If someday soon my body is found lying on the floor of my house, it isn’t the coronavirus that killed me, it’s this damned cat. I am her sole obsession. Every day she sits and stares at me, and when I get up for any reason, she follows me. No, “follows” is the wrong word; she anticipates my every footfall and makes sure to place herself exactly where it’s most inconvenient for me. Just going to the bathroom has become an epic journey, where I’m forced to walk at half-speed through the vibrating quanta of Cat. I may have to get a machete so I can hack my way through this Cat Jungle. I know it’s just one cat, but she has the ability to plane-shift and and seems to have mastered the power of simultaneity.
I think so far she’s only toying with me, but if this isolation goes on much longer I know she sees me as a backup food source, and is practicing how she’s going to break my neck. I’m afraid.
If I suddenly drop off the internet and later my body is discovered, tell the police to investigate the cat. She can’t be allowed to get away with murder.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/27/pets-of-the-pandemic-true-stories-of-how-animals-are-helping-in-self-isolation :-))))
Rather off-topic (probably — but who knows all that the evil cat gets up to?), Trolls exploit Zoom privacy settings as app gains popularity:
Technically, apparently the service is fairly secure, the problems tend to be in poor configuration (including the defaults) and the like, plus a rather dodgy notion of privacy.
I’ve found that the best way to keep my cat from tripping me while walking about the house is to pick him up. But that also means that he knows if he sits in front of me, I’ll pick him up and carry him around the house for a few minutes, which he loves. I might be training him to stand where I’m trying to walk.
PZ
Since you’re walking half-speed, try walking backwards.
That will mess with her head.
Isilzha Mir #3
You think that you are training the cat?
She’s just hungry. Hungry for that delicious human face meat.
Quickest way to get rid of a cat? Show it affection.
What about the spiders? Does Evilcat try to get them?
She loves you, man. Don’t fight it.
:-)
BTW, you’d probably be more in more danger if she were a dog. Word is they don’t always wait til you’re dead; drunk and passed out may be close enough.
She’s just bonding with you. She’s going as stir crazy cooped up in the house as you are. She wuvs you!
Oh, no, she does not like getting picked up. I’ve tried: my granddaughter always wants to see the cat when she calls, and I end up chasing the camera-shy beast around, and if I pick her up, she’s immediately squirming to escape.
My last cat was like that, generally affectionate but didn’t like getting picked up, except when I was getting out of the shower. At that point, I was often blocked until he got picked up. Probably a scent marking thing.
At least I don’t want to think it was a comment on hygiene.
I once found all four of my cats in the bathroom, looked like they were planning something .
Best argument against a flat earth:
If the earth was flat, cats would push everything off the edge.
Thomas Scott@14, According to the mildly deranged penguin, they have. She claims this is why you see all the turtles flashing past, going upwards.
She also points out if the Earth were a ball, they’d be chasing it. She thinks they are — and therefore it is — otherwise, she claims, you’d see some giant, solar system sized, knitting needles.
She is now currently trying to explain why the Earth is also pyramid shaped, but is having problems fitting walruses into the, ah, theory…
My cat used to sit on the sofa arm staring right at me as I watched TV. Maybe she wanted to observe my reactions to stimuli. It was a bit unnerving at times.
You are both suffering separation from Mary anxiety.
Call yerself a scientist, pffft. Carry a laser pointer and aim it where you want evil cat to go. Build a machine out of scrap lab equipment that does it for you. Then build a machine that dispenses cat food pellets at high speed into the darkest corners. This is an intelligence test, you or the evil cat will win, not both.
Point your camera at your path to the bathroom, but don’t look. The cat will be in a state of Heisenbergian uncertainty both wanting to be underfoot but not wanting to be grabbed-and-filmed.
Sounds like classic cat anxiety. From her point of view she lost a family member so now there’s just you. No one else to harass.
I call that attempted walk “Cat Slalom”.
@#18, Lofty:
No, most of that would be engineering, not science.
A snippet from John Crace’s weekly round-up of Westminster (UK “government”) in the Grauniad, [… F]ear and loathing in coronavirus lockdown:
There’s also an amusing picture there of a guinea pig, captioned “I’ve never wanted to be a guinea pig less than I do now.” To the best of my knowledge that guinea pig is not Mr Crace’s dog.
“Vibrating quanta of Cat”
James Bond movie coming out next year.
But serially, if Evilcat is paying that much attention to you PZ, then it’s for sure she loves you.
May Sky Daddy have mercy on your soul-thingy. :)
@ 23
Reminds me of those videos of angry Italian mayors yelling at citizens to stay home and stop pretending that their poor, tired dogs are all incontinent and have inflamed prostates.
Yup, definitely Evil Cat loves PZ. Princess Leia, my cat, follows me when I walk to the bathroom. The difference is, I use a rollator. After Leia loves against my legs in the bathroom, and avidly watches while I wash my hands, she runs out and jumps onto the seat of my rollator and places her front paws onto the front of it. I call her my Valkyrie Cat. She rides to the living room, and seems to genuinely enjoy the ride.
This is what you get when the Cheshire cat mates with Schrodinger’s cat. Perhaps if you can trick it into saying its name backwards, it will disappear into the 5th dimension.
@davidc1 #13:
No, that wasn’t an actual conspiracy. Two of them were agents provocateur and one was a paid informer.
Get a length of string, a couple of metres long. Drag it behind you everywhere you go. The cat will follow the string and won’t trip you up.