The city, which was abandoned after a natural disaster, was an important hub of civics, trade, napping and indigenous dishes such as the cheeseburger.
XQOCHOATL, Yucatán — Archaeologists announced the discovery of a vast and prosperous ancient Mayan jungle city whose inhabitants once worshiped an unusually handsome gray tabby as a feline god.
X’Budiso was an important center of trade, religious life, architecture and art, according to Ferdinand Lyle, an archaeologist with the British Museum of London and lead researcher on the project.
His team located the long-lost city using LiDAR — light detection and ranging — a technology that allowed them to peer beneath the cover of heavy jungle and detect the ruins beneath.
Previously, there was only one indication that humans had once inhabited the area — a feline paw holding a cheeseburger, rendered in stone and poking out of a thick tangle of jungle flora. When archaeologists cleared the brush and trees, they revealed the rest of the statue which depicted a regal-looking cat on a plinth, holding the cheeseburger aloft in triumph.
An artist’s impression of the Mayan deity Budacoatl surrounded by offerings of cheeseburgers, dipping sauces and artisanal cheeses inside the Temple of a Thousand Snacks. A cult devoted to Budacoatl, the Ancient Order of Yums, was responsible for taste-testing the snackly offerings.
The city was a bustling metropolis for hundreds of years before its abrupt abandonment, which researchers said was likely caused by a natural disaster such as a flood or pestilence.
“The Budiso people worshiped a pantheon, and at the top of that pantheon was Budacoatl, the tabby jaguar god of snacks, handsomeness and war,” Lyle explained. “Our research indicates that doom fell over the city, likely in the form of a plague, and that its inhabitants believe they may have angered Budacoatl by skimping on their offerings of snacks.”
Feral felines, like the pair pictured here in front of the Temple of Turkey, still live on the grounds of the long-lost city. Source: Buddesian University Archaeological Department
Partially translated glyphs tell of unprecedented growth for the once-prosperous city, which the people believed stemmed from the favor they enjoyed from Budacoatl. Employing a force of more than 100,000 laborers, they built a magnificent temple to the feline deity in the very center of their city.
An architectural wonder, the Temple of Budacoatl featured more than 500 depictions of the feline in statues and relief carvings. The structure was comprised of tiered gardens with artificial waterfalls and tribute chambers, while gilded food and water bowls were placed at regular intervals for the hundreds of mortal cats who lived on the temple grounds.
A nearby structure, the enigmatic Grand Napitorium, was possibly the first sound-proof building in history and affirmed the X’Budiso people’s communal commitment to satisfying siestas.
The city gained a reputation for culinary innovation, and is considered the birthplace of aji sauce, deep fried turkey, huevos rancheros and Temptaciones, the ancient precedessor to Temptations.
The Artisanal Guild of Nectarean Condiments and the Sacred Order of Saucemasters were two particularly prosperous factions in the ancient city, which developed a reputation in the pre-Conquistadorial world for producing the tastiest guacamole.
“It was said that Budacoatl was particularly fond of sandwiches, and the people sang hymns about his power, influence and ripped physique,” Lyle said. “An epic poem, chiseled into the edifice of the temple, told of battle in the heavens between Budacoatl and the mighty Vakuum, scourge of the Maya. Budacoatl prevailed over Vakuum, banishing him to the underworld where his screeching could not be heard by the inhabitants of the Earth.”
Richly detailed relief carvings from the Palace of Pâté depict figures from the feline pantheon. Source: Buddesian University Archaeological Department
At the foot of the wall where the poem is inscribed stands a statue of Budacoatl, one paw holding a pastrami sandwich and the other raised in a sign of peace.
“Budacoatl was a big deal among the Maya,” Lyle said. “At one point he was bigger than Gozer and Zuul, ruling atop the pantheon. As a result, cats enjoyed enormous favor in the city.”
Professor Ferdinand Lyle, foreground, stands in front of the Napitorium, where the Budiso people would take siestas. Napping was an important part of the culture. Source: Buddesian University Archaeological Department
Alex Garland’s latest film is a road trip through the ruins of America as the nation is engulfed in a modern day civil war. It wasn’t so long ago that such a scenario would be unthinkable. Now we wonder if it’s an inevitability.
There’s a moment in Civil War when Kirsten Dunst’s world-weary photojournalist sits down in the ruins of a US industrial park, with tracer fire lighting up the night a few miles away, and turns to Stephen McKinley’s print scribe.
“Every time I got the photo and survived a war zone,” Dunst’s character tells him, “I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this. And yet here we are.”
In a movie that works on every level as a warning to the American public not to throw away what we have, what we take for granted, that one quiet moment feels like director Alex Garland speaking directly to the audience, making sure no one can miss the point. Don’t do this.
Dunst, left, and McKinley share a quiet moment in an industrial park as a battle rages a few miles off. Credit: A24
The sad truth is, the United States now seem more divided than at any other point since the original civil war. We’re dangerously close to the abyss, and the people dragging us there are the most ignorant of us. They’re the people who can’t tell you the name of their own congressman and can’t articulate what the three branches of government do (or even what they are), but insist everyone listen with rapt attention as they screech incoherently about politics and demonize those whose views differ.
They’re the people who return the zealots to congress, who populate the extremes and openly fantasize about purging the country of the ideologically impure.
Kirsten Dunst, left, and Cailee Spaeny in Civil War. Credit: A24
They’ve sworn fealty to ideology, abdicating their responsibility to think about things for themselves. Because, frankly, it’s easier to pick a pundit and an alignment, construct a filter bubble in which they never have to be confronted with a fact they don’t like, and be constantly reminded how they should feel about everything from petty culture war issues to conflicts happening a comfortable distance away. That way everything remains neatly in the abstract, and the consequences are someone else’s problem.
But not this time.
Civil War’s cast is phenomenal, but much of the film’s power comes from seeing the familiar become the horrific. Garland illustrates the banality of evil by taking his characters on a journey through the war-torn east coast, past shopping plazas cratered by rocket propelled grenades, waterways filled with bodies and playgrounds on fire. One highway overpass is vandalized with a spray-painted “Go Steelers!” while the bodies of two Americans sway on ropes beneath it.
In refugee camps in Pennsylvania and Virginia, people who could be our neighbors talk quietly around fires while their kids play with soccer balls and chase each other. The film’s main characters, a quartet of journalists trying to get to Washington, DC (where we’re told presidential loyalists shoot members of the press on the spot), marvel when they ride through one idyllic small town where people walk their dogs and hang out in coffee shops as if the country isn’t tearing itself apart.
It’s only when they stop to talk to the proprietor of a small shop that they realize the illusion of normalcy is maintained by an army of sharpshooters keeping watch from the rooftops.
Garland wisely stays away from the specific ideological reasons for the civil war in favor of showing us the fallout.
The president is on his third term. He’s authorized airstrikes on fellow Americans, imprisoned dissidents, put a bounty on journalists and hasn’t offered the public anything more than teleprompter-fed remarks in more than a year. But his authoritarian grip on power is finally fractured when two fed-up coalitions of states break away from the union. The more powerful of the two, the so-called WF (Western Forces), is extremely well-equipped: a shot of one of their camps shows F-35 Raptors, mechanized infantry and heavy lift helicopters.
Dunst’s character in a Western Forces camp. Credit: A24
These aren’t people living on the margins of society, armed with civilian versions of AR-15s. They’re US military, entire divisions defected in opposition to Washington with all the firepower and logistics capacity that entails. Separately, another secessionist coalition led by Florida is making its way up the east coast, seeking to turn the Carolinas and other states to their cause.
The noose is tightening around the president’s neck, even as he insists “the greatest military campaign in American history” under his command has defeated the secessionists, like Baghdad Bob in the Oval Office.
Nick Offerman plays the authoritarian, three-term president who has ordered airstrikes on American citizens and had journalists executed. Credit: A24
As the Western Forces and Florida Alliance push toward D.C., there’s a renewed sense of urgency in symbolism. The president, Wagner Moura’s Joel says early in the movie, will be “dead inside a month.” Both coalitions are intent on reaching Washington and ending the war on July 4th.
“The optics,” Joel tells the other journalists, “are irresistible.”
Thus, the reporters decide to go after “the only story left,” which is to attempt to interview and photograph the president before he’s deposed or killed, despite the very real possibility they’ll be executed on the White House lawn before they can ask a question.
The film’s central characters are Dunst’s Lee Smith, a celebrated photojournalist who has seen it all, Moura’s Joel, the reporter who is partnered with Lee, McKinley’s Sammy, a reporter for “what’s left of the New York Times,” and Cailee Spaeny’s Jessie, a green but fearless 23-year-old who wants to be a war photographer like Lee.
Lee and Jessie meet at the beginning of the film in Manhattan, where both are photographing unrest as people crowd a disaster relief tanker, hoping to fill their containers with water. The fact that one of life’s most essential needs is no longer guaranteed, in New York City of all places, is just the first sign of how bad things have gotten.
Jessie moves in, snapping away as the crowd pushes toward the tanker and NYPD officers try to maintain order. When several people rush the tanker, Jessie gets hit in the face by someone swinging a bat.
Reeling, she stumbles away from the crowd, and Lee immediately mothers her, taking the young woman a safe distance away. She takes off her bright yellow press jacket and gives it to Jessie, then tells her: “If I see you again, you’d better be wearing Kevlar and a helmet.”
Spaeny, left, and Dunst. Credit: A24
They do meet again, the next morning. Lee is surprised to see the younger woman in the back seat of their truck next to Sammy. Furious, she pulls Joel aside. He explains that Jessie had approached him late the previous evening, asking to tag along with him, Lee and Sammy on their trip to DC.
Joel argues that Lee was Jessie’s age when she began her career, but he’s not acting out of the kindness of his heart. He is a man, Jessie is a beautiful young woman, and he has ulterior motives.
Lee’s mouth twitches in disapproval. She sees this fresh-faced, naive 23-year-old, and sees herself before she’s become jaded from a career of documenting humans doing horrific things to each other.
Civil War would be a road trip movie, if road trip movies illustrated camaraderie by shared trauma. Pockets of violence are everywhere. Some involve presidential loyalists fending off advance elements of the Western Forces, but some are civilians who see an opportunity to kill, torture and pillage with impunity.
Dunst is magnificent as Lee, wearing the war photographer’s trauma like armor, her disgust with humanity apparent in her tired eyes. McKinley is the old-school print scribe who can’t quit, even as his body fails him.
“You’re worried I’m too old and too slow,” he tells Lee and Joel early in the film as they drink in the lounge of a Manhattan hotel, imploring them to let him accompany them south to D.C.
“You aren’t?” Lee answers.
“Of course I am,” he admits. “But are you really going to make me explain why I have to do this?”
Wagner Moura’s Joel screams in frustration and rage after a particularly traumatic scene. Credit: A24
Here again, so much of the movie’s power is showing America in a state we only see from a distance through the dispatches and footage of war reporters. As the three of them sip their drinks in the hotel bar, waiting for their stories and photos to transmit over glacial wifi, the power drops.
“That’s every night this week,” Lee sighs.
“They’ll switch to the generators,” Sammy says.
They’re not in the shell of a formerly grand hotel in Baghdad or Damascus, relying on juice from old car batteries. They’re in New York, America’s greatest city, the cultural, media and finance capital of the world, a metropolis that operates on 11 billion watt-hours a day. A devastated, eerily quiet New York which resembles the early days of the COVID lockdown, yes, but New York all the same.
A sniper is pinned down by a civilian who has taken advantage of the lawlessness and chaos to kill fellow Americans. Credit: A24
After watching Civil War, I was disheartened to see the usual rage and incrimination in discussions about the film. Depending on their political backgrounds, people are sure Garland — a native and citizen of the UK — is “a lib” or “a MAGAtard.” Opportunities for thoughtful discussion are derailed in favor of the usual talking point regurgitation.
But the hope is that the sensible are the silent majority, that we aren’t so fattened by domestic stability, security and a feeling of invincibility that we can’t see what’s right in front of our faces. We would do well to remind ourselves that the scenarios we experience only in the safety of fiction still happen all over the world.
As you read this, people are dying of exhaustion and suffering pointless deaths in North Korean and Russian hard labor camps so brutal that we don’t even have a way to place them in context. The people of Haiti are terrorized nightly by ultra-violent gangs who have filled the power vacuum, raping and executing with impunity. Gaza has been bombed to rubble, and its rubble has been bombed to sand. People hoping to escape abject poverty embark on the hard journey to America only to find themselves sold into sexual slavery. Men and women in Asia, desperate to find jobs, arrive at what they think are interviews only to be kidnapped and spirited away into compounds in lawless Myanmar, where they’re forced to sit in front of screens for 20 hours a day running “pig butchering” romance scams on lonely American retirees. If they try to flee, they’re shot.
And just yesterday, a man walked up to a golf course in Palm Beach county, pointed the muzzle of an AK-47 through the chain link fence and tried to assassinate a major party American presidential candidate — the second assassination attempt in three months.
The people who most need to hear Garland’s message are those least likely to heed it, but we can hope. Reality has a funny way of obliterating fantasy, and it’s better for all of us if our delusional countrymen don’t find out the hard way that war is neither fun nor glorious.
Let’s hope Civil War remains a movie, and not a prescient preview of things to come.
Civil War is currently streaming on HBO Max and is available to rent via Apple, Amazon and other online streaming platforms.
Header image: Western Forces units fire rocket propelled grenades at White House loyalists using the Lincoln Memorial for cover. Credit: A24
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Political careers, human and animal, have been ended by failure to show proper deference to Larry the Cat.
There’s a current crisis in the UK, one of national importance which must be addressed by all relevant authorities before things get out of hand.
Larry the Cat, Mouser in Chief at No. 10 Downing St. (also known as Larry’s House), is not getting the respect he deserves.
First, incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer moved into No. 10 this summer. Larry has generously allowed five previous prime ministers to live there, so that wasn’t the problem. The issue, which should have been obvious to anyone with a brain, is that Starmer brought his family cat, Jojo, and allowed his children to adopt a new kitten.
After Larry’s dust-ups with Palmerston, the former chief mouser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), it was established that the lord paramount of No. 10 would tolerate no feline presence other than his ladyfriend, Maisie, yet Starmer went ahead and insulted his gracious host anyway. Wisely, he has restricted his cats to his private apartments while Larry has the run of the compound.
Palmerston was retired to the countryside after crossing Larry. Credit: US Embassy London
Poll after poll has shown Larry’s popularity easily exceeds that of every prime minister to serve under him, so rest assured there will be a new prime minister as soon as election law allows. One does not simply thumb his nose at Larry the Cat and get away with one’s reputation and career unscathed.
Now another politician has run afoul of Larry and his legions of admirers, committing career suicide by calling Larry “a little shit” and piling on the disparaging comments.
Quickest way to invoke the wrath of the entire country. His days are numbered.
Ian Murray, the secretary of state of a country called Scotland, apparently a minor territory in Larry’s realm, said he and the other Scottish ministers “were like kids in a sweet shop” when they attended a meeting at No. 10, not because of government business, but because they would have the honor of an audience with Larry.
But as Robert Heinlein once observed: “Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.”
Press reports suspiciously omit the breaches of protocol committed by Murray and Peter Kyle, the Scottish science secretary, but photographs show Larry snubbing Murray’s attempts to pet him while Kyle watched and laughed.
Or perhaps there was no protocol breach, and the Scottish delegation simply fell beneath the notice of Larry. Surely a cat with so many responsibilities can’t be expected to micromanage the affairs of insignificant vassal states and commonwealth territories. After all, does anyone honestly believe Larry has the time to fret about Monserrat or the Cayman Islands?
Murray, left, seen bending down to pet Larry immediately before being snubbed in front of his colleagues and the UK press. After this incident, Murray’s time in politics will surely come to an end.
Regardless, Murray was not pleased. The man is now on borrowed time, and he knows it.
“And without putting too fine a point on it, Larry the cat is a little shit. So none of us got a picture with Larry the cat,” Murray said after the public diss. “Larry the cat is the most miserable animal you’ll ever meet in your life. I’m not surprised given who he’s had to live with for the last ten years.”
Murray and Starmer would do well to consider the fate of Boris Johnson, whose prime ministry was over the moment he called Larry a “thug.”
Johnson knew full well his dog, Dilyn, had tried to steal Larry’s food and received an appropriate thumping for it, yet still placed the blame on the country’s most revered figure. (With apologies to His Majesty King Charles and the late Queen Elizabeth, who both enjoy popularity nearly on par with Larry.)
Likewise, former MP Liz Truss became the shortest-serving prime minister in the country’s history, lasting only 50 days in office after failing to establish a rapport with the chief mouser, who was photographed on several occasions ducking her attempts at affection.
Larry the Cat shows Boris Johnson the finer points of national management during the former’s turn as prime minister from 2019 until 2022, when Johnson lost Larry’s confidence and was replaced. Credit: UK Foreign Office
Politics in any country are chaotic and unpredictable, but if there is one rule in the UK political system, it’s this: those who get on the wrong side of Larry don’t last long.
Just ask Palmerston, who was banished to a country estate after a dust-up with Larry and still carries a token of the Chief Mouser’s esteem on his left ear, which was cleaved with the might of Larry’s claws.
You don’t mess with with the Mouser in Chief.
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There’s huge buzz around Flow, which follows the journey of a cat through a flooded world where humans are curiously absent, but their former presence is felt everywhere.
Happy Friday! We don’t have any sarcasm, Big Buddesian wit or photos of the sexy beast himself, Little Buddy, for you today.
But we do have a trailer for what looks like an amazing cat movie! The buzz around Flow started in earnest in late spring, but I held back on writing about it because there was no information about when or where people could see this film.
Now it looks like Flow, after getting universal praise from critics and a triumphant release in the creator’s home country of Latvia, is finally poised to reach the rest of the world. Behold:
There’s so much going on here, from the sheer beauty of the world the trailer shows us, to the strange absence of humans after an apparent cataclysm, to the snort of the confused Capybara as our heroic void wriggles his way aboard a small sailboat and catches a ride with a motley company of stray animals.
The cat animation is perfect, capturing every nuance of feline movement, and the faces of the animals are expressive, telling us everything we need to know about their thoughts and moods as they survive in this strange new world.
There’s no real explanation for what happened other than the apparent biblical flood, and we’re hearing there isn’t a single word of dialog in the entire 85 minute film. Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis is already well regarded for his 2019 debut, Away, and the reviews for Flow have been glowing.
While Variety reported Flow will begin its run in theaters on Nov. 22, and Rotten Tomatoes has the same date listed, Fandango says the debut is slated for Nov. 12. Whether that’s a typo or there’s some other reason for the discrepancy, we’re not sure, but we’ll update as more information becomes available.
A still from Flow, a 2024 animated movie about a black cat navigating a post-human world of danger and beauty.
A still from Flow, a 2024 animated movie about a black cat navigating a post-human world of danger and beauty.
Unfortunately, Lord Fluffybutt III did not make the list.
U.S. News and World Report compiled a list of the top cat names in America by looking at pet insurance registrations, and a bunch of familiar names topped the list.
Luna is the current most popular name for female cats, followed by Bella, while Milo edged out Oliver for the most popular male cat names. The data is current for the year 2024, the report said.
While other lists use different ways of calculating the top names, including registrations on pet-related sites and listings on PetFinder, the U.S. News list closely mirrors the others.
The name “Buddy” was named “most badass” for the 27th year in a row, since pet insurance companies began keeping statistics. (Okay, we made that up, but it’s probably true.)
Pain In The Bud 