Mere weeks after the death of Meow the Obese Cat, another flabby tabby has stolen the show. Oliver Lee Bateman asks the $64,000 question:  Too much cat, too soon?

Still struggling to recover from the death of media darling Meow the Obese Cat, I awoke this morning to find that the intrepid muckrakers at The Sun (who apparently think nothing of running a daring, nigh-incomprehensible headline like “Internet Porn Boy Aged 12 Raped Girl“) had unearthed another flabby tabby:

Sponge Bob the nine-year-old tom weighs a huge 2st 5lb — as much as a grown labrador or four-year-old kid. At 2ft with a 27in waist he’s believed to be the world’s fattest cat. He’s so big he can’t clean himself and struggles to walk. He ballooned as his frail owner could not regulate his food. Now he’s at a shelter, where boss Kendra Mara said: “We opened up the carrier and 15 people stood staring at him. He’s the largest cat we’ve ever seen.”

This story, distressingly light on the details and heavy on the cat puns (Sponge Bob is on the “Catkins Diet,” natch), mirrors the earliest, error-filled reports about Meow the Obese Cat.  Meow, we would learn later, hadn’t been abused and was much older than his reported age.  Regardless of the facts of this case, Sponge Bob has begun to make the rounds, with a nice feature on Business Insider, a cameo on BuzzFeed’s Twitter account, a blog post on the Good Men Project from Oliver Lee Bateman, and the announcement of a scheduled appearance on The Today Show.

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Although he can’t match Meow’s sheer triple-chinnedness and delightful deer-in-the-headlights stare, Sponge Bob has a lot of advantages that his predecessor lacked.  For one thing, he’s already in the Big Apple, where he’s being cared for by the good people of the Animal Haven Shelter.  Consequently, when he tours the New York-based chat show circuit, he’s unlikely to suffer the same sort of travel-induced stress that may have punched Meow’s ticket across the Rainbow Bridge.

On top of that, Sponge Bob is 9 years old.  Unlike Meow, who was 5 years old and battling a severe urinary tract infection, Sponge Bob has already proven that he’s a survivor.  Granted, he doesn’t move well and probably has at least one paw in the grave, but he’s made it this far and appears to be in it for the long haul.  Animal Haven seems to think that he’s more or less adoption-ready, which wasn’t the case with Meow, whose various health problems led him to being kept in foster care despite extraordinary demand from thousands of Facebook admirers who wanted a piece of that ginormous pussy.

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Although I hope that Sponge Bob winds up getting adopted by a wonderful family that will love him for the cat he is and the much lighter cat he may eventually become, I’m not ready to fully commit to this inane pseudo-story.  I opened my heart to big Meow, only to wind up heartbroken when Meow’s heart broke under the strain of supporting so much weight (so much “w8,” in fact, that one is tempted to refer to it as “w9″).

The most unsettling part of this is how much Sponge Bob resembles Meow.  I suppose there are only so many ways for a morbidly obese house cat to look, but isn’t it disturbing that they’re both (mostly) orange?   What’s happened here?  Is this the newstertainment version of Mulholland Drive?

When Sponge Bob assumes his rightful seat on Anderson Cooper’s narrow lap, will we forget that Meow ever existed?  By some feline law of superposition, will Sponge Bob’s vast flesh be layered atop Meow’s in our collective memory bank?  Or will they merge into a single super-sized cat signal reminding us that, at least on teh internetz, Gresham’s law remains in effect?

Photo–Animal Haven Shelter