I seri­ously doubt this is an attempt at viral mar­ket­ing or cross-promotion on the part of Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Fox for the upcom­ing "Simp­sons" movie, but it turns out that the Crazy Cat Lady really does exist, but her name isn't Eleanor Aber­nathy. It's Mary Kalin-Casey.

Accord­ing to The New York Times, this woman, who I'm guess­ing is either try­ing to sniff out a quick pay­check or is really just that much in need of atten­tion, is very upset at Google and the new Street View fea­ture on their Maps ser­vice. She claims that the ser­vice is an inva­sion of her pri­vacy because, using the Street View, you can faintly make out her cat in the foto of her apart­ment building.

In a post to Boing­Bo­ing, Ms. Kalin-Casey writes:

"I'm all for map­ping, but this fea­ture lit­er­ally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my cur­tains now."

Now, as I was read­ing the arti­cle, my first thought was that she was one of those peo­ple like my grand­mother who just fears tech­nol­ogy and the inter­net in gen­eral. But as it hap­pens, she's a for­mer movie critic for Reel.com! And she's wor­ried about privacy…

In my opin­ion, noth­ing posted online relin­quishes one's right to pri­vacy, but the fact that some­one can see a [very] blurry pic­ture of your cat's face from a pub­lic street is NOT an inva­sion of your privacy!

I guess what both­ers me the most about this is the fact that this woman is so self-involved or fear­ful as to think that the pub­lic at large is really that inter­ested in spy­ing on her cat using the inter­net. Although, in a world of lol­cats, it's entirely pos­si­ble that I could be wrong.

It's yet another exam­ple of how this Amer­i­can pop­u­lace is dri­ven first and fore­most by fear instead of any­thing resem­bling logic or reason.

Gotta love the Crazy Cat Lady.

The Simp­sons Movie is in the­aters on July 27th.