Frustrated Cat Blogging

Margaret Hassan was murdered a few days ago, and the world blinked. I'm a little sick of the world right now. My ill temper is showing. The blogosphere teaches us: When in despair of men's souls, blog the cat.

Notice there are no photos in this cat blog. I don't really like cameras, except for the ones they use to take pictures of Mars and such things. I don't know what the point of photographing the cat would be, as the image could not adequately depict the cat's greed for tuna, its near-psychotic mood swings, or its unreasoning hatred of vacuum cleaners. For compensation, here is a picture of Meryl Yourish's cat, which looks nothing like mine. And here is a haiku I wrote about the cat:

I want to die, old
and fat, flat on my back in
the big yellow patch.

Here is a haiku I wrote about a bat, which rhymes with cat:

I am a blind bat
and you are nothing more than
a hole in my scream.

The cat has no name. Unless I happen to be cursing at it, in which case it has every name under the sun. If it were a dog I would give it a name, but apart from cursing, I see no point in the cat having a name which its brain is too primitive to even recognize. If there were two cats I suppose they would have to have names, so I could distinguish between them when cursing at them, and on the rare occasions when I had to refer to one or the other of them conversationally: "I don't know whether it was Fluffy or Dickhead that knocked the Christmas tree over, but I suspect it was Dickhead."

Besides having no name, the cat has no claws, and no functioning genital apparatus. This aggressive pruning was the work of a previous owner and no responsibility of mine. In happier days the cat was female, and I would think that putting the genitals out of commission would mean no female pheromones, but apparently the pheromones are indestructable. So every filthy, arrogant tom that passes through the neighborhood instantly detects my cat. For years I've been coming home to find these fearless bastards on my doorstep, giving me their nasty defiant looks.

There are many strange things about cats. Like the fact that most of their endearing qualities are derived from their natural existence as solitary killers. Cats don't stink because their saliva acts as a deodorant - a very efficient form of natural camouflage. Curiosity and playfullness are traits they require in order to learn hunting and killing behavior, which is not instinctive in felines. They nap constantly as a means of conserving the maximum amount of energy between kills - and to maintain a constant state of rested alertness, in case something comes along that needs to be killed. In other words, Pooky-Cat is built to kill, kill, kill. No wonder then, that the Nazis named their panzers after cats.

People wonder about the intelligence of cats. Especially after the cat has just perpetrated some unbelievably destructive cat-feat that seems to be fiendishly clever and suicidally stupid at the same time. There is actually a reliable anatomical method of measuring the intelligence of vertebrate animals, which is to divide the weight of the brain by the weight of the spinal cord. The higher the number, the greater the animal's intelligence. By this means we learn that the cat has about two-thirds the intelligence of a dog, and less than half the intelligence of the smartest quadrapeds (like the echidna, or Australian hedgehog).

So it's safe to say that Tigger's instantaneous demolition of all your bookshelves was just a piece of idiotic luck, and not the result of some Osama bin Laden-like plan.

That's all I can think of to say about the cat, which could consider itself well-blogged for now, if it were capable of considering things.