I attended a reiki share at a church in a nearby town. The fellow who ran it, I’ll call him “Paul,” told a story about a religious leader who visited from India. This leader sat in one of the chairs in the church, and Paul always told the story.

To a reiki practitioner, the chair seemed to have retained some of the religious leader’s energy. I like to call it “the God-Realized Chair.”

Yes, that’s right, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow. Six more weeks of winter. Happy Groundhog Day!

“Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.”

“You are an Eco-Avenger, also known as an environmentalist or tree hugger. You believe in saving the planet from the clutches of air-fouling, oil-drilling, earth-raping conservative fossil fools.”

Tuning into your pet’s needs – BlogPaws

My cat turned me on to a new blog for pet owners called BlogPaws. There is some mention of a conference for bloggers, writers and pet supply companies. The first emphasis brought to my attention was the SEO aspect of writing a blog.

kittehboi.com is a fun blog, and though we make sure to mention others’ blogs, etc. for google juice, I don’t want it to end up looking like a Peruvian circus, full of multicolored flashing and dancing adverts.

The first requirement for SEO is to have content that brings readers back. I’m trying to wrap my brain around it, to come up with an idea that goes further than “funny pictures of cats.”

I have a personal interest in evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology, so my personal focus is on animals as intelligent, rational beings. Cats and dogs have the IQ of young children, but much more impulse control.

“C’mon, admit it – we all do it. Some of us talk to them as if they can actually understand us (I’m one of those).”

Did you catch that? The writer said “as if they can actually understand us.” Apparently this person has some doubts.

Dogs (and probably cats) have a Broca’s brain or Wernicke’s area, meaning they are capable of understanding speech. In practice cats have a vocabulary of around 20-30 words while dogs may be able to understand 100 or more. Animal behaviorists will tell you it’s “training.” 40 years ago human psychologists were behaviorists too, and explained all human behavior as learned responses to stimuli. How different *are* training and learning?

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And a Happy Hannukkah to all my friends of the Mewish persuasion!

moar funny pictures

And others the [pe] it is dense the cat cat
Hungry Cats

“Harapeko Neko Neko” (”Hungry Cats”) is a Japanese stop-action animation in which two cats are trying to tell their rather dim-witted owner what they want for dinner. They are rather strange cats, as tall as their owner, with expressionless faces and and zippers in the back. The overall impression I get from my limited exposure to Japanimation is that the Japanese conceptualize animals as being little people in fursuits.

Even funnier than the video is the geeky deconstruction on a NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) TV show “Digital Stadium.”

Engrish translation by Yahoo Babelfish.

The person of motif and this movie, cat the feeling which has been made foolish going hand in hand (in good sense,) the [te] it was good. When you look at the collapse of last set, when “the lie where entertainment and the movie were after all made” is, the thought [wa] it is done keenly, (you think too much kana? ). You think two writers thinks that the head and sense are good, that and, also degree of completion of the work itself is high. We want becoming “the Cohen sibling” of the doll animation boundary.

Although expression of the cat does not change, the feeling which is gotten angry having come out enormously, it was even the excessively funny work. Also song is good!

While the cat, is a little larger than the human which to do, the bull bull the place where it approaches in the uncle does not accumulate!!

It can enjoy everyone, “the [u] of everyone it is” PV of the wind. The song which has the agitation just a little to be lovely weirdness the humorous place. Betraying development expectation in [ii] sense, it was funny.

See more incomprehensible videos at NHK “Digital Stadium.”

Thanks to kittehboi.

Don’t forget to track Santa on the NORAD site.

Santa Videos.

Man’s uniqueness among species rests upon his capacity to perfect the arrangements for his own Judgement Day, instead of waiting for nature to do it for him.

Robert Ardrey,
The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations