Just a short piece today, which also serves as a plug for the ‘Nothing to do with Arbroath’ website, which describes itself as “A daily mish-mash of stuff, fluff and nonsense.”
It’s a bit more than that, really – though there is enough ’stuff, fluff and nonsense’ too; enough to float anyone’s boat, be that Huck Finn’s jolly raft or the doomed Titanic.
Apart from the usual (and highly unusual) animal pictures, Arbroath offers short descriptions of and links to all kinds of strange news stories from all around the world. Most of these are amusing; often, they are quite interesting and, sometimes, they can be moving – moving between poignant and pathetic, you might say.
There are also times of great serendipity, when following posts are oddly linked. It’s at times like these that you almost feel that we do live in an organized universe, after all.
I got that feeling again, yesterday, when I was browsing through Arbroath and came upon the following two stories.
First, this one:
“EXETER, N.H. — A cat aptly named Ugly is attracting a lot of attention at a New Hampshire veterinarian, where clients say they can’t take their eyes off his striking appearance. The cat’s full name is Ugly Bat Boy. He’s bald in most places except for flowing fur on his chest, and he spends his days on a warm computer at Exeter Veterinary Hospital. Bat Boy has become something of a local star. The office staff was getting so many questions about the cat that they put up a couple of fliers saying he’s about 8 years old and perfectly normal in every way — just ugly.”
Which is your archetypical Arbroath animal story: Cute but quirky enough to be enjoyable to those whose default reaction to any furry tale isn’t ‘Aw, how CUTE…!!!!!!’
The next piece – on the same Arbroath page, directly below Ugly Bat Boy – was the following story, which proved, once and for all (if we needed any such reminders) that, when it comes to ‘ugly’, not even the most Quasimodified cat can compete with us, humans:
“An Oakland man has been charged with two felony counts of animal abuse for allegedly breaking the front legs of a 4-month-old Pomeranian puppy in front of its owner, the deaf 11-year-old daughter of his girlfriend.”
(Okay, so you STILL should not break their legs but they can be really annoying…)
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