Reader Darrelle Ernst brightened my day with an email about his sybaritic cat Coco, which looks to be a Burmese:
My wife and I have a prized bowl, hand carved from a single piece of marble by an Italian artisan, that we bought years ago. When our children were born we stored the bowl to keep it safe. This past weekend, one morning at breakfast, I suddenly decided the children were old enough and so I dug our prized bowl out of storage, filled it with red rose petals and proudly placed it as the centerpiece on our dining room table. The attached photo shows what happened less than 90 seconds later. What are you gonna do?
How thoughtful of them to buy their cat a marble bed, and then fill it with rose petals! But, of course, it’s only what Coco deserves.
Darrelle also enclosed a poem about the cat that his ten-year-old daughter wrote for him on Father’s Day:
CoCo
Coco, my cat, is brown.
When she is wet she looks like a clown.
Sometimes she sits like sphinx,
With big green eyes that are round,
And inside her is a treasure just waiting to be found.
She looks pretty but doesn’t make a sound,
And her beauty and attitude will surely astound.
But when nobody’s looking, down the hall she will bound,
And once in privacy, chase her tail round and round!
Finally, for extra LOLz see the video that reader Sara calls “the euphonium cat mute.”
Wow. That’s one really pretty cat.
Pffft. Silly human, of course the bowl is for the cat!
Yes indeed!
Calling a cat ‘sybaritic’ is like calling water ‘wet’, it’s a fundamental property.
😉
Great. Now Baihu wants one….
b&
I’d love it if someone gave me a nice cool polished marble block that had a hollow big enough to sleep in. And the rose petals would be a nice touch. Or jasmine, or sagebrush. But not lavender…
Anyway, she’s a beautiful kitty with an intelligent face. And well behaved – my cats would be eating the rose petals or scattering them!
You called it in one. The rose petals where massacred.
Huh. I thought euphoniums (euphonia?) had double bells. (Yes, I got that from The Music Man.)
Double-bell euphemisms are rare. They had their heyday, such as it was, in the brass band era that ended a bit over a century ago. Even then there weren’t all that many of them.
Actually, there were all sorts of funky brass instruments then, most of which nobody but brass musicians know about — and even still, many of us don’t….
b&
What is another funky brass instrument other than double bell euphonium that has been lost? That is interesting. I like to collect esoteric instruments and create “bad” sounds on them. Not so much now…doing dioramas as sounds need more peeps…still like to learn and know though…analog keeps it real.
Here’s a lovely example of an echo bell cornet — doubly unusual in this case, as the instrument is in concert pitch rather than the much more common Bb or A. The musician is Crispian-Steele Perkins, one of the greatest virtuosos of our time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwlafkbvdY
b&
Oh, very cool! Thanks for that, Ben.
Here he is performing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on a replica of the same instrument it was originally written for. It’s one of the most challenging works in the repertoire on modern instruments, and much harder still on period instruments. Yet this may well be the best performance of the work ever….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFnW_CrPUlA
b&
I didn’t get back to this thread until now. Thanks a lot for the links. Really interesting instruments and great sounds!
That poem is really good. What a treasure of a father’s day gift. Clever girl.
I second that!
Thirded.
Kittehs…. the world is their oyster. And don’t we EVER forget that!
Yeah, there’s the old saying (don’t think I’m mangling it too much)
“Ancient Egyptians treated cats like gods. They have never forgotten this”
A chocolate cake cat!
Darelle – for your daughter I could suggest that minx would be a nice rhyme for sphinx!
Thank you, everyone, for the kind comments.
I’m sure the carving is very delicate and all that, but did it have to be Carrera (or a substitute)? I mean, it’s got good carving properties, but it’s so dull and white and dull and white and it’s still dull and white. Has it stopped being dull and white yet?
What about some nice Connemara marble (banded in greens and ochres), or some criniodal limestone (“marble” to the building trade) chock-full of fossils.
Ah, the plague that is Carrera and the bondage of thinking that “marble” means white and dull.