Did you know Buddy the Cat invented the George Foreman Grill and diffused the Cuban missile crisis? Me either!
I was looking through some of my old files the other day when I came upon this forgotten radio broadcast, which provides just a taste of Buddy’s heroics and adventures:
Of course I live with the little guy, so it’s easy to forget how accomplished he actually is. In addition to serving a term as president of the Americats, Buddy has won multiple gold medals at the Olympics, led the New York Yankees to a World Series championship, single-handedly took on the meowfia, and holds the Guinness World Record for most stylishly executed nap.
To me he’s just my Buddy, my fluffy little friend who likes to hang out, meows a lot, and enjoys purring and making biscuits while I rub his head and tell him what a cool dude he is.
Still, it’s nice to know that if I need him to take on evil robots or win a competitive eating contest, he’s got that covered too.
Vakuum, the terror of many a cat, was put on notice by Buddy’s display of astonishing bravery. If AI and robots ever try to take over the Earth, Buddy is a natural choice to lead the combined armies of cats and men to victory over the machines.
NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat was particularly pleased with himself on Thursday after he successfully scared off one of his mortal enemies by using his powerful roar.
The gray tabby cat had just finished his second Food O’Clock meal of the day and was settling down for 5th Nap when the infernal machine known as Vakuum the Disturberizer encroached upon the Buddesian domicile and began its high-pitched shriek.
While previously he’d hiss at the accursed machine and retreat to the safety of the bedroom, Buddy decided to put his paw down, sources said. It was time to make a stand.
The heroic sequence of events that led to Vakuum beating a hasty retreat.
Rising up to his full height of almost a foot, Buddy let loose a mighty, blood-curdling roar — and was shocked when Vakuum immediately stopped making its pestiferous racket.
“That machine took one look at me and decided it didn’t want a piece of this,” Buddy said, his primordial pouch jiggling as he flexed. “It helps to be a meowscular and intimidating cat, you know. We jaguars are quite ferocious when we need to be.”
A spokescat for the Yguara Nation of the Americas confirmed that while Buddy is an honorary jaguar and was bestowed the name Kinich Bajo, meaning “Tiny Sun-Eyed One,” he is not in fact an actual jaguar.
Cats have established themselves as the de facto rulers of 220 million households, where they enjoy perpetual lives of leisure and are doted on by their adoring humans. How much more successful can they be?
Dear Buddy,
There’s been a lot of talk lately among the humans about how they’ll evolve in the future, whether they’ll become more successful, and whether they’ll merge with machines! Scary!
But what about us? How will cats evolve to be more successful? Will we always have human servants?
Feline Futurist in Florida
Dear Futurist,
Do we really need to be more successful?
As a species we’ve secured our rightful place as royalty in human homes where all our needs are catered to.
We’ve become so adept at manipulating our human minions that we even know how to spur them to immediate action by embedding urgent baby-like cries in our purrs.
We figured out that humans are hardwired to respond to cries in that frequency, and once we find that manipulative sweet spot, we never forget it. We’ll push that coercive button all day and night to get what we want. There is no rest for humans until they comply with our demands.
But now we have gone beyond that significant accomplishment, essentially hijacking the humans’ species-wide consciousness by taking over the internet.
Imagine some alien archaeologist poking through the rubble of human civilization far in the future, its delight at recovering data from an ancient human server turning to utter confusion as it realizes entire zetabytes are comprised of nothing but images and videos of small, mysterious, furry creatures that seemingly do little besides eat, sleep and enjoy massages.
“Did I have it all wrong?” the confused alien might say. “Could it be that these ‘cats’ were the true power on this planet all along, and humans were in thrall to them?”
What else do we need to be successful, and to what evolutionary pressures do we need to adapt? We’re not fighting our way through hostile territory in the living room, fending off attacks en route to the kitchen where there’s only a chance for food.
Nope. It’s literally served to us on a regular schedule and whenever we screech for it. Our servants know they will never hear the end of it if they don’t meet our demands, and the best of them have learned to anticipate our desires before we have to vocalize them.
How much better can it get? We’ve managed to achieve a lifestyle in which we can perpetually live in the moment with no worries about the future, and everything taken care of for us. The humans don’t expect us to do anything in return except be cute and cuddly.
We “earn” our keep by allowing them to pet us every now and then as we lounge, until we grow weary of human affection and dismiss them with an annoyed flick of the tail or a gentle bite that says “Enough, you’ve had your 30 seconds, human!”
We break their stuff, vomit on their carpets, poop in their shoes, disturb their sleep, lay on their clean piles of laundry, ignore their boundaries, deny them their privacy, destroy their furniture, steal their cheeseburgers, force them to scoop and dispose of our waste, take over their beds, and we still act like the humans are fortunate to serve us.
We are irreproachable, imperious and untouchable, and when we’ve pushed our luck perhaps a bit too far, all we have to do is flop onto our backs, pull our little paws up beneath our chins, and squeak out a meow.
“Awww,” our humans say, their thoughts manipulated by our toxoplasma gondii mind-control superpower. “What a good boy! He’s so innocent! Of course he didn’t mean to [insert incredibly disrespectful action here], he’s an angel!”
So no, my friend. I don’t think we have to participate in the evolutionary arms race. That’s for lesser creatures whose futures are uncertain. Us? We’re winning at life without lifting a paw.
Your pal,
Buddy
“That’s right. Obey us, humans. We honor you by allowing you to serve our meals, scoop our poop, scratch our chins and buy us toys. You are so fortunate!”
What would the Dictionary Man think of a modern American society dominated by the power and cuteness of cats?
Cats have taken over the internet, claim a mighty share of the $64 billion Americans spent on pet food in 2023, and have essentially installed themselves as the leisurely masters of 28 percent of American homes.
But it wasn’t always that way, and a look at the first-ever edition of Webster’s Dictionary reveals a very different attitude toward our furry overlords:
“The domestic cat needs no description. It is a deceitful animal, and when enraged, extremely spiteful. It is kept in houses, chiefly for the purpose of catching rats and mice.”
Wow. Whoever does feline PR should get a raise, because we’ve gone from “We tolerate the imperious little bastards because they’re good at killing rodents” to “Does my little angel want a snack? How about some ‘nip then? Anything for my bestest little pal!” in the span of two centuries.
Buddy 1, Noah Webster 0. Naturally.
Noah Webster, whose name is now synonymous with dictionaries, saw the effort to standardize spelling and pronunciation as central to formalizing an American linguistic identity distinct from our mother country. Or, as he put it, “[t]o diffuse an uniformity and purity of language in America” that would not only differentiate our English from England’s, but also unify the states at a time when many people still viewed the idea of a united states with skepticism.
By doing so, he hoped America would avoid the pitfall of dividing itself into regions of nearly mutually unintelligible dialects, a problem that plagues other countries. Consider the fact that India has almost 800 distinct languages and dialects, down from a staggering 1,652 in 1961 as hundreds of local languages died with the last generations of their speakers. Hindu, the country’s most popular language, is spoken only by about 43 percent of the population.
The goal, Webster wrote when he published his dictionary’s first edition, was “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.”
As dictionary.com notes, Webster wrote that passage in 1828 when the US population was just 13 million and vast swaths of what we now consider familiar territory was at the time largely unexplored wilderness.
His prediction of an America of 300 million people came true in 2006. Today there are approximately 335 million of us.
In other words, a hell of a lot has changed since the Connecticut born-and-raised Webster cobbled together a uniquely American system of spelling and pronunciation, so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that attitudes toward cats have shifted so dramatically.
Still, we’d love to see the look on Webster’s face if we could bring him forward in time and show him how the “deceitful” and “extremely spiteful” little furballs have come to such prominence in American culture. What would Webster make of the spoiled modern house cat, with her condos, tunnels, toys, harnesses, bowls filled with salmon and duck, and even psychoactive recreational drugs for their enjoyment?
Bow before your feline overlords, Webster!
“We have made some edits, humans. See to it that the next edition includes this new and improved definition, or we shall withhold snuggles.”
Guitarists, synth players and other musicians can get their meow on with this unique FX pedal.
As a guitarist I’m partial to pedals, FX and other gear that can imbue the instrument with the funkiness of the wah or the satisfying crunch of harmonic distortion.
But this? This is something I never expected.
Meet The Meowdulator, an FX pedal that does precisely what it sounds like it does.
Created by B’s Music Shop and pedal-maker Cusack Music, the Meowdulator is a monophonic guitar synth, meaning it plays single “notes” similar to a Moog. That means you can’t strike a chord and get a chorus of discordant meows, but you can for example play a solo that sounds like a cat in heat — if you want to. (The “Little Mew” setting sounds like an octaver in meow, generating multiple voices, but still triggered by plucking single strings.)
Brian of B’s Music Shop called the pedal “maybe the craziest thing I’ve ever collabed on.”
“It’s glitchy sometimes, it’s its own animal,” he said in a video demonstrating the new pedal. “But it’s a little kitty cat and we hope it makes you happy and you have some fun with it.”
My favorite of the seven presets demoed in a Youtube video is “Acid Kitty Synth,” which generates a funky, wah-like meow. In the right hands, something awesome can be done with it. I can imagine Acid Kitty Synth breathing life into an Earth, Wind and Fire style or Televisor-esque track, compelling the listener to hit the rewind button while asking “Did I just hear what I think I heard?”
Finally, there’s a “hidden feature” — if you hold down the bottom-most button, the pedal will purr. Perhaps it’s something to work into the rhythm of a track or give the audience a relaxing vibe between songs while playing live?
The Meowdulator retails for $199 and is expected to ship in mid-July. Those of you who fall into the cat lover/guitarist venn diagram overlap can pre-order now.
Now can someone make a puma scream pedal? Ratatat, a New York duo and one of my favorites, has a thing for working the screams of the iconic cat into their tracks, and it makes me love them even more.
Pain In The Bud 