The latest strip from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller, will appeal to the many atheists who—for reasons that elude me—are into fantasy and science fiction. But it also appeals to me.
h/t: jsp, Marella
Bafftime!
August 24, 2014 • 4:42 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Ha ha!
As for science fiction, etc., last night’s Doctor Who where we got to know the new Peter Capaldi Doctor better, included the Doctor telling a machine, who was using human parts over millennia to keep it alive so it could go to “the promised land” after death:
The Doctor followed up that their superstition is a result of them stuffing too much human into them.
[SPOILER] And yet, at the end…
Doctor Who has a strong tradition of humanism.
If it has a philosophical flaw, it’s that it often espouses dualism.
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You could argue that the dualism isn’t all that much as each new doctor is different with a different personality.
Ah, no, it wasn’t regeneration that I was thinking of, but some specific stories, such as the Christmas special with the sentient trees.
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No, that’s just sufficiently advanced botany.
I like science fiction because it takes the super out of supernatural.
Cats are bad enough at bafftime, but consider a 160 lb Wolfhound who doesn’t like water…
I vacuumed my 100 pound dog yesterday. There is a Dyson brush attachment. 🙂
If worse comes to worse you can muzzle a d*g, and then it’s just a wrestling match. For cats, you need a straight-jacket; and then you can’t get at the parts you need to wash.
Yeah, dogs lack both the sheer flexibility of cats and also don’t have paws that end in sharp scratchy things.
Hmmm, time for some inverse logic, perhaps? Head thee down to the local caving store and get an oversuit in one of the newer extremely-abrasion resistant fabrics. Gloves too. Full-face motorcycle helmet. Steel-toecapped boots.
Now wash your cat.
Though why one would need to. I struggle to understand. Our mog never had a bath in her life – 18 and a bit years of it.
There’s always the “wet room” option too.
Why would a cat need a baff?
Flea shampoo.
Picture an all-white cat (his name was “Silo”) with a crapload of fleas. Start flea-shampooing him from the tail forward. The fleas, as it turns out, flee from the flea shampoo. By the time you get to his ears, his face appears to be boiling with Brownian motion fleas. Fascinating and stomach-turning at the same time.
Flea shampoo? Never used the stuff. Just collars impregnated with flea-i-cide chemicals, and changed every 6 months or so. Never had a problem.
If you’re running a re-homing/ shelter operation, then I see the potential problem. And it’s time for the armour plating. Or a wet room and a hose pipe set to “spray” with the appropriate chemicals and collect the used chemical from the drains.
Aren’t there powders / dusts that would achieve the same end, with rather less distress for the cat? Like I said, the collars were always effective for the cats I’ve lived with, so I never dug any deeper into the subject.
This was ~20 years ago, so I don’t remember why we used what we used or what the alternatives were.
When Moxie Grace OwlFace was alive, she was a longhaired Maine Coon of black and brown colors only. Moxie Grace was for 14 years the most fastidious of glamorizing self – groomers.
She was also an outdoor / indoor kitty so one day she got something awful on a lot of her fur, slime that smelled like d*g crud. It was the only time she was unable to ‘handle’ .all. that had come onto her form. Likely it was done to her by another animal or even a human; it is surprisingly shocking how evil some are to … … particularly kitty cats. I state that because she was so, so careful — usually.
Well, she needed a bath to get her furs cleansed enough. It — bathtime — was exactly as this cartoon portrays. As I knew it would be such a war, I prepared.
Into the tub I — my whole self — went with her. Only ON my person and under the shower with the tub already partially filled, I was wearing complete and full body – armor: three heavy sweatshirts, one on top of the next, and one pair of sweatpants underneath a pair of denim dungarees with old, leather work gloves.
It happened. I won the war.
But barely.
Blue
Moxie Gracie Owlface would be a great title for a chapter in a SF story.
Absolutely adore that name!!! When babbling to a cat, I will often append words like breath, bottom, face, lips, and other species like pig, cow, eagle to their names.
And congrats!
You survived.
you definitely need to get a caver’s wetsuit. The next time, the cat is going to be wise to your wiles, and will be communicating to the new cat.
What do the hard-of-thinking call it? “Channelling” ? In this case, the channels will come in sets of 4 or 5, and be deep and abundant.
I think this is from Steve Martin –
I gave my cat a bath today, and he loved it. The only hard part is getting the cat hair off my tongue…..
LOL!
That reminds me of a Gary Larsen cartoon: there was a tiled wall with a big tongue hanging down and the caption “cat shower”.
That’s one I don’t remember! 😀 Jeez, I miss Larson.
Try this link:
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/Lx19/Images/larson_cat_shower.jpg
OK, I didn’t mean to do that – sorry!
Don’t worry, Sheila, it’s a new WP feature that we’re learning to live with. In this case I think it’s most apropos.
What could be more on topic? 😀 Thanks!
Sometimes it’s fun to pretend you’re a 12 foot tall minotaur clad in a chain mail battle bikini dutifully applying damage modifiers to a dragon’s butt.
..And I’ll take the dragon over a wet, angry cat any day.
I’ve yet to need to give Baihu a bath. There’ve been a few times when out on a walk (on a leash, natch) that he’s rolled in the dust…but I was able to wipe out the worst of it with a wrung-out hand towel, and he took care of the rest himself.
I shudder to think at how much blood I’d lose if, for some inconceivable reason, I actually had to do the full immersion thing…might actually be best to take him to the vet for that and have it done under full anesthesia….
b&
Full anæsthesia for you or for him?
In 1979 my husband & I were moving by car from Austin to Boston, but we made it only to Waco before the incessant caterwauling emanating from the cat carrier impelled us to pull over at the nearest possible rest stop. Our vet had given us some kitty tranqs just for such an occasion and the time to employ them was now. (Actually it had been about an hour earlier, but we’d been overly optimistic…)
The cat, already in a not-so-pleased mood, was of no mind to let us jam anything down his throat. We wrestled with him at a picnic table, getting more and more flustered, all three of us. Meanwhile we’d failed to notice that the ground all around was full of grass burrs; we’d let our poor d*g out to run a bit and she was now howling in pain with every step. (Not to mention in need of a good de-burring.)
My husband, pills in hand, turns to me and says, “I have an idea. Put the cat back in the carrier and let’s take these ourselves.”
Inclusive OR ?
Definitely not Exclusive-Or.
So your answer to the question, ‘For you or for him?’ might be, ‘Yes’.
At Camp Quest West, the two television shows popular with both adult staff and all campers from age 8 to 18 are “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek”.
“Star Trek” and the novels of Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin have an overtly secular humanist message.
While I don’t think that sf is inherently humanistic, I think I just happened to find many humanist sf authors like Asimov and Clarke whose works helped me on my journey from Catholicism during my teens (1970s).
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One could argue that science fiction, since it often tends to feature cosmological ideas, alternative societies and so on, has an inherent tendency to question the current orthodoxy. And hence will appeal to people who are less likely to stick faithfully with the conventional religion.
Agreed.
My two favorites in that regard are James P. Hogan’s “Code of the Lifemaker” (1983, set on Titan, with religious robots) and Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light” (1967; “His followers called him mahsamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the maha- and -atman, however, and called himself sam: he never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be … “, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity on a colony planet). Both well worth reading if you can find them.
Oh, and for short stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 classic, “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Anything I could say about it would spoil the story.
Ironically, the denouement of that story seems to validate the superstition referred to. But I’m happy to accept that as entertaining irony. (Hope that is sufficiently vague not to constitute spoilers…)
I like Clarke’s short stories, many of them have a good ‘sting in the tail’.
You could see this comic as a tribute to Bill Watterson’s style. Or as a ripoff, if you’re less favourably inclined.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
😉
Wiley has had this style for a long time – but that doesn’t mean he didn’t borrow it from Watterson.
Saw that last night in hardcopy and figgered it was coming.
Good science fiction isn’t like this.
“who—for reasons that elude me—are into fantasy and science fiction”
I largely agree. Some Sci-fi is pretty good; but not much. Asimov was excellent. All fantasy that came after Tolkien’s work are pale imitations.
And comic books? I’ve read a few recent titles that were touted as “really great” and more or less equivalent to regular fiction — good grief, give me a break. Lamest dialogue imaginable. Boringly predictable plots. Ugh.
I suppose some people will always want undemanding escapism.
I can only think you haven’t read widely enough. 😉
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There is that thing about having to shovel too much horsesh*t in order to find the pony.
I’ve tried following the leads of enthusiasts and have been seriously disappointed.
Some times, there really are just better things to do with my precious life’s time.
I have read extremely widely; just not so much in certain genres. I feel perfectly comfortable dismissing the “romance novel” industry. I feel the same for comics, fantasy, and most SciFi.
The sh*t/pony ratio is just too high.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten MUCH more willing to drop books (stop reading them) that I don’t care for.
I gave a serious go to “Game of Thrones”, after I saw Sam Harris was reading it. Couldn’t do it. (As previously noted, pale imitation, right down to the guy’s pen name.) (I have done this with several other fantasy authors highly touted by enthusiasts. I think the genre is just not my thing. Chocolate and vanilla don’t ya know. Like how I know that I don’t like the current industrially-produced “country” music.)
Even the SciFi I liked when I was younger doesn’t age well (except to some degree Asimov). The dialogue seems stuck in the 1940s “he-man” magazine industry. Which is what most the “classic” SciFi writers read when they were growing up.
Well, I guess that depends on your appetite for what Michael Moorcock called “Epic Pooh” over other kinds of fantasy. I’ve found a lot of post-JRRT fantasy that I’ve enjoyed far more (Moorcock himself, Pratchett, Ryman, Miéville, Abercrombie, come to mind easily).
And GRRM is *not* a pen name. GRM is his given name and the second R comes from the confirmation name he adopted 8 years before his first professional sale.
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Go directly to Discworld. Do not pass Go.
YES!! My immediate thought too.
“atheists who—for reasons that elude me—are into fantasy and science fiction”
Fun?
There are three rules of kitty baths:
1. Element of Surprise
2. Element of Surprise
3. Element of Surprise
If any of these rules are not followed…doom.
😀
Well I love sci fi and fantasy, and horror and all kinds of fiction! It is fun, escapist and can be a learning experience. I even enjoy horror based on Xtian mythology, or any other mythology. Hmmmm maybe if I didn’t, I might have a doctorate and write…Oh well!