Cell phone hoax, cats, and the moon.
Did you go to http://www.fixmyfone.org/ to find out about the ‘Statue Of Liberty’ virus?
Guess what? You’ve been hoaxed.
It seems the folks at a local radio station started their annual April Fools joke early, since April 1st is on a Sunday. They even set up a fake website at http://www.fixmyphone.org/.
Here’s the setup: Supposedly, a hacker associated with PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals?) hacked into all the cell phone companies, and downloaded a virus that infects your cell phone. It will cause your phone to overheat and delete all your data, including your address book.
The fix is to stand within sight of a cell phone tower, type in the number 2773665 then hold your cell phone over your head for 30 seconds.
Yup, there are a bunch of idiots out there holding their phones up in a ‘Statue of Liberty’ type pose.
If you look at your keypad, you will see the numbers 2773665 spell out ‘April Fool.’
There’s a cell phone tower about a half mile from here, and of course we are going out there at lunch to see there’s anyone standing there with a phone over their heads.
My friend Chris sent me the following:
A CAT’S GUIDE TO HUMANS
1. Introduction: Why Do We Need Humans?
So, you’ve decided to get yourself a human being! In doing so, you’ve joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often frustrating creatures. What’s so great about humans, anyway?
Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple: THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS.
Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orangutans and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere near as easy to train.
2. How And When to Get Your Human’s Attention?
Humans often erroneously assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of your immediate needs, such as housekeeping, going to their jobs, spending time with their families or even sleeping.
Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want it to do.
Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human to do what you want:
Sitting on paper:
An oldie but a goodie.
If a human has paper in front of it, chances are good it’s something they assume is more important than you. They will often offer you a snack to lure you away. Establish your supremacy over this wood pulp product at every opportunity. This practice also works well with computer keyboards, remote controls, car keys and small children.
Waking your human at odd hours:
A cat’s golden time is between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. If you paw at your human’s sleeping face during this time, you have a better than even chance that it will get up and, in an incoherent haze, do exactly what you want. You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their attention. Remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting suspicious.
3. Rewarding Your Human:
Should Your Gift Still Be Alive? The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the thoughtful gift of a recently disemboweled animal. Some believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they’ve been presented.
After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend that cold-blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, garden snakes and the occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm-blooded animals (birds, rodents, your neighbor’s Pomeranian) are better still living.
When you see the expression on your human’s face, you’ll know it’s worth it.
4. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?
You are only obligated to your human for one of your lives. The other eight are up to you.
We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what do you expect? They’re humans, after all.
Opposable thumbs will only take you so far.
Parting shot:
Scientists have shown that the moon is moving away at a tiny, although measurable distance from the earth every year.
If you do the math, you can calculate that 85 million years ago the moon was orbiting the earth at a distance about 35 feet from the earth’s surface.
This would explain the death of the dinosaurs - the tallest ones, anyway.