Tag Archives: Cats

emocat072311Like cats?

Like Morrissey?

JB writes:

I am reading Morrisey’s Autobiography and on page 286 he tells us that in 1995 he moved into a house on Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2…

 

“I dart about Dublin in the Saab which I park night in a lock up in Lad Lane. Dublin life is a is a steady focus on pub culture and simple pleasures. The streets are safe and it is difficult not to make friends. Instantly I find my own stray cat, who is white somewhere near the blackness of dust.

He patiently waits for me every morning but disowns me once he is fed.

There will be less suffering in his eyes as the weeks pass, yet his business down Dublin’s back alleys is of more concern to him than the variety of cat basket enticements that I lay out for him should he want to edge in permanently. But he doesn’t. I never fail to supply daily sustenance but he equally doesn’t fail to be at his appointed spot, full of simple devotion.

The inevitable morning draws me to the large Georgian windows from which I see his pathetic, half-flattened body in the middle of a deserted street. I race outside and lift his body up into two large bath towels, the body now lifeless, yet softly in my arms for the first time. His short life now over, as death always wins.”

Oh.

Moz/moggy song titles anyone?

Previously: This Charming Mannequin

Pic posed by model

Dead+Kitten

B Bop writes:

Reading this horrific story of despicable animal cruelty, I wondered how all those Broadsheeters who scoffed at that BS posting on the “Love/Hate” cat cruelty story line being unrelated to the actual killing of cats.

The truly sad thing is this will only escalate in the next few weeks. “Children” did this. The heart sinks.

Children (8) kills-cat-and-a-kitten-with-fireworks (Irish Independent)

Previously: The Boycat

Pic: ISPCA

baldwinbewarethecat1570gryffitheditionanimals
Grimalkin (top).

He carried more ‘evil’ than the usual cat.

Sibling of Daedalus writes:

Possibly the first novel ever published, definitely the first horror novel ever published, ‘Beware the Cat’, by printer’s assistant William Baldwin (pub. 1561) told the lurid tale of a Irish cat, Grimalkin.

Grimalkin roamed around the countryside demanding meat (“aon feoil?”) and eating sheep, foal and even humans if his request wasn’t readily complied with.

The hero of the story (a cattle stealer himself: there are no simple answers in this story) kills Grimalkin in self-defence, but comes to a sticky end. On returning home “all weary and hungry he set down by his wife and told her of his adventure, whereupon a kitling his wife kept, scarce half a year old, had heard, up she started and said ‘Hast thou killed Grimalkin?’

And therewith she plunged in his face, and with her teeth took him by the throat, and ere she could be pulled away she had strangled him.”

Some say Grimalkin was a metaphor for the Irish, others for Catholics, either way the story shows it’s best to be very very nice to cats…

Good times.

Read ‘Beware the Cat’ (updated version of 1570 edition) here

Thanks Sibling of Daedalus