Author: Joey deVilla

“Dogs have masters,” my ex-girlfriend Erica, a cat owner, used to say. “Cats have staff.”

If dogs could write poetry, they’d write stuff like this:

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

Is it dinner yet?

Or this gem:

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

I think I’ll eat that.

Cats, on the other hand, would this poesy of this variety:

I hate you.

Now feed me.

To many people, and in this case when I say “people”, I mean “lonely, bitter shut-ins”, cats are ideal, independent low-maintenance companions. To me, cats are The Other White Meat.

In spite of this, Boss Ross and I have declared — for no other reason than for the hell of it, we swear — that Friday is the First Annual Post a Picture of a Cat to Your Blog day.

Personally, I think that pictures of cats should be perceived as damage by the Internet and should be routed around. However, the vast majority of Internet people seem to like cats, especially those who write weblogs. Weblogging is so associated with cat pictures that O’Reilly and Associates, publishers of computer books with woodcuttings of animals on the covers, saw fit to put a picture of cats on their book on blogging:

So don’t forget, folks: post a picture of a cat to your blog this Friday!

(You don’t have post a cutesy one either. Feel free to go all Lee Harvey Oswald if you like.)

Recommended Reading

My unexpectedly pleasant conversation with John C. Dvorak. Dvorak’s response to my saying that the choice of cat for cover animal on O’Reilly’s book was all his fault. (Okay, it’s really in response to me calling him PC Magazine’s “Resident Asshole”.)

What, October already?

(Cue the sound of every classic rock radio station DJ saying “Hey, everybody, it’s Rocktober!“. For that matter, cue the sound of me repeating “I declare Cocktoberfest!” until the joke gets lame.)

I spent yesterday in bed nursing a really bad cold and doing nothing more strenuous that reading Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel, Summer Blonde. I caught the cold because on Monday night, I ran a number of errands on my bike while dressed as if it were still late summer. No jacket, just shirtsleeves.

Today, I am conceding defeat to Mother Nature. I took my sweaters and wool blazers out of summer storage. You have to dress well for Cocktoberfest, you know.

This coming weekend, I’m bound for Boston — or more accurately, Cambridge — to breathe the rarefied air around Hah-vahd and attend BloggerCon. I’ll be there mostly to meet with people whom I only know via the Internet, but I’ll probably also do a little Blogware PR and general schmoozing on behalf of Tucows.

Boss Ross is being sent down on the company account, so he’ll have to stay sober and be “on duty” the entire time. I am travelling on my own nickel, and am free to bail out at any time, drink Guinness with Ryan and flirt with the locals. I can’t afford Day 1 on my own, so I figure I’ll just spend Saturday afternoon hanging out (Day 2, which I’m attending, is free). Any Boston/Cambridge-area folks up for a Saturday afternoon of Guinness and accordion-powered fun?

If you’re wondering what BloggerCon Saturday Dinner I’m attending, it’s AKMA’s, for two reasons:

• I’ve always wanted to meet him.
• It’s at a Mexican restaurant, and no Mexican restaurant in the history of all civilization has ever kicked out a guy for wailing on the accordion.

Come to think of it, putting me and AKMA at the same dinner table just gave the dinner a theme: “The Sacred and the Profane”. We both love rock and pop, so be prepared to talk about music at least part of the time.

Boss Ross will be attending Doc Searls’ dinner (I did one with him, Dave Winer, Wes Felter and Scobe Doggy Dogg at ETCon 2002). Doc, if you’re reading this, I owe you at least a couple of beers — my getting this job is in part thanks to you.

I’m just going to let the article do the talking:

When Keith and Julane Davis started Goliath Casket in the late 1980’s, they sold just one triple-wide each year. But times, along with waistlines, have changed; the Davises now ship four or five triple-wide models a month, and sales at the company have been increasing around 20 percent annually. The Davises say they base their design specifications not on demographic studies so much as on simple observations of the world around them.

“It’s just going to local restaurants or walking in a normal Wal-Mart,” Mrs. Davis said. “People are getting wider and they’re getting thicker.”

Like the airline industry, which was warned in May that passengers were heavier than they used to be, and was asked to adjust weight estimates accordingly, the funeral industry is retooling to make room for ever-larger Americans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 20 percent of American adults are obese, up from 12.5 percent in 1991. Of those 70 and older — the demographic that most interests the funeral industry — 17 percent are obese. Despite the numbers, nearly every aspect of the funeral industry, from the size of coffins to vaults, graves, hearses and even the standardized scoop on the front-end loaders that cemeteries use for grave-digging (it is called a “grave bucket”) is based on outdated estimates about individual size.

Recommended Reading

Atkins Center. Ask me, ask Cory Doctorow, ask Doc Searls, it works. But as I said in an earlier posting, just pick a diet that works for you, and stick to it like glue.