Posted by Jonathan on October 20, 2002, at 0:33:56
In reply to my Kitty was a *bad* kitty on psychobabble (look), posted by kid a on September 27, 2002, at 14:06:22
Kid A,
I think your cat has now cracked Dr. Bob's password and is using it to post adverts for "Hello Kitty" calendars: isn't using these boards to promote commercial products like this against the rules? Until now the offending posts (six at the last count) have only appeared on the Tele board — http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/tele/index.html — which we humans have all but abandoned to cyberspace's growing population of stray cats.
Was he also responsible for that mischievous post on the Meds board, which advised someone seeking medication for ailurophobia to take massive doses of Dr Fischbürpf's™ omega-3 oil? Or that unsupportive (yet disturbingly logical) one-liner in the thread about SSRI sexual side-effects "If you had your cat spayed or neutered you don't deserve orgasms"? Or the post on the "Psycho" board which claims that the therapeutic benefits of swimming with dolphins are overrated? The last goes on to say that, since cats, unlike dolphins, are too intelligent to waste their energy swimming with humans, if we insist on swimming with one of the many species more intelligent than ourselves why don't we try electric catfish? (Malapterus electricus — http://members.fortunecity.com/anemaw/catfish.htm — see also "http://home.vicnet.net.au/~mhlc/ect.html — scroll down to Contents and click on "History of ECT".)
I have a similar problem: I suspect that my neighbour's cat may know something about some out-of-character posts in my name, which I have no recollection of having written. This one, for example, looks like a random walk across the keyboard — http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020908/msgs/30115.html — but if you view the html source with Notepad (or any text editor), replace
content='text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"' /> (at the end of the 5th line) with
content="text/html; charset=Windows-1251" />
then save the file (as something.html) and view what you've just saved with your web browser, you may recognise the opening sentence of "Anna Karenina" — see, for example, http://www.cornellcollege.edu/russian/exercises/reading/annak.html .Now, I would NEVER quote from this masterpiece of pre-revolutionary Russian literature (especially without attribution) because ignorant readers might think that I — and by implication Dr. Bob because this is his site — am actually advocating suicide, or marital infidelity, or the hypocrisy that the latter is acceptable for men but not for women; even though my moral philosophy, like Tolstoy's, is opposed to all three. The sentence cited is additionally offensive because of its denigratory and unfounded assertion about happy families: I've just run a Medline search covering all reputable, peer-reviewed psychological journals; it failed to find a scrap of published empirical evidence that they are all the same.
Another unacceptable (albeit ingeniously pangrammatic) sentence from the same post describes the dog, over which the quick brown fox jumps, with the pejorative adjective "lazy". In addition to its obvious incivility to the canine species, I find this personally offensive to me and other anergic depressives: our sloth-like symptoms are often mistaken for laziness.
Fortunately, I have just found a solution to our problem:
http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/2000-12-10--accessmag--001-001.jpg
http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/Disclaimer: This is a real commercial product, which I haven't yet tried; even if I had, I wouldn't break the rules by endorsing it here.
Claimer: On the other hand, it won the IgNobel Prize for Computer Science a couple of years ago — http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2000 — and the web site advertising it amused me; I hope it makes you smile, too :)Jonathan.
poster:Jonathan
thread:30619
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20021010/msgs/31398.html