The cute calico joined an Algerian imam for evening prayers, climbing up to his shoulder as he led his mosque in worship.
A cat in Algeria reminded an imam that members of her species get scritches when they want them — even in the middle of prayers during Islam’s most sacred month.
Cats are allowed to come and go as they please in mosques, and Muslims view cats favorably, in part because the Prophet Mohammad was fond of them. There’s even a famous story about Mohammad cutting his sleeve off instead of disturbing one of his favorite cats, who was sleeping comfortably on the sleeve when the prophet was getting up for prayer time.
On Wednesday, Imam Sheikh Walid Mehsas was leading tarawih — an evening prayer — when a calico rubbed up against his legs, meowed and then climbed up to his shoulder. She continued rubbing affectionately against him as he continued the prayer:
The prayers were broadcast on a live stream and the moment quickly went viral, with many praising the imam for his patience and love for the cat even as he led an important prayer. (Some comments on the live stream indicated the cat may belong to the imam, or the other way around, although that has not been confirmed.)
After leaning into the microphone as if she was going to join in the evening prayer, kitty thought better of it and hopped down off the imam’s shoulder, opting instead to claim a few more humans as her servants by rubbing up against their legs.
Whether by demanding pets during religious ceremonies, invading the diamond and pitch during baseball and soccer matches, or casually strolling on stage during concerts, cats have shown little regard for human activities and, true to their reputations, have made it clear that cat time takes priority over human time.
Despite that, or perhaps in part because of it, we still love the little stinkers. Perhaps that explains why I can never be mad at Bud, even when he plops himself in front of the screen during crucial moments in video games or tugs down at a book I’m reading, to demand I give him his scritches. I am his humble servant.
The protesting felines, tired of being cast as villains, demanded “cuddlier representation” in movies and TV.
LOS ANGELES — Marching in a broad circle outside the Universal Studios headquarters on Monday, a group of about 200 cats demanded “more cuddly representation” in television and film.
The felid contingent included house cats, pumas, bobcats, tigers, lions, leopards and even a few jaguars, each holding signs with messages like “Cats are more than claws!” and “Stop The Stereotyping!”
“What do we want?” a house cat shouted into a megaphone.
“Cuddlier representation!” the crowd of cats shouted.
“When do we want it!”
“After our nap!” they replied in unison.
Monday’s protest was prompted by Universal Studios’ 2022 thriller, Beast, but protest organizer Buddy the Cat said the felid group was protesting “decades of tropes and injustices committed against cats by Hollywood and TV.” Examples include the undead cat in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, the rampaging lion in Dutch horror-comedy film Prey (called Uncaged in the US), the many murderous felids in the CBS series Zoo, and Jackson Galaxy’s My Cat From Hell.
“We’re tired of always being cast as villains while dogs are the heroes. Take a cat like me, for instance,” Buddy told a reporter. “It’s easy to mistake me, with my razor sharp claws and ripped physique, for a threat to humans. But really I’m just a cuddly little guy who likes chin scratches.”
Linus, a 14-year-old Bengal tiger who starred as Richard Parker in the 2012 hit Life of Pi, said he was a young actor who didn’t know better when he agreed to portray the threatening antagonist.
“Now that I’m older and I have all this Frosted Flakes money coming in, I can be picky about the roles I accept and only choose movies I think will be Grrreat!” he told an interviewer. “But what about the next young tiger, or the jaguar fresh off the boat from the Amazon, who doesn’t have the power to tell the director a certain scene is offensive?”
Linus also took issue with the script, in which the writers have him refusing to share fish with Pi.
“Did you see the boat? It was filled with fish! What am I, some sort of glutton who’s gonna eat 200 pounds of fish while the human starves?” Linus asked, bewildered. “I mean, according to Hollywood we’re angry, dangerous, murderous criminals and we stuff our faces all the time. No wonder people are scared of us!”
Prey, also known as Uncaged, depicts an angry lion rampaging through Amsterdam and eating pretty much everyone.
Beast stars British actor Idris Elba and tells the story of a widowed medical doctor who takes his two daughters to South Africa, where they stay with a family friend and embark on a tour of the native wildlife.
Unbeknownst to them, an adult male lion is on a rampage after a team of poachers entered the reserve the previous night and slaughtered his entire pride. While Elba’s character, his two daughters and his friend (Sharlto Copley) explore the reserve, they discover the mutilated remains of an entire village’s population and eventually come face to face with the murderous lion.
“What’s all this barney, then?” Elba said when asked about the felid protest. “Well that’s unfortunate, innit, mate? I played a tiger in The Jungle Book, a proper tiger. I love cats.”
The actor, who rocketed to fame off the strength of his portrayals of Stringer Bell in American police drama The Wire, the title character in British detective thriller Luther, as well as major roles in franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Star Trek reboot movies and science fiction action-adventure Pacific Rim, said he’s taken the cat’s criticism to heart.
“Buddy’s a good bloke,” says Elba, pictured with his feline friend.
“Me and me mate Buddy, we like to grab a pint on the regular, d’ya know what I mean?” Elba said. “This tosh with the movies, it’s gotta stop. Me mate Buddy is a good bloke, innit? So if he says Hollywood has to have more positive portrayal of cats, then that’s what we’ll do.”
In addition to their negative portrayal in films, which felids likened to the offensive portrayal of Italian-Americans as mafia figures, many cats cried foul at the idea that one of their kind would harm the beloved South African actor Sharlto Copley.
“That’s a very offensive portrayal,” said Chonkmatic the Magnificent, King of All Cats. “Sharlto Copley is the guy who made District 9, about aliens who eat cat food. Everyone knows cats love District 9. We wouldn’t lay a claw on Sharlto!”
Things could have gone south for cats during the early days of the COVID-19 virus.
Someone bring this cat inside, give him a magnificent meal and make him king of the house.
After a man fell 30 feet down a “seasonal waterfall” into a creek drainage in Pleasant Valley, Calif., about 50 miles east of Sacramento, an insistently meowing outdoor cat led the man’s wife and neighbor “right to where the man fell,” per CBS News.
The incident happened a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Feb. 21, according to the El Dorado County Fire Protection District, whose EMTs rescued the man. Authorities haven’t provided updates on his status, but as he was airlifted to a hospital, his injuries were likely serious.
The heroic feline is described as the family’s “outdoor cat.” He should be amply rewarded with a real home.
A photo from the scene showing the airlift helicopter in the background. Credit: El Dorado Fire Protection District
Oh hell no!
A former UK health minister said the government mulled a plan to “exterminate all pet cats” early in the Coronavirus pandemic when the virus was new and poorly understood, the Guardian reported.
“What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” James Bethel told the UK’s Channel 4 news. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”
Yeah, I can imagine a few million incredulous and angry people drawing their blinds, hiding their cats and figuring out ways to buy cat food and litter on the black market to avoid tipping off the authorities in the heavily CCTV-wired nation. If authorities tried to push the issue, things would have gotten ugly.
Here in the US we’d have another run on guns and Bud would run screaming underneath my bed, probably while demanding I slide his turkey and water bowl to him so he could lay low from “the feds.” Hey, he runs a catnip cartel. He’s used to it!
All jokes aside, I think we’ve forgotten that Chinese authorities were beating pets dead in the street and going house-to-house to put them down when the virus raged through the population there for the first time in late 2019. Animal welfare groups said thousands of pets were abandoned by their caretakers and either left to starve in empty homes or left to fend for themselves.
When the virus spread, ripping through countries like Italy, France, Belgium, Russia and taking hold in New York before spreading to the rest of the US, virologists still weren’t entirely certain whether cats — who are susceptible to an unrelated form of Coronavirus — could pass the infection to people. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that if the UK or other countries decided felines must be culled, US authorities may have followed.
The idea of a government demanding we kill our cats is disturbing on its own, never mind the prospect of it happening during a time when our pets were the few things helping us keep our sanity while we all huddled in isolation.
Thankfully reason prevailed and research ultimately proved that the chances of cats or dogs spreading COVID to humans is almost nonexistent.
Knicks commentator Clyde Frazier called Buddy’s performance “a grandilomentitudinous clinic in splendiferousness.”
NEW YORK — With less than four minutes on the clock in the fourth quarter and the Knicks down two, New York point guard Jalen Brunson drove the lane, then kicked the ball out as the defense collapsed, finding an open Buddy the Cat in the corner.
With Boston forward Jason Tatum closing the distance, Buddy slid both feet behind the three-point line and sank a clutch shot, giving the Knicks their first lead since the second quarter.
The Madison Square Garden crowd, already boisterous, launched into a deafening cheer.
“MVP! MVP! MVP!” Knicks fans chanted, dubbing the superstar feline the league’s Meowst Valuable Player.
New York guard RJ Barrett found Buddy with a no-look pass on the next possession and the 10lb cat sailed through traffic toward the rim, banking a layup to put his team up by three.
“Buddy now, driving and conniving, dishing and swishing at the basket,” Knicks color commentator Walt “Clyde” Frazier said. “A serendipitous fourth for the frisky feline.”
Earning defensive stops on the next two possessions, the Knicks extended their lead to six on a three-pointer by forward Julius Randle, forcing the Celtics to foul Buddy on the next possession to stop the Knicks running down the shot clock.
Buddy iced the free throws, then sank another pair after a Boston timeout to give him a career-high 47 points to go with one rebound, eight assists and 11 steals.
Initially picked in the second round of the 2020 NBA draft, Buddy the Cat has become an impact player and fan favorite.
“If you’re [Knicks coach] Tom Thibodeaux, you’ve gotta like what you’re seeing from Buddy the Cat,” play-by-play man Mike Breen said.
Frazier agreed, piling on the superlatives.
“Buddy’s been magnetic and energetic, giving the Knicks strong two-way play with the matador D and splendiferous form as he displays omnipotence on the offensive end,” Frazier said.
The tabby cat’s career performance earned accolades from Knicks fans and players alike on Twitter.
“Buddy the Cat straight cookin’ the Celtics!” Cavaliers star Donovan Mitchell tweeted.
“Y’all see this cat? Unreal!!!” tweeted Ja Morant, the explosive point guard for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Not every player in the league was impressed, however.
“Let him try that move toward the rim on me,” said Lakers forward Lebron James, who has a 6 foot height advantage on the tabby. “I’ll swat that ball all the way to Chairman Xi’s house in Beijing.”
Frazier, who was the floor general for the Knicks the last time the franchise won an NBA championship in the 1970s, said Buddy is an essential component in the team’s promising core of young players.
“You don’t see a player like that every day, folks,” Frazier said. “A grandilomentitudinous performance that thrillified Knicks fans!”
Buddy is averaging 20.7 points, 0.7 rebounds, 6.5 assists and 6.2 steals per game on the season, and is currently the top-rated player at his position in fantasy basketball rankings.
I have to admit, as cute as Buddy was as a kitten, I don’t miss the “war on sleep” phase.
A woman who adopted a kitten set up a camera to film what happens while she sleeps, like the main characters of the surprisingly scary 2007 film Paranormal Activity, except instead of doors opening and slamming shut by themselves, TVs turning on randomly and other freaky ghost stuff, she got footage of her new kitty gleefully waking her, mostly by belly-flopping on her snoozing human:
I know the experience all too well, and I’d imagine most people who have had a kitten know it too.
Buddy was absolutely ruthless as a baby! He’d scurry into a corner or hide under my desk, wait until I was snoring or just on the cusp of sleep, then climb up and screech the kitten equivalent of “Geronimo!” as he kamikaze’d himself onto my stomach.
Not a fun way to wake up. At all.
Bud would celebrate with delighted trilling, then pad back into the shadows to wait for his next opportunity. Oftentimes I’d hear squeaky little kitten chirps and imagine him laughing as he planned his next attack. He had entirely too much fun torturing me at night.
But fear not, Jenna, it gets better! I’m happy to report the Budster is much sweeter and more considerate as an adult cat. He still wakes me up, but often not to the level of fully awake, and instead of a cat landing a triple lutz, double axle on my stomach, I’m treated to super-soft fur against my face and the calming vibration of the little dude’s purrs.
It might take the better part of a year, but your kitten will chill out, adjust to your sleep schedule and realize a peaceful snooze is more satisfying than nighty games of Harass the Human.
The feline tendency to sit on your face and screech into your ear if your cat’s hungry or really wants your attention? Unfortunately that never goes away…
Pain In The Bud 