May 8, 2009

Friday Cat Blogging – 8 May 2009

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Exciting news today!  It’s Inkblot’s tenth birthday!

Sort of.  We don’t really know when he was born, of course, but we brought him home from the Mission Viejo Animal Shelter on July 10, 1999.  He was about two months old at the time, so I figure he was born on May 10.  However, just as federal holidays all fall on a Monday, around here cat birthdays are observed on Friday.  So today we celebrate!

But how?  Good question.  I could buy him a trout or something, but Inkblot is such a doofus he’d just ignore it.  If it doesn’t come out of a can or a bag, he’s not interested.  I could dress him up, but that’s a nonstarter too.  So instead, he gets Friday Catblogging all to himself this week.  His official portrait is below.  Marian says it makes him look fat.  I say: magnificent and visionary, gazing toward a prosperous future with a chicken in every pot and preheated blankets for all.

Bonus trivia: Inkblot shares his birthday with absurdly successful science fiction writer/blogger John Scalzi.  In fact, if you convert human to cat years at the approved ratio of 4:1, they’ll be exactly the same age on Sunday.  I think this means John should write a book about him.

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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.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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