Explosions and stuff...

Only a short one, since while my parents do have a habit of springing "let's go out somewhere" things on me, they generally don't do it during the rain and cold of November.

Yep, here we are, November the 5th and the dreary rain, today being just the latest in a week or so of rainy evenings, is doing little to affect people's cheerful willingness to pay lots of money on exploding things, and even as the rain comes down, the fireworks go up :-).

For my part, I'm just sitting inside in the warm, watching the fireworks through my window, eating yummy chocolate cereal bites and weird golfball sized jam doughnut things, so yeah. For now, that seems to be about as exciting as tonight's gonna get.

But hey, I'm not complaining, my nephew is no doubt off to see some fireworks somewhere, and as long as he's happy, I'm happy :-).

Ciao.

Five minutes later: Actually no, this entry is too short, so let me have a mini rant.

I've noticed, first through displays on shop shelves, and secondly through the more irritating medium of television advertisements, a sort of bizarrely pretentious attempt by catfood manufacturers to imbue domestic cats with aristocratic personalities. A rough (and largely ficticious) example would be:

"Rufus is a cat of taste and discerning distinction. He stalks the hunting grounds of the house looking for his favourite food, new furballs food. Replete with delicious chunks of line-caught yellowfin tuna, and lavishly tasty jelly, Rufus knows that his heart can be satisfied".
While some badly overacting narrator talks us through the story of Rufus and his quest for luxurious food, the director has several shots of an incredibly rare and expensive pedigree cat from some obscure breed or other, usually with blue eyes and frequently in slow motion, stalking across a moodily-lit but extremely tidy house.

Here is a badly recorded but very amusing example of such an advert.

If I could insert sounds into text, I would, at this point, insert the sound of a needle being pulled off a record. But I can't, so there. I'm sure you're familiar with the "ZZZZZZZP" sound I have in mind.

Now, I'm sorry, I don't dislike cats, my sister has two of them afterall, but the fact remains that your average housecat would be just as happy dragging a dead bird through the catflap into the kitchen and tucking in, as it would be eating food that we've created for it because it's what we'd like to eat if we were cats.

I'm tired of this patronising supercilious kind of advertising that takes its product far too seriously. I'm sorry, selling food, however "luxurious" it is, doesn't justify a 55 second long food porn [link is not pornographic] video written by some cat fetishist with a thing for "duck terrine in gravy". "9 out of ten cats prefer whiskas". Prefer it to what? Going hungry? I'd prefer eating whiskas cat food to going hungry too.
And why all this emphasis on "luxurious" and "exquisite" ingredients? Who are they trying to convince, you or your cat? Cats can't understand English, they don't come because you tell them to, they come because their little feline stomachs are rumbling and they know you have the key to the food cupboard.

Cats don't care about "luxurious duck terrine produced in the south of France, with real meat jelly", or "Deliciously indulgent salmon", they care about food. Any food, even small dead mammals are preferable to going hungry.

The advertising isn't there to sell the food to the cats, it's there to sell it to you. If I was a cat, every time the advert came on I'd either giggle to myself and wander off to mutilate the local wildlife, or roll my eyes - if cats can roll their eyes. In fact they probably can't roll their eyes - if they could they'd do it all the time.

Now I've gone off at various tangents but the bottom line seems to be that cats don't care about expensive cat food, certainly not as much as the expensive cat food companies care about expensive cat food. Marks and Spencer had us enthralled for ages with their "deliciously indulgent" food porn advertisements, but do companies like Mars and Nestle (No, really, one makes Whiskas catfood, the other owns Purina which makes catfood in Canada) really have a need to convince you to take their products so ridiculously seriously that nothing else is good enough for your lovely family pet?

It's patronising, it's supercilious and it's annoying. And if I was a cat, I'd be too busy tucking into the blackbird I'd just decapitated to care about "Luxurious Jelly". Luxurious Jelly? How luxurious is it? Would you eat it?

It's cat food. It's food for cats. If you own a cat, you're going to buy cat food anyway. But for the advertisements to lie to you and say that your cat is far too aristocratic and discerning to eat any other food, is just an annoying lie. And to make so much effort in trying to perpetuate this myth of the "discerning ladylike feline" is just wasting everybody's time.

Well, for now I'll stick to just groaning and changing channel every time one of these annoying adverts comes on in a commercial break. Hopefully my deliciously indulgent rant (complete with meat jelly?) has amused a couple of people. At the very least it's made me feel better.

So there :-).