The tabby unleashed his inner big cat through the power of ultraprocessed cheese product snacks.
NEW YORK – Declaring he was “tired of waiting for [his] growth spurt” and insistent that he is in fact a tiger, Buddy the Cat took matters into his own paws on Saturday and turned himself orange.
“I already have the stripes, okay,” he explained. “I just don’t have the color. And obviously I have to get just a little bit bigger.”
Confident that his current routine of napping and pretending to lift weights would yield gains in the latter department, Buddy waited until his human was gone, then popped open a bag of Cheetos using a claw.
“My first dilemma was whether to use puffs or classic Cheetos,” Buddy said. “The puffs are easier to grind into dust, but the classic Cheetos have more of that orange cheesy goodness. Either way, I got to lick the fake cheese off my paws, which was delicious.”
The often-scheming tabby cat emptied the bag on the kitchen floor, then spent almost a half hour rolling around to grind the Cheetos into dust and embed the crucial orange color in his fur.
Now a tiger!
When he was done, he admired himself in the mirror, deciding he was a dead ringer for a tiger, then chose a spot to lay in wait for his human for a planned ambush.
“He’s gonna see a tiger coming at him and he’s gonna have to bribe me with so much food so I don’t eat him!” Buddy said gleefully. “It’s gonna be great.”
Is your cat a Six Dinner Sid spending an increasing amount of time with neighbors?
Your neighbors probably aren’t giving your cats flowers or serenading them with Marvin Gaye songs, and hopefully they’re not giving them chocolates, but they may be cat seducers anyway.
The term dates back at least a few years and it describes neighbors who lure pet cats into their homes, ply them with food, even buy them beds and collars, all in an attempt to gain effective “ownership” of the felines in question without having to worry about vet bills or declare to landlords that they have a cat.
Reports of cat seduction are rife with anecdotes about seducers ignoring polite requests from the owners not to feed their cats and even questioning whether the original caretaker is meeting their needs. Some distressed people report their cats are gone for days at a time and rarely return home as the seducers ignore healthy feeding limits and do everything they can to keep the felines in their homes.
Naturally, cat seduction is primarily a problem in the UK. While the culture around feline companions is changing across the Atlantic as people opt for measures like catios and harness training, the majority of British caretakers still believe their little buddies need outdoor time to remain stimulated and happy.
As readers of PITB know, Buddy is an indoor-only cat, and definitely not because he’s frightened of going outside. The problem is, he’s so meowscular, ripped and yuge that neighbors who might spot him crossing a yard at night or padding powerfully down the sidewalk are likely to freak out and call authorities to report a large cat, possibly a jaguar or tiger, is loose in the neighborhood.
So obviously I have to keep him inside not for his safety, but for the safety and sanity of our neighbors. We’re considerate like that here at Casa de Buddy.
A woman named Amy told The Guardian her cat was gone so often, she put a tracker on his collar to find out where he was spending his time. That’s when she realized he was in a neighbor’s house “constantly.” The neighbor, who says she can’t adopt a cat of her own because she travels frequently, was not cooperative when Amy asked her to stop feeding her pal.
“Cats are cats – they have no concept of human boundaries,” Amy told the newspaper. “She’s literally enticing him away.”
A sign warning admirers not to feed Buddy, who has been known to solicit snacks from the balcony by meowing to passersby.
Alison Ward, who also spoke to The Guardian, said her cat Scooby started coming home “reeking of marijuana” and well-fed “but quite deranged.”
Ward figured out Scooby was being enticed into the home of a group of roommates, all men in their 20s, who had renamed the little guy, purchased food bowls for him and even got him a collar.
“They said they thought he was their cat,” she said.
Online resources dedicated to cat seduction warn of telltale signs. If you’ve restricted your cat’s diet on a veterinarian’s instructions, for example, and the cat is not losing weight or even gaining it, that’s a clear sign the little one is a Six Dinner Sid, bouncing between home and at least one other neighbor’s house. Other signs include constantly “lost” collars, inexplicable grooming, disinterest in the cat’s usual food, and returning home with unfamiliar scents attached to them.
On a subreddit for UK users, several people shared anecdotes about cat seduction.
“My mum’s two cats started disappearing for a day or two here and there. She figured they were shacking up at a neighbours house occasionally which didn’t bother her too much,” a user wrote. “Then one day they both just completely disappeared. Months later she found out who it was that had been sheltering them during those missing periods, and they also happened to have moved away right around the time that the cats disappeared.”
Others worried about their affectionate and sociable cats, and there was a general consensus that social media, particularly posts and memes about the “cat distribution system,” can lead to people believing it’s okay “to take any friendly cat home with them because it ‘chose’ them.”
So ripped!
Of course there’s a simple solution: don’t allow your cat to roam outside unattended.
While some argued that people should keep their cats indoors to keep them safe from dangers like getting hit by cars, as well as to prevent them from killing birds, others rejected the idea. Some even blame US cat lovers for normalizing the practice of keeping cats indoors.
“Oh, you don’t agree with the American way of doing things, well you’re just wrong,” one user wrote. “They’ll rant about the dangers of coyotes etc to cats, while refusing to accept that’s not an issue here. Friends in the US were genuinely shocked when I explained that rabies was eliminated here a long time ago.”
We asked six cats what they think about a prominent story in this week’s headlines.
President Donald Trump escalated his trade war with the Canadians this week by renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America and threatening to increase the punishing tariffs he levied on our northern neighbors.
What do you think about the move to rename the lake?
“He owned the libs! The libs have been owned!” – Alex, 6, furniture tester
“That oughtta teach ’em not to mess with the US of A!” -Rufus, 17, retired competitive eater
“Canada? What’s that, like a new beverage or something?” – Bubbles, 8, office assistant
“Look upon our works, ye mighty, and tremble! Nothing beside remains of that frozen wasteland, round the decay, of the colossal tundra boundless and bare. The lone and level permafrost stretches far away.” – Screecher, 3, public meowing coach
“The lake just became 78% more awesome. We should dye the water red, white and blue, and release bald eagles over the lake during a patriotic Kid Rock concert for true patriots.” – Dwight Eisenmeower, 10, bodybuilder
“I’m glad we’re able to settle these disputes like responsible adults and talk out our problems.” – Cleo, 15 months, mouser understudy
Curry had enormous range, appeared in blockbusters and indies, and was familiar to audiences from at least three generations.
With all the media attention on the death of country singer Dolly Parton, the shocking floods in Nepal and President Trump’s ongoing spat with Canada, you might have missed another sad bit of news, the death of longtime character actor Tim Curry.
Curry was a presence in every movie he appeared in and was instantly recognizable by his cartoonish, made-for-Hollywood smile.
Here I’ve written about some of his roles. They may not be his subjective best work or even his most memorable, but they were my personal favorites:
Herkermer Homolka, Congo (1995): Curry, in a role that almost seems like a proto-Borat, is first introduced as a benefactor who wants to help fund Dr. Peter Elliot’s effort to bring his study subject, a gorilla named Amy, to the place where she was born in war-torn Congo. It isn’t long before Curry’s Homolka encounters liquidity problems and he’s exposed by Ernie Hudson’s Captain Monroe Kelly as a man obsessed with legends of the Lost City of Zinj. The jungle-swallowed city is said to contain vast riches in the form of diamonds and a mine unlike any other in the world, Curry’s Homolka reminds the other characters loudly and often. He believes it’s close to where Elliot is taking Amy.
Curry gets one of the funniest scenes in the movie when Delroy Lindo’s Congolese warlord, amid a tense negotiation over bribe money, gets angry, turns to Curry and shouts “Stop eating my sesame cake!” An animated GIF is worth a thousand words:
Curry’s character is bumbling, single-minded, oblivious to danger, and an absolute pleasure to watch in a film that was a major spectacle even if the script didn’t quite hold up its end against a great cast and outstanding special effects.
Darkness, Legend (1985): It’s surprising how few people seem to have heard of or seen Legend considering it stars Tom Cruise and Mia Sara, with Curry as the villain and Ridley Scott – still basking in the triumphs of Alien and Bladerunner – in the director’s chair.
Legend was an oddball by the standards of the time, with dream-like, almost hallucinogenic cinematography and an ambient score by German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream. There were very few stabs at live-action fantasy epics at the time because of the cost, difficulty and questions over whether audiences would respond, which wouldn’t be definitively answered until 2001 with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.
Here we get classic Curry as the villain, albeit in heavy makeup with prosthetic horns, fangs and head ridges worthy of a Klingon:
It’s still an epic if limited performance, and if you’ve never seen this one, you owe it to yourself to check out one of the weirdest films of the 80s.
Mr. Hector, Home Alone 2 (1992): For the sequel to the beloved McCaulay Culkin movie about a kid accidentally left at home during a family vacation, Curry’s character took on the duties of Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern, the adults who were repeatedly foiled and humiliated by Culkin’s character, Kevin, the first time around.
In the sequel, which also features a certain future president in a cameo, Curry plays the suspicious concierge at The Plaza Hotel in New York City, where Kevin is once again alone after being forgotten for a second time by his family. I don’t recall exactly how the script writers engineered a second bout of parental amnesia, but kids didn’t mind. I know because I was one of them, and I ate this crap up.
Here we have Curry at his most Curry-ness. I mean, just look at that smile:
Curry’s performance turned a rote repeat plot into a genuine adventure as he grows increasingly suspicious of Kevin. As the movie progresses he takes desperate measures to catch the slippery kid and prove he’s been living it up in the hotel by forging his father’s signature and using his credit cards. This was, after all, the early 90s when identity theft wasn’t even on most people’s radar. Credit card companies definitely wouldn’t call you to confirm if you just ordered a dozen pizzas to a hotel room in a city you don’t live in.
Curry did an impressive volume of voice work over the years, much more than most people realize, and while he provided voices to some of my favorite after-school cartoons as a kid, the most memorable was in Gargoyles, the ahead-of-its time Disney animated series about gargoyles turned into stone statues during the dark ages, then reanimated in modern-day New York City where they’re forced to learn quickly and adapt to new dangers.
He appeared as IT in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, a one-off character in the pilot to the cult science fiction series Lexx, had a role in the abominable Charlie’s Angels reboot of 2000, and is perhaps best known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I confess I have not seen. He also had memorable roles in The Hunt for Red October, Clue and Scary Movie 2.
Curry seemed to have no ego about his work, taking on embarrassing roles with relish and lending his voice to innumerable children’s TV classics. He was one of the last of the old breed of character actors, an inimitable talent, and he’ll be sorely missed.
Viral videos show figures dressed as the Dr. Seuss character terrorizing unsuspecting people in mostly quiet suburban settings.
There’s a new freak-out among the terminally online, mostly relegated to Gen Z and people who spend significant amounts of time on TikTok – they think a Dr. Seuss character made flesh is popping up in the suburbs of the UK and Ireland to stalk and scare the pants off people.
Videos featuring the iconic children’s story character have gone viral on the platform in the last week or two, each of them showing similar scenes: it’s night, usually in some safe-looking suburb, and a person wearing a full size Cat In The Hat costume pops out of the bushes or from behind a car to terrify unsuspecting passersby.
Others show the costumed creeps simply standing in driveways or in the middle of the street and silently observing people in their homes.
The alleged perps favor a more sinister look than the traditionally friendly-looking creation of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel in 1957. These cats in hats wear a disturbing grin or a sneer, and some videos depict the costumed weirdos leaping onto cars with feline athleticism or stalking the people they encounter.
While the footage looks real enough that it initially fooled UK media as well as kids, police in several jurisdictions have looked into the reports and concluded the videos are AI generated, likely with Chinese-made tools like Wan and Skywork.
OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies in the US, shut down its Sora AI video generator earlier this year amid widespread criticism and abuse of the tool.
While Sora had guardrails preventing users from generating certain kinds of content or violating intellectual property (you could not, for example, generate a video of a laughing Mickey Mouse gunning down a crowd of people with an Uzi), many of the Chinese-made video generation tools do not place restrictions on videos.
Some western companies have tried to compete in that space, including TripleTaco, which runs quite possibly the creepiest ads touting “AI that never says ‘no.'”
In any case, the panic over the Cat In The Hat mirrors a similar freak-out in India earlier this year when social media was flooded with realistic videos showing tigers and leopards mauling people having their morning tea outdoors or snatching them from moving trains.
The Cat In The Hat videos haven’t really caught on in the US, possibly because it stretches credulity to believe trigger-happy ‘Mericans wouldn’t just shoot weirdos stalking through our neighborhoods.
Regardless, it’s a good reminder to take everything with a grain of salt, especially anything you see on social media.
