kittens – syntaxfree

Collected Tweets

I decided to add a little value to the @syntaxfreeblog Twitter account by tweeting here and there about stuff I’m enjoying, but I still like the idea of collating those here for the record rather than losing them forever in the Twitter swamp. Where possible, I might also rephrase them better than I could on Twitter, or add a little value here which I didn’t have space to mention there. Here are a bunch:

I often struggle to connect with the work of fine art photographers, but here’s one I found lately that I do like: Kim Høltermand [via The Fox Is Black]
Love the African sounds in J. Cole’s Can’t Get Enough. You can hear the original Guinean source material at okayafrica.
As a total non-designer, typography always does my head in when I’m trying to make fonty decisions for this blog or my photobooks. I think they made Type Connection, a font match-making game, for people like me. [via Lifehacker]
Sometimes all you need is a headline: Paris Mayor Combats Noisy Nightlife By Deploying Roving Squads Of Mimes [via Everywhereist]
Sorry for Daily Fail link but IT IS KITTEH! NAMED MARSHMALLOW! OMG TEH FLUFF IS KILLING ME.

Mario

Hi, I’m Mario.

Much like Uncle Orlando, I was found in Michelle’s family’s driveway. It’s tough sometimes to photograph me well because I insist on moving rapidly around a dimly lit kitchen.

Even when someone’s trying to cuddle me, I get all squirmy because the world is awesome and I want to explore it!

Nonetheless, I think it’s clear that I’m adorable.

I am very small.

I’m also very hungry. I keep trying to eat the food lying around for the three other Uncle Cats, but I’m really too young for that right now.

The big boys’ water dish is also too high for me. What shall I do?

Kitten milk in a syringe! I can totally handle this! Om nom nom.

I miss my mom. :( But I guess I could get used to cuddles from someone else.

Michelle’s family is taking good care of me because I need so much help right now. But with Uncles Orlando, Dinky and Winky, and Aunty Casey, they’ve already got four house cats. Together with Paddy, Mickey, Molly and MC who live outside, that’s eight cats they’re already supporting. Will someone kind, loving and responsible please adopt me? I really like napping on a warm human instead of in the drain.

~~If you think you can give little Mario a good home, please contact me!~~ I’m glad to say that we’ve found Mario a well cat-proofed home with new owners who share my family’s zeal for feeding and neutering strays. He’ll even have a friend to play with! Thank you so much to everyone who expressed interest and passed on the message.

Iconic Photos

Having just discovered the Iconic Photos blog (via kottke.org) and spent entirely too much time reading it tonight when I should be in bed, I might as well share it with you too. This is most definitely not the most iconic photo on the blog, but it’s the one I’m linking anyway.

Introducing Orlando

This is Orlando. Orlando appeared out of nowhere on my family’s doorstep (it’s weird, either someone left him there deliberately or he had an uncanny ability to wander to where he would be totally pampered) about two weeks ago, with a very skinny body and distended belly. Since then, my family has fattened him into healthier kitten proportions, cleaned, de-fleaed, de-wormed and toilet-trained him, and he’s now in good condition to go to a loving home.

Update on 10 Dec 2007: Due to unforeseen circumstances of extreme cuteness, my family informed me over the weekend that my mother cannot bear to part with Orlando. As such, he is no longer up for adoption.

He’s a plucky little guy and has formed a sweet wrestle/play relationship with one of our other house cats Dinky who is about three times his size. He’s also incredibly friendly (the other three adult house cats aren’t anywhere as friendly to strangers) and does the whole sitting on your lap purring until he falls asleep thing, which will never get old, never never never.

He’s hard to photograph because if he sees the camera lens he runs right up and sticks his face in it, so I had to wait until he was distracted with something else.

If you read Cute Overload…

…I believe this qualifies as an “ENH!”

I can haz pawburger?

Num num num.

Pwease adopt me!

Please leave a comment or email “name of this blog” at gmail if you can help little Orlando out, or know someone else who can. I’m absolutely dying to keep him for myself, but the flat where I now live with Alec isn’t very cat suitable.

If You’re Smitten, Adopt A Kitten!

Seriously, people, we need to find them homes. I’m gonna pimp them a bit more right now, and if you think you know anyone who might be interested in gaining karma, increasing the cuteness levels of their daily existence and falling deeply in love, please direct them to this post!

You might have noticed from the pictures in the previous kitten post that two of them are pirate kitties. So after naming them Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, my mother and sister went on to name the remaining two Smee and Blackbeard, but after some genital scrutiny it was concluded that Blackbeard ought to be renamed Tigerlily.

This is Smee. I think he’s the second cutest after Tigerlily, but don’t tell the kittens I’ve been ranking them like this in case it’s damaging for their self-esteem.

Davy Jones is perhaps a little less photogenic than his siblings, but he’s just as happy and healthy and I think his centre parting is quite sweet, like an old man with Brylcreamed hair. Or Hitler.

Jack Sparrow is so hyperactive that none of his portraits came out well, so I had to settle for some action shots instead. Here he is trying to climb the cardboard fencing we initially used to keep them enclosed, while Smee snoozes on the left.

And here he is inspecting a flowerpot for clamberability. Tigerlily looks as if she’s playing with a dead palm frond, but she was actually falling asleep in that “head droop… head droop… I’M AWAKE I’M AWAKE! …actually, no I’m not…zzz” way.

Lastly, here they all are with their long-suffering mom. You can even see Smee’s little paw kneading her belly.

If you’re interested, please contact me! “name of this blog” at gmail!

Fuzzballs Seeking Good Homes

My family generally tries to sterilise all the strays we can get our hands on, but Mother Cat (we call her MC for short) was heavily pregnant when she first appeared, so there wasn’t much we could do. After she’d given birth she came to our driveway to get fed, but the kittens were nowhere to be seen. Until Tuesday, when in the process of watering the plants my mum spotted a ball of fur which turned out to be a soaked kitten. Careful inspection under the plants revealed four more soaked kittens.

My mum dried them off (after first trapping a stressed-out MC) and created a little den for them and MC in the corner of the garden, where they’ve been happily snuggled ever since. Four kittens seem healthy, but there was a rat-sized runt who was shunned by the rest, including its mother. It died yesterday.

As adorable as these darlings are, we can’t keep them. If they keep living in our driveway they risk getting killed on the road outside (where we’ve lost 2 cats already) or wandering into neighbouring houses and getting savaged by dogs. We can’t bring them into our house because we already have three housecats and more would really be pushing it. If you’re interested, or know somebody who might be, post a comment and I’ll contact you with further details!

One, Two, Three, Four…

…I declare Kitten War!

If there’s a kitten cuter than Squee in the universe, I fear I may not survive seeing it.

Addendum: a slightly odd conversation I had with Alec last night.

Me: At this Kitten War site there’s a kitten that’s shooooooo cute! It’s called Squee! There’s another kitten called Sox that’s cute too but there’s something special about Squee that I really like.
Alec, eyes half glazed over: So, is Squee a black kitten?
Me, surprised: Yes! How’d you guess that?
Alec: Well, in all these contests, you always like the black one.

[To put things in context, here are some recent reality TV favourites of mine: Fantasia, LaToya, Jennifer, George (LOVED all of them in American Idol 3), Uchenna and Joyce (Amazing Race), first Anwar and then Vonzell after Anwar got boring (American Idol 4).]

Casey At 5 Months

For weeks I’ve been accumulating a pretty large backlog of photos I’d like to put up here. Many record cultural observations, or moments of beauty or humour, capturing my view of the world around me in my attempts at artistic exploration.

However, none of those photos will be displayed in this post. Instead, here be cat pics.

Casey is now 5 months old. On her first visit to the vet, she entered gibberish into her own veterinary records by wandering onto the keyboard as the vet was typing. She is very strong and can pin big healthy adults to the sofa for hours on end, simply by draping herself across a belly, falling asleep, and generally being warm and fuzzy. Her favourite food is finger, but she never breaks the skin.

Cute and she knows it.

Completely unposed, I swear.

Hasn’t quite grasped the distinction between terrapin food and water and cat food and water.

[Before anyone goes reporting me to the SPCA for cruelty to terrapins, let me just clarify that the terrapin spends most of the day clambering around the backyard and sunning itself. It only goes in that small tank to sleep and eat.]

The Unbearable Cuteness Of Being

In two weeks, Casey the kitten (full name Casey Underfoot) has managed to worm his way into everyone’s affections, to the extent that even my usually taciturn father has been sighted jiggling around singing “Look, Caseykins, nice juicy slippers!” (The cat is obsessed with his house slippers and stalks them incessantly. The rest of us theorize that they must need a wash.) Meanwhile, my mother, whose nine cats of her youth never knew vets, worming tablets, or flea powder, has borrowed three cat books out of the library and we’re taking him to the vet for his first checkup this week.

At dinner today, Yuping informed me that she wanted more kitten photos, and I’m only too happy to oblige.

Not quite heavy enough to get snipped…yet

I call this one Reclining Nude

Snug, bug, rug

To anyone getting sickened by all this cuteness, I can’t promise you less kitten pictures, but I will at least point you in the direction of Clay Kitten Shooting, where my current high score is 76. Beat that, mofos.

Happiness Is A Warm Kitten

I know this second lapse into cat pictures will substantially harm whatever chances I ever have of cutting-edge indie cool cyberbabeness, but really, cutting-edge indie cool cyberbabeness doesn’t seem very important at all when you have a warm kitten fast asleep on your lap.

After 10 years on the Internet I am finally the stereotypical Web nerd whose site contains pictures of my cat. Oh happy day. :)