Grudge the Cat makes Star Trek history in Discovery’s latest episode.
Grudge the Cat is having a season of firsts on Star Trek: Discovery.
The floofy Maine Coon is the beloved companion of Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), a mercenary and cargo-runner who turns out to be a galactic do-gooder, stealing animals from the illegal interstellar wildlife trade and bringing them to the safety of sanctuary.
Considering the illegal wildlife trade is thriving and directly contributing to the extinction of many species here on Earth, it’s not a stretch at all to imagine people in the future would pay a hefty premium on ultra-exotic pets from alien worlds. The Booker/Grudge storylines may even prompt more people to pay attention to what’s happening here on our own world.
Ensign Tilly tells Grudge she’s not a cat person, but Grudge conquers all.
In Thursdays episode (mild spoilers ahead), the crew of the Discovery receive a hail from outside the cloaked and secret Federation headquarters of the 32nd century. Anyone with the top-secret location of the base — and the ability to hail ships within it — must be VIP or have urgent business, so the acting captain orders the hail on screen, and the entire bridge crew braces as the image resolves into…
…floofy Grudge sticking her face into the camera.
The cast does an excellent job of looking befuddled and amused at a cat contacting the Discovery on a priority channel when they were likely expecting Orions or Andorians or any number of antagonists.
Grudge looking regal on the bridge of Booker’s ship.
And so, for the first time in Star Trek history, a cat has hailed another starship.
It turns out Booker, anticipating trouble on a dangerous mission, set his ship to auto-return to Discovery’s Commander Michael Burnham if he didn’t make it back in time. That sets up the episode’s main plot in which Burnham goes to rescue Book.
The best line of the night goes to Michelle Yeoh’s Commander Phillipa Georgiou: “That cat can’t get lost. It has its own gravity field!”
That’s floof, not fat, Georgiou!
Grudge is referred to as a female cat in the show, but she’s played by Leeu, a two-year-old, 18-pound male Maine Coon.
Cats were recognized for their efforts to transform laziness into an art form.
NEW YORK — Domestic cats swept the Laziest Species category at the 212th Annual Animal Awards on Friday night.
Accepting the award on behalf of all cats, Chonkmatic the Magnificent waddled on stage, took a short nap, then was helped up to the podium, where he yawned and addressed the audience.
“Thank you!” Chonkmatic said, allowing others to hoist the award for him. “We didn’t work hard at all to earn this recognition, and that makes it even more satisfying.”
Chonkmatic went on to list several other cats who made the award possible by demonstrating remarkable laziness, before handing off the list to his assistant so he could be carried off stage for a snack and another nap.
Jaguars, the apex predators of South America, were recognized in the wild cat category for the remarkable achievement of ruling more than two million square miles of rainforest while napping approximately 70 percent of the time.
Prolific nappers: Panthera Onca, the jaguar.
The big cats of the Amazon prerecorded an acceptance speech because the award show was scheduled to interfere with their napping schedule.
“We are honored to receive this award,” Ahau-K’in, the King of Jaguars, said in the message. “If you could just deliver it to us, that’d be great. In fact, you can leave it at the Temple of Palenque, but bring it up the stairs, mind. We don’t want to have to drag that thing up here.”
Buddy the Cat sleeping on Big Buddy the Human.
Sharing in the recognition was Buddy the Cat, who “showed us all that a new style of napping is possible by training our humans never to move if we’re sleeping on top of them.”
“The New York cat also developed new techniques for prompting humans to deliver snacks directly to their feline overlords,” the judges wrote. “After all, why should we come running at the sound of a crinkly bag being opened? The snacks should be placed before us, requiring as little effort as possible to eat them and leaving more time for yawning, stretching and lazing.”
BRING THE SNACKS TO ME.Chonkmatic the Cat has been chosen to negotiate on behalf of all living beings on Earth. Credit: SPCA of Wake County
The former 41-pound cat has dropped almost half his weight.
Remember Barsik, the cat who was so extra-chonk he had to be wheeled around in a baby carriage because he couldn’t fit in a cat carrier?
The former “Fattest cat in New York” has melted the pounds off in the year since he was surrendered to NYC’s Anjellicle Cats rescue and adopted by 35-year-old Meredith Adams.
When he was surrendered, Barisk tipped the scales at 41 pounds — dangerously close to the Guinness record 46 pounds for a house cat. He was so big, the sight of him getting wheeled into the shelter prompted an amused visitor to snap a smartphone pic and quip: “Did he eat another cat?”
Slow news day: Barsik made the cover of the Post’s late edition back in April of 2019.
Barsik’s having the last laugh, as he’s down to 22 pounds and enjoying life in his new home.
He’s well on his way to his ideal weight of 16 pounds according to Adams, who says she’s been controlling Barsik’s dry food intake while feeding him wet food.
“He does pretty much everything regular cats do — jumping around, at night he gets the zoomies,” Adams told the New York Post. “He is a regular cat now.”
The Post notes Guinness stopped taking new entries for heaviest cat out of concern that misguided owners would over feed their chonksters to pursue the crown. Himmy, the Australian kitty who set the record, died at just 10 years old from complications associated with his obesity.
Barsik has settled into his new life, diet and all.
“He has a big personality. He is very demanding, he is very vocal, but he is also really friendly,” Adams said. “When I come home from work and get into the building, I hear his meowing all the way down the hall. He wants his food, but he also wants to say ‘hi’ to me.”
Barsik shortly after he was surrendered in 2019 and was living in a foster home.Adams and the newly-slim Barsik.
A street cat’s glare wins him thousands of admirers.
A scowling street cat dubbed Giggles has found a new home thanks to his mean mug.
The tabby cat with an unforgettable glower was found roaming in Streetsboro, Ohio — a small city about 20 miles northeast of Akron — and had ticks as well as a wound from a cat bite, according to staff at Riggi Rescue.
After a good Samaritan brought the little guy in, the rescue fixed him up, then snapped a few shots which quickly went viral.
“Private, you’d better unf– this situation right now before I…you know what? Get down and give me 50 pushups. NOW!”
Despite Giggles’ fixed expression, the golden tiger-striped tabby is friendly and affectionate, shelter staff say.
“He’s not mad, he’s actually quite happy, sweet and charming,” Giggles’ rescuers wrote on Instagram. “If he’s angry about anything, it’s because you aren’t petting him.”
As expected, adoption offers poured in, and Giggles already has a home lined up, presumably to someone who’s going to make a fortune on Instagram from his mug.
“Unhand me, human, or face my eternal wrath!”
Then Keep Your Cat Inside!
Iris the cat tips the scales at 7.5kg, which equals 16.5 pounds in the Proper American Way of Recording Weights and Measures™.
The fluffster has become so rotund that she can no longer fit through her cat flap. But her humans, who live a few miles south of Exeter in the UK, think the problem is their neighbors, so they’re “pleading” with people in their neighborhood “not to feed the overweight feline,” the Daily Mail reported.
“She’s getting bigger and bigger,” Sheena Wilson, Iris’ human, told the newspaper. “We cannot keep her indoors. Her diet, as you can see, is not going very well.”
Photographic evidence confirms the Russian blue does indeed love the snacks:
Iris can only manage to get her head through the cat flap now, “so she can only use it to play peek a boo and can’t fit the rest of her in it,” Wilson said.
But Wilson also told the newspaper Iris is a “diva” who demands attention, so we’re left to draw the obvious conclusion: Wilson and/or other humans responsible for Iris are letting her out every day, since she can’t get out on her own.
Iris “pretends to be neglected” and fools neighbors into thinking she has “an empty tummy,” Wilson said.
As much as Wilson may want to outsource supervision of her cat’s diet, it’s hard to believe anyone thinks Iris is underfed.
We sympathize, and we also know there’s a simple solution: Keep the cat inside. You can’t control your snack-dispensing neighbors, but you can cut off your cat’s access to them — and keep her safe from traffic and all the other dangers of the outdoors.
MeowTalk uses machine learning and algorithmic AI to learn cat vocalizations and what they mean.
It’s gonna be the future soon, and I can’t wait!
It was only a matter of time before someone leveraged machine learning and algorithmic AI to parse cat vocalizations, and thanks to Javier Sanchez, translating your cat’s meows — and trills, huffs and chirps — is now a reality.
Sanchez was a member of Amazon’s machine learning team contributing to the development of Alexa, the now-ubiquitous virtual assistant operated by voice commands.
“I got to see how the sausage was made, how they train their models and work with all the data science platforms,” Sanchez said. “So I was fresh off the heels of that and I was thinking, ‘Well, we could do something similar with cats and it could be an app.’”
Sanchez with his cat.
Sanchez’s new employers at the tech firm Akvelon saw promise in the idea and gave him the green light.
The resulting app, MeowTalk, is now available on iOS and Android.
There are two layers to the concept: The first one involves nine or 10 “intents” common to all or most cats. They include vocalizations for “Feed me,” “Hey human!”, “Let me out,” and “Pay attention to me,” among others.
Sanchez didn’t guess or intuit the meanings — they’re based on research by a team at the University of Milan, who built a data set of cat vocalizations by attaching tiny microphones to cats and recording everything the fluffsters say. Each feline utterance was analyzed and catalogued by frequency, rhythmic quality and context, among other traits.
Two cats who participated in the University of Milan study: Note the small black microphones on their collars.
The second layer is where it starts to get really interesting: By using MeowTalk like Shazam, the app will start recording your cat’s particular trills, chirps and meows and — with your help — eventually piece together what they mean.
As with dictation software and machine learning in general, the more data the app gets, the better its translations become.
This is important because, while cats share many sounds, each cat develops its own unique vocalizations:
With MeowTalk, you can create a profile for your cat and start using its auto-recognition to translate your cat’s meows and start mapping its language. While some translations are built-in and inherent to the app, translations specific to your cat require you to train the app to recognize your cat’s specific vocabulary and intentions. Translations you deem to be incorrect can be corrected via the app. MeowTalk is not static; instead it learns and evolves with each translation that you confirm, adding to its corpus, just as we would add new words into our own memory banks or language processing programs.
At the same time thousands of other cat owners are also using the app, feeding the algorithm more data, which the app uses to improve itself. Development is ongoing, with future changes reflective of user (and cat) feedback.
“A tool like this can help certain people bond even more with their cats, especially if they can’t be in contact with other people on a regular basis,” Sanchez said. “So this could be a real game changer for a key demographic that have cats.”
MeowTalk’s user interface.
Applying what they’re learning via the app, Sanchez and his team are also working toward their next goal: Giving your cat a human voice. They’re developing a small device that clips on a cat’s collar and translates meows into human speech in real time.
That tech has the potential to give me nightmares. Imagine Buddy having a human voice and saying “Gimme snacks now, servant!” “Open the door, butler!” “You’re 23 seconds late with dinner!”
Maybe I’ll pass on the collar device. In the meantime I plan to download the iOS version of MeowTalk and give it a spin. I’ll report back in a week or two after giving it some time to adjust to the Budster. If any of our readers give it a shot, we’d like to hear your impressions as well.
Did you know? The Buddinese language includes 22 separate words for “jerk” and 37 different ways of demanding food.
Pain In The Bud 