Friday Cat Blogging – 22 October 2010

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Today’s installment of catblogging features rare video footage of Domino doing — well, let’s be honest: doing something not very exciting. But new! For her. And I just happened to have my camera around when she did it. That’s sort of rare, so today you get rare Friday Cat Vlogging.

To make up for the lack of actual excitement in the video, however, note that my personal video creation skills have taken a great leap forward. Unlike my past crude efforts, this one includes a sophisticated opening title and an actual edit with a diagonal transition. Thanks, Microsoft Movie Maker!

In other pet-related news, Chad Orzel is writing a sequel to How To Teach Physics To Your Dog, so he’s running a contest that will benefit the DonorsChoose fundraiser to support public school students and teachers. Here’s the deal: Chad’s book is full of animal characters, and he promises to name one of them after the biggest donor to his fundraising drive. But what if we all made donations in Inkblot’s name? Simple arithmetic would make this the biggest donation, and he’d be forced to recognize this and feature Inkblot in his book. Right? I mean, the guy’s a physicist, after all. So head on over there and give til it hurts. The kids it will help are all well and good, but this is really for Inkblot. He’ll be watching.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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