As I’ve noted before, my hosts in Poland (who live in the small village of Dobrzyn, about two hours west of Warsaw) have two cats, a diva tabby named Hili—who features in a daily published dialogue with her owners—and a black tomcat named Fitness, who is owned by their lodger. (Fitness is so called because he was found as a kitten outside a health club.)
Since I am visiting for a week, I am told that I will feature in the Hili Dialogues. Here’s yesterday’s dialogue (“A” stands for “Andrzej”), posted on Andrzej’s Facebook page —in Polish—before I arrived:
A: What are you doing on that apple tree again?
Hili: I’m watching out if Uncle Jerry is coming yet.
Andrzej and Malgorzata, my hosts, run the popular Polish website Racjonalista. I am being well taken care of by my hosts and by the rationalist community in Poland.
And here’s today’s Hili dialogue, with the original Polish below:
Jerry: See? I’m here, as I promised.Hili: Good, now you can tell me how humans evolved to love cats and how those, who didn’t, managed to survive at all.
Jerry: No to jestem, tak jak obiecywałem.
Hili: Dobrze, to teraz opowiedz mi jak ludzie wyewoluowali miłość do kotów i jak przetrwali ci, którzy tego nie zrobili.
Excellent! If you get to appear in the Hili Dialogues you have achieved Fame at last.
I hope you will answer Hili’s excellent question.
Beautiful cat.
BTW, is that a d*g behind Jerry? 😀
Photo bomb!
That must be Emma!
“Hili: Good, now you can tell me how humans evolved to love cats and how those, who didn’t, managed to survive at all.”
It’s because cats love those people most of all. At any gathering of people, the cat will rub against, cuddle with, and shed dander on those who pay them the least attention.
Not in my experience.
We have dogs and cats and I did not realise till my wife pointed it out but I am a cat man and everyone else in the family is a dog person.
My cats repay me by sleeping on my bed, on my chair, and hey even on my laptop. And they completely ignore everyone else’s stuff.
Ain’t that the troof! ( and for especially cat-averse visitors they will do a command performance of barfing hair balls).
I read recently that that’s because cats don’t like to be looked at, and people who like cats look at them. People who don’t, don’t, so the cat comes to them instead.
Or so someone says.
Hili looks like a twin of my own cat Poes.
Did you know that poes is Dutch for puss (as in pussy-cat)
Yes, I speak Dutch. She was a wild kitten that we used to call Poes. When we adopted her, her name stayed Poes. 😉
Speaking of cats, I found this delightful and recent BBC documentary about the life of cats in a small brithish town.
Quite interesting.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky9MPO2caIk)
Not that I see images of you very often, but you look pretty trim and fit in the above picture Jerry. Have you recently lost a bit of weight?
Not that you have ever appeared to be overweight.
LOL! Yes, the gastric infection took a lot of weight off me, and I’m trying to keep it off. I wouldn’t recomment the Bacterial Diet, though!
We used to call it the Ganges River water diet! Drink one quart of this, and I guarantee that you will lose 20 pounds in a month! (Like all diets, keeping it off is another issue! The only proven thing about diets?: For the general user, they don’t work.)
I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have much luck marketing that diet plan!
At least, not as a diet plan. But, perhaps as a test to identify people who need help? Anyone desperate enough to buy that diet plan needs help.
You’d be surprised – there are a lot of anorexics and women who are overly body conscious that you can exploit. It sounds horrible, but sadly, I think it’s true.
Yeah, I agree completely. I was trying for levity and knew before I had finished the thought that I was treading on sensitive ground, and that levity might not work so well.
You’d think that by now I would have realized that the best thing to do in such situations is to simply say nothing rather than risk presenting myself as an insensitive, or thoughtless at least, jerk.
Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself! 😀
🙂
Gald you’re all better! 🙂
More capacity for those noshes in Poland!
Wow, that sounds pretty bad!
I am not even the slightest bit tempted to try your method, effective as it may have been.
By an odd coincidence, here’s an article posted today on Science News about how gut flora affect metabolism. It seems that inoculating mice with gut flora from thin people can help prevent them from getting fat.
So the Bacterial Diet might not be that far-fetched after all.
Hili looks like such a cuddly cat!
Aww! I’m jealous that you get to hang out with Hili (^‿^) (and with A & M too, of course!)