Caturday felids: videos and haikus (and maybe a contest)

August 16, 2014 • 6:16 am

Today we get both visual and literary art. First, reader Gravelinspector was nice enough to send not one, but four good cat videos. The indented captions are his.

Fat cat in a pot. Maru syndrome, one step further.

Fat cat escapes from the pot.

One wonders how this cat developed this habit?

A cat burrows in snow:

Kitten, part-filled bath. Exactly what you’d predict.


And the site Jumbo Joke has a series of cat haikus. Here are two. They’re okay, but not outstanding; feel free to write your own below. If there’s a really good one, it may win a free, autographed copy of WEIT with a drawn-in cat. (Professor Ceiling Cat will be the judge; and the prize may not be awarded. If they don’t meet the syllable requirements, they automatically lose.)

My brain: walnut-sized.
Yours: largest among primates.
Yet, who leaves for work?


Your mouth is moving;
Up and down, emitting noise.
I’ve lost interest.

If you do well, you may get something like this (my autographed book for Aaron, who won the World Cup contest by guessing the final teams and score. Since he was a Germany fan, he demanded a cat playing soccer while wearing the German national jersey:


h/t: Gravelinspector, Steve

30 thoughts on “Caturday felids: videos and haikus (and maybe a contest)

  1. If cats did not exist, the internet would be a sad, empty husk.

    I once had a cat who loved water. He would sit in the bathroom sink with the faucet running and chill out while the water level rose around him.

  2. Something similar, say about baseball or bluegrass music or setting a spell in the steam room or frying in cast iron or reading, this is pretty much all, when dead, I want pronounced over my ash or scratched into my marker / headstone.

    String enthusiast
    wrote Human in my obit.
    I, Moxie, was loved.


  3. As a long time haiku writer and contributor to haiku journals I’m forced to point out that no serious English language haiku writer today observes the 17 syllable “rule.”

    The English and Japanese written languages are far too different to transfer the rules for one to the other. Japanese haiku contain 17 characters (kanji) not syllables, and the poems are written, starting from the bottom, in a straight vertical line.

    What makes a haiku a haiku is the *feeling* generated by the poem, which elicits its image using a paucity of words that suggest, not state, the point of the poem. The point often being a feeling about the natural world.

    Those who want to learn more about serious haiku writing can find much at Jane Reichold’s site:
    Those who want to see how far haiku form can be stretched should see this

    Example: a slight adaptation of Allen Ginsburg’s rendering of Basho’s most famous haiku.

    Old pond
    Cat jumps in

    1. I don’t doubt your expertise, but it seems clear to me that Jerry is not asking for instances of what you call “serious haiku”. What he’s asking for are instances of that well-known genre of light-hearted English-language poetry that does obey the 17-syllable rule and that (rightly or wrongly) is called “haiku” by its practitioners.

    2. First, Japanese haiku (and by this, for certainty, I mean haiku written in Japanese in traditional form) do not contain 17 kanji, they contain an arbitrary number of kanji and kana with a total syllable count of 17 (5-7-5). Look at the original of Basho’s “old pond” if you doubt that: the first line has 2 kanji and 1 kana; the second, 2 and 3; the third, 2 and 1.
      Second, Japanese is traditionally written vertically, but top to bottom (and right to left, if more than one line is used). But there is no rule that a haiku should be written on one line – I have a set of haiku cards in front of me and all are in 3-line form.
      What constitutes an acceptable English-language “haiku” may be open to debate, but the form of the Japanese haiku is well-defined.

      1. To clarify, when I say “syllable”, I mean the Japanese “on” – a single kana or kana digraph. And the haiku cards I’m referring to are Japanese.

  4. Summer vacation.
    Hotels don’t like animals.
    Kitty boarding school.


    Feathery playmate.
    Stalk and hide and run and pounce!
    Why’d it stop flying?

  5. I could write a lot of these.

    The Box is Open
    The cat must jump into it
    Maru understands

    I want outside now
    Door opens, but I still sit
    Foot comes from behind

    Doz the red dot know
    Dat I iz near? It comes cloze
    Pounce! Where iz it now?

  6. Dear Jerry,
    A cat named Miss Kitty once owned me. It was always a pleasure to be at her beck and call. Queen Hili reminds me so much her. You posted about how Hili sits outside on the sill and won’t come inside until a human comes to get her. Miss Kitty did the same thing. Her eyes expressed the following:

    Do NOT make me wait!
    When will you take me inside?
    This hard, cold sill hurts.

    An aside: I’m a first time commenter. But I have followed your b**g for a long time. I enjoy visiting with you, other contributers and all of the commenters. Your articles and comments enrich my life.
    Keep up the enlightenment!

  7. Chasing after d-gs
    Why evolution is true
    I now understand.

    This mouse is tasty.
    Why don’t they feed me this meat,
    since they own mousetraps?

  8. New and improved book
    Has arrived with great pictures,
    Have gifted old one.

    Jerry, thanks for the picture and message!

  9. This haiku is in praise of our 17 y.o. black female cat who still hunts for mice and voles, even with her bowls overflowing. I’ve been feeding three young strays by the back door, and they come religiously for the noms. More than once, our old gal would go catch something like a mole or field mouse in the garden and parade it on the patio, in front of their noses. She never eats what she catches.

    “How undignified,
    Young Meows beg for kibble.
    Hungry? See mice run!”

  10. In honor of our cat (a gray tabby shelter cat):

    sounds so much better than
    “domestic shorthair”

  11. The cat and its prey
    Chasing, pouncing and pawing
    The red dot escapes

    Not cats, but here’s a haiku series on evolution I wrote on Darwin Day a few years back. My friend and I often exchanged haikus
    and following my status wishing everyone a happy Darwin Day, my friend wrote:

    Forget Darwin Day:
    Evolution’s disproved by
    Spaghetti Monster!

    I replied:

    And yet it does move
    Galileo did not say
    But it makes my point

    Three observations
    And the two deductions
    Darwin’s Magnum Opus

    For he observed that
    Species over reproduce
    Observation one

    Despite this he saw
    Population stays stable
    Observation two

    Therefore there is a
    Survival competition
    His first deduction

    Last observation
    Individuals unique
    Each is different

    Those differences
    They influence survival
    The best are passed on

    Evidence profound
    ATP universal
    DNA in all

    Fossils abundant
    Tiktaalik “transitional”
    Tetrapod almost

    And so you can see
    Noodly appendage absent
    Heresy, I know

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