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You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Readership Capture / Pet Calendar Pictures

Pet Calendar Pictures

by | 60 Comments

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I spent the last hour forwarding pet pictures you submitted to our delightful calendar maker, because it needed to be done and because when I am on the reboot of “This is your life” I want to spend the entire presentation wondering why I didn’t just shoot myself in the face at the age of thirty, and I have some thoughts:

1.) I like your pets more than you.
2.) Some of you need a remedial course in photography and I will never take shit from any of you again about my picture taking skills.
3.) Some of you need a remedial course in how to insert images into an email.
4.) Some of you need to be dragged publicly for sending a 4 megabyte .png file that takes up the entire fucking screen and then loops around onto the second monitor.
5.) Special props to you special few who sent me fucking videos of your pets to put in the… calendar.
6.) I pronounce .gif with a soft g so it sounds like the peanut butter just to piss off the nerds.
7.) I like your pets more than you.

Also, one of you used to have a cat named McLovin, a tuxedo, and I miss him.

Reader Interactions

60Comments

  4. 4.

    dmsilev

    @lee: I’m kind of disappointed that it didn’t also have the ‘Assholes’ tag. Haven’t we earned that small accolade?

  7. 7.

    TenguPhule

    7.) I like your pets more than you.

    Feelings mutual, Cole.

    I do believe some of the commenters here would shiv you without question if Lily merely gestured in the appropriate way. //

  11. 11.

    TenguPhule

    4.) Some of you need to be dragged publicly for sending a 4 megabyte .png file that takes up the entire fucking screen and then loops around onto the second monitor.

    Look, it was a 4 meg JPEG.

  12. 12.

    Lyrebird

    I’m still just slack-jawed at your previous post,
    at the garbage being typed by Ross Douthat
    and published by the New York Times.

    He gets paid for his writing, yes?

    AAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I hope they get some barn-burning and conscience-igniting letters. I don’t have time to write a good one right now.

  14. 14.

    Barbara

    Pets are really sort of an equalizer. For evidence, I give you this article about that ghastly person named Jack Burkman who is the malevolent force behind the Seth Rich so-called conspiracy. He owns a dachshund whose name is Jack Jr., and let’s just say that the dog is what makes the following worth reading anything about Burkman:

    When Burkman leaned over to get the documents, Eastman said, Doherty shot him twice in the buttocks with a rifle. Burkman fled up a parking ramp, carrying the traffic cone and his dog, Jack Jr. Doherty admitted he then ran down his former employer from behind the wheel of a black SUV.

    Burkman suffered a broken arm, and two bullets remain lodged in his buttocks, Eastman said. His dachshund was not harmed

    . Source

    The thought of a guy with two bullets in his backside running with his dog for safety . . .

  16. 16.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    Was there a deadline for turning in those pet pictures? I sent them on the 23rd last month.

  17. 17.

    CaseyL

    Damn! My computer has been dying a slow death, and uploading photos in order to send them to you was simply not an option Maybe next year… But I have ordered a couple calendars!

  18. 18.

    VeniceRiley

    @Barbara: IDK, Barbara. Burkman also carried the traffic cone while under fire. I guess that means he thought it had evidence in it and the FBI was gunning for it. LOL forever at that! But that cone was worth as much to him as the dog that gave him unconditional love.

  21. 21.

    HeleninEire

    Jesus Christ Cole; that first paragraph.

    Anyway, Wut? I don’t have pets but how is the pet calendar that difficult. Really? Pick 12 pets. We see pics of them all the time.

    I’m once again moving my whole life across the Atlantic. Pick 12 pets Cole. Not so hard.

    Kisses to you of course.

    Also too Helen +3. Hey it’s 9pm here.

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    I like your pets more than you.

    Hey, at least I don’t puke on the carpet, unlike my cats. The linoleum is RIGHT THERE but nooooooo, they have to puke on the carpet.

  25. 25.

    geg6

    @HeleninEire:

    He does that, he might have to hide in the mountains of West Virginia from the angry mobs of Juicers whose pets were not chosen. You obviously have not purchased a calendar in the past. Each month is packed with pet pics.

  26. 26.

    Middlelee

    @Mnemosyne:
    It’s been my experience that cats will run through three rooms of wood floors to get to the one 4 X 6 rug in the house. Even writing this I start to feel the frustration their behavior causes. WTF Why?

  28. 28.

    Middlelee

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:
    So Bill, I take all my photos with my iPhone and send them from the phone. How do I know if I’m sending something too big or too small? My choices are small, medium, large, and I don’t remember the 4th.

  29. 29.

    Josie

    Special props to you special few who sent me fucking videos of your pets to put in the… calendar.

    This is my most favorite ever. Are you sure they are not trolling you, John?

  30. 30.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    Regarding the pronunciation of “gif”, the creator of the format actually agrees with you, John. It’s a soft g. I’d actually always pronounced it that way even before he weighed in. I don’t actually know why, since “gift” has a hard g. But “gin” and “gist” both have soft g’s because English is stupid and consistent pronunciation rules are for chumps, I guess.

  34. 34.

    ??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??

    @Mnemosyne:
    My cat does that all the time. Recently, he’s been continually peeing outside his litterbox, making a mess. At leas that’s on tile flooring.

  37. 37.

    dmsilev

    @Middlelee: The 4th choice on the iThing is ‘Original Size’, which is what gets those multi-meg images.

    For printing a big picture, that’s actually kind of what you want but it apparently makes Cole sad mad so use ‘Large’ instead.

  38. 38.

    Barbara

    @matt: Is there any logical distinction between “give” and “giraffe”? There are gifts, girls, girdles and gibbons — and then there are gin, ginger, giants, and gibbets. Seems like you can pronounce “gif” anyway you want.

  41. 41.

    Tinare

    I probably sent my pictures wrong. Sorry. I’m extremely tech stupid. Feel free not to use them. I will not be hurt.

  44. 44.

    Yarrow

    Some of you need a remedial course in how to insert images into an email.

    May not be user error. In an organization I’m involved with, when one of the members sent photos from her desktop they always ended up huge and in the body of the email that nobody could download. Same thing with another member and emails from iPhone. We then did a test and it turned out it was something about going from those email programs to other email programs. Mobile and desktop of course had different results. It was (and still is) a pain. They did tests attaching the photos various ways so it wasn’t just user error.

  46. 46.

    Mnemosyne

    @Middlelee:
    @Josie:

    My husband finally broke down and bought one of those spot remover machines that clean the carpet. I’ve only been telling him we need one since 2004, but the man has to make up his own mind about these things. ?

  49. 49.

    Mnemosyne

    @(((CassandraLeo))):

    English is stupid and consistent pronunciation rules are for chumps, I guess.

    You’ve been talking to my husband’s adult literacy student, haven’t you? ? English is her second language and that was her most frequent complaint when they were working on her reading skills.

    (She has now “graduated” from his program and is taking classes to get her GED — yay!)

  51. 51.

    sukabi

    @Mnemosyne: they’re being considerate. they don’t want you to slip in it on the linoleum, whereas on the rug, no slippage…and if you don’t catch it in time it’s not wet either.?

  52. 52.

    Mnemosyne

    @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)  ??:

    If your cat suddenly starts peeing outside the litter box, take him to the vet for a checkup. There are various health problems that can cause them to do that, like getting a UTI, and some of those problems can be deadly.

    If he gets a clean bill of health from the vet, move the litter box. Even moving it a foot or two can make it feel “safe” again.

  53. 53.

    Barbara

    @(((CassandraLeo))): @Mnemosyne:

    Gibbet versus gibbon seems especially stupid. I remember reading about an English teacher who ran into ESL students who knew grammar and a lot of vocabulary but spoke what he referred to as “Booklish,” because unless you look every word up in the dictionary or have a linguistic background in languages that contributed to English, there really is no rhyme or reason to a lot of pronunciation. Even our “easy” words are hard: lots of students (including two of my kids) get stopped by the word “the.” I mean, look at it — why would anyone pronounce it the way it is? And “were” and “where” versus “here” or “if” versus “of”? It’s just nutso.

  56. 56.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Mnemosyne: @Barbara: Agreed on all counts with both of you, especially about “gibbet”/“gibbon”, and of course beyond those there’s the utterly ridiculous amount of homophones and near-homophones in our language as well. I do audio transcription right now and I can’t tell you how much this drives me bonkers. There are so many cases where which homophone a speaker uses changes the meaning of the sentence drastically, so even if the speaker’s diction is clear, careless syntax can make their intended meaning utterly incomprehensible. “In”/“an”, for instance, frequently sound similar. Similarly, “insincere words” and “in sincere words” have almost completely opposite meanings, but are pronounced more or less identically.

    This can also, of course, occur with sentence syntax, where the placement of a dependent clause in one sentence versus the subsequent sentence can completely change the meaning of both sentences, though I’m having a hard time recalling the best example I’ve heard of this (and even if I could recall it, privacy laws would prohibit me from disclosing it verbatim; I’d have had to change at least the numerical values). This probably isn’t as unique to our language, and I’m not sure how I’d avert it if I were designing a new language from scratch, apart from perhaps requiring clauses to have hooks to indicate which previous/subsequent clauses they modified. However, that might be difficult for people to get used to, but it might have the potentially positive side effect of requiring people to think about what they’re saying before they say it.

    I’d think of better examples in both of these cases but I’m writing this post mostly as a brief respite from an interesting but research-intensive final project for school, so I suspect I’m not really capable of devoting my full mental energies to this post. I also suspect I’ll end up needing to eat soon before I can progress further.

  57. 57.

    Barbara

    @(((CassandraLeo))): I think the words with a soft g are French in origin and words with a hard g are more likely to be Anglo-Saxon (girl, gift, give, gild, and gird). Gibbon is also French but lost its pronunciation. So no rhyme or reason.

  58. 58.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    @Barbara: Right. English is the Borg of languages. Which is part of the problem. When we import words from other languages, we never update orthography to match the rules of our language, so there effectively are no rules, so we never update orthography when we import words from other languages, lather, rinse, repeat, hang to dry.

    Of course, it’s also probably too late to fix now; if we changed all the spellings, we’d confuse native speakers instead of ESL speakers. I could type this whole paragraph out phonetically if I thought about it long and hard, and then I’d have to think about it long and hard to read what I’d written. It’s like Dvorak vs. qwerty – even if the former actually did eventually lead to a net increase in speed (research supporting this seems to be dubious at best), you’d still have to learn how to type all over again. Same deal, but for reading and writing instead.

    Some other languages, to be fair, have managed orthography reforms with seemingly few of the problems you’d expect, but I also suspect their languages weren’t in such a bad state to begin with.

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