everyone shut up and look at this
How Bert snapped
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Ernie: “My waste paper basket. Bert, have you seen my waste paper basket?”
Bert: “Ask me that again and look into my eyes.”
these puppets are more real than real people
Making friends with people from other countries is so crazy. I sent my group chat a Big Bird gif.
And this one girl says, “why isn’t he blue?”
I’m like, the fuck you mean??
So today I learned that in the Dutch version of Sesame Street, they do, in fact, have a blue Big Bird.
I was baffled by this so I went on Muppets Wiki and guess what.
In Mexico, Big Bird is green and his name is Abelardo.
Turkish Big Bird (aka Minik Kus) is apparently fucking orange.
This looks like a fuckin alternate universe or smth. I can’t.
the best part of that muppetfucker cease-and-desist letter is that the jim henson company proceeded to buy the MUPPETFUCKER.net and MUPPETFUCKER.org domains so that nobody else could use them, and the walt disney company inherited said domains when they absorbed many of the jim henson company’s assets a few years later
so disney has owned the MUPPETFUCKER.net/org domains for well over a decade
another highlight in Muppet Legal History was the time the jim henson company successfully argued in a court of law that naming a pig character after spam did not constitute defamation, and that if anything, they did a service to the spam brand by associating it with pork
THAT KITTENS GAME IS TOO POWERFUL
IT’S LITERALLY ONE OF THE BEST CIVILIZATION SIMULATORS I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE
MADE FOR FUNSIES BY SOME DUDE
WHO HAS ONLY BEEN DONATED $123 OF HIS $200 GOAL
I DIDN’T REALIZE JUST HOW IN DEPTH IT WAS UNTIL I READ THE WIKI THIS GAME IS INSANE AND I LOVE IT
Original concept art for Oscar the Grouch, drawn by Jim Henson.
Jim Henson with his cat George Washington, 1961
HISTORY SIDE OF TUMBLR
Please prove your excistence and teach me about history, I would thank you with my life.
Abraham Lincoln loved cats. He was obsessed with cats. When his wife was asked if he had any hobbies, she responded, “Cats.” He used to take home stray cats on a regular basis. One time he found some kittens on a farm during a military meeting and he put them his lap and petted them affectionately. Then he told the owners of the kittens to make sure they were given warm milk after he left.
Gouverneur Morris once tried to unclog the blockage in his dick (historians think he probably had prostate cancer) by shoving a whale bone up his pee hole, which resulted in death
Charles Adams, John Adams’s son, once got drunk and ran naked across Harvard Yard. He was expelled, but when John Adams spoke to the administrators he was readmitted.
James Garfield was a student teacher at a college in Ohio and he had this really pretty smart student named Lucretia Rudolph but was too afraid to talk to her. So, when they were taking a class picture (a super long ordeal then), he bribed the photographer so he could sit next to her in the picture and finally make his move. They were married a year later.
On April 8, 2014, Philadelphia Zoo welcomed three new little ones to their home as a Black-footed Cat named Aza gave birth to an adorable litter of kittens. The first ever Black-footed Cats ever born at the zoo, the kittens— named Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion—are little, black-footed felines native to southern Africa.
Important.
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
The like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.