Banner Sponsors
For artists and collectors sponsored by Intercal...your mohair supplier and Johnna's Mohair Store
I think I would trust the cat before I would trust the little girl.
or little boy.
By the way you punctuated the sentence it seems that you thought people might assume.
The question is not whether YOU assumed anything. It is about how people, in general, make those kinds of assumptions.
There is nothing in the picture to signify whether the baby is male or female. Same goes for the cat. (Unless the cat was a calico. Then it would have to be female.)
However, all of us... me included... make our own assumptions on the gender of the cat and the baby based on our own individual experiences and biases.
When you typed the sentence, stopped with a period and an emoicon, then typed some more with another period and emoticon it shows that you were thinking the same thing and continued the sentence to make it clear that you were not forcing any assumptions on the reader.
I'm not yelling, not saying anything except to point out the funny little things that occur because of human nature.
Just a little humorous observation:
Even though there is absolutely no information in the picture which would tell us the gender of any person or animal in the picture except for the fish (only male betas are brightly colored) isn't it interesting how we automatically assume that the baby is a girl and the cat is male?
Do you not think it's just as likely that the baby would be a boy and the cat would be female?
Boys are often thought of as being more inquisitive and willing to explore.
Female cats have to hunt to feed their young.
Just an interesting social observation. 
If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express as your e-mail client, I suggest you dump that program and go with something more secure like "Thunderbird."
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Thunderbird is made by the same people who make the Firefox web browser. It's just as good and it's just as free. Plus, it has several features to make your e-mail more secure.
It's got adaptive spam blocking which reads all your e-mail messages and watches the messages you mark as "spam" and "non-spam." As you mark more and more messages as good or bad, Thunderbird learns from you. After a while, it will "know" which e-mails are spam and automatically sort them out for you.
Thunderbird has another feature to help you fight spam that isn't so intuitive. It prevents "web beacons" from nabbing your e-mail address.
A little lesson:
Spammers like to put images into their e-mails to help track who is a good e-mail address and who is bad or bogus.
If I embed a picture into an e-mail and send it to you, I can tell if you read my message by checking the logs on my server to see if that picture was accessed by the internet. If that image was viewed, I know you read it.
The thing is that those images only have to be 1 pixel tall and 1 pixel wide. You won't even know its there because it's only a single dot. It will look like a tiny speck on your screen if you notice it at all but I will know you saw my spam message. Once I know that, I know that the e-mail address linked to that message is a "live" one. My spam bots will mark you for even MORE spam!
Now that you know what a web beacon is, you can understand that blocking remote messages ( and remotely loaded HTML or Javascript code) prevents spammers from using them to track your activity on the internet.
Thunderbird blocks remote images by default. If it detects a remote image it will put up a little button for you to click. If you decide that the e-mail is "safe" you can click that button and see the images. If not, the images won't be displayed and the web beacons can't track you.
You can also "blacklist" and "whitelist" e-mail addresses. "Blacklisted" e-mail addresses will never have images displayed. "Whitelisted" addresses will always be displayed. That way, if you have friends on the internet who send you pictures you can see them without having to click on a button all the time. If there is an e-mail address you know is bad you can "blacklist" it and you won't be bothered again.
I really suggest everybody go visit Mozilla's website and see what Thunderbird has to offer. I think you'll like it! :)
And don't give me that fluff about being afraid to try a new program because you already know how to use Microsoft junk! Let me tell you a story... My mother uses Thuderbird for e-mail and she loves it!
She was having trouble with her computer and, after several attempts at repairing her broken installation of M$ Windows, I cleared her hard drive and installed Ubuntu Linux. She whined for about a week but she eventually got used to it. Now she actually LIKES Linux better than Microsfoft!
A couple of weeks she was out shopping and she needed to look up something on the internet real quick. She stopped at the public library to use the computer there. After about 5 minutes of struggling with Microsft, she quit and decided to wait until she got home!
If my Mom can learn to use Linux, ANYBODY can!
And, to top it all off, Linux doesn't get viruses like Windows does.
You should check it out!
(If you've never eaten at Waffle House, you won't get the joke. )
...you could try increasing it by looking at you "Display properies" which you can find in your control panel somewhere. Not having used windows in years though, I couldn't tell you much more than that...
+1 
I don't do Windows either. Anything but...
Go into your display properties control panel and check your settings.
I don't know which exact setting will be the one for you but it's in there somewhere. Don't be afraid to tinker. There's not a lot you can do to mess it up.
When you make a change, the system asks you to confirm your settings. If you don't confirm in 15 seconds, the display reverts to the old settings. Thus, if you make a wrong setting, just leave it alone for 15 seconds and it will go back to the way it was.
Hint: If you keep a pencil and a piece of paper handy you can make notes to yourself as you work. Every time you try a resolution setting... 600 X 800... 1024 X 768... 1280 X 720... etc., etc. you can mark it down. That way you don't spend time retracing your steps, trying and retrying settings that don't work.
It lowers the frustration level just a bit.
It does corrupt the word. Us Bears don't like it either! 
Harvester bots don't care what the site really is. They dont' care who sees the messages. All they care about is getting e-mail addresses. The more opportunity to sell the "product" the better.
This is a good reason not to post your e-mail address in the clear.
Have you ever noticed that this bulletin board doesn't allow that unless you type it directly into a message? This is an anti-spam measure. Only logged-in members are supposed to be able to read e-mail addresses and only after clicking on a button or link to do so. Spam bots don't (can't) log in as members thus they can not see e-mail addresses.
Don't help them by posting your e-mail address where they can be seen. At the very least, cloak your e-mail address.
For instance, add the word "SPAM".
myname@email.com then becomes mynameSPAM@email.com
If a spambot harvests your address it will get the wrong name. Humans who read your address will know to remove the word "SPAM" before they send a message. The bots usually don't know how to do that.
Another thing to do is type out your whole e-mail address without using symbols "@" or "."
myname@email.com then becomes myname-at-email-dot-com
This works because spam bots look for the "@" symbol and the words ".com", ".net" or ".edu", etc.
If the bots can't find those symbols and keywords they won't recognize your e-mail address.
People don't realize just how much personal information they give out over the internet. It is downright scary to see how much information people can find out about you just from knowing your name, e-mail address and the city where you live! They should be more cautious about the personal information they give out to places they don't know.
Do you know that the word "bears" often refers to hairy gay men?
There could be a spam bot searching out all websites containing the word "bear" and harvesting all the e-mail addresses it finds then sending out "bear" pictures to all those names.
Yes, spam bots are pretty smart. They can harvest e-mail addresses and the real names associated with them, allowing them to make it appear like the messages came from real people.
There are spam bots that harvest e-mail addresses from web forums and similar sites then use that information to send out spam, much of it [INVALID] and fake Viagara, etc. Is that what you are getting?
Or are you talking about e-mail sent by humans who pose as another person for the purpose of sending out harassing messages containing [INVALID]?
Best course of action is to have the IT department at your place of business track down the source of the e-mail and blacklist the sender(s). Do not reply to them in any way. Do not even open or display the messages or any attachments therein. Send them directly to the trash. This is a good reason to install spam blocking extensions to your e-mail program if it doesn't already have one built in.
In the first case, you will be able to block the messages only temporarily. When the spammers change proxy servers and hide their tracks they will be able to evade the block your IT people have put on them. But this block will slow them down, at least for a while. By that time, hopefully, your e-mail address will have gone "stale" in their databases and they will stop spamming you so much.
If it is the second case, your IT people MIGHT be able to track down the sender. If you are so lucky, there is a chance the person could be busted. Unless they have a darned good explanation for their actions they could be blacklisted from this site.
Generally speaking, you're going to get a certain amount of this crud on the internet. Basically ignore it unless it creates a problem of some kind.
They look happy enough with their salad leaves, so why ruin good fluffy waistlines with pizza.
C'Mon! All kids complain about what Mom makes for dinner!
They always want pizza instead. :D
Besides, if a rabbit was going to have pizza it would be topped with lettuce and sprouts. The carrots would be sliced in little circles like pepperoni.
But most rabbits will tell you, "Anything but radishes!"
You make teddy bears, how about raffling off a bear?
How about an old fashioned looking Bear like your "Clancy"?
Give him a riding hat and a little crop.
He'd be cute as all heck! :)
How about giving him a dressage outfit?
Have a special tag printed up for him. Make a special certificate of authenticity which says that the Bear was specially made to raise funds for the horse rescue.
(People who donate money to charities deserve to be fussed over just a little bit. )
There is a definitive caption for this one. It's only two words.
We have a panda preserve of about 20 living in our den.
Wanna see a plethora of pandas? Why it's pure panda-monium! :D
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/panda_nursery_china.htm
Last summer there was a special on PBS television, called "Panda Nursery" which documented how they breed and raise pandas at the Woolong panda preserve in China.
I can't find a link to the video but I know people.
If nothing else, your dog will smell "April Fresh" and be "Snuggly Soft!"
Excellent!
If you do have a storm, take advantage of the opportunity to play the "noise game" for a while.
Why let a good opportunity go to waste? Eh?
When a storm comes in, my dog looks at me for guidance, I just say it's nothing to worry about and he doesn't worry!
Smart dog!
