Cats, Internet, Get Your Cat Picture Here!

You can't believe everything you read on the Internet.  In fact, unless you want to buy a new computer, the best course of action is normally to assume that everything on the Internet wants to steal your identity, freeze your bank accounts, and have conjugal relations with your closest friends and lovers.  There are no magic pills that will increase the size of you or your gentleman friend's appropriate anatomy (if there were, there would literally be no other advertisements during the Super Bowl, and someone would be able to buy Sweden).  No one actually needs your help to recover a lost fortune.  There are no easy tricks to getting thin or having whiter teeth (although not eating or smoking can help, I don't personally recommend not doing either of those things). 

But when I tell you that the following image is one of the most adorable things you will see today, you can trust that I'm not after your Social Security number.  Instead, I only ask that you download my novel, and I'm not even really asking that, there's just a neat sidebar that conveniently has a picture of the book's cover that also takes you right to where you can order your own copy.  I know how hard it is to grasp the concept that someone in the vast miasma of faceless forum jumping actually cares about how much you smile today, but I do.

In fact, there's even the possibility that you steal this picture, slap a funny caption on it, and become instantly rich when your insight into the feline condition makes its way through cyberspace to the overcrowded desks of cat-lovers across the globe.  If that happens, wouldn't you say I'm nearly the best friend you don't know on the 'net?  You would, right?  I need a friend.  My cats spend most of the day doing things that aren't nearly as huggable as the two pictured below.  When they do manage to find time to cheer me up, it's never happens until after they sit in a circle around the litter box while I shovel their poop into plastic bags.  At that point, it is clear to me who is entertaining who.

What I'm saying is, when you get a chance to jumpstart your happiness with a double helping of adorable, you should take it.  Unless it comes in the form of a blinking, flashing, wiggling pop up ad.  Or a strangely grammatically incorrect e-mail.  Or a tweet from someone who joined up only a few hours ago.  Really, I guess, you should probably only rely on me and the following picture.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw this was to question how much the orange-furred cat weigh that his or her tiny paw is enough to send rippling spasms of pain through the grey kitty.  Maybe the Garfield-style kitten is Garfield-sized.  Or it could be a ninja cat.  More realistically, I guess the cat could have learned pressure points from a Vulcan.

Then I realized that the cat on the right might just be yawning, except that the sheer terror on the face of the orange fuzzball suggests that he or she is about half a second from fleeing for his or her life.  I have never found myself fleeing from someone who was yawning.  Just the one time that I was being chased by a narcoleptic banger near Harlem.

Maybe the grey cat is roaring, imitating something he or she saw on television like most children are prone to do (for this reason, I do not allow any of my cats to watch "The Lion King" or the under-rated Val Kilmer classic, "The Ghost and theDarkness").  The power of his or her primal howl is enough to brush back the hair of the smaller feline on the left.  It could send paroxysms of fear that reduce the orange animal to a shaking, quivering, cowering mass.  While on safari, by which I mean while listening to the tour guide at Busch Gardens, I once had the opportunity to come face to face with a roaring tiger.  I chose not to take that opportunity, because I have no desire to wet myself in public.  That hasn't been funny since, what, tenth grade?

Possibly the least cute option would be if the cat on the right is belching, having just finished his or her allotment of canned tuna for the afternoon.   More than once, it has happened to me that one of my furry companions just can't help but attempt to recite the ABC's instead of quietly expelling the fragrant gas into a remote corner of the apartment.  If that's the case, I can certainly understand the other's reaction, since cats, while they tend to have impeccably shiny coats, do not seem to care nearly as much about dental hygiene.

Even if the last turns out to be the impetus for the captured image, it is still quite adorable, as who among us has never laughed at a baby gurgling on her parent's shoulder at Chuck E. Cheese, just before leveling the dining area with the kind of acrid stench that makes even the robot animals pinch their nostrils.  And maybe the cat on the left is just performing one of those all too infrequent dental check-ups, the equivalent of asking someone to feel your breasts to make sure you don't have cancer (this happens, like cat teeth-brushing, only about one thousandth of the time that it should, if you care for my opinion).

You may giggle harder if you visit a tweenage angst-ridden blog, or if you hop over to Cracked to get your fill of list-based humor for the day, and I have to recommend checking out GatheringMagic for your gaming fix, but when it comes to cute, this kind of adorable is all sold out in stores.  With such a limited supply, it only makes sense that we all take the chance we have now to look at that picture again.  Now that I look at it, maybe the grey cat laughs like Danny Devito's Penguin.

You wouldn't like it if he was laughing at you, either.