news – Pain In The Bud

25 Years Later, The 9/11 Attacks Still Feel Surreal

I saw the survivors disembark the train, dead-eyed and covered in dust and debris.

It was a few minutes before 9 am and my roommate was shaking me awake. I wasn’t due in the office until 3 pm, but my roommate told me the public editor had called, said there was a terrorist attack, and asked me to come in ASAP.

When you get a call like that from the public editor instead of the city desk or someone else in the direct news loop, you know the newsroom is in chaos. And it was, worse than I’d ever seen it in my short time there.

At the time I was a glorified newspaper intern and as the low man on the totem pole, I got the crappiest assignment. My editors sent me to wait until the subways and trains started up again, so I spent almost the entire day stuck on a platform with a group of people, listening to their panicked chatter and participating in it myself.

I will never forget when a guy came running onto the platform out of breath and shouted “They hit the Pentagon! They hit the f—ing Pentagon!”

There was a low murmur of disbelief among the people on the platform, with one or two loudly expressing skepticism. The Pentagon? Surely that cannot be possible.

Reality was smashing against the aura of invincibility Americans had enjoyed for half a century. We were not prepared for it.

Aerial view of the Pentagon Building on Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: US Navy

Smartphones wouldn’t be invented for another seven years and the phone lines were overloaded that day, so all you’d get when trying to dial was a busy signal on repeat. Combined with the utter confusion at ground zero and news anchors who could do little more than speculate for most of the day, rumors were flying and we didn’t know what to believe.

I remember someone else announcing that there were hundreds of passenger jets still in the air, the government did not know how many had been compromised, and we should prepare ourselves for waves of hijacked planes smashing into skyscrapers, bridges and, God forbid, nuclear reactors like Indian Point just north of the city.

At the same time, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a sober assessment that potentially “tens of thousands” of people could have been killed, because no one knew how many people made it out of the towers.

Another indelible memory: an enraged woman pacing the length of the platform, screaming that “this bulls–t” had interfered with her plans for the day. She was shaking with anger, grumbling to herself with occasionally louder outbursts, and apparently she believed the heliocentric model had been replaced with one that placed her in the center of our solar system and the universe itself.

Finally the first train arrived in the afternoon, and a crush of zombies stumbled out covered in the pulverized concrete, silica, steel dust, asbestos and human remains that blasted through Manhattan in two powerful kinetic waves as the towers collapsed.

They were dead-eyed and in shock as they clutched their briefcases, Blackberries and messenger bags.

I spoke to one man whose office had a direct view of the towers. He sobbed as he told me his story. His building was evacuated shortly before the first tower collapsed and he’d been caught in the blast, caking his suit, his face and hair in the toxic mix of debris.

Others were almost mute with shock or a mix of relief and survivor’s guilt. Most were commuters who worked within a block or two of the World Trade Center. Others had appointments that day, including a woman who survived because she was a few minutes late to a meeting on one of the upper floors.

Another woman shook with emotion and horror as she described watching desperate people jumping out of the skyscrapers to escape the flames inside.

I gathered as many quotes and details as I could, returned to the newsroom and made my small contribution to the events of the day. I wasn’t a first responder, I wasn’t digging people out of the rubble, I didn’t cook meals for the firefighters or guide bewildered survivors away from ground zero.

I told the stories of a handful of people who directly lived through the attack, and I hope I told them well.

Gen Z Kids Think The Cat In The Hat Is Stalking Them In Real Life

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.

Pet Cats Lead To ‘More Mental Health Problems’ For Kids, Authors Of New Study Claim

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.

Larry The Cat Is NOT Dead, Contrary To UK Media Report

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.

‘Warriors’ Cat Novel Series Gets A Video Game

The announcement follows news that Warriors will also be coming to TV screens as an animated series.

Warriors, the globally popular series of novels about clans of feral and stray cats, has sold 90 million books.

Now the franchise has turned its sights on conquering two new mediums with a TV show (see our June post about the upcoming series) and a newly-announced video game.

Titled “Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest,” the upcoming release from Trailmark Games is a turn-based role-playing game that allows players to create their own unique cat who will run with his or her own crew and interact with major characters and the four clans from the novel universe.

The developers say the game world will include locations familiar to readers of the books, and quests will allow them to choose alliances and make other decisions that impact the story and the gameplay.

Before entering the world of Warriors, players will be able to name and create their own protagonist cat, complete with customized coat colors, markings, eye color and other features.

Since the majority of players will doubtlessly create characters based on their own felines, I’ve taken the liberty of using the game’s art style and editing a screen shot to add Buddy leaping through the air and casting two of his powerful spells, Wrath of Nature and Turkey Rejuvenation. The latter, of course, is a healing spell that restores health points via the magic of delicious turkey, in keeping with Buddesian lore. (And the behavior of the real life Buddy.)

Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest is scheduled for a fall 2026 release date on PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, XBox X/S, and Playstation 5.

Here are some real screenshots from the game: