Elementary, my dear Watson

Well, I've sleuthed out at least part of the reason for Sonya's weight gain, as well as the reason why Bunter's weight has been creeping up every year for the past couple years.

A while back, we switched the cats over to Purina One diet food, since I had read that high protein cat foods can actually be better for cats trying to lose weight than cat foods that are just low calorie. In addition, a high protein food can be good for multi-cat households, since skinny cats will gain weight and fat cats will lose weight with a higher protein food. This made sense to me, since after all, cats evolved eating small animals and other high protein foods, not corn by-products.

But even so, if you want your cat to lose weight, you need to restrict their calories. So we had been feeding the cats half a cup of food, three times a day. It didn't seem like they could gain weight on only half a cup of food a day apiece, but Sonya and Bunter were managing it. So I started to wonder if it was time to switch back to Iams, which now has a high protein food as well. I started checking the calorie content of Iams weight control (with which we had successfully achieved weight loss before): 303 calories per cup; and Iams multi-cat, their high protein formula: 330 calories per cup.

Purina One diet formula?: 426 calories per cup.

!!!!

We are switching back to Iams with extreme prejudice as soon as the last bag of Purina runs out.

(no subject)

Since the regular tv season ended, we've been watching more movies. Since my brain is usually deep-fried to a nicely browned and tasty crisp these days, I'm not really up for Ghandi or Schindler's List and we usually wind up opting for light and fluffy fare. The problem with the light and fluffy comedies, however, is that they're usually not very good. William Goldman once said that there are three kinds of movies made in Hollywood: movies that try to be good and succeed, movies that try to be good and fail and movies that never try to be good. He then added that most movies fall in the third category. And I have to say, you can certainly see it in the average Hollywood comedy, which is usually carefully and cynically designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator by people who have had their senses of humor and morals carefully excised in landmark 12-hour operations. But that's okay. I pick and choose and just don't expect much.

But I've seen three movies recently, that while they weren't earthshaking in their impact, surprised me by being much better than I expected:
( Movie reviews ahoy )

Post-a-palooza

Happy Birthday strephon!

You're still my favorite brother. :)