I recently ended up at Wikipedia through a Google search on "cats aluminum foil." I was trying to determine whether it's true that aluminum foil will keep cats off of stuff. Apparently it is true, according to Wikipedia's surprisingly comprehensive aluminum foil entry. What other encyclopedia would have such a lengthy entry that includes a passage like this:
Deterring pets
Aluminium foil is also sometimes used in the training of cats; as cats have an inborn dislike of loud noise, like that caused by sheets of aluminium foil, it is possible to prevent cats from jumping on or otherwise damaging furniture by covering its surfaces.[citation needed].
It cracks me up sometimes what you can find on Wikipedia. Doubly funny is the "[citation needed]" at the end. Is the person who added that expecting that there's an article on this in a scientific journal or will a column from Cat Fancy do?
BoingBoing recently reported that a guy is putting [citation needed] stickers on real world things (link: biphenyl.org). It's a "campaign that involves recontextualizing ads and signs -- or anything that makes a dubious claim -- using stickers with the [citation needed] tag found in Wikipedia articles." I think this is amusing, but not quite in the way this guy is hoping for.
Jesse James Garrett recently wrote that
Wikipedia's "[citation needed]" convention takes passive-aggressive behavior to a global scale.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as passive-aggressive -- more like absurdly pedantic and simple-minded, especially in cases like the one above.
My search for an answer to the cat-foil question was prompted by an unfortunate cat-Roomba incident. One of our cats decided today to pee on our Roomba. I found it with a little puddle on top, its lights ablaze and it making sad little blurps and whirs. I just spent an hour cleaning it. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit on this blog that I have a Roomba, but I was recently swayed by the positive reviews for the new series, and it's a great help in cleaning up fur from three pets. Plus, as I now know, it's fairly easy to disassemble and clean thoroughly. Assuming the Roomba survives this ordeal, I now have the problem of keeping the cat off of it, so I think I'll try fashioning a little tin foil hat for it.
Another thing I like about that Wikipedia foil entry is the ultra-high resolution "household aluminum foil" picture, as shown above (available here in its full 1984-by-1784-pixel glory).
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