Damn Near Perfect

What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?

It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.

[ID: Bugs Bunny in a suit meme, edited to read "I wish all Etruscan shrews a very pleasant brain-regrowing season."]

They’re the smallest mammal if you measure by mass, coming in at under 2g. That’s tiny.

Because they’re so small, their volume to surface area ratio is messed up, and they are constantly in danger of their body temperature dropping. Their very high metabolism is what keeps them alive.

Their brains can shrink by up to 28% over the winter, so that they don’t have to keep it warm and fed during the coldest season.

They don’t even live where it’s super cold — as the name suggests, they’re found around the Mediterranean, as well as in parts of Southeast Asia. But they’re very sensitive to the cold, on account of being tiny.

solve the multiplication equation for each pair of individual digits and arrange them in the boxes just so

AND THEN ADD UP ALL THE NUMBERS IN EACH COLUMN AND GET THE RIGHT ANSWER????

So you start with a grid with as many squares as needed to write one number across the top and one number down the side. And draw these diagonal lines through them. Yes you should extend them out the side.

THEN you basically multiply the numbers that match with each square, put the tens digit in the top triangle and the ones digit in the bottom triangle. Like so:

so once you’ve done that, you start adding up the numbers in the DIAGONAL column/row thingies from the bottom right up to the top left, like so:

You only want one digit (tho I assume if the very top/last row somehow gets 2 digits that’s ok, but ONLY in that position) and you’ll carry over to the next column, like if you were adding normally.

Then you start at the top left and just take all the numbers going down and around and put them together!

It does take up a lot more space and has a few more steps than the more traditional long multiplication, I think, but for people who struggle with that I think this would be a handy tool!

Here’s a screenshot of the more traditional style to compare:

I made this transparent PNG the night he died in preparation for one of the many ways I was going to memorialize him--a surface rug in his likeness that I planned on laying directly in the line of his favourite sunbeam. And I uploaded that PNG here, because this is the website where people post their cats.

I was not expecting the reception I got. Many people have pointed out that this post has more reblogs than likes, and how insane that is in 2025 when reblog culture is at an all time low. I didn't even talk about the fact that Burger passed away in the original post, it wasn't a tearjerker reblog bait or anything like that. People just loved Burger that much, in the same way I fell in love with him at first sight. He was such an ugly kitten.

Anyways, it's really special to me that so many people have reblogged my best friend. I made this PNG to memorialize him in a completely different way, and you all wound up doing just that in ways I never even imagined.

Thank you. Wherever he is, I know the sun is shining.