Two Cats. One Color.

“Dreaming of a white cat means good luck.” American superstition.

“Black cat or white cat: If it can catch mice, it's a good cat.” Chinese proverb.

Double the luck? Double the mice?

Matching the background to the subject doubles the impact.

And in this case, leaves the eyes, nose and ears.

Canon 5DII. HK. 17-40mm. ISO 2000. 1/25, f4.0.

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Face muscles

Cat girl interfaces with the vet.
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Cat girl: Cute.

Vet: Nice smile. Know how many muscles a cat has in its face?

Cat girl: Er…

Vet: OK. How many muscles in the human face?

Cat girl: Twenty?

Vet: More.

Cat girl: Forty?

Vet: More.

Cat girl: Fifty?

Vet: About that. From the buccinators to the occipitsla frontalis. About ten times as many as a cat.
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Cats, lolcats and language

Jocelyn claims she has no need of anyone at home but her cat.

…

Just you and the cat?

Jocelyn: Company.

Company, yes. But conversation?

Jocelyn: He talks.

He talks, yes. Meow. Talking to a cat is, is, is like…

Jocelyn: A lot passes between us.

Maybe a lot of affective stuff.

Jocelyn: Doesn’t have to be human sounds and words. Lot of those lolcats have no grammar to speak of.

I’m not talking about human sounds and words. Nice to have a cat around. Great, even.  But just answer me this, how can a cat polish your conversation skills? Meow. Hungry, are we? 

Nice pussy.

 Cookie? Sound of munching in reply, perhaps?

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The end is near

Dan and Beatrice are having dinner watching an episode of House, with Leo, the cat with FIP.

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(on screen)
Dr. House: J'ever notice, how all the self-sacrificing women in history, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa... can't think of any others, they all die alone? The men, on the other hand, get so much fuzz it's crazy.
Dr. Wilson: It's an unfair world.

Dan: You can say that again. Leo got a bad deal.

Beatrice: Is there any point in continuing the medication? Prednisone, antibiotics, painkillers, appetite enhancer, emetic. He knows it’s unfair for us follow the Hippocratic Oath.

Dan: I don’t think he could recite you the Oath. But he seems to know something is up.

Beatrice: Just sits with his legs tucked underneath.

Dan: It’s time.

Beatrice. I think so.

Dan: So when shall we do this?

Beatrice: You mean take him to the vet?

Dan: He’ll handle it. I wouldn’t know where to bury him.
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After diagnosis

Barry visits Leo who had a somewhat traumatic visit to the vet two days ago.

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Barry: You have a lucky face, Leo. I’m not just saying that like some Indian fortune teller. I mean it. You made a lot of people happy, you made a lot of people laugh.

Leo yawns.

Tired? Well, no doubt it’s the medicine. Let’s just hope… You feel a bit more comfortable after the prednisone? Did you understand what the vet said?

Leo looks up.

We’ll do our best. Medicine. Food, whatever you like to eat. And let’s just hope. You never know. Do our best to put ourselves at the tail of the bell curve. That could mean several months.

Leo settles closer.

That’s it. Nice to just sit close.

Ten minutes of silence pass.

Will say this for you. You are a good listener.

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Cats on FaceBook

Two middle-aged cats, Jemima and Lolita, are discussing behavior of the younger generation.

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Jemima: You know, my daughter, Jessica, told me she communicates with her friend by Internet.

Lolita: She can type?

Jemima: Oh no. Her owner, sorry, her pet human, types a message to her friend who says “Tell your cat, my cat Jessica says hi.”

Lolita: Don’t tell me. Then her friend’s cat sends a message back through her pet human.

Jemima: A shifted reality? We meet here on the street, talk face to face, communicate blink to blink. Humans type messages to each other over the Internet and sometimes meet. But modern cats locked up in apartments get second-hand messages through humans over the Internet and never meet.

Lolita: Matrix? They're not aware of a parallel universe?

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Great shot

Case calls from the computer room: “Come here.”

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House: What is it? I’m watching ER.

Case: You’ll like it.

House: Who says I’ll like it? (nevertheless getting up from TV)

Case: Isn’t he cute? What do you think?

House: Hmph. My prognosis? If he doesn’t become vegetarian, he could get a parasite from all the fish fingers he’s being fed.

Case: Great snap don’t you think?

House: Admittedly a great shot. But at the risk of sounding curmedgeonly, I’d suggest if he’d been shot on 4 megapixels instead of 26 KB, he'd have stood up sharply at attention and his whiskers would been included, and this would have been a truly great shot. Timing is all, yes, or as Cartier-Bresson would have it, the decisive moment. Devil is in the details. Still, a great shot.

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Naming a cat

Annabelle advises Gretchen on naming her new resident.

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Gretchen: No idea what to call him.

Annabelle: The naming of cats is… how did it go?

Gretchen: A difficult matter.

Annabelle: He looks like Hodge.

Gretchen: Who?

Annabelle: Samuel Johnson’s cat. Hodge.

Gretchen: Hodge. Hmm. He looks like a Hodge.

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Blind cat, diabetic human

I am a cat. I have a problem. I can’t see well. I heard my pet human, Gutman, talking to a friend last night.

Friend: Why keep a blind cat?

Gutman: I’ve had him nine years since he was a baby stray.

Friend: Coping with diabetes, it must make life more complicated for you?

Gutman: Not so much. We have something in common. We both move slowly.

Friend: You walk?

Gutman: I walk. And that’s where the cat is good for me. I am his eyes. And he can’t see so he walks cautiously. At the same rate as I walk with my stick.

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Sub-prime mortgages

Two men, both called John, who don’t know each other, but actually live in the same apartment block, stop at a fence on the way home and look at a cat.

John Wan: Do you know him?

John Tu: It’s Koge. He goes around the neighborhood asking for food where he can get it. Apparently he used to be kept by an old lady but she went to hospital and now he has no human.

John Wan: Sad. You live near here?

John Tu: In the apartment block behind.

John Wan: Really? So do I. 101. You are?

John Tu: 801. Ground floor. You find the ground floor damp?

John Wan: Especially in winter. You’re not going to buy?

John Tu: I might when I’ve saved enough. And wait until the subprime meltdown blows over.

John Wan: Interesting you should mention subprimes. Very funny interview, or rather a skit, on YouTube from ITV. Your name is…?

John Tu: John Tu.

John Wan: How odd. I’m John Wan.

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Dismembering a friend

Leo is restless because the door to outside is closed and his catnip is shut away in the kitchen drawer.
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Fifi: Stop pacing Leo. Sit down and meditate.

Leo: Meditate? Huh!

Fifi: And stop drinking my beer. You’ve got your own water.

Leo: She’s drinking Leo Beer and won’t even give me a sip? Humans! Bah!

Fifi: Look, Leo, on TV. Program on leopards. Wow! Run, leopard, run.

Leo: Reminds me. Time for killing practice.
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cat nip

Delivery man drops off fresh cat litter, two kinds of cat biscuits and...

Fifi: Leo, what's this?

Leo: Meow.

Fifi: It's a new scratching pad, Leo.

Leo: Scritch, scratch.

Fifi: Leo, scritch, scratch. Why so much?

Leo: Scritch, scratch.

Fifi: Ah, catnip. They put catnip on the scratching pad. So you'll bond with it.

Leo: Scritch, scratch.

Fifi: Leo, enough. You'll wear it out. I'm going to hide it.

Leo: Meow.
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Wright Stuff

Scene 34 from Shriek IV. The pet human Leo keeps is a mite scratchy because Leo says it will rain on Monday when she plans to go paragliding for the first time.

Leo: And you may think it's a piece of cake but it's not quite as easy as it looks.

Leo's human: How would you know? You never go as far as the Slopes. At least you've never said.

Leo: Oh I've been. I've flown further than you could imagine. My instructor praised me for having a nice touch on the reins.

Leo's human: Reins? Ha! They're called brake lines, not reins.

Leo: Whatever. Anyway, you have to be made of the Wright stuff to fly.

Leo's human: And land.

Leo: And land lightly. Something we Four-Foots can manage more gracefully than you Two-Foots.
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Slugs, crows and the French

Editor: Most people seem to regard language use as a uniquely human behavior. What’s the difference between animal and human languages?

Author: There's a distinction between signaling systems and what we call languages. A traffic light with red and green lamps is a signaling system. Red = stop. Green = go.

Editor: And language use might be turn left at the next light, there’s a teashop, their organic apricot muffins actually taste quite decent?

Author: Fair enough. So let’s say many animal species do have signaling systems. Some are quite rudimentary, like those used by slugs or sponges. Other species might have more extended systems like those used by crows, cats or chimpanzees.

Editor: Slugs stop at traffic lights?

Author: Admittedly, slugs are not highly sociable. An antenna waved, a waggle in the slime trail perhaps.

Editor: And crows?

Author: Listen to them. Watch them. They have signaling systems. Some say even unique to local crow communities. So a crow living in the U.S. might not understand a crow from France.

Editor: If it could fly that far. Speaking of the French… human languages…

Author: Not everyone would agree…

Editor: Now, now.

Author: Humans signal too. We turn red, wave our arms. We use persuasive expressions like “I’d suggest…” or we use words like “by the way,” to signal a topic shift which is something not even chimpanzees do. But more than that, we use language to tell stories and discuss ideas. So we've made this big jump, we've gone from signaling to communicating through language. And the French have actually always been pretty good at that. They've always practised a lot.
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Tree socialization and cat chat

I heard pohutukawas from the island don’t grow well here on the mainland and the mainland trees don’t grow on the island. Same tree, different subspecies someone said.

Well there are Smiths and there are Joneses, aren’t there now. And they don’t talk to each other. Couldn’t have that. They are different.

That your cat?

Cat? Oh yes. I belong to him. At least he thinks he owns me.

I heard cats can communicate. Does he talk you?

Oh yes. Blinks a lot.

And I heard cats have feelings.

I’ll say. He gets annoyed, gets moody, gets sulky. Then he purrs which means he is happy or is going to sleep. And then I’ll say something and he’ll tell me it’s a lot of nonsense. Very cynical about what I say.

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Keeping a war story on track

Who did the cat belong to?

The ship. But the cook mainly looked after it.

It went to sea with you?

Oh yes. And if the ship went down, the cat did too.

When was this taken?

I’d just commissioned her in Belfast. 358. But she was shot from under us within a month, and then I got 454 and most of the crew were transferred too.

You chose who got to go?

Yes.

And 454 was shot up too?

In a big way. Middle of the night, shell hit us in the magazine. We disengaged action, hove to, I went below, and there were half a dozen fires burning – the cordite had caught fire, so I grabbed the extinguisher, put most of them out, then the hatch above was pulled open, and the blokes on deck were peering down, so I grabbed the shells, they could have gone up any moment, and told them to heave them over the side.

Scary.

Didn’t have time to think about it. One or two of the ABs hesitated, so I let them have it, and tossed the shells up, and they threw them in the water.

How many shells?

Three. In fact, one of them exploded as it hit the water. We were pretty lucky.

But you made it back to port?

Just. But the boat needed a total refit and so that ended the war for me.

And for this you were given the DSC?

As I said, I didn’t have time to think. It had to be done. If we were to avoid being blown to kingdom come.
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Captions

Is it posted on lolcats?

Not yet. I’m trying to think of a suitable caption.

How about… oh…

See? It’s not easy.

Any thoughts?

I had thought of something like ‘MY shoulder! SCRAM!’

Brief enough and sufficiently authentic for cat language.

Just so. The appropriacy of brevity. Never use two words when one will do.

Hmm.

I think it was Thurber who said something about a picture always being dragged down to the level of its caption.

Thurber also said he was not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.

Good caption.

Bit long for a cat, though.

Hmm. A mere cat.

leopard cat Ashera

Soooo cute.

A leopard cat.

What does he eat?

Cat food. And can be walked on a leash. So it says.

So it says?

Well, this is all I've been able to find on it. There was a video on yahoo yesterday, but it's not accessible today. Why did the story disappear so quickly? I got curious and did a little digging.

And?

Well the guy who marketed these things, for 22K a pop...

Twenty-two thousand? Dollars? Per cat?

Per cat. He has a history of running up debts and scarpering, did time in Britain for fraud, started some hi-tech companies that went bust, fired employees without paying them, now he's into cats, exotic ones. Highly priced.

Is that the cat? It looks somewhat leopard-like but... 22K? When you can get a shelter cat for for free, a Siamese for a few hundred and a Bengal for 3K.

You read comments on cat blogs and they are flaming him. No wonder he's dropped off the net. And no wonder I can't google an image of him.

Cat nap

How was your day?

Well, it began pretty badly. I was woken at 5 AM to the sound of a bang in the kitchen.

Burgled again?

Cat burglar. A real cat. He’d knocked over the trash can in the kitchen. Koge, the local ginger cat, he pulled open the screen door with his paw, Ive seen him do this before, and found some mussels I’d thrown out.

You threw out mussels?

A month past their use by date. Anyway, he’d wolfed the lot and took off when I woke up.

You chased him out?

Didn’t have the heart. He's a stray. He wandered out the door and sat outside licking his chops for a bit.

Thought he was just the cat’s whiskers?

Cat’s pajamas, given the hour. Anyway, as the Norwegians say, it’s better to feed one cat than many mice.

Leonard Fletcher

Hello Leonard.

I'm Leo.

Sorry. Fancy a shrimp?

Thought I could smell something besides you.

Hey, wait a second. Back off. Let me get it out of the paper.

Grrr. Gimme. Gimme.

Ow! You slashed me. Look, blood! How about I give you the shrimp if you do that fetch trick.

Just give me the shrimp or I'll shred your hand.

Nice kitty. You've had your rabies shots, haven't you, Leo?

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