So, those of you who read my blog regularly (all ten of you) may have noticed that I was MIA all last week. I wish I had a good reason for my lack of communication, but I don’t. The fact of the matter is, my wife was out of town (Way out of town. London, to be precise) last week, and if I’m being honest, it’s very difficult for me to stay on-task when she’s not around.
Tempting as it is to do the revisionist history thing and post a bunch of entries time-stamped for last week, let’s just pretend that it never happened (which is, in itself, a revisionist undertaking. Tautology! Look it up, kids. Also, what’s up with all the parentheticals today?)
Since only TWO of the aforementioned TEN readers have taken me up on my Meet the Fans Monday feature, I’ve decided to ease us back into the swing of things by interviewing myself. This exercise is two-fold: it give me a chance to mention Chuck Klosterman’s latest book Eating the Dinosaur, which examines the nature of the interview from the quasi-philosophical angle that Klosterman does so well, and it also allows me to talk about myself, which I love doing.
How did you first discover Ex-Boyfriend? I started designing some stuff. It needed a name. And “The Beatles” was taken.
5 10 desert island musical artists? Yikes! Idlewild, The Smiths, Waylon Jennings, The Who, The Beatles, The Cure, Miles Davis, Wilco, Elliott Smith, and Blur. I will rue this list on the days when I crave some Johnny Cash, Radiohead and/or Oasis.
Tell us about your pop cultural guilty pleasures. I don’t ever really feel guilty about the stuff that makes me feel good… but I suppose the stuff that is the most incongruous with my persona would be my appreciation of certain Britney Spears singles, Jane Austen novels, “good” romantic comedies (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, etc) and Gossip Girl.
What kind of tees do you hope we design next? The kind that sell a lot! Ideally, stuff with monsters and robots and critters. You know, the usual.
Favorite haunts on the web? Alright, time for some true confessions… I’m a bit of a sports nut. Not exactly the sort of thing you’d guess based on my job, wardrobe, haircut, listening habits, etc. But I LOVE baseball and football. So a lot of the places I visit deal with sports. Pretty much every one of the Yahoo! Sports blogs is choice. Fangraphs.com. CamdenChat.com. All are pretty entertaining reads. But I also love to drop in on chromewaves.net, because Frank Yang and I share a lot of the same taste in music (and I like free mp3’s), videogum.com is excellent because Gabe is one of funniest bloggers I’ve ever read. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention andiamnotlying.com, which is partially contributed to by my friend David William, who is an amazing artist “living the dream” in hipper-than-hip Brooklyn. And of course tastespotting and liquorious!
Do you have any pets? What are they, what are their names?
I think this is pretty well-documented, but I’m pwned by two cats, Oliver and Bigby. And let’s not forget the seemingly never-ending parade of foster animals.
If you had a time machine, where in history or the future would you go?
The future. To paraphrase Brian Fellows, I don’t do dinosaurs.
Beer, liquor, or wine (be specific)?
Beer and wine are more or less in a dead heat. I love a good Belgian-style wheat beer, but I also like a nice, flavorful copper, amber or red ale. As far as wines, I’ve graduated from the “I only drink whites” camp to almost exclusively reds. I tend to shy away from the drier stuff—no merlots for me, thanks. I like a nice full-bodied shiraz, cabernet savignon, malbec, or pinot noir.
What’s the first thing you notice about the ladies (or dudes if you prefer them)?
Teeth/smile. I can look past a lot of physical flaws, but bad teeth are pretty egregious.
Cake, pie or cookies (ice cream and candy are also acceptable, but be specific)?
This is tough! I love Starbursts. I like cupcakes a lot (though I’m pretty no-frills; plenty happy with vanilla-on-vanilla), and certain pies really get me going (key lime, blue berry, pumpkin, pecan). I appreciate a well-done cookie, but they’re more of a stop-gap dessert in my book—a sort of “well, if there’s nothing else around” treat. My wife’s cherry cheesecake is pretty awesome, as is her pumpkin cheesecake topped with toasted pecans and caramel-bourbon sauce.
As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my wife and I love fostering animals for the Maryland SPCA here in Baltimore. The drag of it is, there are so many foster “parents” on the books with the MDSPCA that you only get a call about once every 4-6 months asking if you’re available. And just as our luck would have it, the last call we got was just days before we left for our tortuous fight with the Icelandic ash cloud back in May, which made it impossible to devote the two weeks the kittens needed before they were ready for adoption. I was pretty bummed, because, y’know, I love kittens, and it was very likely I wouldn’t get another call until this Fall.
Thankfully, I got another one on Wednesday, and promptly prepared our master bathroom for our fuzzy visitors. Five kittens, four boys, one girl, all named after Trueblood characters. Let the cuteness commence!
This* might be the most ingenious plan ever to drive up tithing at church; market God’s love to people that are already up early on Sundays — the poop-scooping demographic.
Initially I was surprised that this was a church in Massachusetts; proselytizing is usually the province of Southerners. But then, those unitarians episcopals are nothing if not inclusive. That said, where’s the special service for cat owners? The way my boys act, they could use a dose of religion every now and then.
*Note the irony in The Salem News using a witch on a broomstick as its logo. I’m sure those Puritan girls burned at the stake 400 years ago are chuckling about this down in Hell.
As excited as I am for my upcoming European vacation (May cannot arrive soon enough), stuff like this just serves to make me pine for a Tokyo visit in the near future.
We always joke that our cat, Oliver, is the sandman. If you’re trying to get out of bed in the morning, he’ll try to keep you there with his kneading and cuddling. If you sit down on our bed (or his bed, if you ask him) to pet him, his hypnotic purrs will have you knocked out faster than a dose of Lunesta.
But these kitties at the Cincinnati Zoo are actually sandmen! Well, sand cats technically. These little desert cats have fur on their paw pads so they can walk around on the hot sand. At just 4.5 to 5.5 pounds, these cuties are even tinier than the kitties at our house. Admire the cute below:
So, as I’ve blogged before, my wife and I are pretty active volunteers at the local SPCA. Our love of companion animals is well-documented throughout the site, from our tee designs to our philanthropicendeavors, but it also carries over into the three dimensional world.
About a month ago, we got a call from the volunteer coordinator over at the SPCA asking if we’d be able to foster a pair of puppies for a couple of weeks until they were old enough to be spayed and neutered before going up for adoption. Despite a split second of reticence brought on by memories of our first attempt at fostering a dog, I said “YES!” Cuteness trumps good sense 99.9% of the time.
So I drove up the next day on my lunch break to pick up Grace (fawn) and her brother Harlowe (black).
Enjoy the cuteness while it lasts!
About six hours later, I was seriously regretting my decision.
While these two are unassailably adorable, all of that goes out the window when they’re, y’know, awake. It’s ridiculous how much energy and poop is contained in those tiny bodies. I feel like the Ms. and I spent two weeks just following these two around with paper towels and sanitary wipes. The good news is, these two were both adopted on their first day of eligibility. As much of a headache as they were, I wanted nothing more than for them to end up in a loving home as soon as possible. As great as the staff and facilities at the Maryland SPCA are, a 2′3 kennel is a 2′3 kennel, and the best thing for these guys is a lot of space where they can run around, if only to tire them out so they revert to their cute and unconscious state. It’s kind of funny how they’d run and wrestle and scamper non-stop for 20 minutes, and then just more or less keel over onto their blanket and pass out. ON or OFF, there is no dimmer switch!
For whatever reason, being an SPCA foster parent tends to be something of a feast-or-famine proposition. Once we’d been approved as foster parents last January, it was a whole two months before we got a call asking us to care for an animal. After that 10-day stint, it was another two and a half months before our next call. Then, we get the call for Grace & Harlowe in mid-October, and the day we returned them two weeks later, we were sent home with 18-month old Jezebel and her six kittens!
Nom nom nom!
Nom nom nom!
Originally (and imaginatively) named Momcat and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, we slowly over the last two weeks got to know every member of the family on an intimate (very intimate—you should have seen the state of that litter box every 6-12 hours; yikes!) level. Being the jailbait strumpet single mom of six, Momcat became Jezebel.
Her brood is made up of two boys, Chunk and Thor, and four girls: Pixie, Rosebud, Clementine, and Valentina.
Sleepy Valentina
Rosebud!
EPIC CUTENESS.
Unlike Grace & Harlowe, these guys were a little more manageable when awake; small size and quiet voices are like that.
While we love every last one of these guys, I can say that I hope we get a little time off now. I miss living in a two bathroom household!
New design, ladies and gents. Please buy one? I have to feed my ever-expanding cat expensive diet food.
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you may remember that a few months ago I rescued two abandoned cats. Yesterday the wife and I (Wife! Crazy!) took Hobbes for a booster shot and the vet told us this guy needs to lose some weight. Because he. is. seventeen. and a half. pounds. Before you report us to social services, please understand that this cat is big-boned. Seriously; this guy’s paws are gigantic, and when he stands on his hind paws he can put his front paws on our counter top. It’s like we have a little mountain lion running around the house. You should hear him trotting down the hall upstairs, it sounds like a herd of elephants. I tried to point this out to our vet, but she still insisted Hobbes was getting pudgy, even for a big-boned part-mountain lion.
So Hobbes (and our other cats) are now on a new and more expensive diet cat food. Awesome. Maybe if you guys didn’t spend 22 hours a day in bed you wouldn’t be packing on the pounds. Just a thought. I am amazed they don’t get bed sores. You’ve never seen lazier animals.
I’m hoping Hobbes’ new food will help him slim down a bit, but if that doesn’t work, there are options:
1. Coffee in the water fountain
The cats have a fancy water fountain that’s supposed to encourage them to drink more water. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to switch my boys to coffee. Kitties on speed will not only result in good Youtube fooder, but all that caffeine might keep them from spending their entire day in bed. Imagine how much more productive my cats could be with a little morning joe. I bet I’d never see another house fly again.
2. Treadmill
We’ve all seen the very excellent videos of cats on treadmills, no? Perhaps it’s time to invest in one for my cats. Not only would this be great exercise, I am thinking we could knit them some leg warmers and headbands. They’d look adorable, like feline Jane Fondas or Olivia Newton Johns.
3. Kitty Thinspiration
I think part of the issue with my cats’ obesity is that they’re pretty proud of themselves. You should see them lying on their backs, tummies in full view, paws in the air. They take great pride in their excess baggage.
You’ve heard of pasting skinny models to your fridge to keep on your diet? Maybe what we need are photos from Cat Fancy of svelte pretty kitties to shame our boys into some self-control. Living in the media-free bubble that is our household, our cats have no concept of socially accepted beauty. A self-conscious cat is a health-conscious cat. Bring on the kitty fashion mags!
P.S. None of the above suggestions are approved by veterinarians. I am only kidding. Please do not try these ideas at home.
P.P.S. I (and our vet) think our cats are pretty rad at any size. We just don’t want them developing kitty diabetes or heart failure. Shit is real. Protect ya neck!
