Tom Jones – "What's New Pussycat?" (1965)

Pussycat, pussycat, I love you

Yes, I do!

[NOTE:  Cat videos are solid gold when it comes to increasing traffic to your website.  2 or 3 lines is always trying to attract more eyeballs, so I thought posting some cat videos couldn’t hurt.]

The Washington Post sends out daily e-mails that highlight the most popular articles in its online edition.

Despite its lofty reputation (47 Pulitzer Prizes!) and holier-than-thou editorial attitude, the Post is not above using sensational, tabloid-type headlines to click on the links in those e-mails.

Here’s a headline from a recent Post e-mail that I found impossible to ignore:

From the Post:

A Texas school district said students and staff members will not be punished despite outrage from the animal-rights community over a video that shows high school juniors and seniors skipping rope with cat intestines.

The North East Independent School District said Wednesday that the exercise earlier this month was part of a lesson plan for an anatomy class at Winston Churchill High School in San Antonio. . . .

“This was not meant to be disrespectful or degrading,” Aubrey Chancellor, a district spokeswoman, told The Washington Post in a statement. “In fact, the students and the teacher are very upset it’s being portrayed that way.”

That’s priceless, isn’t it?  The teacher and students who are jumping rope with the innards of a dead cat are “very upset” because cat lovers have a problem with the video of the activity.  Poor widdle teachers and students!

Here’s the video:

More from the Post:

The district is still investigating the incident but does not plan to punish the teacher or the students who were involved because it was part of a lesson plan — and because, Chancellor told CBS affiliate KENS, they had no “ill will.”

Chancellor said the teacher learned the same lesson when she was in college and thought it would be effective in her own classroom.

Where the HELL did that teacher go to college?

“The idea of the lesson was to demonstrate the tensile strength of the organ,” she said. “However, we understand that best practices change over time, and we believe there is a more appropriate way to demonstrate the concept.”

Ya think?

If that’s not bad enough, the following link appeared in the middle of the cat-intestines-used-to-jump-rope story:

From the Post:

There’s no other way to describe this than to say it is bizarre and disturbing: Students in white lab coats doing a choreographed dance routine with dead cats before dissecting them in biology class, while singing.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) obtained this video of students at Harding Charter Preparatory High School in Oklahoma City “dancing” with the dead cats while singing “meow, meow, meow” to the tune of a cat food commercial.

(You can click here to see that commercial.)

Here’s the video:

After word about the video got out, the school issued a public apology that included this line:

These students made a mistake and they will most likely make other mistakes in their lives.

Given that we’re talking about high-school students here, that’s a safe bet.

* * * * *

“What’s New Pussycat?” was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1965 movie of the same name.  It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost out to Johnny Mandel’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.”

Here's the trailer for that movie, which is completely incoherent.  (By "which," I meant the trailer, but the movie is completely incoherent as well.)

If a guy could trade places with another guy for one day (and one night), you could do a lot worse than trade places with Welsh singer Tom Jones circa 1965.

Here’s Tom Jones singing “What’s New Pussycat?” live on television:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: