Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: About a Cat

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  • Hadyn Green,

    I had this morning off work which meant I could sleep in, or so I thought. Instead my two cats decided to chase each other back and forth across the bed and everytime they would "accidentally" land on my stomach or crotch.

    Bastards! If they were so super-cute...

    Birds are the worst things for them to catch, you'll be finding feathers for weeks.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 2090 posts Report Reply

  • Che Tibby,

    rats could recognize the rhythmic differences between Dutch and Japanese sentences, but not if the words were replayed backwards

    god. damn. it.

    know i need to know if i'm more cognizant than you average rat...

    anyone have a site i can download some dutch and/or japanese mp3 to play backwards?

    the back of an envelope • Since Nov 2006 • 2042 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    I also need to know but am preparing myself to have my ego severely battered....

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • daleaway,

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    I dunno, this site is great for learning Japanese and there is plenty of audio on there.

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • Thrash Cardiom,

    Birds are the worst things for them to catch, you'll be finding feathers for weeks.

    When we moved into our current house the neighbour was breeding white doves. He had a dozen or more and they lived freely, roosting in the trees at the end of the property.

    One day I was in our reading room (reading) and looked through the dining room into the kitchen and saw our cat with its head in the pantry. I called it and it pulled its head out with a mouthful of paper towels which I thought very odd, even for a cat.

    It was actually a nicely peeled dove. The head, feet, wings and tail were there along with skin of the body holding it together. The cat dropped it and left.

    Over the next month we found white dove bits and feathers all through the house. Even now, some 4 years later, we can move some object in an obscure part of the house (very large house) and find white feathers.

    The neighbour moved out shortly thereafter, presumably to preserve his rapidly reducing dove population.

    CHB • Since Nov 2006 • 55 posts Report Reply

  • wendyf,

    If we had been able to afford a divorce I would have sought one, naming our cat as co-respondent. My darling had a beard and it was the cat's delight to curl himself around my darling's neck, licking lasciviously at his hairless head, eyes half-shut, purring with undisguised delight.

    Once, long ago, I was away for a couple of weeks. My husband picked me up from the train ( I said it was a long time ago ) and when we got home there was Cat, curled up on my pillow on the marital bed. Insolent is the word for how he looked at me, before standing, arching his back in a slow stretch and then removing himself from the bed and the room.

    Christchurch • Since Nov 2006 • 88 posts Report Reply

  • Paul Litterick,

    I heart Colin.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 1000 posts Report Reply

  • Idiot Savant,

    I think you'll find it's Kalahari bushmen, not k/calamari; the latter being a seafood.

    Or an African tribe who have been corrupted by Great Cthulhu.

    Palmerston North • Since Nov 2006 • 1717 posts Report Reply

  • Idiot Savant,

    My problem with both our present cat and the previous one is not the eating of the live cicadas so much as the wandering around the house with the live beastie still chirping away in the cat's mouth while it looks for an unsuspecting room to release it in to have a lovely "guilt-free' play…

    One cat I know used to use the bathtub to play circus maximus with captured mice.

    Naturally, the "lions" always won.

    Palmerston North • Since Nov 2006 • 1717 posts Report Reply

  • Jacqui Craig,

    ... wandering around the house with the live beastie still chirping away in the cat's mouth

    When my cat does this her whiskers twitch in time to the cicada's chirps, I swear sometimes the tips meet each other over her nose. I have to remove myself from the vicinity before the crunching begins.

    She's a blotchy tabby like Colin and the stripes are really quite marvellous, there's a patch at the base of her skull that's almost Art Nouveau in detail. Apparently blotchy tabbies are a mutation of the regular tabby that first appeared in England in the 1800s, and it's gradually spreading out and taking over the regular tabby pattern. /geek

    Auckland • Since Apr 2007 • 28 posts Report Reply

  • rodgerd,

    the wandering around the house with the live beastie still chirping away in the cat's mouth

    When you have two they can play cicada rugby.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 512 posts Report Reply

  • Belt,

    "We love him, and he seems to love us"

    Errr... no.

    I know this sounds INCREDIBLY harsh, but I can't wait for my 3 remaining cats to shuffle off their mortal coil.

    One's 21. And it may survive the others.

    Still. I'm 44 and I may still have to feed those freeloading destruction machines, or two of them anyway, for at least another decade.

    I won't bore you with the damage, direct and indirect costs these creatures have imposed on my family. Landlords seem to accepts cats over dogs. How wrong they are.

    Anyway, enjoy your mistake. I'm here when you want to confess.

    Nelson • Since Nov 2006 • 49 posts Report Reply

  • johnno,

    You realise, I hope, that somewhere a cat is reading this thread - and taking notes.

    And then it practices it's Japanese.

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 111 posts Report Reply

  • Che Tibby,

    And then it practices it's Japanese.

    i think we might have discovered ross dallow's issue.

    Boy cat once stole a whole fish from a neighbour and dragged it into our lounge - the proceeds of a day's fishing

    his cat is japanese, and expected him to make sushi. "oi! you! opposable thumb-boy! make with the knife skills!"

    the back of an envelope • Since Nov 2006 • 2042 posts Report Reply

  • Hadyn Green,

    You realise, I hope, that somewhere a cat is reading this thread - and taking notes.

    On the internet, nobody knows you're a cat.

    A question for the hive mind:
    My cat came back from the vet yesterday with a cone on his head so he won't rip out his stitches. How the heck do we feed him? (We're currently holding the bowl up to his mouth) And how do we get him water too?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 2090 posts Report Reply

  • Che Tibby,

    hadyn, don't fret. the vet-cone actually has two purposes.

    1. to make him look silly

    2. to amplify noise.

    once you guys chortle at him a few times, he won't feel like eating at all.

    the back of an envelope • Since Nov 2006 • 2042 posts Report Reply

  • Hadyn Green,

    already done.

    "oh you poor little thing, (snigger)"

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 2090 posts Report Reply

  • Chockasunday,

    A blog about cats from Russell Brown?

    I didn't realise it was April Fool's day ...

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 62 posts Report Reply

  • Chockasunday,

    My cat had the cone on last year, she figured out how to eat without needing it to be taken off!

    She's not the brightest though; it took her a couple of days to realise what the clunking noise and sudden lack of progress meant while attempting to round a corner

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 62 posts Report Reply

  • Chockasunday,

    That's Damien Christie's cat?
    I thought it was a gibbon or something ...

    Bevan.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 62 posts Report Reply

  • Steve Barnes,

    Cuddly Kittens for new year!! Gimme a break, it will be cute fluffy Iranian Bunnies next. I almost chucked up my lunch.
    Where's all the hate Damn it!!!

    Peria • Since Dec 2006 • 5521 posts Report Reply

  • Kracklite,

    For those like me suffering Acute Cat Deficiency Syndrome, there is icanhascheezburger.

    One of my favourite, science-heavy blogs is Peter Watts'. They guy's a 'recovering' marine biologist and hard sf writer. The title of his blog No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons says a lot about his personality.

    He likes cats because they're sociopaths, he says.

    Be sure to check the rest of his site too - plenty of downloads, including pdfs of his novels (especially http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm|Blindsight]]).

    The short(ish) film, Vampire Domestication is a hoot - dark, tho'... and not in the way you might think.

    He's also very fond of giant squid. So there is a calamari connection too...

    (I wouldn't recommend Architeuthis dux as a meal though - too much ammonium ions in their flesh for buoyancy, which makes them taste like they've been marinated in urine... not that I...)

    The Library of Babel • Since Nov 2007 • 982 posts Report Reply

  • dyan campbell,

    she'd lie back down on her chest and tuck her paws under again, watching his face the whole time.

    So she never got to eat him then?

    No, no, the cat that comforted my boss was one of those unusual helpful cats, like the one that rescued Sonjia Davies a few years back, when she fell and broke her hip.

    Most cats - and dogs - are, as the French writer Gabrielle Colette described her animals - are "completely lacking in sympathy" and not only did they fail to provide faithful companionship, both her cat and dog would absent themselves immediately if she ever showed any sign of pain. She said that her cat looked disgusted and her dog embarrassed as they avoided her eye and briskly left the room whenever she was in any form of distress.

    This was in the context of a newspaper article she was writing about the dogs used by the Red Cross (in WW1) that would go out to no-man's-land and nose around the corpses and alert the ambulance crews to which men were still alive, so they could dash out and rescue them. She was interviewing a dog-handler (and his dog) just after the war. Her point was the animals used at the front were made of more noble stuff than her pets.

    But I have been the cowed owner of a cat who'd eat you as soon as look at you. I inherited him from an elderly guy who couldn't take him to the rest home to which he was headed - and Spotty (__Bert__ the pensioner named him) was one tough cat.

    Once, when my friends were all going on about what cute thing their cat would say if they could talk, I said mine would say "__JUST PUT THE FOOD IN MY DISH YOU STUPID WOMAN__. He would claw your ankle to signal it was dinner time. Once, in mid-wash, Spotty leaned over casually and bit my husband's bare toe with considerable force, sneezed, and ignoring Paul's scream of pain, continued washing his own foot.

    He bit every vet he ever knew. Our neighbour's dog was terrified of him. He was like Horse, in Footrot Flats.

    Spotty was the coolest, iif one of the most violent, animals I have ever known. We rarely saw anything he killed, but often he would leave a gruesome crime scene in the laundry room - splatters of blood where some animal's head (species unknown) hit the washing machine, spraying blood 3 feet up the wall, and bloody pawprints leading away from the crime scene to our room. No body, no feathers, no fur. We did wonder.

    auckland • Since Dec 2006 • 595 posts Report Reply

  • Jackie Clark,

    There seems to be two sorts of cat lovers - people who love them because of their aloofness and independence from, nay disdain of, their humans, and those of us who are more dog people but have cats and love ONLY our particular cats because our particular cats are supercuddly, and we treat them like dogs anyway. I'm like that. My cat's a superslut - when she was younger, she was the bitchcat from hell. A hissing, spitting child of Satancat. Now, though, I've trained her - as much as you can train a cat - and she's a smoochy mama. I like a smoochy mama.

    Mt Eden, Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 3136 posts Report Reply

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