The two responsible for the mauling of Buddy the cat have turned themselves in:

12-year-old, 17-year-old turn themselves in to authorities following vicious attack on Buddy the cat

Sadly the two have not been identified because they are juveniles, which also means that they will very likely get a slap on the wrist at best. They came in to the SPCA with “a parent.” This probably means they’re brothers. And it raises the question “why not both parents.”

Interestingly, if you let the video embedded in the above link play, it cycles through a number of stories, including one about a skunk. Here, some people saw a skunk with a peanut butter jar stuck on its head roaming randomly in a panic; they called animal control who successfully got the jar off its head with nobody getting injured or sprayed. Ta-da. A more opposite sort of story would be hard to immediately invent…here, an animal that, unlike a cat, is generally *disliked*, finds itself in trouble and humans actually give a damn and go to some effort to provide aid to the animal. Granted, it’s not detangling a sharktopus from radioactive razorwire, but still… compared to two monsters taking joy in the destruction of a loved, harmless animal? It’s fricken’ Nobel material.

And unrelated to cats and critters, but related to Philadelphia:

Family members identify teen gravely injured after shooting in Wissinoming

The teen is 15, and by “gravely injured” they mean “brain dead, will die in a day or so.” Apparently he was merely a bystander to some sort of altercation that led to shots fired. Police think it might have something to do with an attempted robbery around the corner.

Philadelphia sounds like a nice place to stay the hell away from.

As anyone who has ever had to deal with the myriad of medical maladies that can afflict them, cats are fragile. Conversely, they can be tough little bastards. I saw that years ago when Fingers was still an outdoors farmcat, stoically shrugging off a neck wound that would have utterly ruined a human. And Buddy the cat, set upon by two pit bulls and two “humans,” manages to continue to fight to survive.

Buddy the cat is ‘hanging in there’ after vicious attack by 2 dogs in Philly

There is a brief Facebook video embedded there showing that he is up and about, kneading. That would seem to be a good sign.

No word as yet whether the perpetrators have been found.

Well, if you want your day ruined, I can hook you up (after the break, cuz this story sucks):

Edit: the story deals with the torture of a cat. Those who know me or who have followed the blog long enough will recognize that this sort of story sets me off in a way few other stories will. Some people argue that this is a mismatch of priorities: in a world of rape and murder and war and genocide and Star Trek Discovery, surely one little cat is a small thing compared to the other horrors humans perpetrate. But as I mentioned a few days ago, animals cannot understand the world as we do. When humans mistreat other humans, even on an industrial scale, humans can understand what’s going on. Even if the “why” is unclear, it’s really not that hard to figure out. But to a cat (or a dog, or a horse, or a racoon, or a squirrel, or a mouse), someone committing acts of horror on them is beyond their comprehension. The human in that story becomes a cosmic horror, a god of pain and madness. THAT is why I refuse to harm critters that I don’t need to (mosquitoes? f’em) for any trivial reason. I’m not some touchy-feely hippie who refuses to eat meat because cows or pigs or fish are sacred, but I will demand that the animal not be tortured. I will have the urge to apply boot to ass to anyone who abuses critters for fun. Because cosmic horror should be avoided in real life.

Anyone who tortures an animal becomes, in a very real sense, a demon. And for someone who does not believe in demons, that’s quite a statement.

“Cosmic horror” is a genre of horror invented – or at least perfected – by author H.P. Lovecraft. Most forms of horror have the protagonists being menaced with death by knife wielding maniacs, weirdos with chainsaws, werewolves or sharks trying to eat them, vampires looking to drain their blood, aliens looking to wipe them out. Whether good or bad, that type of horror is comprehensible to the protagonist, at least after they’ve had a little while to process what’s going on. But cosmic horror is horror based on the protagonist being wholly *incapable* of understanding the threat, what’s going on, what the future holds. The alien or the maniac can be defeated in the end with a shotgun blast to the face, or a nuke to the homeworld… but the cosmic horror cannot be defeated. It might be avoided, evaded, delayed or bypassed… but the protagonist will never “win,” nor will the protagonist ever really grasp just what the hell is going on.

By definition, this one is tricky to define, trickier to pull off successfully. Fortunately (?), recent event suggested to me an easy to understand analogy for cosmic horror. Take, for example, the story of “Stepan,” a cat made somewhat famous on Instagram. Stepan seems a perfectly normal cat, in perfectly normal surroundings, with perfectly normal humans. The usual sort of photos and videos of Stepan looking cute made the Instagram account famous and popular. But it wasn’t cosmic horror.

Until very recently. Because Stepan is a *Ukrainian* cat.

Stepan the Internet-Famous Cat Escapes Ukraine, Finds Safety

The shelling of Stepan’s town of Kharkiv caused Stepans humans to pack up and unass themselves and their cat to France. Now, a war, even a bad one, is something humans can understand. A human adult can understand it quite clearly. A human child will have difficulty, perhaps, but unless the child is stupid or incapable of communication, the war can be explained to him/her. The idea that “fire bad” and “bombs bad” and “incoming rockets bad” can be impressed upon them, and rockets and bombs can be explained as to what and why they are, how they work. But to an animal? Sorry, no. Explain all you want, a cat is never going to grasp the first damn thing about a war. All the cat knows is that their life was going along pretty well, then their food-monkey-butlers started acting strange. Then they started running around, then there were loud noises and the big warm cave they live in crashed down and burned, one of the monkey-butlers burst open and stopped moving, the other started making really loud noises then ran away, now the world is rain and snow and fire and wind and loud noises and other monkey-butlers running around making loud noises and sometimes falling over and stopping, and sometimes kicking at them and what is the foul smelling black goop that spilled on my fur and why is it suddenly bright red and why does it hurt and why when I run away the red crackling pain stays right on me ow ow ow…

Yeah. To a cat, a dog, a horse, war is *never* going to make the first bit of sense. It will always remain incomprehensible chaos and madness that will pursue them into their dreams, years after normality has returned. War (or an earthquake, or a house fire, or a tornado, or a hurricane, or one of their humans suddenly going insane due to booze or meth or bad news, or…) is simply beyond an animals ability to begin to comprehend. It is the very essence of cosmic horror. The trick for an author who wants to capture cosmic horror is to do for human characters what war would do for an animal character. The idea is straightforward enough, simple to understand, like “add one extra dimension to a line, you get a square; add one extra dimension to a square, you get a cube; add one extra dimension to a cube, you get a tesseract.” But while the concept is straightforward enough, that last step can be a doozy to really pull off.

By the way, here’s Stepan while being evacuated. This is the look of someone who has peered into the abyss and come away uncomprehending, hope and joy drained from them, refilled with a new fear. This cat has seen some ᛋᚻᛁᛏ. If your human protagonist looks like this at the end of the tale, you *may* have successfully introduced them to some form of cosmic horror. On the other hand, if real-life humans or animals end up looking like this due to actions you have taken… please consider that you may be the baddie.

I have the feeling I posted this some years ago. If so… oh well, it’s worth watching again. A little kitten at a Syrian vet clinic, expressing its disapproval over getting stabbed with needles, and putting up the best fight it can. If it was a *real* fight it would lose, and lose badly… but it would have earned its place in Valhalla.

The war in Ukraine is now affecting cats. The much-feared Fédération Internationale Féline has issued a proclamation:

The Board of FIFe feels it cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing, so it decided that as of 01.03.2022:
● No cat bred in Russia may be imported and registered in any FIFe pedigree book outside Russia, regardless of, which organization issued its pedigree.
● No cat belonging to exhibitors living in Russia may be entered at any FIFe show outside Russia, regardless of, which organization these exhibitors hold their membership in.

Well. Putin has no choice now but unconditional surrender.

Banshee looking either startled or annoyed. Or both.

In the past couple years as I’ve been buried under a mountain of CAD drafting, I’ve also found myself with access to a lot of streaming content. So I’ve been watching a lot of old movies that I had never seen before… some good, some bad, a lot indifferent. A week ago I watched “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly;” a few days ago, “Pale Rider.” Those were good. Then yesterday I decided to give “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” a shot. Got less than halfway through it when I decided that, even as background noise, I had far better ways to waste my life.

Let’s get this bit out of the way. As y’all may know, I’m pretty anti-woke. But, *wow,* that trans-racial Mickey Rooney character was freakin’ *painful* to look at and listen to. Yeeeeeesh.

But that wasn’t my problem with the movie. The movie is about one “Holly Golightly,” who turns out to be an incredibly shallow, vapid, materialistic gold digger with no apparent redeeming value. That’s pretty much *exactly* the sort of thing I’m not interested in. And the movie was also *boring.* So somewhere around a third of the movie, a new character was introduced. I looked at him and went “Huh. Is that Buddy Ebsen? It looks like him, but the voice doesn’t sound like him.” So I looked on IMDB, and, yup, that was him. As for the voice, I went to the “trivia” section pf the IMDB page for the movie and tried to find reference to whether Ebsen was dubbed by someone else. I didn’t read that, but I did read this:

Audrey Hepburn said the scene where she throws Cat into the rainy street was the most distasteful thing she ever had to do on film.

Wat.

Quickly losing patience with the film, I looked up “breakfast at tiffany’s” and “cat” and “rain” on YouTube, and found the scene in question. It’s the ending scene of the film, and it shows Holly driving away in a taxi in the rain with her pet cat Cat. She gets in a huff for some reason, stops the taxi, opens the door, and puts the cat out onto the street and has the taxi driver drive away. She doesn’t actually throw the cat, but not only does she dump the cat, she dumps the cat onto a busy street; not only that, onto a busy rainy street. That results in this shot: