From the desk of Jane E Rankin: http://www.jerankin.com
Began Chinese Zodiac calendar project this week. Research, thumbnails, and 8 of the 12 backgrounds I need are complete! Yipee! Just 4 more backgrounds then I can start character development - can’t wait!
I didn’t think it was possible but I think I have found a cat even sillier than Hershey
- Amber, DO NOT let Hershey watch this video!
Hershey posing for pics from under my chair!
I bring this up because she just wrote to me today about the havoc he created on her computer when he apparently wrote his own macros while walking across the keyboard! Then he decided that the push-pins on her bulletin board were just a little too interesting, and knocked the whole thing down trying to get to them. This story immediately brought to mind Hershey’s first attempt at flight.
It was Christmastime, about a year after he had been adopted, and he had come home with Amber over her long Christmas break. One of his favorite places to be at that time was on top of my desk - not because it was so terribly exciting up there, but more because it was my cat, Pumba’s, favorite spot to sit. Pumba, being 2 or 3 years older, was Hershey’s hero - and Hershey loved to imitate anything “the big guy” did - much to chagrin of Pumba, I might add! So this day, as was his habit, he had followed Pumba to the top of the desk and then pestered him to the point that Pumba felt the need to be elsewhere. As Hershey sat alone now on his perch, he caught sight of a spider on the wall - way up in the corner where the two adjacent walls met with the ceiling.
Immediately, he moved closer to the edge of the desk, and you could see the calculations begin as his ears perked up and he started to crouch lower on his haunches…then suddenly he did it…in one gigantic leap he jumped almost straight up and out toward the ceiling - it was incredible! - he got his nose to within millimeters of the spider!
Now the only problem was, in his eagerness to get the spider, he had not taken into consideration the fact that the desk he was sitting on was a good 4 feet away from the wall where the spider was and, as the saying goes, what goes up, must come down…
Fortunately for Hershey, he came straight down - if rather abruptly - landing on nothing but carpet - and 5 minutes after he came staggering from behind the desk - a little dazed but unbruised - he was back on the top of it, thinking of trying it again!
See Hershey in action:
This just in: I’ve added a new category to our Kitty Kraze series. Appropriately called “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty” - for, well, obvious reasons - This line features and Kendall and Claudius and a host of friends, and we are trying it out on a new product: Skateboards!
Watch for more Kitty Kraze designs in the weeks to come!
Well you had to know that all this talk about cats was leading somewhere!
Kitty Kraze: Claudius
Claudius and his brothers, Conrad and Kendall, are the first in our newest series: Kitty Kraze! Check them out!
The blog has been a little slow this week due to Amber & Tara’s graduation from UC Davis on Sunday. (Well, I gotta blame someone - teehee)!
UC Davis Graduation June 14, 2009
As is well known to all my friends, Jane is always the last to know, so it really comes as no surprise that I should come upon these next two videos about a year after they went viral.
I had cleverly avoided the whole Youtube phenomenon until, hmmm… some time last year, I think, when Amber started taking Maya at UC Davis and posting some of her animated shorts there. Oh, well, here’s hoping a posting here will bring them both a new surge of popularity (yea, right, Jane), but first a little background:
I actually did come across the “Mean Kitty” video, several times in fact, over the past several months whenever it popped up as one of my possible “alternative choices” after watching a few other comedy videos, but not being a big fan of Rap music in general (although I do get a kick out of Weird Al Yankovic’s occasional rap parodies) and not really in the mood to watch a video about another person complaining about their cat - giving cats a bad rap, so to speak - no pun intended - I quite decidedly chose against watching this video - no matter how many stars it got or how many times it came up in the que.
However, after watching and falling in love with the videos of Nora and Coleman, I could no longer resist the temptation. So last Saturday morning, when the next video to come up in my que was labeled “The Nice Kitty Song,” a video answer to the “Mean Kitty” song, I thought, hmmm…a song about a “nice” kitty - that was more like it - and he also resembled Pumba - what more could you ask for - ok - I will give it a try…
Persia: The Nice Kitty
See more of Dave Days videos: Dave Days Channel
Persia, the “Nice” kitty proved to be quite entertaining for a Saturday morning and being in a good mood after seeing it, I decided to go for a basis of comparison - Ok - let’s check out that “Mean Kitty” once and for all and see what all the fuss is about…
Sparta: The Mean Kitty
See more Mean Kitty videos: Mean Kitty Channel
I was quite pleasantly surprised when I finally watched the “Mean Kitty” video. It, too, was quite entertaining, and although, Sparta, “the Mean Kitty” didn’t look like Pumba, he DID look and act just like Amber’s cat, Hershey, totally WILD - and, as an added treat, Sparta’s friend, Loki, turned out to be a Pumba cat! Sparta’s owner, Cory Williams (aka: Mr. Safety) of SMPFilms is quite personable and imaginative, and I spent a very enjoyable morning being entertained by the Sparta, Loki, Cory and the rest of the company at SMPFilms. Who needs cable!
See more of Cory Williams’ (aka: Mr. Safety) videos: SMPFilms Channel
Conclusion: After a week of watching and analyzing various cats and cat videos, we have decided: if you want a people-loving, loyal, friend and helper who will love nothing better than to be hugged and cuddled 24 hours a day - choose a black & white/grey & white patchy “tuxedo” cat; if you want a friendly, loving, but independent and slightly wild cat who will love you but still want to take the occasional chunk from your ankle, chose a grey striped cat; and if you want a friendly and lovable companion to keep you entertained as well as play the occasional duet - choose a fluffy grey and white cat - piano not included.
Our quest for fun cat videos was actually quite unplanned. A few weeks ago, while in full procrastination mode, I was skimming through the latest ‘news’ that shows up on my AOL account (now I know, I know, the general consensus is that no one that knows anything at all about computers would be caught dead using AOL - and I can readily see the justification for this sort of thinking - I have spent many hours wanting to beat my head on the desk trying to get pages that validate and work perfectly in both Firefox and IE to do what I want them to do in an AOL browser - but switching my e-mail accounts would be more trouble than it is worth, so for now I am sticking with AOL both for convenience and random entertainment value - but I digress…)
Anyway, one of the features that day was an article about a guy who had made a strange little video called - piano cat - or something like that - where the guy put a little shirt with some sort of fake arms attached on his cat and then hid in the background and played some recorded music and pretended that the cat was playing the piano with his fake arms. For some reason, this video got really really popular, and we really didn’t see why - it was more strange than cute - but when this video was over, as Youtube does, links to similar videos that we also might find interesting showed up on our screen - one of them for “Nora, the “real” piano-playing cat.”
Now, we weren’t planning to watch any more videos that night, but one look at Nora’s sweet fluffy gray face waiting patiently at the piano as she anticipated her next “recital,” and we had to see what this was all about.
“Ok, so we’ll watch just one more piano-playing cat video.”
Well, one Nora video led to two, two led to three… pretty soon I was a subscriber to Nora’s video channel and e-mailing links to her videos to all my family and friends! Nora actually plays quite well for a cat - she certainly plays better than I do! We sat listening to her play for well over an hour in total awe and amazement, “Hey, is that ‘Chopsticks’?” Solos, duets, Nora does it all! Made me wish we had gotten a piano for our cats - or at least signed them up for lessons!
Nora belongs to the good folks at Ravens Wing Studio
See more videos of Nora: Nora the Piano-Playing Cat
So today we are into cat videos. It actually started last night when we accidentally came across a Youtube video of a cat named: Coleman. Coleman is a grey and white patchy cat (I think the technical term for this sort of coloring is “tuxedo,” but who likes technical terms!). The reason we loved the Coleman videos (and there are many) is because Coleman could have been the clone of our cat, Pumba, not only in looks - almost the exact same markings! - but in deeds! Of course, finding the Coleman videos led to a search for other fun cat videos (we lost our poor Pumba last December after he ate a piece of string, and we miss him much, so the cat videos are fun to watch whenever we need a quick “kitty fix”), the best of which we will feature here from time to time. This video is a particular favorite because Pumba’s favorite place to sit while I was working was always right on top of the keyboard and mouse!
Ok, so here we are at Blogging-Day 2. I am still working out the details of how the control panel - or as it is more popularly referred to - the “Dashboard” works - and, as you can see, haven’t gotten beyond the basic default “theme,” but I am getting there. At least I have figured out where the words go! :0P I would be really, really happy if I could just figure out how to get everything from going straight to the About US page, grrr….
I guess today I will spend some time on Wordpress.org to try to figure out burning questions like: What a “blogroll” is and what you do with one (apparently I have one), and how to change the bloddy theme already!
Victory is ours! Ok - so not total victory - but, as you can see, I did achieve a more interesting background AND was able to modify most of the CSS - not bad for Day 2! Nap time!
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