Great Cats of Science...

Here's an interesting bit of trivia: That mind-blowing high definition video stream we've been receiving from the Artemis II mission is being transmitted back to Earth using a laser communications system first tested with a video of a cat named Taters.

Four Legged Friends

Other than fish, I didn't have pets growing up, and in hindsight, I kind of regret it.

I was 20 years old before I understood that our domesticated companions were not "dumb animals" running off some simplistic programming.

What brought this to mind was that while I was dog sitting a friend's German Shorthaired Pointers, I went to change the trash bag in the kitchen and I was careful not to pop the fresh bin liner open with a flick of the wrists.

It's not that the dogs would have minded, but I have been conditioned not to do that because of Holden. He's a (mostly) fearless tomcat. Even vacuum cleaners just make him warily decamp to another room, but there are two things that put him into an absolute panic: wielding a broom, and popping large sacks open with a flick of the wrist. Poor little fella must have had some traumatic experiences as a feral kitten.

Young me, who hadn't spent time around animal companions, wouldn't have noticed the difference between "wariness" and "terrified", but it's definitely a thing.

Sometimes I have to do things that make my animal friends uncomfortable, whether in the course of normal chores or For Their Own Good (taking kitty to the vet, for instance), and I do my best to reassure them that everything's cool when I'm doing it. But I do my damndest to not do things that actually terrify them.

That Time of Year

I'm on the record as preferring DST to Standard Time. I personally don't have much use for sunlight before 0745 or so, so hack that bit off and stitch it to the other end of the day where I still might be out and about doing stuff.

It's the moving the clocks that's annoying (although it's less annoying as we're down to two battery-powered wall clocks and a microwave that don't reset themselves.) If it were up to me we'd leave the clocks on DST year 'round and spare me the horror of sunset at half past lunch in the dead of winter.

Most people hate the spring time change worse because that's the one that steals an hour of sleep. I, on the other hand, prefer the spring change because...at least for the next week or so...the cats will be pleasantly surprised by the arrival of mealtime rather than driving me up the wall for thirty or forty-five minutes ahead of dinner, begging for food.

(Remember to put fresh batteries in critical safety equipment: smoke detectors, CO2 detectors, weapon-mounted lights or lasers, electro-optical sights, et cetera.)

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It's Huck!

A rather dramatically-lit Huck is lounging in a platform halfway up the cat tree in the living room.

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Monday Meme Day...

Anti-Sleep Cat

Holden started out the evening curled in a ball at my feet, which meant I couldn't stretch my legs out full length.

Eventually my knees were aching enough that I sat up and picked him up and set him on the bed next to me so I could straighten my legs. I carefully set him so that he was stretched parallel to me, leaving me the maximum amount of room to toss and turn in comfort.

Somehow, in his sleep, he rotated himself through ninety degrees on the bed until he was stretched out across its width, about at my waist level, leaving me barely enough room for the width of my hips if I lay on my back. If I lay on my left side in any position other than completely straight as a board, my butt would be hanging off the bed.

He's lucky he's so cute.

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I could have told you that.

Some recent studies of domestic cats show that they have a remarkable ability to pick up the meanings of spoken words just by observation and without specific training.

Even if your cat hasn’t gotten your tongue, it’s most likely getting your words. Without any particular training, the animals—like human babies—appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports. That means that, despite all appearances to the contrary, our furtive feline friends may actually be listening to what we say.

As anyone who's spent time around cats knows, they aren't dumb at all, they just DGAF.

Tab Clearing...

• Being a social media clout goblin is a fraught choice for a career path.


• Home vet tips for the prepper cat owner.


• 94 year-old man finds and restores his dad's car.

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Sleepy Huck

Nikon 1 V2 & 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2

For creatures that evolved in the hot climate of the ancient Fertile Crescent, cats sure seem to have gotten acclimated to air conditioning.

Holden, especially, with his floofy northern coat, was delighted to discover that the metal grates in the floor dispense cool air at this time of year, just like they do warm air in the winter, so it's not uncommon to find him parked atop one during this heat wave.

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Meme Dump...

Sports Fan Alignment Chart

Horking Cat

I was awakened this morning, about an hour before the alarm clock was due to go off, by the plaintive cries that Huck makes just before he horks something up.

He was in some unknown location in the house, and it took me a second to pinpoint where.

Understand that every square inch of floor in Roseholme Cottage is hardwood, tile, or linoleum... except for a smallish, maybe six foot by four foot, oriental-type rug on the floor next to Bobbi's bed.

I went stumbling in that direction, half-asleep still, muttering "No, Huck! No! Not on the rug!"

He must have heard me galumphing his way, because he skedaddled down the hall to the office and proceeded to hork out a blob of hairball and other ick nearly the size of a golf ball.

It's really hard to get back into dreamland after that, and I'd been having a neato one about living on a cool space yacht like the Millennium Falcon.

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It's Caturday!

Huck would like to remind y'all that it's Caturday.

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Attention Seeking

“A lot of the so-called mischievous behavior of cats is simply an attempt to get the owners’ attention,” Serpell says. “They’ve learned by trial and error if they sit on your desk and throw your pens on the floor, eventually you’ll give them attention or get up.” Taking an extra 30 minutes every day to interact with your cat could lead to a happier dynamic.

I don't know where the cultural trope of 'aloof cats' came from. Whenever my ex would lounge on the sofa to watch TV, his big black tomcat, Lucifer, would perch on his shoulder like a parrot on a pirate. No sooner would I lay down on the bed than Mittens would come a-running from wherever she was in the house to curl up next to my head.

When Huck gets anxious for attention, he'll rare up on his hind legs and knock stuff off of desks with a swipe of his paw. Holden will get upset that I'm paying attention to the strange flat glowing panel in front of me, rather than the cat, and mill around in the footwell of my desk while mewing plaintively until I finally pick him up and balance him in my lap for a bit (which is awkward because Holden is way too large to fit in a lap and it takes both hands to keep him balanced there.)

Meme Dump

Groggy.

In retrospect, it was probably a rumble of thunder that woke me.

All I know is I was laying awake in bed and the curtains over the window flashed white. I thought that someone must have been in the yard, playing the beam of a flashlight across the house. As I sat up and pulled the curtain aside to peek out, the tornado sirens started going off.

I decided to go wake Bobbi, who turned on the TV, and sure enough we were about to get smacked by a hella strong front, barreling straight for Indy at 55 miles per hour.

The house rattled with hail, like someone was throwing handfuls of pebbles against the walls and windows. Bobbi was like "Okay, if we head for the basement, you grab Holden and I'll get Huck," and for a hot minute that seemed like a possibility, but then the first wave was past us and the weather settled down to a normal, albeit heavy, rain. At least it would have been easy to grab the cats, because when it started blowing outside, they both jumped up on Bobbi's bed, looking for some soothing.

There were at least two more lines that passed over us behind that first one, but neither was anywhere near as dramatic.

Still, I didn't get a lot of sleep between two and five AM...

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Fluffy the Killer

The old joke goes: "Why are cats such assholes? Because they're God's perfect killing machines, but they're also tiny and adorable and humans keep scooping them up and talking baby talk to them."

At an adorable 3.5 pounds, the black-footed cat has the right to be among the crankiest of them all...

"Adorably big-eyed and smaller than a house cat, black-footed cats are far more successful at hunting than lions. They can jump up to five feet in the air and 6½ feet in distance; they kill eight to 14 meals per night and can eat 3,000 rodents a year.

“They’re considered the fierce cat,” said Bob Cisneros, Hogle Zoo’s associate director of animal care, who described kitten Gaia as a “mighty warrior.”

“These guys are voracious hunters,” he said."

That new resident at the Salt Lake City Zoo is pretty much fully grown at three pounds, which is about a fifth of the mass of Huck or Holden when they're in fighting trim. (Less than a fifth if we haven't been monitoring their dinner portions carefully.)

It looks like if I want to see black-footed cats, the closest ones are in Cleveland's Metroparks Zoo or the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

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The internet is made of cat pictures...

The Pentax Q-S1 that debuted in 2014 would turn out to be the final iteration of the Q series. It was basically a Q7 with the outer shell re-sculpted into more "Leica-rangefinder-esque" contours.

I was headed out the door yesterday with the Q-S1 & 8.5mm f/1.9 01 Standard Prime lens in my jacket pocket when I noticed Huck napping in the window seat looking adorable, so I snapped a couple photos.

The upper one is taking the .dng RAW file and running it through Photoshop's RAW convertor, and the lower one is a monochrome .jpeg straight out of the camera.

Photo Cheating...

With the 1.6X crop factor of Canon's APS-C sensor, the EF 50mm f/1.4 lens is transformed from a normal lens into a short telephoto, ideal for portraiture work. It's fast enough for available light work indoors, even on the old EOS 40D!

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Meme Dump…

Wild & Free

There's a local quasi-feral cat in our 'hood who our neighbor named Copper.

She's been a neighborhood fixture for many years now and had several litters of kittens by numerous feline Lotharios... I remember one notable occasion where I turned the corner on a side street in the neighborhood, only to find Copper and one of her babydaddies, a burly scarred gray & white tom named Thug, taking the advice of McCartney and Lennon right there in the middle of 56th Street and not at all inclined to move for the car.

She's very skittish and it was several years before she was successfully trapped and taken to have her baby-makin' bits deactivated. She still roams the neighborhood, although she's no longer helping populate it.

I was surprised that I was able to get this shot, even with the long 70-200/4L on my 1D Mark III. Normally if you turn and look directly at her, even from several houses down the block, she'll scuttle for cover. I guess having the camera up in front of my face blocked the threatening gaze of a pair of eyeballs.