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.
When OG Anunoby teamed up with local New York cat rescues to promote an adoption event in June, the marketing materials were curiously devoid of any mention of Anunoby having a feline of his own.
The Knicks were still basking in the glow of their incredible run to the NBA championship, and Anunoby was doing a good thing, but there was a piece of the story missing.
Why was he helping cats?
Now we know.
Anunoby says he loves all animals, “but especially cats.” He just doesn’t have a cat of his own yet for a very practical reason: he’s on the road constantly as a professional athlete, and his job is extremely demanding on his time.
“Because of the season and the scheduling and all the travel I have to do, it’s hard to have one,” he told NBC Sports. “So, I don’t have one right now, but I do want to get one in the future.”
Some professional athletes make it work. Jordan Poole is the NBA’s most prominent cat lover and was a regular volunteer at a local shelter when he played for the Washington Wizards.
A close-up of Muñoz’s custom glove with his cat’s name and likeness.Munoz using his custom glove during an MLB game.
In Major League Baseball, 27-year-old Seattle Mariners closer Andrés Muñoz is famous for his devotion to his cat, Matilda. He had her hilariously sneering face and paw prints stitched onto a custom glove, and his wife brings Matilda with her on the road when the Mariners embark on road trips, so Muñoz can have his family with him.
Even Seattle fans love Matilda and she’s become an unofficial team mascot with her own bobblehead doll.
After picking a “starting five” of adoptable cats in June, Anunoby is currently partnering with Royal Canin in a campaign to urge people to take their cats to the vet for preventative care.
He’s beloved in New York not only for being an absolute badass on the court and for exceeding expectations as he hit one of basketball’s most iconic game-winning shots. He’s also loved for his demeanor. The dude’s a space cadet.
After the Kicks won it all, Anunoby stared quietly, immersed in his own thoughts during a national TV morning show appearance with his teammates, completely oblivious to the anchor who was asking him a question. The rest of the Knicks were doubled over in laughter.
He’s the kind of introvert who would probably make a good cat dad, so when he retires — or maybe when he gets a guarantee of stability, like a no-trade clause in his contract — he’ll provide a good home.
In the meantime, he said what every fan likes to hear. The Knicks enjoyed their championship, they basked in the celebration, but they know there are 29 hungry teams ready to stop them from repeating as champions, so now they’re back in the gym and putting in the work to level up.
The new Netflix animated comedy from Ricky Gervais has its moments, but it’s overly dependent on litter box humor and its attempts at redemptive sweetness border on the diabetic.
Ricky Gervais’ eponymous alley cats have one thing in common with Buddy: they think they’re the toughest, most fearsome creatures on the block.
They might recoil in horror, jump back a dozen feet and soil themselves when a vegetable delivery man drops a cucumber on the sidewalk, but approximately half of their obscenity-peppered banter involves discussing other living things they reckon they’d destroy.
Among them: snails, elephants, meerkats, portly humans, sharks and anything besides spiders who are, invariably, referred to as “a bunch of c—s.”
When they’re not praising themselves for being fearless apex predators, hunting mice or watching “a bit of telly,” they’re ripping on Rupert, the only house cat in their gang, by reminding him he no longer has his testicles.
In an early episode the gang is poised on the wall of a cemetery, impatiently waiting for a “dead c—” to get buried so they can go hunting for mice when Rupert pads up, says hello and announces he’s already eaten: chicken and rabbit in gravy “with extra calcium.”
The others tear into him, asking him if his humans brushed him or gave him pudding afterwards.
“I have my pudding during the brushing,” he says, explaining that brushing is stressful and a simultaneous dessert “takes the edge off.”
That prompts another round of full-throated laughter and ball-busting over Rupert’s lack of them. Ricky Gervais’ Gus and Andrew Brooke’s Fang – a big bruiser tuxedo tom – lead the charge, making kissing sounds and mocking Rupert for being a sweet pet to his “mummy and daddy.”
When the scrawny Puke (David Earl) uses the freshly-dug grave as a litter box and Rupert protests, Gus waves a dismissive paw, insisting all humans are scum anyway.
“Not all of them,” Rupert says. “Attenborough. Malala. My owners, for instance.”
“His owners!” Fang says, breaking into mocking laughter.
“Do you hear yourself?” Gus says.
“They are my owners,” Rupert sniffs. “They paid a tidy sum for me, and I’m grateful. Otherwise I’d be rotting in a shelter or worse, living in a dump like you lot.”
Which, of course, prompts another round of mockery about Rupert’s missing bits.
After agreeing they’re the toughest, baddest cats on the block, Gus and the gang are terrified by the sight of a single cucumber.
That’s Alley Cats in a nutshell, no pun intended, until the appearance of a lost kitten gives the gang a purpose and brings out their humanity. (Catanity? Felinity?)
At first the alley cats are tempted to make a snack of the little one until Olive (Diane Morgan) reminds them she’s a baby, she’s lost, and they’re big, strong cats, which they’re always reminding everyone of.
Amid all the obscenities there are moments acknowledging that being a street cat is not an easy life. One minute the strays are joyously knocking flower pots off a window sill, the next they’re staring shocked at the body of their friend who was hit by a driver.
“He didn’t even stop,” one of them says. “He didn’t care.”
“Humans never do,” Gus replies matter-of-factly.
Later they find another one of their mates, an elderly tom, stuffed in a carrier.
“Off to the vet,” their friend says from his confinement.
“He’ll fix you right up,” Gus says.
“Nah,” the scraggly old tom says sadly. “I overheard ’em. This is a one-way trip.”
With their earlier exuberance wiped out, the alley cats decide to retreat for the day, prompting the kitten to ask them uncomfortable questions about mortality and what kind of life a cat can expect.
For Gus, it means being put in a tough spot. He clearly cares for the kitten, even inviting her to snuggle up with him when she’s whimpering alone at night, but he has a reputation to maintain. He’s Gus, fearless and tough street cat!
Gus fancies a tabby from his neighborhood, but usually keeps his distance for fear of her intimidating boy(cat) friend.
Alley Cats is not for everyone. There will be people who reach for the remote within the first two or three minutes because it is relentlessly obscene.
I’m not particularly bothered by foul language if there’s a genuine purpose to it, but too often it feels like it’s in the script in lieu of genuine jokes, as if Gervais is elbowing us like “See what I did there? I called him a c—! Haha! That’s funny, innit? My character is a cat who calls everyone c—s and tw–s! Brilliant.”
The UK press has savaged the show, concluding Gervais is capable of comedic brilliance but has become lazy and formulaic.
And that’s true to a degree, just like it’s accurate to say South Park is a festival of fart jokes. But just like the latter show also has a sharp satirical edge and functions as an equal opportunity eviscerator of the ridiculous, Alley Cats tries to say more. It just isn’t always successful.
Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats are the family-friendly animated template for Alley Cats. Reruns of Heathcliff were part of after-school cartoon blocks in the late 80s and early 90s.
Whether you stick around for the bigger themes depends on your personal tolerance for the banter they’re wrapped in.
Unfortunately it’s also true that the reflective moments are a little too formulaic, like the lesson-of-the-day from after-school TV years ago. Balancing comedy with earnestness is already a difficult task that requires timing and a degree of self-awareness that I’m not sure Gervais possesses at this stage of his career.
Reviewers who have soured on the UK comedian are increasingly convinced he requires the tempering influence of his The Office co-creator and writer, Stephen Merchant.
They may be on to something, but I also think it may cut both ways.
I really enjoyed Merchant’s HBO series, Hello Ladies. It was unlike anything else on TV and felt like a genuinely fresh approach to comedy. But it also operated at a default cringe level orders of magnitude more uncomfortable than other shows.
There were times when the situations in Hello Ladies became so embarrassing, so completely detached from the norms of social behavior, that I had to pause the show and take a break.
Gervais and Merchant could temper each other’s worst instincts as they did in The Office.
I’m not the only one who felt that way. Reviews at the time were fixated on the improbably powerful osmotic cringe effect, and Merchant didn’t know when to let up. Just as you felt so mortified that you’d swear things couldn’t possibly get worse, Merchant found ways to crank it up.
The career trajectories of both men indicate a reunion just might be the best thing for them. If Netflix gives Alley Cats a green light for another season, Merchant could fit right in with the gang as a lanky Savannah, a wannabe Lothario who prompts Gervais’ Gus to lean less on the c-word and more on genuine humor, while Gus could bring Merchant’s cat back down to Earth by reintroducing him to reality every once in a while.
I’m sure that, whatever might come from a new collaboration, it would be better than the moderately funny Alley Cats.
Heads up: Recently I discovered a content scraper was skimming posts from this site and repackaging them as books priced at $40 each. I was able to get that person’s online shop terminated, but have since discovered there are at least two others, including one who repackaged my “Amazing Cats” series. The other is even more exorbitantly priced and appears as part of a trove of materials on an Etsy shop marketed to people who want to put out their own books, and claims to offer chapter modules that can be assembled into custom books, which can then be listed for sale on Amazon et al.
Please do not buy them. These people are NOT affiliated with Pain In The Bud and they do not have permission to use content from this site. The posts they pilfered from are free and remain on this site available to everyone. I’d hate to see people buy this stuff believing they’re supporting the site and end up getting ripped off.
In 1996 the world was rendered deeply confused by the emergence of Snow, a bespectacled Canadian caucasian who implausibly sounded like a Jamaican.
Back in the 90s the choice between hip hop and rock was viewed as a binary, and as a kid you were expected to pick one and express a sort of tribal allegiance. And yes, there were racial fault lines involved, especially among people who lived in insular communities.
If you were a self professed fan of rock, you were supposed regard anything even tangential to hip hop as inherently ridiculous garbage that required no talent to produce. I remember seeing the punk band Goldfinger in 1996 when lead singer John Feldman quieted the crowd, took on a somber tone and announced we were going to have a moment of silence for the just-slain Tupac Shakur…immediately before the band’s drummer launched into the noisiest, most chaotic solo he could muster.
The crowd loved it. There was no indication anyone stopped to think about why they were celebrating the death of another person, let alone one the violent end of a rising star who was only 25 years old when he was slain by a gunman who remains at large 30 years later
On the hip hop side, rock was either regarded as a relic, a nonentity or entirely lacking in the spark that made you feel the music.
In that environment, there was a narrow window for white performers to break through as hip hop artists, but until the emergence of Eminem it was a deal with the devil, and the cost was spending one summer on top of the world and the rest of your existence as a punchline.
Just ask Vanilla Ice. Or Marky Mark, who doesn’t exist anymore because Mark Wahlberg wisely switched to acting and would like everyone to forget he once strutted around with pants halfway down his ass. (“Back when Mark Wahlberg was Marky Mark, this is how we used to make the party start,” Eminem rapped in one of his early tracks.)
Purveyors of reggae-hip hop were not exempt from the aforementioned dark pact, which is why the mainstream hasn’t heard anything from Snow in almost 35 years.
The 56-year-old Darrin Kenneth O’Brien was the hottest artist on the planet for a good chunk of 1992, and despite a name that conjures images of a guy singing twee Gaelic tunes, Mr. O’Brien spat reggae and dancehall with a patois that had listeners sure they were hearing a guy from Jamaica.
“People dem say mi come from Jamaica but mi born and raised in di ghetto of Toronto,” the bespectacled, white-as-you’d expect O’Brien chants on his worldwide hit, Informer:
Informer includes an intro and a short rap from MC Shan, a black rapper, for credibility purposes that were essential in the 90s. (“Well, if black dudes are cool with this pasty Canadian guy singing like a coked out Bob Marley, who am I to argue?”)
Ostensibly it’s about Snow, he of a known criminal reputation, being accused of “stabbing someone down the lane” and heroically refusing to turn informer/snitch on some unnamed greater target. The story was frequently worked into marketing materials at the time to burnish the credibility MC Shan already established: Snow isn’t just good at affecting a Jamaican accent, and he doesn’t just have the approval of respected emcees, he’s also a real criminal! He’s legit, okay?
But dig a little deeper and it turns out Snow was involved in a bar fight and was booked into police lockup or a county jail, not a state prison or its Canadian equivalent.
That changes the calculus considerably. It’s like being told someone played professional baseball, then finding out that instead of being a Yankees or Dodgers regular, he pitched 3.2 innings for the Savannah Bananas in their 2024 campaign.
The Savannah Bananas celebrating a run. I think.
Regardless, Snow’s pact granted him an earworm that blasted from boomboxes and on MTV all summer as people tried to figure out exactly what the hell the guy was saying.
Most of it’s an unimaginative blow-by-blow account of his arrest for possible minor assault stemming from the aforementioned bar argument and the allegedly enthusiastic welcome he received from the drunk drivers, petty thieves, kids caught spraying graffiti and other hardened criminals who populate the cells of Canada’s notorious local lock-ups. A group that was in Mr. O’Brien’s telling so impressed with his cajones, they welcomed him like a lord of the criminal underworld finally returned to his people. Game recognize game and all that.
Kriss Kross, a seminal 90s hip hop one hit wonder whose primary innovation was wearing their clothes backwards.
To this day I don’t know what licky boom boom down means, except possibly the name of a supplementary service at a shady shiatsu salon staffed by undocumented and indentured women of nondescript Asian origin, but the rest is straightforward: Snow is tough, Snow sounds like a Jamaican guy, Snow is respected, Snow is into them irie girls, them irie girls love Snow, bombaclot.
Regardless, Snow walked so that guys like Matisyahu could run, and instead of having their careers extinguished just as quickly as they began, today’s white reggae artists often enjoy long, drawn-out declines playing to small- and medium-size crowds on the sunshine reggae circuit.
But Snow, pioneer that he was, saw his star fall within months, culminating in Jim Carrey parodying him as Imposter in an In Living Color skit. In the 90s, there was no way back from this:
To the delight of onlookers, the mercurial feline emerged to wave a paw and deliver a speech to a crowd on a neighborhood cat tour.
NEW YORK – After cheers of “Buddy! Buddy! Buddy!” rang out for more than a minute, the tabby cat ventured outside to his balcony and greeted the crowd to deafening cheers.
An expectant hush fell over the onlookers as Buddy the Cat climbed onto a platform. Then his little head poked over the railing, followed by his shoulders, and he extended his front paws before waving to the people below like a pope in St. Peter’s Square.
“Meow!” he said, and the crowd roared its approval.
The crowd wasn’t random. It was part of a pre-planned and scheduled tour of neighborhood cats in lower Westchester County, a suburb which directly borders New York City to the north.
“The absolute hightlight of today’s cat tour,” was the way Nadia Petrova, 27, summed up catching a glimpse of Buddy.
Her friend, Elena Mirazova, 25, nodded in agreement.
“Buddy is such cute cat,” said the Russian, who traveled to New York from Moscow with her friend to visit New York and meet its famous felines.
Brandon Williams, the 53-year-old tour organizer, said Buddy was the tour’s most popular feline of the more than four dozen window cats who can be seen on the 90-minute walking tour through the leafy northern suburb.
“It’s not just his incredible good looks or his inimitable charm,” Williams said. “Buddy is magnetic. He lights up a room…or a parking lot. He’s also the only one who gives speeches.”
Indeed, Buddy delivered a 15-minute speech about the awesomeness of domestic felines, the importance of recognizing that awesomeness, and the tastiest attributes of various meals and snacks.
Then he lowered a bucket, which his admirers filled with treats crunchy and soft, as well as cans of turkey pate from virtually every pet food brand known to man.
Ai Imajo of Osaka gifted the beloved feline a variety pack of Japanese cat food, including Tofu Umami Turkey Mix, Super Ultra Perfection Fried Turkey and Squid, and Barbecue Potato Chip Turkey Chunks. As a result of her thoughtful gifts, which took Buddy’s favorite foods into consideration, the popular feline invited her up to his balcony.
“I felt like Courtney Cox getting plucked out of a crowd to dance with Bruce Springsteen,” Imajo said of the famous incident in 1984, which launched Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. Tour and Cox’s career as a model and actress. “But of course Buddy’s better than Springsteen.”
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