Award-winning children's author writes about her cat as "it" and hasn't given "it" a name!

The Guardian newspaper has an article today, online, written by Nova Weetman who describes herself as "an award-winning author of books for children and young adults". She is an accomplished writer. But I sense that she is not an accomplished cat caregiver.

Nova Weetman's no-name tabby-and-white female cat who she tolerates. Image: Nova Weetman

Like many people she adopted a domestic cat companion during the Covid-19 pandemic on the insistence of her children. Worryingly, she says that the kitten she adopted was "a perfect lockdown distraction". Not a good reason to adopt a cat. Not at all. 

We don't know where she adopted the kitten. It appears to have been a shelter which is great but I'm not sure. Weetman does not mention it but she adopted a tabby-and-white kitten.

Initially the kitten was great entertainment for her children while she appears to have tolerated "it".

But also worryingly throughout her entire article she never mentions the name of her cat companion with whom she is now stuck at home while the kids are at school. 

She says that her now adult cat scratches at her bedroom door which clearly indicates that she locks her cat out of her bedroom at night. This is something that any cat lover would disapprove of I'm sorry to say.

It doesn't really work very well as she is experiencing because they want to come into the bedroom at night and in any case the bedroom is a great place for a domestic cat to be because it smells of their owner. And domestic cats are very much into their owner's smells as we all know.

The great American cat behaviourist, Jackson Galaxy, agrees with me in that domestic cats should be allowed into the bedroom at night. He describes the bedroom as a "scent soaker" because it is soaked in the scent of the owner.

He also advises that you might make a little bed area for the cat because he understands that it can be a little bit troublesome to allow the cat on your bed at night while you are trying to sleep.

Okay, but Nova Weetman locks her no-name cat out out which I don't like. And she complains about her cat scratching furniture and so on. 

When she watches television they sit together "like an old couple on the couch". And describes her cat as the boss which I sense she doesn't quite accept.

She openly admits that her cat "annoys me most days, but then undoes me with her attempts to leap the height of the windows to catch a fly, or the hours she spends by the screen door watching the world pass by." Her cat is a full-time indoor cat at her insistence.

And it is quite clear to me that she has done nothing to enrich the environment in which her cat lives. Further, she lives in an apartment. 

Weetman doesn't want this no-name cat. That's pretty clear to me. Wrong home. And the kids are no longer looking after the cat and that was the deal when she adopted her. The cat's a burden to Weetman.

I feel for this cat to be honest because I think she is living in a pretty sterile environment from the cat's perspective. And I really wish she had given her cat a name or at least mention the name in the article. It would have indicated a much warmer relationship.

Meow..hiss. 😎😢

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Scarlet Blake alleged murderer and cat killer claims she killed and tortured to please partner

NEWS AND COMMENT/OPINION: This is the continuing story of Scarlet Blake. It is a muddled story and it is unfolding in court at the moment in the UK. You may have read that she has been accused or it appears that she copied the behaviour of Luka Magnotta about which a documentary was made and aired on Netflix called Don't F***with Cats. 

Click this link for an earlier report about Blake before she attended court for her criminal trial.

And click this link to read my argument that her former partner Ashlynn Bell probably should be charged with aiding and abetting Blake's murder - she has been found guilty of murder in a British criminal court.

Scarlet Blake. Image in the public domain.

Luka Magnotta is notorious for suffocating two kittens in a plastic bag and then going on to kill a man and he uploaded the videos to the Internet. I have the video of the suffocation of the cats but I can't present all of it because that would be against current Internet rules. But if you want to see the beginning of it then please click this link.

Video of alleged cat torturer and man murderer walking the streets looking for a victim.

Inspired by docuseries?

We are not sure if Blake was inspired by this docuseries but her behaviour indicates that it was. But there are complications. She claimed that she is transgender and she told her parents that she was transgender when she was 12 and her parents rejected her and her feelings. This appears to have had a severely detrimental effect on her mental health and development.

My interpretation of the story, is that she hates herself and wants to be destroyed. She is obsessed with blood and destruction. She claimed that she self harms. She is a very troubled woman/man.

Transgender

As mentioned, she claims that she is transgender and has been taking testosterone blockers and has taken these drugs for a long time. We don't know whether she is a woman transgendering to be a man or vice versa. On the basis that she is taking testosterone blockers it indicates that she is a man transgendering to be a woman. If that is correct, this individual is a young man but the news media does not say this.

Did it to please partner?

And with respect to the cat that she tortured and allegedly put into a blender, she claimed that she did this to please her then lover or partner who apparently she met on a forum. Her partner's name is Ashlynn Bell who lives in Colorado, US. It is seems that her relationship with Bell was on the Internet through this forum but I don't know.

She claims that she dissected and put a neighbour's cat in a blender to please Bell. She feels guilty about it. She claims that she did not want to kill the cat but carried out this gruesome killing to put on a show for her partner/lover as it was her birthday or it was Valentine's Day.

She claims it was to make Bell happy because it was something that Bell wanted her to do. She pretended to enjoy it. The whole thing was choreographed she says.

She was asked in court whether she was concerned or aware of the cat's suffering and her response apparently, according to the report, that she felt "awful and guilty". She ended the cat's suffering by stabbing the animal in the heart.

She is also accused of killing a man who ultimately drowned apparently. It's not clear whether she hit him over the head and he subsequently fell into a river or a canal. But on social media there are claims that she strangled him but that would be impossible with the strength that she has or claims to have because she claimed that she has the strength of a unfit woman.

So it appears that she hit the man over the head and then pushed him into this canal or river. He drowned. She said that she was unable to refuse Bell's requests to harm others.

The court also heard that her name was previously Alice Wang. She claims that she suffers from dissociative identity disorder. She says that she has different parts of herself and feels like there are various people in her head. 

She lost her sex drive because of the drug she is taking and in response to a question about her sex life at court, she said the following: "Giving myself up to someone who would take pleasure in destroying me was something I was, I don't know, drawn to".

She involved herself in role-play with Bell in which she was strangled. This indicates that Bell was in the UK at the time? Confused.

Comment

This is an update, and as you can see it's a bit vague because the reporting is not that great in my opinion. But my conclusion about Blake is that she is a very emotionally disturbed woman or man I don't know which; obsessed with perhaps her own death and the killing and death of others. It seems that she wants to die and has very low self esteem. That is my personal assessment on what I read in reports and I'm a layperson not a psychiatrist.

Source of information: various but mainly Mail Online.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Newly opened cat café in Oxford, UK, has no cats (at the moment)

NEWS AND COMMENT: I don't think that we should be too critical of the Mac Kitten Coffee Shop. But they have just opened and they are described as a cat café which is normally quite a popular concept but sadly they have no cats. That is a major problem for a cat café!

Mac Kitten Coffer Shop. Picture by the Oxford Mail.

They are based near the Plain Roundabout. It opened on 9th February 2024 with customers claiming to be excited to be able to visit the establishment and interact with the cats.

But it's not clear yet when the cats will arrive. It may be a month before they are installed at the café. Note: we are not told where the cats are coming from but the usual M.O. is to take cats from a cat shelter based locally and to offer those cats for adoption to visitors to the café which is a nice way of working in partnership with a cat shelter. It should help to attract adopters and promote the local animal shelter.

It has to be said, though, that it is not easy to run a cat café because you've got maybe half a dozen or more cats confined to a strange place (initially) meeting strange people. 

You have to keep them inside that place safely and of course you have to look after half a dozen or more cats which is no mean feat while running a café which in itself is not that easy.

There are probably insurance issues to deal with which means added overheads which probably means adding to the price of the items sold. The workforce need to be au fait with looking after cats. They need to be cat lovers really. There are potential complications.

I don't want to be a wet blanket about this project but my gut feeling is that worldwide cat café's have not been a blinding success perhaps for the reasons mentioned above.

Nonetheless, I wish them the very best particularly if it enhances the prospect of people adopting rescue cats. 

The RSPCA, have claimed recently that their rescue centres are full up because of an increase in people abandoning their cats to the centres post-pandemic with a a parallel decrease in the number of people adopting cats. 

The reason? The cost of living crisis. Family budgets are tight. People are realising that it is not cheap to look after a domestic cat properly.

The Lib Dem candidate for Cowley Ward, Scott Urban, said: "A warm welcome to Mac Kitten Coffee Shop on Cowley Road. Do pop along and say hi! (Actual cats arriving next month.)”

The café was said to be impeccably clean and very welcoming. It would just be nice if there were some cats to welcome clients as well.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

The Owl and the Pussycat tie worn by King Charles III

Here we have King Charles wearing a tie with a cat on it. Nice. It is a tie in honour of 'The Owl and the Pussycat', a children’s poem by Edward Lear. He wore the tie at The Felix Project in February last year. The Felix Project is a United Kingdom charitable organization that saves surplus food from suppliers and redistributes it to charities. It has the dual aim to help reduce food surplus.

Image: cropped pic from Getty Images. Problem publishing it here? Please comment and I will respond speedily.

It is not known if the poem is a favourite of the King and Queen. But we do know that he is a dapper dresser wearing very expensive, classic clothes that might look a bit old fashioned to some but most regard him as extremely well dressed. He must take enormous care in selecting the clothes he wears.

His clothes are classic and he likes his ties to be a bit more adventurous. His ties are also a way of making a statement. The Owl and the Pussycat tie was very suitable for the occasion. Perhaps he wears these ties to open up a conversation with the people he meets at these events.  

Final point for me: King Charles III is a landlord and he forbids tenants of his properties keeping cats. This indicates that he is insensitive to cats and owners of cats looking for a home. I don't think he particularly likes cats. He probably prefers dogs and he has shot birds and attended fox hunts. He is not an animal advocate. He wore this tie for business reasons. Not as a statement that he likes cats.

Click this link for information about the King banning cats from his Sandringham estate.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

AI-generated scientific paper illustration of a rat with a giant erect penis shocks the scientific community

This is a warning about the dangers of AI-generated images and documents. It concerns a research paper published by a leading scientific journal online about the "signalling pathway of sperm stem cells" which was illustrated with a picture of a rat with a giant erect penis and four giant testicles with gobbledygook labelling.

Was this a deliberate plan by the people who submitted the research report to undermine the scientific journals online with the intention to shed light on the lack of oversight by these journals?

AI-generated scientific paper illustration of a rat with a giant erect penis shocks the scientific community. The words of the labelling is rubbish. The words are made-up. Image: The Telegraph.

This AI cock up of a scientific paper created by an artificial intelligence computer got past the journal's peer reviewers and other checks that they are meant to be running and ended up being published. It's been ridiculed of course and it's become a news media story of interest because it provides us with a warning about the potential deficiencies of artificial intelligence.

It also tells us about how artificial intelligence can deceive people because sometimes these images are very good despite being fake. You end up not being sure what is real and what is unreal which in the hands of unscrupulous people can be dangerous.

The research paper was supposedly written by researchers at the Honghui Hospital in China. It's been removed from the journal and the administrators have issued an apology and confirmed that they are working to "correct the record".

Scientists have expressed their concern as to how it was published in the first place. Adrian Liston, Professor of pathology at Cambridge University and editor of the journal Immunology and Cell Biology said: "Generative AI is very good at making up things that sound like they come from a human being. It doesn't check whether those things are correct."

The research paper has been likened to an actor pretending to be a doctor and then delivering medical advice to a patient. Other scientists have described the illustrations as 'shameful' and 'devastating' while some said that they weren't sure "whether to laugh or cry".

The illustrations have been described as "objectively funny" but "[they] have no place in science journals."

The story is a warning to anybody researching online. What is troubling for me is that this fakery has occurred on a science journal. Science is meant to be objective and accurate. It's meant to be as precise and truthful as best as it can be. 

And therefore this AI-generated craziness has infiltrated a bastion of science. You might expect it to occur in less precise and scientific environments but it hasn't and this is troublesome.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.