demon cat!

No not Elizabeth. . .
. . .wait let me think about this. . .
Actually, the Demon Cat is an Irish folk tale among the many collected by Lady Francesca Wilde, mother of Oscar, writer in her own right, and not the biggest fan of cats I've ever met. But the tales she spins of the Irish lore about cats is hair-raising and perfect for today. . .

There was a woman in Connemara, the wife of a fisherman, and as he always
had very good luck, she had plenty of fish at all times stored away in the house
ready for market. But to her great annoyance she found that a great cat used to
come in at night and devour all the best and finest fish. So she kept a big
stick by her and determined to watch.
One day, as she and a woman were spinning together, the house suddenly became quite dark; and the door was burst open as if by the blast of the tempest, when in walked a huge black cat, who went straight up to the fire, then turned round and growled at them.
"Why, surely this is the devil!" said a young girl, who was by, sorting the fish.
"I'll teach you how to call me names," said the cat . . .

Read the rest of the feline wickedness here.

By the way, do any of you remember Bunnicula? Happy Halloween, everybody!

the tooth furry

Elizabeth lost a kitten molar a couple of days ago. I was wondering when she was going to start losing teeth, but after doing the research I think I just missed all the other ones. She probably swallowed them. See, she's about six months old now, and kittens start to lose their deciduous or baby teeth at about 3 to 4 months old. Apparently by seven months all the adult teeth should be there. According to PetEducation.com,

Kittens have 26 temporary teeth, 14 in the upper jaw and 12 in the lower jaw.
These deciduous teeth begin to erupt at about two to four weeks of age.
Permanent teeth emerge at about three to four months of age. Cats have 30
permanent teeth, 16 on the top and 14 on the bottom.

Oh right, YOU hold Elizabeth down and count them. I think not.

aztec cat stats

I'm busy.
But I found something I had, HAD to post, courtesy of the great oddball site Infowisps.

Although the veneration of cats is more associated with Ancient Egypt, cats
were also symbolically important to the tlatoani - the Aztec rulers of the
pre-Hispanic era. Chimalpopoca (died 1427) ordered his scribes to record the
lives and deaths of some 300 pet cats, all of which were named after local
flowers and plants. The most common cause of feline death is given as 'fatigue'
(131 cats), while some of the more unusual reasons for visiting the dirtbox in
the sky include the following: 'collapsed while praying' (8 cats), 'jumped from
a boat' (3), 'struck down by wildfire' (3), 'rolled into the unknown', 'ate
ricaqli pods till burst' and 'pecked by the oracle's geese' (one each).

zzzzz

Hi gang -

Don't be surprised if you don't see me much till like Halloween. I have a late breaking writing gig that could frankly be going a little more smoothly; all this on top of a full time job that's an hour away -- whine, whine. Back asap.

are you a good dog?

Are you? Who's a good little puppy?

I took a break yesterday to go back to Portland and do the Pumpkin Patch corn maze, so no post for you -- today, I offer you Liam Kyle's Hard Hitting Questions, in which he grills Laz the dog without mercy.

We discovered Liam Kyle when someone forwarded us the link to his piece "Shoes," which is absolutely hysterical, but not safe for work. This one is. Anyone who's ever loved a dog will recognize deep doggy thought immediately.

mewsic

. . . non stop? (Kraftwerk reference. There I go again.)

I see a number of concerts are popping up in the "advertising members" bar below. That's nice of them to want to bother. It made me think about pets and music this morning, and sure enough -- the Internet has everything -- I found Pets and Music.

For example, seems kitties like male choirs and deep tones like oboes. This work was done by Prof.Dr.vet.med. Bubna-Littitz (Austrian, as if the name didn't totally give that away), who went on to develop several CD volumes of Music for Cats and Friends, ands of course for Dogs and Friends. Fascinating.

Elizabeth might need a disk or 2.

literary cat admirer

From Carl Van Vechten's The Tiger in the House of 1922:

Chateaubriand, on the other hand, was a discerning admirer of cats. Under
all circumstances, he occupied himself with cats, as an ambassador, as an exile,
and at the close of his life when he ruled over the literary world from the
retirement of Abbaye-aux-Bois. Champfleury finds him “of all writers on this
theme, the best, the most enthusiastic.”
“Do you not know some one, near here,” he asked his friend, Comte de
Marcellus, “who is like a cat? I think myself, that our long familiarity has
given me some of his ways.” Space and Time did not permit his friend to send him
Huysmans, who is described by Arthur Symons as looking like a cat, or Walt Whitman, of whom Edmund Gosse has said, “If it be true that all remarkable human beings resemble animals, then Walt Whitman was like a cat—a great old grey
Angora Tom, alert in response, serenely blinking under his combed waves of hair,
with eyes inscrutably dreaming,” or La Fontaine or Baudelaire.
When he went on an embassy to Rome Chateaubriand received a cat as a gift
from the Pope. “He was called Micetto,” writes M. de Marcellus. “Pope Leo the
Twelfth’s cat, which came into the possession of Chateaubriand, could not fail
to reappear in the description of that domestic hearth where I have so often
seen him basking.”
Chateaubriand has immortalized his favourite: “My companion is a large grey
and red cat, banded with black. He was born in the Vatican, in the loggia of
Raphael. Leo the Twelfth reared him on a fold of his white robe, where I used to
look at him with envy when, as ambassador, I received my audiences. The
successor of Saint Peter being dead, I inherited the bereaved animal. He is
called Micetto, and surnamed ‘the Pope’s cat,’ enjoying in that regard much
consideration from pious souls. I endeavour to soften his exile, and help him to
forget the Sistine Chapel, and the vast dome of Saint Angelo, where far from
earth, he was wont to take his daily promenade.”

Chateaubriand was a French writer and politician, considered the founder of Romanticism in French literature. More on him in Wikipedia.

littering

"What did they use before there was kitty litter, anyway?" Mark asked me yesterday as we were swapping clean for notsoclean.

I figured sawdust, probably, or sand. But that begs the question of when precisely was bagged commercial litter invented?

Now I know. Edward Lowe of Michigan invented it in 1947. He was a salesman of industrial absorbents, and his neighbor asked him if he had anything better than the wood ash she was using and her cat was tracking everywhere. He suggested an absorbent clay product, which pleased the neighbor so well that Edward thought he'd try bagging it up and seeing how other folks would like it. And the rest is history. In fact, he's the guy who invented Tidy Cat in 1964.

Now, we use Feline Pine and paper pellet litters, but no one would have invented more litter if Edward Lowe hadn't made people aware we needed good box-scratchins'.

little dog joshi

"Hallo! Willkommen auf meiner Homepage!"
Joschi is a German dog, and he's telling you "Hi! Welcome to my homepage!"

He's a little guy, brown and fluffy, half dachshund, half Pekingese, and yes that's as cute as it sounds. We get loads of pictures of him, and the charming, sometimes dramatic story of his life, which starts out a little sad but soon is all walks and deep doggy thoughts.

Day by day Ulli (that's his human) is walking around with me.
Not too far away from our flat, there are fields and trees and a lot of other
dogs. I'm free to run, to do what I want, well, not all I want to do. For
instance, Ulli doesn't like me to roll in dirty stuff. But sometimes I do it.
Then Ulli puts me in his bathtub, where he rubs me with soap, and that's a thing
I don't like at all, you know.

Enjoy a charming visit with Joschi. You can pick either English or German for your visit!

churchill's pets

Turns out Winston Churchill was more pet-enriched than I thought. A while back I posted about his requirement that there always be an orange cat named "Jock" at Chartwell; I like that a lot as you may imagine. Here now a few more facts-and-quotes about this brilliant and savvy man who yet placed great value on animal companionship:

Churchill had a pet called "Rota." -- a lion given to him by an admirer which was housed at the London Zoo. Late in life Winston had a green budgie called "Toby."

When his daughter's pug felt poorly:
Oh, what is the matter with poor Puggy-Wug?
Pet him and kiss him and give him a hug.
Run and fetch him a suitable drug.
Wrap him up tenderly all in a rug.
That is the way to cure Puggy-Wug.

One evening at Chequers the film was Oliver Twist. Rufus, as usual, had the best seat in the house, on his master's lap. At the point when Bill Sikes was about to drown his dog to put the police off his track, Churchill covered Rufus's eyes with his hand. He said, "Don't look now, dear. I'll tell you about it afterwards."

some dog quotes

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Ecclesiastes 9:4

Our dog chases people on a bike. We've had to take it off him. - Winston Churchill (a source for many excellent pet anecdotes, owner of among other things a series of orange cats and a miniature poodle)

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.- Henry David Thoreau

"Every boy who has a dog should also have a mother, so the dog can be fed regularly"- Anonymous (Hi, Cash!)

Personally, I would not give a fig for any man's religion whose horse, cat and dog do not feel its benefits. Life in any form is our perpetual responsibility.- S. Parkes Cadman

"Money will buy a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail."- Josh Billings

borges on the cheshire cat

I think I've mentioned before my fondness for Borges' writing.

Though it's highly conceptual and abstract more often than not, it's also marked by his essential benevolence and even-keeledness. You can see this in the unsensational take he brings to the Cheshire and Kilkenny Cats:

Everyone has heard the expression "to grin like a Cheshire cat."
Several explanations for this saying have been proposed. One is that
cheese in the shape of a laughing cat was sold in Cheshire. Another would
have it that Cheshire was made an earldom, and that this provoked the hilarity
of the county's cats. Still another claims that in the times of Richard
III there was a sheriff, one Caterling, who smiled ferociously when he caught
poachers at their work.
In the dreamlike novel Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865, Lewis
Carroll gave the Cheshire Cat the ability to disappear gradually, until only its
smile was left.
It is said of the Kilkenny Cats that they got into furious fights and
devoured each other, leaving only their tails. This story dates from the
eighteenth century.

from Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Andrew Hurley, trans. (New York: Viking Books, 2005), p. 42.

cat face

Having overslept yet again, your friendly curator thinks you should enjoy Weebl's Cat Face 5, in which he tells his nip-abusing buddy to quit playing that Kula Shaker crap.

By the way, did you know a catface was an old wound on a tree trunk that is closing over?

anecdotes of the cat

THE CAT
Might be called the domestic tiger or leopard ; he looks as a species of
those wild beasts, brought to and degraded by, domesticity; however tame a Cat
may be individually, the race has not yet lost its original habits; and
ferocity, cunning, and treachery, still characterize the Cat even on the
comfortable lap, or at the side of his fond mistress. The domestic Cat is of
various colours, from white to black, and the tortoise-shell one is reckoned the
handsomest, although males of that description are seldom, if ever, to be found.
The Cat is a cleanly, neat, and very useful creature, but can never be cured of
his thieving propensity. The tongue is uncommonly rough, and the claws, which
are sheathed and brought out, as the animal pleases, exceedingly sharp. The
Cat lives ten or twelve years, and brings five or six kittens at a litter, which
the female educates; and constantly drills in all fanciful tricks and useful
exercise; far away from her stern and saturnine mate, who would destroy them if
they were, at his reach.

-- From Adventures of the beautiful little maid Cinderilla, or, The history of a glass slipper : to which is added, An historical description of the cat (York : Printed and sold by J. Kendrew, Colliergate [1820?]).

aussie dogs

Among the works entered in 2001 for the National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition sponsored by the National Gallery of Australia, I found a silver dog family.

Lena Yarinkura, an Aboriginal artist, had this to say about making them:

This work [for the sculpture prize]1 is about my own dogs. Manmunj, the oldest
female dog, was looking for a mate and found that Garlang-ngartba, the boss dog,
was interested in her. You can see him smelling her tail. There are two other
male dogs looking at Garlang-ngartba; one is lying on his belly - his name is
Arngurduppu, and the other, called Gurrwerhgurrwerh, is lying on his side. These
dogs are upset, as there is no chance for them with Manmunj. There is a girl dog
watching too, called Werlemberlh. She has her head down. I think she's jealous
and is wishing she were Manmunj.

"I make a lot of dogs," she adds, "because the dog is my Dreaming. It's important for me." By which she means the dog defines her beliefs as an individual; other native Australians may have Kangaroo Dreaming or Shark Dreaming. More than that, though, the Dreaming also refers to the time before time, and the general laws of human life. Some references here.

a little more bugatti

Since your friendly curator has overslept this morning she's giving you a brief post.

I was so eager to have you all see more Rembrandt Bugatti that I've found a well-illustrated page from the Sladmore Gallery in London, which carries his work still. Scroll down to the bottom - mostly you'll see the wild animals, but there is a most charming hen.

goosed

Wow. All I ever knew about geese is that they have a habit of standing threateningly in your friend's driveway, honking and hissing, until you cave in and throw half your home baked cookies out the window to distract them so you can drive by.

I like ducks, though.

Nancy Townshend of Tempe, AZ likes them both, and finds them winning pets. Did you know,
-- Geese can live up to 50+ years….Ducks up to 20
-- Most domestic ducks and geese can’t fly
-- They all like to sit on your lap and sleep in your bed

Wait, what? Yep. They're very clean beasts, and as for that not-so-litter-trainable thing, Nancy has diapers. You can buy diapers. Go buy diapers. (The duckling in the little diaper sling is worth the trip.) But even if you don't happen to need any avian diapers, I think you'll find The Goose's Mother a winsome way to start your week.

"jack"

Dog Jack has gone on the silent trail,
Wherever that may be;
But well I know, when I whistle the call,
He will joyfully answer me.

That call will be when I, myself,
Have passed through the Gates of Gold;
He will come with a rush, and his soft brown eyes
Will glisten with love as of old.

Oh, Warder of Gates, in the far-away land,
This little black dog should you see,
Throw wide your doors that this faithful friend
May enter, and wait for me.

-- by "H.P.W." in The Dog's Book of Verse, collected by J. Earl Clauson (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, Publishers, 1916).

the nyt takes on cat furniture

That's the New York Times, and perhaps you may not have seen today's article on "Good Design, Happy Cats."

As reporter Chris Colin says,

Cats love cat trees. Cat trees are ghastly. So it is a simple but profound —
maybe even existential — dilemma that has dogged kitty lovers for ages: Happy
pet or stylish pad?

It may be possible to have both. Assume not that your cat has unmovably proletarian taste in his/her lounging venues. Read here for ideas.

(interlude: i dreamed last night)

Zozo showed up in my dreams last night. Usually I never dream, or remember them at all if I do, and I'd been dreading the thought of dreaming about her, thinking I'd be even sadder.

But in my dream, she was in my bedroom looking up at me from the carpet as she had many a time, perfectly calm, but bigger -- and orange-er -- than in life. And her eyes were clear. Her right eye had had a cataract for the past year, but not then.

The dream was short. I looked at her, she looked at me, and just as I was reaching down to pick her up, I awoke.

She looked good in the dream, but powerful, too. What was this?

something wonderful!

Boy, do I have a find for you today. I went to the Musee d'Orsay's website just to see what might be appealing for a post, and stumbled onto the work of Rembrandt Bugatti (1884-1916).

His brother Ettore became the force behind Bugatti automobiles. Rembrandt quietly turned his hand to sculpting animals domestic and wild in a representational style that yet shows a tender regard for the living creature. Here's his plaster model of a cat drinking from a saucer at the Musee d'Orsay. I tried to save a search of all his work at the Musee's site, but no go. Try it yourself (look for "Search" at the left). Extra points if you find the kangaroo.

I wish I could say he drew comfort from making such deft and insightful work, but he didn't. He died young by his own hand, depressed by his struggles and the World War. Not very fair, is it?

today we have a bird

Birds. They'll steal your heart. And your snackfood.

Today's post isn't so pet related, but a couple of my friends loved this story and thought I should put it in the Museum. And so today I bring you a seagull smart enough to know what snack he likes and how to rip it off from the Qwik-E-Mart.

In the words of the BBC back in July, "A seagull has turned shoplifter by wandering into a shop and helping itself to crisps. (= Chips, in Britspeak.) The bird walks into the RS McColl newsagents in Aberdeen when the door is open and makes off with cheese Doritos."

The locals nicknamed him Sam and pay for his chips simply for the sheer entertainment value. He swipes only cheese Doritos (what an instant ad campaign). Once he gets out, he pecks open the bag and all his little beaked buddies get in on it. Here's the BBC story. And here is a cinema verite of It Takes A Thief, seagull style (I laughed throughout the whole thing).

And if a seagull's bright enough to do that, imagine what your cat does when you're not around.

bring on the funny (yet artful) dogs

You know what always cheers me up?

William Wegman's dogs.

While not the only artistic endeavor of Wegman's by a long shot, the playful work with his Weimeraners gained enduring affection among the general public in the 80's. And I say, if a modern artist finds a way to make everybody like art, then YAY.

The dogs - well, they're solemn and gray and elegant, and obligingly drapey. You'll see what I mean as you look through these tiny samples of a huge body of work:

early black and white film on YouTube showing the genesis of his idea

Alphabet Soup, a fully fleshed work for children (uh, everybody)

Up to 130 photos on Artnet - you can click on them to enlarge

I wish I could have found a snippet of his Jack and Jill, which is my favorite: the dogs, dressed in character, are peering around as they are (obviously) shot at diagonal to go "up the hill" while in the background some hysterically off-kilter music plays.

Anyway, we all need a laugh. Hope you find some!

the rubaiyat of a persian kitten

Oliver Herford -- whom I'd never heard of before, but suddenly like a whole lot -- created this jewel spoof of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1906. He not only wrote it, but illustrated the poem with gorgeous pencil sketches. One of them is my brand new desktop:

This image is coupled with the refrain,

And fear not lest existence
shut the Door
On YOU and ME, to open it no
more,
The Cream of Life from out
your Bowl shall pour
Nine times ere it lie broken on
the floor.

It's a cute little book and funny. Why don't you take a look at this at the Internet Archive?

a poetry selection: louis macneice

I didn't know until just now that one of my favorite passages of cat poetry was written by the British/Irish poet Louis MacNeice. I thought it was Dorothy Sayers. Even so, I find I'd like to share with you these words from his Death of a Cat:

And in his eyes the light from the mines
One minute flickering, steady the next,
Lulled to a glow or blown to a blaze,
But always the light that was locked in the stone
Before his time and ours: at best semi-precious
All stones of that kind yet, if not precious,
Are more than stones, beautiful objects
But more than objects. While there is light in them.

I often thought of these very words as I looked into Zozo's eyes over all the seasons and all the years. Those eyes of hers were the most precious jewels in the world to me, and no amount of money matched their value.

Thanks, everyone, for your kind messages and words of support. They truly help, and I am so grateful to you.

I finally found the full text of Death of a Cat here.

kitty town

(Still not doing too well, in all honesty. I knew when the time came for Zozo to go that it was going to hurt, but I'm amazed at how much. I wish I could make it stop.)

I know a place, for I used to live near there, that actually was named after cats. Felida's the name, and it's a lovely open farm and orchard area about 7 miles northwest of downtown Vancouver, WA. (Unless by now they have bulldozed all the orchards and thrown in some craptastic housing developments named stuff like "Orchard Hill".)

"Felida" is a corruption of the Latin term "Felidae" for the genus cat - for example, our fine Elizabeth is a Felis catus, or if you want to break it all the way down in taxonomy:

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Felidae
Genus: Felis
Species: silvestris
Subspecies: catus

The story goes, according to the book "Washington Place Names,"

that when the post office was established in 1890 the name Powley was submitted
in honor of a pioneer settler. The postal department countered with the name
Polly. Offended at having their community named for a parrot, the
townspeople resisted. C.C. Lewis suggested the post office be named Thomas,
after his cat. This irritated the citizens even more. Lewis then suggested the
Latin word felidae, for the genus cat, and this name had enough class to be
accepted.

Ha, I love it. You pronounce it FEE ly DA.

the saddest news

Patrons of the Pet Museum,

Your friendly Curator has lost her beloved Zozo today from complications of surgery. I had her for 14 years; I would have happily had her for 14 more.

Here is the last photo I took of her before I bundled her up to go to the vet:

I will keep posting, never fear, but for right now -- my heart is utterly broken. And it's very difficult, I find, to type while sobbing. So there.

Curator

oi!

I love it.

The Punky Pup has all your hard core dog outfit needs locked up. Forget about your prisstastic laces and ribbons'n'bows. What your dog REALLY wants is a T-shirt with the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen", or a lil' pink skull hoodie. Perhaps a guitar pick collar.

But that would only look good on a big herking pit bull or a Rottweiler, you say? Not judging by the models at this website, pal. Ooh, so Poodle With a Mohawk. (There I go dating myself again.)

Express your dog's disdain for the system with some mad new clobber. (That's cool new clothes.)

manet cats

That's all Edouard Manet called the sketch in 1869: The Cats. It's an etching of three simply and elegantly rendered cats - Manet was good like that - against white space, doing the things cats do. Including lick themselves*. He rendered that one as a shaded form so it may take you a minute to figure out that's what it is; I found great pleasure in the abstraction, too. Anyway, go to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts website and enjoy.

*Which put me in mind of this recent lolcat:

*

an ancient doggy kiss

Somewhere under the soil of the place the natives called "Dog Mountain," this sweet marble pair of hounds waited to see the light again.

They were created by a Roman sculptor, possibly in the 2nd century AD. Found in the Italian region of Lazio around 1774 by the Scottish painter and excavator Gavin Hamilton. He sold them in 1774 to Charles Townley. Townley collected Greco-Roman work in the days when one could still conceivably and affordably do this, and it's his collection that the British Museum bough after his death in 1805 to form the core of their holdings in those eras.

None of which has anything to do with two elegant marble greyhounds sitting close together as dogs do, one giving the other's ear a love nibble. See them and sigh.

nice digs!

I wish I'd been in Oakland in 1999 to see the exhibition I've stumbled upon this morning. That year, the Oakland Museum of California presented a show called Dog Haus: Architecture Unleashed.

24 outstanding designs were chosen by a panel of architects, designers and animal experts, and though the designs could be fancy, the shelter was meant to be serious. One was even designed for a dog living with a homeless person.

Read about the show here, and click on the slideshow to see them all!

mask from a cat mummy

Usually you get to see the whole kitty-mummy. A little kitty mask is rarer. Luckily for us, the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee has a lovely one, and wrote a short article examining the life and death of cats in Egypt.

Not that we haven't done that before. However, the article throws in a few things I hadn't seen well referenced before:

In addition to being sacred, Diodorus notes their useful characteristics, such
as confronting asps positioned to bite and warding off other snakes. Cats were
also of service to fowlers in their search for birds in the Nile marshes, as
attested by a wall painting in the New Kingdom tomb of Nebamun at Thebes.
Diodorus explains that a portion of land for sacred cats was consecrated, which
provided for their upkeep and made them self-supporting.

Beautiful cat face from 1st century AD here.