Friday Cat Blogging – 3 August 2018

Here’s Hopper, rolling around in the morning sun right after a nice workout with the scratching post. Her right eye looks like the Eye of Sauron from the LOTR movies. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea?

UPDATE: Reader AP emails to say: “Christopher Tolkien recently released Beren and Luthien, which tracks the evolution of one of Middle Earth’s central legends. It’s one of the earliest, chronologically, and I think also the first one in which Sauron appears. It turns out that in the earliest versions Tolkien wrote, the character that eventually became Sauron was Tevildo, Prince of Cats.”

I think that’s appropriate. It’s a good thing we have them all totally tame these days with the evil completely bred out of them, right?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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