Cat Pee
29 Jan 2007 13:05 by Mark
How do you stop a cat from peeing in the house? No, that's not the start of a joke.
You see, I have a cat and that cat - being an animal - expels fluid waste from its body using its teeny, tiny cat penis. Okay, maybe compared to other tabby cats the penis is a monster both in length and girth but I'm not prepared to do any research in that area. Suffice to say: it's smaller than mine. Really. Beside the point, though. The point - if I remember correctly and dispense somehow of the image of cat genitalia in my mind at the moment - is that fluids, when they aren't being regurgitated or drooled at the speed of light from one end of his furry body, instead prefer the option of ejection via the teeny, tiny penis. In itself, not a problem and I believe the method recommended by leading doctors. However - and the opening sentence may have given this away - he's doing it in the house.
He's not crapping in the house. For that he goes outside the back door roughly where a typical human might step should he or she decide to risk an excursion into The Garden Of Unearthly Horror™. He makes use of the cat flap we installed at great traumatic and sweary cost to ourselves.
But peeing: he's taken to peeing just inside the cat flap. It's a strip of concrete flooring so it has a few benefits:
- it's not carpet like the now-torn-up and discarded dining room flooring ruined in a similar manner by his brother last year,
- it's not a duvet cover like the one that was peed on last month by Feline Assailant Unknown But Very Much Suspected, said urine flowing with the power of gravity through the duvet, through the sheet, through the mattress, and onto the bedroom floor over the course of the day,
- it's marginally less gruesome to clean up than that time one of my little darlings had a bad dream while sleeping on my lap and peed himself a little while digging one very sharp and probably infected claw through the tracksuit bottoms into a very sensitive area of my person as he shrieked himself awake.
So far, I've tried:
- explaining to him, British man to British man-cat, that this sort of behaviour is beneath him and he should really pull his socks up and do the decent thing,
- teaching him how to use the toilet and pointing out that the seat must be lowered afterwards as it's bad feng shui/liable to lead to a clip around the ear from his mum who really doesn't like that sort of thing,
- threatening him with corporal punishment (but he knows I wouldn't really),
- threatening him with capital punishment (ditto),
- threatening him with tying a knot in the offending appendage (ditto; no man could do that to another),
- drawing a picture of him wearing a diaper to try to embarrass him into stopping,
- spraying and cleaning the concrete with numerous pungent liquids in the hope that he'll want to vacate the area - as opposed to his bladder - as quickly as possible. Sadly, it now smells like an old lady fallen in a swimming pool, drying out her chlorine-lavender clothing in a whore's boudoir and I almost look forward to the welcoming scent of ammonia that tells me he's tried to cover the aroma with his own once more.
In other news ...
This is the last update before the site is redesigned and relaunched. Backend coding is almost complete. There will be some new features and some not new features. Some old features may have rejuvenating creams applied to their wrinkled faces giving them a whole new look and some may suffer serious side-effects from botched botox injections leading to swelling, coma, death, and malpractice lawsuits a-go-go. Others still may be set adrift on PHP icebergs with a cheery farewell.
I'm considering implementing a system allowing other people to write on the site too, either to syndicate/promote their own site content to a wider audience (demographic studies indicate most of my readers - like me - are wide) or create their own. I'll have to see if anyone wants to do that though. The new site look will include amazing Dark Text On Light Background™ technology with an awesome custom implementation of Font Sizing That's Larger And Therefore Easier To Read™ because someone asked nicely.
Expect the changes within the next fortnight (*).
(*) Disclaimer: I'm a software developer. Fortnights can last up to nine months.
EDIT: Site redesign complete.
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On to the real "meat and potatoes" (homo) of this post I could not agree more about the font sizing here. In my quest to make MC and the entirety of the AssClown Entertainment family of websites a better place for all I have too decided to ditch the tiny font in favor(our) of something YOU CAN ACTUALLY FUCKING READ!!!!!!!!!! I am more a fan of the grayish white text on the mirky even grayer background technology deployed in previous incarnation of my beloved empire but hell that's just me.
Also, if you are actually going to open up the Mighty Bubble to other writers count me in buddy. Just be careful what you wish for.
OB: that's the sort of out-of-the-box thinking I like. Even if it's in the box in this case. I'm not doing it, of course, because I'm indoctrinated to flushing and would find the transition to scooping litter with my foot too difficult to adjust to at this stage in my life.
I bought a book and forgot I hate reading....through 348 pages of unrelated bullshit.....your anitspam thing is really starting to piss me off.
However, basically, the way to think about CSS is to imagine a page as a box looking down on it, inside which are other boxes. And each box can have other boxes inside, etc. Give each box a name and sketch it out: let's call the outside one 'html' and put a box inside that called 'body'. Inside 'body' there are three more boxes. One's called 'header', one's called 'central', and one's called 'footer'. The box called 'central' has two boxes inside called 'menu' and 'main'. This is one particular starting point for a design. Each box can be a different shape and colour (for example) and - usually - the boxes inside that box inherit the shape and colour, unless you tell them not to. In the design scheme this translates as, for example, saying that the box called 'body' has a white background with black text of a certain font. Every box inside 'body' shares this unless you decide to say otherwise; maybe the 'menu' and 'footer' boxes have smaller fonts and their links are a different colour.
I'll try to marry this up with a diagram or two and it will hopefully make things clearer. I'll be in touch.
A) Does the whole damn thing need to be inside a wrapper or container?
B) When making classes for the divs to follow why can't in CSS 2.0 make a simple A: text-decoration referrence without it being ignored?
C) Alignment. If I want something aligned center calling it in a class as opposed to just using align=center in the div tag itself why is it such a bitch?
You know, little shit like that.
EDIT: Oh, and did you just call me fat?
b) Not sure without seeing a specific example of what you're saying here but some tag elements inherit all properties of those above and some don't. Just a matter of learning.
c) It all comes back to the separating of content and design again. You effectively want the situation where the html contains just divs and classes and the actual content, while the css tells the browser how to display it. If you add the align=center in the content then you're adding a design influence into the page itself.
edit: never!
re the cat pee:
a VERY EFFECTIVE startling, uncomfortable, but not painful method of UNAMBIGUOUSLY communicating to your cat that something is right out of order, is to tap it on the nose. On top of the end of it. doesn't hurt them, but neither is it comfortable. accompanied every time with a clear single "BAD cat!", and they adjust behaviour permanently usually after the 2nd time.
so to associate your outrage with his action, pick him up and take him to the puddle, push his nose down toward it so he knows its HIS stuff that's annoyed you, and "BAD cat" - tap, and let him go.
ie, he's busting for a pee, gets to the door and feels the cold radiating off it, and hesitates till all is lost. if he's getting on a bit, urine may be increasingly harder to hold in, relative to a crap.
if so, you could benefit by training him to emergency-piss in the bath/shower.
after you've taken him to the doorpuddle and told him off, pick him up and put him down again in the bath, doing and/or saying something soothing or encouraging or whatever.
works a treat.
Your nuclear weapons ... fueled by plutonum? Or is it uranum? I can never remember.
The chemical symbol K ... that's for potassum as I recall, yes?
Lithum, magnesum, sodum, calcum, strontum, cesum, barum, radum, titanum, helum, etc, etc. Man, you've got some funny-sounding elements over there.
Wohler is generally credited with having isolated the metal in 1827, although an impure form was prepared by Oersted two years earlier. In 1807, Davy proposed the name alumium for the metal, undiscovered at that time, and later agreed to change it to aluminum. Shortly thereafter, the name aluminium was adopted to conform with the "ium" ending of most elements, and this spelling is now in use elsewhere in the third world(*).
Aluminium was also the accepted spelling in the U.S. until 1925, at which time the American Chemical Society officially decided to use the name aluminum thereafter in their publications.
(*) Defined by dental hygiene. See also; halitosis.
My ancient ancestors discovered the first pop can so, by default, considering I in fact have Roman (pre-Moores mind your, olive, not black olive, shaking, but never stirred) blood coursing through my veins, can call it whatever I choose to and you are forced to deal with it(.)
I am right, you are wrong, and that is, as we say, that. Now, to save some myself some air fair and not to cause an even deeper rift in our friendship (as if your punk ass Pats not making it to the Super Bowl wasn’t enough to warrant a shoe to the nuts and yes, I DO hold you directly responsible) that has spanned these many years we will from this day forward refer to it as tin foil. It is neither tin nor foil but hell: it does make some awesome bowls(*)(**).
(*) A crude smoking device used by married men sickened by wives - strike that, ex-wives – who go on seek and destroy missions ridding their households ((garages) pronounced ga-rodge not gar-idge or gay-rodge that’s a story for a whole ‘nother day, don’t even start) of smoking utensils, including but not limited to; ceramic bongs, aqualungs, glass smoking pipes, etc..
(**) The Surgeon General warns that prolong use of such devices have been proven in tests on monkeys and small marsupials, the given conditions being feeding them hash brownies and jamming a roll of tin foil in their eye sockets, to lead to long term memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease.
So what the fuck were we talking about?
IDEA.........maybe you two could get together and talk about your cats'erections
Your comment was of no help whatsoever. I was hoping you'd understand that the internet doesn't read your mind and can't bring up the exact page you were thinking of in your tiny brain and that there's a chance - quite a large one - that when you type anything into a search engine you may end up on a page with cats in underwear; cats in underwear is 92% of the internet!!!!
P.S. Malice and I are available on speaking circuits talking about cats' erections for a very reasonable fee.
one thing that DID help was to place some of her food in the offending area. of course, i needed to warn guests not to sit in the friskies, but it seems cats won't eliminate near their food. that may work better than putting up obstacles to her cat door.
now time has passed and petrus is more certain of her hierarchy, so it isn't an issue. we also allow her to tinkle in the bathtub when the mood strikes her.
and of course, i'm guessing that at this date, your problem may be solved in its entirety. perhaps someone else may benefit.