Maverick Philosopher

Cat Blogging!

I haven't done any cat blogging in a righteous spell. Call me a slacker. Friday is the official cat blogging day here at MavPhil and elsewhere in the blogosphere, but this Friday is Good Friday. Cat man Dave Bagwill sends this:

 

Friday Cat Blogging! Trump Cat

They Have No Views

My cats eat, sleep, play, and sleep some more. They have no views. But the value of being adoxastos is lost on them.  I do not envy them.  I am glad that I am a man. Man alone among the animals is more than an animal.  Man's distinction consists both in his having views and in his ability to examine them like Socrates, to suspend them like the Pyrrhonian skeptic and to transcend them like the mystic. 

Man is also distinguished by his wretchedness. No mere animal, strictly speaking, is wretched.  Animal suffering never gets the length of wretchedness. Man is wretched because he is great. Therein lies the Pascalian paradox of the human predicament.

Friday Cat Blogging One Day Deferred: Palindrome Pussy

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats

Before we get on to tonight's feature presentation, a little tribute to John McCain. Here he is in Bomb Iran. But the old neocon needs a history lesson. The Regents did it first, in 1961, before the Beach Boys covered it in '65. The Regents in their dotage, live. "I tried Peggy Sue, but I knew she wouldn't do."

............................

Loving Spoonful, Nashville Cats, 1966. They's playin' since they's babies.

Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle. For you fathers out there. Bond with your son when he's five. Wait till he's 50 and he won't give you the time of day. Harry Chapin was a major talent who died young.  Here is his great Taxi. We Boomers are damned lucky to have the greatest popular music soundtrack.

What Happened to Harry Chapin?

Tokens, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, 1961 

Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962. Bent fabric can be said to have a kink  in it. Therefore,

Kinks, Phenomenal Cat

Tom Jones, What's New Pussycat? 1965. 

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog.' The queen of the one-hit wonders?

Mongo Santamaria, El Pussycat. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a pussyhat and a watermelon. While we have Mongo Santamaria cued up, here is his rather better-known Watermelon Man, muchachos.

Buck Owens, Tiger by the tail. This one goes out to Kathy P.

Stray Cats, Stray Cat Strut

Sue Thompson, Paper Tiger, 1965. This one's for Barack "Red Line" Obama.

Elton John, Honky Cat, 1972

Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941.  An influential song in the history of the blues.  

Rooftop Singers, Tom Cat.  From those far-off and fabulous hootenanny days. 

UPDATE (9/16). 

Mendocino Joe wisely recommends Ring-Tail Tom.

UPDATE (9/17),

Monterey Tom, displaying good taste, as usual, reminds me of Laura Nyro's Tom Cat Goodbye.

Friday Cat Blogging! Proof that I am a Racist

I have two black cats and they are never allowed off my plantation. The following graphic proves the opposite of what it intends. It is obviously white supremacist in excelsis for a white man to own black cats!

Friday Cat Blogging Three Days Late: A Puzzling Image

When I travelled in China, I saw not one pussy cat. But I had a Chinese student at CWRU who said that the Chinese eat anything with four legs except the kitchen table. And now I recall eating something in Wuhan that tasted like chicken but a tad gamier. Now North Korea is not China. But I understand there's a lot of hungry people in the Land of Little Rocket Man. That suggests that the following image is fake:

Are Cats Liquid?

Meow

Friday Cat Blogging! Com-Passio, Mit-Leid

Friday Cat Blogging! Trans-Species Cultural Appropriation

No day without cultural appropriation!

Friday Cat Blogging! Black Cats Matter

Friday Cat Blogging! Catfish Blues

Cultural appropriation and an egregious insult to cats!

Canned Heat, Catfish Blues, circa 1967. I forgot how good and distinctive Henry Vestine's guitar work is on this cut. From their first album, Canned Heat. I bought it when it first came out. Mint condition still. Not for sale! Heard 'em live at a club called the Kaelidoscope in Los Angeles and at the The Monterey Pop Festival 50 years ago this June.

Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941.

Friday Cat Blogging! Purr-honian Cat

Friday Cat Blogging a Day Late

And then there is Schroedinger's troll.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats

Loving Spoonful, Nashville Cats, 1966. They's playin' since they's babies.

Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle. For you fathers out there. Bond with your son when he's five. Wait till he's 50 and he won't give you the time of day.

Tokens, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, 1961 

Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962. Bent fabric can be said to have a kink  in it. Therefore,

Kinks, Phenomenal Cat

Tom Jones, What's New Pussycat? 1965. This reminds me to get my wife a pussyhat for her birthday to wear while I watch O'Reilly and the boys.

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog.' The queen of the one-hit wonders?

Mongo Santamaria, El Pussycat. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a pussyhat and a watermelon. While we have Mongo Santamaria cued up, here is his rather better-known Watermelon Man, muchachos.

Buck Owens, Tiger by the Tail. This one goes out to Kathy P.

Stray Cats, Stray Cat Strut

Ted Nugent, Cat Scratch Fever

Sue Thompson, Paper Tiger, 1965. This one's for Barack "Red Line" Obama.

Elton John, Honky Cat, 1972

Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941.  An influential song in the history of the blues.  

 

Sunday Cat Blogging!

Pussy riot, American style. An impotent response to Inaugural balls.

Cultural polluter Madonna has crowned herself poster girl of the pussy riot. Destructive leftists will justify as free speech her border-line incitement to violence.  But the right to free speech is not absolute. Observations on Free Speech, #9:

9. To say that the right to free expression is a natural right is not to say that it is absolute.  For the exercise of this right is subject to various reasonable and perhaps even morally obligatory restrictions, both in public and in private. There are limits on the exercise of the right in both spheres, but one has the right in both spheres.  To have an (exercisable) right is one thing, to exercise it another, and from the fact that one has the right it does not follow that one has the right to its exercise in every actual and possible circumstance.  If you say something I deem offensive in my house, on my blog, or while in my employ, then I can justifiably throw you out, or shut you up, or fire you and you cannot justify your bad behavior by invocation of the natural right to free speech.  And similarly in public:  the government is justified in preventing you from from shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, to use the hackneyed example.  You are not thereby deprived of the right; you are deprived of the right to exercise the right in certain circumstances.

Related articles

Observations on Free Speech

"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."

Is Nothing Sacred?

A Dog Named 'Muhammad'

Free Speech and Islamic Terror: Locating the Bone of Contention

Death Penalty, Abortion, and Certainty

The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg's Logical Point About Potentiality

Friday Cat Blogging! Schroedinger's Zombie Cat

Friday Cat Blogging! Black Cats Matter

Friday Cat Blogging a Day Late! Trump Grabs Pussy

I asked a reader whether the graphic to the left was too tasteless to post to my blog, adding,  "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'"  My reader responded with a fine statement:

Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny.  We should go to battle with a song in our heart.  Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”.  How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times?  Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair.  He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around.  After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake.  So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.

My reader is right.  Trump is all we've got.  He has a rotten character, but then so does Hillary.  This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers.  This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious stealth ideologue.

Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to policy.  

Another thing you must bear in mind is that a vote for Hillary is a vote for her entire ilk and entourage.  Do you want Huma Abedin in the White House?

Related articles

Hillary the Fabulist

On 'Disenfranchise' and Hillary's Will to Power

Friday Cat Blogging! Trump Cat

Friday Cat Blogging! Henri, the Existentialist Cat

Friday Cat Blogging! Is This Kitty Syllogizing?

Weiche dem Größeren, aber verachte nicht den Kleineren! Yield to the greater, but scorn not the lesser!  

When I first glanced at this graphic I read it as: While I concede the major (premise), I do not scorn the minor!  But that would be Maiori cedo, sed non contemno minorem.  Or at least I think that's right: I am no Latinist, though I sometimes play one in the blogosphere. Image credit.

 

Related articles

The Potentiality Argument Against Abortion and Feinberg's Logical Point About Potentiality

Changing the Engine Air Filter on a 2013 Jeep Wrangler

Friday the 13th Cat Blogging!

I Ain't Superstitious, leastways no more than Howlin' Wolf, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path.  All dressed up with nowhere to go.  Nine lives and dressed to the nines.  Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition.  Guitar solo starts at 3:03.  And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:

A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atomic scientist.

As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:

“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”

“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”

Related articles

Who was Max Planck?

Friday Cat Blogging! Politically Correct Cat

Trigger warning!  'Transphobia' up ahead!

The Cat that Came for Christmas

HT: Pam Lane-Garon.

Top of the season to all my readers.  I really do appreciate your 'patronage.'  I wish you all the best for the New Year.

Peace to all who want it, and good will to those who have it.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Friday Cat Blogging! No Cat Without a Catechism

My cat Max Black with his 'catechism.'

Friday Cat Blogging! Neoreactionary Cat

More such kitties here.

Friday Cat Blogging! The Patron Saint of Cats

You didn't know that cats have a patron saint, did you?  Here she is:

And here is her story.

Halloween Friday Cat Blogging!

I Ain't Superstitious, leastways no more than Howlin' Wolf, but two twin black tuxedo cats just crossed my path.  All dressed up with nowhere to go.  Nine lives and dressed to the nines.  Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition.  Guitar solo starts at 3:03.  And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:

A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist.

As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:

“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”

“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”

Friday Cat Blogging! Is Your Cat Racist?

Did you know that "Tom and Jerry" is now deemed racist?  Yikes!

Is there any limit to liberal-left foolishness?  Here are three more recent examples.

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News attacked for using the perfectly acceptable phrase 'witch doctor.' 

Australian opera company bans Carmen for smoking.

Swing sets banned in two school districts in Washington State.

 

 

Friday Cat Blogging: A Man and His Cat

Art Carney with cat from movie Harry and Tonto.

Tim Kreider touches upon some home truths in a recent NYT Opiniator piece, A Man and His Cat.

The Superiority of the Cat . . .

. . . proved once again, this time scientifically.

And to think that F. H. Bradley hunted them!

Friday Cat Blogging: The Existentialist

Video here.

Cat Blogging Friday! Tara the Cat Saves Boy from Dog Attack

Some say that cats are opportunistic and disloyal.  A sterling counterinstance.

My Cat Caissa

Full of sound, and furry.

She lived 20+ years.  Here she is, subdued, near the end.

 

Cat Blogging Friday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Friday the 13th Cat Blogging!

Friday the 13th of the 12th month of the 13th year of the third millennium.  I ain't superstitious, leastways no more than Willie Dixon, but two twin black  tuxedo cats just crossed my path.  All dressed up with nowhere to go.  Nine lives and dressed to the nines.  Stevie Ray Vaughan, Superstition.  Guitar solo starts at 3:03.  And of course you've heard the story about Niels Bohr and the horseshoe over the door:

A friend was visiting in the home of Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr, the famous atom scientist.

As they were talking, the friend kept glancing at a horseshoe hanging over the door. Finally, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, he demanded:

“Niels, it can’t possibly be that you, a brilliant scientist, believe that foolish horseshoe superstition! ? !”

“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”

Related articles

Cat Blogging Friday: Atheist Cat

Cat Blogging Friday: Alekhine and his Cat, Chess

A Per Impossibile Counterfactual

If cats had wings, they would spread them at dusk.   There is something feminine about cats, all cats, and something owlish as well. 

Christian Cat

Christian cat prays before reading. Take that, atheist cat!

Photo Credit:  Steven Nemes

Cat Blogging Friday: Jack and Tyke and "This Strange Scandalous Death"

Jack Kerouac was a cat man and a mama's boy. 

The following from Chapter 11 of  Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious  brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last time in his life north on Highway 1 toward Monterey and  San Francisco where he receives another 'sign':

The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in his expression -- When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead. "

    Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother -- I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting -- He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me -- And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, 'Attends pour mue kitigingoo" -- But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! -- But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:

                "Sunday 20 July 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is gone. Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no availe. He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till "day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket -- and at 7 A. M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of em flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest -- that's something I'll never forget -- I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow... I'm so sick not physically but heart sick... I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more -- and that I wont be seeing him come through his little "Shanty" or Walking through the green grass
                ... PS. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty -- as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real "God" -- Your old Mom XXXXXX."

So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore -- All the premonitions tying in together.

    Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything) -- He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin -- Of course he cant know since I didn't tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk -- The death of "little brother" Tyke indeed -- Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks -- or are you just gonna get drunk again" -- "I'm gonna get drunk yes"

[. . .]

It was the most happy three weeks of my life [the three weeks at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby canyon] dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke -- You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico" -- "Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " -- "Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything" (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler [Ferlinghetti] even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us) -- I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there three thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).

Related articles

Cat Blogging Friday: Atheist Cat

Big Sur, the Movie

The Canticle of Jack Kerouac, poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Cat Blogging Saturday: Bob the Cat

An international sensation

Cat Blogging Dylan Friday

How do these shots differ?  Find at least four differences.  Trivia Test:

Who is the lady in red?
Who is on the cover of Time Magazine?
What year is it?
What is the name of the album behind the lady in red and who is the artist?
Who is the guitarist doffing his hat?
The name 'Lotte' appears.  The first name of whom?
The second shot appears on the album cover of which Dylan album in which year?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cat Blogging Friday! Brotherly Love

Cat Blogging Friday: Skeptical Cat

And reminds us that doubt is the engine of inquiry.

Max Black in Meditation

Friday Cat Blogging a Day Late: The Cat Who Feared the One Book Man

Timmy the Cat sez: "I fear the man of one book."  I would add that it does not matter what that one book is, whether Aristotle's Metaphysics or Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats or the Bible.  Study everything.  Join nothing.  Image credit: Laura Gibbs via Seldom Seen Slim.

Related articles

Do housecats ever kill people?

Cat Blogging Friday: Atheist Cat

Cats On The Internet: A Psychological Explanation

My Cat Zeno

For Zeno of Elea
My cat's named
Solvitur ambulando
Is his game.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Halloween

Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You
Howlin' Wolf, I Ain't Superstitious
Bobby 'Boris' Pickett, The Monster Mash
Mannheim Steamroller version

Alexandru Andries, Dracula Blues.  This one goes out to Peter Lupu.
Lightnin' Hopkins, Black Cat Blues.  The one goes out to Max and Manny, the brothers Black.

 

Friday Cat Blogging: The Debt Ceiling Cat

Friday Cat Blogging

“The weakest link in a chain is the strongest because it can break it.”
- Stanislaw Lec