Hello Furiends,
It’s hard to believe August is almost over! Now that The Human is better some of us felines have had our own health issues to deal with. Lily, as I reported before went for a tooth cleaning and had to have two teeth extracted.

And poor Oliver. Lily only had two extractions, he had three and he’s not feeling happy about it. The Human keeps telling him that being proactive is good because our poor Angel Tucker had to have emergency tooth surgery because he had a terrible infection and he really suffered! Oliver’s not buying this reasoning but once he’s all better and eating treats again, he’ll be happy.

As for me, I’m just crossing my paws and purraying that my wellness exam next year goes as well as this year and the people in the white coats will keep their paws off my fangs!

Well, that was our week in our neck of the woods. I hope your week went better!

2 cats are looking for new roommates. Their adoption fee is $285K, but their house comes free

You all know I’m a huge fan of creative adoption ideas and this one is definitely creative.  Well, here’s  great one. In Olivehurst, California (about 40 miles north of Sacramento) there’s a house for sale in town with interesting terms. Or rather, two cats up for adoption with interesting terms. You can adopt two cats for $285,000.00 and the house they live in comes with them for free. This deal happened when a cat loving lady passed away and donated her tome to FieldHaven Feline Center.

The cats, Spencer and Ginger are ready for some new roomates I the cozy 2-bedroom house. FieldHaven says they are “impeccable houseguests”.

The house comes with a back porch where Spencer and Ginger enjoying hanging out. On the FieldHaven Facebook page it says, “Spencer and Gin have lived here for some time, and don’t need rehoming. They come with the house and expect food, water, and a bit of love,” FieldHaven said in a Facebook post. 

The house is listed on Zillow and Realtor.com. The listing says the house has brand new carpet, fresh paint, a spacious kitchen and a single-car garage with added space for the washer and dryer. It also has a bonus bathroom and shower and a bonus room leading to a spacious backyard.  

The proceeds from the home’s sale will go to supporting animal adoption efforts at FieldHaven. 

I would suggest that the new homeowners consider putting a catio in for Spencer and Ginger.

Missing cat who fell through Mackay office roof reunited with owners after eight months and 1,600km journey

  

Here is another one of my favorite news items. Whenever a feline has a happy reunion with their humans I am a happy cat!

It all started when a large ginger cat fell through the ceiling of Egron Energy.  When some of the workers arrived to check their equipment they were greeted by the cat, whose name is Eugene and a hole in their ceiling. The cat ran out the door and for several days they could here meowing coming from the ceiling. They contacted Mackay Pet Rescue Incorporated (MPRI) who came out and set traps in the ceiling.

And during the waiting time the feline and workers developed somewhat of a relationship. They would look up occasionally and see Eugene staring down at them.

It took a few days but Eugene was finally caught and his humans were called. Imagine everyone’s surprise when they found out Eugene’s home was 1600 km (a little over 994 miles) from the office in Newcastle, NSW.

Eugene’s adventure began when his human Sophie Kilgariff and her fiancé moved from Townsville to NSW in December 2021. On the way, while cleaning Eugene’s carrier, he made his first dash for freedom, squirmed out of his harness and ran into the nearby cane fields.

After hours of searching the couple had to continue on to their new home and new jobs. Sophie’s heart was broken. 

Several days later, Eugene was found and returned to Sophie’s parents, but a paralysis tick threatened his life. Sophie instructed her parents to take him to the vet and he beat the odds, recovering fully. He was brought to Sophie’s parent’s house but he escaped again.

This time months passed but Sophie never gave up, posting on  Facebook and receiving sporadic notifications of Eugene sightings. Sophie became disheartened and clung to the hope that Eugene had found a new, loving home.

And then, eight months later she received the phone call from MPRI telling her they were calling about her cat. When she realized they were talking about Eugene she couldn’t stop crying.

Eugene is now happily at home in his new location in Newcastle. I’m thinking Eugene used up at least two of his nine lives on that adventure!

5 Cats and 5 famous scientists

You all know that this feline is not sciency at all but I do enjoy a story about famous humans and their cats, even if the stories are only legends.

1. Albert Einstein and Tiger

Albert Einstein loved cats and all animals. “If a man aspired towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals,” he said, and was himself known to own multiple pets, including a dog and a parrot. But it was his cat Tiger who seemed to get the most attention.  Biographers have recorded that Einstein was sensitive to Tiger’s moods, noting for example that the cat got depressed when it was raining.

Cats apparently held a big enough place in Einstein’s heart that they pop up in quotes historically attributed to him. I shared an Einstein cat quote in last week’s feature.  He explained the telegraph like a long cat saying, “You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles”.  .

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life: music and cats,” is one of my favorite Einstein quotes.

2. Edwin Hubble and Nicholas

If you think huge space telescope when you hear the name Hubble, you’re right. His discovery of galaxies beyond the Milky Way was revolutionary for the time, as was his work to support the theory that the universe is expanding. And he didn’t do it alone.

The center to Hubble’s universe, was  his cat, Nicholas Copernicus, who, as Hubble explained, made a beloved nuisance of himself. According to the Huntington Library, where Hubble’s personal papers are stored, references to the giant black cat abound in the archives.

Hubble frequently referred to his home as “Nicholas’ estate.” And in her diary, Hubble’s wife Grace noted the close bond between her husband and the cat. In a moment that every cat owner will recognize, Grace observed that when Edwin would retire to his study to work, Nicholas enjoyed lolling on Edwin’s desk, “sprawled over as many pages as he could cover,” she wrote. “‘He is helping me,’ [Edwin] explained.”

3. Isaac Newton and Spithead

Legend has it that, in between developing the fundamental laws of motion and gravitation, doing groundbreaking work on optics and helping to invent calculus, the great Sir Isaac Newton also found time to invent the cat flap. Meowza, who knew?

As one version of the story goes, when Newton was at Cambridge, he requested that a hole be cut into his door and a leather or cloth flap put over it so that his cat, Spithead, could come and go at will.

While some scholars dispute whether Newton even had a cat, historical evidence makes it pretty clear that he didn’t invent the cat door. Apart from anything else, cutting a hole in a door — even one you might put a flap over — hardly qualifies as an invention. Humans have been cutting holes in doors and walls for thousands of years — since before we even domesticated cats — to allow feral felines access to barns and granaries. They could then hunt the vermin that fed on our food supplies.

But as vermin attracts us felines, so do great men often attract their share of legends over time, and Newton was no different.

4. Erwin Schrödinger and Milton(?)

The most famous cat in science history owes its name to the physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger, who won the honor in 1933 for his early work in quantum mechanics. But he is best-known for the thought experiment involving a theoretical cat in a box, and whether it could be said to be both dead and alive. Schrödinger proposed the scenario in a 1935 paper as a criticism of quantum theory at the time.

Forever after known as “Schrödinger’s Cat,” the paradoxical thought experiment has become a permanent — although frequently misunderstood — fixture in both science and popular culture.

People have sometimes wondered why Schrödinger used a cat in his example, instead of a rat or a plant or almost any other living thing. Some stories allege that Schrödinger had an actual cat, named Milton, and infer that the pet may have provided some inspiration to the physicist.

However, Milton may — and may not — have existed at all.

5. Nikola Tesla and Macak

Nikola Tesla was a brilliant but eccentric pioneer of electricity.  Tesla was fond of talking about his childhood pet, Macak, whom Tesla once described as “the finest of all cats in the world.”

In a letter written to a young admirer in 1939, Tesla extolled the cat’s virtues at some length; the man was in his 80s by then, but time had clearly not diminished Tesla’s love for Macak. And that just shows you how much a great cat can affect a human’s life!

He told the story of a winter evening where he found himself stroking Macak’s back. In a moment that inspired his lifelong study of electricity, Tesla was shocked — literally — to discover that the cat’s back became “a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” It was a pretty dramatic moment — his mother told him stop for fear he’d start a fire.

Ah the amazing feline inspires another human again.

Brave mew world: Lim Heng Swee’s cat landscapes – in pictures

I love it when you humans represent us felines in new and creative ways. Kuala Lumpur-based artist Lim Heng Swee has been creating digital artworks of cats camouflaged as landscapes since 2019.. “I found that the body shape of cats lying on the floor is very similar to the shape of a mountain,” he says. “So I decided to blend or hide them inside colourful minimal landscape art.”

Now the amazing thing is that Lim Heng Swee has never owned a cat but you don’t need to share your home with a feline to be inspired by us.

Cats’ Tree Hotel in Paris gives felines the purr-fect guest experience

The Cats’ Tree Hotel gives felines a classically Parisian guest experiences and to that this feline says, “Réservez ma réservation!”.