The Willy Way

Personally, I love shoes. Whenever my Provider comes come and takes off her shoes, I pounce on them, sniffing and playing with them.
My favorite: her sport shoes, although she claims that they smell. Yeah, that’s the whole idea, stupid!

As we all know, humans have this annoying habit of washing and cleaning themselves, their clothes and their apartments, which makes our job of marking our territory damn difficult.

It seems that most Providers, unlike mine, refuse to lend their felines their footwear for cat entertainment.
Since we cats are quite inventive, we find a way.
Take my fellow feline Willy the Cat.
His fetish: gloves aka handwear.

(For all you kittens out there: the front paws of Humans are called “hands” (very good for stroking cat fur and opening cat food packages and tins) and their back paws are called “feet” (awkward body parts that somehow balance their whole upright bodies – don’t try to figure that one out, must be a design flaw)

Willy lives in place called Pelham, NY, where Humans work in something they call “gardens”. (Just some pieces of land that is great to roll around in, although humans freak out when you do that. If you don't believe me, ask my friend Bundy).
Since humans do not have proper claws, they dig in the soil with metal thingies wearing gloves. Just what Willy likes!
  
He loves to sneak into gardens and carry off those gardening gloves.

Willy’s Providers put his trophies on a clothesline strung across their front fence with the sign:
"Our cat is a glove snatcher. Please take these if yours."

This is quite humiliating of course.
When other humans starting checking this out, Willy pretended not to notice and went on playing with a beetle in the driveway.
Ha! That will serve them right!
What happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?

Obviously, the glove game only works in the summer.
Willy gets his prey during daytime raids, often taking two trips to get a matching pair.
So what is our creative friend going to do during the winter, when humans don’t garden?
He goes for dirty socks from the laundry room.
Let this be a lesson to all felines:
“where there is a will(y), there is way”

Feline On A Leash! Quel Horreur!

Florida is part of earth where old Providers go to take long naps.
The climate is excellent and they love to warm their old, wrinkled, furless bodies in the sun. They copied that from us, felines, but that’s OK.

What is not OK, is that a political something-or-other human in Martin County wants cats to be leashed.

Yes, you read it correctly!
Due to those pesty dogs (and may be also crocodiles, it being Florida and all), they launched a leash law in Martin County in 2003, requiring all pets to be on leashes when they are outside their owners' property.
This is of course Stupid and Undignified!

Cat lovers are clever humans, so they tried to exempt us felines from this stupid leash law.
The Martin County commissioner, a human that listens to the name Lee Weberman, supported their efforts, until recently.
He suddenly yanked his support for their efforts, claiming that he may have been a little premature. How come premature? He is male, so it’s not like giving prematurely birth to a litter or something like that!
He gave a very political (read: poppycock) reason: “It's not the right time to modify this ordinance.”
I read this as: “I need the votes of dog owners for my reelection.”

The local felines have a champion in Maris Sine, who correctly statesd that cat lovers want to get rid of the leash law so they can promote a practice of spaying and neutering abandoned cats and keeping them in colonies instead of them being killed at shelters.
Requiring all cats to be on leashes and fining pet owners who don't leash their cats would make that practice impossible. Way to go, Maris!

Another human, Kristen Neilander, said the County recently fined her $575 (which is lots of cat food and toys, my lovelies!) after catching five of the cats she managed without a leash in her colony. She is fighting those fines. (Way to go, girl!)
“I'm not sure you are aware of how difficult it is to put a cat on a leash and walk it,” Neilander told the W. person.
That stupid Commissioner person reacted by saying that a task force of residents asked for the leash law to be expanded in 2003, so he doesn't want to completely rewrite that law.
He went on by saying that he thought that the cat lovers just wanted some tweaking, so he misunderstood.
Well, my Provider is rather nifty with the written word, so I hereby donate her services (she is something called a “lawyer”) free of charge for the Greater Good of Felineness.
I bet she can do that rewrite within one day – obviously she has more grey brain matter than that Weberman nickenpoop.
And if you don’t believe me, ask my friend Bundy or Morty (see picture)!

Coffee, Anyone?

My Provider drinks heaps of hot brown stuff called “coffee”.
I tried it and didn’t like it.
My conclusion was: cats and coffee don’t mix.
But then I read about Kopi Luwak (Civet Coffee).
You see, I want to keep on the good side of my Provider, so I try to find some articles linking her love for coffee to Moi.

For you ignorandi of the human variety - a luwak is a marsupial aka a common palm civet or toddy cat.
These distant cat cousins live in tropical rainforests (from northern India to the Philippines). They like to climbs coffee trees and eat the coffee cherries.
(I prefer Meow Mix, but then, I don’t climb trees – too much of an effort!)

Being cats, luwaks like to eat the ripest and reddest coffee beans, which humans normally use for brewing that coffee stuff.
After eating the outer covering of the beans, they don’t have a use for the rest so the berry thingies pass through their bodies and are deposited off in a proper cat way.
Local humans gather them and sell them to coffee dealers.
The beans are washed, lightly roasted and sold to other humans.

It takes a lot of humans to do this, so the annual production is 500 lbs (227 kg) – which is about what I consume in cat food.
A bloody waste of effort, methinks, but Humans are Weird Animals and pay mucho for their cup of “cat poop coffee”.
I offered my Provider to chew and pass coffee beans for her, but she doesn’t seem to buy into this “rich, strong aroma with a complex and gamey flavor”.

I might be wrong, but I heard her murmuring “marketing crap” when I showed her the article. May be she is not such a dumb human after all….