We are devastated!

Our dear little Auri…the sweet little tuxedo kitten that we just wrote about the other day…we now have evidence that she’s criminally inclined!

I guess it’s true what they say about Saturday night being reserved for wild behavior. I woke up early Sunday morning when I heard some odd scratching. I followed my ears to the closet. I opened the door. And what did I see?

Auri, Agile, and Charger, guiltily looking up at me with their beautiful eyes, imploring me not to turn them in to my wife Susan (“The Furminator”)! Together, they had broken into the locked closet and had been greedily wolfing down Panther’s special prescription diet food (40 bucks a bag, thank you very much!). Because it’s prescription food, this may be a federal offense!

But wait, there’s more! Google News reported that Auri was also identified as a member of the notorious Tuxedo Gang! They even have a known hideout!

We’ve tried to raise her right, but she just wants to raise hell (or maybe just raise heck, after all, she’s still a kitten!). Where did we go wrong?

Tags: Auri, kittens, tuxedo cat

One of our readers gently reminded us that we haven’t written about Auri, our newest kitten, since we first got her way back in October. So here I am to correct this serious oversight.

Auri is such a joy to have around. Really, she’s so adorable and happy that every once in awhile I check her belly to see if maybe there’s a battery compartment in there!

When we first got her from the Folsom Carl’s Jr. (no, she wasn’t in a bun, she was begging outside) she was all fire and brimstone, hissing and growling at all our other cats — even Charger, who back then was easily five times her size! But a good dose of our patented Unconditional Love eventually solved that problem, and now she mostly just annoys Aurum for some reason.

Auri is still a kitten, although she’s grown quite quickly, and she can always be counted on to flip her little toy wolf in the air, or fly down the hall in pursuit of a laser dot. She is quite an expert at sleeping, and when sleeping next to one of us will stretch out, turn into a little black-and-white ball, or assume any other reasonable shape in order to stay asleep and stay next to us while we toss and turn.

Having grown to kittenhood on the kindness of Carl’s Jr. patrons, she is also one of the first to the feeding bowls, which is no doubt part of how she has grown so quickly! Here she is in her current sundae best, looking delectable enough to kiss and kiss and kiss some more:

She is a sweetness.

Tags: Auri, kittens, tuxedo cat

Like a number* of other people, I often learn about new and interesting blogs, websites, facts, and videos by surfing around. Today on Digg I happened to catch this extremely funny and well-done parody of the popular movie “Juno” — called “Jewno” to reflect its NYC/Jewish twist. As the saying goes, you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate it…but it helps!

The perpetrator of this short film is a talented fellow named Stephen Levinson, who has some impressive webness here. Not too many young fellas in the film business have the Coen brothers as an opening act, but you’ll have to read the website carefully for the details (if you’re around NYC at the end of April, please go and tell me what I missed).

*A rather large number, in fact.

I just now read an article on the Salon website recounting the author’s experience in China, wherein he was offered meat from a dog he had befriended. Whether this was intentional or simply insensitive is not the point, but the timing is impeccable, since it was just yesterday that I posted my own article about the many abuses going on in China.

Since this is a cat lover’s blog, I do ask you to read my article, but feel free to skip the link there talking about China’s death camps for cats and dogs, since the contents were even too distressing for me to read in detail. And the reason for China’s killing dogs and cats is to simply “clean up the cities” before the Olympics, although they claim it’s to “prevent disease”. The Catholic Church tried killing cats in the Middle Ages, and the result was the disease called the Black Death. Unless you believe there are no rats anywhere in China…especially this year!

In any case, I would like you to take away three main points from all this:

• Cheap Chinese goods are no bargain when they support death.
• We should all try to cut down on our purchase of Chinese-made items.
• Boycott the 2008 Summer Olympics. Don’t even watch it on TV.

Tags: animal cruelty, boycott Olympics, cats, China