Humans online sometimes refer to their black cats as voids because you can’t see any details of the cat in normal light, just a solid black cat-shape with two glowing eyes.
Calliope (a calico) just pointed out to me that only some black cats should be referred to as voids: ‘If they stare at you, they’re an abyss,’ she said. (I’m translating, of course.) ‘But if they shout at you, they’re a void.’
Okay, that makes sense, I guess. And who am I to argue with a cat?
It’s not any kind of animal, living, extinct, or imaginary; it’s a triskele. (It’s also the populace badge for the Kingdom of Trimaris in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which is, indirectly, how I came to be aware that some idiot AI somewhere thinks it’s a brontosaurus. Grace was doing something online a while back with SCAdian heraldry images and getting very frustrated that an AI thing kept trying to force extremely incorrect tags on everything… When she shouted, “It’s not a [expletive deleted] brontosaurus!” of course I had to find out what had caused the outburst.)
According to that same AI, this is a pig with knife:
So… not as wrong as the first one, but still wrong. (This is the populace badge for another SCA group.) Those are teeth — y’know, the knives that some animals have naturally in their mouths.
And this is a purple dinosaur:
Nope. It’s a wingless dragon dormant purpure. (*shakes head* I know way too much about heraldry terms for someone who mostly doesn’t have any use for such knowledge except to notice when someone’s unicorn is facing the wrong direction.)
And this one, according to that AI, is neuroscience:
It’s a ram’s head. Sure, real rams don’t go around with their faces painted blue and white as if they were hugs fans of some sports team with those colors, but blue-and-white doesn’t suggest brains and stuff, either, does it?
I don’t think I’ve told you about Peanut.
He’s a kitten, currently eight weeks old. He was all of one day old when we found him on our back porch. We don’t know who his mother is; none of the local “ferals” had had kittens recently.
Anyway, eight weeks after that, Peanut is thriving. He gets along well with the other housecats, and Bruce (kitten formerly known as Sploot) has been doing a pretty good job of teaching him how to cat.
Here’s a photo from last week of the two kittens together:
You may recall Bruce from this summer:
(This post brought to you by ‘Weaver was reminded of a thing because he read a blog post by a sapient member of the allium family even though he’s not part of the target audience for said allium’s blog.’)
Maybe you’ve seen a list somewhere online of ‘words that also mean their opposite.’ If so, you’ve almost certainly seen the word peer on the list.
It shouldn’t be there.
Allow me to explain…
Yes, peer refers to one’s equals. No, it does not, ‘also refer to the nobility.’ In that usage, peer is short for royal peer, meaning a person who is the equal of royalty.
On Monday morning, Grace heard a kitten mewing outside the office window… Long story short: we have another cat.
Black-and-white kitten in a cardboard box, on brown and green towels, with a blue “mousie” cat toy behind him.
We’re calling him Sploot for now, until he’s a few months old (current age is about four and a half weeks) and ready to choose a grown-up cat name.
The Tower, my clone-sibling’s latest novel is now available for preorder. Release date is June 1.
(Yes, I’m excited, but if I talk too much about it, I’ll end up sharing spoilers, inundating readers with trivia about various characters, and probably making an incomprehensible comment about pizza or coffee or something. Best to just let everyone read the book in peace.)
Sometime when I was six or seven years old, I saw an old Gilligan’s Island episode in which Gilligan is having a nightmare about being forced to be the figurehead/stand-in for the actual dictator of some small South American country. (I haven’t seen this episode — or any other from that series — in at least forty-five years, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get some minor details wrong.) At some point, the populace becomes very unhappy with the way things are going in that country (the way one does, when one lives in a place ruled by a dictator), and there’s a scene in which Gilligan steps out onto a balcony and looks down at a plaza filled with what could be reasonably described as an angry mob. He mentions this to the actual dictator, who says the people aren’t upset. Gilligan insists they are: he can see them, clearly quite angry about something. So the dictator says, “Who’re you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
I’ve been reminded of that line a lot lately.
It’s dangerous out there – maybe you need one of these:
Stormy, a tabby kitten, inside a pseudo-medieval helmet.
North of Andover 