Have you ever wondered if big cats like tigers and lions like catnip? Well, wonder no more. The following video shows how kitties of all sizes love the green stuff so much they roll around in it, not too different from the typical house cat. Makes me wish there was something like this for humans. My only question is: what's wrong with Joseph?
Loving our pets can be expensive - feeding, bathing, toys, muscle relaxers, vicodin, alcohol... oh wait some of those are for me.
In any case PETCO has a coupon for 10% off your purchase in store (for the stuff you just can not wait for) or online!
Click the links above to print the coupon for instore use or get the code for online use. If you prefer a different big box pet store I know that PetSmart accepts competitor coupons so print it out and take it in.
If your only interested in shopping online see the below information. You may want to click the above link fo rthe terms and conditions though.
Temple Grandin in her excellent book "Animals Make Us Human" says: "One of the most important things you have to realize about cats is that they haven't been domesticated... Basically they made themselves into pets... You can't train a cat using punishment and negative reinforcement... But you can train a cat to walk on a leash by using positive reinforcement."
This is great and worked for me - I used brushing (which our cat liked) to whistle train him to come - which usually worked...
Anyone else train their cat to come?
What if Lassie were a cat? Could she really get Timmy out of the well? I think we all know the answer to these questions.
Sadly, though, captive tigers are not that uncommon in the United States, and they are very poorly regulated. Tigers are an endangered species, meant to be protected rather than treated as some sort of sideshow pet. Less than 3,300 tigers remain in the wild today, and those numbers are not helped at all by the smuggling in of the dwindling species for people who want to keep them as status symbols. More tigers are alive in captivity within the U.S.—more than 5,000 are estimated to be “owned” within the country—but their whereabouts, treatment, and fates are not known due to loopholes in current legislation surrounding exotic animals.
These are wild, untamed, incredibly powerful animals who deserve to stalk prey, travel for miles, and maintain their own majestic wonder in the jungle—not be adorned with glittery collars for spectacle in some rich man’s boudoir. Captive tigers are not fully monitored in the United States, either.
Loopholes around allowing their sale and ownership—imagine, “owning” a tiger! It’s unthinkable—exist, and there is no way for U.S. officials to track the captive tigers sold or bought in the country, let alone even determine how many there currently are. We don’t follow up on how these big cats are treated, either; who knows of their abuses? They’re not only kept as pets, remember, but also killed and used for coats, bags, rugs, and other “status symbols” created from their hides—something that no one can argue helps their endangered species status.
We need to ask Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to do something about it. Help put an end to tiger poaching and make sure that the U.S. monitors further tiger sales and the fates of these tigers. Ideally, the practice would wholly be outlawed; we can at least require tiger “owners” and sellers to register their tigers for tracking. Please sign this open letter to the Secretaries asking for their vital participation in these measures.
In researching Chinese name stamps recently, I ended up veering off into a tangent. It seems that a lot of people carve their own name stamps in China, where you can buy cheap little kits at stationery stores. I even found some places online to buy stamp blanks, small columns of soapstone which you can carve yourself for about $10. Of course, you don't have to use stone to carve your own stamp, and you're not limited to Chinese characters!
Throughout history people have used a variety of materials to carve stamps. Stone is most durable, but it's also most difficult to carve. Other possibilities are wood (particularly fruit woods like apple and cherry), linoleum, and fired pottery.
These days, the casual stamp maker's best option is to carve erasers! The classic big pink eraser is an excellent medium for stamp carving. It holds its shape, and can be easily carved with an X-Acto knife. This is obviously not a craft for very young children, but kids old enough to be entrusted with an X-Acto knife will relish the opportunity to make their own 100% custom, hand-carved stamp with which to make their mark on the world. (Hopefully the paper parts of the world.)
Once you have chosen your medium, and the tools you need to carve it, the next question is "Resist or Intaglio?" It's all about positive and negative space - these are the two basic ways that you can carve your stamp. With intaglio, you carve your design into the stamp. This results in a stamp where the background is inked, and the design is white. With resist, you carve away the background so that the design stands out. This results in a stamp where the background is white, and the design is inked.
(For Chinese name stamps using the resist method, it's traditional to include a border around the shape. This obviously isn't necessary, but it can give your design a nice finished look.)
If you want to make a Chinese name stamp, there are several English to Chinese dictionaries available online. You can also translate the syllables of your name into Chinese characters. (I'm not too keen on this myself - what if you chose the syllables that mean "porn" in Chinese? Personally I think this is best left to the help of someone who speaks Chinese, and thus can translate your name without any embarrassing cross-cultural gaffes.)
You can also draw your stamp free-hand on the stamp, in which case you'll want to practice on paper ahead of time. Or, with a bit of Xeroxing or Photoshop work, you can reduce your drawing to the exact size of the finished stamp. You can then lay this on the stamp blank, and use it to trace out your design. This can be done with ink, pencil, or an X-Acto knife, depending on the medium you're using.
Don't forget to flip your image, if that's going to be important to the finished product! You will be carving the mirror image of how the actual stamp will look.
Let's get carving!
As I watched my Inventor Sim crank away at his workbench, I started wondering which items had the best ROI. ROI stands for "Return On Investment," and it's a useful way to compare several different items to see which is most profitable.
In this case, the initial investment is pieces of scrap. You can even put an actual price on each item of scrap, which is $5.50 per piece if you buy it through the workbench. My Sim doesn't buy scrap, but he spends time digging each piece out of the junkyard. For all that work, I want him to really get his time's worth!
| Item | # Scrap | Sells For | Per Scrap |
| Time Machine | 63 | $1600 | $25 |
| Robot Toy (Cheap) | 2 | $50 | $25 |
| Whale Toy (Cheap) | 1 | $23 | $23 |
| Harvester | 21 | $400 | $19 |
| Miner | 42 | $800 | $19 |
| Floor Hygeinator | 8 | $150 | $18.75 |
| Floating Duck | 5 | $84 | $16.80 |
| Cow Toy (Cheap) | 1 | $16 | $16 |
| Flying Fighters | 6 | $90 | $15 |
| Dog Toy (Cheap) | 1 | $12 | $12 |
| Smasher | 1 | $12 | $12 |
| Robot Toy (Regular) | 5 | $50 | $10 |
| Air Bender | 4 | $37 | $9.25 |
| Rotational Pull | 2 | $15 | $7.50 |
| Claw Dipper | 2 | $15 | $7.50 |
| Whale Toy (Regular) | 4 | $23 | $5.75 |
| Dog Toy (Regular) | 2 | $11 | $5.50 |
| Cow Toy (Regular) | 3 | $16 | $5.30 |
| Drinking Llama | 1 | $4 | $4 |
| Localized Static Tester | 5 | $20 | $4 |
| Tentacled Wind-Up | 3 | $9 | $3 |
I should note that these prices are for a Sim at the top of his game. The toys you make at the beginning are worth a lot less. As your Sim improves, so does the price you can get for them. These are the prices for a Sim at level 8 of the Inventor profession, and with maxed out (level 10) Inventing skill.
For each item, I have listed the number of scrap pieces it takes to make it, what it sells for, and the sale price per scrap. If an item takes 2 scrap and sells for $10, that's a per-scrap sales price of $5. As you can see, the table is sorted by per-scrap value, with the best value at the top.
Some interesting things popped out at me, once I put it all in table form. There are two high-value items, the Time Machine and… the Cheap Robot Toy! At $25 per scrap each, these are far and away a better value than almost anything else.
A regular Robot Toy and a Cheap Robot Toy both sell for the same amount. But the Cheap Robot Toy only takes 2 scrap, where a regular one takes 5 scrap. That's a pretty big difference! I imagine the Cheap Robot Toy breaks faster, but who cares? You're just trying to maximize your profits.
From a strictly profit-oriented perspective, the Cheap Robot Toy gives you the best bang for your buck. It earns the same amount, per scrap, as the big-ticket item (the Time Machine). But because you're making lots of small toys, you can cash out a lot faster.
The worst value on this chart is the Tentacled Wind-Up, at a mere $3 per scrap. And note that if you're buying scrap from the workbench (instead of scavenging it), you are actually LOSING MONEY if you make anything which is worth $5.50 per scrap or less! (I colored those losers red.)
10. When you adopt a cat from a shelter, you are usually getting it from a much more humane place than if you do from a pet store. Pet stores often receive their animals from shady sources, where animals may be abused or over-bred. While people may reason that these animals may need to be adopted more than any others, continuing to purchase animals from these sources just continues the cycle of abuse and allows them to continue staying in business.
9. Shelter animals are usually spayed or neutered. Spaying or neutering pets is essential in preventing homeless cats and dogs. If you get your animal elsewhere, you often have to add veterinary costs into the mix when you have to get him or her spayed or neutered yourself.
8. Shelter cats are typically immunized. Many states require cats to be immunized when kept as pets. It’s also simply important to keep your cats’ immunizations up to date for his or her overall health.
7. Shelter kittens are de-wormed. Worms are usually a problem with kittens—which can make pet owners especially worrisome. Kittens should not be given over the counter worm medication, as it could potentially harm them; it’s better for them to receive medication from a veterinarian. That’s one more cost you can circumvent when you get a cat from a shelter.
6. Buying from a shelter supports homeless animals. While you’re preventing animals from being traded and sold in cruel situations (see #10), you’re also supporting the care, health, and prevention of homeless cats and dogs.
5. Shelter animals are assessed. While you might just be able to buy any pet in a pet store, shelter workers assess pets to determine whether or not they will live well with other animals, children, or in special circumstances—such as in an apartment or outside. (It is recommended that all cats be kept inside most of the time, since outdoors they can be exposed to a variety of diseases and injuries.)
4. Shelter personnel are usually quite helpful. While a pet store operator may simply be after a sale, shelter operators are primarily interested in the well-being of the animals. They will make sure a family is well-suited for an animal before allowing them to adopt him or her.
3. Shelter animals are often more socialized than pet shop animals. With volunteers and staff regularly playing with them, shelter pets may be ready to come home with someone more than an isolated animal might be.
2. Shelter animals are often house-trained already. Cats are generally pretty quick to learn how to use the litter box, but with the support of shelter staff, shelter cats usually know how to use the litter box before coming home.
1. You can save a life. Since they are often so over-filled, shelter animals are often euthanized after remaining at a shelter for a long period of time.
This has to be one of the coolest ideas ever put to work for big cat conservation—and it’s definitely much cooler than those awful Elvis Presley stamps we had to bear years ago. With just a few extra cents every time we buy stamps, we could help protect tigers by funding efforts to stop poaching, educating the public about the tigers and how to protect them, and creating protected areas to give these animals—as well as other species—safe grounds to live on.
Right now, road developments, farming ventures, logging activity and urban development are all destroying tiger habitat, forcing them to find a new home—or being killed in the process. Meanwhile, poachers are hunting down the beautiful creatures and selling their pelts and bones for profit. Even some Chinese folk medicine practitioners are exacerbating the species loss as they hunt or buy tiger body parts for medicines. We know that funding is often very difficult to come by these days, so this stamp act is a very welcome solution to this bleak situation.
Please write to your Congress members and ask them to pass this act. Once it passes, be sure to purchase the stamps if you can and generate some much-needed funds for these majestic animals.
Here are some other ways you can help tigers today:
Click for the tigers. You can click every day (for free!) and generate a donation to preserve tiger habitat at Care2.com. EcologyFund.com offers similar features.
At the Save the Tigers Fund, you can learn more about the plight of the tiger, donate to save their habitat, and get more involved in campaigning for tigers. Click here to visit their webpage.
Save China’s Tigers has all of the latest news about tigers in China. You can volunteer, adopt a tiger, watch videos, and learn more about tigers in general—including fun tiger facts for kids—a their site.
Indian Tiger is a site where you can learn about tigers and get involved in efforts to help create protected areas for the big cats.
