Here are this week's most important animals from the internet
It’s Friday afternoon. If you work standard working hours and are based in America, you are probably winding things down, biding the hours until you can return to your family or friends or just the blissfully silent subterranean lair in which you hibernate each weekend. If you work on or near a computer, you have spent most of the week online, probably disdainfully scrolling through various social networks in search of something to pass the time. You have seen many, many animals—animals from people you know, animals from people you don’t know, animals you never knew existed. Or perhaps you are rapper T-Pain and this is just how you live your life:
Either way, catching up on the important animals of the week is both a way to kill some time while you wind down the clock and a productive way to stay abreast of the news. The news cycle is fast in this always-on world, after all, and it’s easy to miss important animals. Consider this your daily news podcast, but weekly, a blog post, and mostly about cats.
Everyone loves Surprise Vent Cat, a lovely cat the emerges from a vent
Unquestionably the most noteworthy animal on the internet during the week of February 26, 2018, was Surprise Vent Cat, an instant celebrity that came meowing out of a dang vent completely unexpectedly. The video has been viewed, at press time, 8.25 million times, receiving almost half a million likes on Twitter, which serves as a powerful reminder of the viral potential of a good animal story. As a point of perspective, this is almost half as many likes as the free nugs kid got—and he got free nugs out of that shit!
While the story needed very little additional information, perfect as its tweet was in structure and payoff, further tweets elucidated that the cat did not in fact move in with @brenaclifton and teach her that owning a cat was the thing she didn’t know she needed, teaching her wry lessons about life, love, and cat ownership. In point of fact, she is allergic to cats, and the cat belonged to a neighbor, and now the cat is safely back home. Still, the video provides hope for us all that that faint mewling we hear in the distance is not a stray spraying itself on a garbage can but, rather, a magical new friend waiting to pop out of the heating vents and into viral immortality.
A pair of extremely good boys riding bikes
A philosophical question: Is it “normie” to enjoy dogs doing people things, or is that actually the best possible activity for a dog online? Animal content often straddles the line between played-out and compelling. Dressing a dog up like a famous fictional character or aggressively imposing a narrative upon their innate playfulness can feel put-upon, the stuff of chain emails and blocked Facebook users. But a dog who rides a bike because they are friends with their owner, on the other hand? There, friend, is art.
Here, too, is a dog riding a bike, although this time the roles are inverted, and it is the owner showing an unwavering fealty to the dog.
These are some of the best boys imaginable.
Reminder: One time someone put together a bunch of cute animals and delicious foods
Earlier this week, Munchies posted a story about the Twitter account of one Karen Zack, who has achieved viral celebrity for a series of tweets that explore the aesthetic similarities between adorable animals and delicious food. To wit:
They are extremely good tweets, both convincing in their comparisons and detailed in their research. They are also creepy, in that you sort of feel hungry looking at pictures of chihuahua heads. They are also two years old. You can get away with posting a story like this again verbatim two years later because neither animals nor food have changed in the intervening years; they exist outside of the tides of fashion or politics or timeliness, and the memory of the internet is vanishingly small. It begs the question: When will Surprise Vent Cat be available again? Is there a statute of limitations on animal reposts?
Cat looks like Dobby the house elf, also Adam Driver
It was a big week for Teddy, the lanky, big-eared cat with a gaunt face and three siblings. The intriguingly named Dobby Cat was dubbed a YouTube “creator on the rise” by the platform, instantly appealing to fans of a) cats, and b) fantasy house-elves. The cat also got significant mention in a longer piece on Real Life, in which he is dubbed “a piebald Adam Driver,” an image that you will not be able to shake from your mind while viewing the following videos.
A surprising quantity of the videos of these cats takes place in the laundry room, which somehow makes sense:
Real Life notes that Teddy honks consistently at the tone of F#, if you want to tune a piano to him.
Finally, a reminder
While all of the above animals are cute, here is a video of a big man wrestling two bears.
There is no reason for anyone to ever do this. Please, even if you are a big man, do not wrestle any bears.