A Cat-Naming Contretemps as Captured on Twitter

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jmr1944

Just Googled 'Leonardo da Kitty" and got no hits. Look like our new cat has a name. 31 minutes ago via TweetDeck



Oh noes. Pater da former student hit the Google and found multiple Leonardo da Kitty refs. Let's keep it a secret from our kitty, guys.
7 minutes ago via TweetDeck



Okay trouble. E. does not want new kitty to have name intended to be unique that isn't. Common name that we know is common is all right. 2 minutes ago via TweetDeck

Stay tuned. 1 minute ago via me

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Cat on a Leash: Never Rely on Anecdote, but Still...

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A story in Salon that at least made me rethink the possibility. And what a funny paragraph.

In five years of living in New York -- a city that prides itself on its vast parade of human experience -- I've only seen one cat on a leash. (Putting the ratio of strangers' penises to leashed cats at 2:1.) The New York Times wrote about a real estate broker on the Upper West Side who leash trained his cat, which suggests just how remarkable the feat is. Even the phrase "cat on a leash" has a campy spark of the impossible, like something you'd see in a Farrelly brothers movie...

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People Thinking About Adopting Cats Spend Time Looking at Cat Videos

Kitten Countdown is Underway

Less than a year after we were married, E. brought home our first cat conveniently packaged in kitten form . I had told her I wanted a cat, and one of her junior high students was redistributing the family wealth, their cat having gone all supply side: Birth 'em and hope someone will come.

And for 40 years after we had cats or you could say cats had us because we are fiercely loyal cat owners, willing to spend money to keep them alive. But after Oliver died almost a year ago -- died in bed with me, pressed agains my side -- we have been catless.

We concluded E.'s mom might not be with us much longer, and her final illness would mean weeks in Florida and 60-hour weeks at work to enable E. to go to Florida as needed. That wouldn't leave much time for kitten nuturing and kitten bonding, and I wanted E. to be at the center of what will probably be our last great Gathering of the Cats.

And so it was, and so E.'s mom died in September. And now E. is about to retire. It's kitten time, two of them, I think, and their momcat, too, because I have a sentimental bourgeois aversion to kittens saved while mom is euthanized.

January, probably, after the holidays. We preview the moment.

Pat's Rose is Old. We Fortify Ourselves in Art. Works for Cats, Too, Likely for Guinea Pigs and Parrots. For the Rest, Applications Being Accepted.

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Brother Peter Moore unearthed this.

The House Dog's Grave

by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now

Run with you in the evenings along the shore,

Except in a kind of dream; and you,

If you dream a moment,

You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door

Where I used to scratch to go out or in,

And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor

The marks of my drinking-pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do

On the warm stone,

Nor at the foot of your bed; no,

All the nights through I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet

Outside your window where firelight so often plays,

And where you sit to read‚

And I fear often grieving for me‚

Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard

To think of you ever dying.

A little dog would get tired, living so long.

I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear

As good and joyful as mine.

No, dears, that's too much hope:

You are not so well cared for as I have been.

And never have known the passionate undivided

Fidelities that I knew.

Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided...

But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.

I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures

To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,

I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Black Cat Month is Coming

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Or so they say over at About Cats, my website of choice for unlimited (and perhaps even untethered) cat love. I believe we must have us a black cat soon. I'm told that they are harder to adopt out and more likely to be abused because of their association with witches, evil and bad luck. We've had two, and they were the sweetest boys.

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So Far So ... What?

Duelling wills, the new one placed in E.'s hand after the visitation tonight. Cue the music. Play us off, cat.

Stumbled Across 'Fade to Cat' - and Now Oliver's Gone

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See, the cat is the boss now. Hah-ha. It's about meritocracy and loyalty to inferiors, the true disinterested man or, in this case, a cat.

Escaping the Ambush

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today at the neighborhood farmers' market we stumbled upon a couple cages set up by Oakland Animal Shelter volunteers -- two cages, four kittens, a handsome Bengal pair and a less handsome grey kitten lumped over an even less handsome black kitten.

It was the latter pair I warmed toward, of course, always on the side of the undercat and remembering our two black cats: Lawrence, who died young of feline leukemia; Oliver, who died in bed next to me last December, almost 17.

They were loving kitties, quite insistent on worming in and huddling up. Also, I've read many places that black cats have a harder time getting adopted and are often cruelly tormented, such cruel fools so many people are. So I think I now must always have a black cat, just to put a grain of kindness on the scale.

But no kitties today, not until E. retires, which I am beginning to think she never will do. I want her to be home with kittens, enjoying them and bonding. This next batch could be our last batch, actuarially speaking. Even if we survive this next lot, I'd not get kittens again but some fine old homeboy or homegirl, ten minutes from execution.

That will be then. This is now. So: kittens! But not today. We mutually tore one another away from those beautiful kittens in the cage, all fuzz and fun and big neonatal mugs.

Tonight I find in Daily Kos a bit of a tearjerker about euthanizing a beloved cat. Mine were certainly jerked. I don't understand people who don't like cats. I prefer cats, but I like dogs. Maybe these people saw their parents having sex ... with dogs?? Bowwow Oedipus, I guess. Got to be some explanation other than a withering of the soul.

More Oliver Memories. He's the One Cracking on McCain.

Brother, Can You Spare 75 Cents If You Won't Go for a Sunday Subscription?

Shortly after their deaths, I cradled the limp dead bodies of our brother cats Boris and Oliver, and I grieved.

In the case of Boris, that grief was almost 15 years ago when he was run over crossing the street in front of our house, and a neighbor came to tell. That was painful. I won't go into particulars of my regret because I'm afraid all this recent pet-loving is all so bourgeois -- you may be interested to know, by the way, that if you prick a bourgeoisie, do we not bleed? -- but suffice it to say that it's hard to lose a young pet with so much fun still to come for us and for the cat.

You can fill in the blanks, I think. If you've read this far, we are probably in sync.

Did the same thing with little Oliver after he died in our sleep Friday morning, holding him for a while, before he started to get stiff. That death was less painful because he had lived long and well, and we had fought so hard the last six months to keep him alive. Seeing him dead, my mind reset to images of his relative health as short a time as only a year ago, and I saw that his death was a proper end, acceptable to us and a relief to him.

All this I have said is by way of introducing a few thoughts about the delicate state of newspapers today.

(So much introduction and so few thoughts. This is the kind of thing for which I'd grade my reporting students down. Lack of proper proportion between intro and body, I cry!)

Anyway, this morning I flop-stepped outside in my sandals and my pink bathrobe. (Send me a quarter, and I'll explain that bathrobe; I've got to monetize my fan dance.)

So out I flop out to pick up our four morning papers. And I look at them there in driveway and front yard. And I think of Kitty Oliver, as I see them lying there, so thin and limp, pitiful really if you remember their muscular days.

And I think this is just like being in bed Friday morning with Oliver. I'm watching newspapers die. I look. I turn away (metaphorically).

I will turn back and they will be gone.


Addendum: And, yes, this little conceit quickly breaks down, given the fact we'll go to the pound and get a box of kittens, and happiness will reign, and my ruling analogy will curl up in a ball and go to sleep.

Though, actually, when it comes to gathering information both useful and accurate, the internet is a little bit like a box of kittens. For once I don't mean that in a nice way.

Sometime Between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. This Morning

Our cat Oliver died in bed with me, pressed against my side as I slept fitfully. After all the syringes full of food, medicine, laxative, minerals that I gave him late last night -- after the successful squeezing of his bladder -- I put him in his cat basket, which has a heating pad under the blanket on which he lay.

Around three I heard him cry out. He had crawled out of the basket and was stretched out on the cold slate floor of the bedroom. I put him on an absorbent pad -- think a big Depends sheet -- and then placed my sweatshirt over him.

I got back in bed. I lay there for a minute or two. I got out of bed and put two of the absorbent sheets across the sheet next to me and picked Oliver up and laid him there and lay down next to him and began to cuddle him.

He was making soft cries of protest, against pain I suppose, though perhaps only against the touch of death, the tightening of its grip. He was limp as a rag doll. When I had gone to bed around midnight, I had imagined that sometime during the night he would come struggling up his ramp, having improved enough from the treatment he had just undergone at the vet to manage that modest incline.

That he was worse rather than better suggested failed treatment, a hopeful diagnosis gone wrong. I can squeeze his bladder, I thought, and squeeze baby food and chicken broth into him, but for how long? At what point does one accept the inevitable? It was a hard question. I saw no easy answer.

About five, I got out of bed and put him next to his water bowl, but he would not drink. I took him to the bathroom and used a clean syringe -- we have a dozen or so; we stocked up; we encouraged ourselves by behaving as it we were in for the long haul -- and fed him water, which he seemed to relish.

Then, I took him back to bed. I couldn't sleep and thought I might get up in the dark and have coffee and wait for the first of the four newspapers we get every morning. But then I did sleep, and I dreamed. There were several different dreams, and at the periphery of each was Oliver, not well again but improved, limping about, interested in food, trying to jump up with that awkward gallant determination he showed as he slowly lost control of his back legs.

I awoke around seven and looked at him, still pressed against my side, and saw almost at once that he was dead. Which I did not expect.

I took him upstairs and sat on the sofa where he loved to sit and cradled him in my arms for a good long time. Then I called my wife in Florida. She was picking up barbecue for her mother's lunch. I asked her how long before she would be home and would have waited telling her the news until then, but then she asked how Oliver had passed the night. And I told her he was dead and how and when.

And then we wept -- wept as I told the tale, filling it with gasps and gaps -- and I felt all the better for it. In the barbecue restaurant in Florida, several people asked my wife why she was crying, and every time I heard her reply, "My cat died."

Here's a Coincidence. Lolsecretz.com Closes Down.

Here's the part I love, near the end of the announcement. Look at the members of this panel.



If you're interested in keeping up with us, you can do so in a few ways. First, we'll be attending ROFLCon at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, on April 25-27, 2008. We'll be speakers on the "Lolpanel" along with the creators of I Can Has Cheezburger, LolTrek, LolBible, and other LOLers... for more information, including how to attend, please visit http://www.roflcon.org.

Here's the first part of their farewell. It's brave to walk away when the run is done. It's a proud thing to do.

We all knew this day would come eventually, but even still, it's bittersweet to write this post today. After a lot of thinking and talking and intense brainstorming over enchiladas and hemming and hawing... we've decided to draw this chapter of lolsecretz.com's life to a close. Part of us would love to continue making and receiving secretz forEVAR, to see what new hilarity we can fashion out of inscrutable kittycat memes, and to see how you, our wonderful readerz, can exceed the boundaries of our own imaginations and make us laugh over and over again.

But mostly we want to preserve the spirit out of which lolsecretz was originally born - one of doubled-over laughter and playful manipulation of themes generated on these crazy Intrenetz; a feeling that we were creating something fresh, unique, and extraordinarily (and inexplicably) funny; a witty jab at things that we love but feel deserved to be parodied. Fact is, we've become just as repetitive as PostSecret at this point, and that means it's time to go. We honestly never, ever expected lolsecretz to become the hit that it did; at the peak of the site's popularity, it was seeing thousands upon thousands of hits per day; we got attention from numerous media websites that we read (!); and there's even been talk of a book deal...So we had our 15 minz, and now we feel it's time to move on.

Down the pitch Oliver Oklahoma! makes a darting run. Gooooooooooooooooooooal!

Having been warned that the name of this blog was a slippery slope down which I could so easily slide into the ghetto of encapsulated Catmania, I have carefully excluded cat mentions, cat references and cat kudos from these pages these many weeks. I have not let the hairball wag the cat, as it were. I think the blogosphere has appreciated my restraint. If you Google the Ten Top Cat Blogs of All Time, you will not find Darwin's Cat, which you would if I chose to "cat it up."

Because I can cat it up, baby.

As I result of my restraint, I thought this blog had achieved a perfect equilibrium, a Zen stillness of energy in counterpoise with wisdom. And then I discovered one of our cats, apparently miffed, had hired a flack.
I discovered this when I started to get press releases from Mark Satan, who is apparently a partner in the public relations firm of Satan, Satan, Devil, Demon, Dybbuk, Bush and Codpiece. The first release -- snail mail, 37-cent Eubie Blake commemorative stamp -- said, "Like the legendary Brazilian soccer stars Pele, Kaka and Robinho, local cat personality Oliver is known by but a single name."

Well, what?

There wasn't even a news hook, no context, no nothing. I was tempted to tell Oliver he was wasting his money, but it's his money. And who am I to interfere with someone else's pursuit of a livelihood when, at the end of the day, no harm is done except the osmotic transfer of excess capital? That's why when I am reading a newspaper on the bus or on BART, as I finish a page I ball it up and throw it on the floor, to keep the unions working.

The second release was a little better. It began, "Heard around town: Local cat Oliver commenting, 'It's a little embarrassing being named after a Broadway musical. It could have been worse. I could have been named Oklahoma!'" That wasn't so bad. Adding the phrase, "Over martinis at Haight Street's fabled Persian Aub Zam Zam..." would have given it a little texture, painted in a little background, created a little synergy with another client. But even without that, it read like an item. I was tempted to drop Mark Satan a note, saying, "Try Leah Garchik." Tempted -- but no. Not funny enough. I'm no Herb Caen, but I can tell snap from crackle and crackle from pop.

Still, just when you think some PR guy is really a fool, he will surprise you. Yesterday I got a 2-pound box of See's assorted chocolates with a hand-written note: "What about the rat?"

When there really is a story, that's all it takes when you are dealing with a trained professional journalist who has seen enough and perhaps too much.

What about the rat?

Faithful readers recall when Oliver discovered we had a "mouse" -- for that is what I insisted in the face of my wife's repeated RATRATRATRAT -- back in November. At first I though he killed it or chased it away, but then something started shredding the butter cookies and invading the instant cocoa. And, man, those little turds. It was clear Oliver wasn't up to rodent elimination, either because of an innate pacifism or perhaps a deep world-weariness that the cynic will dismiss as incompetence. Anyway, I went through a series of traps: the little grey plastic "safe capture" traps; the easy-disposal kill trap with the tiny door through which the mouse is supposed to enter while the other mice sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"; the regular old-fashioned Victor-brand spring-loaded skull crusher, all of which my wife said would not work because they were too small, given the fact she knows rat turds when she sees them.

Finally, in what seemed an effort to taunt us, the rodent started depositing his little raisins on top of our rollout cupboard for all to see. I put one of the old-fashioned traps up there. This was maybe ten days ago. Next morning around 6 a.m. well before sunrise, I was awakened by Oliver going through a whole series of vocalizations, sounds never heard before, as if he were speaking in tongues. I turned on the light and there on the floor was a juvenile rat, much too large for the safe-capture trap or the disposable trap with the little mouse door.

"Good job! Oliver. Good job!"

The rat, stunned but alive, was disposed of. Oliver was fed the choicest tidbits. Splendid cat who lulled the rat into false complacency and then struck with the precision of an atomic clock! But then when we got up for the day, new evidence was discovered that does not disgrace Oliver but certainly makes it less likely we will try to get him an audition for RatMaster 2: Death Purr.

I saw that the small trap on top of the cupboard had snapped. Caught between its wooden base and its spring-powered cudgel was a single rodent hair. And so we pieced the story together.

1) The rat advances, attracted by the peanut butter I had placed as bait.

2) The trap closes, too small to kill but certainly able to stun.

3) Oliver, drawn by the sound or loitering nearby, suddenly sees a semi-conscious rat come raining down like manna -- or pennies; pick your fantasy -- from heaven.

I would rather it were otherwise. I would rather Oliver had like Achilles before the walls of Troy at last from his tent emerged to slay his enemy. But it appears that, more like Falstaff in Henry IV, Part One, he merely confronted a prostrate adversary and struck an irrelevant blow.

For all I know, it was a Midnight Cowboy thing, and he was bringing the rat to me for immediate medical attention. Cue the lyrics to Lili Marlene.

It's finally all a mystery, isn't it? Mark Satan had it right. Sometimes all you can do is ask the question.

What about the rat? What about the rat?