Wednesday, 5 October 2022

Volodymyr Zelensky's Warrior Cats hate Poo Tin's 2-legs

I agree that the title is a bit bizarre. The picture might help. And if you click on the link below, you'll see the connection between Poo Tin and Putin. And finally, there a strong fan club of the Warrior Cats books remain online, and they love to participate in role play games (Warrior Cats RPG). 

RELATED: Please be responsible and pop your dog’s poop in the POO TIN.


I have a suspicion that this is the product of photo-editing but who cares. 

Ready to fight! ✔️😊😎. My God I am very keen to see Putin's forces kicked out of Ukraine and for things to return to 'normal'. But they won't. I predict a form of nuclear war and perhaps a world war.


Another related page, my attempt at a Warrior Cats short story.

RELATED: Warrior Cat – The Long March. This is just one episode. A sample. There are 10 in all.


Sunday, 2 October 2022

10-year-old girl who fled Ukraine is reunited with her cat, Arsenii

10-year-old Ukrainian girl reunited with her cat who was flown over from her home country to California
10-year-old Ukrainian girl reunited with her cat who was flown over from her home country to California. Image: The Hill.

Here is an audio of this story. It is very short and succinct. It is a success story and a good ending story of cat rescue, effort and commitment to do the job. Ukraine must seem a long way away to this 10-year-old girl.

The audio file below is embedded. It is served by npr servers. It may stop working at some stage.

 
Here are a few words. The 10-year-old's family left everything behind but are now together in Sonoma County, California. They plan on starting a new life. The Bezhenar family are of course adjusting to their new way of life. 

There are 3 daughters, one of whom, Agnessa was pining for her cat. The other 2 daughters are Maria and Eleanor. The family are in a large house, and they have adopted an additional kitten named Tosha. 

The rescue of Arsenii, Agnessa's cat is down to Geoffrey Peters. He made the arrangements and found an app which connected the Bezhenar family to him. 

 The community pitched in and furnished an empty house and donated money, food, gas cards and gift cards. They even donated a piano as one of the daughters is musical.

The reason why website readers really must accept adverts

A lot of people find the adverts on my websites and other sites irritating. One visitor said that she found the website hard to read because of the adverts which was a distinct exaggeration. However, it is a point, and it needs to be discussed. I will tell you why adverts are essential and why visitors to websites 'must' accept them and even click on them.

Google Ads are a force for good in one way. The support the 'independent websites' which provide a valuable contribution to the internet. Image: Google.

On a personal level, I have spent tens of thousands of hours and spent many thousands of pounds and dollars in running PoC and ancillary websites like this one. I don't get paid a penny but if I was paid the minimum wage, I would have earned tens of thousands of pounds.

The overall cost over the 15 years of the websites would be somewhere around £250,000+ at a rough calculation if you add in the minimum wage payment. The Google adverts bring in a relatively small income. Nowadays it is around £500-£900 per month. The company which hosts the site charge £80 per month.

So those are the raw facts. Without the adverts I'd have to take a massive loss payable out of my savings or charge a visitation fee. If I charged a fee to visit the site's viewing figures would drop pretty dramatically because no one else is charging except the large news media companies. 

All PoC traffic would go elsewhere to websites like Wikipedia. So, adverts help to keep independent website alive. By 'independent' websites I mean those owned and managed by a person and not a group or a business.

Without ads there would be no websites owned and run by single individuals working alone. I think that would be a big loss to the internet. I would not continue if there were no ads. In fact, I would not have started.

Do you want the internet to be dominated by big corporations who charge for entry to their sites?

Visitors should payback what they have learned from visiting these independent sites by clicking on an advert. You don't have to buy anything. Just click on the ad and see the product. You may make a purchase and at the same time the website owner earns a tiny bit of money (around 10 pence).

It is a small price, and the inconvenience of ads are also a small price to pay for free information. The ad blocker businesses are wrong. They are predatory and damaging to the internet. I know Google and other businesses make pots of dosh from ads but that's the nature of capitalism. 

I believe that all internet users should support the independent websites as it supports free speech and it helps to provide checks and balances against the corporations who, for me. are often unconcerned about animal welfare.

Saturday, 1 October 2022

Self-discipline is the way to survive, even enjoy old age!

I am sorry but (1) this is not about cats although I mention them in passing and (2) you don't want to hear the dreaded word 'self-discipline'. But it is vital during all of one's life but particularly so in old age when every day is about maintaining oneself, the home, the garden, the car and the cat.

Self-discipline is the way to survive old age!
Self-discipline is the way to survive old age! Image: MikeB

And maintenance includes maintaining mental health which can only be achieved by exercising the mind while staying as much as possible in the present. Exercising the mind does force the mind to stay in the present in any case.

In old age (70+) you have to have purpose. Often there is no need to work. That immediately undermines purpose. You have to find some other way to create purpose. You might generate it artificially. You might give yourself projects. You need to place demands on your body physically and mentally. The body needs to be worked just like an old car. And all this requires self-discipline.

And when the mind is challenged it automatically stays in the present. This blocks out negative thoughts through looking back into the past and forward into the future.

Nowadays, it is very easy to generate negative thoughts because the future looks a little bit bleak in the UK because of a dysfunctional government plus the war in Ukraine and an economic crisis. And it is just post-Covid. And it is very easy for an old person to be nostalgic. Beware of nostalgia as it can become a depressive.

Another important aspect of life which requires self-discipline is structure. I believe it is vital that an old person lives their days with structure. This can mean doing similar things each day which sounds boring, but it injects a framework into the life of a person who might become a little bit distracted and whose mind might wonder distractedly which can lead to mental upset and depression.

There is another benefit to a structure in the life of an elderly person. If they have a cat which is quite likely, then the cat will also enjoy that structure. Almost above all else, domestic cats like to know what's going to happen. It provides them with reassurance. I believe that all domestic cats need reassurance, and it should be given freely.

But all these aspects of life when retired require self-discipline. For example, you need self-discipline not to eat too much. You need self-discipline to finish eating when you are still a little bit hungry and would love some more because it is food therapy. Enjoy eating but don't do food therapy. And the less you eat the less you feel you need. It controls appetite. The opposite: eat more and the stomach demands more.

You need self-discipline to eat the right foods in order to ensure that the body functions at least reasonably well at a time when it will start malfunctioning.

For example, I go for a walk twice a day. I think every retired individual should walk for at least 45 minutes per day, preferably one hour. And it should be reasonably vigorous walking ideally in nature. Nature - trees particularly - are healing. They pour balm over the troubled mind.

 Perhaps you might do something else while walking such as discussing topics with a companion or doing photography. Both of which stimulate the mind.

But there has to be some physicality in life in order to keep the body functioning. There's nothing worse than sitting down for two hours watching television which of itself is bad for the digestion and bad for health generally.

And when you get older the body requires maintenance in terms of medications which should be taken daily, religiously but minimised. This is a proactive step in order to keep oneself in reasonable condition and functioning.

Personally, I stopped drinking alcohol about seven or eight years ago. Alcohol is calorie rich, and it is not a great food. You can put on weight very easily drinking alcohol and of course it makes you feel better for a while until the downside clicks in and you feel worse. There is always a price for artificial highs.

The problem is you put on weight, number one, and secondly you can more easily become depressed drinking alcohol because it is a depressive drug.

In addition, alcohol makes it harder to function normally both during drinking and afterwards. I would recommend employing self-discipline to entirely eliminate alcohol, but it can't be eliminated it should be minimised right down to the barest minimum.

The right foods need to be eaten and you can look that up on the Internet. It requires self-discipline to do all these things. I completely changed my diet about six years ago in order to shed some weight because the extra weight had increased my blood pressure to the point where medication was considered. 

I avoided medication because I lost weight almost immediately with a radical diet. I have modified that diet over many years and maintained it. It was hard.

Perhaps the greatest task for an elderly person is to keep their weight down and to achieve a good BMI. Excess weight brings many health problems. It is not the fat that you see but the fat that is around the organs inside the body which prevents them working such as the pancreas (creating insulin) where the damage is done. 

Incidentally, pancreatitis can be caused by an excess of alcohol which can cause temporary type 2 diabetes.

"Fatty pancreas is associated with abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, T2DM, dyslipidemia, arterial hypertension and metabolic syndrome" - National Library of Medicine USA
It took me about eight years to completely and radically change my diet to where it is now and where my weight is stable with a good or very good BMI level and my blood pressure is below 120/75. Like I said it took a lot of time and a lot of self-discipline to achieve that and it is an ongoing and never-ending challenge. Every day has the same challenge and every day that challenge must be met and surmounted.

Here is a bit more about Type II diabetes. I would expect that you have read about it. What is so shocking is that it is nearly always caused by excess weight and therefore a person suffering from type II diabetes due to obesity can self-cure themselves by losing weight, but it seems to me that very few people do this. It appears that they are addicted to food and food therapy.

My immediate neighbours are both obese and they both suffer from type II diabetes. Type II diabetes is a slow killer. You end up losing feeling in your feet because it kills the nerve endings at the extremities of the body which can lead to ulcers in the legs, which can lead to amputation. 

It damages the kidneys and liver. It damages the retina of the eyes. It can cause blindness. It is a slow insidious death and yet people can't stop eating to cure themselves. I find it astonishing, and I have to say it demonstrates a complete lack of self-discipline which is the point of this article.

3-hour old wet cat food in bowl? Your cat might prefer it.

My personal experience tells me that if you put down a sachet of wet cat food into a cat food bowl and your cat rejects it for whatever reason, you should cover it up with a plate (stop flies laying eggs) and wait at least a few hours depending upon the ambient temperature because your cat might come back and eat it. In fact, it can be left for much longer depending on the air temperature and your cat's preferences.

He might do this because (1) he is a little hungrier three hours later and (2) the food is a little smellier. And some cats are more dependent on others on the food being smelly. Some cats, also, are more naturally scavengers and they don't mind if the wet cat food smells a bit.

My cat eating 3-hour old wet cat food.

The advantage of using this method is that you throw away less cat food. Throwing away a full bowl of cat food or even a half full bowl is troublesome for two reasons (1) you are wasting money and in this era of cost-of-living crisis you don't want to waste money even pennies and (2) throwing away substantial amounts of wet cat food is problematic because it smells. 

You put it in the waste bin, but it smells and sometimes flies deposit their eggs on the food before you can throw it away which results in maggots crawling all over the place. You don't want to throw away wet cat food you can help it.

Wet cat food bowl used for 5 meals without washing it. Image: MikeB

And on occasions, when you put down just the right amount of wet cat food and your cat is nicely hungry, he will eat everything in the bowl, and you will not even need to clean the bowl in preparation for the next helping of wet cat food!

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