The Great Cat Conspiracy - continued

... actually, we could call this the Never-Ending Story ...

Oddly enough, considering I've been a Cat Man all my life (even though our household also includes a magnificent Border Terrier), it wasn't until a few years ago that I started suspecting that cats were in cahoots pretty much all over the world. I blogged about this early in my blogging career, when I first saw a Simon's Cat cartoon and realized that Peaches did exactly the same thing as the cat in the cartoon, except, of course, for the bit with the baseball bat; and that was only because I didn't have one handy.

The suspicion was confirmed when others at my workplace (so many of my co-workers on the 17th floor at Metrotower II were cat people at the time that I'm sure the Evil Empire (otherwise known by its official title, "Human Resources") started to check into the definition of "discriminatory hiring practices") saw Simon's Cat and said, "my cat does exactly the same thing!"

Now ... more evidence that the International Cat Conspiracy is alive and well. When I was little, I noticed early on that my cat -- a Siamese named Tuptim (as, in fact, were many Siamese cats at the time, thanks to The King and I) -- had an uncanny ability to pick the exact spot on a book or newspaper where I happened to be reading and curl up there. As it turns out, she was by no means unique.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

and, lest you think this concept exists only in cartoons,

Exhibit C

Daisy Mae, who's "helping" Amelia, also finds my computer keyboard particularly comfortable, and I've had to develop a reflexive motion with my left hand, sweeping her tail away as I type. Even by not actually being directly on the keyboard, the constant "C" is significant. 

"If she knew what she was staring at,
she wouldn't be a cat."
-- Walt Kelly (creator of Pogo)

When she's not on the keyboard, Daisy Mae has another favorite place on my desk: under the lamp ... and on top of the router. She hasn't knocked me offline yet, but while she appears to be dozing in the lovely, relaxing warmth, she's probably communicating telecattically (like Peaches, on the right) with other cats around the world (those with the motto: "Opposable thumbs? We don' need no opposable thumbs!") to find out how to do that.

The Kaufman-and-Hart play, You Can't Take it With You, includes a woman who writes novels and uses kittens as paper-weights. When my parents produced the show at the old Avon Theatre in Vancouver in the 50s, they used real kittens in the cast. They were generally kept on the desk with saucers of cream, but one day they went walkabout. Dad went a-hunting and eventually heard mewing backstage and discovered the kittens had found a hole in the wall and -- being cats -- crawled in to investigate. Dad wound up ripping out most of the drywall before getting to the beasts in time to get them onstage. Even then, the constant "C" had not been factored-in, and this was a good decade before Moore made his prediction.