Fogbow

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 9:09 pm I like Caliban. Too many syllables? Calvin .

JJ MacNab @jjmacnab@counter.social
It's Saturday so I'm going to start a Proof Of Cat thread.

Pictures, or you don't have a cat.

This is Anchovy aka Ancho aka Cho aka Soap Eating Boob.

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Thu Nov 10, 2022 11:17 pm Princess Zelda brought her own flair! I love black kitties. She’s beautiful. Welcome and congrats.

Cats in Japanese Woodblock Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Animals Came to Star in Its Popular Art

Few countries love cats as much as Japan does, and none expresses that love so clearly in its various forms of art. Though not eternal, the Japanese inclination toward all things feline does extend deeper into history than some of us might assume. “In the sixth century, Buddhist monks travelled from China to Japan,” writes Philip Kennedy at Illustration Chronicles. On these journeys, they brought scriptures, drawings, and relics – items that they hoped would help them introduce the teachings of Buddhism to the large island nation.” They also brought cats, in part as carriers of good luck and in part for their ability to “guard the sacred texts from the hungry mice that had stowed on board their ships.”

Buddhism made a lasting mark on Japanese culture, but those cats practically overtook it. “Today, cats can be found nearly everywhere in Japan,” Kennedy writes. “From special cafés and shrines to entire cat islands. Indeed the owners of one Japanese train station were so enamored with their cat that they appointed her stationmaster.”

By the mid-nineteenth century, the ukiyo-e woodblock print master Utagawa Kuniyoshi could keep a studio overrun with cats and not seem too terribly eccentric for it. “His fondness for felines crept into his work, and they appear in many of his finest prints. Sometimes they crop up as characters from well-known stories; other times, they are beautifully expressive studies.”

Kuniyoshi made his name illustrating tales of historical warriors, but his artistic capacity also encompassed “everything from landscapes and animals to ghostly apparitions and scenes from popular kabuki theatre.” When the Tokugawa Shogunate sensed its power declining in the 1840s, it banned such “luxuries” as the depictions of kabuki actors (as well as geisha).

► Show Spoiler

To accommodate that demand, Kuniyoshi created humanoid cats endowed with features resembling well-known personages of the era. This in addition to his series Neko no ateji, or “cat homophones,” with cats arranged to spell the names of fish, and Cats Suggested As The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a feline parody of Hiroshige’s earlier Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. Rat-eating aside, cats aren’t known as especially useful animals, but many a Japanese artist can attest to their inspirational value even today.

Phoenix520 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 11, 2022 4:25 pm In my house, right now, cat greetings are:

Hiss
Growl
Rowr

sugar magnolia wrote: ↑Sat Nov 12, 2022 10:00 pm My daughter's cat is obsessed with potatoes. He even sleeps with one.

Your Cat Might Not Be Ignoring You When You Speak
Cats have a reputation for being aloof, but a new study has found that their relationships with their owners may be stronger than we thought.

By Anthony Ham
Published Nov. 12, 2022 Updated Nov. 13, 2022
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Every cat owner has a story to tell of being blanked by their cat: We call to our cat, it turns away, and some of us might be left wondering why we didn’t get a dog. But your cat may be listening after all. More than that, it cares more than you may think.

A study by French researchers that was published last month in the journal Animal Cognition found that not only do cats react to what scientists call cat-directed speech — a high-pitched voice similar to how we talk to babies — they react to who is doing the talking.

“We found that when cats heard their owners using a high-pitched voice, they reacted more than when they heard their owner speaking normally to another human adult,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, an author of the study and cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “But what was very surprising in our results was that it actually didn’t work when it came from a stranger’s voice.”




https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/scie ... e-dog.html