Catstantinople? “Being a cat in Istanbul is like being a cow in India,”

Why Istanbul Should Be Called Catstantinople
Turkish city can’t quit delighting in felines; ‘like being a cow in India’

ISTANBUL—In this ancient city once ruled by sultans and emperors, the real king is the humble alley cat.

In historic neighborhoods along Istanbul’s Bosporus and Golden Horn waterways, an army of furry-tailed street cats are fed, sheltered and cooed at by an adoring public. Hundreds of fleece-lined houses have been erected at street corners by cat-mad residents. Most are flanked by makeshift feeding stations fashioned from yogurt pots or plastic bottles and overflowing with tasty scraps.

In some districts, ground-floor windowsills are lined with pillows and blankets, offering a cozy place for the discerning kitty to recline. In restaurants and cafes, cats are often part of the furniture, curling up next to dining tables or patiently waiting for leftovers from patrons.

Visitors to the city can dine at one of several cat-theme cafes or stay a night at the Stray Cat Hostel. During a 2009 visit here, President Barack Obama paused to pet Gli, one of dozens of cats living in Hagia Sophia, a museum that was once a Byzantine church and Ottoman mosque.

“Being a cat in Istanbul is like being a cow in India,” said Sibel Resimci, a musician and confessed cat junkie who says her husband often walks nearly 2 miles to work rather than disturb street cats sleeping on his moped. “For generations, they’ve had a special place in the city’s soul.”

Now, Istanbul’s feline fetish is adapting to the digital age.

Social media sites offering daily pictures of the city’s cutest street cats boast tens of thousands of followers. Web developers have created apps to help adopt and locate users’ favorite kitties. Local filmmakers have released a trailer for their coming feature film “Nine Lives” on video sharing platform Vimeo. Wildly popular YouTube tutorials show Istanbul residents how to build shelters and feeding stations so cats can nap and nibble in maximum comfort. The #catsofistanbul hashtag on photo-sharing website Instagram has more than 50,000 posts of cats nonchalantly—and almost always adorably—doing their thing.

[...]

Cats have a special place in Islam: Muslim lore tells of a cat thwarting a poisonous snake that had approached the Prophet Muhammad. One teaching tells that he found a cat sleeping on his shawl and opted to cut the fabric rather than disturb the animal. A popular saying goes: “If you’ve killed a cat, you need to build a mosque to be forgiven by God.”

The feline fetish is also functional: In the 19th century, cats were bred in large numbers for pest control to kill a rat population thriving in the city’s expanding sewage system. Before that, they helped Istanbul avoid the worst of a bubonic plague epidemic spread by rats.

Cats are even hard-wired into the city’s iconography and political culture.

In the bowels of Istanbul metro stations, pictures of waterside cityscapes feature cats posing alongside fisherman, in some cases munching the daily catch. Cat cartoons are used to satirize politicians: a digitized picture of a mustachioed sour puss named Recep Tayyip Erdocat was shared thousands of times last year, in a not-too subtle effort to lampoon Turkey’s pugilistic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. [...]

Who knew? See the whole article for pics, videos, links and more.

     

Do Cats Really Rule?

Not everywhere, but in overall numbers, perhaps yes:

Where cats are more popular than dogs in the U.S.—and all over the world

We all know there are only two types of people in the world: cat people and dog people. But data from market research firm Euromonitor suggest that these differences extend beyond individual preferences and to the realm of geopolitics: it turns out there are cat countries and dog countries, too.

Here in the U.S., slightly more households own dogs than own cats. But Euromonitor’s numbers show that in terms of raw population, cats outnumber dogs to the tune of 2 million (the number is closer to 4 million, by the American Veterinary Medical Association's estimate). Why? One simple explanation is that cats are more compact. You can fit more cats in a house than you can, say, golden retrievers. (You can also geolocate a lot of them, which is fun, but entirely besides the point.)

At the state level in the U.S., cats outnumber dogs in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Dogs are the favorite in the South and Southwest. The most dog-friendly state is Arkansas, where dogs outnumber cats 1.35-to-1. At the other end of the spectrum stands Massachusetts with 1.87 cats for every dog.

"A lot of that simply has to do with population density," Jared Koerten, a pet industry analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview. "Many cities just aren't that dog-friendly."

[...]

World pet populations also appear to follow a few interesting—if inexplicable—trends. For one, highly developed countries, for reasons yet unclear, tend to have more balanced cat and dog populations. "Looking across all countries, there's a correlation between developed economies and balanced pet preferences," Koerten said. Brazil, as is turns out, has a strange affinity for small dogs—it has more small dogs per capita than any other country. [...]

Go to the original article to see the 10 top cat loving states, the 10 top dog loving states, and the countries around the world with their large differences. There is a color coded map of the states, and also a map of the world too.

     

Is Venus The Cat for Real?

Meet Venus, the Two-Faced Cat

As adorable cats go, Venus earns a double take. Literally.

Her face appears to be split in two: half black cat, half ginger tabby cat.

The latest Internet feline fixation is a chimera cat by genetics. Three vets have confirmed this to Venus's owner, according to a post on the kitty's Facebook page, which has already garnered 32,000 Likes – and counting.

Also contributing to the appearance of two faces: 3-year-old Venus's blue and green eyes, which are the result of heterochromia iridum, or a change in coloration.

But don't be fooled by her looks – Venus, whose story went viral two weeks ago when someone posted her photo to user-generated news site Reddit, seems to be anything but two-faced.

"She's as sweet as can be ... gentle, loving, and has this little tiny kitten like 'meow,' " her owner writes on Facebook. "She acts like a big baby in the way that she loves to be babied. She doesn't bother any furniture with her claws and uses a scratching post."

Adds Venus's owner, who rescued the cat in September 2009: "She does not have one single bad habit ... she's perfect!"

Well, there might be one thing – if you ask her canine siblings. [...]

Is she even real? The link is from People Magazine, but their source is a facebook page? Has anyone actually seen it? Is there any video? If it's been photoshoped, it's really well done. In case anyone is wondering what a chimera is:

[...] Genetics . an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an artificially produced individual having tissues of several species. [...]

It also means a monster made up of various parts. Sweet little kitty couldn't be that, could it? Ask the dogs in her household!    

Practical advice for the War On Cat Poop

How to stop cats from fouling in your garden

 My garden is frequently visited by my neighbour’s cats. (I like cats. My sister has 4 cats and my cousins like putting hers in cute fancy dresses!) Last year, one of them started to poo in my garden. I embarked on a battle to stop him from doing so. I have tried many techniques; some based on the principles of sound, smell, novelty andcontact and failed most of the time. It was a bit like the movie Catch Me If You Can, except that I was no Leonardo DiCaprio (Frank). I was more like ’Carl’, the FBI bank fraud agent (Tom Hanks), who kept trying to catch Frank, the Conman, but was always a step behind. Every morning, the first thing I did was to roll up the blind and check if the set up has worked. Sometimes, I was amused by how clever the little cat was! A year on, I am happy to declare that I have won the battle! Here is how I found the ultimate solution against cats fouling in my garden. [...]

The author goes through each one of the many typical recommendations that one finds on the internet, and tells you (from experience!) why each one fails. That is, until the final one, that we are told works. Read on to find out!    

A pussycat encounters an iPad

The interactive touch screen is not harmed by cat claws. The kitty (inadvertantly) demonstrates a few of the iPad's features:


     

Dog has Kittens for Lunch

And breakfast and dinner, too. Here is a video I got in my email recently:



The cat and the leopard mommies in the video also make some interesting adoption choices: A fawn and a baboon.
     

My Pussy on the Porch with Snowflakes

Can you tell that she's thrilled? She looks a bit like a dirty snowflake herself.




The ducks, out on the lawn, consider it as good as rain. It turned into rain later in the day. Fortunately it didn't damage the cherry tree blossoms.



I had to adjust the camera shutter speed to get the snowflakes to show up, but a photo still doesn't capture the beauty in the movement of gently falling snowflakes.

You can see more snow pics on Pat's blog.

     

iGoogle and it's WikiHow offerings

For quite some time now, the home page of my Firefox web browser has been iGoogle, which is a customizable start page, which gives you many options to add content you enjoy or find useful. I've configured mine thus:


One of my favorite features of this has been the links under "How to of the Day", which links to randomly selected How-To articles from wikiHow. I often see something interesting or useful, where I think "I've always wanted to know how to do that" or "I wonder if it has some tips on how to do it better?" I have often found entertaining and useful information there. Here is a sample, of today's links:

How to Power Nap
Have you ever noticed that a short nap can be refreshing, while a longer nap can leave you feeling even more tired? There is a reason for that:

[...] What you're doing during a power nap is capturing the benefits of the first two of the five stages in the sleep cycle. These first two stages take place in the first twenty minutes. In addition to making you feel more rested and alert, the electrical signals in your nervous system strengthen the connection between neurons involved in muscle memory, making your brain work faster and more accurately.

[...]

Sleeping for any longer than 20 minutes will be counterproductive. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, making you feel sluggish and more tired than ever. [...]

The wikiHow instructions also offer tips for the topic, and often have footnotes at the end to follow up on if you want more information.

The other tip for today was about a difficult task cat owners sometimes have to face:

How to Give a Cat Medicine


"Expect a struggle"

While anyone who has ever tried to do this with a cat knows it won't be easy, there are ways to make it easier, and the wikiHow gives you relevant tips. It also helps by telling you what NOT to do as well:

[...] DO NOT squirt liquid medication into the cat's throat or tongue. Liquids are likely to go down a cat's windpipe, making the cat choke. For liquid medications, insert the dropper between the cat's cheek and teeth. [...]

Just getting through the experience without getting scratched or bit is worth taking the time to read the wiki. If you can get the medicine down successfully as well, so much the better.

These two examples from wikiHow may not seem terribly exciting, but keep in mind that the subjects chosen are random, so over time you end up with quite a selection of topics. Even topics that may seem stupid or irrelevant to you can be amusing to read. Sometimes you discover that a topic you thought was simple actually is a lot more complex than you thought, because of factors you had not considered or didn't know about.

All in all, it's been educational and fun. I'm definitely a wikiHow fan now.

     

Farm Report 07/01/07

Life and Death on The Farm
Farming really puts you in touch with the basics of life. You feed and care for animals; they reproduce, if you allow it; then eventually they die sooner or later. We have had three instances of that last part. One death is uncertain; another was not entirely surprising; the last was very unexpected.

The first involves our cat, Mr. Swanky. We got him when he was a kitten, as a companion for our white Siamese cat, Smudgie:


They were inseparable, initially. As they matured, we didn't get Smudgie fixed in time, so she had to have an abortion when she was spayed. After that, they still got along, but Mr. Swanky began to wander far from home, disappearing for weeks at a time.


Smudgie is a good girl and always stays close to home, but Mr. Swanky loved to wander. The picture above was taken after he returned from a three week absence. He was very thin. We were pleased to see him again.

He's been gone now for over two months. I've given up hope that he's coming back. At about the time he disappeared, the dogs went crazy one night, barking at the yard. The next day, there was a bird feeder missing from the yard. I found it several days later, in the woods. It had been ripped from the tree, carried there and crushed to pieces, for the seeds inside. I'm not sure what would do that. A bear?

Could it have anything to do with the cat's disappearance? Who knows. I expect we will never find out what happened to Mr. Swanky, it will likely remain an unsolved mystery.

The next death is a certain one, not entirely surprising but still a bit sudden. It was our old dog, Saffron, seen here in this photo from last year:


For the past two years, she had slowed down a lot, and was having some trouble going up and down the stairs. Sometimes I would carry her. I was very fond of her, and didn't want to end her life as long as she could keep on going.

We got her about 12 years ago, from the SF SPCA. She was an Australian Shepard Mix, with one blue eye and one brown eye. Her owner had surrendered her because she was too rambunctious. They had guessed she was about two years old, but I think she may have been as old as four. The next two photos are from the early days:


She was a handfull; a real Frisbee dog, with endless energy, totally obsessed with a ball, Frisbee, kong, or ANYTHING you would throw. You had to exercise her a lot. She was the dog I had always wanted... when I was 10! As an adult living in a city, I think I would have prefered a dog that was a bit calmer. But she did get me outside a lot and we got lots of exercise while exercising her, so it worked out well.


I never had a dog before that demonstrated so much devotion to me. She would follow me around, and just lay down at my feet, waiting for a command. When I would sit at my desk doing office work, she would lie at my feet and doze off.

Since moving to the countryside, she's spend a lot of time outside. Here she is last year, just enjoying the outdoors, too old to chase balls and Frisbees anymore. She had slowed down a lot. This year, she had even stopped barking at squirrels.


My office in the house is too small for dogs. We had enclosed our large back porch, and partitioned it into two sides. One one side was a room for changing muddy boots and raincoats, which is also where the dogs get fed and sleep at night. The other half is like a den. I've been working on turning a corner of it into an office, so I could once again do my office work with Saffie; she could lie on the floor nearby, under the skylight, and snooze.

It was a nice dream, but one that won't come to pass. Before I could finish the office, Saffie's health went downhill fast. She stopped eating, then stopped drinking water; soon she couldn't stand or walk. She started to have trouble breathing, so we ended her misery. We buried her on the edge of the yard she had enjoyed so much. We planted a flower bush on her grave, so we'll remember her every time we see it.

Here is a photo of her a short time from the end:


Now I really miss her. I hope it doesn't seem morbid talking about it, but I think it's perfectly natural to miss our pets when they die. As much as the absence hurts, I have so many, many wonderful memories of life with her, that I would gladly do it all over again, she gave me so much. The experience had many more pluses than minuses. I'll always think of her fondly, may she now R.I.P.

So on to the NEXT death, which was sudden and unexpected:


Bizarre Guinea Fowl Death

Early this spring we got six Guinea fowl chicks. One was a runt, and died soon after. The remaining five grew quite large, and were integrated into the chicken coup.


They are rather shy, and for six weeks stayed in the coup when the chickens were let outside to forage. About a week ago, they ventured outside for the first time.



They seemed to enjoy themselves, strolling around in a group. However, a conflict seemed to emerge, between two males. The alpha male began picking on a beta male, the one with white tipped wings. The beta began hanging back, and would often get separated from the group.

One evening, the beta male did not return to the coop. Andy went looking for him, and found him... dead! It seems that he had been foraging (or hiding?) in some underbrush, and got his head caught in some blackberry vines. It looked like he had panicked, and in his struggle to free himself, became so fearful, that he pooped his guts out! There were no external injuries, and he was stone cold dead, his intestines hanging out of his rear.

So now we are down to four Guinea fowls. I hope they last, they are strange and kinda ugly, but I've grown fond of them and their funny ways and noises.


Humming Bird Heaven
That's enough death for one Farm Report! I'll end it with this glimpse of the Humming Bird Heaven that our front porch seems to have become this year:


We often have six or eight Humming birds at once, competing at two feeders. Yet they move so quickly; I've not been able to photograph more than two at a time.


I'd really like to get a video of them, as it's wonderful to watch them in motion. That may be my next project.


For now, photos will have to do. And that completes this edition of The Farm Report.