Ceiling Cat has smiled on you: you get three awesome felid items today. The first is a cat video from Russia, which for some reason (I suspect the deep Russhian love for the “kot”) is producing some of the finest internet cat videos. This one has the Russian title below, which some reader should interpret. I know only the first word. The cat, however, is trying to pwn the music coming out of the speak. Aside: for some reason many Russian cats appear to be gray with round heads.
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Here is a series of epic cat leaps, many of which are FAILS:
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Finally, from the Torygraph and the Asahi Shimbum, a heartening report of a cat in Japan who, after being lost for three years in the tsunami, was reunited with its owners.
From the Torygraph:
A cat that vanished three years ago during Japan’s 2011 tsunami disaster has been unexpectedly reunited with its owners.
The black cat, called Suika, was thought to have died after disappearing on March 11, 2011 – the day of the earthquake and tsunami – from his home in Ofunato, Iwate prefecture.
Kazuko and Takeo Yamagishi, his owners, spent three months searching for the cat across the city, which was badly hit by the tsunami, before abandoning any hope that he may have survived the disaster.
However, in a rare happy twist more than three years on, the cat was recently spotted in a neighbouring town and taken to the authorities before the owners were tracked down via its collar information, according to Japanese media.
Although the owners are still unsure as to where the cat has been for the past three years, their joy was evident as they were reunited at Ofunato Health Centre.
From the Shimbum
On April 10 this year, a couple spotted a black cat curled up in a cedar forest in Rikuzentakata, another disaster-hit municipality in the prefecture. They took in the cat, which wore a collar and was friendly, and reported the animal to the Ofunato Health Center.
Days went by with no one showing up to claim the cat. So the center decided to print the cat’s picture in a local newspaper.
When an employee was taking the cat’s photo on the morning of May 9, he noticed faded letters and numbers on the collar. He deciphered the name as “Yamagishi” and made out the numbers. They turned out to be the cellphone number of Takeo Yamagishi.
It is unclear how Suika survived the ordeal and how long he had stayed in Rikuzentakata, which is 15 kilometers from Ofunato.
But a bell on his collar indicated that someone had taken care of him.
Suika looked content with his eyes closed and back in the arms of Takeshi and Kazuko.
h/t: Chris, Barry, Tw**t from Rowan Hooper via Matthew Cobb
The leaps!
Beautifully timed with the “1812!”
Russian cat translates on YouTube as “cat and subwoofer” and it’s playing with/vexed by the air flow.
Well, it couldn’t be a generic woofer (aka d*g), because then it would have been pwns for realz.
It looks like the Russian cat is destined to become a Scratch DJ. 🙂
Many years ago, my sister bought me a copy of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ for my birthday, which you may know includes the sound of a dog barking.
As soon as that sound started, my sister’s dog, Frodo, came bounding into my room, had a look round for the interloper. Once he’d established that there wasn’t another dog in m y room, he sat, in perfect, head cocked, HMV pose, transfixed by one of the speakers.
It worked every time I played that album. Poor Frodo could never work out how the ‘other dog’ got into that little box.
If I placed a speaker in the middle of the floor, Frodo would circle it, tail wagging, occasionally trying to dig a way under the speaker.
This sounds very like a tale from the early 1970 or the late 1960s, just from the d*g’s Tolkeinist name.
One of these decades I’m going to have to read something like the Guiness Book of hit Singles and commit it to memory. My lack of attention to music really hurts my quiz team performance.
Looks like the cat is experiencing synesthesia, seeing what it’s also hearing, and responding to what it sees.
The second word in the title is in fact an English one, ‘subwoofer’, so the title is something like ‘Cat and a subwoofer’
It’s not so much a translation but rather the kyrillic transliteration of the spoken sound “subwoofer”.
I wonder if the cat in the first video is sensing vibrations or air flow.
Almost certainly the case. Cats have almost no ability to hear sounds under 200 Hz. Humans hear well down to 20, around three octaves lower by my estimation.
Well,
log_2 (20/200)=-3.3 🙂
I based my estimate on a five string bass with symmetric BEADG tuning and A=55hz. I could tell it was a little more than three octaves, but I didn’t think it was that much more.
Yes, it is modulated air flow coming out of the exhaust port of the subwoofer.
It seems to paw where the tips of its whiskers are, so I think, yes.
Obviously, she/he is practicing orchestra conducting.
😉
Oh and the leap one – the balloon is the funniest. I love how the cat takes a minute to contemplate how the balloon is now popped then gets freaked out by it. Somehow, I find this totally relatable.
My favorite is the epic multi-stage launch that ends with a splashdown in the fishtank.
I know; I laughed again just reading your post! 😀
I think the Russian cat is pawing at pulses of air. He, or she, is in front of what appears to be a sub-woofer with a ducted port. As the back-and-forth-moving speaker diaphragm moves back and forth, it sends pulses of air out the ducted port which the cat undoubtedly feels.
I was thinking that it looked as if the cat was trying to catch a spider on a thread of web, or something like that.
Air pulses sounds good.
Suika (‘watermelon’) seems a strange name for a cat, but it makes me happy to see that he survived in the area that was hit hardest by the tsunami.
The cat leap video has me thinking about the viral “cat saves boy” video of the other day.
It might be that some cats like leaping upon fast moving animals and therefore the viral video cat was not saving the boy, but possible just leaping upon the fast moving dog.
This is a possible alternative?
Said heroic cat, Tara, has been offered the opportunity to pitch the first ball in a local minor league baseball match.
Rather not. What we have seen here was playful behavior, not real action.
No.
The cat in that video really meant business when it hit the dog, as evidenced by the fact the big dog instantly abandoned its victim and took off like a rocket with the cat pursuing it. It wouldn’t have done that unless it had got a faceful of claws.
The kids in these videos got knocked over but (so far as one can tell from the very brief clips) weren’t otherwise harmed.
(That was “No” to New england Bob, not Scientifik, of course. I forgot about the way WP nests posts…)
It’s the drumbeats that the cat is reacting to.
b&
My favorite is the leap into the fish tank.
My russian neighbor told me koshka=cat.
Wouldn’t that be the diminutive? Like we say “kitty”?
Probably.
In the first video the kitten looks like he’s starting to lose interest at :30. He turns his back to the speaker, gets hit in the butt with a base note, and he’s like “WTF was that!”
…for some reason many Russian cats appear to be gray with round heads…
Probably Russian Blue alleles are a lot more common in the breed’s homeland. They appear to bulk up fairly easily and show it particularly in the face – the original “I can has cheezburger?” cat was, I believe, a Russian Blue. Head like a ball of wool.
No relation, of course, to the Norwegian Blue.