March 14, 2013

Today Is the 10th Anniversary of Friday Cat Blogging

This is it: Today is the 10th anniversary of Friday Cat Blogging. March 7, 2003, was the inspiration. On March 11 I announced I’d do it. And on March 14 I posted the first ever Friday Cat Blogging. Huzzah!

To celebrate, I’m doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything session at 10 a.m. Pacific time today. I’ll have a link available at 9:30, or you can just go to the main Reddit IAMA page and search for Kevin Drum. If you have any questions about the cats, this is the time to ask them.

While we wait for the Reddit session to start, how about a stroll down memory lane? To start, here are the very first Friday Cat Blogging pictures. Jasmine is on the left and Inkblot is on the right:

The picture on the left, from April 4, 2003, is one of my favorites of Jasmine. The picture on the right, from April 16, 2010, is one of my favorites of Inkblot. The image that I photoshopped onto the TV screen is still the one I use as the desktop image on my computer.

Jasmine died on January 4, 2007. A few days later we headed down to our favorite local shelter, and after we failed to bond with half a dozen cats the volunteers brought out one final possibility. She took one look at me, jumped into my lap, and purred herself to sleep. Sold! We took her home and named her Domino because she was black with a little white spot on her forehead. Here are the first pictures I took of her, on January 14, 2007. The one on the right is especially appropriate on a transcendental day like today:

Hey, how about some movies? The one on the left, from November 12, 2009, shows Domino and her favorite pair of shoes. The one on the right, from February 11, 2010, shows Inkblot in one of his favorite spots. Both feature bonus meowing at the end.

This is one of my favorite series of pictures of Domino, from June 1, 2007. She’s playing under the sheets as we make the bed, having an absolute ball:

I just happen to like these two pictures. They’re from September 10, 2010:

As we all know, Inkblot decided to run for president in 2011. Here’s his campaign poster from July 24, 2011:

Sadly, Inkblot died on July 24, 2012, when he slipped out one night and got attacked by a coyote. Here’s his final picture:

At that point I thought cat blogging was over, but I couldn’t give it up. Today, Domino carries on the tradition by herself, which is as she thinks it should be. She’ll be here tomorrow in her usual spot, of course.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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