She Monsh It!

A few days ago, Elegant Choice stepped into my comments box and encountered a major award: his word verification was panties. I took a screenshot of the miracle and saved it, with the intention of presenting it to you as a gift; however, when I went to retrieve it an hour later, it had disappeared from my desktop. Consumed with anger, I sat at my desk and refreshed my comments page furiously until I extracted from it a sequence of word verifications that could adequately describe my thwarted feelings:

Defeat Is a Milk Splash on My Face

Oh, great. It appears that my fake nemesis Dan Chiasson has gone to work for The Paris Review as a poetry editor. I'll never get in there now--not after defacing his poem with a plump-breasted Abraham Lincoln feeling all over his bearded self! Do I regret it? Ah, my friends, I only wish I had drawn more warts.

Open Letter to Tim Mahoney

Tim Mahoney, you pair of pants. I lived three doors down from your office and never once did you attempt to have an affair with me. The most you ever did was stop me on the street while I was carrying a bag of groceries and talk to me like I was a puppy--a puppy you weren't man enough to have sex with! HOW DARE YOU refuse to acknowledge my sexual presence in your neighborhood.

The Last in a Long Line of Cartoon Cats #2

You're welcome. Never again will you wonder what the chub-rolls of a stick of dynamite that is also a cat might look like; never again will you wonder how a tugboat shows his pain.

Eat Your Heart Out, Louis Wain

I'm not particularly grateful to my mother for giving me the gift of life; I figure I deserved it. I am, however, grateful to my mother for giving me this cat painting, which she found at a church rummage sale. This painting used to hang in a school. And why not? The sooner children learn that the wild and waving fur of dystopian cats will be the green fields of our doomed future, the better.

Happy Birthday, Wallace; Please Accept This Kreechur

The same day I discovered Steffie Can't Come Out to Play, I stumbled across a "limited $1.99 edition" of a treasure called On Basilisk Station. The cover depicts a sassy spaceship commander cradling a small, appalling space-cat.


Two words: DIABEETUS


MONSTER.


Now, even I am not devoted enough to actually read a book described as "militaristic sci-fi space opera," but I did page through it long enough to encounter this paragraph:

The fluffy ball of fur in Honor Harrington's lap stirred and put forth a round, prick-eared head as the steady pulse of the shuttle's thrusters died. A delicate mouth of needle-sharp fangs yawned, and then the treecat turned its head to regard her with wide, grass-green eyes. "Bleek?" it asked, and Honor chuckled softly. "Bleek yourself," she said, rubbing the ridge of its muzzle. The green eyes blinked, and four of the treecat's six limbs reached out to grip her wrist in feather-gentle handpaws. She chuckled again, pulling back to initiate a playful tussle, and the treecat uncoiled to its full sixty-five centimeters (discounting its tail) and buried its true-feet in her midriff with the deep, buzzing hum of its purr. The handpaws tightened their grip, but the murderous claws--a full centimeter of curved, knife-sharp ivory, were sheathed. Honor had once seen similar claws used to rip apart the face of a human foolish enough to threaten a treecat's companion, but she felt no concern.

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Oh, I'm sorry, did you want me to say something else? Why? The author himself describes the creature as having, of all things, a prick-eared head. My work here was finished before it began.