Laughter and meows at Oakland’s Internet Cat Video Festival

A cat video is projected on the Great Wall of Oakland (Holly Bailey/Yahoo News)

OAKLAND, Calif.—Teddy usually spends most weekends lounging around the house, drifting in and out of long luxurious naps.

But on Saturday, he made a rare exception to his routine--taking a ride in what his owners called his “Kitty SUV,” a fancy caged pet stroller with duel front wheels said to be tough enough to climb a mountain.

Inside, Teddy, a 2-year-old Persian-Munchkin mix with a fluffy caramel-colored coat, looked like a tiny little king—and as one of the feline attendees of the city’s first Internet Cat Video Festival held at the Great Wall of Oakland downtown, he was.

As he was maneuvered through the crowd of several thousand people here, Teddy in his chariot was surrounded at every turn by cooing kitty groupies. Many wore cat-themed T-shirts, while some, including Teddy’s owner, Yachi Singh, were actually dressed up as felines, complete with fake ears and drawn-on whiskers.

“What better excuse to bring this indoor cat out here, to let him socialize a little bit, than a cat video festival,” Singh said, as her husband, Ratti, stood nearby, wearing an amused smile. Inside his stroller, Teddy, whose tiny legs were no more than four inches tall, cautiously sniffed the air and yawned.

Teddy was among several cats who accompanied their owners to what could be easily described as a feline lovefest. On Saturday afternoon, thousands of people turned out for a block party featuring local bands dressed up as cats, comedians telling cat jokes and even a troupe of cat-themed dancers.

Steps from the stage were dozens of booths selling artisan cat merchandise, including everything from art prints of cats dressed up as superheroes like Iron Man to $12 packets of “Meowy Wowyy”—organic catnip held in a felt packet shaped like a marijuana leaf.

“One of our best sellers,” the vendor said.

But the real attraction came just after sundown, when a 70-minute reel of the most popular cat videos on the Internet was beamed onto the side of a 10-story building here in the city’s historic downtown district. The clips, compiled by Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center for its inaugural cat video film festival last summer, featured everything from cats behaving badly to a feline cast as a depressed French existentialist.

At moments, the meows of the feline film stars seemed to reverberate off the buildings—though that was often drowned out by the laughter and coos of a clearly delighted crowd of cat lovers, who wildly cheered their favorite clips.

Barbara Henninger, who drove from nearby Berkeley for the festival, dressed up a black cat for the day—complete with drawn-on whiskers and a headband of felt black ears.

“I love cats, I love cat videos, and I really love being around cat people,” Henninger said. “There is something about cats that are really peaceful. They are gentle and loving, and I like to be around people like that.”

She added, “I knew there wouldn’t be any violence here.”

But there were some tensions, including when one man walked into the festival with his brown Beagle on a leash.

“NO DOGS ALLOWED,” an older woman standing nearby yelled, even though dogs actually were permitted by the festival's organizers.

The man just shrugged, smiled and continued walking with his pooch.

"Some people," the woman huffed.

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Internet sales tax bill faces tough sell in House

WASHINGTON (AP) — Traditional retailers and cash-strapped states face a tough sell in the House as they lobby Congress to limit tax-free shopping on the Internet.

The Senate voted 69 to 27 Monday to pass a bill that empowers states to collect sales taxes from Internet purchases. Under the bill, states could require out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes when they sell products over the Internet, in catalogs, and through radio and TV ads. The sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.

Current law says states can only require retailers to collect sales taxes if the merchant has a physical presence in the state.

That means big retailers with stores all over the country like Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target collect sales taxes when they sell goods over the Internet. But online retailers like eBay and Amazon don't have to collect sales taxes, except in states where they have offices or distribution centers.

"This bill is about fairness," said Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., the bill's main sponsor in the Senate. "It's about leveling the playing field between the brick and mortar and online companies and it's about collecting a tax that's already due. It's not about raising taxes."

The bill got bipartisan support in the Senate but faces opposition in the House, where some lawmakers regard it as a tax increase. Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, and the conservative Heritage Foundation oppose the bill, and many Republicans have been wary of crossing them.

Supporters say the bill is not a tax increase. In many states, shoppers are required to pay unpaid sales tax when they file their state tax returns. However, states complain that few taxpayers comply.

"Obviously there's a lot of consumers out there that have been accustomed to not having to pay any taxes, believing that they don't have to pay any taxes," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., the bill's main sponsor in the House. "I totally understand that, and I think a lot of our members understand that. There's a lot of political difficulty getting through the fog of it looking like a tax increase."

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has not commented publicly about the bill, giving supporters hope that he could be won over. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction over the bill, has cited problems with the legislation but not rejected it outright.

"While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go," Goodlatte said in a statement. Without more uniformity in the bill, he said, "businesses would still be forced to wade through potentially hundreds of tax rates and a host of different tax codes and definitions."

Goodlatte said he's "open to considering legislation concerning this topic but these issues, along with others, would certainly have to be addressed."

Internet giant eBay led the fight against the bill in the Senate, along with lawmakers from states with no sales tax and several prominent anti-tax groups. The bill's opponents say it would put an expensive obligation on small businesses because they are not as equipped as national merchandisers to collect and remit sales taxes at the multitude of state rates.

Businesses with less than $1 million in online sales would be exempt. EBay wants to exempt businesses with up to $10 million in sales or fewer than 50 employees.

"The contentious debate in the Senate shows that a lot more work needs to be done to get the Internet sales tax issue right, including ensuring that small businesses using the Internet are protected from new burdens that harm their ability to compete and grow," said Brian Bieron, eBay's senior director of global public policy.

Some states have sales taxes as high as 7 percent, plus city and county taxes that can push the combined rate even higher.

Many governors — Republicans and Democrats — have been lobbying the federal government for years for the authority to collect sales taxes from online sales.

The issue is getting bigger for states as more people make purchases online. Last year, Internet sales in the U.S. totaled $226 billion, up nearly 16 percent from the previous year, according to government estimates.

States lost a total of $23 billion last year because they couldn't collect taxes on out-of-state sales, according to a study done for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which has lobbied for the bill. About half of that was lost from Internet sales; half from purchases made through catalogs, mail orders and telephone orders, the study said.

Supporters say the bill makes it relatively easy for Internet retailers to comply. States must provide free computer software to help retailers calculate sales taxes, based on where shoppers live. States must also establish a single entity to receive Internet sales tax revenue, so retailers don't have to send it to individual counties or cities.

Opponents worry the bill would give states too much power to reach across state lines to enforce their tax laws. States could audit out-of-state businesses, impose liens on their property and, ultimately, sue them in state court.

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

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Internet sales tax bill to hit roadblock in House

WASHINGTON (AP) — A bill to require Internet shoppers to pay sales taxes for online purchases may be cruising through the Senate but it will soon hit a roadblock in the House.

"There's a lot of political difficulty getting through the fog of it looking like a tax increase," said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark., one of the main sponsors of the bill in the House.

The bill would empower states to reach outside their borders and compel online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. Under the bill, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.

Under current law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state. As a result, many online sales are essentially tax-free, giving Internet retailers an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.

Womack says the bill is not a tax increase. Instead, he says, it simply gives states a mechanism to enforce current taxes.

In many states, shoppers are required to pay unpaid sales taxes when they file state tax returns. But governors complain that few people comply.

The Senate voted 63-30 Thursday to end debate on the bill, though senators delayed a final vote on passage until May 6, when they return from a weeklong vacation. Opponents hope senators hear from angry constituents over the next week, but they acknowledged they have a steep hill to climb to defeat the bill in the Senate.

President Barack Obama supports the bill.

Senate Democratic leaders wanted to finish work on the bill this week, before leaving town for the recess. But they were blocked by a handful of senators from states without sales taxes.

Oregon, Montana, New Hampshire and Delaware have no sales taxes, though the two senators from Delaware support the bill.

"I think it's going to be interesting for senators to get a response from constituents over this upcoming week," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "I'm not sure that the country knows that something like this coerces businesses all around America to collect other people's sales taxes."

The bill pits brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart against online services such as eBay. The National Retail Federation supports it. And Amazon.com, which initially fought efforts in some states to make it collect sales taxes, supports it, too.

Retailers who have lobbied in favor of the bill celebrated Thursday's vote.

"The special treatment of big online businesses at the expense of retailers on Main Street will soon be a thing of the past," said Bill Hughes of the Retail Industry Leaders Association. "The overwhelmingly bipartisan support for leveling the playing field is rare in today's political environment and paves the way for a level playing field once and for all."

Supporters say the bill is about fairness for local businesses that already collect sales taxes and for states that lose revenue. Opponents say the bill would impose complicated regulations on retailers and doesn't have enough protections for small businesses. Businesses with less than $1 million a year in online sales would be exempt.

Many of the nation's governors — Republicans and Democrats — have been lobbying the federal government for years for the authority to collect sales taxes from online sales.

The issue is getting bigger for states as more people make purchases online. Last year, Internet sales in the U.S. totaled $226 billion, up nearly 16 percent from the previous year, according to Commerce Department estimates.

The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that states lost $23 billion last year because they couldn't collect taxes on out-of-state sales.

Anti-tax groups have labeled the bill a tax increase. But it gets support from many Senate Republicans who have pledged not to increase taxes. The bill's main sponsor is Sen. Mike Enzi, a conservative Republican from Wyoming. He has worked closely with Sen. Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat from Illinois.

Under the bill, states that want to collect online sales taxes must provide free computer software to help retailers calculate the taxes, based on where shoppers live. States must also establish a single entity to receive Internet sales tax revenue, so retailers don't have to send them to individual counties or cities.

"Obviously, there's a lot of consumers out there that have been accustomed to not having to pay any taxes, believing that they don't have to pay any taxes," Womack said. "I totally understand that."

But, he added, "It's not a tax increase and states can easily employ the proper software for the people to pay. At the end of the day it becomes more or less a political decision, and I'm not real sure where the House is going to be on it."

___

Follow Stephen Ohlemacher on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stephenatap

View the original article here

The worst word on the Internet

By Rob Walker

Precisely because I love words, there are certain words I despise. Not a few have either come into existence, or have been redefined, in the digital-communication era. And I’m particularly prickly when it comes to words that touch the craft of writing itself.

So if I could choose one word — or, really, I feel better calling it a “term,” denying it actual-word status — to obliterate, it would be “longread.”

The subject of despicable words is not new. About a year ago now, Ben Greenman at The New Yorker threw open to Twitter the question of what words ought to be eliminated altogether. The response was robust —  “moist” was a top candidate — and Greenman’s wrapup was an elegant summary of words we could live without now. More recently, Slate picked over this territory, focusing on “word aversion,” a visceral negative response words like (again) “moist.”

While I’m fascinated by such emotional reactions to language, I find myself identifying more with Kurt Andersen and his list of “Words We Don’t Say,” which he put together when he was editor of New York Magazine. Anybody who writes that X “hails from” Texas, that Y “graced” the pages of Vogue, or that Z is either “comely” or someone’s “hubby,” should stop writing. I most strongly endorse Andersen’s prohibition of grating language that relate to the business of words, notably “authored” and “penned” — both classic examples of using a supposedly exotic stand-in for a perfectly good word (“wrote”).

Using such gimmicks is how a “writer” signals to himself that he is “writing.” (The ultimate bad-writing sentence would be: “Scribe Pens Tome.”)

Something has happened since Andersen put his list together in the late 1990s. No, I don’t mean “the Internet” -- I mean rhetoric that refers to the Internet. The robust class of pundits and gurus and entrepreneurs whose living depends on elevating all discussions of technology into the highest stratospheres of hyperbole have, along the way, pretty much destroyed a series of formerly useful words. “Share,” “collaborate,” “discover,” “crowd,” and many others have been abused beyond recognition.

But, you know, fine: Language is dynamic, and I at least understand the ways those words have been warped. The “longread” thing, however, is a Web-era neologism I simply cannot fathom. (Apologies here, by the way, to Longreads.com, which surely means well; but if Philip Morris Companies can become Altria, then clearly you have other options, too.) I am almost as hostile to its close cousin, “longform.” That word I can at least understand as the acceptably descriptive “long-form,” condensed to more hashtag-friendly form. But like “tome” as a replacement for “book,” neither word has any defensible advantage over, say, “feature” or even “story.” Stephen Roddick is onto something when he compares “longform” to “creative nonfiction,” another distractingly pretentious term.

When I started ranting about this to one of my bosses here at Yahoo News, it reminded him of this Twitter exchange:

That may indeed be the goal, but I sometimes wonder if #longread doesn’t function as something more like a warning than a boast: If a piece of writing’s most fundamental element is longness, do you really want to click through?

Look, I’ve written long stories. I’ve written books. I read a lot, and regularly enjoy features, stories, essays that run into the thousands of words. But as a writer and as a reader, I do not count longness itself as defining feature of such works — let alone a selling point.

The goal of any piece of writing isn’t to see how long you can make it. Often, in fact, it’s about knowing exactly when to stop.

View the original article here

The worst word on the Internet

By Rob Walker

Precisely because I love words, there are certain words I despise. Not a few have either come into existence, or have been redefined, in the digital-communication era. And I’m particularly prickly when it comes to words that touch the craft of writing itself.

So if I could choose one word — or, really, I feel better calling it a “term,” denying it actual-word status — to obliterate, it would be “longread.”

The subject of despicable words is not new. About a year ago now, Ben Greenman at The New Yorker threw open to Twitter the question of what words ought to be eliminated altogether. The response was robust —  “moist” was a top candidate — and Greenman’s wrapup was an elegant summary of words we could live without now. More recently, Slate picked over this territory, focusing on “word aversion,” a visceral negative response words like (again) “moist.”

While I’m fascinated by such emotional reactions to language, I find myself identifying more with Kurt Andersen and his list of “Words We Don’t Say,” which he put together when he was editor of New York Magazine. Anybody who writes that X “hails from” Texas, that Y “graced” the pages of Vogue, or that Z is either “comely” or someone’s “hubby,” should stop writing. I most strongly endorse Andersen’s prohibition of grating language that relate to the business of words, notably “authored” and “penned” — both classic examples of using a supposedly exotic stand-in for a perfectly good word (“wrote”).

Using such gimmicks is how a “writer” signals to himself that he is “writing.” (The ultimate bad-writing sentence would be: “Scribe Pens Tome.”)

Something has happened since Andersen put his list together in the late 1990s. No, I don’t mean “the Internet” -- I mean rhetoric that refers to the Internet. The robust class of pundits and gurus and entrepreneurs whose living depends on elevating all discussions of technology into the highest stratospheres of hyperbole have, along the way, pretty much destroyed a series of formerly useful words. “Share,” “collaborate,” “discover,” “crowd,” and many others have been abused beyond recognition.

But, you know, fine: Language is dynamic, and I at least understand the ways those words have been warped. The “longread” thing, however, is a Web-era neologism I simply cannot fathom. (Apologies here, by the way, to Longreads.com, which surely means well; but if Philip Morris Companies can become Altria, then clearly you have other options, too.) I am almost as hostile to its close cousin, “longform.” That word I can at least understand as the acceptably descriptive “long-form,” condensed to more hashtag-friendly form. But like “tome” as a replacement for “book,” neither word has any defensible advantage over, say, “feature” or even “story.” Stephen Roddick is onto something when he compares “longform” to “creative nonfiction,” another distractingly pretentious term.

When I started ranting about this to one of my bosses here at Yahoo News, it reminded him of this Twitter exchange:

That may indeed be the goal, but I sometimes wonder if #longread doesn’t function as something more like a warning than a boast: If a piece of writing’s most fundamental element is longness, do you really want to click through?

Look, I’ve written long stories. I’ve written books. I read a lot, and regularly enjoy features, stories, essays that run into the thousands of words. But as a writer and as a reader, I do not count longness itself as defining feature of such works — let alone a selling point.

The goal of any piece of writing isn’t to see how long you can make it. Often, in fact, it’s about knowing exactly when to stop.

View the original article here

The week's best of the internet

The 7 best images, videos, and memes to emerge from the great digital playground — from Japan's superiority at life to the safest seat on an airplane

1. Japan is way cooler than us
As BuzzFeed points out, Americans invented (and subsequently ruined) the Harlem Shake. Meanwhile across the Pacific, Japanese school kids are doing next-level stuff like this:

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It's called Hadoken-ing.

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Dang. Pretty cool, huh?

SEE MORE: 8 bizarre sounds you've probably made without knowing it

I know, Ryan. I'm sad for us, too. (Via BuzzFeed)

2. Koalas are rad
Bet you've never seen a koala running around on the floor before, have you? Huh, you have? Luckyyyyy. Here you go anyway. (Via Imgur)

SEE MORE: My stepson is a porn star. Help!

3. Limp Bizkit debuts a new song with Lil Wayne
The rap/nu-metal/rap collaboration that music aficionados across the globe have been breathlessly awaiting was finally revealed this week. Behold, world: "Ready to Go" by Limp Bizkit featuring Lil Wayne. Strong language ahead.

SEE MORE: Girls on Film: Stephenie Meyer, of The Host and Twilight fame, is not anti-women

Wait. What's that? This column is called best of the internet? Whoops! My bad, ya'll. (Via MTV)

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4. The singularity is nigh
Brace yourselves. Cats have learned how to reprogram our robotic vacuums and are using them against us. Send help. (Via Tumblr)

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5. Click, Print, Gun
Vice debuted a chilling but fascinating documentary about 3D-printed guns. The doc focuses on Cody R. Wilson, a bright, articulate 25-year-old University of Texas law student who's been using 3D printers to piece together AR-15 rifles. His aim? To expose what he sees as "the futility of gun regulation." (Via Motherboard)

SEE MORE: Refresh your memory on Game of Thrones before Sunday's season 3 premiere

6. What's the safest seat on an airplane?
Your chances of dying in a plane crash are slim, just 1 in 4.7 million, says the Telegraph in a new report. But which seat gives you the highest likelihood of survival? Thanks to an analysis of deadly plane crashes with survivors, the answer: Sit in economy class, with your seat belt on, by a window, just a few rows away from the emergency exit. (Via the Telegraph)

7. Cat of the Week
Everyone please give a big, warm hug to Stanley, this week's winner. He's a big fan of hanging out. And eating, I think. (Thanks, Peter!)

SEE MORE: How to get that annoyingly catchy song out of your head

Do you own a dog, cat, or other cuddly animal? Send photos to Gayomali@TheWeek.com for a chance to have your furry pal featured.

SEE MORE: The 65-year battle over the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act

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Other stories from this section:

• Apple explains why you should love Apple
• Cyber-war trends: good, bad, and scary
• How our love of gadgets makes us hate each other

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