Category: Cats

Isis, the current black cat, prefers hardbacked, 1000-page classical literature to cheap paperbacks like Deep and Swift:

Of course, she judges a book based on the amount of resistance it provides when she scratches her cheek on it, and she prefers the thicker books and hardbacks for her self-gratification.

She can’t actually read the books, gentle reader.

She’s a great cat, but not that great.

Seen on Facebook:

Isis says:

The hard part is knowing exactly when her desire will change from preening with petting to biting. Which changes faster than a quantum computer can add single digit numbers, my friends.

As I was saying, we have enough cats that we can pretty much match any cat in any meme. And if we can’t? We have an extra Fancy Feast dish with no owner yet.

Modern American society has broken down to the point that people have to hire mentors called “life coaches” to tell them the things their parents, other family members, or peers should have or should be telling them.

As you might know, gentle reader, my own parents are dead, and my stand-offish manner and backwater blog have limited me from developing meaningful friendships with peers and mentors who could guide me to bettering myself instead of spending time maintaining a backwater blog.

But not to worry. I have a new life coach.

All will be better after bacon and a nap.

Actually, I oversell it. Roark does not steal the bacon from the table; he licks it. But now he has discovered the pan in which the bacon is cooked and which sits on the counter with lots of sweet, sweet bacon grease in it, and he has, over the last couple of days, waited for us to sit down at the breakfast table before ambling over there, minding his own business, when lick, lick, lick.

I know, you come here for the incisive political coverage, gentle reader (well, reader of 2004, maybe, although the political coverage was about the same on the Mohs scale incisivity, but there were fewer blogs to choose from, so more bored readers chose MfBJN). But some days, all I have are cat memes.

With the five cats we have, it’s pretty clear that any cat picture I see, we will have a cat that looks like that (see also this).

So when I saw a meme on my cousin-in-law’s Facebook wall, I knew my cat had to respond.

Our newest cat is quite an eater. He came into the house weighing something like nine pounds, and now he’s twice that. We call him “Foot” although his chip name is Mercury because he is always where we are, at our feet, and often stopping. If you’re headed to the downstairs refrigerator or coffee pot, near his food, he will take up a position trotting ahead of you, stopping about every step to turn his head to see if you’re following, and when we get there, he’ll have a couple of bites.

Clearly, he still suffers from some sort of food insecurity even though he’s got two bowls of food to choose from all day long.

Do you want to know why we don’t change the linens frequently at Nogglestead?

It’s not because we’re lazy. It’s because there are hidden dangers.

Feline dangers.

So when we make the change the linens on the beds here at Nogglestead, it’s game on for a couple of our cats. Roark likes to jump on the bed and chase his tail while we settle sheets and blankets on him, after which he will pounce out if we turn the linen so his head is near the end.

So today I had the bright idea that I would change both the beds in the master and the guest bedrooms at the same time. That way, when he hopped onto one bed to do his little game, I could go into the other room and put on a linen before he followed me in there. Then, when he hopped up onto the bed, I could go into the other room and put on a linen.

It worked, briefly. I got fitted sheets on both beds and a flat sheet down in the master bedroom, when an unexpected complication arose.

Chimera.

Now, Chimera plays a different game: He will lie without moving on the bed and let you completely make the bed on him. Then he will lie there under the sheets and blankets all day. Which is disconcerting, because I tend to worry that he won’t be able to breathe. But so far, so good, clearly.

So all chores were suspended for a bit until the coast cleared, but I did get a little song out of it.

Bed, bed, Howard Roark.
Beddest cat in the whole dang house.
Bedder than Chimera is.
Sweeter than Athena, too.

My beautiful wife claims that the third line is not in rhythm, but I insist because Chimera lacks a hard stop, the Chimera is really sounds like three syllables instead of four.

I would claim that I am a poet, but she is, too. And although she has more magazine appearances than I not counting college journals, I have more earnings from poetry so far than she does ($100 for my poem in There Will Be War Volume X puts me ahead of a lot of poets in lifetime earnings) and more full length poetry collections (one) than she does, so I argue from authority.

I’ve discovered, as I comb through the archives from the earliest days of this blog, that I used to post more cat pictures. I also used to get hundreds of hits per day. Coincidence? Let’s try it out.

Here’s a picture of Chimera, one of the second generation, pawing at one of my Christmas presents right after I hung it on the wall:

Silly cat. A minute ago, this was blank wall. Now, he’s looking to see if there’s a wall safe behind this particular picture. Clearly, he does not know much about the installation of wall safes.

Reduced again to cat pictures. I wish I had more for you, gentle reader.

Dominique and Tristan:

Click for full size

Here at the Noggle household, we’ve moved pretty much to LCD monitors for our various workstations, and the transition is not without its victims:

The cats used to love to climb atop the nice warm CRT monitors to nap. Now, this eMac is the last remaining CRT system in the house, and Galt vows to defend it.

It’s better to be safe than sorry, so Tristan practices what he would do in the event of an earthquake:

When the other cats are flying through the air like extras on the bridge of the Enterprise, won’t he be laughing?

Until the gas line goes, I suppose.

Check showtimes near you for Yuri Kuklachev and his Moscow Cats Theatre:

In the current Cats Theatre show, Kuklachev makes a hilarious initial entrance. Standing in a small, low wagon, he is pulled on stage by a cat walking on its hind legs. The production’s lone dog, also on its hind legs, pushes the cart from the rear.

When Kuklachev steps out of the wagon, the dog hops in and is pulled off stage by the kitty.

A 75 minute show of cats trained to do tricks. How can a culture that can train cats not dominate the world?

I don’t have anything to say, so here’s a picture of an apparently floating cat head:

Ajax doesn’t think it’s hard to get on TV:

Sure, that top is 1 15/16 wide, but to Ajax, that’s comfortable.

When you look into the bookshelves, the bookshelves look into you. Sometimes.

Tristan fantasizes about dinner: