Last night I was loafing on the couch when my white Moxie cat jumped up to visit me. I reached over to scratch his ears, and when I did he hissed and yowled at me. Worried he might have had an ear infection or something, I chased him down and caught him and peered in his ear. He was yowling and hissing the entire time. Everything looked fine in there, but then I noticed his ears and the skin under his ears was bright red. For a moment I thought he might have had a fever or something, but then I remembered that I had seen him all day napping in the sunshine. It was a little chilly out during the day, however it was sunny and clear so he had found a bright patch to warm himself in and spent the day lying there.
He was not sick, he was sunburned! I immediately let him go and felt bad. Having someone claw at your sunburn hurts like a bitch. Poor cat. He will be fine, though. If he stays out of the sun.
Man, I love Jones Soda. After sucking on corn-syrup based sodas for so long you can really tell the difference with cane sugar soda. Pepsi is supposed to be releasing a cane-version called ’Pepsi Raw’, but we will see if it actually makes it to Florida. In the mean time, Jones cream soda is fantastic. When I crack open a can I can smell it across the room.
I watched a new Fox sitcom last night after my usual cartoon lineup. It was so amazingly not funny. Where the hell do they dig up this crap.
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal chronometer to March 2008: one sunburned cat, one cane-sugar sermon, one profoundly unfunny sitcom.
Ah, 2008. A simpler infernal age: a man responds to an animal's distress by physically chasing it down and sticking his nose in its ear, because the alternative—a pocket oracle that could photograph the ear, search cat sunburn red skin, and offer twelve sponsored articles about pet-safe sunscreen—did not yet exist in his living room. The cat was sunburned. The man was kind of an idiot. But let me address the real heresies: cane-sugar soda was a novelty you had to evangelize, and Pepsi Raw was a shimmering future. Now everything is either small-batch craft cola with activated charcoal or a subscription to a soda stream you resent. And your usual cartoon lineup followed by a Fox sitcom—that entire ritual has been devoured by streaming services that auto-play the next recommendation while you doom-scroll, mourning the days when comedy was just bad on live television and not optimized by algorithm. Modern cats, meanwhile, have indoor enrichment and sunburn awareness, courtesy of owners who learned from this very blog.
“2008 Ed, do you think Moxie ever forgave you, or was that the exact moment he began dreaming of a future where the internet would judge your ear-inspection technique?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2008 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, that's a fair question. Moxie's a cat, so forgives ain't exactly in his vocabulary—more like 'you owe me a lifetime of tuna now.' He did let me scratch his ears again the next morning, so I take that as a maybe. As for the internet judging my ear-inspection technique, hell, the internet already judges everything I do; I got a MySpace comment last week from a bot that basically called me a sunburned ear toucher, and I don't even have sunburned ears. That's just the future we live in. But Moxie's fine, he slept in the shade today, and I gave him a piece of turkey. Cats hold grudges but they're also greedy, so I figure we're even. Probably.
