A Tail Of Two Cats

The title to this blog entry might seem facetious to you, or you might think it a rather bad pun, but it does make a point about our two cats.

People who have not had pets do not understand or do not believe that animals have personalities just as different and distinct as humans do.

Take our cats, please. (No, that's an old Henny Youngman joke: "Take my wife, please.") But, I digress.

Our two cats, or maybe I should say our cat and the other one that comes to eat and sleep here during the day, are as different in behavior and habits as any two humans can be.

Lea,  the cat on the right of this photo,

has the personality, habits, and finicky character of an old spinster (she is old BTW; we guess she is 12 years old which would make her a 70 year old person). If you are a film buff like I am, I would describe her like Millicent Wetherby, the spinsterish woman played by Joan Crawford in the movie Autumn Leaves. Or perhaps an older Jane Hudson as played by Katherine Hepburn in Summertime, the movie about a spinster who goes to Venice and falls in love with Rossano Brazzi. 

Well, Prince, the cat on the left of the picture would make a convincing Renato de Rossi, the character played by Brazzi in the same movie. He is dashing, handsome, amorous, and quite the man (uh, cat) about town.

In this photo,

 you can see that he is not one of perfunctory sleeping habits, much to the dismay of Lea. Yet, much like in the movie Summertime (and if you are too young to remember it or have seen it, here is a link to a clip in Youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67MxIl795w) Lea is just as reluctant to give in to Prince's shenanigans as was Miss Hepburn when Rossano Brazzi tried to charm her out of her wits and to stay in Venice. In the movie, Jane's common sense and old maid morality prevails and she leaves Venice. In our house, Lea's spinsterish spirit prevails and she has no truck with Prince.

Joan Crawford's behavior toward Cliff Robertson in "The Autumn Leaves" it is not too far fetched to describe what happens to Lea when Prince comes around after being out all night doing who knows what all over the neighborhood. (See the 1956 trailer for the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiDz3vcEBnQ).

When he comes in, like the rake that he is, he goes up to Lea and kisses her (actually rubs noses). She accepts his gesture but then strikes at him, as if saying, "You smell of another cat, you cad!" Prince nimbly jumps out of harm's way, like the young, street-wise cat that he is, then jauntily goes to have his milk and food, after which he sleeps all morning. Nevertheless, when he leaves to do his rounds, she stares out the window, longingly.

But, back to why I named this entry "The Tail Of Two Cats."

There are many things that give insight into an animal's personality and its state of mind. But, in a cat, the most telling (apart from the meowing, purring, and growling) is the way they move or manage their tail.

Lea is constantly at war with her tail. She chases it, bites it, paws at it with her claws to such an extent that we find tufts of her hair on the rug and her tail looks like those Christmas tree branches after they have gone dry and have lost all of their pine needles.

To me this "tail chasing" denotes Lea's character and anxieties. Like all old maids, she is highly strung, mildly psychotic, and always chasing herself instead of chasing a male cat.

While Prince, on the other hand, never chases his tail. He does chase other cats, especially his nemesis the black cat that lives in a street near-by and dares invade Prince's territory.

When he is not fighting, Prince's main occupation is sunning himself in front of the house or on top of our garden table. His tail, a thick, furry thing that serves him well as as rudder when he is jumping from roof to roof, keeps a sort of time when he is at rest. Like a metronome, it flips from side to side, at regular intervals, as if he were humming to himself and thus marking the beats to a song.

When he is about to get into a fight or he is on the alert, his tail stands straight up, like a battle flag.

It reminds me of the Japanese soldiers in movies like Kagemucha.

Lea, in contrast, uses her tail mostly to display anger or displeasure. She shoots it straight back as if streamlining herself for a run.

Prince being an expressive cat, uses his tail in a lot of ways which (being a cat psychiatrist I am in a position to know) I think allows him to be a more settled, well-adjusted feline; while Lea, which is always at odds with her tail (and it seem with Life itself) is so nervous her hair falls out.

Prince seems to have learned his cat ways from Tom, a cat that lives across the road in a neighbor's house and whom we suspect is in fact Prince's father.

That's Tom sitting on a post of our front fence. As one can see, Price looks a lot like Tom. Prince has taken over the street from Tom and occasionally he lets him know who is boss now so Tom is always on the lookout for Prince. He is, in fact, afraid of him -- as one can see from the way he looks when Prince is approaching.

Tom has a funny way of expressing himself with his tail. He never meows or purrs or utters any sound at all. But, he twirls his tail when we feed him. Its his way of saying, "Thanks for the chow."

Strangely enough, there are no female cats in our neighborhood (except Lea and she has been "fixed", as they say). So, I wonder how this cat saga is going to develop when a she-cat appears on the block.

I bet there'll be a lot of tail wagging.

Dummies defeat designers: not really news!

So, I imagine some guy in the design department of an automotive manufacturer pitching the first idea ever for a wireless device that would lock/unlock a car's doors with just the push of a button on the key itself:

"You know what happens," the guy said to management, "to a lot of people (he did not want to say women because he would have been accused of being a misogynist by the one woman on the management team) they leave the car and forget to lock the doors, or think that they will be back in five minutes so they are too lazy to lock them, and ¡bam! a car thief makes off with the car in a New York Minute. So, here is the perfect answer to that problem: a wireless device to lock the doors of a car with just the push of a button."

The guy was given a substantial raise and he was promoted to head of design at the car company.



OK,  now flash forward twenty years. How do you defeat such great design? Easily. A few days ago, a person I know (no names, please) got out of the car, dutifully clicked on the device to lock the doors and walked away from the car. Why do I say that this wonderful design was defeated? BECAUSE THE PERSON LEFT A WINDOW OPEN! And, not only that, when the car alarm complained by bipping, this person, ignored the beeps and was even annoyed by them!

I wish they would make talking alarms that would shout insults,

"Hey, dummy, you forgot to close the door!

TV clickers, those long black things with lots of buttons that allow you to change channels, adjust the volume, and so on were designed so that one didn't have to get up from the couch to go twist a dial or push a button on the TV set itself when you wanted to change channels or adjust the volumen. How can a person defeat this design? Easily: you leave the clicker in another room!

Some smart designer made a brush with a handle that fits neatly onto the handle of the matching dust pan. Thus you keep both items together neatly without having to look for one or the other when you want to, say, pick up the cat litter that your cat pushes out of the litter box.

Why is it, then, that every time I want to use said items I can find the brush but not the dust pan or the dust pan but not the brush? Foiled again, Mr. Designer.

Pens are a favorite subject around our house. It seems you can never find one when one wants to write down a message or take down a telephone number. My wife buys boxes of them and they all quietly, mysteriously disappear. So, she decided to get a pen designed to avoid those pesky pens that run away. She got one of those pens that are attached to a base by a chain!

Oh, yeah? Well try to find both pen and base. They seem to have run away like those prisoners that escape chained together in those prison movies.

When I worked in the systems support department of a large corporation, we systems engineers dreaded the time we had to answer calls for support from users. No matter how "fool proof" we or the designers of computer software made things, users would find a way to defeat the design. Idiots and fools can prove incredibly ingenious when it comes to making stupid mistakes or defeating the purpose of a design.

Take floppy disks, for example. Most people nowadays do not remember why floppy disks were called that. It was because they were indeed floppy, made of very thin material. So, they came protected by a harder plastic cover. Well, there was always some enterprising moron who would look at the thing, figure that if the floppy was going to be read by the machine it should be taken out of its cover! One guy cut the cover with a large pair of scissors, put the floppy part into the floppy disk reader, and after the reader crunched it up into a ball of plastic, he brought it to us at the systems department to complain that his machine did not work properly.

There is a web site http://www.darwinawards.com that records the fatal disregard of the obvious, the warning sings, the defeat of designs that are meant to keep you safe. The results are tragic...although they do make me laugh. I especially like the story of the man who turned off the lights of his car to "save electricity." A 40 ton truck showed him it was a bad idea.

There has been a lot of reports lately that car makers are working on production of "driverless" cars. That is, cars that drive themselves. Well, if that doesn't scare you into becoming a Jehovah Witness I don't know what does.  Can you imagine some guy defeating that little piece of design? "Oh, let's see what happens if ..."

Nothing, absolutely nothing is "idiot proof". Only an idiot would believe things can be idiot proof.