Today Grand Central, aka The Artist Formerly Known As Warner Books, announced that it had just paid $1.25 million for a book about a cat that lived in a library. The book, to be co-authored by a librarian and a dude who has pooped out a bunch of those Chicken Soup books, is meant to be a cat-lady answer to dog-person sleeper hit Marley and Me, which sold for $200,000 three years ago and has since sold almost two million copies. "You can't underestimate the market out there for people who love animals," said Karen Kosztolnyik, who will edit the book. Close, Karen! While there may be a dog-loving sucker born every minute, it's not so easy to shift kittycat pablum (um, unless maybe there's a mystery plot!) But seriously, crazy cat ladies are many things—single and living in unclean cat-hair apartments littered with kitty litter, etc—but they're not dumb. They're intimidatingly smart. That's why they're single. Well, that and the cats.

Iowa Library's Cat Has A Rich Second Life As A Biography [NYT]

As regular readers/depressives have no doubt surmised, most every weekend around here is about reading the New York Times — that is, ogling the pictures and sniffing the newsprint — and convincing ourselves that, just like Harry Hurt, we could do interesting things if we wanted to, that we aren't just inputs to an industrial contraption presently on a 48-hour cigarette break. The glossy girth of the Sunday Times serves such purposes quite well (so stay in your lane, weekday colleagues); the flimsy flaccidity of Saturday, not so much. Take today's Arts section, which contains reviews of four television programs premiering this weekend. Three of them — 75 percent! — are shows about animals.

Much as we admire the whippersnappers who bring us Weekend Gawker, we must take issue with their decision to award the coveted "Best cat-related remark" T.M.I. award to someone other than Sue Pike, who is a "slender 45 year old" from Prospect Heights who is "in the field of animal communications." That's right: Sue is a kitty psychic! The Times finds her tending to the needs of aggressive Gatti and shy Lola, whose voices she channels in a "high-pitched girlish tone." After the jump, Gawker's own Mulder and Scully (guess who is who!) try to figure out whether Sue really has the power of sight beyond sight. Hint: no.

Our stomachs clenched the moment we read these out-of-place words on former Seventeen editor Atoosa Rubenstein's MySpace: "current mood: sad." Huh? It turns out that Atoosa's cat Thurston—who was to star in "Psychic Kitty, a series of psychedelicized videos on her MySpace page"—is suffering from inoperable cancer. We have to be honest with you: we are genuinely bummed. We're sort of crazy cat ladies ourselves, and also, death is sad! Everyone, let's all take a moment to cherish the cats, dads, and over the top media-ish personalities in our lives, okay?

Anna Nicole Smith's death has left us all yearning for closure, and now, we find it the one place we still can: in the resolution of the Petrescu cat-couple fash week hoax mystery, which Radar had guessed was something to do with Sasha Baron Cohen character Bruno. As the Wall Street Journal online reports, Nicolae and Elisabeta Petrescu are figments of Trovata designer John Whitledge's fertile imagination. We know nothing wants us want to buy a high-end frock like a twenty-pound drugged tabby. Seriously!

Heard on the Runway [WSJ]