The Hanging Gardens

My general stance on Persian cats is that they're abominations, but in a bizarrely adorable way. They're so far on the ugly spectrum that they come back around to cute, like those weird, perpetually wheezy little dogs with the goggly goldfish eyes. I look at their squashy flat faces and their permanently concussed expressions and they're so hapless, so obviously unfit for survival, that a primal "Awww" of pity and amusement rises up in my breast. Also, I kind of want to shear them like tiny meowing sheep.

The best thing is, the more deformed a Persian gets, the more it's seen as an exemplary member of the breed. For example, the Cat Fancier's Association named this Best Cat (of all possible cat breeds in the entire show) for the 2008-2009 show season:


Yes, I know, it doesn't even look like a cat, it may not even have legs under that fur, but who cares? I cannot be in a bad mood when I look at that picture. Even thinking about it can be enough reduce me to hysterical giggles. It's like a mop with teensy little ears and big, big orange eyes staring out at you with all the confused woe in the world. No matter how bad you have it, at least you are not that cat.

All of that is a very long introduction to a revelation I received courtesy of ginmar: Persian kittens are cute. Not so-ugly-it's-cute, just plain adorable. Mind-bogglingly so. Moreso that other cat breeds. All of the features that make them such hilarious monstrosities as adults - their big round eyes, their squished faces, their overabundance of fur - makes them weapons grade cute kittens.

I picked up my laptop this morning and heard the ominous clattering of a loose part within. Thoughts of expensive repairs and lost data dancing in my head, I held it up and tilted it back and forth very carefully.

A penny fell out of the CD drive.

I was relaxing with a fluffy vampire novel* and I came across this:

The blue of my eyes had become gleaming silver, the pupils dilated to pinpricks.

I had to read it at least twice to really comprehend that yes, the author had actually written that and their proofreading pool and/or editor hadn't caught it. And then I looked up "dilate" again, just to be absolutely sure that my definition was in fact correct. Way to yank me out of the narrative with egregious biological impossibilities, book.

* I am a simple girl with simple needs, and one of them is reading about superpowered people who get to solve most of life's problems by ripping its head off.

Doing calculus while feverish is fun!

I was sitting there in the RKC (shiny new science building) when I overheard this tidbit a Biology professor was sharing with a senior planning her project:

"Oh, you can have viruses in the lab, even if they're human infecting. It's not like they're going to jump out and infect someone on their own. Now let's see what's available...hmm, polio, probably don't want that. Ebola, definitely don't want that..."

People, if you hear in the next few months that Bard has become a quarantine area, know that it started here.