Whiskers are twitching in Boulder, CO, after disclosure that one of the candidates for City Council, Rob Smoke, used campaign funds to buy food for his volunteers. Nothing against the law in doing that, but it attracted attention when it was disclosed that the food was purchased at Only Natural Pet Store.
Campaign finance reports showed that Smoke spent $14.37 of the $236 he’s raised on “dinner for campaign staff” from the pet store. But don’t worry; he wasn’t feeding college interns; his campaign manager, Sita the Cat, was the recipient of the free meals.
“It’s just a general protest against the way expenditures are handled,” he said of his billing his campaign for a household expense. “You have people dumping road signs all over the right-of-way, forcing the city to spend money to clean it up, all by candidates who give lip service to caring about the environment.”
He said his few donations came from personal friends, and he’s not going to hear from real estate developers about how he’s spent their money.
“My taking care of my cat is above what some of the people have done,” he said, referring to candidates donating money to each other to get more matching funds from the city, and candidates accepting money from developers with business in front of the city. “I think there are a lot of abuses, and I don’t partake of any of them.”
Boulder campaign finance administrator Dianne Marshall said the city code doesn’t say which campaign expenses are legitimate, only that expenses have to be disclosed.
“It’s not unusual that he would buy food for campaign helpers,” she said.
Later, Sita became a national sensation when she was the subject of one of the questions on National Public Radio’s popular quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”
In the “Lightning Fill in the Blank” round, host Peter Segal asked comedian Paula Poundstone to guess what justification Smoke gave for using campaign funds to feed his cat.
George the Cat, a clever orange and white tabby in the U.K., has figured out that the best way to get all the tuna juice and Tempations he wants is through hypnosis, and thanks to his owner, he’s accredited as a hypnotherapist.
George’s owner, Chris Jackson, registered George with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP), the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists (UFH) and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association (PHPA). Each accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George’s credentials.
The UFH later admitted the mistake, which it said has since been corrected.
A PHPA spokesman said the organization makes great effort to ensure every applicant is a fully-qualified hypnotherapist.
The BBNLP said it exists only to provide benefits to its members, not to check or certify credentials.
Heather Allen of Halo Animal Rescue says she has never seen anything quite like this in her fifteen year career of saving animals. The chihuahua pup’s mom died while giving birth, leaving the pup needing a source of nourishment… fast!
Allen called Animal Control looking for nursing mothers. The only thing Animal Control had available was a black cat with four kits about the same size as the Chihuahua pup.
They dropped the pup in with the littermates, and so far, so good. Whoever eventually adopts the pup might even find that he’s litter trained!
Forr all you cool cats who couldn’t make it to Burning Man this year, here are a few of the catmobiles that have graced the Playa… maybe to inspire you for next year?
In a claim that strains credulity, Jim Cowell of the U.K. has come forward to claim that his cat Tizzie is the world’s oldest at 36+ years old.
Cowell says that Tizzie was found near some railroad tracks in the 1970s by a couple who gave the cat to Jim’s mother. This 1975 photograph shows Jim’s mother and Tizzie.
Jim hopes that his story will prompt the couple who originally found Tizzie to come forward and help verify Tizzie’s age. Tizzie’s vet has no record of her age, so she’s unlikely to make it into the record books without further proof.
It’s not unusual for cats to want to go to school, but it is unusual for cats to graduate with high school diplomas. Oreo C. Collins has done just that, earning her sheepskin from Jefferson High School Online. Remarkable enough for a cat, but at two years old she is also the youngest ever to graduate from Jefferson.
Superachiever Oreo comes from the most humble of beginnings. Found in a roadside ditch when only a couple of weeks old, the Collins family of Macon, Georgia, adopted and nutured her.
Kelvin Collins, who is the president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Central Georgia encouraged Oreo in her scholastic efforts by helping him investigate online diploma mills.
He helped Oreo sign up to work for her diploma online, and even paid the $200 tuition fee for her.
Oreo was a star pupil, earning mostly “A”s in her classes, including credits for an essay she wrote about her “life experiences.” Collins did provide some support in helping Oreo complete her coursework, help she probably wouldn’t have needed if she’d been born with opposable thumbs. It didn’t hurt that anytime Oreo missed a test question, the test provided a helpful hint at the answer.
Oreo was rewarded for her academic prowess with extra treats and a self-cleaning litter box.
Unfortunately, Oreo’s diploma is not the same as a GED diploma. GED tests cannot be taken online. Collins says that Oreo’s “degree” serves as a warning to those ready to buy worthless diplomas. “We (the BBB) do a lot of stories on these diploma mills, but a lot of times consumers really don’t get it until you show them an example of how they (the diplomas) aren’t worth much.”
Like many recent graduates, Oreo is unemployed and living with her family. But Collins insists that we need not worry about her future: “Like Oreo wrote in her test essay, she always lands on her feet.”
What’s worse than a child pornographer? How about a child pornographer who blames the downloaded smut on his cat?
Keith Griffin (right) was charged this week with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after authorities found more than 1,000 images on his home computer. But Griffin alleges he had no knowledge of the illicit images and claims his cat was behind the downloads.
According to Griffin, his cat regularly sits on his computer keyboard, and on several occasions he came back to his computer to find that “strange material” had been downloaded.
Police didn’t buy it. Griffin is currently being held in a Florida jail. A family friend is caring for the cat.
Casper, a gorgeous 12-year-old green-eyed feline, boards the No. 3 bus outside his home in Plymouth, Devon, at 10:55 each morning, and travels the entire 11-mile route before returning home about an hour later.
It’s an interesting ride. On the route, Casper passes an historic dockyard and naval base, a city center, several suburbs and the city’s red light district (maybe he’s looking for cat houses?) Being a cat, however, Casper snoozes through most of the ride from his favorite spot at the back of the bus.
All First Bus drivers have been alerted to look out for him and wake him up to ensure he gets off at the right stop.
Susan Finden, Casper’s owner, said, “Casper has always disappeared for hours at a time but I never understood where he was going.
“I called him Casper because he had a habit of vanishing like a ghost. But then some of the drivers told me he had been catching the bus.
“I couldn’t believe it at first, but it explains a lot. He loves people and we have a bus stop right outside our house so that must be how he got started – just following everyone on.
“I used to catch the odd bus too so maybe he saw me and got curious what I was doing.
“Casper is quite quick for his age so he just hops on to the bus before the doors close. He catches the 10:55 am service and likes to sit on the back seat.”
Rob Stonehouse, one of the drivers on the route, said, “He usually just curls up at the back of the bus. Sometimes he nips between people’s legs but he never causes any trouble.”
I hope tax dollars weren’t spent on this “well, duh!” research project! Here’s the scoop:
If you’ve ever wondered who’s in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It’s your cat.
Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.
This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.
“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”
They know us
Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and human infant cries.
McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans’ sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound “less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to,” she said.
McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she learned that some of their cats also made the same type of call. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.
Tough to test
Setting up the experiments wasn’t easy. While the felines used purr-cries around their familiar owners, they were not eager to make the same cries in front of strangers. So McComb and her team trained cat owners to record their pets’ cries — capturing the sounds made by cats when they were seeking food and when they were not. In all, the team collected recordings from 10 different cats.
The researchers then played the cries back for 50 human participants, not all of whom owned cats. They found that humans, even if they had never had a cat themselves, judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food — the purrs with an embedded, high-pitched cry — as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts.
When the team re-synthesised the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the human subjects’ urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly.
McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats’ normal purring, “but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.” In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might be overlooked.
The results were published in the July 14 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Edward McIrvin has done his level best to win the “Cat Guy of the Year” title. This volunteer at the Rockingham animal shelter in Reidsville, NC is facing felony charges for catnapping 37 cats slated for euthanasia.
McIrvin, who plans to turn himself in to Reidsville police on Monday, is working to find homes for all the catnap-ees.
“If I go to jail, I hope the cats are saved before then,” he said.
After breaking into the shelter and stealing the cats, McIrvin paid a veterinary hospital $5,800 to spay/neuter and board the cats for one week. The $5800 also covers adoption fees.
As of late Friday, eight of the felines had been adopted, and veterinary staff said there was a line of others waiting to adopt.
Kathe Nagy, office manager at Reidsville Veterinary Hospital, said the hospital did not want to press charges against McIrvin, but had no choice. Rockingham County contracts with the hospital for shelter space, and the cats are county property. The director of the shelter–who assisted McIrvin–may lose her job over the incident.
Like many shelters, the Rockingham regularly takes in many more cats than it can adopt out. According to Nagy, as many as 40 cats are brought in each week, and most face euthanasia.
McIrvin said Thursday he took the cats because he feared they would be euthanized. He housed them temporarily in a Greensboro office and planned to foster them.
“He did the wrong thing but for a good reason,” Nagy said. “He has a very good heart. He’s a lot of people’s hero right now.”
Nagy said many of them had overstayed the 72-hour mandatory hold period and would have been euthanized Tuesday. A total of 23 cats and 14 dogs were euthanized that day, she said.
Let Reidsville know that Edward McIrvin is a hero, not a felon:
Reidsville NC police: (336) 349-1010
Whiskers are twitching in Boulder, CO, after disclosure that one of the candidates for City Council, Rob Smoke, used campaign funds to buy food for his volunteers. Nothing against the law in doing that, but it attracted attention when it was disclosed that the food was purchased at Only Natural Pet Store.
George the Cat, a clever orange and white tabby in the U.K., has figured out that the best way to get all the tuna juice and Tempations he wants is through hypnosis, and thanks to his owner, he’s accredited as a hypnotherapist.
In a claim that strains credulity, Jim Cowell of the U.K. has come forward to claim that his cat Tizzie is the world’s oldest at 36+ years old. 
Keith Griffin (right) was charged this week with 10 counts of possession of child pornography after authorities found more than 1,000 images on his home computer. But Griffin alleges he had no knowledge of the illicit images and claims his cat was behind the downloads. 
