Cats know squat

WARNING: This post is about people and animals urinating. I'm sure you need no more enticement to keep reading, so here it is:

THINGS MY CAT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND #1: Urinating

I don’t think cats understand urinating. At least not the way dogs do. Or I should say, male dogs. When a dog lifts his leg, he’s not just urinating, he’s aiming at something. He’s got an innate sense of fluid dynamics – pressure, volume, trajectory – that your average cat just doesn’t have. What happens for a cat is, he’s walking along and suddenly, “Hey, I feel like I have to squat!” He feels something happening, so when he’s done he turns around to look. He finds a smelly wet patch and thinks, “Whoa! I almost sat in that! I better cover it up before someone else steps in it.”

Now, it has often been observed that cats don’t see humans as companions so much as food processors and scratching machines. I believe this based on the fact that a cat will come up to you and start sharpening his claws on your leg, as if you were no more than a mobile tree. I think it’s the challenge that excites them. But you would never see a cat do that to another cat. So we have a preexisting bias of unbalanced respect in the first place, which leads to the assumption that whatever the human is doing that doesn’t directly affect the cat is beneath notice.

I live in the woods. When I’m way out in the backyard, which is just another part of the forest, I’ve often found it more convenient to just pee behind a tree than to walk all the way back to the house. When my dog sees this, I can tell he understands. I know he’s thinking, “Yep. Good job. Nice arc. That’s now your tree.” And then he goes on to mark out his own territory: “This here’s my tree. And that’s my bucket. This corner of the house…Hey, neighbor kid! My kid now.” And so on.

Now when my cat sees me peeing behind a tree, he’s thinking, “Food processor! Scratching machine!” and walks right up. He’s got no idea about fluid dynamics. In particular the relationship of pressure to trajectory as it relates to distance. So he comes right up to stand at my feet and says, ‘Hey, food processor! How about some scrPTHPTHPTHPTHPHTPH!!”

George Takei's Last Name

Proper pronunciation is important, especially if you are pronouncing someone's name.

If you pronounce someone's name improperly, it can be very offensive.

George Takei, say it out loud. I bet you mispronounced it.

Takei: Teh•kay

Teh•kay, not kai, kay.

GET IT? No? Then maybe you need a visual representation:

Pronunciation: Pro•NUN•see•a•shun

Where Did Teddy Bears Come From?

It is a common misconception that the "Teddy Bear" was named after Theodore Roosevelt, but was actually named after Sir Lawrence Theodore "Teddy" Bayer of mid seventeenth century Spain. During his early childhood, his entire family was mauled by a pack of, now extinct, Spanish Bears who hunted in packs, similar in fashion to wolves. 

(Spanish Bear)

The reason for their extinction was that Sir Lawrence had started a personal vendetta against the Spanish Bear species, eventually hunting them and having them all stuffed. After Sir Lawrence died, his descendants looted his home (for he had not written a Will, and they did not like him anyway) and found the thousands of stuffed Spanish Bears. They easily mistook them as children's toys, and since their surname was "Bayer," they named it for themselves. So there you have it! The true birth of the Teddy Bayer!

A Nice Pet

You know, if I had a pet Manatee, I would probably name him "Hugh."

Then, I could invite people to my house to witness all of Hugh Manatee.

Never Enough Notepad

Yay for a hundred Notepads!

Ham and Cheesy

Here's something I did recently. For a snack, I took a piece of ham, and sprinkled some shredded cheese on it. Not just a little cheese, I really put a wad on there. And then rolled it up. I lifted it to my mouth and just as I was taking a bite of it, I somehow managed to breathe in. This turned the rolled up ham into a miniature cheese cannon which launched a spray of finely shredded cheese particles toward the back of my throat. Not content to stop there, many of the particles, noticing that the path continued in the down direction, proceeded to explore this new avenue at high speed. After mere micro-seconds, they got bored with this new direction..

“Oh, look,” said one cheese particle to another. “Where do you suppose that opening leads to?”

Yes, I know that's a pretty long sentence to speak in mere micro-seconds, but cheese talks really fast.

“I think it's the lungs,” said the second cheese particle. “Let's go in there! I hear it's da bomb!”

Cheese isn't really good at staying current and frequently uses out-dated expressions in an effort to appear hip, but it really just comes across as....well, you know. But we know what it meant.

So anyway, they decided to go into the lungs, which I can only assume made the cheese particles happy, but what it did for me was cause me to cough and hack and gasp for breath for almost ten minutes. On thinking about how I did this to myself, I decided that it had been a pretty stupid thing to do. But it gave me an idea for a new thing you can do when someone you know does something as equally stupid as sucking cheese through a ham tube.

Like maybe he put his MP3 player in his shirt pocket when he went to the restroom. And maybe, after using the restroom, accidentally knocked his headphones off. No, no, they did not fall into the toilet. They were too cheap for that. But when your friend leaned over to pick them up, the MP3 player slid out of his pocket. Toilets are not fussy, yet while they are perfectly content to do their job without comment, they understandably yearn for finer things. Like MP3 players. So the toilet sucks in the hapless player, like cheese from a ham tube. Now we will not speculate on whether or not your friend reaches into the toilet to retrieve the player, nor will we consider whether it could survive such treatment; we will content ourselves to assume that the MP3 player was no longer a part of your friend's life after it hit bottom. Now, this is not to suggest that this actually happened to me, or that I would reach in after the player, and take it apart and try to dry it out, to no avail. I didn't suggest that at all. This is all theoretical, of course. Yes, yes, you understand.

So your friend tells you about this and at first you laugh. But then you stop, and, savoring the moment, you say to him, your voice dripping with mock disdain, “You cheese breather!”

Math?

(DON'T NEED/TAKE)*(MONEY+FAME+CREDIT CARD TO RIDE THIS TRAIN) = (THAT'S)^LOVE

Think about this, friends.

Now, I am going to throw this idea out to you, to maybe see things a little differently. I dunno if it'll work, but it doesn't hurt to try.

So, have you ever been talking to someone, or watching TV, or hunting an octopus, or something when suddenly a memory pops into your head?

Not a good memory, a bad one, a really bad one. Y'know, the one where you said that ridiculously stupid thing to your friend or snapped at the lady talking through the speaker at the drive through and made her cry because you didn't know that her father died yesterday. Yeah, those kind of memories.

We all have them. They suck. They make us feel horrible on the inside. They make you think: "Oh my God, why did I do that?"

Well, I have theorized a possible reason for these sudden vivid remembrances.

I believe that this habit of remembering bad things is an instinctive trait, something ingrained deep into our subconscious minds.

This instinct, in my opinion, is a good thing. First, let's explore why I say that.

Back in our cave-dwelling past, bad and probably deadly experiences were probably more common then. So, if a caveman made a really bad life-threatening mistake, it would stick in his mind for the rest of his life. Just like our less-deadly mistakes. The caveman would be occasionally reminded of this event when when it pops into his mind spontaneously. Over and over again.

So, why do we have these memories? We have them to constantly remind us to never do that stupid thing again. That is what the memories are for.

And to me, that sounds like a good thing.