Today, my admirable and gracious colleague, Megan Burbank, arts editor for our sister publication, the Purrtland Mercury, has posted a piece that nicely summarizes our ongoing argument about which Pacific Northwest city hosts the most cat people.

Distrustful of the numbers she gleaned from her "reliable" sources, I decided to draw up a Slog poll to determine for my own damn self the number of cat people in Seattle. The Slog poll results: We have 287 single dudes with a cat + 264 partnered dudes with a cat + 195 single ladies with a cat + 247 partnered women with a cat. So, according to just the people who voted in that narrow window of time, that's 993 cat owners. Emotionally, that's more than a million.

In her post, Burbank called into question the legitimacy of our tally, writing:

at least one Stranger commenter—a cat-owning man who, by his own admission, DOES NOT LIVE IN SEATTLE—claims to have responded to the poll in the affirmative. I'm sure he just wants his cat ownership pride to shine, but that doesn't change the fact that he's set a precedent for CARPET BAGGERS stuffing the ballot box.

Since we have no real way of knowing who is voting honestly and who is carpetbagging, I say we agree on a margin of error of +/- 60 percent, given that a 2002 study from the University of Massachusetts—Amherst shows that 60 percent of people lie at least once during the course of a ten-minute conversation.

Following my lead and despite her suspicions, Burbank has created a poll of her own so that we may come to some kind of conclusion. If you live in Portland, I guess you ought to go vote. If you don't live in Portland, vote anyway, and then tell Megan in the comments that you voted even though you don't live in Portland.

While I anxiously await the results, I'll peruse the photos in this new calendar of Russian Orthodox priests posing with their kitties.