It’s Caturday, and Professor Ceiling cat has just arrived in Louvain-le-Neuve, Belgium, discovering from Grania that I forgot to schedule a Caturday Felid post. Since I don’t remember missing one of these for years, please enjoy this trifecta from Europe.
First up is a post from artFido, featuring the artwork of American Arna Miller, who makes lovely animal-themed screen prints you can buy. Her latest series are old-style matchbook covers featuring cats, done in collaboration with her husband, print artist Ravi Zupa. They’ve produced some lovely matchboxes all showing cats in late-night bar situations, a series called “Strike Your Fancy”. Here are a few:
Here’s how they’re made:
The artist:
You can buy the cat matchbooks here for only $20 each (there are nine varieties), and you can simply fill up the matchbox when it gets empty. You can be the life of the party for years to come!
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Here’s the story of a black-and-white cat named Oreo (good name!) who attacked a rattlesnake (the video says he was “protecting his owners”, but who knows) and got bit in the process. Oreo will be okay, but nearly lost his leg. The YouTube video is below, and here’s the description:
When a fearsome Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake slithered into the Peterson family’s yard in Lake County, Florida, their cat rushed to protect his owner, Jaiden, 10. Oreo the cat fought off the venomous snake while Jaiden ran away, but the fierce feline suffered a bite during the scuffle. The Peterson family hurried Oreo to the vet to save his life. Oreo now wears a cast and can’t go outside, but the animal clinic expects him to make a full recovery.
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Finally, here’s what Vox is best at: cat stories. This one is a video about the perennial question: “Why do cats always land on their feet?” I’ve dealt with this issue before, but this is a new explication of the same answer. We KNOW the answer and it is, as always, “the laws of physics”.
But here’s something you didn’t know. If you strap a buttered piece of bread to a cat’s back, with the buttered side up, and then drop the cat, the Buttered Bread principle, in which dropped bread always lands buttered side down, will keep the cat spinning in the air indefinitely.
h/t: Malcolm, Amy
Probably all kids have tried dropping a cat to see if it would land on it’s feet. I did, and it did.
As a youngster I had a vertical poster using this time technique photographs, the alternate stretching and pulling in of it’s limbs, as well as the close to 180° different phases of front and back at some stage was clearly visible.
I wonder where that poster is now.
With the buttered bread strapped to its back would the cat not land splat on its back with the butter hitting the ground?
No,because the cat is trying hard to land on its feet! The two forces cancel each other out, causing perpetual spinning.
Fair enough🐾🐾
Love those match books. A collector’s item for sure.
As someone who in art school tried to train himself to ‘think in’ Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and 13th century mss illumination, I am greatly impressed by how Arna Miller captures the feel of period commercial art, right down to replicating quirks in the printing processes.
Will be buying some of her work for myself and as gifts.
They are quite good aren’t they.
Uh oh, $175 for the set, hmmm. I wish these amazing artists success in their business!
I’ll second that. The texts are pretty good too.
I wonder if Ms Miller knows that you can buy screen printed matchboxes wholesale ?
Of course, the minimum order is 5k boxes.
Ah, the good old days. When I wasn’t running my limo business, I was selling screen printed match boxes and books to bars and restaurants. But then Houston outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants in 2005. That was the beginning of the end of the part of my entrepreneurial empire.
Those videos show ducks being fed, nothing about rattle snakes or butterbread cats.
??
They worked for me.
cr
They work now, don’t know how the duckfeeding pitched up there.
Do we know how high and how often in the wild do/did cats fall from a height so needing to land on their feet?
They evolved in Syria, so probably not often.
No,because the cat is trying hard to land n its feet! The two forces cancel each other out, causing spinning.
Sort of comforting to see that PCC is not immune to being caught out by WordPress’s daffy commenting interface. 😎
cr
Bravo to hero Oreo!
“Here’s how they’re made:”.
It is a bit annoying that WordPress seems to strip out the Vimeo references for me, so I cannot find the video. (Though I suspect the source info is either in the page code somewhere or snapshot, because I see a blurred image of someone holding a matchbox.)
Has anyone else this problem?
Now for some cat video in return. I was too tired to switch a youtube stream yesterday so an interview I cared for was followed by a movie star show. I learned that *humans* can have Maru syndrome. Christina Ricci calls her behavior “Ricci-ing” [ https://youtu.be/vv6lIaHLWug?t=468 @ 7:48 in; https://fun107.com/christina-ricci-ricci-ing/ ]. She makes a much better Maru impression in the video by sitting in the studio fruit bowl and , but I found this from her Twitter stream:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeIK0SBIgAEOlp0.jpg