It was funny enough when Blizzard's World of Warcraft gave you the option of owning pets, including Maine Coon cats, and players discovered that talking about their pets in Chat Channels filtered "Coon" as profanity.

On Tuesday, they quietly changed the name of the cat without announcing it, regardless of the fact that Maine Coon is a real type of cat, and the state cat of Maine. (Maine Coons are giant cats once thought to have been mated with raccoons. Kitty is a Maine Coon). People quickly noticed that their pets had changed and complained. The official Blizzard response included:

This non-combat pet name was changed as there were a number of concerns expressed by players that had never heard of this particular breed of cat. To them it seemed offensive, which was never our intent upon introducing this pet. I'm sorry if you're the owner of such a pet and your desire to love it has lessened since patch version 1.6. We weren't that dedicated to the name to attempt to educate people on its meaning. It's a non-combat pet. Had the name Thrall [Leader of the Horde] created an upset, we would've handled the issue entirely different, or perhaps we would've just changed his name to Green Tabby. I'm sorry that some of you aren't happy with our decision to change the name of the pet formally known as Maine Coon .

The juicy irony of this story is that in an effort to make the kitty less racist, they renamed it Black Tabby.

My site was down for a few hours yesterday morning. Submitting a ticket to tech support led to the discovery that my web host (which, to date, has always seemed like a one man company) has outsourced Tech Support to India.

The Emmy nominations are out, with Lost getting 12, Arrested Development getting 4, and Alias getting 4. I find it amusing that Jennifer Garner really deserved a nomination for her acting in the first three seasons, and she gets one for the season where she phoned in half the episodes and wasn't in the other half (no doubt busy making babies, a.k.a. "suffering back injuries on the set of Elektra", with Ben Affleck).

The final movie of Old Funny Movie Week is this Nutrigrain commercial, titled "I feel great!". If you don't have a Quicktime movie player, this movie should give you the incentive to go download it (10MB MOV)