Friday Cat Blogging – 29 December 2017

For our final catblogging post of the year, our local furballs have agreed to give the stage to Tillamook, one of my mother’s cats. I was visiting yesterday because the latest Windows update from Microsoft corrupted her PC so badly it wouldn’t boot. It was a lengthy visit, since I had decided it was time to buy a new computer rather than risk surgery on the old one, which would probably just crash again soon. They’re so cheap, why not? Anyway, the basics are all working now, though I’m sure there will be plenty of fiddly details to attend to over the next few weeks.

Every time I do something like this I wonder how anyone survives having a PC. I’m pretty PC savvy, but even I had to screw around a fair amount to get all the backups and the email archives and the browser profiles etc. etc. working properly. An ordinary person wouldn’t have had a chance.

On the bright side, the printer driver apparently installed itself without my even touching it. If only everything else worked so well.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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