LOLcats in a New Home
After lots of investigating, emails, and phone calls, I finally found a no-kill shelter with slots for the two kittens, and as of tonight, they're hanging out with other cats and in no immediate danger of being euthanized, tormented, run over, or eaten. It took some doing, and I'm relieved: I couldn't rightly conscience letting two young beings I'd had in my care chance easy harm or death. Tink and Zeugma don't miss them -- well, maybe Tink, a little -- but I do.
Especially with kittenish behavior like this wonder at the glories of the carousel microwave:
OMG!! It has soundz AND movez AND foodz! WANT!!!1!!1!
And I'll be volunteering for a few hours a week at that no-kill shelter, starting tomorrow morning.
Learning LOLKitteh
The Ratliff compels, and one obeys.
Well, OK: Clancy wrote, "Mike, you HAVE to do an I Can Has Cheezburger? image," but while I can read and parody LOLKitteh, I'm far from being a native or even adequate speaker.
I'm doing my best to learn LOLKitteh, certainly, particularly given its recent emergence as one of the fundamental philosophical discourses of modernity. My efforts, however, yield slight return. Tink and Zeugma regard me indulgently as I practice the tense-shifts and contractions, but when I attempt to engage them in LOLKitteh, they flee to the litterboxen.
As Clancy has demonstrated, though, LOLKitteh allows us to speak of that which other discourses and other interlocutors (our friend and colleague Joanna Howard comes immediately to mind) forbid. There is, for example, the practice of interrogating so-called 'flavor' as sociocultural and affective construct.
However, my lack of LOLKitteh fluency has stymied attempts at adequately describing the above interaction.
Your captions are welcomed.
Imagined Feline Affective Relationships
The girls are four years old. We'll celebrate, of course, on Caturday.
Semicolons and Pianos
Tink's whiskers quiver sometimes separately and sometimes chorded together, like piano strings.
Zeugma is often like a semicolon, and sometimes like a comma.
My Assistant Grader
She's more holistic than me in her approach to assessment.
But she always likes it when students manage to work the words "hermeneutic," "reflexivity," and "halibut" into their essays.
Cat Class
The [no longer] last line in my "about" description, "I like cats," is a bit of a private joke that may merit some explanation. Several years ago, I was taking a seminar called "Writing and Emerging Technologies" and working on a paper that talked about various generic qualities of Web pages when someone -- it may have been me -- made a reference to "I like cats" home pages. It seemed an apt description of those pages many of us in the seminar were familiar with: usually hosted on GeoCities or Tripod, #FF99CC or #CCCCFF background colors, white-haloed animated .gifs, various badges and hit-counters at the bottom, blink tags, lots of exclamation points, and lots of pictures of the page author's cat in various poses, accompanied by descriptions of the cat's activities, the page author's favorite books and hobbies and other favorite things, all described in breathless prose. In this context, the declaration "I like cats" is a tool of rhetorical ethos: it positions the author in relation to two groups of people, those who like cats and those who don't. (The male geek equivalent to the "I like cats" page that most of us in the seminar were familiar with was the "I like Pam Anderson and Deep Space Nine" page.) In using the phrase "I like cats" to describe these pages, there was an unfortunate rhetorical sneer, at least on my part. I was engaging in snobbery, constructing the "I like cats" authors as real life versions of Jean Teasdale. In that sense, for me, "I like cats" became a class marker.