cats and shops, cats and pop

Assistant Blog frequently tries to come off all enthused by and informed on subjects like politics, pop music and poetry, as you'll have noticed, but really my interests and ambitions in life begin and end with the goal of cat-ownership. I think cats are the best. So here, more for my own amusement than anything else, is a picture of a cat. Aaah. It comes from my new favourite blog, Working Class Cats, which collects photos of cats who live in shops. Amazing.

Continuing the cat theme, I'm not the only blogger who is easily diverted. Poor old Carrie Brownstein, late of the utterly magnificent Sleater-Kinney, only gets through a few paragraphs of the first entry on her new blog, Monitormix, before getting sidetracked.

"The other day I was driving home and saw a boy in his early twenties walking along the sidewalk. He was wearing a gray trench coat, combat boots, and a backpack, and he had a medium-haired black cat on his shoulder. It always worries me when people carry their cats around in public. It's not as bad as the woman in North Portland who brings a mini pony with her to the coffee shop, but it still makes me uneasy; it's attention-seeking, and I am forced to spend the next few hours wondering how someone trains a cat to do that. But what kind of music does a young man who is a human scratching post listen to? I might guess Peter Murphy or Tool or My Chemical Romance, but I have no idea. These are some of the questions I want to answer. I want to find out why people are drawn to certain songs, genres, voices, or instruments.

Let's start with this question: If you carry a cat around on your shoulder when you go out, or a bird, or a lizard, what music do you listen to?"

Sadly, I've never been able to convince an animal to travel around with me in this way, but if you have you might want to pop over to Carrie's blog to give her some feedback...