by Kevin Burton
Sometimes the people news is too depressing to deal with. Sometimes as a remedy, I turn to the world of my cats.
You will notice that people tend to creep into the cat news. This may be unfortunate but may be inevitable.
So here on Page 7, all the cat news that is printed to fit and/or fit to print….
When our cat Lakin doesn’t eat her Fancy Feast wet food right away, I speak to her in Spanish, with a warning I learned from Mexican music.
One of my favorite songs by a Mexican recording artist is “Si Fuera Tu” by Pandora. In Spanish, “si fuera tu” means “If I were you.”
The song is spoken advice from one woman tu another that she stick to her man, closer than his mama, because the world is swarming with women and, translated, “you never know who would like to eat your pastry.”
Any food left out that Lakin doesn’t eat, our cat Ronnie will vacuum up immediately without pausing to ask “you gonna finish that?”
So if she hesitates, I say “La-kin, si fuera tu kit kit”…..
Cats can make 276 different facial expressions, according to the Interesting Facts website.
“In 2021, researchers at UCLA recorded 194 minutes of cat-to-cat facial expressions at a nearby CatCafé Lounge. Then they coded all those facial muscle movements, excluding things like chewing and yawning, and discovered 276 unique expressions,” reads a story on the website.
The Burton Media research team studied cat-to-human facial expressions and found that 253 of the 276 expressions mean, “feed me”….
Lakin has a severe box fetish. That makes the Burton household circa fall/winter 2023-24 feline heaven for her. She is at least as happy lounging on a stack of boxes as on the blanket that Jeannette’s grandmother made for her around 1970. You can’t leave a box open either, or Lakin will be inside exploring.
Cats have an instinct to hide and boxes offer a perfect semi-enclosed space for that. From there they have a good vantage point for spotting danger…..
This is an old one, but it’s news to me. A year ago The Independent ran a short story saying cats had been rescued from Ukraine and brought to the US.
“Cats that have been rescued from war-torn Ukraine are being welcomed to an animal shelter in Washington DC,” reads the story. “Rescue volunteers travelled to Ukraine to bring the cats back with them to the states in the hopes of finding them a forever home.”
It would make me feel stupid I guess, but I would like to read that this was some kind of joke I fell for. Nobody loves cats more than I do. But what about the human beings in Ukraine?,……
I don’t think cat ladies ever start out saying they’ll be cat ladies,” Writes Abbey Roy in the Newark (Ohio) Advocate. “Unless they are Tiny, who has stated on multiple occasions that someday she will live in the apartment complex near our house and have 100 cats. (And who am I to crush a 7-year-old’s dream, especially one who wants to live close by?)”
“I imagine, as with many things, it starts out slowly. You semi-committally add a feline to your household and realize that it’s the perfect kind of pet for a person who likes warm, fuzzy things that don’t make much noise, don’t slobber, bathe themselves and are fine to be left alone for periods of time,” Roy writes.
“Then you realize the cat could maybe use a friend, or what if it dies someday and you have to start from scratch, and also the Humane Society keeps posting pictures.”
“And then it’s just all downhill from there.”
Roy asked her readers, so I will ask you: How many cats does it take to make one a cat lady (or cat dude)?
We have two cats, for now. Stay tuned to this blog for news that my wife Jeannette has agreed to a third. Once that third one comes on board, the sky’s the limit!
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