither of us felt like stopping for wine, so we’re gonna kill it with dinner tonight.
Good call on the replay! Jokinnen (sp?) scored!
? Martin
@inkadu: Pretty sure BOB is still with us. I’ve been trolled a few times by someone that has too strong a resemblance to BOB. Or it could just be DougJ.
srv
@inkadu: I hope it’s not a new apartment complex. They seem to all be burning down.
SiubhanDuinne
What a great cat he was! I’m so glad you still post pictures of him, John. Steve is a very fine cat, no question about it, but Tunch was something else again.
BGinCHI
Today is Flannery O’Connor’s 89th birthday. Amazingly, she could still be alive. Sadly she has been dead for exactly 50 years.
What a great, great writer (teaching her tonight in my grad seminar).
Happy birthday, Miss O!
the Conster
TUNCH!! What a loss. Window closed, door opened for Steve. What a crazy karmic world we live in.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If Hobby Lobby prevails, every woman should tell every man to go fuck themselves. Literally. Lysistrata rules.
CapnMubbers
Still hoping for a Tunch with big wings T-shirt….
Elizabelle
That cat looks like its own county.
RIP Tunch.
Amir Khalid
@ranchandsyrup:
What? OH NOES!!
Elizabelle
@BGinCHI:
Happy Birthday Flannery O’Connor.
Yes, she could be alive today. How sad to leave so soon.
inkadu
@? Martin: Did BOB get banned? As much time as he spent reading at Town Hall, I found the idea of living off of bulk flour a wood-fired brick oven somewhat comforting. I also remember the Grand Panjandarum, not least of which (ok, entirely) because of the name.
BGinCHI
@Elizabelle: “She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Gin & Tonic
@the Conster: Speaking of Lysistrata, check out this t-shirt from Ukraine. The caption on the shirt says “Don’t give [this] to a Russian.”
IowaOldLady
@BGinCHI: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of my favorite stories.
Scott Alloway
Damn it. I know the feeling. Would do almost anything to have Sparks on my arm for a few moments. And it has been 10 years since she was killed. I still tear up (like right now), and I’m a grumpy old man at 63.
Elizabelle
@ranchandsyrup:
From WaPost:
I am throwing up virtually.
Sad, because little kids are involved.
ranchandsyrup
@Amir Khalid: Today is the day that love died.
But in good branding news, she announced on their website that they “consciously uncoupled”.
PaulW
For anyone with ebook accounts, Amazon and Barnes&Noble are sending out credit as part of the ebook settlements. I got $11.68 from B&N. I’m gonna go waste it on trashy scifi erotica (just not the tentacle ones, those are NEVER properly edited, grammar errors up the wazoo, I tells ya).
SiubhanDuinne
Seeing Tunch makes me think of Asiangrrlmn, and that makes me think of Yutsano/Yatsuno, and that makes me wonder again whether he’s been seen or heard from since the mudslide in WA state over the weekend. I don’t pretend to read every single comment in every single post, but I usually notice when he’s around and I haven’t seen him in these parts for a few days.
Anybody know?
ranchandsyrup
@Elizabelle: Totally right about the kids. “Consciously uncoupled” is a doozy. Failing upwards is a skill.
Amir Khalid
@ranchandsyrup:
That is genius spin. Gwyneth should quit this acting lark and start her own PR firm.
muddy
What a fine figure of a cat! He’s got a right kingly expression on him – “Lions don’t catch flies.”
Calming Influence
What a great picture. I’m gonna go pet our cats for about an hour.
Cacti
@Amir Khalid:
Puh-leeze.
Do you really think her publicist didn’t come up with that for her?
BGinCHI
@SiubhanDuinne: Yuts was here the other day. That was a little tiny town north of Seattle where that happened. Really terrible.
Pogonip
BOB must have been banned; seeing as he apparently had nothing to do besides post here, if he could, most likely he would. I, on the other hand, have many things to do other than post here. I am hoping that if I sit around and post long enough, at least some of those things will go away. (My day job is auditing contracts, and sometimes, what with that whole cost-effective thing, some of the unauditable moldy oldies with half the documentation missing do go away; now if I can only get the same phenomenon to work with real-life tasks.)
Sorry, I have no good audit stories; my dept does not audit for fraud (although we occasionally run onto it), but for payment errors. Not very exciting.
After seeing the picture, now I know what happened to all that missing documentation. Tunch ate it.
muddy
@Amir Khalid: Isn’t that what she mostly does?
WaterGirl
@inkadu:
RIP, Tunch, the Best Cat Ever
So sad.
SiubhanDuinne
@PaulW:
I’m getting $17.29 from Amazon. Nice little email this morning. Plus, when I retired last year, my colleagues gave me Amazon gift cards worth $150, which I haven’t yet redeemed.
It would be easy to fritter the money away on small purchases here and there, but I have wanted a really good globe for a long time, and I think it would be more meaningful (especially the gift cards) if I used them that way. Any suggestions from globe-lovers?
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
There is something odious about Gwyneth, and I’m usually an easy audience.
Pretentious. And I hated her crying through the Oscars in that pink Ralph Lauren dress that did not fit her well.
That year, I wanted Cate Blanchett to win for Elizabeth, which was every bit as good as Shakespeare in Love (albeit without Judy Dench).
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Now I’m crying all over again.
JPL
@PaulW: I’m going to spend part of my settlement on Boys in the Boat. Although the money just goes back to publishers, it’s still a nice surprise.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
I was about to put that line in here. Good thing I continued reading the thread. I had a student write in a paper about Anna Karenina, “She would of been a good woman, if she’d had a train run over her every day of her life.” She got an A, no prob.
gogol's wife
@Gin & Tonic:
Isn’t it “Don’t put out for a Russian”?
shelly
And speaking of weight…
Under the Newsmax headline, “Drudge Angers White House,”
it opens with “Internet heavyweight Matt Drudge..”
Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Yes, ol’ Drudge. When he speaks, the world listens.
inkadu
@Pogonip: No good auditing stories? How about hallucinations from boredom? Tell us about those.
Gin & Tonic
@SiubhanDuinne: I like atlases more.
Elizabelle
Oh, I love it. Reading that WaPost story further:
Earnest, yet oblivious. (*snicker*)
More from Paltrow’s statement:
Did someone tell her that “co” words are the way to go?
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: That is perfect. And true to boot.
Gin & Tonic
@gogol’s wife: Yes, that’s better. I was too literal.
SiubhanDuinne
@Pogonip:
Also the mustard.
Also the Subaru-in-a-field.
ranchandsyrup
@Elizabelle: I don’t think earnest is the right word for her “tips”.
SiubhanDuinne
@Gin & Tonic:
I love atlases*. Atlases and globes are not mutually exclusive.
*(‘Cept when they’re a-shruggin’, of course.)
Pogonip
@inkadu: Well, there was this one time I thought I saw a fluffy white basketball with orange cat ears and an orange tail, and it zoomed across the desk, devouring everything like Stephen King’s Langoliers…
Actually auditing is not as boring as it sounds. It’s like being paid to do puzzles. But people always think of the exciting type of audit where you’re chasing zillion-dollar fraud, and I didn’t want to disappoint.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Me, too. I teared up when I the Tunch photo at the top of the thread, then I cried for real when I found the post so I could let inkadu know.
Pogonip
@SiubhanDuinne: He thought the Subaru was pretty good spread with mustard.
gbear
@SiubhanDuinne: Wait until Putin dies.
Tunch looks like someone left him sitting in the sun too long. He melted!
Roger Moore
@PaulW:
I’m glad to hear that you’ve read enough of it to know the flaws.
Pogonip
John, speaking of devouring everything in sight–there is a fluffy gray tribble on your sofa! You’ll be knee-deep in Tribbles by tomorrow morning!
Elizabelle
I LOVE that pic of Cole’s pets.
The man runs a home for somnolent animals.
Anoniminous
@SiubhanDuinne:
If you hurry you can save $2,749.95 by buying one of these.
schrodinger's cat
Lubs me some Tunch.
Roger Moore
@SiubhanDuinne:
Do you want a good globe or a cool one. I have to admit admiring the ones that are inlaid with different colored stones. They aren’t particularly good as maps, but they’re cool as objet d’art. Historic globes are also kind of cool. My brother used to be able to date a 20th Century globe to within a few years by looking at how the borders and countries changed; he could even point out when they were inconsistent because they had updates some parts of the world more regularly than others.
inkadu
@Pogonip: Puzzles are fun. But I’m guessing the rules to the puzzles you solve are rather long & involved. I’m glad you enjoy it.
Thanks for the waterworks, Watergirl.
Which cat disappeared for a night and sent John into an unholy and amusing panic? My cat was out one night in 5F weather. Came back the next day smelling like he’d slept on an engine block.
Litlebritdiftrnt
@SiubhanDuinne:
Reminds me of this song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjxxi5cupqI
Roger Moore
@shelly:
Maybe they were thinking of his body type.
SiubhanDuinne
@BGinCHI: Mudslide is awful, and so many people still just unaccounted for. But glad to hear Yutsy is okay (I figured he was, but of course one can’t help being concerned in this globally linked community of ours).
Pogonip
@Elizabelle: I said once before that I’d seen more activity from lions at the zoo. Which prompted replies from a surprisingly large number of people who had seen zoo lions actually move. One guy had seen a lion stand up. The mind boggles.
I have John’s “Very Fat, Very High” post bookmarked; it’s where Tunch tries to move, but is too fat and too stoned on catnip to do so. He (Tunch, not John) holds a foot up, studies it, realizes it ain’t happening, and puts the foot back down.
Where’s the de rigeur scolding of John for having fat cats? Seems overdue.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anoniminous:
Wow! FORTY INCHES!!
shelly
Be careful when you call out ‘who wants to go out?” or Rosie’s gonna whack her head on the underside of the coffee table.
mzrad
Hi there Mr. (losing hair) Cole. NICE pet photo set today.
You have to own the baldness thing. The worst is a pathetic man who no one has the courage to tell is sporting a sad situation on top of his head. Don’t fight it, unless you have the money for whatever intervention Old Handsome Joe Biden managed to get: his hair looks great! Comb-overs are Trump-a-licious and toupeés are Rand Paulish. Own it.
Elizabelle
@efgoldman:
How very strange to think that Gloria Steinem is only 9 years younger than Flannery O’Connor.
They seem from different eras.
Litlebritdiftrnt
Tunch truly was a most magnificent fat bastard and that photo brought tears to my eyes just looking at it. Not to say that Steve is not also a magnificent fat bastard (and to that it looks like he is taking up half of the sofa, is it right that a cat can do that?, the most my cats can do is one cushion)he almost looks bigger than Lily. I am old enough to remember the day you brought Lily home. What a joyous day that was.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
I’ve seen pictures of (and drooled over) the ones inset with semi-precious stones. I’ve also admired the older, antique-looking globes (and in fact I have several antique maps [reproductions, of course] framed — I adore the look of them, and if there are occasional spots of “Here be monsters,” well, all the better.)
But I want a good, clean, attractive, readable, accurate globe. For instance, I would have liked having something near at hand during the past couple of weeks as the Flight 370 story was unfolding and changing almost hourly. And a few years ago, it would have been neat to track on a globe where all the various Arab Spring uprisings were happening, in what geophysical relation to each other. I have a pretty decent map sense, but in my experience the distances and latitudes and so on are far more compelling on a globe than in an atlas.
EDITED to close a parenthesis.
Anoniminous
@SiubhanDuinne:
Puts those 12″ Rand-McNally desk globes in their place don’t it?
schrodinger's cat
I came to Balloon Juice from Sully’s place. The beagles were no match for the magnificent bastard..
Mike in NC
@mzrad: Joe Biden got transplants back in the day.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
Doris Day turns either 90 or 92 (depending on which birthdate one chooses) next week, on April 3.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
I’m mostly over the Gophers losing the national championship game on Sunday. 38-2-1 is a hell of a season, even if one of the two losses comes at the end.
Now I’m dealing with the fact that the class that were freshmen the first year I started watching the team have played their last game, save for Amanda Kessel, who took this year off to play in the Olympics. I’ll never watch Kelly Terry backcheck ever again. Or Sarah Davis fight for a puck along the boards. Or Baylee Gillanders play defense in front of the net. Or Bethany Brausen do something silly like wearing a fake playoff beard.
It isn’t that I’m not going to enjoy future years but it won’t ever be quite the same. I’m going to miss them.
Shana
@SiubhanDuinne: Is the Subaru still in the field?
SiubhanDuinne
@gbear:
Yeah, I’ve wondered about how to keep up with changes as Putin absorbs more and more of the former USSR back into Russia. Or, you know, if Texas actually secedes, or Puerto Rico gets statehood, or something. Do the globe companies send you little colored stickers to paste on, or just how does that work? (I am forever going to feel geographically inferior to Roger Moore‘s talented and knowledgeable brother. That’s a given.)
scav
@Roger Moore: You related to Bob Argesinger? I’m not sure Bob was limited in that skill by the twentieth century — it was a joy to watch him do it.
Steeplejack
@PaulW:
WTF. I got a useless e-mail today from B&N telling me that I would be getting another e-mail in three days detailing the actual credit. The one today did have my settlement ID in it, but that failed when I entered it at the B&N settlement site. Grr.
SiubhanDuinne
@Shana: no, in fact I think John said a day or two ago that he had sold it to a fraternity brother or someone. But one must never pass up a chance to make a stupid Tunch joke, no matter how lame.
JPL
@Steeplejack: I received the same email and withing a few hours, another one detailing the amount.
IowaOldLady
I got $17.04 from Amazon. That won’t last long. I burn through a lot of books, mostly kindle these days.
Redshift
@SiubhanDuinne: My favorite globe ever was an actual topographic one, with a 3-D surface. I think it was at some friend’s house when I was a teenager.
Amir Khalid
@Anoniminous:
That whole thing is almost as tall as I am, and the globe itself is one meter in diameter. I would pity whomever had to look for a place in the Southern Hemisphere. If you were tracking the flight of MH370, for instance, you’d have to sit on the floor.
SiubhanDuinne
@efgoldman:
I came thisclose to making that joke, but figured someone else would, soon enough.
@Anoniminous:
This one, too, except I was going to say Replogle.
Fun fact: a kindergarten classmate of mine was Stephanie Replogle, daughter of the Replogle Globe guy. I remember one time he came to our class to talk about globes. I was way ahead of most of the kids, as we sold Replogle globes in my family’s bookstore. At least I knew what a globe was.
Exurban Mom
I still feel like Tunch is our benevolent overlord. I think of him often. I remember when i read the post telling us he was taken from this earth, I reacted with such shock that I had to tell my family all about him and MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND how horrible what I had just read had been. It felt like losing a part of the family somehow. The internets are a strange place, when you can be attached to a cat a few hundred miles away, and not be in any respect a cat person and in fact be allergic to the damn things. Drinking a toast to Tunch, our once and future king, the magnificent fat bastard.
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
I also love globes. I haven’t shopped in a while, but National Geographic used to have some great ones. There was a store in D.C.; I’m sure there is a Web site now.
. . . Yeah, there is.
Some good globes here, too.
Anoniminous
@Amir Khalid:
It is gimbaled and turns so the user can examine the southern hemisphere.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
I like this one: 16", pedestal or desk, updatable, $185.
Roger Moore
@SiubhanDuinne:
If you want old but not antique-expensive-old globes, you may be able to find them in second-hand stores. I think that’s where my brother got a few.
Anoniminous
@SiubhanDuinne:
I loved globes as a kid and used to spend hours with the 36″ (?) floor globe in our Public Library. I would have been a pest if I had known a globe maker. Did you get to tour the factory?
Steeplejack
@Shana:
No, Cole said in a post a day or two ago that he sold it to some guy and also paid the farmer a little for his inconvenience.
Anoniminous
For fellow globe-freaks: here’s a 40″ one for a mere $200,000.
Roger Moore
@scav:
Not that I know of. My brother just enjoyed doing that. Everyone has to have a hobby, and dating globes by looking at their borders seems rather harmless.
mainmata
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: As a former Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), Tweety is an ongoing, rambling mess. Pathetic. I can’t stand his inexcusable sh**ting all over the carpet all the time.
SiubhanDuinne
@Redshift:
I want topographic AND political.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
This one caught my eye.
Anoniminous
@SiubhanDuinne:
That’s a nice one.
While looking at it I noticed it’s got Ukraine wrong: Crimea, you know. That caused me to wonder if they are going to have to sell off all their old globes cheap.
scav
@Roger Moore: Harmless and sometimes a means of employment. It is grand to learn there are more of them out wandering about.
They’re dated, but old RMC International Atlases are fun too. Boundaries increasingly wrong, but standard scales throughout and native language place names everywhere. Saw a picture of one aboard one of the space stations. Charmingly old tech.
danielx
TUUUUNCH!
With a serious glower, too.
raven
Crimea river.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Check it out: #1 – #2
And as a conversation piece, this one is kind of neat-o as well as functional.
Redshift
@SiubhanDuinne: This one had political boundaries and labels, too.
Citizen_X
Globes are awesome. And if I get rich, I’m buying that $12,000+ one.
I was trying to come up with a Tunch globe joke, but all I got was this:
Consider a spherical cat…
Steeplejack
@SiubhanDuinne:
I liked that one, but the angle of the globe in the stand seemed a little strange. Is that the “real” angle of the earth?
Also—and this applies to a lot of the globes—there is no information on whether it is fixed in the stand or can be taken out and fondled ad libitum, like, say, if you really wanted to examine Antarctica.
Redshift
@Exurban Mom:
Of course he is. He’s watching over us from… above, somewhere, even if he wouldn’t climb the cat tree.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
If I didn’t already collect books, CDs, DVDs, stamps, and dust bunnies, I could very easily get into globe collecting.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
“Fondling Antarctica” would be a great name for a garage band.
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
I think they can all be spun, adjusted, and removed as required. But the 23.5° angle has its own uses.
SiubhanDuinne
@Anoniminous:
Yes, I was wondering about that at comment #85. Truly, I have no idea how they keep up in rapidly-changing geopolitical times.
mclaren
@BGinCHI:
She certainly died way too young. But Heinrich Hertz died at age 36 just after discovering the existence of radio waves, and Evariste Galois died at age 20 after creating group theory.
Little known fact: Hertz was also crucial in discovering and characterizing the photoelectric effect, which Einstein later won the Nobel prize in physics for.
jl
Thanks for pic of Zen master Tunch. Looks like he is reviewing his past lives, or sagely reflecting on the gigantic and numerous karmic burderns of his hapless charge, Cole.
Suzanne
It’s not a globe, but Mr. Suzanne and I nerd out over map projections. I bought him one of these FutureMaps. So awesome.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
Wow, those are really cool!
Jay C
@Elizabelle:
That might be, in my humble opinion, because they basically are: Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925, wrote her best work in the 1950’s and (sadly) died at age 39 in 1964. Which is, basically just the start of Gloria Steinem’s career (in 1964, Gloria was just a year away from having worked as a Playboy Bunny). “Eras” can change pretty quickly: people who live long lives can span a lot of history – especially in the fast-paced 20th/21st Centuries…
SiubhanDuinne
@Jay C:
You are right. I’ve recently been engaged in a long conversation with my cousin and younger siblings (all born in 1945 and raised, essentially, as triplets), whose experiences are worlds removed from mine, only three years older. We shared the same environment but have ended up, 70 years later, with radically different world views. Just a few years can make a huge difference.
Singing Truth to Power
He was a big-boned boy –
joeyess
Ahh……. look at that magnificent flat, sprawling ball of goodness…….. John Cole saved me a week or so ago. I had a cat taken from me in the same way Tunch was. Hard week…….
Cole’s words pulled me out of my pit of despair and he’s living the words he wrote to me…… Now Tunch’s pics make him wryly chuckle….. and they still tug his heart with the desire to rough up his pudgy pal.
They’re great friends. And Cole is right, it does gets better……
Aleta
I had a huge, Tunch-Iike fellow, soft white with red tail, the cat love of my life. When he died (from human mistakes), I would have given a body part to have him back. Lately I’ve been looking for his type on Petfinder; sometimes I find one, but far away and often local-area-only adoptions.
Here’s a big cat who looks like a Tunch-Maine Coon cross to me. (He’s in Virginia or I would go myself. He sounds and looks wonderful.
http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/28024675/