Every cat lover’s camera roll is dominated by photos of our fluffy little overlords. It’s the natural order of things.
I’ve always said Bud’s silent treatment can be worse than his vocal protests when it comes to gauging the intensity of his disapproval.
Howling at me to fetch him a snack? That’s normal. Sitting down two feet away and fixing me with his wide-eyed, accusatory stare as I eat a snack without getting one for him? Now that’s serious.
Andreas Nilsson, the director of a new ad highlighting a recently-introduced Apple feature, clearly understands the hierarchy of feline displeasure:
In the spot, a man uses Apple Intelligence to remove his cat, Garrett, from a photo he just snapped of his wife relaxing and reading a book.
“Look, I deleted Garrett,” he says, holding up the photo and clearly expecting something along the lines of “Wow, that’s a pretty cool feature!”
Instead, she gives him a dry “I always knew you hated Garrett” and goes back to her book.
But Garrett himself doesn’t have to utter a single meow. His reproachful gaze is all the prompting the man needs to undo his mistake with the tap of his screen.
The commercial ends with a slow close-in on Garrett’s face, which has “You’re on thin ice, human!” written all over it.
I like this spot. The creative team took a risk in showing off a new feature in a way that made the characters react negatively, but cat people will love it, and viewers aren’t likely to forget what they saw.
Android users have had something very much like it for quite a while now. Sometimes it really does work the way it does in the commercials, with seamless results, but other images are a bit more difficult to clean up and require some manual tinkering. If Apple’s figured out a way to measurably improve this sort of thing, that’s a pretty big positive for the future of smartphone photography and editing.
In any case, cheers to Nilsson for knowing who holds real power in human-feline households. Now if you’ll excuse me, the king is demanding my attention, no doubt to have me scratch his chin, open a door for him, or serve him second breakfast…
Buddy confronts his machine arch-nemesis, while NASA celebrates JWST’s third anniversary by imaging the cosmic cat’s paw in detail we’ve never seen before.
To mark its third anniversary, the team behind the James Webb Space Telescope has released an image of the Cat’s Paw nebula, and it’s incredible!
Below is a dramatically scaled down version of the image to make things easier on readers who may have slower connections or tend to visit PITB on mobile devices. The original is 30mb and can be found here.
It really is worth viewing at maximum resolution, where you can see details of the stellar nursery and the thick plumes of ionized gases that comprise the radiant, multi-hued structure of the nebula.
The dark red areas are dense concentrations of gases, the clouds from which stars are born. The blue stars are the cosmic newborns, and if you scroll through the image at maximum resolution, you can see those young stars floating in seas of their golden brethren in interstellar expanses stretching thousands of light years. In this image, we’re looking at an area of our galaxy between about 4,000 and 5,500 light years away.
Here’s the small version:
And here are images that better illustrate why it’s called the Cat’s Paw, with a view oriented in the “correct” way to trigger our brains’ pattern recognition processes, the mechanisms that make us think “Oh yeah, that does look like a cat’s paw!”
“Toe beans” up top, large pad beneath. The Cat’s Paw Nebula.Viewed in different wavelengths to better see the overall structure without the obscuring elements.
We’re fortunate there is no cosmic-scale feline floating out there. Just imagine entire star systems batted around for fun, or a section of the galaxy reserved as a litter box.
I know this can seem overwhelming to some people, while others see images like this and think “What’s the big deal? Haven’t we seen things like this before?”
And the truth is no, we haven’t. That’s the beauty of the James Webb Space Telescope. We’re not only seeing galaxies and structures previously undiscovered, we’re also seeing familiar cosmic locations in detail and resolution that was previously impossible.
In a very real way, we’ve upgraded from standard definition Cosmic TV to the HD version.
The scope is in orbit, at a gravitationally stable position known as Lagrange point 2. In plain English, it’s a special place a million miles from Earth where the gravitational dance between our planet and our sun effectively cancel each other out.
Or, as NASA puts it, Lagrange points are “positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put.”
It took decades of planning and the engineering talents of thousands of humanity’s best to create the JWST, which is also a spacecraft. The scope was built to travel to L2 without anyone aboard, then unfold itself in a delicate ballet of almost innumerable moving parts. The JWST’s ability to transform, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, is an engineering marvel in and of itself, and that’s before it began providing us with a better view of the cosmos than we’ve ever had in the history of our species.
Header image credit: Texas Tech University Department of Physics and Astronomy
The fury of the Budster
Casa de Buddy has a new vacuum, desperately needed during this hot summer as Bud has been shedding more fur than usual.
I could have made another cat from all the hair the new vac picked up from the area rugs, couches and pillows, but Buddy wasn’t happy.
As PITB readers know, vacuums are high on the list of things Buddy despises. He’ll start hissing the moment he sees one, even if it’s not plugged in. He thinks they are angry nemesis machines created to infiltrate his territory and torment him.
Usually I try to lure the little dude into another room with treats and lock him in for a few minutes while I vacuum, but he was nowhere to be found, so I thought he’d spotted the vac and retreated voluntarily.
Tragically, I was mistaken.
Shortly after I began vacuuming my bedroom, I heard a low growl, then Buddy leaped from his hiding spot under my desk and shrieked his high-pitched, baby-like battle cry as he launched himself at the evil vacuum!
It was comical. His little face was twisted into a mask of rage, his ears were pinned back, and he slapped the hell out of the vac: SLAP SLAP SLAP SLAPPP!!! with his little paws.
Here’s a reimagining of the ghastly incident, since it would be cruel to repeat it just to get photos. It’s Buddy — or the “model” of Buddy I’ve built using dozens of photos — exacting his wrath on the evil machines that disturb his peace:
I turned the vacuum off and tried to calm him down by reassuring him in a soft voice that he was safe. Nothing to be worried about, pal!
But I couldn’t stop laughing, which didn’t help the situation. Little man does not like to be mocked, and I’m convinced he fully understands when I’m laughing at instead of with him.
Ah, well. Next time there will be no assumptions and I’ll get him safely out of harm’s way before using the evil contraption.
From summer 2014 when Bud was about five months old.
Bud says: “Derp derp derp! I’m a bug-eyed kitten! Derp!”Bud says: “Now THIS is a more regal image befitting my status as a handsome feline!”Bud says: “Here I am in action! As you can see, I was ripped but not quite as meowscular as I am now.
Flashback photos from the spring of 2020 when most cats were wondering why their people were huddling at home and only venturing out cautiously with masks and gloves.
Taken during the spring of 2020 during the height of the quarantine, which Bud was blissfully oblivious to!
Arabian leopards are among the most rare of all cats, with only about 120 left living in the wild. Trump was taken with them on a recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
I can practically hear Donald Trump bragging about the new pair of extremely rare Arabian leopards the Saudis will send stateside as a deal-sweetener between the countries.
“They’re tremendous cats, just terrific,” he’ll say. “The most ferocious cats you’ve ever seen, believe me. It’s incredible. A lot of people are saying — and by the way, did you know leopards eat up to 40 pounds of meat a day? They’re tremendously powerful animals, very powerful.”
As the New York Times notes, Trump is just as beguiled by dangerous apex predators as he is with dangerous “strong men” tyrants:
Mr. Trump does not own pets and, unlike his sons, he does not hunt big game. But he has shown a particular fascination for animals at the top of the food chain. Last year, he talked constantly on the campaign trail about shark attacks. While campaigning in 2015, he was nearly mauled by a bald eagle he posed with in Trump Tower for a Time magazine photo shoot. (“This bird is seriously dangerous but beautiful!” he chirped after the raptor lunged at his head.)
During his first term, Mr. Trump asked aides about dropping snakes and alligators into a hypothetical moat he wanted built on America’s southern border. He also reportedly became fixated on the viciousness of badgers, badgering his former chief of staff Reince Priebus, who is from the Badger State, as Wisconsin is known, about whether badgers were mean or friendly, according to “Sinking in the Swamp,” a book about the first Trump administration. (Mr. Priebus did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Trump viewed the leopards and spoke to a zookeeper while he was in Saudi Arabia to complete a recent arms deal. (The U.S. will sell $142 billion in high tech weapons to Saudi Arabia so the kingdom can more effectively slaughter Yemeni civilians in its ongoing proxy war with Iran.) The American president wanted to know all about the big cats, including how big they are and what they eat. The zookeeper, who routinely handles those sorts of questions from visiting classes of elementary school children, happily indulged his interest.
Arabian leopards are fierce, but they’re somewhat smaller than their Asian counterparts. Panthera pardus nimr, as the species is known, generally has a lighter, tan-colored coat that provides more camouflage in desert and arid environments.
An Arabian leopard Arabia’s Wildlife Center in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Arabia Wildlife Center
The Times also quotes Joe Maldonado, aka Joe Exotic, who spoke to a reporter from prison, where he’s serving a 21-year sentence for trying to have Big Cat Rescue’s Carole Baskin murdered. Maldonado is keenly aware of Trump’s recent streak of handing out pardons to reality TV grifters, like Todd and Julie Chrisley, who stole almost $40 million, as well as less famous scammers like convicted crypto bros. (The Chrisleys, who were convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion, declared bankruptcy to avoid paying back their victims, and will now launch a new reality TV show detailing their post-prison lives. ‘Merica!)
Now Maldonado sees an opportunity.
The former “Tiger King” says Trump should have leopards and other big cats prowling the grounds of the White House, which is the kind of thing dictators like Vladimir Putin and Saddam Hussein have been known for.
“I think it would be absolutely amazing if he would put some endangered cats like that around the White House,” Maldonado said. “I’ve never been there. I don’t know how big the Rose Garden is, but I would imagine you could build a pretty nice size complex.”
Perhaps Trump can threaten to feed congressmen and senators to his new leopards if they defy him and don’t vote for legislation like the “big, beautiful bill” he’s been pushing.
Maldonado admitted that even he’s never seen an Arabian leopard, an animal so rare that only an estimated 120 of them remain in the wild. Still, he thinks he can handle them for Trump.
“Let me out,” Maldonado said, “and I’ll come take care of ’em!”
Pain In The Bud 