Caturday felid trifecta: Cats in bar situations on matchbook covers; cat protects staff from rattlesnake, gets bitten but recovers; how cats land on their feet

March 30, 2019 • 9:45 am

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:

https://vimeo.com/288435376

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

Steve Pinker’s new humanist ad for the FFRF

March 30, 2019 • 8:30 am

As the Freedom from Religion Foundation explains, this is the first time they’ve done a national television ad in a long time, and reader Paul just saw it on the Colbert show.

The ad debuted in January in about 18 regional markets during “The Late Show.” In February, CBS agreed to run the ad nationally. This will be the first time an FFRF commercial has aired nationally on CBS since 2012. FFRF’s ad featuring John F. Kennedy’s famous remarks as a candidate endorsing the separation of state and church was shown then on “CBS News Sunday Morning” and the “Nightly News.” However, CBS has refused to broadcast FFRF’s commercial featuring Ron Reagan, in which he describes himself as “an unabashed atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.”

I’ve put Reagan’s ad below Steve’s:

 

h/t: Paul

Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 30, 2019 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Happy Saturday!

Today in history:

Notable birthdays

  • 1853 – Vincent van Gogh, Dutch-French painter and illustrator (d. 1890)
  • 1863 – Mary Calkins, American philosopher and psychologist (d. 1930)
  • 1905 – Mikio Oda, Japanese triple jumper and academic (d. 1998)
  • 1945 – Eric Clapton, English guitarist and singer-songwriter
  • 1955 – Randy VanWarmer, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2004)
  • 1979 – Norah Jones, American singer-songwriter and pianist

As it’s sufficiently soothing for a Saturday morning, here’s Norah Jones singing Cold, Cold Heart.

Over in Poland Hili has a problem I can relate to.

A: Everything is waking up again.
Hili: And I’m sleepy
In Polish:
Ja: Wszystko budzi się do życia.
Hili: A mnie się chce spać.
From Twitter:
(Click on the white arrows to view the videos if they don’t play automatically)
Baby Meerkats!

The Supreme Leader controls the waters

More importantly

Is this a type of tool use?

https://twitter.com/photoDaleMiles/status/1108094407742574592

There is nothing new under the sun, except now this probably wouldn’t be allowed on the side of a new building

Seeing as Brexit hasn’t actually happened on the day it was supposed to, there is a new plan

On that note:

https://twitter.com/shahmiruk/status/1111708337148702723

On to other subjects

The perils of being a condescending jerk on the Internet is that you will accidentally forget the title of Animal Farm and land on Animal House.

And someone discovered a wombat. Click through for more videos.

Have a good day!
Hat-tip: Matthew

A woman who hugs sharks

March 29, 2019 • 3:00 pm

Reader Michael found this short video of a woman who likes to pet and hug Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi). As the YouTube video notes say, “Cristina Zenato is the woman who isn’t afraid to hug sharks.”

If you’re wondering how dangerous this shark is, the answer is “not much.” Wikipedia says this:

Normally shy or indifferent to the presence of divers, the Caribbean reef shark has been known to become aggressive in the presence of food and grows sufficiently large to be considered potentially dangerous. As of 2008, the International Shark Attack File lists 27 attacks attributable to this species, 4 of them unprovoked, and none fatal.

Amsterdam: Part IV

March 29, 2019 • 9:30 am

Two days ago was the obligatory visit to the Rijksmuseum, the epicenter of Rembrandt paintings, drawings, and etchings. The building dates from 1885 and includes, besides the Greatest Painter of All Time (my opinion), works by Hals, Vermeer, and even the stray Van Gogh.

I was lucky to be there for the “All the Rembrandts” exhibit, celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Master’s death. The name means that every Rembrandt work possessed by the Museum was on display, not every Rembrandt in the world (I wish).

In the garden before the entrance was a beautiful Eurasian magpie (Pica pica), a corvid and a bird of high intelligence.

You can see ALL the Rembrandts online, so I won’t reproduce pictures of them (I took only a few anyway). What struck me was how different going to art museums is now that people have cellphone cameras. You can take photographs in the Rijksmuseum without using a flash, and what happens is what you see below with The Night Watch. Many people photograph the painting but don’t spend any time looking at it. Many even take selfies with a painting, apparently just to show that they were there. It’s a strange way to appreciate art.

Ditto with The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer. I also consider him one of the ten best painters of all time.

A lovely Rembrandt etching:

Otherwise I took pictures of waterfowl and cats in the big collection of paintings. Here’s a duck that, sadly, has joined the Choir Invisible, destined for dinner.

One of the nicest paintings in the Rijksmuseum, “The Threatened Swan” by Jan Asselijn, painted in 1650. An aggressive swan protects its nest and eggs from an approaching dog. It brims with life and is a tour de force for that age. Here I’m admiring it.

A happy mallard helping a bunch of other birds attack a raven for stealing their feathers. This is part of Melchior d’ Hoendecoeter’s painting “The Raven Robbed of the Feathers He Wore to Adorn Himself” (1671).

A section of “A Pelican and Other Birds Near a Pool” (ca. 1680), also by Melchior d’Hondecoeter. There’s a passel of ducks, including a muscovy, a mallard, and, at top right with the brownish-red eye ring, an Egyptian duck (see below for a live one):

More ducks; I don’t know the painting.

Jan Steen’s “The Dancing Lesson” (also known as “Children Teaching a Cat to Dance”), painted between 1660 and 1679. Cats didn’t like it any better back then, and the old dude at the top is telling the kids to knock it off.

“The Drunken Couple” by Jan Steen, painted between 1655 and 1665. Note the cat looking up incredulously at its besotted staff.

The boy at lower left has a kitten, but I can’t remember the painting and can’t be arsed to look it up. Maybe we have an art-history genus reading this who can name the painting:

A nice Art Deco building near the Rijksmuseum.

Yesterday was another obligatory (and another wonderful) visit—this time to the Van Gogh Museum, a five-minute walk from the Rijksmuseum. (Note; i recommend not seeing them both on way day because of the possibility of ocular exhaustion.) Here’s a picture of Van Gogh’s palette, which is on display. van Gogh is in my top five of World’s Best Painters, so I was lucky enough to see three of them in just two days.

Almond Blossoms (1890), painted the year van Gogh died.

“Still Life with Mussels and Shrimp” (1886):

Cypresses and Two Women (1890). This was the year van Gogh died after having shot himself in the chest. In my view, these late paintings are his best.

“Winter Garden” (1884), pencil, pen and ink.

A post-Museum waffle. They come in all grades from plain to chocolate-iced to this one, including chocolate icing, drizzle, and a Twix bar embedded in the top. They get even fancier than this, including strawberries or raspberries. Dutch waffles are GOOD!

A herring stall near my hotel. I haven’t yet worked up the courage to try raw herring Dutch style, but I am going to try.

A sign in the herring stall. Translation, please?

A box of cat cards in a store. What are these? From knowing German I can make out “advice cards” from “the world’s most famous cat”.

Curiously, although I’ve seen a few coots and swans in the canals, I haven’t seen a single mallard. I got excited when I saw ducklike shapes swimming in the canal near the Central Station, but upon closer inspection they turned out to be a new species for me: the Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca). It’s the only species in the genus Alopochen, and Wikipedia says it’s most closely related to shelducks, which are ducks and not geese.

Do you see it in the painting above? It’s clearly been in Holland since the 17th century, Why is it here? Wikipedia says, “[The species] spread to Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy where there are self-sustaining populations which are mostly derived from escaped ornamental birds.”

It is a handsome DUCK (not a goose; I cannot be enamored of geese). Looking up divergence times in TimeTree, I find that the common ancestor of the Egyptian “goose” and the mallard lived about 20 million years ago, while the common ancestor of the Egyptian “goose” and the Canada goose lived about 28 million years ago. One always finds this species most closely related to other ducks than to other geese. Since I don’t think ducks and geese are paraphyletic, this is not a goose. It is apparently called a goose because it’s larger than most ducks, and is very chunky.

Here’s the natural range map of the Egyptian goose:

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 29, 2019 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, welcome to Friday!

 

In history today:

  • 845 – Paris is sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collects a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.
  • 1549 – The city of Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of Brazil, is founded.
  • 1632 – Treaty of Saint-Germain is signed returning Quebec to French control after the English had seized it in 1629.
  • 1867 – Queen Victoria gives Royal Assent to the British North America Act which establishes the Dominion of Canada on July 1.
  • 1927 – Sunbeam 1000hp breaks the land speed record at Daytona Beach, Florida.
  •  1936 – In Germany, Adolf Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum to ratify Germany’s illegal remilitarization and reoccupation of the Rhineland, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters.
  • 1974 – NASA’s Mariner 10 becomes the first space probe to fly by Mercury.
  • 1999 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above the 10,000 mark (10,006.78) for the first time, during the height of the dot-com bubble.
  • 2014 – The first same-sex marriages in England and Wales are performed.

Notable birthdays:

  • 1900 – Bill Aston, English race car driver (d. 1974)
  • 1927 – John Vane, English pharmacologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
  • 1929 – Dick Lewontin, Jerry’s Ph.D. boss, turns 90 today and is still kicking. Born March 29, 1929.
  • 1929 – Utpal Dutt, Indian Bengali actor, director and playwright(d. 1993)
  • 1936 – Judith Guest, American author and screenwriter
  • 1940 – Astrud Gilberto, Brazilian singer-songwriter
  • 1943 – John Major, English banker and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (28 November 1990 – 2 May 1997)
  • 1955 – Marina Sirtis, British-American actress, best known for Star Trek: The Next Generation

Today iHili is issuing orders that may or may not have an ulterior motive.

Hili: You’ve drunk your coffee.
A: Oh, so I have.
Hili: Make yourself another one with cream – but not all the cream.

In Polish:

Hili: Wypiłeś kawę.
Ja: O, rzeczywiście.
HilI: Zrób sobie następną, ze śmietanką (ale nie całą).

From Twitter today

There are worse things in life than being you.

From Wednesday, an interesting note.

An angle I had not considered

One thing you didn’t know ducklings like to do

A new and better ending to Frankenstein

An interesting story, no it’s nothing to do with chimeras.

Overly-dramatic man makes three new friends

Same

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1111143087231778816

Finally, panorama photos of dogs are a new form of art.

 

The ducks have become friendly; Anna concludes that the hen is Honey

March 28, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Anna is back co-parenting the mallards with me, and sent three short videos and some pictures. She is now pretty sure that the female is Honey, as she’s friendly, eats from the hand, and comes to Anna’s whistle.  Voilà (Anna’s notes are indented):

They’re doing well. Must be Honey. Also she does have the dots on her beak. Now that she’s so friendly I can see them.

She bites a little! Frank was way less bitey.

Corn-ucopia:

And some photos:

Such a beauty. So glad she’s back!

Selfie with Honey.

Clearly Honey has a new gentleman friend; that isn’t James Pond. Would readers like to suggest a name for the drake?