And now for something completely different

November 18, 2015 • 2:15 pm

by Grania

We all know two truths about the internet; one, it was invented by Al Gore and two, it was created to post cat pictures.

However, there can be an educational or cultural element to posting cute cat pictures on Twitter, as Emily Steiner shows. She’s a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and because her interest is medieval literature, she knows where to go to find these gems:

 

 

 

(Click the white button to animate the one below if it doesn’t play automatically in your browser; it’s a nice animation for a tw**t!)

Cats, it would seem, never change.

And now I am ful slepy.

30 thoughts on “And now for something completely different”

  2. Thank you for a delightful bit of relief in these saddening times. I laughed out loud!

  3. Everytime some one mentions that (partly true) Internet invented by Al Gore meme (Gore was actually the Congressional funder of the folks who invented it), I think there’s some pun lurking in there on
    “Al Gore Rhythm”
    but I’ve never been able to get it to gel.

    2. Same here. My latest effort to get a joke out of al gore Rhythm revolved around how he would have been the first Muslim president instead of Obama. But I always had to explain that algorithm was derived from Arabic and no one ever laughed.

      Like a cat delivering a dead mouse, you may now do with my offering anything you wish.

      1. One person pointed out to me after my lame attempt at humor that one can be Arabic without being Muslim and I retorted that one can be Obama without being Muslim and that actually got a laugh.

      2. Actually, I think “algorithm” is from Persian. It came from the name of al-Khwarizmi, who was apparently called after his native city of Khwarezm.

        1. The rithm bit comes from Greek arithmos for number, from with both logarithm and arithmetic are derived.

  4. These are wonderful! Thanks Grania!

    A couple of days ago I saw a pic of a medieval manuscript with cat paw marks in black ink across it – a cat had obviously walked across it while the ink was still wet. As said above, cat behaviour seems to be a constant.

  6. Ful sleepy. I love that.

    In our house, the cats and humans got to the ground state. (Physicists on board will know the true meaning.)

    ‘Ful sleepy’ should now be used when describing perturbed systems returning to the ground state.

  8. I really like the cat playing with mouse picture. I’m going to have to try and find a good quality print of that one.

  9. “Lat take a cat, and fostre him wel with milk,
    And tendre flesh, and make his couche of silk,
    And let him seen a mous go by the wal;
    Anon he weyveth milk, and flesh, and al,
    And every deyntee that is in that hous,
    Swich appetyt hath he to ete a mous.”
    — Geoffrey Chaucer

  11. What is the translation of “yladde”…

    …it’s driving me crazy.

    Google has not helped so far…

    1. Sheesh, at least you could have warned us with an “NSFW”.

      Can anybody translate the Germanic calligraphy? Or is it just too over the top?

      1. Sorry my bad.

        It looked small enough that I wasn’t sure and since the photo auto loads I didn’t think it would help:(((

        Super sorry about that.

        1. Hey! Don’t apologize. I thought the pix was great! I should have tossed in an appropriate emojii to indicate irony (if I could have figured out how).

      2. whoah! Looks like “flaisch macht flaish.” If flaish = Fleisch, that would mean meat makes meat??

        1. Indeed, it means “meat makes meat”, which is to say: meat makes you big and strong. There’s a lot going on in this picture: the nun trying to trade a fish for the cat’s “meat” (the meat you beat…), the sexual connotations of the cat, the fact that at the end of the rosary is dangling not a crucifix (the word of god made flesh) but aforesaid “meat”. Not sure what the jester is up to. Clearly, there’s some kind of joke at the expense of nuns going on here… given the date, I wonder if it’s some kind of Reformation-era satire.

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