Happy Elvis Week everybody!

Not sure how to celebrate? There's something for everyone.

With the Wowwee® Alive™ Elvis® [no, I am not making this up], "you can touch his soft hair and sideburns, stroke his skin, feel his 1968 black leather jacket, look into his clear baby blues, and marvel as his lips form their distinctive "curl" before he sings in that soulful voice."

Yes, the good people at Sharper Image have made available this officially licensed animatronic robot that sings eight of the King's biggest hits, or you can sing along karaoke style, or you can even plug your iPod into it and watch him sort of bop along. Apparently. For only like 300 bucks or something. Plus shipping. Cool, huh?

Or you could listen to the classic Richard Thompson song about an Elvis fan gone mad:

Oh she dressed in the dark and she whispered amen
She was pretty in pink like a young girl again
Twenty years married and she never thought twice
She sneaked out the door and walked into the night
And silver wings carried her over the sea
From the west coast of Ireland to West Tennessee
To be with her sweetheart, oh she left everything
From Galway to Graceland to be with the king

She was humming Suspicion, that's the song she liked best
She had Elvis I Love You tattooed on her breast
When they landed in Memphis, well her heart beat so fast
She'd dreamed for so long, now she'd see him at last
She was down by his graveside day after day
Come closing time they would pull her away
Ah to be with her sweetheart, oh she'd left everything
From Galway to Graceland to be with the king

Ah, they came in their thousands from the whole human race
To pay their respects at his last resting place
But blindly she knelt there and she told him her dreams
And she thought that he answered or that's how it seems
Then they dragged her away it was handcuffs this time
She said my good man are you out of your mind.
Don't you know that we're married? See, I'm wearing his ring.
From Galway to Graceland to be with the king.
I come From Galway to Graceland to be with the king.

-Lyrics lifted from RT's website. I tried to find an mp3 of the song for you but I can't put my finger on one just now. Here's some guy singing it on youtube, though, in case you don't have your own copy of the song. Which you should.

Update: How could I forget this Elvis? I'm not sure what he's doing to celebrate this week. Likely out catting around is all. As usual.

Fridge art + bonus catblogging

A couple of loose ends from the comments to the 5 weird things about me* post the other day:

Magpie, whom I've known in real life since before the 1st Gulf War, recalled that I had a cat who did a peculiar thing. I'm not sure how that makes me weird, but I do have photos of Anna with a paper bag on her head.

She'd really do this herself. You know how cats will crawl into an open paper bag if you leave it on the floor? Anna really loved smaller bags. Bags that fit on her head. She'd put them on her head and then walk around with them, sort of bumping into things repeatedly (and apparently on purpose).

The other cats in the house, who normally harrassed poor Anna mercilessly, gave her a wide berth when she had a bag on her head, sort of like they thought she might be somehow dangerous. In this picture, she had actually jumped up onto the mantel and picked up the ToyboatToyboatToyboat bag; I was afraid she'd fall down, so I lifted her off. You can click here to see her on the floor with a plain brown paper bag on her head.

My sister the mailman said that she thought it was strange that I used to keep a photo of Counselor Troi taped to the wall above the cats' dishes so they could watch her when they ate. I had to tell her that she was mistaken about that. For one thing, they ate in separate rooms. They did share a water dish though, and there was a picture above it. She's not totally nuts. The picture above their water dish was actually a postcard someone sent me with two cats who looked like Edie and Anna, and who were drinking water out of a bowl that was nearly identical to their water dish.

The photo of Deanna Troi was actually on the fridge, and it wasn't a picture of her, or even of the actress who played her, but rather it was a picture of my 25th birthday cake. A painter friend of mine used to make these fabulous cakes, and then get a bunch of white frosting, some food coloring, and a palette knife and mix all the colors herself and paint with the frosting on the cake from whatever photo you'd give her. Note the Star Fleet insignia (some made up, some from ST:TOS uniforms) on the cupcakes.

Yes, my friends and I were geeks when we were in our twenties. Somewhere there are photos of the Jean-Luc Picard cake that another friend got for her birthday the year after that cake. I'll post one if I can find it, if anyone is interested.

But speaking of stuff on my fridge: When I took down the DT cake photo this morning to bring it in and scan it, I noticed that some of the items next to it had been on my fridge since at least the early nineties. Which is kind of remarkable considering that I have moved house 13 times since 1990. Seriously. There are lots of magnets and old photos and postcards, and also some cartoons, which are torn and faded and yellow. I brought in a couple of them to scan, so that I can at least preserve them digitally. Quite a few of the cartoons have a dinosaur-extinction theme going, such as this one above from back when Dilbert was actually funny. Click here to embiggen and maybe it'll be more legible, depending on your monitor.

And this one is perhaps my all-time favorite cartoon, from Lynda Barry, one of my all-time favorite cartoonists. Click here to see all four of the panels in the strip; the whole file was just too big to post, and I couldn't make it any smaller without making it completely illegible.

The original is pretty illegible to begin with, even though I tweaked it and enhanced the contrast as much as I could. The date on it is 1996. The third panel is especially faded; here's the narration:

"Iguanadon told us the tar pits rocked. Me and Megalosaurus throught it wouldn't hurt to try it once. Next thing we knew we were hooked. We both got kicked out of our band. Iguanadon choked on his own vomit. The scene was getting ugly but we couldn't stop." And then the dialog between the two dinosaurs: Dino 1: "For godssakes! Iguanadon is dead and all you can think about is finding his stash!" Dino 2: It's around here somewhere."

I've always been fond of putting things on the fridge door. I used to collect headlines from tabloid newspapers (the Weekly Word News was my fave: More space aliens, less celebrity gossip) and arrange them on the fridge door.

The one pictured at left is my first solo apartment, sometime in the late 1980s. The cats on top are named Kolena and Martha. I'm not 100% sure which one is which, although I recall that the solid grey one on the right is the mom of the other one (also pictured below).

Those two cats were adorable, though. Unfortunately they only stayed with me for a few months to accommodate a long-term houseguest of their real mom. The poor houseguest was desperately allergic, but as soon as she went away, these two went back home.

Here's a picture of the younger one in a very popular spot: over the pilot light on the gas stove. That was the most wonderful stove I ever cooked anything on in my entire life. I wish I still had it.

I scanned some more of the fridge art, and some more very old pictures of cats that are no longer, in fact, alive. But I need to go do some other things right about now, so I'll save those for another post.

*I know I'm supposed to tag five more bloggers to complete the meme, but I don't do chain letters or anything like that, so if you want to list five weird things about yourself, please consider yourself tagged. You can post it on your own blog or put your list in the comments over on the original post. It is kind of fun to do.

Trying to herd a cat

Mrs. Mitty did not want her picture taken last night. This is the best one of several I took. I don't know whether she adopted this little perch before or after the miniature rose died. Doesn't matter. I was hoping to show you how adorable she looked curled up in the dirt. She had other ideas, however, and left to pursue them.

Catblogging: Another neighborhood feline

And here is another cat that doesn't actually live with me. I had to use the zoom lens to get this photo on account of he's very shy. We call him Marmalade, but he's not the only marmalade tabby loose in the neighborhood. Scruffy Marmalade passed on this spring, and there's another one we call the Real Marmalade because he was the first marmalade tabby we'd seen in a while. Sometimes we mistake this one for the Real Marmalade, but Scruffy Marmalade was unmistakable. And this one has more white on his feet and chest than the Real Marmalade.

This one is the most persistent of all the marmalade tabbys we've seen here, and the other cats (Elvis and Mrs. Mitty) seem to tolerate him OK. Which is not to say they like him, because they don't. But they do let him up on the porch once in a while to eat the food we leave out there. He hasn't so far let us pet him or get too close, but he does need to be taken in and vaccinated etc., so we are trying to get to know him better. He's getting a little more relaxed, and doesn't run off unless you actually move towards him. Sometimes he'll even come up on the porch until you look right at him or move suddenly, then he runs off and dives down into the storm drain across the street. That freaks me out a little for some reason, but all the cats do it from time to time. They don't seem to come to any harm. But really, what's down there? When I shine a flashlight in there it looks like a big deep drop-off, but they seem to get back out pretty easily. How do they do it?

Cats are pretty amazing.

Belated catblogging

I have been remiss in my catblogging duties. Here is Mrs. Mitty. She is, like Elvis, not my cat. She lives more or less on my porch and across the street on the porch of my lovely ex-wife. I'd bring her into my house and adopt her & all, but she doesn't like to be inside. We bring her to the vet and make sure she is vaccinated & everything, and she has been spayed, but she does not want to be a house cat. The other day Elvis had an appointment for his shots, but he figured out what was going on, so -- to make a long story short -- we brought Mrs. Mitty instead. She wasn't all that happy about it, but she is much easier to put into a box than Elvis is. When we got back, though, Elvis was on the porch. Maybe we imagined that he was looking smug. But Mrs. Mitty hopped out of the box and gave Elvis this look like, "you owe me, you little fucker." He has since been taken in and vaccinated, and she'll go in for another round of shots this week. So even though I don't actually have any pets just now, the hassle and expense does not cease.

Oh, and I asked my lovely ex-wife once why she named this cat Mrs. Mitty. She said, "because it rhymes with pretty and kitty." How goofy is that? She is, as usual, right. Of course.

[Update: my lovely ex-wife told me the other day that she first thought of it on account of how Mrs. Mitty had two very pale mittens on her feet when she first showed up. I don't recall that, but I don't think I lived in the neighborhood then. She's obviously very solid grey now.]

Catblogging

I don't actually have a cat, but this is Elvis. He lives across the street from me now. He used to live with me, after Stella first found him in the park, starved and injured and almost dead, poor little thing -- and not even five weeks old. We didn't think he'd last the whole day.

That was about eight years ago.

I was working from home then, and home was an apartment not far from here where cats were not allowed. So when my friend went to Nicaragua for a couple of weeks, Elvis and I stayed with her dog, Stella. The two of them became inseperable very quickly, and he stayed there, very happily ever since.

Isn't he a beautiful cat? [Update: You might need to turn the brightness up on your monitor to see him. It's really hard to photograph shiny black mammals.]