Friday Super Cat Blogging – 20 October 2017

For two weeks I’ve seen no cats in London close enough to photograph. Last night it started raining and I figured the jig was up. No cats.

Then, this morning, we decided to go up to Portobello Road and browse the antiques. We got off the bus and Marian suddenly motioned for me to slow down. The proximate cause was this little cutie-pie of a cat who came over and let us scratch her head while she smooched around the gate:

A minute later, I saw a shop across the street that announced itself as a Pet Boutiqué & Cafe Lounge. Was this one of those cafes that has cats roaming around? No, but it did have this magnificent Grumpy Cat wannabe lounging on one of its pink stools:

Two cats this week! But we’re not finished yet. Remember that gray cat from last week who was prowling around Edwardes Square Park but disappeared into the foliage before I could get a picture? On our way home, we saw him again. He clearly didn’t want to make a new friend, but he was kind enough to pose for a glamour shot before he hightailed it away:

Not done yet! We got home, and around dusk the tiger-stripe cat showed up again. He was friendly and came up to me, but then I made the huge mistake of picking him up. That was OK, but then I walked into the house and he went crazy. So this is the best picture I got:

And there’s more! It turns out the white cat was watching the whole thing:

After two weeks of drought, it was suddenly pouring cats. So why not put up one more? Last night, thinking that it was time to give up on London cats, I decided to photoshop a picture of my mother’s cats onto some London scenery. Since I went to all that trouble, I might as well put it up. Here are Luna and Lilly keeping a close eye on the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

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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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