Relatively new ‘Blogger Gloria Salt of Apropos of Nothing emailed me the other day to ask me what was with all the photos of cats on ‘Blogs. I explained that catblogging was something of a tradition of the medium, to the extent that even male Oxford academic Chris Brooke had a “Thursday Kitten Blogging” feature.
I have never knowingly catblogged. In fact, in the dark days of my hand-coding my ‘Blog in static HTML (when it wasn’t even called “PooterGeek”), it might well have carried the tagline “Guaranteed Cat-Free”. Today I change all that.
Little Mo has been gaffer-taped to a Bridgestone and eagerly awaits your contributions
[click image to enlarge]
It’s content-free Friday here at PooterGeek. It’s up to you to fill the comments with your own stories about animals (especially your own pets) doing recklessly stupid things but surviving. (Failing that, any jokes about animals will do.) If you entertain me sufficiently then Little Mo will live.
My my: It would appear that your readership has little time for catblogging.
I concur.
Toodle Pip!
P-G
An historian writes… Although isolated pictures of his cats, Jasmine and Inkblot, had appeared on his blog (for example, here), American blogger Kevin Drum can be said to have inaugurated the tradition of Friday cat-blogging in this post of 14 March 2003. Only two weeks later, he could report that the trend was spreading across the World of Blogs, and in his Normblog profile, KD referred to Friday cat-blogging as “by far my most significant permanent contribution to the blogosphere”.
Googling Cat-blogging now gets a hefty half-million hits.
On my birthday back in February, I was driving to my sisters place and a kitten ran out in front of me and made a nice crunch noise as it hit my front headlight. I had to keep going, it was a one way street at peak traffic. I looked back and it was just lying there by the side of the road. I cried for ages and if you’d let me paste a picture on your blog I’d show you my boyfriends response to my hit and run. In fact I’ll email it to you now…
Gee, happy birthday, Leasey.
Some kids in my street were shooting cats with air rifles. They managed to hit mine sideways through the mouth. She lost her two bottom canines.
I had a kitten with bad cat-flu and as I wiped goo from his eye the eyeball burst. The other eye was OK though. He’s not so good at walking along walls.
[…] Your meagre anecdotes insult Bast, Perfumed Protector, Cat Goddess. The one you call “Little Mo” has paid the ultimate price for your failure to show sufficient respect. Until all households of the Infidel West are part of the Catiphate our martyrdom operations will continue. Until the sacred lands of the desert again flow with milk and catnip the blood of a million moggies will be on the radials of the Unbelievers! […]
Googling Cat-blogging now gets a hefty half-million hits.
Conversely, “beaver-blogging” gets a mere 19 hits, which break down as follows:
Direct links to the Virtual Stoa: 2
Indirect links to the Virtual Stoa: 6
Pages referring to “Eddie Beaver blogging”: 2
Pages referring to “Leave it to Beaver blogging”: 1
Pages that coincidentally happen to contain the words “beaver” and “blogging” but usually not in the same sentence or even paragraph: everything else
So while beaver-blogging has yet to catch on in a big way (or, to be brutally honest, much at all), there’s very little doubt as to who gets the credit for starting the ball rolling.
We used to have loads of kittens, which is what happens when you have a randy queen and you live near farms. She was a great mother, and we weren’t short of homes for them all, so we let her go at it to her heart’s content. Anyway, kittens love clambering into car engines. Before driving anywhere, we used to have to pop the bonnet and check inside for kittens. There would usually be at least three of them, snuggled in around various bits of the engine, staring up at you.