We asked six cats what they think about a prominent story in this week’s headlines.
President Donald Trump escalated his trade war with the Canadians this week by renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America and threatening to increase the punishing tariffs he levied on our northern neighbors.
What do you think about the move to rename the lake?
Images via Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash
Curry had enormous range, appeared in blockbusters and indies, and was familiar to audiences from at least three generations.
With all the media attention on the death of country singer Dolly Parton, the shocking floods in Nepal and President Trump’s ongoing spat with Canada, you might have missed another sad bit of news, the death of longtime character actor Tim Curry.
Curry was a presence in every movie he appeared in and was instantly recognizable by his cartoonish, made-for-Hollywood smile.
Here I’ve written about some of his roles. They may not be his subjective best work or even his most memorable, but they were my personal favorites:
Herkermer Homolka, Congo (1995): Curry, in a role that almost seems like a proto-Borat, is first introduced as a benefactor who wants to help fund Dr. Peter Elliot’s effort to bring his study subject, a gorilla named Amy, to the place where she was born in war-torn Congo. It isn’t long before Curry’s Homolka encounters liquidity problems and he’s exposed by Ernie Hudson’s Captain Monroe Kelly as a man obsessed with legends of the Lost City of Zinj. The jungle-swallowed city is said to contain vast riches in the form of diamonds and a mine unlike any other in the world, Curry’s Homolka reminds the other characters loudly and often. He believes it’s close to where Elliot is taking Amy.
Curry gets one of the funniest scenes in the movie when Delroy Lindo’s Congolese warlord, amid a tense negotiation over bribe money, gets angry, turns to Curry and shouts “Stop eating my sesame cake!” An animated GIF is worth a thousand words:
Curry’s character is bumbling, single-minded, oblivious to danger, and an absolute pleasure to watch in a film that was a major spectacle even if the script didn’t quite hold up its end against a great cast and outstanding special effects.
Darkness, Legend (1985): It’s surprising how few people seem to have heard of or seen Legend considering it stars Tom Cruise and Mia Sara, with Curry as the villain and Ridley Scott – still basking in the triumphs of Alien and Bladerunner – in the director’s chair.
Legend was an oddball by the standards of the time, with dream-like, almost hallucinogenic cinematography and an ambient score by German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream. There were very few stabs at live-action fantasy epics at the time because of the cost, difficulty and questions over whether audiences would respond, which wouldn’t be definitively answered until 2001 with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
Here we get classic Curry as the villain, albeit in heavy makeup with prosthetic horns, fangs and head ridges worthy of a Klingon:
It’s still an epic if limited performance, and if you’ve never seen this one, you owe it to yourself to check out one of the weirdest films of the 80s.
Mr. Hector, Home Alone 2 (1992): For the sequel to the beloved McCaulay Culkin movie about a kid accidentally left at home during a family vacation, Curry’s character took on the duties of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, the adults who were repeatedly foiled and humiliated by Culkin’s character, Kevin, the first time around.
In the sequel, which also features a certain future president in a cameo, Curry plays the suspicious concierge at The Plaza Hotel in New York City, where Kevin is once again alone after being forgotten for a second time by his family. I don’t recall exactly how the script writers engineered a second bout of parental amnesia, but kids didn’t mind. I know because I was one of them, and I ate this crap up.
Here we have Curry at his most Curry-ness. I mean, just look at that smile:
Curry’s performance turned a rote repeat plot into a genuine adventure as he grows increasingly suspicious of Kevin. As the movie progresses he takes desperate measures to catch the slippery kid and prove he’s been living it up in the hotel by forging his father’s signature and using his credit cards. This was, after all, the early 90s when identity theft wasn’t even on most people’s radar. Credit card companies definitely wouldn’t call you to confirm if you just ordered a dozen pizzas to a hotel room in a city you don’t live in.
Curry did an impressive volume of voice work over the years, much more than most people realize, and while he provided voices to some of my favorite after-school cartoons as a kid, the most memorable was in Gargoyles, the ahead-of-its time Disney animated series about gargoyles turned into stone statues during the dark ages, then reanimated in modern-day New York City where they’re forced to learn quickly and adapt to new dangers.
He appeared as IT in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, a one-off character in the pilot to the cult science fiction series Lexx, had a role in the abominable Charlie’s Angels reboot of 2000, and is perhaps best known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I confess I have not seen. He also had memorable roles in The Hunt for Red October, Clue and Scary Movie 2.
Curry seemed to have no ego about his work, taking on embarrassing roles with relish and lending his voice to innumerable children’s TV classics. He was one of the last of the old breed of character actors, an inimitable talent, and he’ll be sorely missed.
Viral videos show figures dressed as the Dr. Seuss character terrorizing unsuspecting people in mostly quiet suburban settings.
There’s a new freak-out among the terminally online, mostly relegated to Gen Z and people who spend significant amounts of time on TikTok – they think a Dr. Seuss character made flesh is popping up in the suburbs of the UK and Ireland to stalk and scare the pants off people.
Videos featuring the iconic children’s story character have gone viral on the platform in the last week or two, each of them showing similar scenes: it’s night, usually in some safe-looking suburb, and a person wearing a full size Cat In The Hat costume pops out of the bushes or from behind a car to terrify unsuspecting passersby.
Others show the costumed creeps simply standing in driveways or in the middle of the street and silently observing people in their homes.
The alleged perps favor a more sinister look than the traditionally friendly-looking creation of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel in 1957. These cats in hats wear a disturbing grin or a sneer, and some videos depict the costumed weirdos leaping onto cars with feline athleticism or stalking the people they encounter.
While the footage looks real enough that it initially fooled UK media as well as kids, police in several jurisdictions have looked into the reports and concluded the videos are AI generated, likely with Chinese-made tools like Wan and Skywork.
OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies in the US, shut down its Sora AI video generator earlier this year amid widespread criticism and abuse of the tool.
While Sora had guardrails preventing users from generating certain kinds of content or violating intellectual property (you could not, for example, generate a video of a laughing Mickey Mouse gunning down a crowd of people with an Uzi), many of the Chinese-made video generation tools do not place restrictions on videos.
Some western companies have tried to compete in that space, including TripleTaco, which runs quite possibly the creepiest ads touting “AI that never says ‘no.'”
In any case, the panic over the Cat In The Hat mirrors a similar freak-out in India earlier this year when social media was flooded with realistic videos showing tigers and leopards mauling people having their morning tea outdoors or snatching them from moving trains.
The Cat In The Hat videos haven’t really caught on in the US, possibly because it stretches credulity to believe trigger-happy ‘Mericans wouldn’t just shoot weirdos stalking through our neighborhoods.
Regardless, it’s a good reminder to take everything with a grain of salt, especially anything you see on social media.
Not all pets are created equal, but not all studies are either.
A new study claims we’ve gotten it wrong all these years, that pet cats and dogs aren’t good for young children, while kids who grow up with pet fish, turtles and hamsters learn empathy and develop better mental balance.
The authors of the study claim cats are “the only common pet linked to more mental health problems in children.”
Furthermore, the authors claim, pets like turtles, fish and hamsters are “linked to” positive mental health in children, while data shows dogs have no effect.
To understand what we’re dealing with here, we’ve got to break down “study,” “linked to” and “data” in relation to the report by researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain.
“Study” here means a meta-analysis of data collected by the INMA Project, a collaboration of universities, biomedical institutes and medical conglomerates in Spain. INMA is primarily concerned with researching the impact of environmental pollutants on early childhood development.
The INMA data was not collected specifically for this new study dealing with pets.
Secondly, while INMA did “track” some 1,900 participants from birth through six or seven years old, the “data” itself primarily consists of subjective reports by the parents of the children along with “environmental measurements and clinical tests.”
It’s not clear if the original data collection effort had anything to do with the presence of pets in the homes, or if that was just one of many data points gathered in a larger assessment. For example, the INMA questionnaires may have simply asked if the families have pets and what kind of pets they have without any further elaboration or information about whether, or how often, the children interact with the pets. There can be enormous variation in that area alone.
Then there’s “linked to,” a very specific choice of words by the authors. They’re using “linked to” instead of “caused by” because the data they have – if you can appropriately use the word data to describe the results of self-reported questionnaires based on subjective feelings – cannot distinguish between correlation and causation and really says nothing at all except certain animals were present in the homes of young children.
In all, 8.7 percent of the children lived in homes with a cat, which works out to a sample size of 165, all from Spain.
So we’re already on really shaky ground here. I don’t think there’s any real scientific value in information that comes from questionnaires distributed to parents, and certainly not when it comes to topics like mental health and behavioral problems.
The definition of bad behavior varies widely between parents in different families and even mothers and fathers in the same family. Was there a baseline? Did the participants receive instructions on how to describe their assessments so they’d at least roughly resemble uniform reports? Were there other commonalities among the children who lived in homes with cats? We don’t know the answers to these questions.
What we do know is that, putting all other concerns aside, the report claims that 165 children live in homes that have cats, or had cats at one time, and some of them have varying degrees of behavioral problems.
That the conclusions are vaporous becomes even more obvious when the authors go on to speculate, with no data, why children who live with, or previously lived with, cats are allegedly more likely to suffer behavioral issues.
They repeat common misconceptions about felines being aloof, claiming the nature of cats “limits emotional bonding” compared to other companion animals.
“Having fish, turtles and hamsters on a constant basis does seem to protect children from mental health problems,” the authors concluded, although again the reasons are pure guesswork.
I’m not sure how anyone can say feline behavior “limits emotional bonding,” then in the very next paragraph claim fish and turtles, animals with which there can be very little or no real interaction, “protect” kids from mental health issues. Not even “help protect,” but full on “protect.”
The authors also point to a common boogeyman, toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can be transmitted to humans dozens and potentially hundreds of different ways, including contaminated water and undercooked meat, but cats are blamed because they’re easily infected by it and can pass it to humans.
To be clear, toxoplasma gondii does not figure anywhere in the data and the researchers did not test the children for infection.
But the bit that sets off the most alarm bells in my mind is the claim that dogs have no impact on the mental health of children.
That should have immediately prompted the research team to go back and figure out where their analysis went funky.
There are so many studies linking cats and dogs, and especially dogs, to tangible improvements in mental health and mood that anyone who claims the opposite has a lot of work ahead of them to demonstrate why their findings are accurate and the abundance of studies that concluded the opposite are flawed. (Dogs are better studied than cats because they’re easier to control, so the abundance of studies on dogs shouldn’t be confused for a stronger impact on human health.)
Whenever I write something like this, I always worry I’m contributing to the anti-science positions of some people who view the entirety of science with suspicion.
Science is nothing more than a formal process for learning about the natural world. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s important for us to separate our qualms with the methods and standards of particular studies from the idea of science itself. A study may be flawed, but the scientific method remains the best, most time-honored way to expand human knowledge we’ve managed to come up with.
There are also major differences between “soft” sciences like psychology and hard sciences like physics and chemistry. The latter are primarily black and white, true or untrue, while the former deal with uncountable shades in between. It’s hard to quantify human feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
I’m sure the researchers involved in this project mean well, but unless we begin to see other studies placing fish, turtles and hamsters atop the pet hierarchy for their impact on mental health, I think we can file it as an anomaly and move on.
The news site that reported the chief mouser’s death is going with the “we were hacked” excuse.
“If your mom tells you she loves you, verify it with a second source.”
If that sounds absurd, well, it’s meant to be, but it was also a favorite maxim of news editors before the “publish now, verify later, never admit mistakes” style of journalism became the norm.
Rushing to publish without verifying is precisely why Politics UK – a news site founded by British populist Nigel Farage – ended up with egg on its face after it reported the death of the beloved 19-year-old mouser at London’s No. 10 Downing St., Larry the Cat.
The site’s editors went with the “we was hacked!” excuse, or a variant of it, claiming their usually reliable source had been compromised by a hacker who wanted to cause mischief.
Even if that’s true, it could have been avoided by simply picking up the phone and calling the prime minister’s office at Downing Street. That’s journalism 101.
Getting a statement from the prime minister’s office would have been part of the reporter’s job here anyway.
While making a big deal over the alleged death of a cat might sound ludicrous to people outside the UK, Larry isn’t just a mouser. He’s become an avatar of stability in a chaotic era that has seen prime ministers swept out of office as quickly as they ascended.
His presence at the UK’s seat of power and his antics are ready-made for the British press, who frequently assemble outside the building while waiting for government announcements. Those reporters and photographers have a front row seat every time Larry chases off an interloper, fights a territorial battle or checks an ego by snubbing a powerful politician.
The press and public are deeply invested in Larry’s adventures, and his natural indifference to political developments is a calming counterweight to the often depressing news.
Meanwhile the real Larry remains blissfully unaware of the momentary distress caused by the false report of his demise, and was recently photographed napping on a windowsill at No. 10.
Larry’s unofficial X account also reassured the British public and admirers worldwide that the UK’s true leader is doing just fine:
We are very glad the iconic feline, who first took over chief mouser duties in 2011 and is now on his seventh prime minister, is alive and healthy.
In a statement, Americat President Buddy said he was relieved to hear from his counterpart across the Atlantic.
“Larry is a Tremendous cat, one of the best cats ever, believe me. They Love him Over There, its incredible,” Buddy wrote. “Now if the Canadian’s don’t send me 50 Ton’s of Turkey by 8 pm tomorrow I’m gonna hit them with Tariff’s the likes of which no one has ever seen! Tariff’s of AT LEAST 700,000%!!! The Governor of the State of Canada needs to Bend the Knee! Thank you for youre attention to this matter!”
Update 1:36 am: Added background on Larry’s time at No. 10.
Pain In The Bud 