We’ve seen worse, but recent days have seen the thermometer dip to about 40 at night and it takes longer for the sun to warm everything up in the morning.
I took this picture a few weeks ago at about 7 a.m.
Looks cold..? It is.
That means more cuddling time for Miss Jenny, Marshal Tito and the f****g fascist depicted in the banner, pardon my French…. It also means more noms for calories and Maz has now taught Jenny to wake mommy up for them. Lots of pawing, standing on hips, face-licks with hellish breath, etc…
Tito is the only one not begging for food anymore…
Weather looks cloudy with a heart of gold
Every so often, I do forget and leave food unattended. Maz never forgets.
Pizza? Why not, s'long as there's no peppers...
Wonder what they dream of… The cat version of “the King and I”? Complete with coo’s and chirrups?
He is mine and I wuvs him and I shall call him my Lake Titicaca
Or maybe they dream of centipede bunnies crapping skittles. Who knows?
Mmmmh... Skittles.
Naturally in the real world, cats would devour the bunnies, resulting in… Well, just watch.
It’s 3:40 a.m. and I’m trying to work up a movie review. The boys are pooped and crashed in their spots on the computer desk: Tito in the basket above and Maz in the doggie bed to the side.
I want to play. Play with me.
Miss Jenny still wants to play and is getting bratty about it. She’s carrying this balled up piece of paper, dropping it in Maz’ bed and steps on him to get a reaction. No dice.
She jumps up to Tito’s lair, almost knocking the desk lamp clipped to the side. I can hear Tito sigh, but he doesn’t budge. Down she comes again, picking up her toy once more.
I keeled it.
She bats it into the space between the TV table and the wall and lunges after it, wedging her front end down there while back-pedaling with her rear.
She farts. Oh God she farted.
She comes up victorious with paper in mouth, I guess. I can’t really tell, my eyes watering and the fumes affecting my inner ear: the image and sound on the TV seem out of sync, because sound travels at a different speed after she ‘alters’ the atmosphere. I put my hands down on the desk to steady myself, Jeez… We need to change her diet progressively, but soon. Much depends on this.
All four of our kittoons here have needed a bit of socializing right from the start. It might seem that Maz Whang didn’t, but his universe was turned upside down when we adopted him, as he’d grown up a full year with Sphynx siblings, and a couple other cats and dog.
To be wrenched from his home was traumatic, and the poor beastie gacked and crapped all over himself in the cat carrier on the way to his new digs.
No camera! No camera!
We had to stop, clean him up and comfort him as best we could before driving on.
Sphynxes are social, but on their own terms, which aren’t always easy to decipher. They really are driven by the two related needs of warmth and sustenance, with much playtime in between.
Just like you test the warmth of a baby bottle prior to feeding, you have to ensure your hands are warm enough before petting Maz or he’ll recoil and dart away in shock and horror. I call this “ghosting” because that’s what his reaction makes me think of. We’ve said he’s been very good for Tito (and vice versa), drawing Tito out of his ‘goth’ period following Boober’s passing.
Strangers at first
Finally, Tito was able to chase and play to his heart’s content with the streaker, losing excess weight in the process, and bonding with, well, an alien. Even Miss Jenny finds Mazuzu irresistible: both want to nom on Maz, who’ll leap straight up a couple feet in the air and maybe growl if a tooth racks his spine. Mmmmh. Baby back ribs…
Love happens
Given Tito and Jenny’s “affection” for shoes, I suspect they enjoy Maz’ gym locker smell when it’s time to give him a bath. That’s usually a signal for us to drag him into the tub, but then they love the new cat smell just as much and are all over him again.
Affection? They have it. Tito tricks us into feeding him and leaves the food for Maz, knowing the alien always needs more. Smart Tito…
Maz grooms both Tito and Jenny when he beds down with either in the basket atop the computer desk, later gacking hairballs and meowing his discontent, but what can you do..? Jenny also grooms both, focusing on Maz’ ears in particular, an unexpected boon for us since Maz and Q-tips don’t mix well.
The mutual grooming society in action
One of the biggest changes is something Maz started and Jenny continues: helping Tito find his voice. Because he never was very vocal at all, this watchful little thing which grew into a big cat. He now trills and coos and meows, although always in the higher pitch of a kitten. And it may be early yet to tell, but I think Jenny’s going to be the same. They both will always sound like kittens.
Tito and Jenny
This may sound like a sign of arrested development but I prefer to think of it as a display of happiness, along with Tito’s joy at being picked up and carried from room to room for a few minutes, purring and discovering a new perspective on his world with wide eyes, rubbing his chin on our cheek as we do so. And Jenny’s happiness at going to sleep hugging my hand to her head, like a pillow.
Our two little feral rescues no longer have to survive on mean streets, they only have to romp and warm each other and their “cousin” from outer space.
It’s love
Love is in the air and scarcely displaced by Maz and Jenny’s farts. It’s all good.
I have a thing for feral cats, and Rudha-an has one for kittens. Feral kittens, therefore, are our favorites. We’ll never know exactly where they came from, what they went through, why they are so scared of shoes, think of nothing but murder, and yet are so hungry for affection.
Each one has a story but they’ll never tell even if they could, we just wonder as they teach us to live in the moment.
This week, here are some of my favorite photos of our pointy eared people, followed by a clip of very funny story telling. About a sloth. Enjoy.
Maz and Jenny in a tender momentTito MagnificoMazuzu: art deco or fascist icon?The Queen of Cool
And now, enjoy this very funny sloth story from Kristen Bell on the “Ellen” show.
It’s not that Maz Whang is selfish, exactly… Or even that Tito is an enabler, but… Let’s again face the fact that Maz, a bit like Bad Santa, is an eating, drinking, sh*tting machine, who zeroes in on food with purpose and violence.
He does burn through calories like a three alarm fire and prefers 80 degrees weather.
Tito would even sit on a kitchen chair, looking at us with eyes half-closed, a signal that he wants canned food, only to leave it to Maz once he showed up: in other words tricking us into feeding Maz even more.
I watch and see all
But that’s just Tito being the Big Brother, the Paraclete. Three in the morning, Maz digs at my wife, standing on her for effect. Claws are always out, by the way: he always has that sense of urgency about him, like Indiana Jones pressing his face in the wall as he is about to get crushed: “we-are-going-to-die!”
The rule is, though: no canned food until six a.m.
Which means that for Rudha-an, the window from 3 to 6 a.m. is a preview of purgatory, pummeled by this mace wrapped in leather while I (mostly) sleep soundly and justly. The way of the world is the way of the cat, perhaps especially one that looks like David Bowie in “the man who fell to Earth”.
Keeps food in the fleshy folds of his visage...
Okay, in truth, Maz is more Richard Widmark than Bowie, but he is a star.
Good thing, then, that Maz’ naked ambitions are checked by the crème brulee that is Miss Jenny. We used to joke that Maz was nuclear powered, watching him streak through the apartment, up and down the furniture and hanging from the cat tower like a monkey. But she matches him step by step and then some. And that’s no small feat.
She is so nommable
So while the Whang does his thang, the blue-eyed she-devil chases after him to steal… Well, kisses, actually.
I wuvs him
That’s right, she nuzzles both boys and grooms them to the point that we thankfully no longer need to use Q-tips on Maz’ flappers.
Maybe she can be enticed in tackling Maz when he starts his food dance at three in the morning…? No.
Nope, she’ll stand right next to him waiting for noms, maybe even egging him on. She dances to her own tune, that one: if noms aren’t forthcoming, she’ll just force Maz into a high-speed chase or chew on his leg while Tito watches from the shadows in the hallway, always waiting.
Looks like a Disney movie...
So… “Jules and Jim“, or might a “Pact of Steel” be in the works? All I know is even I often wake up from being hit by a high-speed feline cannonball, making me yell “F****G FASCIST!!!” like Jeff Lebowski…
It’s another manic Monday and that requires a bit of humor. I tend to surf the net until something catches my eye. That usually results in a snowball effect of memory jogs and link chasing. That is pretty much what happened in this case.
I found this video.
The above video immediately reminded me of my favorite Ab Fab bit that I just had to share.
Paraskevidekatriaphobia, the irrational and morbid fear that something really, really, but really bad is going to happen when the calendar turns to Friday the 13th.
Irrational? But there is a greater fear about a more definite and immediate threat of getting your head ‘sploded by cats. And there’s no name for that yet.
0927 hrs - 1/13/2011: they stopped speaking as I walked into the kitchen
Even Miss Jenny was excluded from their conversation… Whatever, man… ‘Spect the ‘stache…
Walrus? Walpurgis? Tom Selleck?
Eventually, Maz ambled back into the living room and “parked” himself in front of the television until…
I make melon go kablooie
Maz being nothing if not excessive, he ‘sploded another head, lifting his paw under the strain. Either that or he was passing gas.
See what I did there? No? Watch again!
For those who haven’t mastered their powers yet, and I pray they don’t, Tito recommends starting with something easy like the photobomb…
My argument is that science often attempts to recreate naturally occurring phenomena by technological means, and that the results often are subject to the “law of unintended consequences”.
Over the past several decades, Hollywood has been instrumental in ‘gently’ opening the lid of the Genie’s bottle, through movies and television series designed to familiarize people with what was just over the horizon. Today, web instruments, like memes for instance, are used with similar intent.
We see hints poop up everywhere until they tend to coalesce into messages picked up and disseminated further by mass media.
Case in point, as we’ve all read and heard: the internet is made of tubes… The internet is made of cats… Fear the cat butt… Photos of cats’ eyes glowing in the dark “assuming direct control”… And now, cat farts. Why? To get a sense as to where this all might lead, let’s first have a look at NASA’s recording of solar events to analyze their occurrences and effects, using technology developed at LawrenceLivermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The technology, developed to improve computer chips’ manufacturing specifications and performance, was used to great effect by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Below is a photo montage of slides taken by NASA’s vehicle:
Solar slides taken by NASA’s SDO
Now for comparative purposes is a now familiar capture of Miss Jenny’s fart using a mass spectrometer:
Mass spectrometer assisted photographic capture of cat poot.
While there do appear to be similarities, the shapes and energy releases (swirls and lightning) in the cat’s fart seem to display a more organized pattern, maybe even a design. But I’ll leave the potentially religious considerations to proponents of either Ceiling Cat or Basement Cat, and concentrate on the science.
The releases of energy, discovered by the LLNL scientists have been analyzed in conjunction with a researcher at Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), and have been shown to be ‘influenced’ by emissions of light particles popularly (and erroneously) referred to as “laser eyes”.
Jenny’s fart cloud reacting to photonic emissions from Tito’s peepers
Notice the realigning of molecules and energy. An instrument developed jointly by LLNL and SLAC is used to measure the pulse by pulse levels of energy of an X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL).
Now, the XFEL’s ability to capture atoms and molecules in motion with minimal disruption led to another intriguing discovery at SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) program: molecules in cats’ farts are imprinted with data and react to photonic emissions from their eyes (the cats’, not the molecules. And if you don’t stop cracking jokes in the back, you’ll get to stay after class).
My theory is that a cat farting on a human is simply an attempt to fully communicate with us, by ‘flagging’ all of our senses, and making us inhale information, so to speak. This process, or more accurately ‘collection of processes’ is now the subject of study for applications ranging from data storage and management to renewable energy (they cannot stop farting, it seems). So if the law of unintended consequences does apply, we may well end up with complete world domination by cats and find ourselves in the litter box… Remember:
Regrettably, I need to talk about the passing of two of my favorites… Let me rephrase that: the passing of gas by Mazuzu “Mace” Whang and Jenny N.
This is another dimension to the old “fear the cat butt” slogan, such as the one I wrote about in “when the nitty gets real gritty”.
Mazuzu farts, Tito is camouflaged
When I grew up, our cats were indoors/outdoors with a large yard in which to romp. Our current crop of kittounes are housebound, but still get plenty of exercise. So, why they should squeeze out the foulest SBDs* on a semi-regular basis, I have no clue.
There’s no competition to eat, they all have plenty and stress-free nomming sessions.
Peas in a pod, farts in a box...
I have no idea whether Tito ever cuts the cheese, but there is no doubting the other two open up the valves of hell whenever they get heavy petting.
The most foul? Miss Jenny. That’s right, and I can tell when it’s her as the air takes on a different hue and seems to shimmer as in the summer heat. That’s just before the cloud envelops you like an overly friendly drunk who hugs you and won’t let go and follows you all the way to the window.
Jenny's fart photographed with a mass spectrometer
You best start the fan, because the fiendish aerosol hangs about for a while and sounds travels slower through it: in her farts, no one can hear you scream. It even generates its own lightning!
No. There is no silver lining to those clouds… As to Maz, you can hear the faintest “buzz”, a bit like a distant boat motor and get a look of heavy sarcasm: “there’s more room outside than inside”, it seems to say. Then you feel like someone pelted you with rotten eggs and cat food.
