Books about Kitties: Dewey and Cheezburgers

The Winter Solstice is quickly approaching, so I know you're looking for gifts for the special people in your life. Lots of people like both kitties and books, so here are two book reviews of recently read kitty-themed books.

Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron:

On a cold winter night in 1988, someone dumped a small kitten into the book slot at the library in Spencer, Iowa. Naturally, the cat was dubbed "Dewey" and subsequently adopted by the library. Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, while nominally the story of this apparently adorable cat, also tells the story of the librarian, Vicki Myron, who was Dewey's principal steward for the next 18 years. OK, I confess, I got this book nearly two months ago, from the publisher for free in exchange for reviewing it, no less. I had it read less than two weeks after finishing it, but I just couldn't review it. I was already having a fairly difficult month (why do you think I haven't been blogging like I used to?), and then here comes this book that I think is going to be chock full of adorable stories about a cute kitty being cute in a library. So I read it. And, sure enough, there are lots of funny stories about Dewey being a kitty, but there is also a lot about what corn-growing Iowa was like in the 1980s and 90s ... and about the ordinary yet difficult life of Myron herself, and how like many pets since humans have started having pets, Dewey somehow made everything a little bit better. The writing is straightforward and unpretentious—it's really just a librarian talking about her cat—but as the book is a quick read (and enjoyable, once you've located your box of tissues), it's sure to be a good gift for anyone who likes stories about cats or libraries.


For something more upbeat, here's a review of I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun with more words in the review than in the entire book, by probably an order of magnitude:

It's great having a hardcopy of lolcats (years from now this will still be a conversation starter, whether it lives in a bathroom or on a coffee table), and I was majorly looking forward to receiving my solid dose of happiness-in-book-form in the mail. As expected, it is pretty entertaining, but as other reviewers have noted, it seems that somehow the funniest lolcats were not selected for the book. (Of course, there's no selection which would not engender this kind of response from some group of people, but even though I'm one of Those People who check icanhascheezburger.com several times a day [I bought the book, this shouldn't be surprising, OK?], there were several picture/caption combinations in here that made me just go, "wtf? I don't get it. At all.") The bigger complaint that I have with the book, however, is the presentation: it could do with being a tad bigger, and having some space around the pictures. As is, it is sometimes difficult to tell immediately whether or not the two facing pages are one big lolcat or two completely unrelated ones, and the result is a bit of information overload (and not in a good way, unfortunately). There are several pages on which the presentation is really well done; some space around the picture, a cute little (unrelated) drawing. A few pages are "instruction manuals" or "classroom styles," teaching cats what such terms as "invisible" and "in ur" mean. (Though, again, these pages suffer from the page-size issue.) It's nice to see, in these cases, a presentation which isn't merely "paste picture from int0rnet into book."

Regardless of all these complaints, this LOLcat Collekshun is still a book of lolcats, and any fan of the meme will be happy to get a copy for Christmas or a birthday or a "just cuz." Srsly.

An Engineer's Guide to Kitties

To ensure it doesn't get too serious around here, here's some Friday afternoon fun:

Personally, I prefer the phrase "snuggle attack" to "corporal cuddling," though the alliteration in the latter is appealing. And, for the record, δ Carina is about 18 inches by at most 5 inches, for an aspect ratio of about 3.6; this is why she has graduated from "furball" to "furslinky."

Definitely a Link Dump

I'm tired, and therefore you're not going to get a real blog post out of me. So here are some interesting and/or funny things I've seen on the internet lately.

• Class and National Service as well as Social Class and Educational Access tackled at Uncertain Principles


• And then there's Sean at Cosmic Variance discussing even more evidence for why funding and curriculum standards for public schools should be nationalized.
  


• From Freshome we have a house that looks like a toilet and a sideboard with a glowy full moon


• Are Homophobes Aroused by Homoeroticism? from Dispatches from the Culture Wars


• a funny kitty:
  


• A delightful discussion of typography and political campaigns, via Deadly Mantis
  


• Hat tip to Blake for pointing me to the Relativity Song from everyone's favorite Max Tegmark and 8.033:
  
  


• And finally, via the Friendly Atheist, a nice explanation of how Jesus and Tetris are really the same thing.

DoorKitty

δ Carina recently figured out how to get on top of the bathroom door. I haven't seen her actually get onto the door, but she's pretty funny and proud of herself once she's up there. For your lolcat captioning pleasure...:

A Kitten's Decision Tree

How δ Carina decides whether or not to attack something:
Basically, she wouldn't have attacked Iraq unless she was feeling hyper that day, and I'm not 100% looking forward to flipflop season.

LibraryThing

I know this was a fad a few months ago, but I've just joined LibraryThing, home of the ever-brilliant UnSuggester, the lovely piece of science which tells us that people who own Kushiel's Dart are unlikely to own John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian religion.

As it turns out, typing ISBNs into the computer is more fun that it should be, and now that I have run out of books (I apparently own 201, 44 of which live in my office) I feel the need to keep going. I've made sure as many of the books as possible have the correct cover images associated with them, and even put notes on some of the obvious ones.

Fun facts: my library apparently shares two books with Tupac Shakur's and three with Thomas Jefferson's (but none with Amadeus Mozart—his are old and German anyhow). I apparently have three books autographed by the author; in order of date acquired, these would be The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, I Sold My Soul on eBay by Hemant Mehta, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling. There are only three books which I have in common with only one other LibraryThing member; one of these is a friend who I did not know used LibraryThing but apparently took the same silly French class in college that I did. I would guess now that there are at least half a dozen books which I am the only user who has (somehow I was unsurprised I am a 1905 copy of Lanzo's Applied Mechanics or one of the Thai massage books I bought in Chiang Mai); unfortunately, while I can easily get the number of other users who have a certain book, I cannot sort my entire library by this parameter.

I also apparently have 30 unread books (or, if they are textbooks [which one rarely "reads" cover-to-cover], essentially never-been-used). I find this to be a surprisingly large nmber; I know I have a stack of about half a dozen books in my "to be read" queue (mostly new ones like Freakonomics and The Assault on Reason), but really?? Thirty?! And here I am wanting to go and buy other books? At least this will give me an excuse to start using the date started/date finished cataloging feature LibraryThing provides.

In unrelated-except-that-it's-also-on-the-internet news, I finally uploaded δ Carina to Kittenwar. She has currently won 4 battles and lost 2 ... how could someone not realize she is the cuttest kitty in all of existence?! Silly people.

A Belated iPhone Post

Yesterday marked the end of vacation, complete with the last leg of all-day driving, this time from South Carolina back to Ohio. Hanging out in the car all day can be really boring, especially when preceded by a day of hanging out in the San Francisco airport watching what we were told was the "worst weather in over ten years." So, naturally, I started playing with the (not my) iPhone:

I just learned that I can't upload photos directly from an iphone to blogger. But now we are at a toll plaza in West Virginia. Typing on the iPhone is hard so I don't think I'll finish this post here. Also the road is curvy and Carina wants a belly rub.

Here is said picture of δ Carina sitting on my lap:
The problem with these kinds of "vacations" is that they are not at all relaxing—and yet it is still really hard to even pretend to get work done, so they are just exhausting. I doubt that going to sleep at 8pm the night before returning to the office is a sign of renewed enthusiasm ...

Cat Conversations

While I am in Arizona this week, Carina is spending her time with one of my officemates who has a giant kitty of his own. I wonder if their interactions are anything like this:

A Day to be Thankful For

My new idea is to send people to and for whom I am thankful Thank You cards for Thanksgiving. I didn't think of this until today, but maybe it will happen next year. I love the Thanksgiving holiday because it is so unpretentious: get together with loved ones (or at least, people with whom you can vaguely get along during a meal) and eat lots of food. And, of course, the undercurrent of "being thankful" is perhaps a good one, only normally people take "being thankful" to mean "remembering there are a bunch of things taken for granted that perhaps should not be." This happens even when there is a person who should be the receiver of the thanks: why is it, "I am thankful you are here today" instead of "Thank you for coming today"? Any other time of year, it would be the latter, so why the passive voice when we are actively trying to "give thanks"?

Off the soapbox and back to the food. This year, the significant other came to Ohio and we are spending the weekend alone and away from family. We had a duck and sausage stuffing for dinner; even though neither of us had ever cooked a whole bird before, preparing the duck turned out to be even easier than this ostensibly simple duck roast recipe we found online. Staying true to the spirit of the holiday, we made enough food four four or five people even though it is just the two of us. We also bought a bottle of gerwurztraminer, and discovered that wine bottles can be easier to open with a corkscrew than without, and that most of the people in the grocery store on Thanksgiving can be observed talking on the phone asking if there isn't "just one more thing" needed. There was also bread and goat cheese, hot spiced apple cider, and pumpkin pie. We're halfway through a puzzle bought yesterday, and so far, Carina has only tried to eat one of the pieces. I think she's still got a bit of food coma from the bit of duck she had. The next project will be to see what she thinks of the bucket of Legos once its opened and we try to build a Lego castle...

You Asked For It

As the lone commenter (so far?) on the previous post pointed out, apparently kitty posts get more comments than art or science posts. So, here is a picture of δ Carina in a trashcan:
I'll probably have another science post sometime this weekend, but in the meantime, anyone have a good lolcat caption?

The Indie Art Capital of the World

So, apparently Columbus has been named the Indie Art Capital of the World. I'm not really sure what this means, but it is true that I have become a lot more aware of art—and people creating art—since moving to Columbus. In fact, the guy I got δ Carina from (thanks, Craigslist!) is an independent artist; he even gave me a self-printed short comic book (about SPACE! and Dylan Thomas being cool!) as a thank you for taking my new shoe-sized meow-monster.

Probably part of Columbus's new title can be attributed to the monthly Gallery Hop in the Short North area of town (the aptly named neighborhood shortly north of downtown). Art galleries littered along about a ten block area stay open late on the first Saturday night of each month, as the crowds wander from gallery to gallery, bar to bar, shop to shop, navigating the random music being played and jewelry and other random things being sold on the sidewalks. And, in these cases, a place doesn't necessarily have to be a "gallery" per se in order to attract people looking for visual and mental stimulation; if you have open wall space to hang a few paintings on, you're in business. Just tonight bought my first piece of what could be considered, you know, real art: a 12"x18" print of the above pretty lady, Sernity, from Robert Walker, an artist displaying his paintings at a realty office. I was also lucky enough to see the original of Rachell, this purple-haired vixen on the right, who I might have just taken home with me had I had $1000 to spare...

δ Carina: A Narrative

So the new kitty's name is now officially δ Carina. You may call her δ, Carina, or Carrie for short, but she probably won't respond to any of them. The choice of δ Carina as a name, in retrospect, was incredibly obvious. I had originally been trying to decide between Cassiopeia and Carina (and so either Cassia or Carrie for short), but for such a hyper little hairball, Cassiopeia seems a little to sophisticated. So Carina it is, but the all-too-obvious nickname/association with Carina is Eta Carina, the stupidly massive old cranky variable star in the constellation Carina. And my little bundle of skittish cord-chewing energy is neither massive nor old enough to be an η Carina, so the obvious other choice was Epsilon Carina (since in the land of mathematics ε is generally small but nonzero quantity). But as it turns out, eps Car is a binary star, and since I've got one cat and not two (though, seriously, ε Carina A and ε Carina B would be awesome names for sibling kitties), that was Right Out. So, in the spirit of taking the limit of small delta and epsilon-delta balls, δ Carina became the new name nominee; the only remaining question was: what kind of star is δ Car?

Well, as it turns out, there is no star δ Carina. The Bayer designation of stars names stars in a constellation as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc. from brightest to, er, less bright; so, for instance, Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the Centaurus constellation. So how can a consellation have no fourth brightest (i.e., Delta) star? Glad you asked. See, back in the day, Ptolemy made a list of the 48 constellations in the sky. One of the largest was Argo Navis, the Southern Ship. So there was an Alpha Argo Navis, a Beta Argo Navis, etc. But when the constellation got broken up in 1752 into Vela (the sail), Carina (the keel), and Puppis (the poop deck [hehe]), astronomers, being astronomrs and thus logical in all ways, decided to also split up the stars and keep the Greek lettering instead of, you know, re-assigning the names to the actual nth brightest stars in each new constellation. So, α and β went to Carina, but γ and δ are in Vela—leaving the name δ Carina free to be assigned to my new 9-week-old clingy attacking striped meowing fuzzball.

And so, as she attacks my hands and legs and arms and keyboard and oh my god I hope she's going to get tired out so I can get some sleep tonight, I present to you δ Carina, The First Day: A Narrative.


Oh no!! A new place! What do I do? I'm all trembling and scared.
Cords! And a ball! How do I choose??
Shoes!!!! My favorites! How did you know??
OK time to read some but how do I choose?
That was lots of hard work now it's naptime.
Whoa. I fell off that was scary. I'll hide here and let Athena the Raccoon protect me.

Kitty, Part 1

I got a kitty today!! The apartment I was living in for the last two years did not allow pets (something about undergrads being irresponsible creeps), but now I'm in a pet-friendly place and in town for a while, so ... I will do my best to not let this devolve into a cat blog, but first, there's this post which has been sitting in draft for for almost a year ...

Why I need a kitty:

Because my at-home vocabulary is too large:
Because I need another website to check obsessively.
Because traveling frequently will be just that much easier.
So I can take silly pictures and attach dorky captions to them.




Also, KITTY!!!