Pain In The Bud

Six Cops Storm Woman’s Home, Break Door Down With An Axe To Seize Cat

Now the cat’s caretaker is suing to get her pet back and says she’s worried the authorities will have the tuxedo shorthair euthanized. The RSPCA says it responded to serious concerns about the cat’s health.

Usually when complaints about UK police hit the headlines, it involves sheepish constables knocking to talk to a “suspect” about a social media post that offended someone.

This seems to be a whole different level of crazy, and neither the police nor prosecutors are denying that six police officers and an official from the RSPCA showed up at the North London home of Katherine Theodotou, chopped up the front door with an axe and charged in.

The 79-year-old Theodotu, through her attorney, said she was recovering from breast cancer surgery and couldn’t make it to the door quickly. The police, she said, came through the door just as she was reaching it and knocked her over.

They also provided images of the door after the May 27 “raid” on Theodotu’s home:

Theodotu says the police searched her entire home and an adjoining Greek school, which she founded.

The RSPCA and Metropolitan police tell a different version of the story, although they do not dispute the urgency and violence with which they entered Theodotu’s home. They say veterinarians who examined and treated Rita the cat had serious concerns about her health. Rita, who had a congenital condition, cannot use her back legs and requires special care. Theodotu’s attorney said the former human rights lawyer turned educator can prove she’s paid significant sums for Rita’s rehabilitation and care, including a recent veterinary surgery.

But veterinarians who examined Rita after the RSPCA took her found her condition “extremely concerning and consistent with a significant deterioration since discharge, alongside evidence suggestive of prolonged inadequate hygiene, nursing care, and monitoring within the home environment,” said Mark Townsend, an attorney for the RSPCA.

Theodotu is suing the RSPCA and the police for taking her cat and asking the court to prevent the RSPCA from potentially euthanizing Rita. Let’s hope the courts are able to sort out if the cat was receiving proper care and rule in the animal’s best interests.

In the meantime, the London Metropolitan Police should probably review whichever policy allows its officers to break into homes as if they’re ending a hostage situation, not collecting a cat. Unless a real life Jason Stathamesque character is barricaded in his home and making violent threats, it feels like one cop just to make sure everything stays civil and the temperature remains low would be the appropriate response. Two is overkill. Four is almost comical. But six? With an axe? Chopping the door down? Nah. You’ve gotta revisit your protocols, gov.

What’s The Funniest Misunderstanding You’ve Ever Been Part Of?

A tale of Big Buddy’s stupidity!

I had a crush on Meghan.

She was a sophomore resident assistant on the second floor of my dorm. Short, blonde and witty, with an easy smile and an understated sense of humor. I really liked her.

The problem was, I couldn’t stop making an ass out of myself in front of her. Whether it was jokes that landed with a thud, awkward encounters or my own general self-sabotage, it just never seemed to go well. Yet she still tolerated me.

While I was getting accustomed to living at school that first year, juggling classes, new friends and easing into the responsibilities of adulthood, I had a minor crisis: my dorm had undergone a “refresh” over the summer, and my room must have been one of the last because I discovered the wood stain they’d used on the dressers hadn’t fully dried.

I came home from class one day to find my roommate wearing a pair of my boxers on his head like a hat and a bunch of my friends laughing at me. All my boxers had sticky, stinky wood stain on them. T-shirts too, which proved I wasn’t soiling myself, but my roommate and friends had a field day with it nonetheless.

I removed all my clothes from the drawers, did a cycle of laundry and was dismayed to see the wood stain stuff hadn’t washed out. I don’t remember how many cycles I did, just that after several attempts the clothes appeared to be clean, finally.

So there I was in the laundry room late at night, crouched in front of an open dryer door, trying to determine if I needed to do one more wash. I reached in, grabbed a fist full of clothes and took a deep huff to make sure I couldn’t smell the wood stain any longer. Was I still smelling the stuff, or was it my imagination? I inhaled deeply again, my nose pressed against the fabric.

That’s when I heard someone behind me. I turned, saw Meghan the RA giving me a half wave with a strange expression on her face, and that’s when I realized the fistful of clothes I’d pulled from the dryer, the clothes I’d been deeply huffing a moment ago, were mostly boxers.

So now Meghan didn’t just see me as a joke-bomber and an idiot. I was also a weirdo who liked to sniff his own underwear.

“Hey Meg, it’s, uh — My clothes. The wood stain wasn’t dry in my room, and it got on my stuff so I, uh…” Ah, @$%! it, I thought. There was no way I was going to explain my way out of this.

So I just accepted she would see me as a weirdo, which she most certainly did at that point, and banished any thought of becoming more than friendly with her.

Sadly that is not my most mortifying moment in college, and there were some comically awful low points, but that one felt particularly shameful. No one wants to be known as a pervert who sniffs his own underwear. No one wants to be that guy.

The lesson here, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure the coast is absolutely clear if you’re sniffing stubborn dirty clothing after a wash. Or maybe the lesson is not to put your clothes in drawers that have been recently treated with wood stain. Or maybe it’s just about not caring what others think of you. Regardless, it’s a misunderstanding I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

This post is a response to the WordPress daily writing prompt. If you found it amusing, please consider following Pain In The Bud and whitelisting us on your adblocker. Buddy the Cat demands it!

Maryland Man Tried To Use A Kitten To Rob A Bank, Cops Say

The suspect’s crime spree was short lived and the kitten has been returned.

Magnolia is back after her meowgnificent caper.

The three-and-a-half month old kitten was conscripted into an attempted bank robbery by a man who stole her from the adoptable cats section of a Maryland pet shop late Tuesday morning, then took her to a nearby bank.

Security camera footage from the pet store shows the suspect cradling Magnolia as he darts out of the shop.

The man, whose name has not been released by police, then asked a teller to hold the kitten while he scribbled out a note demanding cash.

Despite the suspect’s wily and carefully calibrated plan, the attempted robbery went awry when police arrived in force before he could escape with any cash.

Meanwhile the pet store employees across the street, unaware of the attempted robbery, watched the cops converging and thought the local sheriff was very serious about pilfered pets.

“I immediately saw all of these police cars, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a heck of a response for a stolen cat,” Stephanie Stullich of Beltsville Community Cats told a local TV news station.

As for Magnolia, she seems to be a resilient kitten and wasn’t particularly phased by her ordeal. Footage after her return shows her happily batting her paws at a toy. When pet store staff were told by the cops that their cat was in the bank, they found Magnolia cuddling up with the bank manager.

The man who stole her had visited several times and had been fixated on the kitten, store employees told the local NBC affiliate.

Magnolia was back and safe shortly after her ordeal. Now she’s looking for her forever family. Credit: NBC Washington

Surely treats are in order for little Magnolia. We’re glad to hear she’s okay. She’s available for adoption, by the way, and wants to retire from her brief lifeof crime. Stullich says she’s “looking for a law-abiding citizen with a lot of love in their heart.”

Police haven’t offered details besides acknowledging the incident and saying they’re still sorting details out. We’ll update as more information becomes available.

Game View: The Future London Of Watch Dogs: Legion

It took a team of thousands to recreate London in stunning detail. Here’s what it looks like.

Over the years I’ve developed kind of an obsession with virtual recreations of real places, and since I’ve mentioned it in the past on PITB, I figured virtual London would be a good place to start.

The gates of Buckingham Palace at night. Although Legion depicts a future London, Queen Elizabeth II was still going strong in 2020 when the game was released, and her reign felt like it could go on forever. There’s a hologram portrait of her somewhere in the city, but I cannot remember where I saw it. (Near the British Museum perhaps?)

So the next best thing is an illustrative image of the gates of Buckingham Palace in this future dystopian London, where a private security megacontractor has essentially taken over the city, leaving people pining for a sight of the queen:

In Legion you’re part of an activist/hacker collective called DedSec, fighting back against a police state. As a result, any Londoner is a potential ally. You can recruit police officers, judges, barristers, construction workers, street cleaners, assassins, spies, office workers, store clerks, disc jockeys, the homeless, and people from any background you can think of.

Each has its advantages: judges and cops allow you to get access to restricted spaces and manipulate the legal system from within. Construction workers have access to equipment no one else can touch, and security won’t think twice about them walking into a construction site. Street sweepers are largely invisible to a public that ignores them, allowing them to listen in on conversations.

Every person has a different attitude toward authority, challenging it, and the direction the UK has been heading. Recruiting them involves winning them over to your side by proving you can be trusted, sometimes by helping them out personally, sometimes by keeping secrets, and sometimes by striking back at the authorities.

One of the most fun parts is that DedSec’s secret headquarters is tucked into the back of this pub, The Earl’s Fortune, accessible via a secret door in a back room:

Early morning in Piccadilly Circus, before the crowds:

The Sky Garden at the top of the “walkie talkie building” affords incredible views of the city:

The Eye. Yes, you can ride it. Yes, you can take photos from it.

This is called Waterloo Plaza in the game. I’m not sure if it’s a real place or if it’s been renamed due to rights issues:

A tube station with an advertisement that reads “Illegals hurt homegrown Brits.” The game clearly took inspiration from real life political events and grievances:

The “gherkin” from the Sky Garden. Again because of rights issues, the logo is from a company that does not exist in the real world:

Beefeaters standing guard:

“Larry?! Larry, where have you run off to?”

The authorities do not like you getting anywhere near No. 10 Downing St. It took a lot of sneaking around for me to get this close and get these screenshots. Sadly, I did not see Larry.

I’m not sure exactly where this is, but the game recreates streets and neighborhoods in astonishing detail. Note the puddle on the pavement. Modern gaming technology actually recreates the way light bounces off of water, stone, windows, plants, etc. In the past, if you saw a reflection in a game, it was a static texture. Thanks to ray tracing technology, all reflections are dynamic, meaning if you’re looking in a store window and a bus passes behind you, you see the bus pass in the reflection. It’s awesome.

A street adjacent to Piccadilly Circus:

The view from an Eye capsule. The Thames is dirty AF!

Big Ben:

In reference to the ray tracing effects mentioned above, note the way the windows reflect the surrounding area. You can see the light behaves differently based on whether it’s in shadow or sunlight, and the surrounding structures are reflected in the windows. At night the windows behave dynamically so they are turned on and off randomly. Using shaders, you can see the interior rooms from street level.

Regretfully I did not take enough photos of random neighborhoods. In Southwark, for example, there are run-down areas, public housing and you don’t see the grand structures of historic neighborhoods.

There are parks with people kicking footballs around and laying in the grass, bicyclists, buskers, people talking on their phones, mimes, cops on the beat.

Another view through a Sky Garden window:

In the future, free wifi will be even more plentiful!

What’s next? Tokyo? New York? Ancient Athens? Future Detroit? Los Angeles? Miami?

All images captured on my PC: AMD Ryzen 7 8700F 8-Core Processor (4.10 GHz), AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT (12 GB), 32GB DDR5 G-Skill RAM, Windows 11.

Study: Cats Have Figured Out How To Weaponize An Otherwise Friendly Behavior

Species: felis catus. Super powers: Teleporting, conscripting humans into their service, cuteness, being annoying.

Cats can be selfish jerks, but the fact that they’re willing to groom each other shows they have a selfless side too.

Doesn’t it?

Not so fast, say two scientists from Belgium’s Ghent University.

While allogrooming — animals socially grooming each other — is a sign of community, alliance and social bonds in other species, apparently cats have found a way to weaponize it.

By analyzing footage of cats grooming each other, the Belgian team confirmed cats groom the way other animals do, signaling closeness, trust and all that good stuff…most of the time.

But they also use it to seriously piss each other off, usually to take possession of territory they covet.

“I saw these weird grooming patterns in my own cats where I thought, ‘This is not super friendly at all,’” Morgane Van Belle, a cat behaviorist and co-author of the new study, told the New York Times. “Sometimes one cat would lay on the blanket near the window and the other cat would come up and start licking it — but in an annoying way.”

The aggressor cat is hoping the other feline will get so annoyed with the invasive grooming that they’ll abandon their prize spot, whether it’s a sun puddle or a particularly comfortable spot on the couch.

The study’s authors believe there’s more to learn about this behavior, and understanding it can help people mitigate conflict among their feline overlords.

For readers who have multiple cats, have you witnessed this behavior?

For what it’s worth, allogrooming between cats and humans is a thing too. For example, I brush the Budster, and he grooms my hair when I’m in bed.

Some people find that gross, but I try to take it was the compliment it is. Thankfully I have not been subject to weaponized hair grooming, but I’ve seen examples of the behavior the Belgian researchers have identified, and once you realize what you’re looking at, it makes perfect sense. Taking a normal behavior and turning it into an instrument of annoyance is also a very feline thing to do.

Cats show great ingenuity, so we’re fortunate they’re extremely lazy. If sufficiently motivated, they could undoubtedly rule the world.