Cat Man Do
November 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Cliff shared this great animated cat video with me. The way animator Simon Tofield is able to capture such realistically entertaining cat behavior with such simple animation is spectacular. Tofield is an animator for Tandem Films, much of their other work is also entertaining. I really enjoyed Tofield’s tiger advertisement for Singapore Zoo and the extract from Flatworld makes me want to see the rest of that film.
Tags: advertisement, cat, cat annoying, film, kitten, kitty, man, man sleeping, simon tofield, singapore zoo, sleep, tandem, tandem films, tiger, tofield, video, zoo
Monkey Washing A Cat
April 20, 2007 | 3 Comments
Most people will have seen this clip by now. It is a favorite of both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t much funnier than this video of a monkey washing a cat. In fact, I can’t help but giggle every time I watch it…
Tags: cat, colbert, colbert report, Daily Show, monkey, monkey washing cat, video, washing
My Cat Has A Computer Virus!?!
March 16, 2006 | 2 Comments
In a white paper released by the University of Amsterdam and promoted on RFIDVirus.org, an explanation of how RFID is actually vulnerable (in many cases) to simple SQL injection attacks.
How does this apply to your cat (or other pet for that matter)? Well, many veterinarians and the humane society now implant RFID chips in pets to help identify and match strays up with their original owners.
Their research group has developed a proof of concept following this basic scenario:
prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected. Since the vet (or ASPCA) uses this database when creating tags for newly-tagged animals, these new tags can also be infected. When they are later scanned for whatever reason, that database is infected, and so on. Unlike a biological virus, which jumps from animal to animal, an RFID virus spread this way jumps from animal to database to animal. The same transmission mechanism that applies to pets also applies to RFID-tagged livestock.
Hopefully if this gets enough press, wide scale deployment of RFID can be further delayed.
Tags: cat, cats, privacy, RFID, rfid virus, university of amsterdam, virus
Cyclops Kitten
January 22, 2006 | 55 Comments
I’ve been shown this poor little kitten a couple times now, so after feeling confident about it’s validity, I figured I should blog it…
According to some sources, the shortly lived kitten suffered from Cyclopia, a medical disorder characterized by the fusion of the orbits into a single cavity containing one eye.
Other places report that the cause was Holoprosencephaly, which causes facial deformities, according to the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. In the worst cases, a single eye is located where the nose should be, according to the institute’s Web site.
Anyway, the common report from the AP provided by Yahoo news:
Cy, short for Cyclopes, a kitten born with only one eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. The kitten, a ragdoll breed, which died after living for one day, was one of two in the litter. Its sibling was born normal and healthy.
Traci Allen is keeping the kitten’s corpse in case science wants to research it. I wish they would so I could feel even more confident this poor thing is real… If so, maybe it would qualify as world’s ugliest cat!
Tags: animal, bizarre, cat, cy, cyclopes, cyclopia, Cyclops, cyclops kitten, eye, holoprosencephaly, kitten, kittens, oddity, one eye, pet, photo, ugly, ugly cat, weird
Sketchy Feline Abuse
August 6, 2005 | 4 Comments
This image from the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness is just plain sketchy. Notice they are holding the cat down with their foot at one point? Who’d actually do this process to their poor cat?
This jogged my memory of an equally funny and disturbing cat situation. Check out CatEnema.com. Read the full story, it is quite funny, though I do feel bad for Fred.
The final scary cat story is fortunately not likely to be true. Go take a look at BonzaiKitty.com. They’re slogan says it all: “Dedicated to preserving the long lost art of body modification in housepets.”
Tags: bonzai, cat, enema, feline, housepets, sketchy, technical documentation, vacuum, weirdness