New York Times – Page 3 – Pain In The Bud

Sunday Cats: 4th Blogiversary, 9th Buddiversary, PLUS: Buddy Gets Plagiarized!

Go, Bud! It’s your birthday!

Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us! Happy birthday dear Buddies, happy birthday to us!

We received a notification from WordPress congratulating us on four years with WordPress, although this blog isn’t technically four years old. It started as a place for my random scribbles about Buddy and as a sort of travelogue for my trip to Japan, and it wasn’t until September of 2019 that I registered the domain and started blogging in earnest, transforming the site into the Pain In The Bud we all know and love today.

Over the last few years we’ve been fortunate enough to merit the attention of critics, who have lavished praise on us:

“There’s a reason young kittens the world over have posters of Buddy on their walls. He’s effortlessly charming, possessed of inimitable wit and he’s got one hell of a singing voice.” – Fat Cats magazine

“An indictment of the American education system. I feel dumber for having read it.” – Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine’s guide to the Worst Blogs On The Internet

“An extraordinary blog focused on an exceptional cat whose wit is sharper than Valyrian steel. Endlessly entertaining.” – The Buddesian Times

“A catnip junkie and the human who enables him. Gives all cats a bad rep.” – Veterinary Association of America

“Has there ever been a cat more handsome and interesting than Buddy? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.” – The Chronicle of Higher Buddy

“It’s difficult to tell who’s the bigger moron, the human or the cat. They enable each other, launching their idiotic schemes to take over the world and horde its turkey. Thankfully they’re as incompetent as they are clueless.” – Jefferson Nebula, host of My Cat From Hades

Of course we would not be here if not for our readers. Thanks for finding us, sending us your ideas and most of all, feeding Buddy’s ego by telling him what a charming, interesting and ferocious tiger he is.

On a related note, since I’m not sure of Buddy’s exact birth date, we celebrate his birthday and adoptiversary around the third weekend of April.

Happy birthday, Bud!

Very Sad Buddy — Bud, you sexy beast, you!

How the heck is the little guy nine years old? That doesn’t seem possible. The age equivalency chart says that’s the equivalent of 52 human years, but Bud still has a spring in his stride, meows like a little baby and likes playing with his toys, especially the game called “Mighty Hunter” in which I manipulate wand toys like prey and he ambushes them. Since he doesn’t know he’s supposed to deliver a “kill bite” and hasn’t made the connection that hunting = food, he happily bobbles the toy with his front paws while bouncing around on his feet, then rushes to cover to reset the game.

I will not dwell on or speculate about how long he’ll be with us because I turn into a blubbering mess despite being a grown ass man, so I’ll just say I’m extremely grateful that he’s healthy and happy, and I’ll continue to enjoy every minute with him.

Except when he meows really annoyingly when his food is late. And when he wakes me up by grooming my face. Oh, and his insistence on walking 1/10th of a stride in front of me so I’m always in danger of tripping on him. Also, when he goes into super annoying determined mode and tries to wake me by punching the door flap on his litter box, knowing the squeak of the hinges drives me crazy.

He is very accomplished at annoying me, but that’s okay. He’s my little Buddy.

Plagiarized, you say?

Thanks to those of you who alerted us to a PITB story that was plagiarized by a pet-focused site recently. We’re aware of it, and unfortunately it’s not the first time.

It takes a lot of time and effort to create readable, entertaining content, and there are people who simply don’t care and help themselves to the content without scruples. Almost all of them are based in countries whose authorities don’t respect US intellectual property rights and won’t cooperate with any takedown notices or legal threats.

The Drudge Report, for example, famously links to DNUYZ, a site run by an Armenian guy who steals content from the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Financial Times and other news sites. Google canceled DNUYZ’s AdSense account, but the operator simply signed up with a different ad server, and he makes a tidy profit by stealing content en masse.

If major media organizations can’t stop this nonsense, I have no hope. I’ve had some luck petitioning sites that host third-party content, but many don’t respond and I don’t even get an apology from those who do acknowledge that my content was posted to their sites, earning them pageviews and ad revenue.

There is a way you can help, however. Every time someone links to a PITB article, it incrementally increases our legitimacy in the eyes of Google, and that’s important because it means PITB shows up first when people search for an article or topic on this site, rather than the plagiarized versions copied by content scrapers in countries like India and Russia.

I am not asking people to randomly link to PITB. That wouldn’t help anyway. However, if there’s a story you really like, consider sharing it on social media and help spread the word. Organic virality is the name of the game, and Buddy and I think we do offer something relatively unique in the cat-o-sphere with a blog from a dudely perspective with a focus on absurdist cat humor, big cat conservation and important news stories that impact our furry little friends.

And if that’s not reason enough, well, just look at him. He’s a sexy beast, and surely your cat-loving friends would be angry with you if you did not tell them all about Buddy and his adventures. Don’t make them upset. Do them a solid and invite them to the Wonderful World of Buddy!

George Santos Allegedly Stole $3,000 From Veteran Whose Dog Needed Life-Saving Surgery

The congressional clown show continues, but it’s not funny anymore — it’s just sad.

The George Santos story just keeps getting worse.

My first reaction to the initial New York Times story outing newly-elected New York congressman George Santos as a serial fabulist was surprise, then sadness because I knew his election was in large part made possible by the death of local news. If there’d been competent local media still operating in the area, Santos’ campaign would have ended as suddenly as it started in a flurry of revelatory news coverage, and Santos himself would have been a footnote, a political oddity and embarrassment to the local GOP.

Then for one glorious moment I thought maybe Santos was a performance artist, that we’d find out George Santos is the alias of some comedian or media provocateur whose congressional run was designed from the start to show that politics has become so polarized, so divorced from issues and hitched to ideological loyalties that even a widely disliked grifter — with no roots in the community and a completely fabricated resume — could win simply because he said the right things, pushed the right buttons and kissed the right behinds.

Alas, no Dax Herrera or Ari Shaffir came forward to claim credit for inventing the George Santos persona.

And it just kept getting worse. There were the stories about pending criminal charges for using stolen checks in Santos’ native (?) Brazil, former roommates who saw Santos on TV wearing expensive clothes he’d allegedly stolen from them, and Santos working as the director of a company under investigation for running an alleged Ponzi scheme.

osthoffsapphire1 — Sapphire, veteran Rich Osthoff’s service dog.

The latest story might be the most infuriating: Santos is accused of stealing $3,000 from a homeless, PTSD-suffering veteran whose beloved service dog needed life-saving surgery.

Rich Osthoff, who was living on the streets at the time, needed money to pay for veterinary surgery to remove a large and life-threatening tumor from his service dog, Sapphire. Osthoff says Sapphire was his lifeline during difficult times and he was desperate to get her the surgery she needed.

In 2016 a well-meaning vet tech and another veteran connected Osthoff with Santos, who claimed he ran a charity called Friends of Pets United and could help. At the time, Santos was going by the name Anthony Devolder.

Santos set up a GoFundMe drive for Osthoff and Sapphire, raised $3,000 with a tear-jerker of a plea, then basically ghosted Osthoff and his veteran friend Michael Boll, founder of New Jersey Veterans Network. After fobbing them off with a series of excuses, he stopped responding to their calls and vanished with the proceeds.

“It diminished my faith in humanity,” Osthoff said of the experience.

Santos denied the accusation.

“Fake,” Santos texted news startup Semafor on Wednesday. “No clue who this is.”

osthoffsapphire — Osthoff with Sapphire.

But dozens of other people besides Osthoff, Boll and the vet tech were involved and confirmed Santos’ role in the fundraiser, there are publicly visible tweets from 2016 linking to it — and crediting “Anthony Devolder” for running it — and GoFundMe acknowledged the existence of the drive.

In addition, news reports have confirmed Friends of Pets United, Santos’ “charity,” was never registered as a non-profit. Santos also defrauded an animal rescue group in New Jersey when he pocketed the proceeds from a 2017 fundraiser he ran on behalf of the organization, according to dozens of media reports. Santos was terse in his response to the accusations from Osthoff and Boll, but he was eager to talk about his non-existent pet charity during his campaign, when he claimed Friends of Pets United “saved” more than 2,500 cats and dogs over a four-year span and trapped and neutered more than 3,000 cats.

Santos’ lies are so numerous and so outrageous it’s difficult to keep track of them, and it’s doubtful he remembers all of them.

He claimed his mother worked at a financial firm at the World Trade Center and died in the 9/11 attacks, but Fatima Devolder left the US for Brazil in 1999 and never returned. She also never worked in finance. He claimed four of his employees died in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting that claimed 49 lives. Santos never had any employees, his company didn’t exist, and he didn’t know anyone who died at the nightclub. He claimed ownership over an impressive and burgeoning real estate empire, but never owned any properties and owes more than $40,000 in back rent on a Queens apartment he shared with his sister for years. (His sister was also the recipient of a $30,000 FEMA handout and contributed a hefty $5,000 to his campaign, but still owes tens of thousands in back rent on the apartment, reports say.)

Rep._George_Santos_Official_Portrait_(cropped) — George Santos has refused to resign from congress despite calls from his own constituents, other lawmakers, figures in his own party and media commentators demanding his exit. Credit: Official congressional portrait

There are too many lies to list here, too much insanity to digest in one sitting, and it’s probably not good for the blood pressure to dwell on this weasel of a man allowing a homeless veteran’s service dog to die while pocketing the money raised for her surgery.

But we’re not done yet. We still don’t know how Santos bolstered his campaign with $750,000 of his own money, or where that cash came from. It’s not even clear if Santos is his real name, or if he’s actually a U.S. citizen, with some reports — like a New York Times story from last week — suggesting he may have married his former wife for citizenship.

While New York Republicans have been among the loudest voices to condemn Santos and demand he resign or be removed from congress, national party leaders haven’t made any moves to get rid of him — and have actually given him committee assignments — because they believe they need his vote in a slimmer-than-anticipated congressional majority.

As the lies keep piling up, the biggest question is: How long will this farce be allowed to drag on?

Buddy: PITB Is A ‘Terrible’ Site That ‘No One Reads’

Buddy, the former president of the Americats, is not pleased that PITB has featured stories about topics other than Buddy.

Apparently angry that Pain In The Bud hasn’t been featuring enough stories about him, Buddy the Cat went on a tweet storm Tuesday night in which he took aim at the site and its staff.

“Just looked at the failing PITB and saw they published ANOTHER story that’s not about me,” Buddy wrote at 10:57 pm. “That’s obviously why they’re losing readers! Sad!”

Four minutes later he launched another salvo, noting only a handful of stories in the past month were focused on him.

“PITB and its editorial staff think they’re being so inclusive by writing about birds and orange tabbies and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he wrote. “BORING!”

The former president of the Americats tweeted seven more times in the next 23 minutes before turning his attention back to the site that was named for him and ostensibly exists to feature stories about him.

“That rag, the failing PITB, is no better than the New York Slimes. It claims I slept as a mouse invaded my home. FAKE NEWS!!!” he wrote. “Folks, I am a TREMENDOUS HUNTER and would have DESTROYED that mouse — if it existed. NEWSFLASH: It doesn’t! Another lie by the lamestream media!”

That message was immediately followed by a tweet in which Buddy declared himself “the best hunter of all time, a tremendously talented hunter, and everybody knows it.”

Buddy the Cat — Buddy has expressed his displeasure with PITB.

Buddy’s supporters took his accusations to heart. At a rally in New Jersey attended by 24,000 cats, a tuxedo cat held up a sign that read: “The media hates turkey and hates America!’

Another sign held by an Abyssinian blasted “Low Energy Big Buddy” and referenced C-Anon, a conspiracy theory that imagines Buddy as the leader of a league of patriotic heroes fighting to take down a shadowy kitten smuggling ring.

Supporters of C-Anon believe Buddy is working with “supposedly deceased” cats like Streetcat Bob and Lil Bub to combat insidious canine forces who have allegedly infiltrated feline leadership.

Not all cats are enamored with Buddy, however.

One user, LosGatos446, pointed out that Buddy accusing someone else of being low energy was hypocritical because the silver tabby sleeps between 10 and 16 hours a day, promoting Buddy to reply with a terse “FAKE NEWS!”

Another user with the handle ScaredyCat_Bud shared a video that appeared to show a terrified Buddy dashing for cover behind his human’s legs in response to the crinkle of a paper bag.

“An obvious deepfake!” Buddy replied. “Everyone knows I have tremendous courage. I’m an incredibly, tremendously brave cat!”

Every Attempt To Translate Meows Has Failed. Why?

A New York Times science writer tries MeowTalk, the app that says it can tell you what your cat is saying.

New York Times science writer Emily Anthes details her experience with MeowTalk in a new story, and has more or less come to the same conclusions I did when I wrote about the app last year — it recognizes the obvious, like purring, but adds to confusion over other vocalizations.

Back in January of 2021, in MeowTalk Says Buddy Is A Very Loving Cat, I wrote about using MeowTalk to analyze the vocalizations Bud makes when he wants a door opened. After all, that should be a pretty basic task for an app that exists to translate meows: Cats ask for things, or demand them, some would say.

But instead of “Open the door!”, “I want to be near you!”, “Human, I need something!” or even “Obey me, human!”, it told me Bud was serenading me as he pawed and tapped his claws on the door: “I’m looking for love!”, “My love, come find me!”, “I love you!”, “Love me!”, “I’m in love!”

According to MeowTalk, my cat was apparently the author of that scene in Say Anything when John Cusack held up a boombox outside of Ione Skye’s bedroom window.

John Cusack and Buddy the Cat — Buddy the Director.

Anthes had a similar experience:

“At times, I found MeowTalk’s grab bag of conversational translations disturbing. At one point, Momo sounded like a college acquaintance responding to a text: ‘Just chillin’!’ In another, he became a Victorian heroine: ‘My love, I’m here!’ (This encouraged my fiancé to start addressing the cat as ‘my love,’ which was also unsettling.) One afternoon, I picked Momo up off the ground, and when she meowed, I looked at my phone, ‘Hey honey, let’s go somewhere private.’ !”

On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum, MeowTalk took Buddy’s conversation with me about a climbing spot for an argument that nearly came to blows.

“Something made me upset!” Buddy was saying, per MeowTalk. “I’m angry! Give me time to calm down! I am very upset! I am going to fight! It’s on now! Bring it!”

In reality the little dude wanted to jump on the TV stand. Because he’s a serial swiper who loves his gravity experiments, the TV stand is one of like three places he knows he shouldn’t go, which is exactly why he wants to go there. He’s got free rein literally everywhere else.

If MeowTalk had translated “But I really want to!” or something more vague, like “Come on!” or “Please?”, that would be a good indication it’s working as intended. The app should be able to distinguish between pleading, or even arguing, and the kind of freaked-out, hair-on-edge, arched-back kind of vocalizations a cat makes when it’s ready to throw down.

buddytranslations — Accurate translations of Buddy’s meows.

Still, I was optimistic. Here’s what I wrote about MeowTalk last January:

“In some respects it reminds me of Waze, the irreplaceable map and real-time route app famous for saving time and eliminating frustration. I was one of the first to download the app when it launched and found it useless, but when I tried it again a few months later, it steered me past traffic jams and got me to my destination with no fuss.

What was the difference? Few people were using it in those first few days, but as the user base expanded, so did its usefulness.

Like Waze, MeowTalk’s value is in its users, and the data it collects from us. The more cats it hears, the better it’ll become at translating them. If enough of us give it an honest shot, it just may turn out to be the feline equivalent of a universal translator.”

There are also indications we may be looking at things — or hearing them — the “wrong” way. Anthes spoke to Susanne Schötz, a phonetician at Lund University in Sweden, who pointed out the inflection of a feline vocalization carries nuances. In other words, it’s not just the particular sound a cat makes, it’s the way that sound varies tonally.

“They tend to use different kinds of melodies in their meows when they’re trying to point to different things,” said Schötz, who is co-author of an upcoming study on cat vocalizations.

After a few months in which I forgot about MeowTalk, I was dismayed to open the app to find ads wedged between translation attempts, and prompts that asked me to buy the full version to enable MeowTalk to translate certain things.

The developers need to generate revenue, so I don’t begrudge them that. But I think it’s counterproductive to put features behind paywalls when an application like this depends so heavily on people using it and feeding it data.

To use the Waze analogy again, would the app have become popular if it remained the way it was in those first few days after it launched? At the time, I was lucky to see indications that more than a handful of people were using it, even in the New York City area. The app told me nothing useful about real-time traffic conditions.

These days it’s astounding how much real-time traffic information the app receives and processes, routing drivers handily around traffic jams, construction sites and other conditions that might add minutes or even hours to some trips. You can be sure that when you hear a chime and Waze wants to redirect you, other Waze users are transmitting data about a crash or other traffic impediment in your path.

Bud — “I’m thinking deep thoughts about turkey.”

MeowTalk needs more data to be successful, especially since — unlike Waze — it depends on data-hungry machine learning algorithms to parse the sounds it records. Like people, machine learning algorithms have to “practice” to get better, and for a machine, “practice” means hearing hundreds of thousands or millions of meows, chirps, trills, yowls, hisses and purrs from as many cats as possible.

That’s why I’m still optimistic. Machine learning has produced algorithms that can identify human faces and even invent them. It’s produced software that can write prose, navigate roads, translate the text of dead languages and even rule out theories about enduring mysteries like the Voynich Manuscript.

In each of those cases there were innovators, but raw data was at the heart of what they accomplished. If MeowTalk or another company can find a way to feed its algorithms enough data, we may yet figure our furry little friends out — or at least know what they want for dinner.

Karl Lagerfeld’s Millionaire Cat Travels By Private Jet, Drinks From Silver Dishes

Choupette has her own custom Louis Vuitton carrier and enjoys perks like a personal chef.

Choupette Lagerfeld travels the world in her own private jet, appears in commercials for Japanese beauty projects and has graced high fashion covers, including a shoot with French supermodel Laetitia Casta for V Magazine.

At one point she traveled with a body guard, two minders, a personal chef and her own doctor, according to the New York Times. She drinks and eats from silver bowls and enjoys a one-of-a-kind Louis Vuitton carrier.

Oh, and she’s worth millions.

Choupette (“sweetie” in French) is a white-and-cream Birman with subtle tabby marks on her head, and she was adopted by Karl Lagerfeld in 2011. The German designer, who was the creative director of fashion houses Chanel and Fendi, died of pancreatic cancer in February of 2019 but left a considerable fortune to his cat.

On Thursday, Choupette’s minders marked her 11th birthday by sharing a snap to her Instagram, choupetteofficiel, showing the fabulously wealthy feline aboard her private jet, with a cake presumably made of pâté, a bottle of champagne, balloons and various gifts from her late human’s fashion collections.

“Happy birthday to me,” the post reads. The pampered puss’ Instagram has 121,000 followers.

Choupette's birthday — Choupette celebrated her birthday on Aug. 18. A snap shows her celebrating on her private jet, which ferries her between modeling gigs and vacation spots like Ibiza.

No one’s sure precisely how much Choupette is worth, but Lagerfeld — who had a net worth between $170 million and $300 million, per reports — left her a considerable sum.

“She’s an heiress,” Lagerfeld told an interviewer. She “has her own little fortune.”

Like human celebrities she’s the subject of net worth profiles on various sites, which list an often-cited $13 million number. Some of that money includes her own earnings for commercials in Japan and Germany, where she’s been the face of beauty products and luxury cars, respectively.

Sacre bleu! The Eiffel Tower, a French supermodel and Choupette! This photo was printed in V Magazine, which featured Laetitia Casta and Choupette in a 10-page spread.

I’m kind of at a loss for words here. Anything I could say seems so obvious.

However, I’m thinking it may be time to put Buddy’s good looks and charm to use for once and arrange some sort of meet cute with Choupette.

The name Buddy would have to go. He’d have to be called something appropriately, Frenchly snooty, like Jean-Luc Budélard Lucien or Yves Buddiene Baptiste. I’d have to school him in Parisian meowing, invent a suitably bohemian upbringing for him, and fabulate a skill that hints at his creative genius. Perhaps he’s inspired by Choupette’s late human and works as creative director of the Buddeaux fashion house, or maybe he creates abstract art by smearing paint on a canvas with his paw pads.

Meanwhile, in India…