Looking to recuperate after a long morning of eating and lounging in the suddenly warm weather, the little guy settled down for some shut-eye.
What’s better than a Sunday afternoon nap?
It’s been a glorious day here in Buddyland! The forecast had us breaking the 50-degree mark for the first time in at least four months, so imagine our surprise when the temperature topped out in the low 60s!
Bud decided to celebrate the balmy weather by stretching out and drifting off for a nice nap, and I couldn’t resist taking a few photos of my pal looking relaxed after a hard day of eating and lounging.
To be fair, I was out earlier and when I came home, Bud was right by the door to greet me as always, so he probably had a very demanding nap in the proximity of the front door while I was gone, then opted for a more relaxed nap after expending all that energy on his earlier nap. I had also topped off his dry food before his lunch, in case he got hungry while he was eating.
Last night I was in the kitchen looking for something, anything, to satisfy a sudden craving for sugar when Bud padded up and gave me one of the standard greetings in his Buddinese repertoire.
It’s just a “Hmmmmph!” in his high, Elmo-like voice, an acknowledgement that he sees me and he’s watching with interest, but without any of the typical demands or strong opinions attached.
“Hmmmmmph!” I replied.
“Hmmmmmph!” he said again, and we went back and forth until he stopped, tilted his head curiously, and gave me a look that said “Are you making fun of me again?”
I couldn’t help myself and busted out laughing, bending down to mess up the fur on top of his head as he rubbed up against my leg.
Of course I can’t actually prove that he understands our little exchange, but I know in my heart that he does. Sometimes he gets indignant when I laugh at him. Sometimes I get indignant when he gleefully smacks me or tries to chew on my glasses.
But mostly we laugh together, and he understands that human laughter is a happy sound, even when he’s deeply confused about what exactly I find so funny.
Will I ever have this kind of bond with another cat? I don’t know. It’s taken more than a decade to get here, a decade of being inseparable and understanding each other on a fundamental level.
But I’m not going to spoil it by spending too much time thinking about it. That would ruin the joke.
Buddy the Cat’s female admirers, both feline and human, say he is a sexy beast.
NEW YORK — For the third night in a row, Buddy the Cat rolled onto his back, belched thunderously, and settled down for a restful nap surrounded by the devoured remnants of treats and snacks gifted to him for Valentine’s Day.
“It’s wonderful to be so loved that hundreds of Valentines Day packages are deliv…ooh, bacon-flavored crunchies!” Buddy said, breaking his train of thought after discovering six or seven of the little treats under a pile of opened and discarded packages.
“Where was I?” the bloated feline asked, blinking. “Oh yeah. It’s such a great feeling to have so many admirers that … mmmm, sandwich … every day brings new …* burp *! … gifts of food to sample and … oh, I love turkey gravy!”
The chubby tabby has been the recipient of countless Valentine’s Day gifts this year, reflecting his considerable popularity among females, both feline and human. He’s been eating his way through them with enthusiasm since the packages began arriving.
Witnesses report the well-fed feline was unable to complete a sentence without getting distracted and stopping to shovel food into his mouth mid-sentence.
“He only stops eating when he falls asleep,” one witness told PITB. “At this rate, his human will have to roll him around like a boulder because, frankly, I’m not sure anyone makes a cat carrier with material strong enough to lift him without ripping apart.”
As of press time, Buddy had fallen asleep with a sloppy hand-written note taped to his forehead, asking visitors to leave Valentine’s Day gifts in one of the 27 provided baskets.
A reboot of the iconic scifi-horror film upends the balance of power, placing the feline at the very top where he should be.
The long-anticipated Alien reboot starring Buddy the Cat hit theaters this weekend with audiences flocking to see the modernized classic after effusive praise from critics.
Featuring the new tag line “In space no one can hear you scream — unless you’ve got Buddy on your side,” the reboot reimagines the science fiction-horror classic as a cautionary tale about messing with cats.
“While the original built tension over almost two hours and inspired an overwhelming feeling of dread in viewers, the new Alien clocks in at just 28 minutes and ends right after the iconic chestburster scene,” critic Ferdinand Lyle wrote. “Instead of screeching into the shadows of the ship to commence its turbocharged metabolic processes, only to emerge later as a fully formed creature who terrorizes the crew, this alien is immediately caught by Buddy, who delivers a swift kill bite and deposits it in front of the humans. They reward him with a chorus of ‘Good boy!’ and rub his head while plying him with snacks, and the credits roll. Now that’s efficient storytelling!”
The Alien 👽 was no match for Buddy, who woke from a nap to dispatch the creature with brutal efficiency.
The new version is “the ultimate FAFO flick,” raved the AP’s Misty Lemire.
“The central message here is ‘Don’t tangle with Buddy.’ The apex predator of the cosmos is no match for the apex predator of Earth.”
Other critics were enamored with a post-credits dance scene featuring Buddy, the crew of the Nostromo and dozens of face-huggers who fly through the air, forcing the cast to bust impressive dance moves to avoid the dangerous creatures. At one point Buddy launches into a breakdance routine. The actress who plays Ripley wags a finger at a xenomorph and declares “You just got served!”
“It’s clever, light and wildly entertaining,” one critic wrote. “Buddy’s got some magnificent dance moves!”
Others praised Buddy for his impressive physique. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Buddy said he’d been training non-stop for eight months for the role, eating a high-protein diet and spending five hours a day napping in the gym to accentuate his meowsculature.
“The effort paid off big time,” a review from Calico Critics noted. “Buddy looks more ripped and impressive than he ever has, and he was already competing against a high bar he set during his previous films.”
In the post-credits dance scene, Buddy and the Nostromo crew perform a synchronized routine while dodging facehuggers.
However, not everyone was impressed. Reached this weekend at his New Zealand bunker, where he’s fled “until America isn’t annoying anymore,” director James Cameron called the Alien reboot “derivative, low-calorie cinema junk.”
“Remember when I had characters saying ‘Hasta la vista’ and ‘Adios, muchachos’? That was really cool. I was one bad hombre,” Cameron said. “Audiences might think this is a good film, but that’s because they haven’t seen the wonders of Avatar XVII yet. Just wait, it’s gonna be awesome. And there are no cats.”
In the seedy underbelly of Paw City, where niplords run kitty crack empires and feral gangs fight eternal turf wars, one unshakable detective brings the bad cats to justice.
The call came in after midnight.
Shots fired near Burmese Boulevard, with witnesses reporting one party fleeing the scene in a car while another took off on foot.
Normally I’d tend to other biz and let one of the kids in the detective bureau have their shot, but the commissioner’s on my ass and the mayor is worried about what the headlines will do to the tourism economy.
Leave it to the leaders of a dump like Paw City to care more about the scratch in their pockets than the felines they’re supposed to protect.
But I’m a grizzled detective. I know where the real power naps, and it ain’t city hall.
It’s Scratcher Tower, home of the international consortium that runs Big Yums, controlling the flow of every last morsel of kibble into this forsaken city. The Fat Cats on the top floor, they call the shots, control the mayor and have their paws in every pie. If it’s biz, the Fat Cats get their cut.
The feds? They talked a big game last year when they popped Angelo Felinzino and nailed him on a racketeering charge that earned him 15 to 20 in the slammer. But the Fat Cats are a hydra, and even though Felinzino was rumored to be the consortium’s top earner, the fellas in Scratcher Tower’s penthouse didn’t miss a beat.
It was pouring by the time I pulled up near the corner of Tortoiseshell Street and Burmese Boulevard. I padded out of the warm comfort of my ride, the Budmobile, and told it to watch my back. The Budmobile’s AI chimed in acknowledgement and miniature silos opened on each rear quarter panel, ejecting a pair of drones. One drone circled above me in a defensive posture while the other zoomed ahead, scouting my path.
I tasted wet rain and something else. My nose wrinkled, pulling me toward a funky scent. I crouched, sniffing the sidewalk, and that’s when I saw them: crumbs made soggy by the downpour, their addictive chemicals turning a shade of toxic lime as they interacted with the acid rain.
Tempheads are dangerous. They’ll do anything to get their fix, even if it means stealing from littermates or breaking into homes to raid the treat cupboards.
No Temphead was going to catch me off guard, I thought as I placed a paw on my holster and felt the reassuring grip of Thunderclaw. The old revolver was reliable and had legitimate stopping power. The sight of it alone was often enough to get bad guys to back down.
Lightning cracked the sky as I followed the crumbs down Burmese Boulevard, under the old wrought iron bridge and into a back alley.
I paused and sniffed. The Temphead had lingered here at the door to a shady-looking ripperdoc clinic, probably trying to get them to buzz him in. The ripperdoc was smart, didn’t want anyone bringing heat down on his clinic, so he turned the Temphead away.
My keen sense of smell and my detective’s intuition told me the Temphead quickly moved on, and sure enough, there were more crumbs ahead, where the alley made a sharp right turn toward a cross street.
I padded ahead, nose leading the way, and looked up.
The Bradbury Building.
Once a symbol of commerce in the city’s gilded age, now a dilapidated microcosm of Paw City, its former glory obscured beneath decades of grime and decay.
Patting Thunderclaw again for reassurance, I pushed against the heavy bronze doors and into the gloom inside.
My ears prickled in the funereal silence, and my whiskers felt movement in the air currents. There!
A shadowy figure was heading for one of the exits.
Justice is my job, and what kind of cat would I be if I didn’t have the swiftness of a cheetah and the bravery of a tiger?
I leaped the railing, landing gracefully on my feet as I always do, and followed the shadow through the door. The rain was coming down hard, battering my trenchcoat and cap.
Where’d that cat go?
He was clever, I’ll give him that. Lightning lit the alley, and he used the crackle of thunder to mask the sound of his feet splashing through the puddles before he leaped.
I never even saw it coming. It’s been a long time since anyone’s gotten the jump on me. Maybe I was too confident. The attacker barreled into me, knocking me off my feet, and was already propelling himself up a nearby fire escape as I landed in a puddle of rain water.
Thunderclaw was torn from my grip with the impact and went skidding across the concrete.
The Budmobile’s follow drone chose that moment to reappear, making a lazy loop around the alley before stopping to hover in front of me, its ventral nozzles firing whispers of propellant to keep it stabilized.
“Oh dear,” the drone said, “you seem to have fallen, sir. Shall I bring the car around?”
“This,” I told myself, “is undignified.”
The drone chimed.
“Is that a yes, sir?”
I resisted the urge to paw smack the useless machine.
“Yes! Call the Budmobile to the end of the alley.”
I might have been Paw City’s greatest detective, but I wasn’t going to catch criminals with my clothes and fur all wet, smelling like a dirty mutt.
I retrieved Thunderclaw from the ground, slipping the trusty revolver back into its holster.
That’s when I saw it — a scrap of torn clothing on the end of the fire escape, black as night. Black like the absence of light.
I ran a paw pad over the material, feeling its familiar weave and texture. There was only one shop in this section of Paw City that sold zero albedo clothing. Could the Shadow Void be back to stalk the seedy underbelly of Paw City once again? I put him in the slammer once. Now I may have to do it again.
I climbed back into the Budmobile, grateful for the blast of heat from its dash. It was time to pay Tommy the Tailor a visit…
Check back for the next episode of Detective Buddy: Feline Noir!
Pain In The Bud 