Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Bark louder, little dog.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, it’s door #2)

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

I really should read my own blog.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

He really is that stupid.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

So many bastards, so little time.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread and Rocky Update

Open Thread and Rocky Update

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Thursday Night Open Thread 9

We have an update on Rocky!  I do love a happy ending.

Update from indycat32!

Was talking to my neighbor yesterday afternoon.  Turns out Rocky is not homeless.  He belongs to a woman in the next block who has way too many cats. According to the little girl who was visiting my neighbor Rocky’s name is Leo.

The 4 cats that I now think are  hers that I’ve had contact with (that is, I got  neutered) were all well fed, friendly and health.  Not what one usually expects with hoarders, which why I thought they’d been recently abandoned. I guess Rocky just preferred my house – less crowded.

Animal Care Services is now involved, and according to my neighbor they’re letting her keep the ones that have been fixed. So  I’m out of the Rocky business.  He is being cared for and will, I’m sure, continue to stop by for a snack.

Thanks to everyone on Balloon Juice!

Open thread.

Here’s he original post in case you missed it.

Cat Bleg – One-Year-Old Rocky in Indianapolis Needs a Home

 

Reader Interactions

74Comments

  3. 3.

    MinuteMan

    Cats are like that. If the neighbor’s chow is better than yours, they jump ship like the free agents that they are.

  4. 4.

    CaseyL

    They’re letting her keep the four that you had neutered.  Isn’t neutering is an overnight procedure, even for the boys?  So “her” cats vanish for days – and then turn up with no testicles –  and she doesn’t notice?

    How many are left?  How many did she have??

  5. 5.

    indycat32

    @CaseyL: Strays, or “community cats” are not kept overnight.  Take them in early in the morning, pick them up the same afternoon.  And she did wonder to my neighbor down the street “who is fixing my cats”.  I don’t think he told her even though he did know

    ETA: don’t know how many she had. I only know a lot.  She’s keeping the fixed 4.  Animal Care told her they would be back to check.

  6. 6.

    Trollhattan

    Frickin’ cats, man.

    Glad, uh, Leo is being aptly cared for, king of jungle and all that.

  7. 7.

    VFX Lurker

    Happy for Leo/Rocky. ❤️ Wishing him well.

    Props to indycat32 for neutering the cats. 👍

  9. 9.

    karen marie

    I had a very ancient Portuguese neighbor in Massachusetts who brought home two tiny kittens – a male and a female.  She was oblivious to spaying and neutering.  Wanting to protect myself against a deluge of kittens, I arranged for a local animal rescue to tell her there was a special program for seniors that would spay/neuter her cats for free.  I paid happily.  When the boy was about a year old, he started spending all his time at my house, because he was in love with my cat.  My neighbor was furious with me for a couple years, accusing me of stealing her cat, but eventually she understood that I wasn’t doing anything to stop her cat coming and going, he’d simply chosen where he wanted to spend his time.

    It may seem a bit ridiculous to pay for other people’s cats to be spayed/neutered but if you can afford it, it’s the right thing to do.

  10. 10.

    eclare

    @VFX Lurker:

    Yes!  Major props to indycat32 for being responsible!  Those kitties have her to thank for being able to stay at their home.  I wonder why the owner didn’t get any fixed?

  11. 11.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    Yay for Rocky! I like that better than Leo. ;)

    My Dark Brandon yard sign arrived today and now I’m deciding between ordering red-tinted LED pupils or red/clear LED pupils that light up red. Decisions decisions… In the meantime I have it propped just inside my garage so anyone who goes by can see it.

    I like the choice of Star Wars font…lol!

  12. 12.

    CaseyL

    I get that it’s a good thing Rocky-Leo will be able to stay in territory that is familiar to him, among humans he already knows.

    But considering he seemed to very much want to be someone’s kitty – someone other than The Hoarder – I’ll just say it may also be a good thing he has a potential Second Mom down the street he can seek out if needed.

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @indycat32:

    I’m curious. When the various cats were fixed, did the vet also notch their ears to signify they were feral (which was the assumption, yes?), or is that not a “thing” everywhere?

  14. 14.

    Doc Sardonic

    Think one these might be appropriate in my area.

    CHINGATUMAGA

    PENDEJO

    No Mas Naranja

    2024

  25. 25.

    Another Scott

    Reminds me of seeing a dog out alone one evening when I was walking Ellie.  It had a collar but its only tag was an Apple AirPod thing.  I don’t have an iPhone….

    Rocky/Leo – “Hey, I just went down the street for a friendly snack, why am I half-way across the country in a new home??”

    Human-readable collars and tags – how do they work???!

    [sigh]

    You did well, indycat32.  Thanks for the update!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  27. 27.

    TaMara

    Every time I see Rocky/Leo, I can’t help but think how much he looks like my pensive Gabe looked, who was with us much too short a time.

  29. 29.

    Steve in the ATL

    @eclare: I assume this is to replace the brain drain since I moved away?

    Or maybe I should lay off the Delta wine—haha j/k NEVER!

  30. 30.

    Baud

    @eclare:

    He described the scale of the proposed supercomputer like this: “If you take the two largest supercomputers in the world, and you combine them and you multiply them by four, that’s what we’re building here in Memphis.”

     

    Yeah, that guy knows nothing beyond the sales pitch.

  32. 32.

    TBone

    @SiubhanDuinne: I didn’t know that was a thing!  Our newest cat Josey has a notched ear.  Neighbor-former owner said “he doesn’t like to come inside” when I asked her about him, but Josey comes inside our house every chance he gets and every night at the same time before we go to bed. The neighbor who lives behind us got a new dog who EATS cats for a hobby and all of their 3 cats suddenly became community cats.  Josey sat in our yard for a year before he’d come close. I’d gradually get close and was able to pet him during feeding. However, when I told her he was really very sick, possibly dying from exposure, hunger, a wracking cough, and only one tooth left, she shrugged.  I know SHE didn’t take him to the vet!  Finally during a cold November rain he completely relented and let me bring him inside. Happily ever after…I wondered how he got fixed all this time.  Thanks for letting me know!

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @eclare:

    A city can’t say no to something like this, but the issue is what they’ll give away as “incentives.” That’s where things go awry.

  36. 36.

    eclare

    @Baud:

    I am aware.  I work in tax and have worked on acquiring credits.

    Once this thing is built, assuming that it does get built, I don’t know how many employees it will need on a continual basis.

  38. 38.

    eclare

    @Baud:

    No idea, but Muskrat chose TN/Memphis for a reason.  In theory, as long as there is continual capital investment and a large workforce, I don’t object to credits and incentives, like for the Ford Blue Oval project about an hour away.

    But I don’t know that this project will have either, and I don’t trust Muskrat.  Too many people are still just dazzled by the name alone.

    Memphis also has pristine, amazing water from an aquifer.  It’s probably Memphis’ greatest resource.  How much will this project consume?

  39. 39.

    TBone

    Open thread dept.  Not just saying the quiet part out loud, but now BUILDING MONUMENTS to it!  🤬

    https://digbysblog.net/2024/06/05/oh-jared-2/

    Gah!

    But the fine print of the deal includes a commitment that seems destined to stir up even more international controversy: a pledge by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to construct a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”— an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees a quarter century ago in response to its relentless campaign of repression and savage massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
    Among those exercised over the Kushner deal is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the war.
    While he has no objection to a U.S. firm investing in Serbia, the planned revisionist memorial—officially proclaiming America’s adversary in the war to have been a victim of  “aggression”— “is worse than a reversal” of U.S. policies in the region, said Clark in an interview with SpyTalk. “It’s a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”

  40. 40.

    Baud

    @eclare:

    and I don’t trust Muskrat

    Yeah, when you first linked, I didn’t realize it was a Musk project. In my heart, I wish a blue city could tell Musk to pound sand on principle alone. I hope it works out Memphisians, or at least doesn’t cause too much damage.

    ETA: my heart sank when I read about the water part in the article.

  41. 41.

    Kay

    @karen marie:

    When the boy was about a year old, he started spending all his time at my house, because he was in love with my cat.  My neighbor was furious with me for a couple years, accusing me of stealing her cat, but eventually she understood that I wasn’t doing anything to stop her cat coming and going, he’d simply chosen where he wanted to spend his time.

    I love this story. I had a black cat at one time – an indoor cat. I once got a call at work from someone who had driven by my house to tell me the cat was on the roof. It was a different black cat though. I couldn’t believe anyone cared about my cat that much.

  42. 42.

    Geminid

    @Baud: This sounds like grounds for a shareholder lawsuit, for Tesla stockholders. Musk acts like he owns these companies and can do with them what he wants. He doesn’t own Tesla though, just a big piece of it.

  44. 44.

    smith

    I see the Republicans in the Senate blocked the Right to Contraception Act. Hope they’re ready for the ads pointing this out.

  46. 46.

    Nukular Biskits

    @Baud:

    Ref Musk, supercomputers –

    Believe it or not, MS was supposedly in the running to get that.  Which makes me wonder what sweet, sweet taxpayer-funded “socialism” MS officials promised Musk … which means TN officials promised even more.

  47. 47.

    MazeDancer

    Does this mean Rocky was living with a hoarder? Actually still is. How many that aren’t fixed are the authorities taking away?

    Maybe I’m missing something obvious. Not understanding the “happy” part. Cats are being confiscated. What ever led Rocky to seek help hasn’t changed has it?

    Indycat is to be commended, of course. But I’m confused by the “happy”.

  48. 48.

    bjacques

    @Baud: counting on my fingers and toes—carry the 1—that’s sixteen supercomputers! One supercomputer is really impressive, but sixteen? That’s almost unimaginable. What a time to be alive!

  50. 50.

    Another Scott

    @eclare:

    Once this thing is built, assuming that it does get built, …

    Do I detect a note of skepticism?? Why on Earth would you be skeptical??

    WOSU.org (from 2022):

    A proposed hyperloop line that promised to provide high-speed travel from Chicago to Columbus and Pittsburgh appears to be dead in its tracks, at least for now.

    Hyperloop technology involves powering pods down low-pressure tubes via magnetic force, reaching speeds of over 500 miles per hour.

    The Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission has been working with Virgin Hyperloop One on the feasibility of such a line since 2017.

    Thea Ewing, the commission’s chief regional development officer, said the company’s technology has yet to receive approval from federal regulators.

    […]

    Even in cases when it’s true, and especially in cases when it isn’t, blaming the federal government for failures of big projects is an all-purpose excuse.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  54. 54.

    Another Scott

    @eclare: Thanks for the link.  Made me look…

    For comparison, ORNL.gov (from 2022):

    The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking today as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.

    Frontier features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops, or two quintillion calculations per second, making it ten times more powerful than ORNL’s Summit system. The system leverages ORNL’s extensive expertise in accelerated computing and will enable scientists to develop critically needed technologies for the country’s energy, economic and national security, helping researchers address problems of national importance that were impossible to solve just five years ago.

    […]

    * Frontier has 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, which are purpose-built to support next-generation supercomputing performance and scale, once open for early science access.

    * Each node contains one optimized EPYC™ processor and four AMD Instinct™ accelerators, for a total of more than 9,400 CPUs and more than 37,000 GPUs in the entire system. These nodes provide developers with easier capabilities to program their applications, due to the coherency enabled by the EPYC processors and Instinct accelerators.
    […]

    So they’re aiming for roughly 8x that or maybe 16 exaflops.

    A graph mentions that their cooling plant has a capacity of 40 MW, equivalent to the power consumption of 30,000 homes. 8x that would be 320 MW or 240,000 homes.

    The Top500 list has Frontier at the top, and it consumes 22.8 MW. It says Frontier has 8.7M cores.

    Oak Ridge can power things like that because it has the TVA nuclear plants nearby. I’ll be very surprised if Memphis can bring that kind of electric power online “by the end of the year”.

    We’ll see.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  57. 57.

    Jay

    So, it turns out that James Comer’s past is coming out.

    Wonkette link to avoid The Beast link.

    https://www.wonkette.com/p/james-comer-kentucky-fried-banjo

    As Ag Commish, he awarded a trial program to grow commercial hemp to a sponsor/donor, then twice provided that Company with trial seeds, once from Italy (Mob?) and once from China (Warlord?) that were straight up, high potency pot seeds,

    Then colluded with the “grower” to avoid DEA testing of the “crops”.

  58. 58.

    Argiope

    Since this thread is about animals getting back where they started, I helped reunite some chickens with their people today.  Walking the dog in our usual spot, the town cemetery, I came across 4 hens hanging out near a big fir tree.  This is not typical.  I’ve seen lots of deer, many dogs, tons of birds and once, memorably, a young woman walking a pair of goats, but chickens were a first.  No one seemed to have noticed them including the maintenance guys.  I decided to call the non-emergency number for the local constabulary and let them know if anyone called to report lost chickens, where to look. I was walking home a few minutes later when the penny dropped and I remembered which family probably had chickens close enough to go on the lam in the cemetery.  Called them up and theirs were missing…they were relieved.  A fox had been spotted in their driveway earlier in the day and they’d been fearing the worst, so it was a happy ending.  And we got to answer the age-old riddle as well.

  63. 63.

    indycat32

    @MazeDancer: I don’t know how many cats Animal Care Services took, but she now only has the 4 fixed cats and Animal Care Services will be checking on her.  When the cats showed up at my house they were well fed, healthy and friendly (which is why I thought they’d been dumped). That’s not what I typically  think of when you say hoarder, even though yeah, she was a hoarder.   I’m not sure  Rocky was seeking help, but rather he liked the wet food I feed my small colony of community cats.

  64. 64.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @indycat32:

    Do you know how long Animal Care Services will keep checking on her? Without serious intervention, hoarders resume hoarding. You can take their “stuff” or, in this case, cats, away, and they’ll start accumulating all over again. So I’m sad that Rocky/Leo has gone back to her. Not your fault or responsibility, of course, but hoarding is a serious illness that doesn’t just go away. Something I know from direct, personal experience.

  68. 68.

    karen marie

    @Old School:  I’ve been continuing to mask in enclosed public spaces, although I’ve gotten a tiny bit lax – like today, I didn’t mask at the vets – but I’m now buttoning back up.  These motherfucking germs ain’t going to get me.

  69. 69.

    Indycat32

    @O. Felix Culpa: I don’t know. All this info was told to me by my neighbor and her friend. I’m assuming the cat woman’s neighbors will keep a watchful eye. And obviously she lets the cats wander. If necessary I can always swoop in and kidnap Rocky. I doubt I’ve seen the last of him.

  70. 70.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud:  Guy, without any concept of what this is, mindlessly repeating the kindergarten-level description that someone gave him.

    What could possibly go wrong?

  72. 72.

    BeautifulPlumage

    @MinuteMan: ​
      Bob cat did beg on my back deck before I finally took him in. Turned out he belonged to a new next door housemate and he didn’t like the resident doggo. She cried when she gave me his collar but knew he was happier. Lovely little brat and overall goode kitteh.

  73. 73.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @eclare: oh, it’s musk. Don’t let him bottle up your aquifer and sell it. Oh dear. Good luck in Memphis.

    water rights are a big thing out west. I wonder if Memphis is going to need

  74. 74.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Gloria DryGarden: need good natural resource lawyers.
    I wonder what sneaky things he’s going to push through behind closed doors.

    (in Colorado someone from out of state got a private session w the state Congress and got the rights to a new lane on the highway up to boulder. Taxpayer funded, profits to the new owner. Community had no say. If the road closes in a blizzard, any lost toll revenue is owed to the owning entity, to be paid from the taxpayer base, also. I wouldn’t like it to happen to others. I bet it does all the time.  My fellow Coloradoans here can explain it better than I.)

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