Yesterday, browings the internerd, we were intrigued by a little video linked from BoingBoing of a cat in a box tooling around a workshop on a set of wheels. The video [QT] purportedly showed us Elvis, a cat who'd lost his hind legs in an accident with a truck, and Chris Bertocchini, a roboticist who's Team BioHazard were champs in Comedy Central's BattleBots.
Though the clip was from 2001, we thought it was interesting enough to merit some follow-up. C'mon -- helping disabled pets? Fighting robots? We'd joked about a robot named Elvis, but a cyborg cat named Elvis? So after a quick search revealed that Chris is just down 101 in Belmont where he runs Robot Books and just started Battle Kits, we shot him an email. But there are no books or kits for your suffering early-adopter of a pet, sadly. He wrote us back to let us know it was all a hoax.
The good news is that Elvis (the cat) Bertocchini is fine and dandy, so there's that, at least. And Chris is lucky there's no law against cruelty to animal lovers, since there's gonna be a lotta broken cat-loving blogger hearts at the SFist headquarters today -- and maybe even some open weeping when they read about real disabled cats overcoming their disabilities and peruse photos of carts for pets with mobility problems (though the pictures of dogs wearing diapers are always good for a chuckle).
Still from the joke video in question.