Tag: PITB

Buddy, cat humor, cat stories, Feline Overlords, human servants

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

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!

Feline Overlords, Hero Cats, human servants, news

Sunday Cats: Larry Welcomes A New Servant To No. 10 Downing, More Cats Rescued From Ukraine

Larry the Cat, official mouser in chief at 10 Downing Street, is now on his fifth prime minister.

After the disastrous and short-lived tenure of his predecessor, Lizz Truss, new PM Rishi Sunak officially moved into the UK prime minister’s residence earlier this week — and walked right past Larry without acknowledging him:

Note the reporter doing a live broadcast, which you can hear in the background.

“He is arriving now…the new prime minister of the United Kingdom!” the reporter said as Larry padded his way down the sidewalk and stopped.

Failing to acknowledge the true power at No. 10 is an ill portend for Sunak and the UK. What kind of person doesn’t greet his boss on his first official day of work? Larry will get him sorted in short time, undoubtedly.

Big and small cats from Ukraine find homes in Poland and the US

During the opening phase of the Ukraine war, there was an Indian national webcasting from Donbas, constantly asking for money to keep his “pet jaguars” — actually leopards — safe from the advancing Russians.

idiotandhisjaguar

It was one of the most infuriating aspects of the young war. The guy was keeping the big cats in an apartment, referred to them as his “children” despite not even knowing their species or how to care for them, and he lied to his audience, claiming he’d purchased them from the Kyiv Zoo. He didn’t. Zoos don’t sell big cats to people. He got them on the illegal wildlife market.

I don’t know if those particular leopards are among the big cats rescued from Kyiv in recent weeks, but a new report says illegally kept pets are among the felids who were rescued from Kyiv and Odessa — two of the hardest-hit cities — and brought to sanctuaries in Poland.

That’s good news. Hopefully any remaining wild animals are taken out of the hands of private owners and put in sanctuaries where they belong. Big cats don’t belong in a war zone, and they don’t belong in private hands.

Meanwhile, Homeward Trails Animal Rescue in Washington, D.C., has house cats from Ukraine up for adoption.

Most of the little ones were rescued from warn-torn areas in the eastern part of the country, and the rest were moved from a Ukrainian shelter just in time, as the building was hit by Russian missiles shortly after the animals were cleared out. Some of the cats were found wandering amid the ruins and destruction in towns and villages that had been hit hard by the invading Russians, Homeward Trails’ Sue Bell told WTOP.

The US non-profit will continue to work with a shelter in Ukraine, which rescues cats from heavily impacted areas.

“Right now, Homeward Trails is the only organization taking cats from this new Ukraine shelter,” Bell said. “And so, for every cat that we took from the shelter, that not only gave that cat an opportunity for a home, but it created a space in that shelter for the team to go out there and bring more cats in.”

budandwhitetiger2

A belated happy National Cat Day!

There are so many cat days, I lose track, so apologies for missing this one.

Happy National Cat Day to all PITB readers and your beautiful kitties! It’s a good excuse to spoil our little buddies and remind them how much we appreciate them.

Changes to PITB

You may have noticed, if you don’t have ad blockers installed on your browser, that I enabled ads in mid-September. I strongly dislike ads and I don’t like clutter on the site, but after three years of operating and publishing PITB, I decided to enable a limited number of ads in an effort to get PITB to pay for itself and hopefully a few upgrades that would be helpful in making the site more accessible, while also providing the tools to expand PITB’s content offerings.

Please send us your feedback. If you see an ad that covers the content, let me know. If you see an inappropriate ad, let me know. You should see ads for cat-related products and/or ads for things you may have expressed interest in before — due to the way ad networks use cookies and data from services you use, which is perfectly normal — but I want to make sure no one’s having a bad experience here.

Buddy, cat humor, cat indignities, fake news, Feline Overlords, turkey

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

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!”