Ape Think

Cat Date

Lucy is the friendly visitor. In fact, she’s the only cat I’m aware of who hasn’t breached our cat door. She sleeps on our deck furniture, and on her way home, which is two doors up, she stops to roll around on the back porch. Weeby is smitten with her because she’s the only cat he’s ever met who doesn’t want to beat him up.

It was then that I realized that an entire television show, including the careers of the actors, the writers, and crew, not to mention the emotional investment of millions of viewers, were all carefully manipulated over the course of more than six years simply so Tina Fey could see the words “Liz Lemon Waffle Bowl Sundae” emblazoned on the wall of an ice cream shop.

superseventies:

Betty Davis

Frank!

I finally got a picture of this elusive bastard, the only one in the ten years since I moved here. He bolts whenever he sees me, which is usually before I see him.

I used to call him Property Boy. He lives in the house behind us and thought our yard was his when I first moved in with my cats in ‘03. I quickly learned that he was a young bully, so I’d run him off whenever I saw him because I didn’t want him roughing up Laney. He did once make the mistake of sneaking in through the catdoor. His horrified screams woke us up and we ran to the living room to find Kenobi chasing him around, beating the shit out of him every time he tried to get back to the catdoor. He could see the backyard though the sliding glass door and kept jumping at it like a lunatic until we subdued Kenobi and opened it for him. Unlike our current duo of wienerpusses, Kenobi wasn’t about to let any random cats come sauntering into the house.

About a year ago, my wife and I were standing on the deck and watched as new neighborhood asshole cat Andy came scrambling over the back wall and scurried along the fence line from our backyard to our front, with Frank in hot pursuit. That’s when we learned his name. His human, who we’d never seen before, popped his head over the back wall and shouted “Frank! Frank! Get back here! Frank! FRANK!” Andy bailed through a hole in the next-door neighbor’s gate and Frank, suddenly aware that we were standing right there, quickly turned and ran back along the fence to his awaiting human’s Wilsonesque demi-head.

True Fans

People piled in line yesterday to wait for tickets to this weekend’s episode of Saturday Night Live, as Kristen Wiig returns to the show for her first time as host.

Fun fact: Only three other SNL-umni™ have returned to host the show during the season after the one in which they left the cast: Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy.

More fun facts: When Chevy returned, he and Bill Murray got into a fistfight just before airtime. After Bill’s first time hosting, producer Jean Doumanian and several cast members were immediately fired. Eddie Murphy’s return was actually his second time hosting the show. He has the distinction of being the only person to host while still a cast member. Thanks to 48 Hours co-star Nick Nolte being too hungover, Eddie was asked to perform hosting duties, and earned the disdain of his fellow cast-members when he changed the traditional opening line to “Live from New York, it’s the Eddie Murphy Show!”

I might be an obsessive fan, but thanks to people sleeping in the streets for two nights, I don’t feel like I take it too far.

28 Days Later

He had a note claiming that his name is Kevin and that he has Catdoorstevensnesia.

I was doing stuff out on the deck and saw this fly just sitting there. A while later, I noticed she was still there, so I grabbed my camera to see how close I could get before she flew away. The answer was very.

Chinaco³

In the castes of colonial Mexico, the natives and mestizos who worked as servants doing heavy labor were likened by the Spanish colonists to Chinese laborers, and were called Chinaco. Unlike most non-noblemen, the Chinaco, being in charge of the nobleman’s stables, became expert horsemen and helped contribute to the cause of the revolution against Spain, both sides of the Reform War, and against the French Intervention, presumably including the battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.

A leader of the Chinaco forces was General Manuel González, who purchased land in the north eastern state of Tamaulipas. A century later, hurricane Inez devastated crops throughout the state, and González’s descendants decided to plant agave to sell to tequila distillers in Jalisco, which was the only state legally allowed to produce tequila. When the crops matured, the Jalisco buyers backed out, and the González family decided to start their own tequila company and called it Chinaco. They petitioned the government for years, and in 1977 received Denomination of Origin status, becoming the only legal tequila distillery outside of Jalisco. Each bottle bears the emblem of the horseback warrior who fought from being servants to Spanish nobility to being the earliest of Mexican nobility.

In 2011, my neighbors gave me a cat they found in a parking lot and I named him Chinaco. Because I was drunk.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!