Adopt a cat!

My friend is giving up her two cats because she doesn't think she can take proper care of them when she comes out of the hospital.

They are two spayed females:

• Daisy is a brown tabby about four years old with beautiful green eyes.


• Nelly is a plush grey cat about two years old.

Both are healthy, friendly, and well-behaved. They are used to staying indoors. And they get along well together. Daisy, at least, is used to dogs; I'm not sure about Nelly.


If you are in the general area of Toronto, Ontario, and have a cat-shaped hole in your life, please get in touch.

Monorail cat: more passengers

moar funny pictures

I'm back on my diet.

LOLcat technology: Hover Cat

...is exploring the universe.

Monorail cat 2.0

Now with improved pathfindings:

Reality TV meets experimental linguistics

This must be my favourite LOLcat yet.

Original Shroedinger's LOLcat

Check here for the story of the first Shroedinger's indeterminate kitty.

Sandwalk on Calico Cats

Male cats can be black and white or orange and white, and so can female cats; but with the normal number of chromosomes, only female cats are black and orange and white, or "calico." The reason is that the colour gene for black or orange is on the X chromosome. Males have only one to express. Females are expressing sometimes the X chromosome from their mother and sometimes the X from their father, and thus expressing different colours. The white is caused by another gene that suppresses colour, and can be expressed on more or less of the cat's hide.

Dilute calico (Peek-A-Boo)

There's been a discussion on talk.origins about calico cats���do they have to be female? The color pattern is an interesting combination of sex-linked genetics and epigenetics. Epigenetics is the inheritance of characteristics other than nuleotide sequence. In this case, it's inheritance of an inactivated X-chromosome

Go to Larry Moran's Sandwalk: Calico Cats for a detailed explanation.

The tortoiseshell cat has more blended colours than the calico, but the same sex-linked rules apply. This image from Kittenwars.com is called "Oswald and his sisters." You can tell which kitten is Oswald because three of the kittens mix orange and black while one has only black fur���so he's the male.

Lawnmower dinosaur

A living lawnmower, Nigersaurus taqueti, has been reconstructed from fossil bones discovered in the Sahara desert. The dinosaur is on exhibit in Washington, D.C. so we will plan on seeing it during our winter trip to the U.S.

A CAT scan of the skull reveals that more narrow teeth are lined up behind the ones in use, ready to drop into their sockets like the leads in a mechanical pencil.

Monorail cats: out of service

Monorail cats have retired for the evening.

LOLcats: Monorail Cat is offline

This is about what I feel like tonight:


I'm home from New Orleans. All the cats are in and accounted for. The kittens are visibly bigger. I'm going to get some rest.

Academic LOLcats: peer review

That's some peer review!

Follow the link to another academic LOLcat.

Academic LOLcats

It seems that LOLcats are getting into academia and refereed papers:



Here's another academic LOLcat.

Academic LOLcats: hmmmm

I disagrees with ur theories...

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

LOLCAT pirates celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day tomorrow!

LOLcats: monorail cat

I believe that this is the original "monorail cat" poster.

Plague of voles in Spain

Mild winter and a fruitful spring seem to have brought a plague of voles to Spain. Hundreds of millions of moles are munching their way through the crops. There are so many that you can smell them. The government of Castille-Leon has started to burn harvested fields in hopes of roasting some of the mouse-like rodents. Several methods are being tried to kill them, including driving them with ultrasonic sound. Maybe they should get more cats, too.

Here's some vole info.

Experiments in the biochemical basis of monogamy were conducted on voles.

Lemierre's Syndrome

I am watching a TV program on The Learning Channel about a disease that puzzles many doctors: Lemierre's Disease or Lemierre's Syndrome. It starts with a sore throat, fever, great lethargy, and bodily weakness; but that is followed by high fever, stiffness, swollen lymph nodes in the neck, and blood infection.

It's called a "forgotten disease," because it is now very rare: less than one case per million people. So it's often not recognized.

Before antibiotics, Lemierre's disease was fatal in about 90% of cases.

The cause is a bacterium, usually one of the genus Fusobacterium. The bacterium infects the throat but it causes an inflammation of the jugular vein. That causes a blood clot in the jugular. Pieces of the clot break off and take the bacterium to other places in the body, causing a variety of serious and mysterious symptoms.

The first patient developed a brain abscess in the left temporal lobe; she had to have brain surgery. Her head was held still by a frame while the surgeon did CAT scans to find the extent of the abscess and minimize the damage. At that point I remembered that I knew some technical writers who wrote the manuals for the probes and imaging software that are used in brain surgery. It's nice to be helping out behind the scenes.

LOLcats: physics

This is my favourite LOLkitten:

Cute kittens for adoption - now with pictures

The two feral kittens are settling in nicely and are just a little more skittish than hand-reared kittens. We have two cats already or we would keep these ones. They are happy together. For more pictures, see my personal blog.

Kittens!

If you are in the Greater Toronto area, or anywhere from the Niagara Peninsula to Oshawa or up to Barrie, I have two very cute kittens that need adopting. They are skittish because their mother raised them in my dad's backyard, but they are settling down nicely. They are short-haired, grey boys about eight weeks old. See my personal blog for news and pictures of similar kittens.



UPDATE: We kept the kittens and they have turned into very sweet small cats.