Theater and Cats DO Mix!

Those serious Sioux City thespians are leading the way to a whole new vision in cat-theater futures.  The Sioux City Journal reports today that if you bring a can of cat food to the theater for the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s as good as a ticket.  Proceeds go to the local humane society. 

You can bring other cat stuff as well to serve as your admission price, just don’t bring your cat — contemporary theater for now remains wholly unprepared for cat-inclusive audiences and will need to surmount obvious technological barriers before that dream is realized.

Best Jazz Album Name Ever

Do I need to tell you how great to have a cat actually playing guitar on the cover of Who Let the Cats Out?  Cats are a lot more musical than we imagine, if they can just calm down and not run out of the room when someone starts to teach them. 

Mike Stern’s Who Let the Cats Out is clearly among the great jazz album names that include cats in the name.  I’m not entirely familiar with all the cat jazz album titles in the world, so make sure to remind me with comments of the many I will probably miss.

I like that Who Let the Cats Out is both a funny riff and so very true.  Because we all heard Who Let the Dogs Out, but the truth is dogs that get let out are far easier to find than cats who get let out. An out cat can’t hardly be found if he wants to be, which he usually doesn’t.

Naturally, Who Let the Cats Out is a jazz album. If cats were a musical genre, they would be jazz.  And if cats played music, they’d play jazz.  My cat Brody plays the keyboard, and it’s improvisation at a very pure level.  No technique, knowledge, or musical score can impede him when he starts tickling the ivories.

Bullet Train Borrows Cats’ Ears & More

A futuristic train in Japan will feature air brakes shaped like cat ears that retract like cat nails!  Of course, the retractable-claw cat-ear air brakes are superior to all the brakes people have made without involving cats’ design ideas, proving that cats should be consulted more often in the design-phase process.

What does it mean that a train of the future borrows so heavily from feline technologies?   Is this early evidence that cats are on the cusp of improving our lives Big Time?  

A minor point: Cats take no responsibility to the disco-tights quality of the train’s exterior. For that, I think you can thank manga.

Learn about the cat’s forthcoming bullet train here.

Real Cats Go to Lego Church

 

Precious enjoys a quiet moment in the Lego church.

Here’s a unique example of a cat-human spiritual collaboration involving the creation of a church made entirely of Legos.  Naturally, Lego artist Amy Hughs’ cats couldn’t wait to get their paws all over the Legos church under construction, contributing their value-added X-factor to the Lilliputian house of God. 

Please go see the pictures of Precious and Anya terrorizing the organ player and lounging in the various vestibules.  It’s a rare glimpse into a world where cats are 13 feet tall.  Their devotion to spending time on this project highlights the cat’s attraction to special and even spiritual places.  If only there were more little nubby churches for them to attend.

In a poignant note, Precious (seen in the picture above) did not live to see the church completed.  That very sad fact seems to make the cat’s connection to the Legos church that much more mysterious and beautiful.

Self Help for Cats is eternally interested in hearing about all cat-human collaborations, in the spiritual realm and beyond.  So if your cat is your spiritual advisor or just is always “helping” you with your projects, we would love to hear about it. 

My thanks to the Ironic Catholic where I learned of this fantasic project. 

Cat as Dumbbell: Catflexing by Stephanie Jackson

Need to tone up? Is your cat bored? Then does cat fitness trainer Stephanie Jackson ever have the plan for you! Catflexing: A Catlover’s Guide to Weight Training, Aerobics & Stretching (Ten Speed Press, 1997) is the only program I’ve seen that provides essential bodily maintenance for the human while simultaneously inventing a whole new brand of “quality time” with the cat.

Kudos to Stephanie Jackson for this pioneering effort that shows how even something as painful and counterintuitive as stretching and exercise can be improved upon if you just manage to involve a cat.  Girl is onto something here, and you can see she’s enjoying herself.  When was the last time the gal in the tights was smiling wide doing her crunches? Well, do a crunch with a cat on your abdomen and just try NOT to smile, okay?

In fact, the whole book made me feel good, and I didn’t even try one of these exercises yet.  I smiled just reading it and looking at the wonderful pictures of Stephanie doing lunges with her cat on her shoulders, Stephanie doing pushups with the cat lying on her back, Stephanie using the cat as a dumbbell. 

Yes, this is truly a classic in the cat-human canon.  Stephanie and her co-authors, Bad and Masi, can count themselves among the spiritual midwives of the Self Help for Cats movement. If anyone knows how to contact Stephanie Jackson, I would be thrilled to interview her here on Self Help for Cats, to learn more about how her spark for synergy originally ignited, and to update us on her latest good works. 

Meet the Cats behind Self Help for Cats

Having laid a foundation for the Self Help for Cats paradigm, it’s time to introduce you to the stars of the show: Brody and Herman Panther. These are the scoundrels shown hard at work/sleep in the above banner photo. Notice how they are on top of their paperwork and reading. Without these two, Self Help for Cats would be nothing at all.

The talented duo have already been featured in several newspaper articles for their incredible contributions to me, their collaborator, medium, archivist and main patron.

In the Self Help for Cats book, you will read about how Brody’s Maine Coon Cat ancestors shaped their own destiny, with romantic stories about going half-wild in New England, later kicking butt at the first American cat shows, and, later still, losing out at the same shows to prissy, “precious” breeds. The Main Coon didn’t let the public’s finicky attitude for felines get him down, no: He boarded a train to California to sire, a few generations removed, the brilliant nut-cat I found one day at the San Francisco SPCA.

It’s just part of the story behind the Self Help for Cats movement, one piece of the puzzle that adds up to the fact that cats and people are on a collision course with destiny. We sit on the verge of the lip of a whole new future, a new age in which cats and people collaborate on levels that right now we can hardly even begin to imagine.

I know this seems unfathomable to you, but trust me, with the steps and exercises in the Self Help for Cats book, redefining your felines’ future is going to be simple as pie.