In the era of Amazon, America’s independent bookstores survive by offering things the online giant can’t.
Like everything else in the realm of print media, bookstores have been having a rough go of it the last decade or two.
Waldenbooks, Crown Books and Borders no longer exist, with the latter chain shuttering its last 400 stores in 2011. Barnes and Noble is the last surviving book chain thanks to an aggressive strategy of expanding their cafe and lounge space, encouraging shoppers to hang out while they sample books and drink coffee.
There are still some 14,000 bookstores in the US, depending on how some hybrid businesses are categorized, and independent booksellers now make up the majority of real-world retail while the giant that is Amazon looms.
The key to survival is offering things Amazon can’t. Some distinguish themselves by catering to specific customers, like fans of mystery or science fiction, offering rare and signed volumes alongside their regular stock. Some pursue a Barnes and Noble-like strategy, leaning heavily into the hybrid coffee shop model. And some become community spaces for book signings and poetry nights.
Others lure customers inside — and back after they’ve already visited — with pets.
In a new story, the New York Times highlights independent book shops around the country that have dogs, lizards, turtles, rabbits, and of course, cats.
When it comes to our furry and clawed friends, some shops are populated with adoptable felines:
At the Literary Cat Co. in Pittsburg, Kansas, readers have the opportunity to adopt a pet while they shop. The store partners with a local rescue organization, hosting about seven cats at a time, along with three permanent feline “employees”: Hank, the regional manager; Scarlett Toe’Hara, the assistant regional manager (she’s polydactyl); and Mike Meowski, the assistant to the assistant regional manager.
Jennifer Mowdy, the store’s owner, described each cat’s role, personality and origin story with the air of a matriarch ticking off successful grandchildren. Speaking of the upper respiratory illness that cost Mike Meowski an eye, she sounded stoic. He was a kitten; she was there for him. They soldiered through.
Mowdy created a glass alcove for allergic customers – and to deter escapees – and a “kitty conference room” (accessible by cat door) for litter boxes. With regular scooping, four air purifiers and daily mists of Mrs. Meyers Room Spray, she said the scent of the store is neutral to positive.
In the past year and a half, the Literary Cat Co. has facilitated 50 adoptions. “We’ve only had one cat that didn’t work out,” Mowdy said. “Too much fight in her.”
Kittens tend to wreak havoc; Mowdy prefers a mature animal of the “Don’t call me, I’ll call you” variety. Felines are welcome to scale shelves and interact with readers as they please, which is their way.
“They get to practice being a good house cat,” Mowdy said. “They get socialized.” Occasionally, the right cat finds the right reader’s lap. The rest is destiny (with the rescue organization handling logistics; the Literary Cat Co. simply makes the introduction).
The latest viral cat story offers a lesson in healthy skepticism in today’s news environment.
Viral news accounts on social media and less scrupulous news sites have been buzzing this week about a school lockdown in Moses Lake, Washington, which was reportedly caused by a teacher confusing a particularly fat cat for a puma.
I saw red flags immediately while reading the story. While it did give a specific location, it was suspiciously devoid of other details, and the wording on all the posts and stories was dubiously similar. Additionally, a Google news search doesn’t turn up anything recent from reputable press.
Then there’s the photo, which looks a little too good to be true.
This photo is a Getty stock image and does not depict the domestic cat in the school lockdown story, despite accompanying it in dozens of news posts.
So did a school really go into lockdown after a case of mistaken feline identity?
Yes, but it happened in November of 2023, and the photo of the obese cat making the rounds in stories this week does not depict the cat in question. The original story was published by a local news site on Nov. 22, 2023, and says the school went into lockdown at 10:30 that morning, but was quickly lifted after staff confirmed there was no puma stalking the school grounds.
“…educators soon learned that the mountain lion was in fact, a “fat cat eating a rat,” according to the school memo to parents.
‘While we take all reports seriously, this was the first report we’ve ever had of this nature,’ the school wrote in a statement.
Despite the benign nature of it all, safety measures resumed to safeguard students and staff. Classes resumed as normal after a short period of time. “
As for the photo, the particularly rotund moggie’s image is a stock photo from Getty. It was used in a story about feline obesity in 2017 and an April 2018 story from the New York Daily News about public outrage in Jefferson, Iowa, where the police were shooting feral cats instead of dispatching animal control or working with local shelters.
Since the image is from a photo agency and predates the original story about the Washington school lockdown by at least six years, we can rule it out as an image of the feline mistaken for a mountain lion while settling down to a feast of fresh rat.
A deceptive image used to promote the story on Facebook.
So what happened here, and why are so many news sites and channels reporting this incident as if it just happened, accompanied by a deceptive photo that is not credited to Getty?
It’s classic clickbait. That is to say, some administrator or editor saw the old story picking up traffic or noticed a blip in certain search strings, and republished the story as if it’s new while omitting the original date.
Others noticed and followed suit to get the clicks while the getting’s good, fighting over the scraps that fall from the Zuckerbergian table in the form of ad revenue. The story is simple, sharable, has been paired with an amusing image, and is exactly the sort of thing people love to post and comment on via social media.
It’s a reminder to all of us to be skeptical about what we read, and to never take anything on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok et al at face value. In fact, it’s best to ignore anything on those platforms presented as news or fact. Everyone’s got their own preferences, but here at Casa de Buddy, we like the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Guardian, Associated Press, al Jazeera, the BBC, and aggregators like RealClearPolitics.
That doesn’t mean they’re above reproach or that everything they produce is a sparkling example of journalism, but they’re institutions that operate under the traditional rules, staffed by professionals who take pride in trying to get stories right. I’ll take that any day over a random Facebook account run by some shady guy in Macedonia or Belarus, who will post anything as “news” as long as it brings him clicks and ad revenue.
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.
It’s the first time a mountain lion has been spotted in New York since 2011. Authorities aren’t sure if the cat is an escaped — and illegal — pet, or if it made an epic journey from the west coast.
For the first time in 14 years, there’s a puma on the loose in New York.
The wild cat was spotted on a Rochester woman’s Ring doorbell camera padding along the sidewalk in front of her home at about 4 am on Wednesday morning.
A representative from the state Department of Environmental Conservation cautiously said the agency is working on confirming the species of cat in the footage.
But the feline’s size, gait and tail are dead giveaways, despite the dark footage and fleeting glimpse: it’s a puma.
In the brief clip, the wild feline walks past a tree, giving the DEC an important context clue. Michael Palermo, a wildlife manager with the department, said his team measured the tree, allowing them to closely estimate the animal’s size by comparing the footage to their measurements.
“If, in fact, it is some large cat, we would want to question, how did it get here? It’s not impossible for a wild cougar to travel to New York; it’s happened before,” Palermo said. “Was it a captive one that may have been legal as a licensed facility, and if so, did it escape? We still need to do some work to verify anything like that.”
While pumas were once native to New York and thrived in the forested mountains of regions like the Catskills (“cat creek” in Dutch), the last verified sighting in New York was in 2011. That cougar crossed through the Empire State after an epic journey from the west coast, a stronghold for the species.
Some people who posted to a Rochester community group on Facebook are already freaking out, and pumas are widely misunderstood, so it’s important to note the facts:
Pumas are not African lions, are not closely related to them and do not behave like them
They’re not aggressive toward people. In fact, they try to stay away from humans and will go out of their way to avoid confrontation
The exceptions are when people threaten a puma’s cubs or corner the animal, giving it no opportunity to escape
Americans are 150 times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a puma. There are only 27 reported cases of people killed by pumas in more than a century. By contrast, an estimated 4,300 to 10,000 Americans have been killed by dogs in that same time span. (Higher estimates include people who did not die immediately from dog bites, and people who died of infections or complications from bites.)
While some people and media reports erroneously call pumas “big cats,” they are not members of the panthera genus. They are felines more closely related to domestic cats and small wildcats. Accordingly, pumas can purr and meow, but they cannot roar
Pumas are also known as mountain lions, cougars, panthers, painters, screamers, catamounts, pangui, onca parda, cuguacuarana, katalgar, chimbica, shunta-haska, fire cats, California lions, ghost cats, and red tigers, among many other names.
In fact, the species has more names than any other animal. That’s because it’s adaptable with a historically wide and varied range. There are some 40 names for pumas in English and more than 80 in Spanish, Portuguese and the languages of indigenous Native American tribes.
The species is officially known as puma concolor, or “puma of one color” thanks to its typically biege fur that, unlike tigers, jaguars, leopards and even house cats, does not have stripes, spots or rosettes.
While it’s extremely unlikely the mystery cougar would pose a threat to people, Rochester police — who have fielded several reports of sightings in recent days — advise locals to keep their pets indoors and to exercise caution while walking their dogs.
Update: The DEC has officially confirmed the cat is a puma, although it was obvious from the footage.
In the meantime, a Rochester man says he saw the wild cat — and people running away from it — on Wednesday night.
Although that sighting has not been substantiated by authorities, it does illustrate the need to educate the public about these animals.
“You know, a mountain lion, it be ‘rawr.’ They be crawling and… serious,” Curtis Jones told WHAM, an ABC affiliate in Rochester.
“I am going to keep this bat right here, man, just in case,” he told a TV reporter. “I am going to protect us, I ain’t going to let nothing happen to us, nothing. OK?”
Let’s hope common sense somehow finds its way into the Facebook algorithm amid all the misinformation as the locals discuss the sightings online.
If you’re from the area, we beg you: please do not attack, shoot or chase after the puma with a baseball bat. The animal does not consider you food, is not a danger to you, and is probably scared and hungry.
That deserves special emphasis if, as the DEC’s staff have said, the puma is more likely an escaped captive than a long-wandering traveler from the western US.
Jones said he saw the puma “slithering” and hear it “rawr,” but it’s worth noting, again, that pumas are members of the genus felinae, meaning they’re genetically and behaviorally much closer to house cats and can meow and purr, but cannot roar. Despite their size, mountain lions are not true “big cats.”
As for Jones, we hope him and his neighbors give the cat a wide berth and let the authorities safely capture it, have a veterinarian evaluate, and figure out where it belongs.
“I don’t play with lions, I don’t play with tigers, bears, nothing in the wild, I don’t play with those, I promise you,” Jones told the station. “I don’t even do rollercoasters. I’m good.”
The woman has been dubbed a “serial killer” of animals after eight of her pets and one of her horses met early ends, and several others simply disappeared. She’s part of an unfortunate trend of influencers and quasi-celebrities popularizing exotic pets, with “ownership” of the animals frequently leading to tragedy.
So apparently Katie Price is some sort of proto-Kardashian, a pioneer of the “famous for being famous” genre of hybrid reality/online celebrity, to use the term loosely.
Wikipedia says she got her first taste of fame in the 90s posing topless for British tabloid newspapers before moving on to loftier pursuits, like appearing on Big Brother and holding court on important topics, like whether toes have bones.
The background really doesn’t matter, except to establish that Price is someone with a lot of money, minimal common sense and extraordinarily poor judgment who has gotten so many of her pets killed or injured, PETA and other animal rights groups in the UK have begged politicians to write new laws preventing serial pet-killers from purchasing more animals.
Sort of a “10 strikes and you’re out” rule, if you will.
Four of Price’s dogs have been hit by cars, including one killed by a pizza delivery driver on her property. Another got stuck in an electric armchair and was crushed after Price gave him cannabis oil, pleading ignorance on its effects.
Previously, one of her breed cats was euthanized under mysterious circumstances at five months old, her rare chameleon fell ill and died because he wasn’t kept in a properly heated enclosure, and her “guard dog” was apparently intentionally killed by someone, although the information on that death comes from Price so there’s no way of telling what the actual circumstances were.
A horse Price owned was killed on the same road where two of her dogs met their end, which would bring the tally to nine depending on whether you consider a horse a “pet.”
Price, pictured this year.
There have also been animals — kittens, puppies, animals gifted by boyfriends, fiances, and friends — who were featured on Price’s social media feeds as babies and never heard from again, according to the UK’s Mirror. Some of them were given away to assistants and acquaintances. The fates of the others are unknown.
Price currently owns at least four chihuahuas and five Sphynx cats. An incident with one of the Sphynxes has animal lovers and welfare groups renewing calls to prevent her from buying new pets. (Price, like so many social media influencers, exclusively purchases breed pets for thousands of dollars each.)
In a new video posted online, Price — who has been dubbed a “serial killer” of animals by PETA — makes duck lips at the camera and rubs one of her Sphynx cats, Kevin, explaining that the little guy suffered sunburns.
“Oh Kevin you have been in the sun today, you have got sun burnt despite us putting sun cream on you… look at his little face,” Price said in the video. A caption written by Price claims “Trying to keep the cats out of the sun is hard work.”
A screen shot from Price’s recent video in which she shows one of her cats who suffered sunburn during the ongoing heat wave.
The latest incident is drawing fresh attention to a petition that calls for the UK government to step in to stop Price from owning animals.
As of July 10, there were 37,728 verified signatures on the Change.org petition, which mentions a number of additional disturbing incidents involving Price’s pets. One accusation claims Price’s guard dog — it’s not clear if it was the dog who was killed, or a new guard dog — bit the tail off one of her cats.
“Anyone who warns Katie not to hurt the animals she takes in might as well be screaming into the wind, for all she seems to care,” PETA’s Elisa Allen said. “And here we go again: her cat is sunburnt – something she was likely warned about when acquiring a gimmick cat, bred to look odd and be hairless.”
For her part, Price claims the deaths and unfortunate incidents that have befallen animals in her care are simply the result of bad luck and circumstances outside her control. Her representatives have also accused animal welfare groups of using the influencer’s fame to raise money.
That has not changed the narrative as new incidents continue to pile up. In a 2023 live TikTok stream, Price allegedly slapped her then-puppy, Tank — who she’s since discarded — for sitting on a hoodie. “Get off! You’re sitting on my jumpers, my jumpers that I love,” Price said after the sound of a loud slap off camera, leaving viewers fuming.
Price is not alone in the world of influencers, quasi-celebrities, Real Housewife types and entertainers who apparently view animals as disposable amusements.
Hilaria Baldwin, Alec Baldwin’s wife, has earned the nickname “Cruella Seville” from her detractors for her alleged treatment of her breed cats and dogs. The nickname is a play on the character Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmations and the Spanish city of Seville, where Baldwin claimed to have roots before claiming she was born in Mallorca.
Baldwin with two of her Bengal kittens. New kittens have appeared in her Instagram posts several times in recent years, apparently replacing older Bengals she’d purchased previously.
Baldwin, you may recall, was enthusiastically Spanish until she wasn’t. She was essentially exiled from celebrity-adjacent society in 2020 after Twitter users dug up videos of her fluctuating accent and performative “forgetting” of English words like cucumber, outlet and onion. Former classmates, acquaintances and friends came forward to say she was the Boston-born Hillary Hayward-Thomas and didn’t go by Hilaria — or speak with an accent — until around 2010, when she met Alec Baldwin.
But the actor’s wife never stopped posting to social media, and in addition to animal lovers calling foul on videos that show her allegedly mishandling her dogs, her online posts show a rotating cast of Bengal kittens. Critics have called for action against Baldwin for her alleged treatment of animals, as well as buying Bengals despite the fact that it’s against the law to keep them as pets in New York City. PETA, which previously worked with Alec and Hilaria Baldwin on a publicity campaign, also called on the couple to stop buying exotic pets.
In the music world, mainstream pop artists like Justin Bieber and Rihanna have both come under fire for purchasing baby monkeys — a capuchin in the case of Bieber, and a slow loris for Rihanna.
The Rihanna incident, in which she shared a photo of herself with a slow loris pet to social media, resulted in raids on illegal wildlife markets in Thailand, where Rihanna allegedly acquired the animal. There are nine subspecies of slow loris, ranging from vulnerable to critically endangered in conservation status, per the World Wildlife Fund.
Rihanna posing with a slow loris, a nocturnal, arboreal animal that is notably the world’s only venomous primate. The venom glands are removed from slow lorises sold on the illegal wildlife market. People continue to poach and sell them despite their declining numbers in the wild.
Bieber named his monkey Mally OG and famously ditched the then-infant in Germany in 2013, when officials there seized the primate from his private plane after it touched down in Munich, citing his lack of permits and purchase records for the animal. (They essentially accused Bieber of buying Mally on the illegal wildlife market.)
“Honestly, everyone told me not to bring the monkey. Everybody,” Bieber told GQ magazine in an interview several years later. “Everyone told me not to bring the monkey. I was like, ‘It’s gonna be fine, guys!’ It was the farthest thing from fine.”
Bieber with his pet capuchin monkey, Mally OG, who was just an infant when he was ripped from his mother’s arms so he could be sold to the pop singer.Bieber with another capuchin monkey as part of a skit in which he joked about German authorities seizing his first monkey pet.
The singer said he’d return for his pet after retrieving the paperwork from one of his US homes, but he never did, and Mally OG was placed in a sanctuary after a long rehabilitation period.
In a follow-up story five years later, Asta Noth of Serengeti Wildlife Park said Mally was still trying to imitate human speech, and didn’t know how to communicate with his own species. That’s a common problem with monkeys who are former pets, as they do not understand the complex social dynamics of troops and family units.
His developmental problems stem from the fact that “he was taken away from his mother and natural family way too early,” Noth said. “He did not learn to be a monkey.”
Pain In The Bud 