Viernes Blogging de Gato – 9 agosto 2019

You guys are lucky this feature isn’t called Friday Dog Blogging. It would probably exceed MoJo’s server allocation. I swear, I have never seen as many dogs as I have this past week in Colombia.

Cats, on the other hand, are hard to come by. This sweet little critter owns a fruit shop in Ubaté, though of course he’s co-opted a human to actually run the place.

This was a sociable cat, but was sort of overrun by its next door neighbor, below. The cat was obviously accustomed to ridiculous dog behavior, but even so this guy was bouncing around so much that it put the cat a little ill at ease. Even in a still photograph, you can practically see its tail wagging.

That was on Wednesday, and given my luck so far I thought it was likely to be the only cat I’d see. But on Thursday I came across three cats. The first was in Usme:

This cat was very sociable and allowed me to pet her, but completely ignored everything I did. You see, there was a pigeon that commanded 100 percent of its attention. That was much more interesting than yet another human admirer.

I was on my way to Parque Nacional Natural Sumapaz when I took this picture. More about that later. On the way back, near the village of Madrid, I stopped in the middle of road and took this adorable picture out the car window:

Isn’t that the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? A puppy and her mother, along with a cat to order them around. Such domestic bliss.

The third cat was in a different part of Usme on my way home. It was slowly working up the nerve to come see me, and I was encouraging this instead of taking a picture while the taking was good. That was a mistake. A moment later a dog bounded up and two donkeys came clacking up the street. That was too much, and the cat rushed back into the sanctuary of its shop. So no picture.

Despite this Thursday bounty, the apparent ratio of dogs to cats in Colombia is still about a thousand to one.

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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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