By request. It’s hard to get pics when I have to monitor for coyotes, which way the kittehs want to go, and whether or not they are going to pounce. I take them out one at a time, because they inevitably want to go in different directions, and then when it’s time to go in, 27 pounds of squirming cat can be difficult to handle. Zooey is in purple, and Ric in denim.
Open Thread!
lollipopguild
Cat-a-rific!
rikyrah
BEST.PICTURES.EVER!!!
LOOOOOOOVVVEEEE THEM :)
rikyrah
Third woman has come out against Brokaw:
hastingstribune.com/entertainment/tom-brokaw-accused-of-making-unwanted-advance-by-third-woman/artic…
rikyrah
CNN’s @LauraAJarrett asked Rod Rosenstein about @freedomcaucus members considering his impeachment
“They can’t even resist leaking their own drafts….I don’t have anything to say about docs like that nobody has the courage to put their name on…DOJ is not going to be extorted” pic.twitter.com/EtW0eNxSFN
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) May 1, 2018
ET
That first picture of Ric basking makes him look like the happiest cat around.
schrodingers_cat
Love the cattitude, Zoey is quite the royal kitteh in purple.
khead
Adorable kittehs.
Major Major Major Major
Omg that first picture of Zooey is great.
Cheryl Rofer
And the rotating tagline comes up:
eclare
Both are magnificent beasts, but that first picture…what a look!
Gravenstone
I’m just trying to picture any of my guys in those harnesses. It’s both an amusing and terrifying image.
germy
germy
This photo…
trollhattan
Go Jerry. Go Jerry. Go Jerry. Go Jerry.
Article doesn’t note the sixteen states joining California in the suit, but they total 140 million.
germy
germy
ruemara
Adorbs! I like those harnesses. Zooey & Ric are so cute! Are they siblings? I guess they are due to the similar coloring. How long have you been doing that? Did you handle leash training them yourself?
I wish I could take the kittens out, but I honestly don’t have time for it and it changes cats into demanding little snits about outside time. They already do that for laps.
PaulWartenberg
writing peeps: do any of you post to Wattpad? If so, what’s the response like? does it keep you actively writing?
scuffletuffle
Had a kitty that I trained to the harness and took her everywhere, even traveling, visiting. She went from a hidey introvert to a totally mellow fluff…to the point where little kids could hang with her quite safely. Next adoption involved 5 kittens and I didn’t have the energy for a repeat. Miel was a one off, but totally awesome.
trollhattan
By my count eight states border Tennessee. Would one of you neighbor jackals please go there and deliver a heartfelt dope slap? WT absolute F?
Cheryl Rofer
@ruemara: I think they are siblings. They were picked up together by Animal Control, and the shelter offered them as a bonded pair. They are good buddies.
I started training them last fall. I put the harnesses on and let them walk around the house. Cats are funny about harnesses. At first, they just freeze and then fall over on their sides. The Vests of Paralysis. But after a while, they realized that they could fight back against the spell. Once they were willing to walk with the vests on, I took them out so that they could see a benefit. And yes, Zooey in particular demands his outside time.
Chip Daniels
That first pic of Zooey is the quintessential Imperious Cat Stare.
MazeDancer
Outstanding pics!
And most inspirational. I have a 19 pound British Shorthair who just showed up in the yard one day. And I’m firmly convinced he was raised around dogs. For one thing, he is constantly waving his tail, not in anger, but like dogs would do in wagging motion, while they mill around the kitchen reinforcing your giving them food or pad around the house looking at you with that “where’s the food?” expression.
Maybe I’ll try one of those padded harnesses and see if he’d like to go on walks.
Mary G
Zoey’s expression in that first photo is hilarious. “Obey me, human!”
@Gravenstone: I can’t imagine my two in those harnesses, but I can imagine the scratches all over me from trying to put them on. Flea medicine is WWIII in our house, and it almost never gets all on.
worn
Neither one of those critters looks like a 27 pounder to me. Must be the lens playing tricks!
Betty Cracker
@germy: That person has me blocked on Twitter, which is weird because I’ve never heard of her. Oh well. I guess I’ll have to live with the mystery. :-)
Roger Moore
@germy:
In the same timeline, I came across this one:
It’s actually a pretty big deal. The California Supreme Court has ruled that for somebody to classify as an independent contractor, they must be doing “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business”. It should mean a business can’t hire some people as employees and others as contractors if they’re doing substantially the same work; you’re only truly an independent contractor if you’re being hired to do something unusual for the company that hires you.
Cheryl Rofer
@worn: They each weigh 13.6 pounds. Together, that’s a bit over 27.
trollhattan
@Cheryl Rofer:
Basically converts to each weighing 0.5 Steves.
Yutsano
@Mary G: “U look tasty hairless ape.”
@trollhattan: So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with the Bee and followed the link for the “What Mike Pence is Doing for California Republicans” and it was nothing more than a fundraiser. I was almost embarrassed for the old coot.
Millard Filmore
@ruemara:
My cat used to be a demanding little snit about outside time. He spent hours out sitting on top of the privacy fence around my apartment’s little patio area. Then my neighbor got two male Siamese kittens. And now, they have been gone two years and Cat only wants to go out for a few minutes at a time, and only when I am close by.
catclub
@Major Major Major Major: I think that first one is Zooey figuring out which shoe is getting cat poop in it.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore: it is a potential BFD. I heard about it on the radio.
catclub
@Roger Moore: Of course, contractors ofr the US government are employees of the contracting company.
I can imagine a similar layer for the private sector – you are still not an employee of Apple – just an employee of the contractor to Apple. With minimum benefits – or guaranteed hours.
mad citizen
Great pics! Love the harnesses–the design has come a long way. 18 years ago I was going to train our two girl kittens on harnesses, but they were strap-types. Lulu wrapped herself around the grill and had a freakout for the ages. I knew I would never get the harness on her again. Her sister Betty passed a year ago January but Lulu, about two years deaf, is still going pretty strong, about to turn 19 in July. She eats soft food, sleeps, and gets rubs.
MisterForkbeard
@germy: Jesus H Christ, REALLY? That’s even more ludicrous and stupid than I could have hoped. The classified information is literally “We’re doing this to offer condolences.” And also, it wasn’t marked classified in the subject header, so it was also incorrectly done and mailed TO Hillary rather than Hillary ‘sending classified information’. I want to hit the people responsible. Or at least yell at them. :)
On a side note, I’m enjoying the current kerfluffle involving Don Blankenship and Mitch McConnell. Calling him “Cocaine McConnell” because his wife owns shares in a rental truck business whose trucks were used to smuggle drugs is fantastically awful, and is actually *more* substantiated than 99% of Republican attacks on HRC. If McConnell thinks this is unfair, I’d love to see literally anyone in the media ask him about the various attacks on Hillary and his obvious double standard.
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: It would certainly have affected several of the jobs I’ve done in the past. And several of the jobs I might do in the future.
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
Isn’t it though?
Simply love it.
David Morris
I have adopted a cat (haven’t had one in over 40 years), and I would like to take it for walks. I bought a small harness, but the cat can slip out of it. I guess I need the holster type? Any advice?
germy
@MisterForkbeard: Blankenship is politically correct, calling McConnell’s inlaw a “Chinaperson” rather than a “Chinaman”
Blankenship will lose spectacularly, right? Seeing drumpf win made me believe any win is possible nowadays.
rikyrah
@MisterForkbeard:
#CocaineMitch
It would be irresponsible not to create the hashtag…LOL
Major Major Major Major
@catclub: in that situation you’re at least an employee of something, which for the sorts of workers we’re talking about is a step up.
ETA for many of them, that is. Thinking Uber here, not myself as a contract programmer or somesuch.
zhena gogolia
@Cheryl Rofer:
The cats are superb. I admire your determination in being able to walk them.
rikyrah
@germy:
He’s responsible for killing 29 people…he’s the perfect GOP Candidate.
MisterForkbeard
@rikyrah: The sad thing is that Comey already proved that threats DO work. He was so worried about Republicans sandbagging the FBI if he didn’t sandbag HRC that he violated department policy in order to damage his campaign, and has admitted as much in his book and interviews.
So clearly working the refs works great at the DOJ/FBI level.
@rikyrah: Remember, he did it in the name of… I don’t know, what’s the excuse this week? Entrepreneurship, or…. wait, i’ve got it: Preserving the Traditional Heritage and Profession of Our Noble Coal Miners.
germy
@rikyrah:
I love when republicans fight.
catclub
@Major Major Major Major: True – some company will have to contribute the employeR
part of SS/Medicare taxes. Which I always suspect too many self employed people try to skip – 15% off the top is hard.
JPL
Zooey in the first picture is saying Sez who… So cute.
rikyrah
My favorite MSNBC legal Pundit:
“I worked for Bob Mueller. The notion that this would come from Bob or his team strikes me as almost literally impossible … They just don’t leak. They don’t talk. If they have to talk, they do it in a court room.”
– Fmr. US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg pic.twitter.com/lyq7JPKUPL
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 1, 2018
Villago Delenda Est
@MisterForkbeard: The vermin of the Village? Ask McConnell about that? They’d sooner dip themselves in acid that do anything that might help Hillary Clinton in the most microscopic way.
MisterForkbeard
@Villago Delenda Est: Oh, absolutely. Hacks gona hack.
Cheryl Rofer
@David Morris: The brand name of Ric and Zooey’s vests is “Kitty Holster.” There are others as well. Zooey has managed to slip out of his, but that was when he was freaked out by a passing car and I was holding the leash wrong. Do not expect to take cats for walks as dogs do. I think that some manage that, but we do whatever the cat wants to – walk a little, run, pounce, sit in the sun. I time them for about a half hour each, but they would like more.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
I assume there will be contracting through other companies rather than hiring independent contractors, but there are big limits when you contract with an outside company. For one thing, that company needs to make a profit, so you’re paying somebody else’s profit margin in addition to the direct cost of the employees. It can still save money overall if you’re paying a lot less or if you’re hiring people for genuinely temporary work, but this should make it hard for businesses to arbitrarily classify some workers as independent contractors to evade employer responsibilities.
germy
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t understand how that works.
In my old age and reduced attention span, I find myself reading informative and sometimes amusing tweets. But I don’t have a twitter account.
If I want to read Bob Schooley for example (someone I discovered here) I google “Schooley” and the first result is a link to his twitter page. I then read his tweets. I do the same with Judd Legum and others.
Because I’m not logged in to twitter and don’t have my own account, I can’t reply to them. But I see no point in replying, I just enjoy reading their tweets.
germy
@Cheryl Rofer: Have you encountered aggressive dogs in your travels?
That would be my concern walking our cat. Lots of big, barely trained dogs on extra long leashes. Some even walk unleashed.
Roger Moore
@rikyrah:
My understanding is that the NYT article makes it clear the leak came from somebody close to, but not actually on, the Trump legal team. If, as Trump says, the leak is shameful, he needs to clean his own house rather than pretend it was Mueller.
Cckids
@Chip Daniels:
This. “Oh, minion!” If he had thumbs, he’d be snapping his fingers at you.
eclare
@trollhattan: I live in TN, in the city which recently took down statues of Forrest and Davis. In response, the TN legislature voted to withhold some funds from Memphis. It’s very much a rural vs city divide.
Roger Moore
@germy:
Blocking on Twitter is definitely leaky. Blocking somebody prevents you from seeing what they write and vice versa, but they can always check what you’re saying by logging out (or using a different browser/incognito window) to look. The big thing is to prevent yourself from getting messages you don’t want.
Roger Moore
@eclare:
Which in contemporary America is a polite way of saying it’s a white vs black divide.
Cheryl Rofer
@germy: We stay in the yard, which is fairly big and offers a variety of microenvironments, along with birds and lizards. The kittehs would prefer to venture out around dawn or dusk, but after one close encounter with a coyote, I decided that closer to midday is better. The coyote was in the next yard, on the other side of a chain-link fence. I grabbed Ric and ran back to the house. Ric seemed totally unaware of the coyote.
West of the Rockies
@Roger Moore:
I wonder if this will affect adjunct faculty.
Betty Cracker
@germy: Yeah, you don’t need an account to read Twitter, and if you do have a Twitter account and someone has you blocked, I suppose you could log out to read that person’s tweets. I just noted it because I don’t think I’ve ever heard of or interacted with that person, so it’s weird that she blocked me. Shruggies! :-)
ruemara
@Betty Cracker: Twitter blockchain. You can block people based entirely on who they follow.
zhena gogolia
@Cheryl Rofer:
I once had a cat who would walk all the way around the block with me, just frolicking by the side of the sidewalk but always keeping basically by my side (no leash). But he was very special.
zhena gogolia
@germy:
That’s how I “use” Twitter.
zhena gogolia
@eclare:
Isn’t this about the lynching memorial?
TenguPhule
@Villago Delenda Est:
Their terms are acceptable.
TenguPhule
@trollhattan:
Nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
TenguPhule
@germy: Peak Irony.
zhena gogolia
Great arrangement of “Just My Imagination,” if anyone needs some sweet music for the afternoon.
Weaselone
@TenguPhule:
Hold on now, shouldn’t we at least hear the type of acid and it’s concentration before accepting the proposal?
TenguPhule
@Weaselone: i figured we’d be the ones deciding that.
gene108
@MisterForkbeard:
As long as McConnell can remain Senate Majority leader, he doesn’t give a damn, what people say about his wife. He is a soulless, power hungry man-turtle, with no shame and no morals, other than amassing power.
gene108
@catclub:
But the employer pays into UI, offers some sort of medical benefits, unless they are a mom and pop shop and aren’t required to under Obamacare, etc. You aren’t getting Apple shares as part of your compensation package, but you do get some general benefits of being employed versus being a contractor.
Roger Moore
@Weaselone:
I recommend concentrated hydrofluoric acid. It’s not quite as nasty as it was portrayed on Breaking Bad, but it’s nasty enough.
Yarrow
Love the photos, especially the first one. That look! Nice they get to enjoy a bit of the outdoors.
TenguPhule
White House defends taking records from Trump’s former doc
Not the Onion.
JPL
@Cheryl Rofer: Chain link doesn’t deter coyote or foxes which both I have seen in my yard.
A neighbor saw a deer walking down my driveway once, but I’m not sure where it came from. I have less than an acre but it backs up to one property with eleven acres and another with 1 1/2 acres. City living.
A few weeks ago, I had to stop for two coyote pups. I did notify neighbors about them because they are so cute and can be mistaken for dogs.
TenguPhule
Breaking at Wapo.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
There’s clearly stuff about his health Trump doesn’t want the rest of us to know. The only problem is that he’s so deranged and mentally different from ordinary people, it’s hard to know if he’s trying to hide something really damaging (e.g. he’s suffering from early Alzheimer’s), something embarrassing (e.g. he’s impotent), or something everybody already knows but he thinks he’s successfully hidden (e.g. he’s obese).
Steve in the SFO
@trollhattan: one of many I never went back to Tennessee after high school
Elizabelle
Cats be rocking those harnesses.
I think they need little Star Trek logos.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
While not on the level of burglarizing Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist it’s still within grenade range. “Blow the damn safe!”
A Ghost to Most
Google “osprey shark fish” for Florida bird pic of the day.
Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian
Kitty Holster, eh? I’ll have to look into it. Thanks, Cheryl.
But I’m skeptical about being able to stuff Spencer into it. He’s 18 pounds of weaponized Maine Coon with an attitude.
JPL
@Steve in the SFO: So you will never be Steve in TN.
btw.. The republicans are using Stacey Abrams to show that she approved of the redistricting, so all is okay.
theintercept.com/2018/04/27/stacey-abrams-georgia-republican-voting-rights-gerrymandering/
I think they are trying to depress the black vote, but Stacey Evans was always the progressive one. They must be scared about Abrams which is okay with me. If she can get out the vote, then even if she doesn’t win the governorship, dems might be able to flip some seats.
The info is just in case you are ever Steve in GA again.
Adrift
They are so gorgeous and you are lucky to be chief of staff to two beautiful cats.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
As ruemara said, there are extensions to Twitter that allow you to block (or, alternately, follow, I believe) users based on who they follow and also based on lists of “known” trolls, bots or icky people compiled by a (presumably) trusted source. As with everything, it’s a sloppy, error-prone process, so you probably ended up on some random list that Cajsa copied from somewhere.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Also rural areas deciding they should be allowed to dictate how the cities are run.
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
Thank God neither of them is wearing the ill-fated redshirt harness.
Quinerly
Anyone discussing this? talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/we-now-have-schillers-side-of-the-story-it-aint-good
Oops… Didn’t read all the comments.
Elizabelle
@Steeplejack: ???
Steeplejack
@Elizabelle:
“Curse of the Redshirt”: video.
Wikipedia: “Of the 59 crew members killed in the series, 43 (73%) were wearing red shirts.”
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I think this follows directly from the racial makeup of rural vs. urban areas.
Steve in the SFO
@eclare: also, “Memphis”, “West Tennessee “, and “Democrat” are all thinly disguised code words for “black”.
Steve in the SFO
@JPL: I still vote there! A candidate named Angelika canvassed me over the weekend. She was sharp. She was good, and German, but not, you know, a “good German” in that sense.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore:
I love my state.
Fair Economist
@Roger Moore:
Por que no los tres?
JPL
@Steve in the SFO: Nice.. I’m in Price’s district and was asked if I wanted to help out. hahaha I simply said no, which impressed my sons because it was not fk no. The previous mayor is running against her and running pretty damning ads on social media. The 48th district is solid republican but if they damage each other, maybe there is a window opening where a dem can win. hope springs eternal
Ruckus
@germy:
Too much money makes people fucking stupid and selfish. Of course if they weren’t so selfish in the first place they may have seen that having vast sums of money really is a worse than useless as a measure of ones value as a human.
Manyakitty
@Cheryl Rofer: The big question, though, is whether or not he’s willing to wait for the vest. I’m concerned about giving my jokers a taste for the outside, because none of them are flight risks right now.
Cheryl Rofer
@Manyakitty: If they’re happy the way they are, not necessary to change. These two are my first fully indoor kitties, and I feel a little guilty for having abridged their freedom to run.
Manyakitty
@Cheryl Rofer: Fair enough. Your gentlemen look so happy frolicking in the sunshine.
Ella in New Mexico
@Cheryl Rofer: Well, you live up near where my brother lives, and TBH far too many of his kitties lost their lives to coyotes or owls or heaven knows what. You did the right thing. I’m in Cruces. My cats are city pusses who roam my yard and sometimes next door, and after they learned about “THE ROAD!” for the most part are safer than yours are exploring.
And my gosh they’re just adorable, by the way. So silky and pretty, I can almost feel how good it’d be to obsessively pet them… :-)