Cat: The Other White Meat...

I hate cats. With a passion.

If it were up to me, your typical tabby housecat would be on the Endangered Species List and we'd be able to undertake an effort at Mass Extinction that would guarantee that the only place you'd ever be able to know there was ever any such animal would be a visit to the Museum of Natural History, where little plaster replicas of feline skeletons would be on display, like those of the dinosaurs and three-toed-giant ground sloths.

If there's anything more useless than a housecat, I can't figure out just what that might be. Yeah, yeah, I know, they keep the vermin out of the house, and they provide love (cats don't love; they simply attach themselves  to whoever feeds them regularly) and companionship, and give complete retards an opportunity to waste money and emotional energy on cute little cat outfits, kitty litter, saccharine, vomit-inducing calendars and YouTube videos, and Cat Fancy magazine, but is it all really worth it?

I mean, a dog -- at least a great big one -- serves a useful purpose and can at least scare off potential burglars, rapists, and serial killers who invade your property, if not chew such degenerates to shreds. I'm definitely a Dog Person, and not those little yapping rats on leashes wearing little cardigans, either. A chihuahua is almost as useless as a cat, if you ask me. Give me a great, frightening German Shepherd, the wolf-like Malamute,  or a saddle-ready Great Dane any day of the week,.

What has prompted this little diatribe against certain members of the Genus Felix has been the behavior and activities of the neighborhood cats.

For some reason I have yet to discern, the little Kitty Gangstas in this neighborhood have taken to my front lawn, treating it as if it were their own private Disneyland. My evenings are replete with the sounds of cat fights, cat orgies, and the chorus of singing and meowing housepets set loose for the night. These activities invariably seem to take place right below my bedroom window.

I would hazard to guess that the abundant shrubbery and flower beds tend to give horny cats those safe-and-secluded retreats they require for their noisy fuck sessions, much like humans use those seedy, out-of-the-way No-Tell-Motels out by the airport, where they charge short-stay rates and extra for clean sheets, and every Civil War-era bathroom you wouldn't use without the full panoply of inoculations against tropical diseases has it's own second-rate, your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine condom dispenser, just in case you forgot.

Nary an evening goes by, and it's gotten worse since summer is here; when I'm not chasing kitties out of the flowerbeds, or I'm not awakened by the sound of cats doing it doggie-style, sometimes in groups. Cleaning cat crap off the front lawn is a disturbing chore, and this is only occasionally made more interesting by the surprise discovery of the dead squirrels, birds, small rodents, and large insects scattered about the property, stalked and murdered by the thoughtless little cretins, and left to rot, fester and smell in the heat.

They don't even TRY to eat them, or drag them home to their owners. Hell, one of them actually dragged a squirrel that had been hit by a car out of the street on onto my front lawn, probably as a love offering to one of his fuckmates.

But last night was the Absolute Last Straw.

I had just stepped out onto the front stoop for a smoke, when my nostrils were assaulted by the most offensive odor imaginable. It was worse than the rancid aroma of New Jersey at low tide. It was a scent that would make a Pakistani Incontinent Leper ward smell like a perfume factory. It's a smell that affronts: it is not only an attack upon the old olfactory sense, but it'll actually make your eyes water and your stomach churn. I know this effluvium all too well.having once had a girlfriend with an abundance of male cats in her full-of-fur-urine-turds-and-stink home.

One of the neighborhood tabbies has been spraying (marking his territory) near my front door, the little bastard, and I had just caught him in the act.

I wish I had had a deadly weapon at that very moment, and screw the idea that this may be some child's pet. This animal needed killin', as they say in the South.

Even more aggravating is the fact that the stupid animal had the audacity to stare at me as if I had invaded it's territory. This must be the little brute who's been dragging and stashing dead squirrel carcasses (I've lifted three out of my flowerbeds in the last fortnight, and the first indication they're present is always the stench) all over the property. This must be the Feline Lothario who's been keeping me awake with his raucous lovemaking in the wee hours. This must be the four-legged lunatic who's dug holes all over the front lawn seeking beetles. This is the reason six or so other cats congregate outside my window on a near-nightly basis.

If I ever get the opportunity to kill this little fucktard, he's a goner.

Which brings me to the sheer inconsiderate behavior of my neighbors. I've left signs all over the neighborhood asking people to keep tabs on their tabbies, to no avail. I don't see the need to keep a pet which, frankly, believes it owns you, and which -- probably because it's an annoying little douchebag -- requires you to let it out every night so that you can get some sleep, and fuck everyone else's sleep requirements.

That's not a pet; it's another petulant child that you're raising.

Another notice will go out; I don't want your cats fucking, shitting, meowing, congregating, pissing, spraying, or even breathing beneath  my bedroom window anymore. I'm keeping my Wrist Rocket, baseball bat, and a Super Soaker full of salt water infused with a generous touch of ammonia and chlorine bleach handy in order to defend the old Homestead against this invasion of pesky and destructive little four-footed buggers.

I have half a mind to sell the pelts, and give the meat to the local Chinese and turn the entire enterprise into a lucrative work-from-home opportunity, and if you come to complain with your crying kids in tow, I'll tell you to fuck off. This situation has gotten seriously irritating, and asking Cat Owners to exercise a little restraint with their pets is apparently like asking a democrat to work for a living; it's something they consider outside the realm of normal probabilities.

I've heard the expression "It's like herding cats..." before, and I think whoever coined that phrase was never acquainted with the cats in my neighborhood, who seem to be extremely social to the point of having formed some little kitty street gang dedicated to destroying my landscaping (which costs a pretty penny every month, thank you. Despite what some may say, Mexicans certainly DO NOT work cheap when they can manage it). There's an entire herd of them in my yard every night.

Which should make it extremely easy to help the little bastards shuffle off this mortal coil in numbers that make the effort worthwhile.

Then I might be able to get some sleep and not have my front porch smell like cat's ass.

I Wish These Guys Would Stop (Allegedly) Stealing My Stuff...

Now I know who all the people who find this site through Semrush and Whorush and simple Google Searches are: They appear to be mostly Bloggers -- who get paid while I don't -- who may be stealing my stuff. I ain't got no proof, but I got a laundry list of coinkydinks.

I wrote this three days ago. The only difference is that, true to the Ur-Conservative principle of discussing matters of money before all else, some people are starting to ask the additional question of who's paying for the new conflict in Libya. I'm seeing many of the same points being made by other bloggers and columnists long after I made them.

This is the second time (I believe that) I've noticed another blogger basically posting something I've already written which happens to coincide with a flurry of Semrush and Whorush hits (in case you don't know, Whorush and Semrush are companies which rank blog/websites by various traffic factors in order to let advertisers know which sites may be the best advertising investments for them. It can also, if you really think about it, be used to gauge the relative anonymity of those blogs/webpages so that if you were so inclined, you can rip them off and still have a plausible defense for it: I couldn't have stolen his work, Your Honor. Look: Semrush says that hardly anyone ever visits his site, and it's highly unlikely I -- a Professional Writer, as opposed to the Plaintiff, who could hardly write a Thank You Note -- would have come across such an obscure author, even by accident!

If a blog has a sizable following and a great number of visitors, then you can't steal their posts very easily because there are simply too many eyeballs, and the chance that the same pair of eyeballs catches the same, or near-same, post on another blog increases. If not, then apparently, it's fair game, and really, who's to know? It's just weird that I wrote something about polar bears once, and then S.E. Cupp wrote the same things ten months later, almost word-for-word, and now I ask ten questions about Libya, and a bunch of other people write basically the same crap that I did, and they all got paid.

Now, I really can't accuse anyone of much of anything based upon such flimsy evidence, but it does make me somewhat suspicious. It's also possible that two people working in complete ignorance of one another can manage to come up with the same ideas, so whatthe fuck do I I know? But this is starting to get spooky.

UPDATE: Edited to remove someone's name that I put in there by mistake. I meant to identify another author/blogger, but got confused. Sorry!