Today we have an all-audio and all-video trifecta.
First, here’s an eight-minute video about why cats run away from home. If you let your cat go outdoors, watch this, and, more important, get your cat chippsed AND a collar with a phone number on it. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve known who have lost an indoor cat that accidentally went outdoors; and there was no collar with an ID tag and no chips. In my view, all cats should be chipped.
******************
In this Purrli® program (click on screenshot), you can adjust six parameters of a cat’s purr to find out what kind of purr you like best. (“Meow-y” means that there’s an occasional meow, which I like. Below the screenshot I’ve given that I consider my favorite purr for a cat lying on my chest or lap.
My favorite settings. There are around two meows per minute, but I’d silence them if I were working at the same time:
***************
One of the great internet video sequences is to introduce the candy Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. It creates a huge fountain of the soft drink reasons given here. An excerpt:
All the sites recommend a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke (not regular Coke) and a limited number of Mentos.
The carbonated drinks’ fizz comes from carbon dioxide added to the bottles at high pressure. 2-liter Diet Coke contains around 12-15 grams of dissolved carbon dioxide. The gas tries to escape and form bubbles around any irregular surface, called a nucleation site. Mentos also have nucleation sites because they are not as smooth as they appear. When added to Coke, the dissolved gas pushes the liquid out of the container at a super-fast speed in the form of bubbles. The candies simply catalyze the release of gas from the Coke bottle. Therefore, the chemical reaction between Coke and Mentos, in reality, is a physical reaction.
No matter how messy or sticky the experiment is, there are only two ingredients required to make this geyser. One bottle of 2-liter fizzy drink, preferably Diet Coke, and Mentos are needed in an adequate quantity to give a spectacular reaction. For a 2-liter bottle of Coke, at least five Mentos are good enough. Moreover, all Mentos must be added to the drink simultaneously, giving each of them equal time to create an effect. As Mentos candies are dropped into the Coke bottle, there is an explosion seconds later, and a “Mentos Coke Fountain” goes high up in the sky.
. . . The highest recorded explosion has been of Mentos and Diet Coke when the fountain touched up to 10 meters. Most people believe that the more Mentos are added to Coke, the bigger and higher the eruption will be. However, the number of Mentos that will make a difference is limited. Through various investigations, it has been deduced that seven Mentos are the max.
Well, try it (I wouldn’t waste two liters of Diet Coke when you can watch it on YouTube). But can you watch cats reacting to it? Here’s a 3-minute video of cats watching this chemical reaction set up to follow a domino-falling sequence. I wonder how many times they had to set this up to get it right, for it requires the cats to help.
There’s a related video, sans Mentos and Cokc, below. Actually, I like the second one better because there’s a treat at the end.
*****************
Lagniappe: A short video of a cat encountering a giant tarantula (nobody gets hurt):
h/t: Barry
Love it! The different purrs were subtly different to a d*g owner, but to a cat lover they are all as different as night and day!
And, of course, everyone loves falling dominoes—even cats—although they were too cool to indulge us humans with a reaction.
The purring app freaked my cats out! They both came alarmed and confused, trying to figure out where the intruder is.
I’m going to try Purrli on my phone for wakeful nights. Even if I don’t go back to sleep, I will rest.
I’m not sure where people get the patience from to design and set up those domino layouts!
Got the idea that the cats thought it was pretty dumb, but if it amused Staff, they’d play along.