Friday Cat Blogging – 12 July 2013

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Today’s quilt is “Watercolor Garden,” a watercolor design from Pat Maixner Magaret and Donna Ingram Slusser. It is machine pieced, hand quilted, and no fabric was used twice.

Domino was surprisingly cooperative about the whole thing. I just plonked her down on the chair, and she stayed there patiently while I took some pictures. The photo shoot probably would have turned out better if I could have found her an hour earlier, but she’s apparently discovered a brand new hidey hole and I couldn’t figure out where she was. By the time she finally made an appearance, the light coming through the window was a little dim. That’s the catblogging life for you.

In other news, the Daily Mail reports that there is no great stagnation: “A new range of apps lets cats take their own photos, also known as selfies. When the phone is placed on the ground, the screen shows moving dots or ‘bouncing lasers’ for the cat to chase. When the cat hits the laser, its photo is taken.” Soon Domino will be able to do her own catblogging instead of relying on us flighty human shutterbugs.

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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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