From Eithiriel.com

From Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs‘ “twenty-three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can really love them”:

14. For reasons that cannot be explained, cats can suddenly read at a twelfth-grade level. They can’t talk and they can’t write, but they can read silently and understand the text. Many cats love this new skill, because they now have something to do all day while they lay around the house; however, a few cats become depressed, because reading forces them to realize the limitations of their existence (not to mention the utter frustration of being unable to express themselves).

This being the case, do you think the average cat would enjoy Garfield, or would cats find this cartoon to be an insulting caricature?

(secundo)
Garfield with G’s thought bubbles removed:

“The power of consumption has been usefully theorised by the Marxist sociologist Georg Simmel. In The Philosophy of Money, he looks at how buying an object is an act of individual subjectivity, the person stamping himself on a thing and claiming his right to its exclusive enjoyment. Simmel cited the example of a friend he knew who would buy beautiful things, not to use them, but to ‘give an active expression to his liking of the things, to let them pass through his hands and, in so doing, to set the stamp of his personality upon them’.

“Shopping remains a way in which our choices have a tangible effect, in which we can make something in our lives new and different. It also becomes the primary way in which people can enjoy the creativity and efforts of others, even if this is done unconsciously, without knowing who made something or how.”

From here, though the rest isn’t really on the same topic.

“Myanmar’s military junta has reportedly insisted it does not need help from foreign aid experts, while survivors in the cyclone-devastated country are braced for further hardship following warnings that more bad weather is coming this week.”

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