Slashdot Mirror
Former Slashdot Contributor Jon Katz Believes He Can Talk To Animals (amazon.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland got a surprise when he visited his local bookstore:
Jon Katz turns 70 this August, and he's published a new book called Talking to Animals: How You Can Understand Animals and They Can Understand You. Katz was a former newspaper reporter (and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone) who wrote for HotWired, the first online presence for Wired magazine in the mid-1990s, before becoming a controversial contributor to Slashdot during the site's early days. Katz left Manhattan in the 1990s to live on a farm "surrounded by dogs, cats, sheep, horses, cows, goats, and chickens," according to the book's description, an experience he writes about on his blog. His new book promises that Katz now "marshals his experience to offer us a deeper insight into animals and the tools needed for effectively communicating with them."
He first made his author bones writing crap that pandered to and was about "nerds", who in the 90s where not nearly as cool as the "tech bros" of today, but then the nerds, who tend to be fairly smart, exposed his bullshit (Apple II buried under a yurt in Afghanistan? lol) and so he was forced to find another socially isolated group to sell books to: people who are so lonely they try to talk to their pets, which is to say cat ladies.
Katz is a douche. That said, maybe I'll see if I can find a used copy of "Voices from the Hellmouth" or whatever on eBay for a nostalgia trip back to the days when nerds were nerds and frat bros went into finance.