April 24th, 2009, 3 Comments »
I’m short on time today, so (perhaps in a nod to Gill’s feline Friday posts), here’s a Japanese cat in a box:
You may recognize this cat from such YouTube favourites as 特訓するねこ。 and 滑り込むねこ。.
October 3rd, 2007, 8 Comments »
We have this cat that spends about 40% of her time in our farmhouse. I recently discovered that she had several ticks, grossly engorged with blood, attached to her head and shoulders.
I alerted the cat’s owners–two retired British fellows who live down the street–but they seemed a little prissy on the removal. So, I consulted the Internet, put on some gardening gloves and got to work. The quarter is for scale (it, happily, didn’t come out of the cat), and to instruct my victims of the nationality of their killer:
I was quite pleased with myself–this sort of hands-on-mammals stuff really isn’t my domain of expertise.
There was a little parable in how we went about it, too. For the first tick, one of us held the cat while I tried to pull out the offending insect. There was plenty of drama, as the cat doesn’t like to be held, and I suspect she could tell everybody was tense. So, there were several aborted attempts and she only let us do it once.
The next time, I just walked up to her while she was sleeping and quietly went to work. She let me take out all three without so much as batting a, uh, claw. The lesson, I guess, is that sometimes a haiku beats a sonnet. Or is that too abstract?
July 26th, 2007, 12 Comments »
Here’s a charming story from the CBC about Oscar, a cat that lives in a Rhode Island nursing home. Oscar apparently has an unusual skill:
Oscar makes his daily rounds, waiting patiently outside rooms if the doors are closed, wrote Dosa. Once inside, the grey-and-white cat jumps onto beds and appears to inspect patients by sniffing the air.
If Oscar leaves the room, the patient isn’t likely to die that day, said Dosa.
But when the cat curls up on the bed, staff notice. They start phoning family members because the patient usually dies within four hours.
Experts are uncertain about how Oscar makes these calls–they cite scents given off by the patient or the behaviour of the nurses as possibilities.
Poppycock! Clearly the cat is secretly knocking off these poor patients when they’re not looking.
July 13th, 2007, 6 Comments »
We periodically feed this cat who lives a few doors down. She tends to eat and run, so we named her Dine and Dash. Or, if you prefer, Dine ‘n’ Dash.
Yesterdat, I was working upstairs and I heard her downstairs, yowling at the top of her little cat lungs. I eventually went down to see what the fuss was about. She’d returned the feeding favour:
It was an enormous locust or cricket or grasshopper. I don’t know how to tell the difference. But seriously, it was as long as my hand. I could have hired this one out to do stunt work in that Hilary Swank movie. Get a million of these badboys, and you’ve got yourself a plague of Biblical proportion. I searched my memory, and this is probably twice the size of the next biggest insect I’ve ever seen outside of a zoo.
As cat’s will, Dine ‘n’ Dash grew bored with her prey, and didn’t want to eat it or otherwise finish it off. I gently swept it into our dust pan and deposited it on the deck. It walked, with the plodding pace of a war veteran in chronic pain, into the fields beyond our house.
June 14th, 2007, 4 Comments »
My new Hungarian MacBook has a video camera in it. Clearly I should leave it well enough alone:
I mention a link to Wikipedia for the Basilica ta’ Pinu. Here’s it’s official site, with a peculiar, extremely brief sound cue on every page.