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Q&A with Casper the Cat: Election night fog

The Internet's Most Famous Feline Pundit emerges from convalescence to comment on the recent civic election in Vancouver and beyond.

Q: First, how are you feeling?

A: Fine, thanks. My appetite has returned, especially with a renewed interest in canned food, and my energy levels are back to normal. That's good, because not only am I now running around the apartment chasing a ball, string and crumpled up pieces of paper, I can also get back to researching my latest epidemiological paper. I've presenting it at a conference and rally in Bogota next week which I need to get ready for.

Q: So, what do you think about the return of the NPA to power in Vancouver and the defeat of Jim Green and Vision Vancouver and the decimation of COPE?

A: Actually, what I think is more interesting is that Vision Vancouver's master plan almost worked. That's the bigger story, not some half-baked idea that the city embraced the NPA's "message" (which was vague at best) or its candidates. The Vision party, which really isn't a party in the standard sense of the word since it has no membership or constitution and is really a slate organized by Jim Green and friends, elected four of its five candidates for council and came within a spoiler's share of votes of the mayor's chair. If the mayor's race had gone 3,700 votes differently, Vision would have had a lock on council if you include COPE's David Cadman, who is closer to the centre than some of his party's counterparts. Vision gambled and lost, but it was in some ways a clever, calculated gamble, and will be one of the great "what ifs" of Vancouver politics for decades. It's the Operation Market Garden of the Vancouver left.

Q: So Green and the other councillors were right in splitting from COPE to run as a separate left-centre party? Didn't the breakaway split the left, hurt morale among members and volunteers and therefore reduce the left's effectiveness in running a coherent campaign?

A: It absolutely did. While it was an interesting gamble to form a breakaway slate, thinking that you could run two left-centre parties (which shared much bitterness toward one another) against a unified and refreshed right-wing party is nuts. It confused, demoralized or disenchanted all the people who came out to vote for COPE the last time in 2002. It's why, for example, the Georgia Straight, of all media outlets, backed Sullivan. All the NPA folks had to do was show up to make this a contest, and given that they again had lots of money, and a fresh set of new faces that is more diverse than COPE and with less baggage than Vision, meant they had the upper hand going in.

Q: What about the independent mayoral candidate James Green's role as a spoiler because of his nearly identical name to Jim Green of Vision?

A: He lost the election for Jim Green. Why he ran is a mystery, since like any independent candidate he had no chance, and while there's no evidence of an NPA-linked conspiracy to back him as a spoiler, James Green's boasts that he was going to pull off a major upset were ludicrous. But as Jim Green said on election night, James Green had a right to run in a free democracy. And while a lot of voters ticked off his name by mistake, you could also suggest that some voters purposely voted for James Green as a form of protest. They were pissed off at Jim Green for splitting COPE, but didn't want to vote for the NPA's Sullivan. Voting for the obvious spoiler was an obvious way to show just how royally pissed they were.

Q: What about the NPA victories at parks board and school board?

A: Those are side effects of the overall NPA win at council, smaller waves from an overall flood. Neither parks board nor school board had any major calamities this year that merited major changes like that. From a non-partisan point of view (no pun intended), there were some good candidates elected, although I'm sorry to see Andrea Reimer, the smartest trustee in the past decade, go down to defeat. I hope she reappears somewhere else in civic politics. I'm also worried that an NPA board will be lukewarm on a junk food ban and will overturn COPE's corporate advertising policy. Hello, Coke, come to Vancouver's schools and sell your stuff to us.

Q: What about outgoing Larry Campbell? What will be his legacy?

A: I'm not convinced Campbell is a real person. I think he's a fictional character, and that for the past three years, we've been living a dress rehearsal for Da Vinci's City Hall. He was a celebrity candidate coming in and is a celebrity mayor going out. It was fun while it lasted, but what did it really do for the city? I mean, what has he changed, besides shepherding the admittedly pragmatic supervised injection site into existence? Before he showed up, the NPA had a lock on civic politics, and now that he's gone, the NPA has a lock on civic politics again. The past three years have been a dream, and now it's over, and we're back to a business-friendly civic party in power. For most of the issues that the left cares about, it's just like the situation I faced last week when the vet put on his rubber glove ...

Medical Tuesday: Ailing webcam star

WMD: Casper the cat, star of webcam and blog post, is sick this week. What began as vomiting and then loss of appetite and thirst could signal an intestinal blockage, says the vet. He (the vet) suspects it's a compacted hairball, as opposed to a foreign object (coin, button, tennis ball) that a kitten or dog would routinely eat, and that ideally it will eventually pass through. But in the meantime, his worsening condition meant a stay at the clinic today where Casper enjoyed a physical exam, X-rays, blood work, a urine test, IV fluid intake, several doses of laxatives and a couple of enemas. When I got the bill, I felt like I'd had multiple enemas, too. But at least I still have my cat, and he's otherwise in a pretty good mood. (The clinic staff also talked about what a trooper he was, and tied a kerchief around his neck to make him look nice.) He's an outpatient tonight and tomorrow, during which time I have to give him medicine and attempt to feed him by hand. So far, it's proved to be loads of fun cleaning the wet medicinal food off the carpet. He goes back to the vet Wednesday to see what's up and if something more invasive is called for to alleviate his problem. Casper appreciates the well-wishers who've already emailed in, and expects a quick recovery.

Media Monday: cat licks toilet

Today's bLINKit: Tara sent me this link of a video of a cat helping clean the toilet tank. Tara asked Casper if he'd do the same. Casper's reply: "Lick a toilet? Are you nuts?" And then he preceded to clean his ass.

Apparently, there's a whole subculture of blogging videos about your cat. While some say posting a pic of your kitty means your blog has finally jumped the shark, I say, eat me, been doing it since 2001. The Casper-related traffic accounts for a big chunk of my page views on any given day.

Q&A with Casper the Cat: animal genocide and more on litter

Q: What did you think about the recent news story that JaqPike sent us, about the dog that rescued the family from a house fire? It was this one:

Golden Retriever Saves Kits Family
Jun, 28 2005 - 8:00 AM
VANCOUVER(CKNWAM980) - A family dog is getting the credit for saving a family this morning in a house fire in Kitsilano. Firefighters say Duke, a golden retriever, awoke his mistress around 6:30 AM. "At first, she shooed him away," says Capt. Rob Jones-Cook, "but he kept pawing her, and then he started growling, and when Duke started growling, she got up."
The woman then discovered the house was on fire.
Everyone inside -- including Duke -- escaped, except for the family cat, who died.
The fire was put out within forty-five minutes, but the house was gutted. Firefighters are still investigating.

A: That's a brave dog, no question about it. But what the story fails to mention is that the cat died trying to put out the flames.
Q: Why wasn't that in the story?
A: It's the structural, systemic anti-felinism of the media. It's something we struggle with daily.
Q: What about Phil's suggestion that cats, especially the large populations of feral cats, are responsible for a songbird genocide?
A: Again, that's largely more anti-felinist propaganda. Really the onus is on humans: cats are excellent natural hunters. By putting thousands of us out of doors, aren't we just asking for an impact on the ecosystem? The problem comes down to why we have feral cats in the first place, and we have feral cats because we have failed to put in place proper support systems for them to keep them off the streets and out of the woods. Feral cats live miserable, short and brutal lives. Responsible owners spay and neuter their cats and keep them indoors or outdoors under controlled circumstances. Schemes to allow legal culls of wild cats, essentially a Gestapo tactic inflicted on animals, will simply give licence to the anti-cat yahoo to blow away the family tabby next door for looking at him the wrong way. There are people like that on every block in North America, and many of them are armed.
Q: How's the litter situation?
A: We're back to pine-based litter. The crystal stuff is too pricey and the look of those little crystals on the floor was starting to creep my human out. We did look for Arm and Hammer litter, but can't find it in local stores. It might be only available in the U.S. We also appreciated the note (and pics) sent to us by Lola, and may adopt the idea of putting a screen up in front of the box. At the moment, the box is the covered variety, with a rug thrown over it and a plant put on top, which makes cleaning it daily a bit of a pain because you have to take off the plant etc. Having it behind a screen means we can leave it uncovered and dispense with the rest of the disguise. And to confess, the box is in the de facto human's bedroom. He sleeps in his living room because his bedroom has been turned into an office. It also allows me to surf the Net, do research and engage in numerous text message conversations while he sleeps. I also throw in a couple of games of CounterStrike each night.
Q: You mentioned cleaning the litter box is a pain? But you're not the one who cleans it ...
A: Not true. I feel my human's pain.

Q&A with Casper: Some of my best friends are ...

Q: We've heard you hate dogs.
A: That's absolutely not true.
Q: No?
A: No. Some of my best friends are dogs. Sure, their intense neediness is trying at times for a cat, but their pack mentality and eagerness to please are highly useful for organizing around social justice causes. And their tongues are great for licking stamps during direct mail campaigns.
Q: But you're critical of dogs in Vancouver at times.
A: Correction. I'm critical of dog owners. Dogs are great, their owners, most of whom are great, tend to be the problem. Dogs can live successfully in a city, even with the difficulty in training dogs, but the minority of dog owners who give the responsible ones a bad name need to be sent to educational camps. In fact, I hear the city is considering something like that. Or at least an education campaign.
Q: What are the problems?
A: It comes to lack of consideration, which is really the key urban issue of our times. That is to say, too many people are a-holes these days. People need to train and control their dogs, respect public space, clean up dog messes, realize that some people either don't like or are afraid of dogs. Everyone's got a story about going out in public and having a bad experience with a dog, and then a worse experience with the dog owner, who was inconsiderate or defensive or even abusive. I'd like to chalk it up to a sense of bourgeois, yuppie privilege some people have, but that might be a bit cheap. This is a complex, crowded city. It is not necessarily a natural space for a neurotic animal with a pack mentality and a barely submerged desire for hunting and killing. Dogs need to be trained and controlled. They definitely need to have their own spaces, ie offleash parks, where they can romp free, but they otherwise can't have the run of any greenspace or public place. It doesn't work, not without unhappy consequences, including often for the poor dogs.
Q: Not everyone agrees.
A: No, and that's something that needs to be worked out. I know many lovely dog owners, and many lovely dogs who are models of consideration. And I have to add there are similar issues with cats. While we're a highly intelligent, if not superior species, we're best kept indoors so we don't dig in people's gardens, spray their doors and windows, get run over or eaten by coyotes or produce a zillion little unwanted kittens. And it could be cat owners are probably even more clueless as a group than the dog owners when it comes to training, control and again that very important issue of consideration for others in a dense urban environment. The difference in consequences for untended cats vs. untended dogs is that cats aren't running amok on the seawall and stealing people's food or peeing on their babies, and they don't rip unfortunate random kids or joggers apart because they suddenly got triggered into hunting and attacking.
Q: So cats are superior?
A: Just about. But not all felines are helpful or good, at least according to a recent post I came across.

Q&A with Casper the Cat: The myth of trackless litter

Q: So, what's up with you these days?
A: Concern.
Q: About what?
A: I'm in the real estate market. Or rather, my owner is. He's looking for an affordable home, which in Vancouver is like looking for a cabbie who's a native English speaker or a potential girlfriend who's not into yoga, sushi, Sex and the City and sitting in front of a fire with a glass of wine and talking endlessly about travel.
Q: How's it going?
A: Not so great. The problem is that several traditional rules of thumb of real estate purchasing have to be thrown by the wayside. First, the idea that you should have 25 per cent of the purchase cost for the downpayment. That's hard to do when houses begin at half a million dollars. The second notion is that no more than one third of your income should be devoted to housing costs. Again, I know many people, who have good jobs and are responsible financially, who shake their heads at that goal as being quaint in the era of hyper-price increases, property speculation and foreign and elite purchasers buying second or vacation homes and further increasing demand and prices. Vancouver home purchasers, especially those just now getting into the market, can expect to pay a significant amount of their monthly family budget on home costs, and that's without being extravagant. The middle class is being priced out of the city, and I wonder how much money that could have gone into buying services and goods from the city's economy, which now seems almost totally dependent on residential development for growth, is going to pay off mortgages.
Q: Not good. Is your owner looking for a house?
A: Condo, and therein is the second problem: the tricky question of buying an apartment that's not in the leaky condo building range. The fact that a great number of Vancouver builders, who were building homes in a rainforest environment, couldn't build them not to leak is the biggest, most single shameful episode of the last half century in this province. And yet every time I go around this city, I see yet another new building, including some that have surprised me, with scaffolding on them indicating repairs for leaks. There are three leaky buildings within two blocks of Caspercam HQ alone. And now the residential towers downtown, the very towers that have transformed the skyline, are beginning to leak. It's absolutely shameful.
Q: No argument there.
A: A third problem is size and cost. Last year, the detached family market went nuts. This year, partly because detached homes are out of reach of most buyers, the apartment market is going nuts. It's demand, with low interest rates, also fed by a fawning real estate press that seems to get off on encouraging the buying frenzy. It's a deeply stupid market, with lunatic bidding wars, and people throwing money at anything with a door and four walls. New apartments, which you hope to God won't leak because you think builders have been sufficiently shamed by their past shoddy workmanship to improve their game, are also smaller, and because construction costs have risen (thanks to demand for materials from China and other places), they are also expensive. But smaller is a problem.
Q: Why? People can learn to live in small places quite comfortably.
A: Yes they can, but for a cat, the question always is: where do you put the litter box? In the hall? People will trip over them. In the bathroom? No room, and you don't want extra moisture around them. In the living room or kitchen? Guests will see it. In the bedroom? Get serious. Litter boxes are a necessary evil. But they're big, they smell, and, despite claims from myriad manufacturers of litter, the litter inevitably tracks outside the box.
Q: I thought various brands of litter were 99 per cent tracking free.
A: That's complete dog crap. In the past I've used clumping, flushing, wood chips, pine chips, plastic bubbles and now crystals, and they ALL TRACK outside the box. The crystals, when tracked, look like little bits of crack cocaine on the carpet. Stratospherically priced real estate is one thing, but our society's inability to produce a litter that does not track is the real pain of our times.
Q: It sounds like dogs have cats beat on this mark. At least dogs still go outside to use the bathroom.
A: Not so fast. Dogs go outside to take a pee, but so do their owners, who have to follow their dogs around and pick up their crap in little plastic bags. Not to mention throwing a tennis ball around for hours to make the mutt happy. Believe me, cat owners, despite the litter problem, you're still better off with my kind. And we don't bark like crazed lunatics when people knock on the door.

Friday Q&A with Casper the Cat: Lessons from Parliament

Q: So, what do you think about the budget vote that the Liberal minority government barely passed this week?

A: What I don't think is that it proves Parliament is dysfunctional. Quite the opposite. This is the way parliaments are traditionally supposed to work, with horsetrading and debating and votes to prove that the government of the day retains the confidence of the House on the issue of spending money. Nothing was unconstitutional about the vote, and if nothing else, it's made Canadians more interested in their democracy and parliament than we've seen in years. That's not a bad thing. I also side with Murray Dobbin in the Tyee who argued that "for the first time in a long time, Canadians actually got out of a federal government what they have been saying for over a decade that they want: a return to activist government which operates in their interests and not in the exclusive interests of corporations and the wealthy." What's not to like here?

Q: What about Belinda Stronach crossing the floor to join the Liberals?

A: Again, that's fairly standard politics. Sure, her move was probably crass and opportunistic considering the plum reward she received from it, but she was also clearly unhappy hanging out with the Conservatives. She may have been bored in Opposition, after not winning the leadership race, and as a former corporate executive she no doubt was itching for some real power and the chance to order people around. And she's a social liberal, an endangered species among the Reformed Tories.

Q: What about the sexist attacks launched against her?

A: They were nothing but offensive and said by people who should know better about behaving with manners in public. But I don't think it's some kind of massive patriarchal plot to keep down this poor little female. The people who were saying nasty things about here never liked her to begin with, and not because she's a woman. You note they're not saying the same things about other female politicians they may or may not disagree with. Jane Stewart, when she was in public works, was roundly criticized for the financial problems in her department, but no one called her a whore or a dipstick (and I'd argue as human females go, she's probably better looking than Stronach). The Stronach critics are just bringing out the nasty, rusty knives because they really, really don't like her, beyond any disagreements they may with her. Partly it's because she bought her way into politics, but also because she's a social liberal. But this is not to excuse any of that nastiness. Those guys in Alberta and Ontario who were saying these things should shut up and learn some decency and respect for others, male or female. It really gets back to that.

Q: What about Stronach's "betrayal" of Peter Mackay?

A: Three words to Mr. Mackay: Don't date co-workers. Some people never learn.

Friday notes with Casper the Cat: Enterprise ending sucked wind

Casper the Cat says: Watched final episode of Enterprise: The good: It's over. The bad: It will be in reruns. Plus, reducing the final episode of what could be the last Star Trek series, either forever or at least for many years, to an outing IN THE HOLODECK..what Romulan ale were the producers drinking when they approved this script? And what kind of script was this, lacking narrative drive, suspense, or even any real decent emotional resolution. Yes, they killed off a major character, except that they telegraphed it with a million signposts. They should have hit us with it, not babied us through the experience. And we didn't get to see the Vulcan in her underwear. One last time, just for nostalgia sake, that would have been special.

A good way to sum up the Enterprise run, and the demise of the franchise in general, is this quote from a 1999 Salon article on what even then was the decaying health of Trek. In writing about rumours of another Trek series, Robert Wilonsky discussed rumours that the new show would be about Starfleet Academy (that idea didn't happen, and Enterprise did instead). Wilonsky notes:

Mark Altman [Star Trek expert] actually sees nothing wrong with a Starfleet Academy series. If nothing else, it would revive the franchise without carbon-copying it. For once, there would be no more starships cruising through space seeking out new life and new civilizations one more ho-hum time. Thirty-three years later, he says, it's time someone realizes that space is no longer the final frontier. "To go on another starship," Altman says, "and deal one more time with anomalies and things that attach themselves to the ship -- who cares?"

Exactly. I'm going to my litter box.

PS: Remember to vote on Tuesday. The Feline Liberation Front needs your support.

Friday Q&A with Casper the Cat: Cat of mass distraction

The Internet's only feline pundit returns after a long absence ...
Q: Where you have been? It's been months!
A: I've been on a sabbatical. And I had to nap. Now I'm back, and this time I've got stories. First, we all know that the ostensible reasons for invading Iraq provided by the Bush administration were either lies or gross misinterpretation of the available evidence. But we now know the real reason for the invasion: to rescue this cat.
Speaking of Iraq, if Shias and Sunnis and Kurds have a hard time living side by side, they're nothing compared to cats and dogs striving to cohabitate. Finally, it's monkey see, monkey do on a SWAT team in Arizona. And people think animals are dumb.

What have I been watching: TV

WMD: I've been watching a little TV in past months. The best shows of late are The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Da Vinci's Inquest. Two cop shows and an SF retread.

The Wire is perhaps the best American police drama ever produced. Set in Baltimore, the same city as the groundbreaking Homicide, it's a detailed indictment of the American domestic quagmire that is the war on drugs. Finely acted and written, it shows both sides of the war, from the drug bosses and their underlings to the cops, who come in various shades of ability and morality. Wonderfully shot with subtle characterizations and a rich plot, it features great set pieces: cops puzzling over the jargon in wiretaps; drug sellers marketing to users; recovering drug users telling their stories at a narcotics anonymous meeting. The show's unafraid to make its characters unlikeable, something American TV seldom tries short of The Sopranos.

Da Vinci's Inquest is the best Canadian series ever, both a fine police procedural and this season, providing the kind of political and social analysis you don't get in journalism in this country. It's a better mirror on the city than the evening news. The inside comments on Vancouver politics and the problems with the cops in this town, if accurate, should be required viewing leading up to the November civic election.

Finally, I never thought the new version of Battlestar Galactica would be any good. The old '70s show was a campy ripoff of Star Wars, which itself was a campy ripoff of Flash Gordon. The new BSG is, as the NYT's put it, a war movie dressed in the trappings of science fiction. Fortunately, it's a decent war movie, think Band of Brothers in Space. The premise of the show is similar to the original outing: a machine race called the Cylons launches a surprise attack on a human civilization, similar to our own and seemingly a distant offshoot from Earth. The attack devastates and nearly wipes out the humans, except for 50,000 or so survivors who flee toward a mythical Earth from the pursuing Cylons. The show's creators made some interesting decisions: the culture and military and political jargon is American, not in the blithe Star Trek way but almost consciously so, to avoid the fantasy names and pseudo-archaic naming conventions and rituals of the previous BSG. The old characters are back, but better rounded: Adama is now Edward James Olmos (think EJO as the Lt. in Miami Vice running the ship and compare that image to Lorne Greene in a cape), mourning the death of his son and estranged from his surviving one; Starbuck is a woman and half insane; Col. Tighe is an alcoholic and cuckolded by his wife; Boomer is an Asian chick who, it turns out, is a Cylon clone (there are actually two Boomers in separate narrative lines, and both are conflicted about being Cylons and their role in mass murder); Baltar is a scientific genius who is manipulated into betraying the humans in the original attack and now is haunted by a beautiful Cylon only he can see--or he could just be nuts. The technology dispenses with lasers and space opera froufrou in favour of bullets, missiles and nuclear weapons. Battle scenes are kinetic, with the camera often struggling to keep up with the action. The political and social struggle of the surviving humans is also highlighted, with conflict between the surviving civilian administration (the secretary of education, way down the list, becomes the new president) and the surviving military leadership. And the show is shot through with a post-911 sorrowfulness, that represents itself both in the decisions the characters make to survive and specific imagery. For the former, in the pilot episode, the fleet's ships equipped with faster than light drive were forced to abandon thousands of refugees on ships without FTL drives to slaughter in the face of an oncoming enemy attack. The 9-11 imagery came up with a long camera shot down the corridor of the Galactica showing walls covered in photos and little mementos of loved ones lost in the Cylon attack. The Cylons themselves are interesting: presented as a metaphor for technology coming back to haunt humanity, who made them, they now clone human DNA to make human-like Cylons and seem highly interested in the human condition. And while the humans have a pagan religious structure, which is barely practiced, the Cylons are monotheists warring for God. Shades of Islamist fanatics versus Western decadents who've lost their way.

It started as a miniseries and is now a regular series, with the first episodes appearing on Space now. (I've watched much of it via episodes taped from a British satellite channel and loaded onto newsgroups.) While the initial miniseries and first few episodes were terrific, quality has varied in the ensuing segments. But I'll keep watching.