Cats may not wear watches but they’re excellent time keepers!
Some people think felines are incapable of telling time. Cats disagree. And as anyone who has ever had the honor of serving a furry friend knows, cats are exceptional time keepers who like to adhere to strict schedules and like their meals delivered with the precision of the finest Swiss timepieces. To prove it, we asked six random cats if they know what time it is.
“It’s been 4 hours, 13 minutes and 22 seconds since my last meal, which was an unsatisfying salmon pâté . Do better, human.” – Parmesan, 8
“It’s yums o’clock!” – Pepper, 4 1/2 months
“It’s nap time. Again.” – BA Baracus, 4
“It is time for you to get off your lazy behind and fetch me something tasty.” – Shadow, 5
“In exactly 12 minutes it will be time for me to visit the neighbor for third breakfast! Then in another hour, first lunch at the nice lady’s house down the street!” – Clover, 7
“What is time, if not a way to mark the wonderful meals enjoyed, the scrumptilicious snacks devoured, the moments of opportunity when a human plate goes unattended? Wait. Did I say the last part out loud?” – Remontoire, 2
The actor went all out, wearing a full fur suit made to look just like the late Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved Burmese cat.
As we suspected, Choupette the cat didn’t attend Monday night’s Met Gala in honor of her late human, Karl Lagerfeld, but the famous feline was there in spirit.
Rapper Doja Cat paid tribute to the famous Burmese with cat ears and a dress inspired by her fluffy white fur, but it was Jared Leto who stole the show in a full cat suit, complete with a heavy-looking headpiece that looks just like Choupette.
Like all cats, Choupette isn’t big on human parties, with Lagerfeld asserting she’s “not a party girl” when he showed up without her to a New York event honoring Tilda Swinton in 2013, despite the feline being listed as the designer’s plus-one.
Jared Leto in his Choupette costume.
Leto momentarily removed the head piece to wave hello to photographers on the red carpet at Monday night’s Met Gala.
Choupette’s more than 12 years old now, so she’s getting up there for a cat, and it makes sense that her caretaker, Lagerfeld’s former housekeeper, decided the famous kitty would be better off staying home in France rather than taking the long flight and possibly being freaked out as the center of attention at a well-attended, noisy party.
It’s entirely possible that Choupette could have run under a piece of furniture and spent the rest of the night hissing at staff tasked with coaxing her out, so declining the invite was a wise call.
Props to Leto for his hilarious and accurate costume, and for being a good sport. The weather here in New York is about 50 degrees tonight, so it’s not warm, but Leto’s costume still looks stifling.
If you’re into this sort of thing, you can see the rest of the celebrities in their outfits here. There was some blowback prior to the event, and the Washington Post ran an article detailing Lagerfeld’s “problematic” (oh how I hate that word) past, meaning about half a dozen off-color comments he made in almost a half century in the public eye.
A group of young fashion world regulars who are affiliated with the gala sat out this year, saying the act of honoring Lagerfeld was “exclusionary,” which I found hilarious. High fashion and haute couture are by their nature exclusionary, and the Met Gala is perhaps the most exclusive of parties. Tickets are $50,000 apiece, attendance is invitation-only, and the guest list is comprised only of people Vogue editor Anna Wintour considers “fabulous” enough to be in her presence.
There is no such thing as diversity or inclusion in an event like the Met Gala or in the fashion world, so they might as well be honest and own it. Maybe next year they can adopt a Zoolander theme and show the world the fashion world can have a sense of humor and poke fun at itself.
But despite all the absurdity, we can’t help liking Choupette, and Lagerfeld’s story of falling in love with the cuddly kitty late in life after never imagining he’d have a cat, let alone dote on her like a beloved child.
Lagerfeld had no love for cats before he was asked to cat sit for Choupette. The experience changed him for the better.
I imagine I would have had very little in common with Karl Lagerfeld, yet there’s one thing that makes us kindred spirits.
Neither of us expected to have a fondness for cats and were blindsided with love for a furry friend.
For Lagerfeld, the revelatory moment came when he reluctantly agreed to cat-sit for a model friend who was going out of the country for a shoot. When the friend returned after two weeks and saw how Lagerfeld was enamored with Choupette — and how mellowed out he was with her — he decided to let the designer keep the cream-coated Burmese kitty.
Evangelista Choupette Vogue cover
Choupette brought the normally reserved German out of his shell and she became his favorite muse, appearing on the covers of fashion magazines in the arms of the world’s most famous supermodels.
“My love for little furballs came to me quite late,” Lagerfeld told an interviewer in 2016. “I had dogs before in my life, but that was when I lived in the countryside. In Paris, as in all big cities, it’s always a bit complicated. As you can imagine, I can no longer afford to walk a dog down the street without it bordering on a riot. And then a dog is far from clean and spotless, and when it rains, it smells of dead rats. I had two friends who owned a cat, and they always did loads of them in the overflowing kind of affection, so much so that I found it frankly ridiculous. Well, now I’m much worse.”
“I never thought I would fall in love like this with a cat,” the designer added.
Like Lagerfeld, the cat enthusiasts I knew mostly took their love for felines to absurd levels. My friend Dave grew up in a house that was home to between 10 and 12 cats at any particular time. I had to dose on antihistamines just to enter the damn house and often had to leave, nose congested and eyes bloodshot, before things got worse. Another childhood friend had as many as 10 cats at any particular time.
To me, cats were annoying, inscrutable animals who climbed on everything with impunity and made me very sick.
It wasn’t until the latter friend moved in with his girlfriend and their cat count was reduced to a manageable two that I realized I could interact with cats without getting sick — and I actually liked the little stinkers.
Like Lagerfeld, sometimes I look at what my life has become and think, “What the hell am I doing here?”
But of course there’s nothing wrong with being a man who has a cat, and Bud has been a hugely positive part of my life, providing daily amusement, refusing to leave my side when I’m sick, making sure I get out of bed when I don’t want to because He Must Be Fed, and in general being my best buddy.
I adopted Bud at a difficult time in life and taking care of him, being responsible for an innocent life, kept me from sinking into an even deeper funk. He has destroyed my favorite guitar, half my t-shirts have little claw holes in them, he wakes me up nightly simply because he wants to snuggle and he’s an absolute terror when it comes to swiping things off every flat surface in the apartment.
But I would not change a hair on his head. I’m incredibly grateful for the little guy.
As buzz around Choupette builds now that it’s confirmed she’ll play a central role in this year’s Met Gala — which will honor her late human, Lagerfeld — we’ll see a lot of photos of Choupette amid the excesses of the fashion world.
Choupette on a private jet. Choupette eating food prepared for her by her own chef. Choupette laying on a bed while Kim Kardashian makes duck lips and poses with her. Choupette with Anna Wintour, the infamous queen bee of fashion who is perhaps the most outlandish symbol of that world’s excess.
But it helps to remember Choupette was first and foremost a beloved pet, and she’s a cat. She doesn’t know who Kim Kardashian is and she doesn’t care. She certainly isn’t impressed by the opulence around her, which is the product of humans projecting their ideas onto her. Replace her custom-made silver bowls with a $15 stainless steel set from PetSmart and she won’t be phased.
And I’m pretty sure that when she does participate in the Met Gala, she’ll rather be at home, snuggling up in her favorite blanket, belly full of yums and settling down for a nice nap instead of being fussed over by a group of people who look like aliens in a Star Wars cantina.
In fact, Choupette famously refused to leave Lagerfeld’s hotel room despite being listed as his plus-one for a New York event honoring Tilda Swinton in 2013. “Choupette is not a party girl,” Lagerfeld said at the time.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to take Buddy to a tuxedo fitting and refine my plans to have him “bump into” Choupette, so he can turn on the charm, sweep her off her paws and become the very wealthy Mr. Choupette.
As the supreme species on this planet, cats have a lot to lose if AI seeks to supplant them as Earthly rulers.
With artificial intelligence making rapid progress over the past year, we asked cats what they think about a future where we depend on intelligent machines.
“Can AI open cans? No? Then why are we having this discussion?” – Bryce ‘Mice Dice’ Price, 8, executive chef
“At the moment, humans remain catdom’s best solution for producing reliable, easily-manipulated servants.” – Meowchio Kaku, 16, scientist
“Imagine the boxes a superintelligent AI could design!” – Anthony Purrcelli, 5, firehouse mascot
“If AI takes over more mundane tasks, that means more nap time for us!” – Peaches, 9, conductor
“If yums are more delicious in the Matrix, then why not? Plug me in!” – Ferrari, 3, accessories model
“I’ve already gone to war with the AI that dispensed my kibble. We had a fundamental disagreement about the frequency and quantity of yums it was dispensing. Let the smoking pile of rubble be a warning to other machines who would challenge felines for Earthly supremacy.” – Meowchal Douglas, 21, investment banker
Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us! Happy birthday dear Buddies, happy birthday to us!
We received a notification from WordPress congratulating us on four years with WordPress, although this blog isn’t technically four years old. It started as a place for my random scribbles about Buddy and as a sort of travelogue for my trip to Japan, and it wasn’t until September of 2019 that I registered the domain and started blogging in earnest, transforming the site into the Pain In The Bud we all know and love today.
Over the last few years we’ve been fortunate enough to merit the attention of critics, who have lavished praise on us:
“There’s a reason young kittens the world over have posters of Buddy on their walls. He’s effortlessly charming, possessed of inimitable wit and he’s got one hell of a singing voice.” – Fat Cats magazine
“An indictment of the American education system. I feel dumber for having read it.” – Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine’s guide to the Worst Blogs On The Internet
“An extraordinary blog focused on an exceptional cat whose wit is sharper than Valyrian steel. Endlessly entertaining.” – The Buddesian Times
“A catnip junkie and the human who enables him. Gives all cats a bad rep.” – Veterinary Association of America
“Has there ever been a cat more handsome and interesting than Buddy? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.” – The Chronicle of Higher Buddy
“It’s difficult to tell who’s the bigger moron, the human or the cat. They enable each other, launching their idiotic schemes to take over the world and horde its turkey. Thankfully they’re as incompetent as they are clueless.” – Jefferson Nebula, host of My Cat From Hades
Of course we would not be here if not for our readers. Thanks for finding us, sending us your ideas and most of all, feeding Buddy’s ego by telling him what a charming, interesting and ferocious tiger he is.
On a related note, since I’m not sure of Buddy’s exact birth date, we celebrate his birthday and adoptiversary around the third weekend of April.
Happy birthday, Bud!
Bud, you sexy beast, you!
How the heck is the little guy nine years old? That doesn’t seem possible. The age equivalency chart says that’s the equivalent of 52 human years, but Bud still has a spring in his stride, meows like a little baby and likes playing with his toys, especially the game called “Mighty Hunter” in which I manipulate wand toys like prey and he ambushes them. Since he doesn’t know he’s supposed to deliver a “kill bite” and hasn’t made the connection that hunting = food, he happily bobbles the toy with his front paws while bouncing around on his feet, then rushes to cover to reset the game.
I will not dwell on or speculate about how long he’ll be with us because I turn into a blubbering mess despite being a grown ass man, so I’ll just say I’m extremely grateful that he’s healthy and happy, and I’ll continue to enjoy every minute with him.
Except when he meows really annoyingly when his food is late. And when he wakes me up by grooming my face. Oh, and his insistence on walking 1/10th of a stride in front of me so I’m always in danger of tripping on him. Also, when he goes into super annoying determined mode and tries to wake me by punching the door flap on his litter box, knowing the squeak of the hinges drives me crazy.
He is very accomplished at annoying me, but that’s okay. He’s my little Buddy.
Plagiarized, you say?
Thanks to those of you who alerted us to a PITB story that was plagiarized by a pet-focused site recently. We’re aware of it, and unfortunately it’s not the first time.
It takes a lot of time and effort to create readable, entertaining content, and there are people who simply don’t care and help themselves to the content without scruples. Almost all of them are based in countries whose authorities don’t respect US intellectual property rights and won’t cooperate with any takedown notices or legal threats.
The Drudge Report, for example, famously links to DNUYZ, a site run by an Armenian guy who steals content from the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Financial Times and other news sites. Google canceled DNUYZ’s AdSense account, but the operator simply signed up with a different ad server, and he makes a tidy profit by stealing content en masse.
If major media organizations can’t stop this nonsense, I have no hope. I’ve had some luck petitioning sites that host third-party content, but many don’t respond and I don’t even get an apology from those who do acknowledge that my content was posted to their sites, earning them pageviews and ad revenue.
There is a way you can help, however. Every time someone links to a PITB article, it incrementally increases our legitimacy in the eyes of Google, and that’s important because it means PITB shows up first when people search for an article or topic on this site, rather than the plagiarized versions copied by content scrapers in countries like India and Russia.
I am not asking people to randomly link to PITB. That wouldn’t help anyway. However, if there’s a story you really like, consider sharing it on social media and help spread the word. Organic virality is the name of the game, and Buddy and I think we do offer something relatively unique in the cat-o-sphere with a blog from a dudely perspective with a focus on absurdist cat humor, big cat conservation and important news stories that impact our furry little friends.
And if that’s not reason enough, well, just look at him. He’s a sexy beast, and surely your cat-loving friends would be angry with you if you did not tell them all about Buddy and his adventures. Don’t make them upset. Do them a solid and invite them to the Wonderful World of Buddy!
Pain In The Bud 