Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cats. Show all posts

Thursday, October 5, 2023

Autumn purrs and purrs!

 

Autumn was the matriarch (catriarch?)  of our cat family. She left us during the pandemic, but since then  my son's family has adopted two lovely lady cats, Moonie and Luna. Added to Shannon's Mia and Max, and of course our wonderful Bentley, we are now a five-cat family!

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

😸Why does my cat bite his fur?😺


Watching Bentley groom is fascinating, because he doesn't just lick - he bites his fur, especially the fluffy, flossy tummy fur which he keeps so immaculately clean. This video got over 600 likes, whereas the ones I work and slave over might get 30. But it's cats, folks. 

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

💗Beautiful, Beautiful Bentley: my gorgeous, sleepy cat!💗


Bentley has been with us now for seven years, and we can't imagine our lives without him. He is a dignified cat, rarely meows or makes a fuss, but rules in an imperious way, striking magnificent poses (i. e. his British Museum pose, modelling the famous Egyptian bastet sculpture which inspired worship in ancient times). He divides his loyalties evenly between us, but it is always along certain lines which never vary. He sleeps very contentedly on Bill's lap in the Lazy Boy, but his routine with me is different. As I lie reading in bed (something comfortably boring to help me get to sleep), he will steal into the room, jump up, and stare at me with those uncanny eyes for the longest time, before gingerly reaching out a paw to touch me. Then another touch, then a little harder one, then he stretches his paw way up and spreads his toes - the signal for me to give him his treats. Then when he has had a nice face-wash, he settles himself between my ankles, turning around and around and plunking himself down. When I turn out the lights, I often have to turf him off or at least get him to move over a bit. We often think he understands everything we say, to the point we are tempted to spell things out as you would do with a toddler. But he is wise beyond his years, expending his energies only to leap up to the bird feeders installed on our windowpanes. He IS a cat, after all. And a cat's a cat, for a' that. 

This is the tribute to Bentley I posted not long after we brought him home. Hard to believe it's been so many years! 


When my beloved lovebird Paco died just a short time ago, it was agonizing. She only lived 100 days, and was an absolute delight. I should have spent many years with her. I knew I couldn't get another bird, because if that happened again -

We didn't even have cats on our minds. Oh all right, we did, because my daughter had just adopted Mia, a darling little tabby who stole everybody's heart. I noticed how the whole atmosphere in the house had changed, as if it had been flooded with sunshine.



At one point in my anger and grief over Paco, I said to Bill, "I can't get another bird, I just can't. We might as well go get a cat." This was a reference to the "no more cats" rule we had made after the death of Murphy, the 17-year-old catriarch of the family, in 2007.

Bill especially felt that we'd be too old by the time the cat reached that age, if it ever did. But he said something surprising that changed everything. "We could get a cat." I hadn't meant it literally, but suddenly our thinking began to change. And as we all know, that changes everything.

We decided we would "start the process of looking for a cat". Not rush into anything, of course. We weren't even supposed to be getting another pet at this stage. It was too soon, far too soon, wasn't it? But I began to look into it, research adoption web sites.  My first experience was with a Vancouver kitten rescue agency called VOKRA. I looked at one cat, a very lovely cat indeed, and as soon as I reached out to pet her, she tore a chunk out of me. We both went home from that "viewing" with bloody scratches.

I think sometimes certain organizations are just too idealistic about whether a cat is truly adoptable or not. That one wasn't.



So we decided to try the SPCA, where most people go. I had been looking on the web site for a while, and saw this snagglepuss-like baby cougar, and just HAD to go see him. Right now. He was in Maple Ridge, so it didn't take too long.

It was just one of those things. He was housed in an enclosure about the size of a large walk-in closet, much more amenable than a cage, but still kind of cramped for a cat. When he saw me he jumped down, ran towards me and wound himself around my leg. I immediately picked him up and held him. He relaxed into my arms. He had a soft, plushy coat, and was purring gently.

"This is the cat," I said to Bill. "Are you sure?" "There are no other cats. This is the one."

It has only been a few days, yet it seems longer, and not because time is dragging. It's another thing entirely. This little guy, about a year old, has an incredible history. Someone found him outside, mangled and bleeding. He had been mauled by a dog and had bite-marks on his shoulders. And yet, he is a sweet and gentle cat who loves to be held. So far his worst habit is drinking out of the toilet.


He has substantial gaps in his coat where the dog bit and probably shook him. They might or they might not fill in with fur, but if they don't, they'll only remind me of his valor in facing down a nasty old dog, and (even more remarkably) not becoming nasty himself.

My daughter-in-law Crystal has a way of summing things up. "After he flew down from heaven, that's where his wings broke off," she said.  Amen to that.

Wednesday, December 7, 2022

😻WRAP your CAT for CHRISTMAS!😻



An all-time YouTube classic, from back in the days when YouTube was all about sharing the fun. This cat must enjoy the sensation of being swaddled, but given the fact most cats love to cram their bodies into tight spaces (my 16-pounder tries to squeeze into a shoebox), it might not be as remarkable as it looks. I think getting kitty to lie down on the paper and stay there would be the easy part. They don't show the cat being released from his paper bondage, but it might be cute to plunk him under the tree like that just as everyone is coming down the stairs on Christmas morning
.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

💐🌹🌼ADORABLE! Victorian Ballerina Cats🌼🌹💐 (animation)



Hey, it looks like I'm "back" (not that I was ever away). After a brief moment of panic, YouTube is once again allowing me to post videos without going in circular gyrations that take forever and may not even yield results. This is one of my earliest animations, likely made for Facebook or perhaps for this blog, which I have transformed into YouTube videos. I came to rhe realization that I had THOUSANDS of gifs - I can't even count how many - that I spent a tremendous amount of time on, posed once, then filed away. Some of them are good enough to work on some more, adding sound/music and being given a second life. Sounds like a theme!

Monday, February 18, 2019

Louis Wain: a cat's a cat




I think I was in my teens when I first encountered the enigmatic, provocative cat paintings of Louis Wain. Throughout his life he was moved to represent his beloved cats in a wide variety of artistic styles, including a highly abstract form which was so original and unknown that it sometimes scared the hell out of people. As is so often the case, fear and ignorance hardened the public's  perception of the artist into a distorted and only partially-true stereotype.

Thus a brilliant and inspired, not to mention significant, contributor to 19th century art was jammed into a box of conventional belief and nailed there, a condition made infinitely worse by constant replication on that mindless Xerox machine of a communications system, the internet. So how much of it is actually true?




When I was about 16, I remember reading  a Time-Life coffee table book called The Mind which was full of (I realize now) ridiculous, stigmatizing untruths about mental disorders. Wain was used as a classic case of "the tragedy of mental illness", with his charming magazine cats slowly and hideously devolving into foul fiends from hell: surely, the authors claimed, a sign that Wain had gone irreversibly "mad".




This "madness" was labelled "schizophrenia", at a time when 90% of the population would define the term as "a split personality". Nobody who wrote about this had the first idea what they were talking about, but all at once Wain's work was cemented in a sort of immutable chronology, with the most representative and realistic cats at the beginning, followed by the whimsically naughty greeting-card-style cats, then those oddball wildly-colored-and-patterned things, and finally, the horrendous, scary, oh-my-we-don't-like-that-one cats trailing along at the end. This was proof positive that not only had Wain gone mad,  his very art had slowly but relentlessly deteriorated from drawing-room respectability into something no decent person would ever want to look at.




There is biographical evidence that Wain WAS sometimes difficult to deal with, even antisocial, and could be "inappropriate" (which in Edwardian times was almost synonymous with being a "madman"), and spent some time in an asylum when his sisters had had enough of his strange ideas and angry acting out. As in too many cases, he landed there in part because his funds had run out and he had nowhere else to go. For as time went on, his charming anthropomorphic cats went out of style, as everything else eventually does. 




Because he was an artist in his soul and not just an illustrator, Wain kept on painting, even while hospitalized - and yes, he DID paint his cats in a tremendous variety of styles, from the most purr-rumbling, paw-kneading, whiskery realism to the most wildly, even disturbingly abstract - but none of these works was ever dated. Thus there is no evidence at all that as his mind supposedly deteriorated, his conventional cats relentlessly and sequentially devolved from whimsical creatures to bizarre psychedelic ones, to (finally) those dreadful Satanic figures that barely resembled cats at all.






Art historians who have actually taken the time to research his life have concluded that Wain was likely not a schizophrenic at all, but may have lived with another condition that was even less understood. We now know much more about autism and Asperger syndrome and the many gradations of it, and are even beginning to unlock its artistic/creative significance. From existing records, it is likely he painted his conventional cats in parallel with the wildly imaginitive, even disturbing-looking cats he became famous for. Yes, he probably DID experience a chronic mental or perhaps social liability that sometimes separated him from his fellow humans. But he never once gave up on his beloved cats, portraying them in every conceivable manner, with a few that were so startlingly original that no one knew what to make of them. They just didn't fit anywhere. Happens sometimes with these artist types, as with that other fellow. . . you know, the "madman" who painted all those sunflowers.





The little arrangement I give you here is NOT in any kind of chronology. Nor is it completely random. These cats are here because I like them. The more extreme ones aren't here, not because I dislike them but because they're already getting enough (if not too much) play on websites called Psychedelic Cats! and Wain's Schizo Cats. Each inevitably includes a rectangular diagram cut into squares, with each cube representing a stage of successive deterioration rather than a phase of inspiration. I even found a few paintings with labels like "early stages". Obviously, Wain's originality was a sign of sickness. We are still poking the madman with sharp sticks.

Anyway, as I sigh in my usual  exasperation at what a lot of ignorant lunkheads human beings are, I found this snippet on an art site, and it clarified things a little bit for me. 




"Dr. Michael Fitzgerald disputes the claim of schizophrenia, indicating Wain more than likely had Asperger syndrome (AS). Of particular note, Fitzgerald indicates that while Wain’s art takes on a more abstract nature as he grew older, his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish as one would expect from a schizophrenic. Moreover, elements of visual agnosia are demonstrated in his painting, a key element in some cases of AS. If Wain had visual agnosia, it may have manifested itself merely as an extreme attention to detail.





A series of five of his paintings is commonly used as an example in psychology textbooks to putatively show the change in his style as his psychological condition deteriorated. However, it is not known if these works were created in the order usually presented, as Wain did not date them. Rodney Dale, author of Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats, has criticised the belief that the five paintings can be used as an example of Wain’s deteriorating mental health, writing: “Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] ‘later’ productions which are patterns rather than cats.”





H. G. Wells said of him, “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”

His work is now highly collectible but care is needed as forgeries are common."





Tuesday, February 12, 2019

My Fuzzy Valentine: a tribute to Bentley, the cat of my heart




My fuzzy valentine
Sweet fuzzy valentine
With you I never would part

You are inscrutable,
It's indisputable
I know you've hooked my foolish heart

Are your vet checks less than fun,
From the vacuum, do you run?
When you meow, you know your chow
will soon appear

Don't shed your fur on me,
Please try to purr for me - 
Stay, my Bentley-paws, stay with me!
(stay off the table)

Stay, my Bentley-paws, no, stay there!
(stay off the counter)

oh well, what can I say. . . 

Each day is Fuzzy Valentine day!