kscott@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Kevin Scott%Kuntz) (09/27/85)
<Does anyone still have a news reader with the line eater bug?> On the related subject of bizarre pets, my next door neighbor back in wonderful Mahwah NJ (it's a nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit there) had a gargantuan cat named Tent, I believe. Well, this large cat hated water as much as any cat, but he was still fascinated by it. They had to make sure the toilet seat was closed, or the cat would balance on the edge and flush the toilet all night. -- two to the power of five thousand against and falling ...
fred@gymble.UUCP (Fred Blonder) (09/28/85)
> From: kscott@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Kevin Scott%Kuntz) > > On the related subject of bizarre pets, my next door neighbor back > in wonderful Mahwah NJ had a gargantuan cat named Tent, I believe. > Well, this large cat hated water as much as any cat, but he was > still fascinated by it. They had to make sure the toilet seat was > closed, or the cat would balance on the edge and flush the toilet > all night. Now, if they could just train the cat to USE the toilet properly they'd really have something. (I'm not sure what.) What was that that someone said about cats only being capable of stumbling into objects and eating them? -- All characters mentioned herein are fictitious. Any similarity to actual characters, ASCII or EBCDIC is purely coincidental. Fred Blonder (301) 454-7690 Fred@Maryland.{ARPA,CSNet} seismo!umcp-cs!fred
leimkuhl@uiucdcsp.CS.UIUC.EDU (10/03/85)
We used to have a very odd cat we called Magic. Magic, a tortoise-shell persian, spent the larger part of her time under the big bookshelves in our living room-- coming out to eat only when she was certain the other cats were not around. In particular, she was terrified of a severely obese old tom-cat named Toby. You see, for some reason, Magic had just shown up on our porch one day, and in view of the determination she showed by hanging about for two days, we had added her to our feline menagerie. Toby had hated her from the start, and he delighted in playing upon her neuroses. This was quite out of character for Toby, whose usual attitude was one of passive ambivalence (except, of course, in matters relating to food). Magic had a very peculiar walk--almost a crawl. Her darting about so close to the floor was more reminiscent of a snake than of a cat. Her strangest vice was that she loved a sort of self-administered chinese water torture: she would sit in the bathtub with her head positioned directly under our leaky shower head, waiting for the drops to fall. I would often discover her there, in the middle of the night, making strange cries each time a drop would hit her head. While watching a nature show on television one night, we were surprised to learn that Magic had a strange affinity for jungle noises, especially the cry of a wild monkey. When we would mimic the sounds, she would become quite agitated, darting about in her strange way, sometimes alighting on the caller's lap. She was rather frightening to the superstitious, and it was great fun to bring people into the living room to show her there, only her eyes visible from her lair under the shelves. We lost Magic and Toby in a strange sequence of events. First Magic was found dead at the side of the road outside our house, hit by a car. My father, who had been working outside that day, conjectured that Toby had chased her into the path of the auto, for he had been in an especially vindictive mood that afternoon, and Magic was only slightly less frightened of streets and cars than she was of Toby. More bizarre was the death the next day of Toby, our friend of ten years, at the precise location where Magic had died the day before. Probably he was the victim of a cruel coincidence, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that there was something more involved. -Ben Leimkuhler