Japan’s Cat Cafés allow pet-less people to hang out with cats for only $11 an hour. Now you know.
“In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.
The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.”
That Cuddly Kitty is Deadlier Than You Think
“You have to assume that existential malaise — which is not quite the same as boredom, incidentally — is a constant of modern life, and live accordingly.”
Matthew Gallaway, The Metropolis Case (via mar-see-ah)
Matthew Gallaway: I’m reblogging this because I thought I’d take the chance to say that (in light of some of the debate crossing my dashboard today), I’m 44 yo and I FUCKING LOVE TUMBLR. <3 <3 <3 (Srsly.) Like whatever number of books I would have sold otherwise, I’m sure I sold AT LEAST ten times more thanks to tumblr, which isn’t to say it’s just abt being a self-promoting whore (although there’s some of that in my case; let’s be honest), but actually meeting some other fucked up children of the earth (via Spacemen 3) and relating to each other in a way that is sometimes serious and often not. Yeah, cat pix might be involved, so fucking what. CLOTU 4ever u guys. Twitter’s okay — I mean, I’m not great at it, but I admire ppl who are — and yeah, FB is ugly and gross but good for keeping up with high-school friends, so who cares, whatever, I’m not going to be like, OMG social media is destroying civilization because there are worse things, and I find that people doing the alleging about social media are, generally speaking, insiders who don’t seem to understand what it means to be really alone (or they’ve forgotten) and how sometimes a few kind words or a lol or a hot gay bear or whatever else crossing your dash can really make the difference between the total shit and not-quite-total shit that so often passes for life.
(via matthewgallaway)
