Cat Lovers Thread

[Ringo]

In Antalya, the cat strolled nonchalantly through the State Opera and Ballet Theater, outshining both the production, the orchestra, and the soloist, who immediately realized he had lost.

 

[Alan Stallion]

Drama cats...

 

[Alan Stallion]

Neko tricks...

猫

 

[Ringo]

A snow leopard on the hunt.

https://idiod.video/ad8yp8.mp4

 

[Ringo]

 

[Alan Stallion]

Another video game featuring a playable cat dropped this month.

Cuteness overload!

 

[Alan Stallion]

Indiana Jones vs. OwlKitty

 

[Carl in Michigan]

 

[Stryder50]

Amusing article from "The New Yorker". It will hit you up for a subscription, but you should be able to get a free read.

The Man Who Reinvented the Cat​

The curious career of the illustrator Louis Wain tells the story of how our feline friends came in from the alley and took up their place at the hearth.
...
In mid-nineteenth-century London, which had a population upward of two million people, the journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew set out to survey the lives of the working and nonworking poor. One of the now obsolete categories of labor he investigated was that of the cats’-meat men: sellers of boiled horseflesh, who purchased their stinking wares from knackers’ yards, then wheeled it in barrows along appointed routes each day, selling it to the public as cat food at two and a half pence per pound. By Mayhew’s reckoning, there were a thousand such venders in the capital, serving the needs of a feline population of three hundred thousand: roughly one cat per dwelling house. Cats had a liminal status, perceived by the humans they lived alongside as being somewhere between regulators of vermin—they helped control the population of rats and mice that flourished among the goods brought in and out of London’s teeming docks—and vermin themselves. Weasel-faced and rat-tailed, given to screeching and swiping, the mid-century cat was a rogue scavenger and a fit target for the cruelty of children, thanks to its own well-known predisposition to cruelty.

At the same time, however, a new cat was beginning to emerge. This was a round-faced, wide-eyed, sleek-bodied creature that was pampered, primped, and lavished with affection—like Oliver, a plump, stately, black domestic cat who was a member of a suburban household in the late nineteenth century and who, preserved in taxidermied condition with a yellow ribbon tied in a bow around his neck, is now in the collection of the Museum of London. Consider, too, the proliferating creatures drawn by Louis Wain, an artist born in Clerkenwell in 1860, whose anthropomorphized felines, engaged in activities such as playing cricket or singing in choirs, came to populate the pages of the Illustrated London News no less densely than their feral cousins prowled the warehouses along the Thames.

Wain is the figure at the center of “Catland” (Johns Hopkins), an entertaining and often surprising cultural history by the literary critic Kathryn Hughes. “Catland” chronicles a seventy-year period, stretching from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, during which, Hughes writes, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” In alternating chapters, Hughes narrates the life of Wain—whose drawings at the height of his popularity were as familiar as those of Beatrix Potter, and who spent his later years in a mental asylum, afflicted with symptoms of what may have been schizophrenia—and provides a zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth. Hughes makes the case that the new world of cats which Wain both chronicled and helped to create is a signal instance of modernism in all its confusion and uncertainty. She writes, “When it came to ‘making it new’—that battle cry of early twentieth-century intellectuals—nothing conveyed the principle better than the transformation of the domestic cat from smudgy outlier to cultural obsession.”
....

The Man Who Reinvented the Cat

The curious career of the illustrator Louis Wain tells the story of how our feline friends came in from the alley and took up their place at the hearth.

www.newyorker.com

.....
Modern variation of a "Wain";

Tomcat T-Shirt

Unlike any other cat our Tom Cat earned his wings and is ready to take controls. T-shirt features a relaxed fit, with reinforced double-stitching on all seams. After dyeing they are washed and dried, so they arrive to you comfortable, pre-shrunk & ready to wear.

www.wright-bros.com