Obligatory Cat Post

I imagine you've heard of the seemingly ever-widening Poison Pet Food Disaster. I am happy to report that my two cats are healthy and gluten-free.
I had a half-dozen recalled cans that I had just bought but hadn't used yet. I read about the recall at work and traded the cans in at my grocers instead of poisoning my cats. Being a web junkie paid off- I saw the news as it broke.
This is Wilkins, (below). She's named after NFL placekicker Jeff Wilkins, who kicked a field goal that won a bet for me on the same day I got the cat. My buddy Mike found her inside a box left in the parking lot at his work. She was a kitten then. Now she's almost thirteen. She was a good mouser in her younger days, but my current digs don't have mice so I put her to work as a music critic.

I clear the floor and cover it with a shallow layer of CDs. Wilkins then walks over to the heap, sniffs around a bit and pushes a few aside. If one is really good, she'll bat it across the room, safely away from what happens next.
Once she has made her selections, she perches herself above the remaining discs and hunkers down on her haunches as if to shit. I always toss her outside at this point, so I don't know if she would really carry through with her turding or if it is just a critic's gesture.
Her picks are usually pretty good, although I've noticed she's started picking discs containing rampant profanity, which I cannot play on-air. I think she's slacking up because she misses her giblets n' gravy canned food.

This is Opus, my Tuxedo Cat. I think he's about ten- I got him from the pound and he was pretty grown-up by then. He's the second dumbest cat I have ever owned, but he's also the sweetest. He already has a long-term kidney problem, so he doesn't have 'normal' food in his regular diet anyway -so he was pretty safe from the recalled food.
He likes to go out in the rain. He will stand at the door and meow until I let him out. Then he runs outside and hides under a shrubbery until it stops raining or he gets hungry, whichever comes first. As I said, he's not very smart.

The dumbest cat I had was a Persian named Oliver. He used to leap into our old clawfoot bathtub and then pretend he couldn't get out. The stupid fucker could snatch a hunk of thawing hamburger from the top of the refrigerator but couldn't get out of the tub.
One night I came home from work and found a raging party in progress . Someone had given Oliver a dish of cream and Kahlua and he was wasted...a jar of honey somehow got spilled on the kitchen floor and my poor stupid drunken cat rolled in the honey.
When I opened the front door , Oliver rushed past into the street behind me. His sticky fur had already started accumulating debris- a few bottle caps, a cigarette butt, a lighter...

I turned around and chased him into traffic- I was almost as drunk as the cat- and somehow managed to wrestle him inside.
By the time me and my roomie Chris got Oliver into the bathtub, he was covered in honey , trash and street grime. We donned thick, long-sleeved garments and tried to wash the poor cat in the tub, but Oliver really didn't take well to being scrubbed and soaped.

We only had one choice. I cut the largest bits of trash out of his long fur with a pair of scissors while Chris held him tightly, then two of us held the cat while Chris used electric shears to shave the wretched beast.
Oliver ran directly into my bedroom and hid under the bed. He refused to come out until his fur had grown back, which took several weeks.

That cat was one sour-ass roommate.