Two ideas, one gut-wrenching disease
I stumbled into working with people with schizophrenia in 2007, and it was one of the roughest years of my life. Schizophrenia fascinates me, makes me feel so helpless and useless as a clinician, and makes me grateful that medications exist. The disease is a monster, so I have high respect for anyone searching for answers.
Some amazing research about schizophrenia has come out recently, and though both studies kinda say different things, both are relevant and both can be right. See, the problem with schizophrenia is that it seems to be many different causes of it, both genetic and environmental.
Having multiple origins makes sense to me: people with schizophrenia aren’t exactly procreating constantly, so if it was just a genetic disorder, it would have selected itself out by now. So here we have two possible links to schizophrenia- cats and marijuana. Read on if this stuff interests you, and also, it should. It’s amazing stuff.
I love when good, rigorous, important research is accomplished.
I love Lemondrop, both for employing me and for showing me this gem.
For those of you that have cats and day jobs, I’m sure you wonder what the hell your cat does all day while you are gone. Well, wonder no more. Science took care of this mystery, via Friskies Cat Food’s Research Department.
Cat. With camera.
To solve this mystery, fifty house cats were given collar cameras that took a photo every 15 minutes, and based on the photos, we now know how kitty cats spend their days without you. The answer may warm your soul, and it may break your heart.
Which Music Will My Cats Like?
As seen on Neatorama from this guy Daniel’s flickr stream, this is the best damned science project I’ve ever seen. (Even better than my 7th grade science project “Are Aliens Real?”)
SOS
The daffiness of this video has completely destroyed me. This is a very serious WWI era cat trying to message the rest of his squadron.
Good lord, Cute Overload. Do you ever stop?
This may be my next tattoo
Here is a lovely children’s book from 1970 that I found at Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves, which is pretty self-explanatory.
Can’t you just see this, sans words, on my arm? What? Did you say that one cat tattoo is enough? Oh. Ok then. Sorry about that. I’ll just go back over here and put on my overly fuzzy cardigan and get on my child’s bike and pedal back home. My kitten needs me.
What do you get the newly kitten-obsessed for Christmas?
Well, if you’re friends with us, we have a few suggestions for you. It seems that some of our friends don’t understand that we love our baby Bagel very very much and text us things like:
I miss you guys too. LA is nice. I don’t miss Bagel because if she died we’d buy a new one. I do love her though.
Which is just uncalled for. UNCALLED FOR. So we’ll take one of these (Thanks Neatorama):
Cat lovers, take a seat. An adorable kitten’s face decorates your toilet lid; viewed from above, the matching rug completes the cat’s body to hilarious effect. Soft acrylic synthetic fabric. Hand wash. Imported.
And also one of these:
“only if your an asshole to them”
Courtesy of Vivek, and spurred on by the recent addition of Bagel the kitten to our home, here is a question posted to Yahoo Answers and some of the answers provided:
Is it true that Cat’s suck the life out of us?
Jamie says:
ive never heard of them sucking the life out of our bodies. i do know that they like to sit on newborn babies faces though because they like the smell of the breath and the warmth of it, so therefore i guess they can suck the life out of them.
Dev says:
You are a vile, awful person to think such a horrible thing. Any old person who told you that was probably mentally retarded to think that such sweet honorable creatures as the feline race to be anything but divine.
Sassy Barbara M says:
No, I believe that is called a husband.
Simeon says:
only if your an asshole to them
And the answer deemed “the best answer”, from Piscine:
You said it yourself – you heard from many OLD PEOPLE. This is a ridiculous old wives’ tale. Would people really be allowed to own such dangerous animals if this were true? Do you have a pet wolverine in your basement? Please execute some rational thought before believing something, ANYTHING someone else says is true.
Pets.
Kumail and I are going to the home of a friend of his on Wednesday in order to look at this little thing, which is ours for the taking:
is this Bagel?
