I don't know why cats like to hang out around computers, but I've always had cats (with brief hiatuses due to landlords, spousal objections, etc.) and they have always displayed an inordinate interest in what I'm doing on this machine. It's almost as if they think....there's cat food inside. In this picture, I think it's beginning to occur to her: Maybe...not.
The idiocy of cats never ceases to amaze me, especially when you consider that it's pretty clear they have domesticated humans, not the other way around. (Not a roaring endorsement of the supposed superiority of the human brain.) Cats will, when it's raining, go to the front door, meow to be let out and then, confronted with evidence that torrents of water are pouring from the sky, look at you accusingly, as if to say, "I could call the SPCA on you for this." They then trot to the back door and meow to be let out. When you open that door, they always look stunned, absolutely poleaxed with horror. "GodDAMN, it's raining out the back door, too!" I figure the basic tabby cat domesticated humans millions of years ago because it was becoming clear that, evolutionarily speaking, they were slated for that Big Slag Heap in the Sky. Yeah, they hunt. But I have seen Roxy spend loooong moments stalking... an oak leaf. My former cat, the dear departed Ralph, used to catch rodents all the time, but he worked on a catch-and-release basis, somewhat like U.S. immigration policy: he nailed the little critters at the border, brought them inside the Big House and then said, "Now, getouttahere, you wild and crazy guys!" Which they did. Some people get a cat to rid themselves of a rodent problem; we never had a rodent problem until we acquired a cat. The only thing Ralph ever learned to do, and this was absolutely seared into his tiny little brain, was to come running when he heard the can opener. He lived to be 19 and this behavior continued up to the day of his death, some 12 years after I quit buying cat food that required a can opener to get into. "What? Tomato sauce? But I thought..." Ralph, bless his heart, keeled over and died at the food trough, which is the way I suspect he would have wanted to go. His interest in food was not just a hobby; he was One Big Mother. Part Maine coon cat, he tipped the scales at 22 pounds; a veterinary assistant who had to carry him upstairs once accused me of feeding him concrete. Roxy, in contrast, is svelte, and quite beautiful, which she knows; periodically, she will throw herself on the floor and roll around like a naked Marilyn Monroe on a bearskin rug, and you can just read the thought balloon above her head: "Ain't I purty?" That's it. That's her One Big Party Trick...sort of like some women I have known. Unlike them, Roxy is assured of Tender Vittles for the rest of her life, which just goes to prove my thesis: as dumb as they are, they are smarter'n us.
