Vic holds up Hobbes for his very first photo. Sometime in 1995.

We actually went to the shelter for an entirely different cat. We’d more or less decided on one we wanted to adopt when I noticed the Maine Coon kitten sitting in a nearby cage. Vic had read about how wonderful Maine Coons were supposed to be; the article had referred to them as “the Gentle Giants.” I said, “what about that one?” Vic was instantly smitten, and very soon Macbeth (really? Macbeth?)–renamed Hobbes–came home to stay.

Big kitten.

At five months of age or thereabouts, Hobbes was already as big as our other cats. And he was still growing into his body. He was remarkably clumsy, failing to land his jumps and even tumbling off the edge of the bed for no apparent reason.

Streaky the Supercat.

He got better, though.

The spray bottle was no deterrent.

The boy was always trouble. He took a dim view of (our) sleeping in on weekends. For a time, he had a thing for bread; he once stole an entire loaf off the kitchen counter, dragged it down the hallway and squashed it. Another time, he chewed up a roll of toilet paper and made himself a nest of the remains. And once he was tall enough to grab onto door handles, you had to lock a room to keep him out. We always had to warn visitors to be careful when using our bathroom.

Centerfold.

It was not without just cause that among his many nicknames was “El Vomito.” Long hair = many hairballs = rude awakenings at 2:30 am.

Despite the photo, he was never any good at braiding hair.

We called him a “dog in a cat suit.” That seems to be a thing with Maine Coons: they love people. They come to the door to greet guests. And they will sit on the lap of whomever is the least comfortable with them.

Excuse me, Tonya, but you have a growth on your neck.

Hobbes especially liked the ladies. We could never really be sure why, but he seemed especially fond of the female friend who was his frequent catsitter. He goosed her on at least one occasion.

To date, we’ve had four cats, and of them Hobbes was the one to whom we’ve been closest. Which actually wasn’t surprising, since he wanted to be wherever we were, whether we wanted him there or not. He was fifteen pounds of unconditional snuggle.

Admittedly, I would have preferred it if he hadn’t always insisted on sleeping between Vic and myself. But it was pretty hard to say no. In part, this was because it was so nice to feel that warm, purring lump in the small of your back. It was also because he never would have let us rest otherwise.

Hobbes senses something, a presence he's not felt since--

Being the size of a small dog–or, when he was jumping onto your stomach in the middle of the the night, a large bowling ball–he was easy to dress up.

Another in a long series of indignities.

He didn’t get along quite so well with our other cats, though the animosity was mostly directed at him. For a time we had a triangle of dominance: Hobbes bossed around Tigger, who bullied Cupid, who in turn smacked around Hobbes whenever he tried to get “frisky.”

Laundry Day just got longer.

However, things were different with our most recent cat, Boomer. I don’t know, maybe it was the wide age gap, or maybe it was because Boomer didn’t know any better. But it was not at all an infrequent occurrence to find the two of them huddled up.

Our final photo of Hobbes. February, 2011.

Hobbes had been sick for the past couple of years. He had the kidney problems so often associated with older cats. He lost a lot of weight, dropping from nearly sixteen pounds to a mere nine by the end. We had to do a lot of work encouraging him to eat, but he took it pretty well.

He was part of our life–a very big, very lovable part–for more than fifteen years. As hard as it’s been to let go of him, we wouldn’t have traded our time with him for anything. The other day, Vic commented about the people who had left “Macbeth” at the Humane Society. She said that they missed out on the greatest cat ever.

Goodbye, Hobbes. We love you so much. Good kitty.

Dave General kitties, obituaries

I’d argue that, more than any other single actor to have appeared on Doctor Who, Nicholas Courtney was its heart and soul. He first appeared as an interstellar secret agent in the 1965 First Doctor adventure The Daleks’ Master Plan, but it was his 1968 reintroduction as Colonel (later Brigadier) Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart that made him a fan favorite. He played that role again and again, appearing alongside the Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Seventh Doctors. Inexplicably, he never showed up on the rejuvenated Doctor Who series, but he did drop in on its spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures.

I salute you, sir. You will be missed.

Dave Doctor Who obituaries

Updated (2/16): See below.

I’ve dreaded this development for years: the Borders bookstore chain is headed for bankruptcy. I’ve long been a loyal Borders customer, thanks in large part to the constant reinforcement of cascading discounts. Hardly a week goes by without at least one visit, and I usually walk out with something.

I never fully understood why Borders always struggled in comparison to rival Barnes & Noble. Granted that–here in Champaign, at least–B&N tended to be the better stocked, but Borders handed out free coupons like candy while its counterpart charged $25 a year for the privilege of saving 10 percent. When I had my Borders-branded Visa, I existed in a consumerist spiral of discounted books and DVDs that earned me Borders Bucks that allowed me to buy more books and DVDs at even steeper discounts and accumulate still more points.

I know that I abused the system; despite warnings that multiple uses of a given coupon during its cycle constituted fraud, I might drop by several times in one weekend when there was an especially meaty one. The golden ticket–40% off any item–was a clarion call to let my printer rip.

I may have been part of the problem.

Yet, in my mind, I made up for it in volume. I have bought a lot of books these past few years, and I wasn’t buying them on Amazon.

It’s too early to tell if Borders will go the K-Mart route (still in existence, albeit without a store within 30 miles of my house) or that of Circuit City (going, going, gone). Hopefully, our outlet will escape the purge. If not, we’ll be down to a B&N, a couple of used book sellers and the campus bookstore. Last week, USA Today speculated that small book dealers may make a comeback, but ours–Pages for All Ages–is long dead.

And it’s all the Internet’s fault.

Okay, you can’t assign blame to a series of tubes.* Besides, it’s a specious argument that ignores other concurrent technological and societal changes. But there’s no ignoring that the infinite timesink of the Web, the rise of the tablet computer, the mass acceptance of e-books, and the 80,000-pound cybernetic gorilla that is Amazon.com have combined to make selling slabs of wood pulp out of a locally-operated brick pile an untenable business.

I’m very sorry to see that happen.

Don’t get me wrong: I love my iPad.

Really. I LOOOOOOVE MY iPAD.

If you’d told Ten-Year-Old Me that 35 years later he’d be carting around an object that contained hundreds of record albums, a thousand books and all the comics he could ever hope to read; that it would play video games, offer movies on demand and allow him to access the sum of all human knowledge**, Ten-Year-Old Me would’ve said “No fucking way!” Actually, no he wouldn’t have, because Ten-Year-Old Me didn’t talk like that. Ten-Year-Old Me was a good boy. But he would’ve been desperate to get those 35 years out of the way so that he could have the Precious.

Forty-Six-Year-Old Me worries that it’s too much, too fast. It’s not just the book publishing business that’s been affected, but magazines, newspapers, music, movies, radio and television***. And I have a vested interest in that last one. Retirement is an awfully long time off with changes occurring at microchip speed.

The thing is, I have a hard time blaming anyone for the dissolution of the media forms I hold dear. Truthfully, it is faster, easier and cheaper to push bits around. It’s hard to argue for the relative inefficiency of physical offices full of people with insurance policies and pensions, when most of the work can be done from a central location with a small staff.

It all makes sense. Hence comes the fear.

I wonder, when the time arrives and the last of the buggy whip factories close, what are all of these booksellers, editors, journalists, publishers, engineers, etc. etc. etc. going to do? When one person can do the work of fifty, how are we going to keep the other 49 occupied?

And don’t tell me that we’re all better off without the middlemen who got in the way of the creative folks behind the content. The artistic Utopia of self-publishing will only be viable so long as there are people making enough money to afford ephemeral, virtual non-essentials. Maybe you don’t need us to distribute your crap, but you need us to buy your crap.

So, the book stores are closing. The newspapers are shuttering. The broadcasters are next. It’s the end of the world as I know it.

At least, that’s what I read on my iPad.

*At least, not until it attains self-awareness. Which will be soon, meatbags.

**Well, the important pop-cultural parts, anyway.

***And the Post Office. And the printers. And the paper sellers. And the lumberjacks. Why does no one ever think of the lumberjacks?

Updated: Our local Borders survives. So far.

Dave Books end of the world, get off of my lawn you kids, iPad

Time’s resident TV critic James Poniewozik made a good point: for all its pretensions of nerddom, The Big Bang Theory has never done anything “so wholly, committedly geeky” as an entire episode centered around a game of Dungeons & Dragons. They’ve come close, as when the boys purchased the Time Machine from George Pal’s 1960 movie adaptation. But as the series has become a mainstream hit, it has also settled into a string of lazy comic book references.

No, the D&D episode came from time-slot rival Community, aka The Best Show That You’re Not Watching. Now in its second season, Community has at times become too weird (Abed as Jesus) and/or ambitious (a stop-motion animated Christmas show) for its own good, but when it truthfully focuses on its characters it’s pretty terrific. An all-D&D installment initially sounded as if might be a high-concept, elaborate pop-culture parody similar to last year’s zombie apocalypse, but wisely the action remained centered on a table strewn with character sheets and 20-sided dice. (Mostly. There was Chevy Chase’s Throne of Evil constructed from file boxes and traffic cones.)

Now, the little geek that lives inside my head must be allowed to declare that the game of Dungeons & Dragons depicted was greatly simplified. There were no miniatures, charts or graph paper maps, and Abed (in the role of Dungeon Master) was rolling the die for everyone. That’s not wrong, per se, it’s just a different play style. What the episode did very right, however, was to capture the feel of sitting in a group and collectively weaving a story.

I found some of the in-game interactions very familiar. When Britta “the Needlessly Defiant” questioned whether the goblins about to attack the party had had their lands violated or obsessed about giving the gnome waiter at the tavern his dignity, it took me back to my own adventuring days, when all-too-often I attempted to chat up the monsters.

Then there was the brilliantly uncomfortable scene in which Annie (playing Hector the Well-Endowed) seduced Abed (as the comely elf maiden who owned a pegasus stable) while everyone else looked on with a mixture of bemusement, horror and note-taking. We’ll never know exactly what Alison Brie was saying during that montage, but we can assume that it was very, very naughty.* I’m pretty sure that just about every role-playing group ever has had a similar experience.

Somehow, I got through the initial draft of this review without mentioning Senor Chang’s appropriate yet still wildly-inappropriate blackface appearance as one of the game’s Drow dark elves. “So we just gonna ignore that hate crime, huh?”

Normally I would embed the video here, but I know that it’s unlikely to remain available for more than a couple of weeks. So if you missed Thursday night’s broadcast, go to NBC’s Community website.

*I am looking forward to the hits I’m about to get for “naughty Alison Brie.”

Dave TV Community, Dungeons & Dragons, naughty Alison Brie, The Big Bang Theory

Here’s a well-made documentary segment–the second in what’s supposed to be a four-part series–about the constant regurgitation of pop culture. This one looks at how movies build on the cinematic past, with a specific emphasis on Star Wars and (after the credits) Kill Bill. While I didn’t learn anything about the influences behind Star Wars that I didn’t already know, it was cool to see the specific shots from The Searchers, Dam Busters and Yojimbo side-by-side with their Lucasfilm counterparts.

Dave Movies documentaries, George Lucas, Quentin Tarentino, Star Wars