The Empress of Cat Food

FrankenMouse

So far the raw diet experiment is going pretty well. The cats all loooooove it. And their poops smell a lot less! I would write about all the reasons that I'm finding it to be a good idea and how I am NOT AT ALL CRAZY to do it, except I'm too busy making the cat food itself.

I tell you what, though, I would totally start my own business making this shit, except I wouldn't make the frozen kind (shipping and storage costs would make it prohibitively expensive, I think) but the pressure canned kind which is shelf stable at room temp. It would be so easy. You would source your meat suppliers (seek out ethical ones) and get your permits together. Call your company FrankenMouse, because the food is basically trying to re-engineer a mouse and mice are the perfect food. (Or call the company something less stupid. Please don't think that the kind of marketing that I do is the kind that involves naming start-ups.)

Christ, you could start production out of your own kitchen. Pressure can all the food, then you can ship it at ground rates. Once business ramps up, look for a commercial kitchen. After that's outgrown itself, move to a farm and raise your own rabbits and chickens locally. Organically. It would cut down on production costs hugely. Raise their feed on the farm as well, natch. Get vets to consult on special needs lines. Do actual research on actual cats. Eat your own cat food, literally - something like a video of me eating the raw cat food would totally go viral on YouTube. Holy shit, right? I should make that video just to see if there's a market. (Also that would be BADASS.) Invest in a sustainable salmon fishery. Make corporate donatations to salmon research. Sell excess produce to local restaurants, because the kicker is that not only is the cat food human-grade, you're raising the chickens and rabbits and salmon on human-grade food.

You could market it as not only the best cat food nutritionally, but also the cheapest and most ethical choice possible. You could get Whole Foods to distribute it, first some local in-store testing and then nationally. You could build an empire.

Happiness is

singing along to Passenger Side while drinking whiskey with only the cats to hear.



This right here is made of awesome. I think it's actually better than the original - the video definitely beats Robert Smith clawing at the air and lying on the floor singing.



In case you are not familiar with the original.

In what may not be a coincidence, Simone is currently lying in my lap purring and biting my typing fingers. That's the signal that I have to go be a crazy cat lady for a while. Plus the whiskey needs a refill.

for my sister the artist

This is right up Sue's alley. In fact, anyone who's got a zen for zombies and/or claymation should watch this. It's REALLY well crafted. Srsly. Note to my other sister: wait until the kids are in bed until you watch this, because it's pretty gory and the boys will get scared.



via BoingBoing, where so many good things come from.

it's hard to think of seven wierd things I haven't told you all already

For Maya. I love memes. And talking about myself. What's not to participate in, here?

I. I re-read Hamlet once every couple of years. Usually when I'm feeling especially sorry for myself.

II. I am so hyper-clean that I've been known to use q-tips when cleaning the toilet; my fish, consequently, fail to thrive because I ruin their little ecosystem because I can't stand all that dirt in the tank.

III. I'm pretty sure I'm one of those people who taps their teeth and drums their fingers and jiggles their leg but none of it is on purpose so I don't usually notice. I bet it's annoying for other people, though.

IV. I am the boss of my cats. (Unless you have cats, that's not going to sound weird, but it's at least unusual. To the non-cat people: trust me when I say that generally the cats are the bosses of the people.)

V. In college I could read 100 pages an hour (actually I think I can still do that) and take legible notes at the speed that the professor talked. Without skimming or using shorthand. Everyone always wanted to borrow my notes. (I definitely can't write fast any more, and legibility has gone south too.)

VI. I can pull my left thumb out of the socket and bend it around like a chicken wing. (Starting to reach for things here.)

VII. Despite the second item on my list, my car is usually dirty and smells like ass, especially when the weather has suddenly warmed up and you put on the a/c and a terrible mildewy smell comes out of the vents, like the breath of a dying old man with gum disease. I guess that's not exactly weird but it is gross. Sorry.

Sopranos + timewasting = genius

Okay. So a friend of a friend (it's more complicated really but I'll leave it at that) created this gorgeous little snippet of a video documenting reactions to the Sopranos finale. It's clever and amusing. There are NO spoilers. And it's worth watching even if you haven't watched Sopranos since Season 3 and have no idea what went down in the final version. (Uh, in a crazy coicidence, I fall into this last category.)

Eventually I plan to Netflix the entire Sopranos series but haven't gotten around to it. Also Dave sleeps much less than me - no seriously, he sleeps like 5 - 6 hours a night which A) leaves me in slack mouth wonder and envy and B)makes him predictably REALLY SUPER FUCKING CRANKY by the end of the week. Anyway, it means that he gets through Netflix DVDs of TV shows much faster than me - I'm still working on Season 2 of The Office (UK version - totally, awesomely relevant to a bunch of stuff in my life) and he finished it the same night we started watching - Sunday. So far I've fallen asleep a few episodes in each time. This would be fine if he didn't object to having DVDs around for longer than, say, a week. (Maybe we just each need to get - and pay for - our own subscriptions, so I can wait AS LONG AS I FUCKING WANT to watch them.)

Anyway. The video.



By the way, if you've got time, click on this link instead of the YouTube one since the visual production values are so much better and you can see how pretty it all is.

The creators of the video are hoping it'll go viral and get all over the internet, just like it's hard to eat lobster without getting lobster stink all over your house and person. Even after repeated scrubbings with lemon juice. But, uh, to get back to the viralness, if you think it's a decent video, then by all means, repost. Submit it to digg or reddit if you're a user. Post it in one of the TelevisionWithoutPity threads. I don't even know what the best platform for spreading viral TV-related videos would BE, it's such a narrow vertical and so far out of my usual terrain. If you have better ideas, though, definitely lemme know.

Other news, in upcoming post: got a haircut. gained more weight. got divorced. these three events are related. heh. I'll post haircut pictures, at least (I'm sure no one wants to see eveidence-of-weight-gain pictures. Although my own obsession with the way my jeans fit did give me pause over the past 4 weeks. I think it's as simple and as difficult as this: my weight is ostensibly under my control. It didn't help that my shrink was booked solid for 4 weeks, either. Sort of my fault for not making a bunch of appointments in advance, but then I had a bunch of other stuff going on.)

And I bought a bunch of new music, most of which turned out awesome - Feist's The Reminder being the best surprise - and I was feeling all cocky and then realised: when you haven't bought new music in two years, it's not that hard to cherry-pick seven decent albums.

I bought a bunch of new makeup, too. Including liquid liner. Hee. I'm scaring people with it already.