This cat, just like OMG Cat (maybe), is also CLEARLY (maybe) DYING, perhaps of a COMPOUND SKULL FRACTURE or even a BURST BLADDER (these symptoms are clearly neurological and/or dehydration or maybe “random”), and all these people can do in their cat video is LAUGH. Laugh all you want at your clearly dying cat.

Phew. Despite much shuffling in The CW’s schedule, “The Vampire Diaries,” my only actually guilty pleasure in this whole world, emerges safe and sound with its prime Thursday 8 p.m. slot. In response to The CW’s scheduling announcement, Washington Post TV critic Lisa de Moraes lost her mind.

New York is changing. New York is always changing. Now it’s a place where people come to raise families; you can’t smoke in bars; the Meatpacking District is like Miami or Los Angeles or Milan or something; Times Square is like Disneyland except with more car bombs. All true. But sometimes it seems like New York is changing faster and more dramatically than you’d ever expect. Like when the place seems to be losing its most New York characteristics.

Take this article in the Home and Garden section of today’s Times. It’s about how a couple’s divorce can affect other people in the building where they live. It starts by acknowledging the cliche that New Yorkers don’t know their neighbors. Then it asserts that this is not always the case, and that when close relationships are formed within a building the ugliness of a divorce can make everyone feel uncomfortable.

“Joseph Cilona, a clinical psychologist and life coach in Manhattan, said that in the last several months he has had three cases involving clients trying to deal with troubled relationships in their apartment buildings. ‘It’s kind of a natural reaction to close the doors,’ he said. ‘But neighbors should be proactive, should talk about what’s happened and should purposely try and push things back to where they were.’”

I had to read that three or four times, with my jaw dropped open, before coming to conclusion that Dr. Cilona was not in fact advocating that neighbors try to push a divorcing couple back together-which would be an extremely intrusive thing to do, and fly very much in the face of the New York tradition of minding one’s own business. Rather, he is saying neighbors should push their respective relationships with each side of the couple back to “where they were.” But that is not very clear.

Then there’s the case of Holly F., a woman whose upstairs neighbors-a couple with three children-split up after a loud drunken argument turned physical and led to the man’s arrest.

The father spent the night in jail and was reunited with the family the next day. But within the year, he had moved out and the couple had divorced. Soon after, Holly F. moved out as well. “I became jumpy about everything,” she recalled. “And I didn’t even realize it until I got out of there. It makes the neighbors a nervous wreck. It was like a disease had spread to me, and I was an innocent bystander.”

This person moved out, gave up her apartment, because her neighbors got a divorce. In the New York housing market!

Lastly the article tells the happier story of a woman named Mary Williams who got divorced but, because of the friendly relationship she had with her neighbors, was able to take a different apartment in the same building to stay near her children. Her neighbors even gave her furniture.

“The worst aspects of living in a close space also became the best. I had a community I could go to, that reached out and helped us,” she said. “When you live here, there’s no escape. But there’s also no loneliness.”

There’s no loneliness in New York City? What?! New York City is the loneliest place in the world! It’s the whole main paradox of city life. Being alone in a crowd-this is a defining characteristic of the place. What about the guy playing the saxophone on his fire escape late on a hot summer night? You think he doesn’t feel lonely? That sound doesn’t make you feel lonely? Everyone else can hear it, the city is full of people, you don’t they all hear it, we all hear it, you don’t think it makes everyone feel lonely? Isn’t that why anyone who lives here lives here, to feel lonely?

Bowing to political reality, Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul has issued a clarification of his beliefs which includes the words, “I unequivocally state that I will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Poor guy. What have we become as a country when a man can’t affirm his belief in the rights of private businesses to discriminate based on race without then having to explain that he himself does not believe that businesses should discriminate based on race, just that they should be allowed to discriminate based on race? This is not the America I knew.

At some point within the next day or two one of you will take issue with/register your praise of/make a completely unrelated point to a post on this website and hit “submit comment.” Assuming it is not spam and is immediately approved, it will be the Awl’s 100,000th such response. That’s right, kids, we are rapidly approaching our 100,000th comment, and we could not be more excited.

Okay, well, there are a ton of things that would make us more excited (blowjobs, lifetime supplies of cat food, a reunion of Suede’s original lineup, etc.), but this is still pretty cheering. We are naturally quite grateful to all of you, who shape the direction of this site as much as we do and are responsible for creating one of the most enjoyable and vibrant communities on the web. Thanks.

To celebrate, we are going to offer a special opportunity to one of the most dedicated segments of our commenter base, by which I mean those crazies who are still leaving remarks at the bottom of this post in some misguided belief that being the person to leave the final riposte in that spot is a worthwhile aspiration. Here’s the deal: As soon as the 100,000th comment comes in-and we’re not going to tell you exactly how close we are, to keep things sporting-that thread will be closed, giving whoever has left the most contemporaneous play on the word last the, uh, distinct privilege of having indeed been that post’s final commenter. It is the least we can do. Seriously.

My dad is a man of the old school. He doesn’t use a computer and isn’t exactly interested in learning how to. (And forget about “the Internet.” Just imagine how difficult it is to explain to him what I do for a living! I gave up after about the hundredth time and told him that I’m a script doctor for anal-themed porn movies. He seemed okay with it.) He likes to gamble, and when I was a kid and arcade games started to become popular he refused to understand the point of playing them, since “what do you win? You’re just pissing those quarters away.” And he is resolutely old fashioned when it comes to banking. (The man carries his cash in a money clip, for God’s sake, although that might have more to do with the fact that he’s Italian.) A couple years ago I went out to see my folks for the weekend and when he picked me up at the train I told him we needed to swing by the bank so I could take some money out. “Uh, you might have a problem there,” he told me. “It’s Saturday, genius. Banks are all closed.” At the time I thought of it as part of his irascible charm, but I am now starting to realize that his ignorance of the workings of the ATM card might actually qualify him to be a United States Senator. Hell, he could even be on the Appropriations Committee. Although he’d probably have a hard time with all of those newfangled “press button to record vote” gizmos they’ve got now.

A new strip club in south-central Illinois is operating out of a long-unused schoolhouse that, according to the Chicago Tribune, was once a place “where people gathered to sing hymns, attend 4-H meetings and sell homemade pies.” But after the Pioneer School was sold off for a mere $36,000 to local entrepreneurs who transformed it into The School House, the place had its “homey Midwestern feel” wiped clean. Out were the 4-H meetings; in was “a poster titled ‘Class Rules’ that reads ‘Keep hands off dancers’” and a VIP room inside what was once the teachers’ lounge. The hymns are still there, though, thanks to people who protest the club nightly with a sign that reads, “Does your family know where you are? Jesus does.” No word on if the homemade pies were replaced with nightly spins of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” which seems like a crucial detail to leave out.

Uh oh. Our in-house LIBERAL ELITIST MAYBE-RACIST Cord Jefferson is back in his home state of Arizona, we have just learned from his Twitter, a trip he promised in his recent piece that argued against the Arizona boycott. There’s no telling in what ways he might be trying to enliberal the local population of poorly-educated racists of that state with his “tolerance” and “offers of friendship.”

This is very wrong.

And what makes it worse is that it’s a story about child exploitation in African cocoa production, WHICH IS A VERY SERIOUS ISSUE WE SHOULD BE SENSITIVE TO.