The mystery of the spaghetti-eating cat has been solved.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the skinny. During a segment on binge drinking on The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, the show suddenly - and without any explanation at all - switched to a picture of a cat seated at a table eating a plate of pasta. The cat wasn't on the show and they never said why it happened. But now a spokesman for the show has explained what happened. It wasn't a technical glitch or similar error, it was actually done on purpose! The woman talking about binge drinking said something shouldn't have said, so instead of using the usual "bleep" the show went to this picture of a spaghetti-eating cat. If you watch the clip after hearing this explanation you can actually tell that's what happened, because the audio drops out too and when they come back co-host Juliet has a half-smile/half grimace on her face, as if something bad was just uttered.

When I posted the question about why the word "Amish" was bleeped from last night's My Name Is Earl, series creator Greg Garcia responded in the comments that the bleeping was his choice. After we got that comment here at TV Squad HQ (think of it as the old Letterman home office... its location changes at our whim), I called Greg's office to see if I could get more details. Here is his response:

Joel Keller: So, you were the one who decided to bleep out the word "Amish" from last night's episode?

Greg Garcia: Yeah. I mean it was pointed out to me, but not like in a... we shot that so long ago, um... It was pointed out to me; somebody was watching whatever finalization they do at NBC, and they were like, "Hey, do you remember that this (line) was the Amish thing?" And I was like, "Yeah, ooh... I don't want to start the episode out like that." I mean, it wasn't like we were making fun of the Amish.

(UPDATE: Series creator Greg Garcia responded in the comments to this post that he was the one that decided to insert the bleep. After he left the comment, I called up his office and talked to him about his decision. That conversation is here.)

As Mike S. pointed out in his review of My Name is Earl, a TV Squadder pointed out to him that the word "Amish" was bleeped out of the show right at the beginning of the episode. That TV Squadder would be me. I noticed that right at the beginning of the episode, as Earl and Randy are helping Catalina wax a hirstute neighbor, Earl's voiceover says something like this: "You know how the <silence> go around the village and raise money to build a barn? That's what we did to get Wilma to wax her moustache."

Of course, you know that weirdly silent moment was a word that was bleeped in post-production. And, given the fact that the Amish community is still reeling from the school shooting that occurred earlier this week, and that the community does exactly what Earl described, chances are pretty good that NBC bleeped the word "Amish" from the show at the last minute, in deference to the school shooting in Lancaster County, PA earlier this week.