As a devotee of Tufte, I'm generally against chartjunk. Graphical elements that obscure interpretation of the data occasionally have a useful role to play, but more often than not that role is to entertain the expense of enlightenment, or worse, to actively mislead. So it's with mixed feelings that I refer you to catterplots, an R package by David Gibbs to create scatterplots using outlines of cats as the symbols.

But hey, it's the Friday before a long weekend, so here's a poorly annotated catterplot of households with dogs vs households with cats in the 48 continental US states (plus DC):

The data behind this chart I found at data.world, which looks to be an interesting new resource for data sets. (Registration is required to download data, however.) The code behind the chart is below. (If you want a variant featuring Nyan Cat, try cat=11.)

dogscats <- catplot(dogs, cats, size=0.1, catcolor=c(0.7,0.7,0.7,1),
                    cat=3,
                    xlab="Households with dogs",
                    ylab="Households with cats",
                    main="Household Pet Ownership in US States")

The catterplot package is available for on GitHub at the link below.

GitHub (GibbsDavidl): Catterplots