Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

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

Republicans in disarray!

Battle won, war still ongoing.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

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

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

T R E 4 5 O N

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I really should read my own blog.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Optimism opens the door to great things.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The willow is too close to the house.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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Pet Rescue

Reposting: Lucky the Cat Needs a New Home!!!!!

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There was a lot of interest in Lucky in the comments yesterday, but I’ll need you to email me so I can put you in contact with Sheryl, as she’ll make the decision. So please email me at  Adam-Silverman (at) balloon-juice (dot) com and I’ll pass your info onto Sheryl and you can chat.  We’ll still help arrange transport as needed.

New pic!

This Is a Pet Bleg!!! I Repeat, This Is a Pet Bleg!!! Lucky the Cat Needs a New Home!!!!! 2

Also Sheryl added this: One thing I forgot to say about lucky is, she does not scratch the furniture. She knows how to use a scratching post. Whoever had her before trained her very well.

Original post below the fold.

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Kitty Origin Stories

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Leslie sent in this very sweet non-adoption adoption story, and since TaMara will be super busy for the next month or so, TaMara thought I should post it.

TaMara said that was a lot like she got her first cat, so I told her the story of how I got my first cat. I ended my story with this:

So maybe we all have the same origin story with cats, and just the details are different?

And we both had the same thought – maybe a Kitty Origin Stories thread would be just the thing for Balloon Juice.

Kitty Origin Stories

Here’s mine:  My Kitty Soulmate, Quiver:

For me, it was the cat who wondered in when I worked at the University.  I was moved to a big warehouse building out in the country for a few months while they did some repairs to my office on campus.

I should start by saying that I had never been a cat person, though if I loved you, then of course I loved your cat.  But that was the extent of it.

I returned to work after a couple of days off, and there was a cat in the office.  They had named him Quiver, because of a funky thing he did with his tail.  It was fall, and he visited us every day for weeks.  In the week before Thanksgiving, I kept asking the top boss if we could bring him in for the 4-day weekend that was Thanksgiving – because it was getting really cold outside.  She finally relented!

All of us agreed we would share in the food, the feeding, the cost of the litter box, cleaning the litter box…  As soon as we put the litter box down, he used it, so we were in good shape.

But pretty soon I was the only one feeding him, the only one making sure he had fresh water in his bowl, the only one cleaning the litter box, the only one buying his food.  I didn’t mind.

He started hanging out in my office most of the time, so of course I had to buy him a little cat bed for my “visitors” chair.  And he needed a toy, for sure.  And a brush, he had to be brushed!   For treats, I brought in some cream.

I was usually the first one into the office every morning, and I would say “where’s Quiver” as I unlocked the door.  I knew how much I loved him the day I caught him absolutely racing down the long hallway to get to me in the morning.

Then one night there was a loud clap of thunder just as the night janitor opened the door to clean, and Quiver bolted out the door.  (The janitor felt terrible and left us a note.)  It was cold and rainy and he was nowhere to be found.  I was beside myself.  Inconsolable.  I drove around looking for him everywhere, in the rain, stopping at all the farms where I saw a human.  It rained for 2 days straight.

After a couple of days, I had all but given up on ever finding him.  Then one of the guys spotted him, soaking wet, hiding under a bush.  He snagged Quiver and immediately brought him to me.

At that point, it was obvious to everyone that he was my cat.  He was soaking wet and I’m wearing my good work clothes, but I couldn’t care less. I hugged him and toweled him dry and hugged him some more and held him until he was dry.  And then held him some more!

When I finally got to move back to my office on campus, I asked if I could take Quiver home with me, and they all said yes.  I really don’t know what I would have done if they had said no!

Kitty Origin Stories 1
My sweet, beautiful boy.

So maybe we all have the same origin story with cats, and just the details are different?

Anyone else have a kitty origin story to share?

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Anyone Up for Kitty Transport Relay?

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So this beautiful little girl needs a home.

Anyone Up for Kitty Relay Transport? Anyone Up for Kitty Relay Transport? 1 Anyone Up for Kitty Relay Transport? 2 Anyone Up for Kitty Relay Transport? 3

grammy pat has her and caring & sensitive would like to have her.

Of course, grammypat lives in Texas, and caring & sensitive lives in Vancouver, BC.  So of course our fearless leader asked me to see if you guys are up for a cross-country kitty relay.

Starting point for the relay, if we can pull it off, can be either Austin or San Antonio – depending on the preference of the person who could take the first leg of the relay.

Destination could be either Bellingham or Seattle, depending on the preference of the person who takes the last leg of the relay.

As you all no doubt know by now, I suck at geography and time zones.  So I am most definitely not the person to figure out how to get from point A to point B.

Anybody up for participating in the relay?  I guess that’s the first step before we get serious about figuring out all the details.

Anyone Up for Kitty Transport Relay?

Open thread.

 

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Warm Thoughts for A Cold Season

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(For once, it’s worth reading the replies!)

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Yay for Fishtopher!

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Something cheerful, for a Sunday morning…

Per the Washington Post:

… The “very sad and depressed” 5-year-old feline, a New Jersey shelter said, was waiting for someone to adopt him.

The call-out that went viral — possibly thanks to Fishtopher’s decidedly unimpressed expression — has been answered: A Maryland couple drove to pick up the “big cheeky boy” at the shelter this weekend.

“FISHTOPHER HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!” the Blackwood, N.J., shelter said Saturday.

Social media users have avidly followed Fishtopher’s story since a Twitter post with a screenshot of the seemingly grumpy cat’s online adoption profile was posted on Thanksgiving Day, earning more than 169,000 likes…

Tanner Callahan, 24, applied to adopt Fishtopher after his partner, Laura Folts, 22, sent the link to the cat’s profile — though it wasn’t initially “a super serious thing,” Folts told The Washington Post on Twitter. “We had been talking of Tanner adopting a cat or dog since he moved into his new (bigger) place, and had a trend of me sending cute animals as a joke,” she added.

Callahan lives in Baltimore, and Folts outside of the city. The couple posted pictures of their journey home with Fishtopher on Twitter…

Folts tweeted that Fishtopher has feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV, which weakens cats’ immune systems and is similar to the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Cats cannot transmit FIV to humans…

The executive director of Homeward Bound, Lysa Boston, told Insider, “We are thrilled with all the attention that he [Fishtopher] got and hope that it will make people realize that we have so many wonderful cats and dogs as well up for adoption that are so often overlooked.”

Of course, Fishtopher has his very own twitter account, now — and he (his humans) share pics of other forlorn shelter cats who are still looking for their own happy endings…

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Friday Respite Open Thread: “In Search Of A Hot Pink Bitch Named Breakfast”

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Before y’all get judgey, I once dyed my first dog glitter blue for his doggy obedience-class Halloween party. He didn’t find the dye (which washed out right afterward) nearly as annoying as the strap-on butterfly wings and the light-up deelybobbers… he was a Papillon! (And a bodhisattva, but that’s a longer story.)

“This hot pink bitch was named breakfast!!!” is a string of words and punctuation that’s just barely coherent enough to communicate its subject matter (a magenta dog that is named after a meal) and just crazed enough to inspire intense devotion. The sentence was written, possibly for the first time in history, in a March 22, 2018, post to “Dogspotting” by Katie Dawson along with a blurry snap of a roseate Pomeranian.

In Dogspotting, the 1.8 million-member Facebook group, people post pictures of dogs they’ve spotted and assign them semi-arbitrary point value. It was a mid-2010s internet triumph: one of those rare low-stakes, positivity-only outposts on an increasingly sour and combative internet…

But Breakfast is, at least by the standards of viral animals, underexposed. Unique among internet-famous pets, Breakfast has no curated online presence, no brand deals, no intention to be anything other than a hot pink bitch. Breakfast presumably doesn’t even know they are hot pink, as dogs are colorblind and pink is not a color they see.

A few weeks ago, after I saw a periodic repost of the photo, I realized that the photo was four years old, and that’s about 30 percent of a Pomeranian’s lifespan, which made me sick with fear that Breakfast might have died. I’d lose my breakfast if I lost my Breakfast!

So I cracked my knuckles, opened a new tab, and started my quest for Breakfast. First, I tracked down Katie, Breakfast’s original spotter who now lives in Arlington, Va., and works in partnerships at a philanthropy organization. The Dogspotting Facebook group has an ironclad rule against posting dogs you know, so it was unlikely that Katie and Breakfast had a long-established relationship, but I hoped that maybe she had stayed in touch with the dog’s owners. I mean, they’d presumably struck up a conversation when they told her Breakfast’s name. I pestered Katie with a few messages and eventually she replied to say that she did not know Breakfast’s whereabouts. “Pretty wild that I still get people reaching out about this when I took that picture close to five years ago,” she added, making it clear that she’d moved on. I, unfortunately, had not…

We asked each other, “If you were a hot pink bitch named Breakfast, where would you be?” The answer, instantly obvious, is Instagram. Reed and I looked through the hashtags #breakfastdog and #breakfastthedog, which turned out to be mostly galleries of egg-topped hot dogs or dogs eating bacon, until we found one blurry shot of a Pomeranian by a couch. A bit of sleuthing revealed that Breakfast’s owners had been in an NYC-based punk band—making them the exact type of people you’d expect to dye a dog hot pink, I suppose. Soon enough, I was on the phone with them.

“We got him in 2012 and first dyed him pink in 2013,” Sofia, 33, told me while she was making dinner for her human toddler. In this moment, I realized that Breakfast was a he—a hot pink bro, as it turns out…

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10 Rescued Kittens & Cats Need Homes! (Update)

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More on the 10 kittens, and photos!

Laura titled this The Kindness of Strangers!

Introduction from Laura:

WaterGirl, in her infinite patience with Luddites, offered to post a second installment in the Hartstene Island Kitten Rescue epic, so here goes:

I am trying to find homes for ten kittens.

The ten kitties are eating, pooping, playing, sleeping and practicing their winsome cuteness skills in hopes of finding the homes their moms and dads never had. They come from a property where a kind lady fed a few stray cats and tried to get them fixed, but couldn’t keep up with their reproduction. When I found out about the situation, there were thirty plus cats on the property. A friend and I are trapping the adults, getting them fixed, and placing them in barns through BarnCats.

I am a volunteer at a sanctuary for unadoptable cats. It is not an official charity. The sanctuary is a series of cottages with enclosed yards which the owner built to house the overspill of feral, elderly, and sick cats from a local cat rescue. The kittens are in large ferret cages in one of the cottages, They can’t live at the sanctuary for the rest of their lives; there isn’t room, and besides they are adoptable!

The lady from Kitten Rescue came out and dewormed the kittens, gave them their first shots, cleaned their ears, and figured out what sex they all are.  “Phoebe” and “Spice Girl” are boys. 

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So here are the kitties:

Sammy is a Siamese mix. He was nearly dead when I found him curled up on a pile of garbage. He is now a sweet, happy, bouncy kitten with cream and brown fur and blue eyes. Very playful!

10 Rescued Kittens & Cats Need Homes! (Update)

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