Friday Cat Blogging

Julie Powell, the woman whose blog and book became the movie Julie & Julia, recently wrote an article about her biggest complaint against the movie: the incorrect depiction of her cat. Fuck yeah.

What we see is not the sardonic, complicated, talented cat of my longtime acquaintance, but a sweet, thin, red-headed doll of a thing who watches old episodes of The French Chef with her head pertly cocked, as if to echo the words of her owner, “Julie Powell,” regarding Julia Child: “Isn’t she adorable?”

Yes, anytime you see a movie where the cat seems to give a shit then you know the screenwriter’s taken poetic license with the story. In which case they should’ve written in a dog instead.

Sadly, Julie mentioned at the beginning of the article that her cat Maxine just died at 17. Sigh. At least that is a good age for a cat; my late cat wasn’t quite 15. Shebang turns 6 this fall.

In other news, this is a month old but I forgot about it: some dude arrested for child pornography on his computer said his cat did it, not him. Yeah, a cat walking across your keyboard is going to open your browser, point it to a pedophilia site, download a bunch of photos and save them all to a particular folder. Totally plausible, sure. Once Mom’s cat Spooky sat on my keyboard and messaged a friend of mine with “mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmSome coherent sentence that I’d copied earlierzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”. Seems her fuzzy butt was capable of a Ctrl-v, but not in operating the touch-pad, so sadly I found no unexpected nudity in my image folders.

That’s it for the cat links this week. Shebang’s going to be so mad at me come Monday, because I’ll be leaving her alone for over 3 days while I spend the long weekend in Vancouver. Hopefully the crazy antics of my neighbours in the parking lot will keep her entertained while I’m gone.

I don’t think I’ve done one of these posts from Kelowna yet. I think I was waiting to see if my cat would survive the move; I swear she didn’t eat the entire week she was homeless (and at Dad’s or a kennel) because when I took her back on the 5th she was all ribcage with fur around it. My cat does not handle stress well. Neither do I, really, but I wouldn’t forget to eat. Shebang seems to be okay now, though, and is enjoying the novelty of morning sunbeams (my last place faced west).

The view is down into the parking lots of this and nearby apartment buildings, which gives her lots to look at, what with all the ghetto action going down. Did I mention there was a drug dealer in my building?

There’s not much more to say about The Bang, who’s currently sitting on my lap, purring and licking my arm because longpig is so tasty. On to the links!

I snorted at an inappropriate place and time this week after a friend sent me a link to this commercial:

A new Simon’s Cat cartoon came out a few weeks ago. Yet again his work imitates my life in such an extreme way I wonder if someone’s webcamming me for ideas.

Also a few weeks ago I saw this news piece going around saying that cats can modify their purrs in such a way as to control their owners’ minds. Something like that. Yes kitty, whatever you say kitty. Like, they might add a little mew in the purr so you feel sorry for them and give them stuff. The scientist to come up with this idea is Dr. Karen McComb and here’s a random article on the subject. I figure she’s probably right; when I think about it, why the hell am I so nice to my cat, when she in turn tap dances on me while I sleep? If it’s not brainwashing or real time mind control, it’s a brain parasite making you dopey.

Happy weekend everyone!

The internet must be smaller than I originally thought. A few minutes ago I saw a blog post about trollcats, a subgenre of lolcats where the caption is a troll blog comment. Supposedly the site’s been around since May yet nobody told me about it, possibly because they have lives or something.

But what’s really weird and worth mentioning here is that when I followed the link, the picture that showed up at the top of my screen looked awfully familiar:

She’s actually been lolcat’d before, but here’s this trollcat posting. Man, that’s so creepy. It’s like when you turn on the TV and there’s you on the screen (which has strangely happened to me a couple times): you click a link and there’s your cat. I tried showing the photo to Shebang but she doesn’t really pay attention to the internet like some pets do. Besides, she’s been famous before. Oh Shebang, get your paw out of your kitty zone!

Speaking of cats and zones, my new slave drivers are paying to move my cat to their zone. I’m sure Shebang approves.

I’d say I’m sorry to those of you who were disturbed by my turtle rapes shoe post a month ago, but then I’d be lying, and lying is wrong. In fact I have yet to be as entertained by anything since, and the idea that some of you were grossed out only makes it funnier. Ah, good times.

But I don’t want to upset you all the time, so here’s something sweet and innocent involving a turtle with absolutely no simulated sex in it whatsoever:

So beautiful, so sad. The turtle loves the kitty, but the kitty couldn’t care less. Maybe because the turtle humped it earlier, who knows?

Since it’s Friday, here’s a picture of my cat being rather into my fleece robe. I have a black fleece robe and she would curl up on it if it were on my bed or floor, or on me if I were wearing it, and I wasn’t sure if it was that her mother was black or made of polyethylene terephthalate.

So I bought a second fleece robe, in blue, and she kneeds and suckles it too, as you can see here. In fact, I’m wearing the robe right now and typing with one hand because the other arm is holding Shebang on my lap. You might suggest I just push the cat off me, but then you wouldn’t know that that’s a futile gesture given that my cat won’t go away when I’m dressed up like Mommy.

The only solution is to take off the robe and give it to the cat, but then I’m cold. And the cat does warm up my lap, so it’s best just to share.

(Update) Oh, and via Wednesday night’s episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I heard this 3-years-old quote from Rush Limbaugh, about his cat:

I said that she’s a very smart cat. She gets fed. She gets petted. She gets caressed. She gets sheltered, all these things, and she doesn’t have to do anything for it. And then I said: This experience has been more valuable to me than anything else in learning about women.

Personally, I just think that’s valuable experience in learning about cats.