It’s Friday, and I sort of played hookey from the serious business of this blog. Sometimes, with this stuff, you’ve got to take a breather.
So, instead of the usual terrible quotes from terrible people here are some cats being cats.
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And now, without further ado, here are more kitties!
We’ve done ourselves a real disservice, separating dental hygiene and overall health, as if our mouths aren’t part of our bodies and the key to maintaining oral health isn’t oral hygiene. Can you imagine the suffering and death historically that can very likely be attributed to a lack of basic oral hygiene practices? Awful.
The other nasty one that I’ve seen people suffer horribly from is cracked teeth. Abscesses needn’t be present when the roots of your teeth are exposed! I dated a guy for a few months who wouldn’t manage his time and see the dentist despite, after years of boxing, having a lot of cracked teeth requiring root canals and other endodontic procedures. He was in agony with migraines much of the time we spent together so I suggested he spend our time at the dentist instead. Maybe, in the future we could hang out and he wouldn’t be debilitated by pain that way! He never took responsibility for his oral health despite excellent insurance coverage so that one ended.
I met another guy who, after a rugby career and years of migraines, went to the dentist for the first time. Every tooth in his mouth was cracked. Every. One. He spent months going to and from the dentist, having a procedure on each of his teeth. I can only imagine what that man’s mouth is worth now.
So, mouth guards aren’t just for looks either.
@kittehserf
Yeah it is a pretty long move but we lived here before so it’s not as much as adjusting as it would’ve been.
I note that the Pajamagram people are now selling “family sets” of pjs, which means pjs for everyone including the dogs and cats. On their website you may see pictures of this. In one of the pictures, if you enlarge it, you can see that the cat-model has its tongue out in anticipation of the treat that is evidently being used to keep its mind off the fact that its legs have been stuffed into pajamas.
I assume that the task of getting the cats into the pajamas was given to the person who had most egregiously screwed up just before the photoshoot.
I love it – gives a whole new slant to the line about “the beatings shall continue until morale improves”!
@ Zolnier – Oh, nuts! I do hope your kitty turns up! 🙁
Cats in pajamas — a very cute and totally horrible idea.
@Zolnier: I hope your cat turns up — we’ve had several cats disappear on us so I understand how it feels. However, cats are pretty resourceful and =– as one of our vets commented — the perfect predator. (The reason they sleep so much is that it only takes them a small part of the day to catch their food in the wild.) We’ve always had several cats, since we live in an old farmhouse with attached barn near open fields, so rodents are always an issue. (Our youngest cat caught 5 mice in a 24-hour period, ate 2, and generously gave the other 3 to my wife.) We love our rodent control officers. We have a cat door and a pet cafe so they can eat what they want and go in and out as they please. So every so often a stray decides that we’re their new home. (Not to mention raccoons, possums, and an occasional skunk.)
We had a huge Maine Coon Cat who was good-natured but couldn’t get along with the resident kitties, so we found him a home with some people who lived way out in the woods and he lived out his life happily — he preferred to live outside, but whenever his “owner” came out to work in the yard he followed him around supervising.
We had a very pretty, very pregnant kitty who was also very nice but unable to get along with our resident kitties. We eventually took her to the Humane Society — she was a very adoptable cat, and there is actually a shortage of kittens in NH — the SPCA actually brings in cats from other areas where neutering is less prevalent.
We had a very fluffy white cat that we called Fluffy when he was clean and Scruffy when he wasn’t. Once he got into a tussle with another kitty in a mud puddle, and you have never seen a filthier cat. Luckily he submitted to a bath without any complaint. I was fond of him but he was not really a house cat — he had obviously been on the street for a long time and had acquired a high-risk lifestyle. As expected, he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.
We currently have a black cat who appeared on our porch the summer before last and then decided in February, when nights often get down top zero or even below, that she better make friends with those large animals that serve the other kitties. She and my daughter have adopted each other, and she spends most of he time in my daughter’s room. She is very much a house/people cat, and I think she was most likely someone’s beloved furrinati who got separated by accident. Sometimes I think of our cats who’ve disappeared (and hope they found a new home — we do know of one that did — rather than being dinner for a coyote), and I wonder if there’s someone out there thinking mournfully of their beloved black beast who disappeared suddenly almost 2 years ago.
tl;dr @Zolnier — if it makes you feel any better, your cat is not necessarily deceased — they are very good at finding new homes that are supplied with willing servants in addition to being good at surviving as strays.
I’ll second the importance of dental health — my life would have been unlivable many years ago without good dental care. I recall reading a short biography of James Smithson, the British scientist who left his wealth “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.” I read a short biography of Smithson which described how he suffered from ulcerated teeth and probably never ate a bite of food without severe pain in the latter decades of his life.
Somewhat ironically, one of the subjects that Smithson investigated during his scientific career was the chemistry of tears, though history does not record whether he used exclusively “male tears”.
So can we treat this thread as a kind of open thread for less serious stuff? I want to ask a question but I don’t want to detract from the serious business in the Open Thread.
I inherited some Japanese food from my MIL’s boarder, and while most of it has English labels, some of it does not. Is there anyone here who could identify the items for me if I posted pics of the labels? Surely someone here can read Japanese.
@Emilygoddess I would think that since cats are never off-topic in any thread, My nothing in any thread about cats is off-topic. My son could probably help you with the labels. If you want, go ahead and post and I’ll ask him to look at them.
Thank you for the sympathy. Honestly the main reason I’m worried is the bloody dingos, turns out the stereotype is true but mainly applies to cats and weaker dogs.
My mother’s work cats are a mother and daughter, the mother still dotes on the daughter in her smothering way but she hates her grand kittens with a passion, luckily she’s not that bright and easy to distract. Also one of the kittens might have Down’s syndrome, I didn’t know that existed amongst cats.
Kitties are kind like that.
Zolnier, I had no idea Down’s existed among cats either!
I wouldn’t be able to read the labels on the Japanese stuff but some of it I might recognize anyway.
Or an equivalent to Down’s, that is.
I read a book on cats that claimed they pity us for being too clumsy to catch mice, so they do it for us when they’re in a benevolent mood. “Just open that can of tuna, two-legger, and maybe I’ll bring you a mouse or two in thanks.”
From what I’ve seen the cat habit of delivering mauled animals to their slaves is basically them trying to parent us, they teach their kittens to hunt in much the same way. If we actually scoffed the dead bird they might try teaching us some advanced skills in eating things.
Well then, my cats are horrible parents. One of them’s never brought me a dead thing, and the other hasn’t since, like, 2008.
@Falconer:
Maybe they’ve just decided you’re a lost cause. 😛
Well, my older cat did catch me setting a live trap when we had a mouse … I could just about hear the snort of disgust.
When I was a kid, our old mama farm cat used to bring me dead/half-dead things. She also used to try to groom me. She’d follow me through the woods and meow at me if she felt I had got too far away from the yard, and then lead me home again. All in all, I always felt that she thought I was a particularly large, stupid kitten. Not far off the mark, really!
My parents used to use live traps because there were so many mice that kill traps couldn’t keep up. Also, the frequent and repeated snapping would sometimes wake us up at night. The intent wasn’t nearly so benign, though, as they would feed any mice they caught to the dogs. They actually treated it as a kind of blood sport. 🙁
We had a big old tom when I was still in school who would regularly catch things. Once, he came in with a big fat mouse (maybe a small rat) and sat down by the piano, where my mom was noodling, and proceeded to eat his prize in public.
He used to fit in the palm of my hand. If he got into more fights, he’d have been a real Greebo.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB6AhRHc3WU&w=830&h=497%5D
Katiekins was the mightiest hunter of all our kitties: she once wiped out nine blackbirds in the space of a fortnight (bear in mind this is in the suburbs and she was always indoors at night, and most of the day). She wasn’t into presenting them, though: they were HERS. I saw her catch a bird on the wing once.
Mamie wasn’t much of a hunter but she did have a weird thing for eating birds’ feet and leaving the rest.
How did the other 15 blackbirds get away? And wasn’t your pie a bit short when you presented it to Louis?
XD
I dunno, maybe she was slacking off those days!
Luckily this was all earthside, so baking pies wasn’t a thing (my cooking skills here are of the “heat in microwave for 5 minutes then stir” variety).
Not that I’d want to give him, or anyone I liked, a blackbird pie anyway, rhyme or no rhyme. There’s a famous old brand here, Four ‘n’ Twenty, but they’re mostly famous as the water-fat-and-gunk meat pies traditionally eaten at the footy. They’re not that far off Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler’s wares.
I see you attended the same culinary school I did.