The cat in the icon
Nov. 5th, 2025 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI slept the laptop overnight, and it's still working so far, albeit on borrowed time. The new one is due tomorrow, and I just have to pray it shows up before the taxi does.
Meanwhile, I think it's about time I introduced the fine fellow in the icon. His name was Minsky, he is no longer with us, but he was the most stunningly intelligent cat I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. When I lived in Sheffield, I had four cats; there was Minsky, there was his brother Chomsky (the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever, since there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both), and then there was a pair of ginger siblings called Klinsmann and Heidi who were about eighteen months younger. They could not have been more different characters if I'd written them.
I also had a lodger. I didn't especially want a lodger, but I had this friend who inherited his mother's lingerie business and it went... er... it failed, shall we say. So he had to sell his house, and nobody else would take him in, so he ended up in my spare room. We will call him Bob the Lodger, which is not his name. He was not exactly easy to deal with for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which was that he tended to have a lot of extremely fixed ideas. One of these ideas he had was that it was impossible for a cat to be intelligent (because he didn't especially like cats). In his mind, dogs could, but not cats. So when I kept telling him how bright Minsky was, he thought I was just imagining things, because he could be rather patronising like that. However, unfortunately for him, he voiced his opinions about cats in front of Minsky.
So Minsky decided he would show this silly human. One day, Bob the Lodger parked his car outside my house and was walking to the gate when Minsky spotted him. He ran into his path and angled his head as if to say "follow me, human"; and Bob thought grandly, "Ah, the cat wishes me to follow it. I shall humour it!" So he followed, and Minsky led him up a narrow lane between two rows of back gardens. In one of these gardens, there was a dog.
Minsky positioned himself where the dog could see him, so of course it set about barking frantically. Minsky then calmly moved along to the garden diagonally opposite, where there was another dog, and did the same thing. Next, he moved into the middle of the path where both dogs could see him (and therefore also each other), paused for a moment... and then shot off back to the entry to the lane, leaving these two dogs barking at each other like mad. Cats can't actually smirk, but Minsky apparently managed to give that impression; certainly he looked up at Bob as if to say, "See? I did that."
Bob was flabbergasted. He came in and told me the whole story. "I take it all back," he said. "That cat did forward planning!"
"I did tell you," I replied.
Cats can't laugh, either, but I'm quite sure Minsky was off somewhere doing whatever they do instead.
Meanwhile, I think it's about time I introduced the fine fellow in the icon. His name was Minsky, he is no longer with us, but he was the most stunningly intelligent cat I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. When I lived in Sheffield, I had four cats; there was Minsky, there was his brother Chomsky (the most embarrassingly misnamed cat ever, since there were two cats, and there were two brains, and Minsky got them both), and then there was a pair of ginger siblings called Klinsmann and Heidi who were about eighteen months younger. They could not have been more different characters if I'd written them.
I also had a lodger. I didn't especially want a lodger, but I had this friend who inherited his mother's lingerie business and it went... er... it failed, shall we say. So he had to sell his house, and nobody else would take him in, so he ended up in my spare room. We will call him Bob the Lodger, which is not his name. He was not exactly easy to deal with for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which was that he tended to have a lot of extremely fixed ideas. One of these ideas he had was that it was impossible for a cat to be intelligent (because he didn't especially like cats). In his mind, dogs could, but not cats. So when I kept telling him how bright Minsky was, he thought I was just imagining things, because he could be rather patronising like that. However, unfortunately for him, he voiced his opinions about cats in front of Minsky.
So Minsky decided he would show this silly human. One day, Bob the Lodger parked his car outside my house and was walking to the gate when Minsky spotted him. He ran into his path and angled his head as if to say "follow me, human"; and Bob thought grandly, "Ah, the cat wishes me to follow it. I shall humour it!" So he followed, and Minsky led him up a narrow lane between two rows of back gardens. In one of these gardens, there was a dog.
Minsky positioned himself where the dog could see him, so of course it set about barking frantically. Minsky then calmly moved along to the garden diagonally opposite, where there was another dog, and did the same thing. Next, he moved into the middle of the path where both dogs could see him (and therefore also each other), paused for a moment... and then shot off back to the entry to the lane, leaving these two dogs barking at each other like mad. Cats can't actually smirk, but Minsky apparently managed to give that impression; certainly he looked up at Bob as if to say, "See? I did that."
Bob was flabbergasted. He came in and told me the whole story. "I take it all back," he said. "That cat did forward planning!"
"I did tell you," I replied.
Cats can't laugh, either, but I'm quite sure Minsky was off somewhere doing whatever they do instead.
