As you may have guesed, there’s a story behind the “kittenboo” domain-name of this site. The story goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a brilliant little animated television series called Animaniacs. Along with the general hilarity of the Warner brothers (Yakko and Wakko) and the “Warner sister” Dot, the sheer genius of “Pinky and the Brain,” and a number of other recurrent characters (a pretty complete list can be found here), there was a rather postmodern piece of absurdity called “Chicken Boo.” The recurrent gag in the Chicken Boo skits was the fact that the aforementioned chicken was extraordinarily good at imitating a human being while wearing only minimal disguises; every episode featured Chicken Boo doing something human-like, and then eventually being disclosed to be a six-foot-tall chicken — which resulted in his being chased away by irate humans.

My wife Holly and I had two cats when we were in college, and these two cats (Aurora and Arabella; Arabella, unfortunately, died in 2008 after a long bout with cancer, and Aurora passed on at the ripe old age of 18, but we have since acquired five additional cats — sisters Cocoa (deceased) and Caramel, our “big orange” former stray Mango who showed up on our doorstep one summer afternoon (deceased). and the two “little orange” brothers Finn and Poe — who continue this proud tradition) delighted, as cats often do, in thinking of themselves as human beings: getting up to eat on the kitchen table, trying to use the sink, and generally acting as though they owned the place. So they quickly became, collectively, the Kittens Boo.

When Holly and I were married in 1995, we made up the programs for the ceremony on our computer, and we wanted to add some kind of fake corporate copyright notice to the back of the programs. After not much thought we settled on “Kitten Boo / Get Off That Table Productions.” (“Get off that table!” was, of course, something we said to the Kittens Boo all the time, to stunningly little effect.)

Over the years since then, “Kitten Boo” has appeared whenever either of us felt the need to provide something that looked like a corporate copyright: on films produced by and for one of the youth groups we ran, on lecture slides, and so on and so forth. So when it came time to create a website to host and syndicate assorted content, what better name to select for the domain?