Caturday felid trifecta: a cat of negotiable affections, cat cafe closes because it ran out of cats, and cats in academia

I was going to call this cat, Nala, a “whorecat,” but then I realized I’d be cat-shaming, so I will call her “a cat of negotiable affections”:

According to Distractify, Nala came home bearing this note:

Transcript:

I don’t know who this cat belongs to, but she comes visits us every few weeks. She’ll meow outside our back door until we let her in, she wounds herself [sic!!] around our legs, walks about the house like it’s hers, waits @ the fridge until my husband or I fed her baloney. She doesn’t like our cat food very much! We look forward to her visits. We lost our 21 yr old cat this yr.

This reminds me of one of my favorite children’s books, Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore. Sid is the male equivalent of Nala, who in the story cons six owners to feed him. Each of them thinks they own Sid. But he gets caught when he catches a cold and six different “owners” bring him to the vet. The vet cottons on to the cat’s scam, and he eventually has to go back to one dinner per day. You can hear the book read aloud (with illustrations shown) here. I recommend it!

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The good news is that cat cafes are opening all over North America, and one recently opened in Vancouver. The bad news is that because of its popularity, and the fact that (like most cat cafes) the resident moggies were up for adoption, the Vancouver location, “Catfé,” ran out of cats (see here for location and opening hours).  This was published on January 5:

Catfé, the café where you can cuddle with a cat and get an espresso at the same time, has adopted all their resident kitties and need to wait for more to arrive before they can open again.

“We haven’t been able to keep enough cats in the café at a time,” owner Michelle Furbacher told Vancity Buzz.

She said it partially stems from the holidays. Most of the cats in the café come from Northern B.C., and poor road conditions along with holiday hours have prevented Furbacher from being able to keep a full stock of kitties.

And while there are many adoptable cats in Metro Vancouver, Catfé is specifically partnered with the SPCA, leaving them out of luck for the moment. A new shipment of cats is expected to arrive this Thursday, allowing the café to reopen on Friday.

As of today, they now show 11 resident cats, but it looks as if most of them are being adopted. To further this incentive, anyone who visits the cafe, takes a photo, and adopts a cat from the cafe will get a free autographed copy of FvF (with a themed cat cafe drawing as well as an audiobook of the same.

I love what they call the coffee makers:

And I can’t imagine a better scheme to get cats adopted! Go have a cattucinno, chill with the cats, and find one that’s sympatico. Then adopt it.

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Finally, December saw the annual Academics with Cats Awards, a contest in which academics vie to have the best photo of them and their cat in a cerebral situation. This is the “best in show” winner:

The Times Higher Education site mentions the contest, which had over 300 entries, but also gives a few choice cat-related items, including this (with explanation:

[A]round 1420, one scribe found a page of his hard work ruined by a cat that had urinated on his book. Leaving the rest of the page empty, and adding a picture of a cat (that looks more like a donkey), he wrote the following:

Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many other cats too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.

And there’s this autographed paper; its story is below:

One curious cat has outshone all others, becoming an academic legend in the process. F.D.C. Willard has published as both a co-author and, unbelievably, as the sole author on scientific papers in the field of low temperature physics.

The story goes that Jack Hetherington, an American physicist and mathematician, needed to eliminate the use of the royal “we” in a paper, so he added his cat as co-author.

Concerned that colleagues would recognise Chester’s name, he concocted a pen name: F.D. forFelis domesticus; C for Chester; and Willard after the cat that sired him. The joint paper waspublished in Physical Review Letters in 1975 and has been cited about 70 times.

When the reprints arrived, Hetherington inked Chester’s paw and sent a few “signed” copies to friends.

One was sent to a physicist who later recounted that colleagues wished to invite Willard to a conference because “he never gets invited anywhere”. The physicist produced his copy of the paper to the organising committee and “everyone agreed that it seemed to be a cat paw signature”. Neither Willard nor Hetherington was invited.

Hetherington recalls: “Shortly thereafter a visitor to [the university] asked to talk to me, and since I was unavailable asked to talk with Willard. Everyone laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag.” Terrible pun presumably intended.

h/t: Ed, Michael