Reflecting Day: Kitten Talk!

It's Reflecting Day, 🌭s! It's a time when we look back on who we are and what we've done. But first, I want to thank the people who've allowed it. Specifically, you, if you're reading this. You've made it possible for us to keep working in a genre of media that has been absolutely determined to destroy itself for over 20 years. Since we launched last Leap Day, your excellent investment has produced... let me che--oh my god, 419 articles? Holy shit. Brockway, Liddy, Jason, Brendan, did you guys know we've done 419 articles?

Speaking of funny, hard working people, we've hired a new columnist! Starting next week, you'll be seeing regular articles from Gamefully Unemployed's Tom Reimann! Hot Dog Computer, generate welcome_image.png \cmd Tom_Reimann hype_magnitude MAXHYPE:

That's... I was expecting something more. Sorry, Tom. Hot dog computing is more science than art, and I'm an artist. Speaking of, that's what we're talking about today. I'm going to show you the process of putting together a 1900🌭 article, a thing I've personally done 181 of the 419 times. So if you've been holding off on assassinating me until you could figure out how to make it look like I'm still alive, you're out of excuses, coward.

First, we start with something insane. Or stupid. It's best if it's several of both of those things. Let's grab a book at random from my library and see how it goes with... Kitten Talk!.

We're already engaged in an act of theater. I'm pretending like this has all been decided by fate, but I've already read Kitten Talk!, made sure it would work for this self-indulgent concept, and plotted out the flow of this whole article. I'm usually more honest about things like this, but kittens make me impish.

I picked up this little book almost twenty years ago knowing then, and this entire time, I would never have an occasion to do anything with it. I have a huge section in my library for things like this-- books I'll never use but I keep because they made me laugh in a thrift store. For instance, I bought only Volume 7 of the 1978 Sesame Street Library because of this page:

They had to know, right? The cranky puppet whose who would absolutely scream a racial slur if he thought it'd get you to fuck off is saying, "Heh, heh, oh, I have an n-word for ya..." Anyway, I'm not going to do an n-word article, and you're welcome. I'm here to talk kittens.

At first, Kitten Talk! is so tremendously exactly what you'd expect. Meowing puns, a chapter called Fuzzywiggles, and is that a section for cat horoscopes? Fuck. Even the author, Suzanne Smither, sounds like a name you'd blurt out if you were trespassing in the Cat Fancy offices and someone asked if you belonged there.

Seeing only this, I'd say there was nothing more worth exploring. This is the background noise of a cat person's life, not the kind of remarkable lunacy that has made us the nation's top 🌭 website. But what if we took a closer look?

Okay, this is promising. Suzanne has decided to write the tiny book as a cat. That's the kind of bold decision that makes for good crazy. I also like that she clearly states her thesis-- this is to be a book about the special needs of individual cats. And it's not. It's not even close. Also, she stops writing as Andrew The Teenage Cat several pages in. Which means this woman sat down to write a book about diverse cat needs as a cat, then forgot to do both instantly. Part of the joy of scrutinizing artifacts like this is that I'm the first one to ever do it. Until this moment right now, it never occurred to anyone to give a shit if Kitten Talk! was useful or sane, and that includes Suzanne and her publisher.

Most of the book is a long story about the time Suzanne's cat, Pele, had kittens. And here's a fun fact about books and authors like this: if there's no one checking to see if they're lying, they lie. Maybe not even on purpose. I think Suzanne probably had a cat, and probably even thought its baby was in danger, but look at the language she uses. "The umbilical cord seemed to be wrapped around his neck." Dingbat, who else would know? You're the one reaching into this wet litter of newborn kittens to perform barehanded surgery. Was it a feline nuchal cord or not? Because Google seems to think that would be an extremely unusual complication.

As you can see, the most important thing is happening: I'm starting to hate this woman enough to get excited about writing an article about her. This is a first time cat owner literally stroking the throat of a four-second-old kitten because she thinks it's the treatment for a trauma she isn't sure happened, definitely didn't, but probably wouldn't work if it had. That's fucking fantastic. Indescribable, kitten-slaughtering ignorance in a book certain it's the opposite. And this is her own account! She thinks she's a hero for pawing at the neck of this confused cat's baby! She tells people she's a cat expert and writer! Ha ha, I'm going to let her finish the story:

Yes! She talked herself into thinking she saved the cat's life! The one she yanked out of its birthing bed to choke!!! But I skipped to the end, right past the other two magical moments Suzanne packed in there.

She thought the cat was eating the kitten! The one she snatched out of a biologically automated procedure to fuck with! And maybe this happened. That cat would have had no idea what to do after watching a human murder its baby. Eat it, it guessed? Maybe Suzanne really did have to pry the goddamn thing from her jaws, but for this to be true she'd be the sole witness to two overwhelmingly unlikely emergencies happening back-to-back, where she heroically, and with no training, rescued everyone. I'm getting very excited now because I'm more certain than ever this fucking idiot sucks. Of course, if this was a regular article, all of these observations would be edited down into one third the size and have a punchline. But here in this special behind-the-scenes Reflecting Day article, I'm just going to point out how the only detail she's 100% certain on was the clever line she delivered to the unpaid veterinarian: "I'm having kittens...

...

...

... and my cat is, too!"

Seeing Suzanne's pride in that terrible, rehearsed line and piecing together the real story from her dramatic bullshit makes me feel such exhilarating hate. I'm so happy that after all these years something can still make me hate like I'm that 7th grader spending his last five dollars to rent DeadlyTowers for the Nintendo. If I had a single-use time machine, I would use it to go back and tell Hitler how much I hate Kitten Talk!.

It's at this point in a regular article I'd have to make some tough decisions. This is getting wordy, and after a certain amount of these scans, I'm more-or-less handing you an entire book to read. But if this was a real article, which it isn't, I would have to include this page. I'd be desperate for you to know what Suzanne landed on as the reason her cat tried to eat its own offspring.

It's common knowledge, even to a dipshit like this cat moron, that animals sometimes eat their young for whatever dark, godless reasons. But Suzanne doesn't think her Pele would do that. No, Suzanne thinks the cat was in pain and biting down on the kitten's head like you might with a stick! Or a, you know, human birthing towel! It's... it's... ngh, t-the unlogic. It's a thing cats don't do, using something they specifically wouldn't if they did. Which means she believed her own lie, and is now inventing her own animal behavior to account for it. She both believes her cat is a murderer yet refuses to believe it at any cost. But can you imagine me going on about this for 2000 words? It would be ridiculous.

Here's another tough decision that needs to be made at a time like this. How much outside research should I do? I already had to look up a few things about cat umbilical cords and kitten mortality since Suzanne and her publisher didn't. But how relevant is Suzanne herself to this book?

A lot of times I like to look at the art independent of the artist. This can lead to an embarrassing lack of context like the time I made fun of some nerd's stick-juggling VHS tape, published it, and then found out from someone else's simple Googling that he used his juggling skills to perform international sex crimes. I like to think it would have changed the tone of things if I had known that, but if I'm being honest, I hate stick juggling about the same way regular people hate human trafficking.

Other times I leave things out consciously. Like when I reviewed Naura Hayden's book on not quiiiiiiiiite sucking your husband's cock every day, I cut out a huge section I wrote about her death. See, she spent most of her life as a vitamin grifter claiming to be immune to disease, and after she died, they suspiciously kept the cause of death secret. That was interesting to me, but what kind of ghoul would stop their book review to say the author died like they were the inventor of the penis pump getting their dick ripped off by a pencil sharpener? Even if you were willing to get in a car and drive to the end of that joke, I had to cut it. We would have been there all day if I tried to include every detail of a 70-year-old con-woman's life in my article about her blowjob manual.

So say I was thinking about including more information about Kitten Talk!'s author. A quick search of Suzane Smither reveals she got a job rewriting press releases for Success Magazine and used what she learned there to succeed with four published articles on VeterinaryTeamBrief.com. One of them was about a man who found a sick cat in the park and brought it to a vet. She nursed it back to health and a belligerent woman came in claiming the mostly dead, neglected feral cat was hers, offering no proof. She kept the cat, and the Internet got so mad they bullied the vet into committing suicide. It's the most uniquely fucking crazy story and in the title of Suzanne's story about it, along with three other places, she calls it a "trend." She thinks we're about to be seeing a lot more of these cyberbully suicide cat custody stories.

Here's a look into my process. I don't really know why I scanned this page. I must have thought it was funny how she considered Sleepless in South Florida to be a cute or clever way to describe not getting enough sleep. It's not. Fuck you, Suzanne. You simple cow. There's genuinely something wrong with this woman for involving herself in an ordinary, unremarkable cat birth to this degree. Kittens don't need this kind of attention, which she should have learned when she immediately almost killed one with her meddling. It's like a dumb person adapted Of Mice and Men into a one woman show and then a dumber person adapted that into a checkout aisle pamphlet.

I guess I mostly included this page because of how I build these articles. When I'm working on a book thing, I scan pages as I read so I don't lose magical quotes like this lady watching herself alternate between nothing and cat murder and concluding, "It was teamwork all the way." I'll probably use that.

So I take these scans, chop them up, highlight them, add a little drop shadow to show I care, and those images become the skeleton of the article. Then I write about the quotes in those, and only those images. If I don't do this exact process, I will spend days, weeks, maybe months rereading and thinking about a book while adding 4000 words worth of joke ideas to my Notes app, none of which will work together, and all of them will require a penis pump inventor's tiny injured dick gag's worth of effort to squeeze into the article's structure. And if you think it's sad watching a kitten get its head bitten off by its mother, try throwing away 600 jokes about it.

Hahaha Suzanne could only come up with three things she did during her entire week of "helping" and they were calling the vet, kitten counting, and laundry. Her veterinarian must have hated her even more than me.

If this were an ordinary article, which again it is not, I would have so much fun inventing gag names for the mundane cat instincts Suzanne thinks she invented. I'd probably start by satirizing the source material with names like Eat the Food, continue the pattern with Nap Sleeping, and then catch you off guard with Watch Me Cut. See, comedy comes from unpredictability, but also hard truths, and I think making up cat game names that would betray Suzanne's dangerous loneliness is something I would (hilariously) do.

Including this page would have been excessive in a real article since you already knew Suzanne was going to take professional photos and place classified ads for these kittens she was abandoning (just in time for Valentine's gift giving). And you could have guessed she would have a list of demands for their future owners. After all, she hand-pulled each of them from their amniotic sacs and taught them how to play "kitty in the bag." Anyway, she gave them to a couple she chose to describe as "childless" with the same tone you might call a penis pump "disappointing." I'm not quite sure what I mean by that, which is the kind of frankness I wouldn't normally include with a callback dick joke.

If I wasn't fully confident I should share Kitten Talk! with you, this might have clinched it. Suzanne had each of her pets write about the time she annoyed that cat during labor. It's breathtaking. The puns, the cat parody titles... it's like watching the T-1000 die if he spent all movie disguising himself as Garfield strips.

I knew when I saw this woman call herself a "longtime cat watcher" as a qualification to be your pet's fortune teller, I was going to come up with a great joke about it. I didn't, but as a handsome person, I've found people don't care so much when I fuck up.

Once your brain has decided "star sorcery, only for cats" is a thing, there's no coming back. The only time you'll ever be sane again is by accident. Owning a psychic cat that can predict phone calls? Sure, fine. A cat weather report? Why not? Call it a "furcast." Who gives a shit. Cats born in November can predict the weather, is the point.

This is how Suzanne ends her "book." By describing the conservative platform of your kitten mayor, slave to the god of the sea, and way too stoned to compete in cat sports. If this was a regular article I'd wrap it all up with some kind of point. Like how I hope this opens your eyes to something I've known for years: we are tiptoeing upon the thinnest membrane of reason. Behind every innocuous cat pamphlet, success magazine, or penis pump manual, there might be hiding a gaping hellmouth of otherworldly madness. Kitten Talk! was sitting on a shelf next to batteries and Tic Tacs where potential cat chokers could buy it for $1.19 ($1.49 Can). Think how many things like Kitten Talk! you've walked right past this week... how many may already be in your home. I wouldn't write an exit line this dumb in a normal article, but maybe the Kitten Talk!... was you all along.

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If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.