Category: pop culture

The Fashion World’s Excesses Aside, Choupette’s Story Is About A Man Discovering His Love Of Cats

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.

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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.

Cat On The Street: What Do You Think About The Rise Of AI?

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.

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“Can AI open cans? No? Then why are we having this discussion?” – Bryce ‘Mice Dice’ Price, 8, executive chef
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“At the moment, humans remain catdom’s best solution for producing reliable, easily-manipulated servants.” – Meowchio Kaku, 16, scientist
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“Imagine the boxes a superintelligent AI could design!” – Anthony Purrcelli, 5, firehouse mascot

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“If AI takes over more mundane tasks, that means more nap time for us!” – Peaches, 9, conductor

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“If yums are more delicious in the Matrix, then why not? Plug me in!” – Ferrari, 3, accessories model
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“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

White Sox Photog Saves Scruffy Stadium Stray, PLUS: Super Rare Male Calico Born in Colorado

A young ginger tabby made himself at home at the former Comiskey Park in Chicago, feasting off of ballpark food shared with him by fans.

The Chicago White Sox opened the baseball season on the road, then headed home where they hosted the San Francisco Giants — and a scrappy, hungry stray who helped himself to heaps of stadium food.

The cat appeared in the park for three consecutive nights of the homestand, emerging from a hiding spot in the bowels of the stadium to sidle up to fans eating ballpark grub and meow for them to share. And share they did, according to Block Club Chicago, with fans holding the little guy and feeding him “shredded chicken off the top of their ballpark nachos.”

“He was just super chill and very comfortable roaming the park, like it’s his territory,” White Sox fan Alexis Lopez told Block Club.

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The stray, now named Beef, is enjoying his forever home and his doting human servant. Credit: Darren Georgia

The cat, who was “a little scruffy and thin” according to Lopez, took an overly enthusiastic bite of some stadium food and accidentally punctured the skin on her cousin Antonia Denofrio’s finger. Stadium staff treated Denofrio at the park and thought they were in for a thorough search for the kitty, but the night after the White Sox finished their home series against the Giants, the orange tabby “jumped right up onto a security golf cart and was super friendly,” White Sox team photographer Darren Georgia said.

Georgia brought the cat home, got him fixed and examined by a vet and named him Beef. Now they’re best buds.

“He’s outgoing, loves to play and snuggle,” Georgia told The Block. “Just everything you’d hope for in a cat.”

The unicorn of cats

When Alli Magish, a foster for NoCo Kitties in Colorado, took home a mom cat and her five kittens, she realized one of them was incredibly rare: a male calico.

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Charlie the male calico kitten is now 11 weeks old. Credit: NoCo Kitties

Magish brought the little guy, now named Charlie, to two veterinarians to confirm, and for all of them Charlie is their first male calico. Only about one in 3,000 calicos are male, the Coloradoan reported, citing statistics from the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine.

“We will probably get huge adoption fee offers for him, but we want him to go to the best home, and that’s not necessarily the one that could be the highest bidder,” Davida Dupont, founder of NoCo Kitties, told the Coloradoan.

Typical adoption fees for kittens at the rescue are $195, but Dupont says she wants to organize a fundraiser around the little guy before settling on the best place for his forever home. (Shhhh, no one tell Chloe Mitchell.) Since she spoke to the Coloradoan on April 1, NoCo Kitties has received a flood of adoption applications, and in a follow-up Facebook post  Dupont says she hopes some of them will consider adopting the many other lovable cats at NoCo who are looking for homes.

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Charles Barkley Disses Cats As Pets For ‘Old Women,’ But Don’t Cancel Him!

The Prince of Pizza likes to say controversial things.

I can’t overstate how much I like Charles Barkley.

When I was a kid watching the NBA in the 90s, Sir Charles was a force to be reckoned with, a player who could put an entire team on his back and would have rampaged his way to multiple championships if a man named Michael Jordan didn’t play in the same era.

Chuck was physical, an outstanding and efficient scorer, a tenacious rebounder and a guy who played the game with passion. He was also beloved as the NBA’s resident “fat guy,” an admittedly pizza-loving athlete nicknamed The Round Mound of Rebound and The Incredible Bulk who always had to lose a few pounds when he showed up for training camp.

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A young Charles Barkley (right) eating pizza before a game. No, seriously, that’s what he ate before NBA games!

In his post-NBA career, Barkley has delighted audiences for years with his brutally honest takes about basketball and many other topics. He’s blunt, honest to a point and often hilarious.

That’s why I still can’t dislike him even after he insisted cats are pets for “old women” during a playoff broadcast on Monday.

“A cat is not a real pet,” Barkley said on TNT when fellow host and former NBA player Kenny Smith mentioned he likes cats and has one at home.

“Why not?” Smith asked.

“Because it’s not a dog,” Barkley replied.

Later, when a fan jokingly tweeted an image of cats taking issue with Barkley’s declaration, The Prince of Pizza doubled down.

“I don’t dislike cats, I just don’t think they’re real pets,” he said. “A dog is a real pet.”

“What’s a cat?” Smith asked him.

“Just something old women have,” Barkley said, drawing the ire of cat lovers on the internet.

Before anyone rushes to fire off an angry tweet, it should be noted that Barkley is known for saying things to get a rise out of people, and Inside the NBA is legendary for its shit talk, with Shaquille O’Neal and Ernie Johnson rounding out the quartet of hosts who spend as much time laughing as they do analyzing the games. The guys on Inside the NBA are also notorious for poking fun at themselves and playing pranks on each other (I’ll never forget seeing all 300 pounds of Shaq falling on his ass after the other guys took the screws out of his chair, and the good-natured way he took it), so I know Sir Charles wasn’t trying to be mean. He was probably just taking a dig at Kenny.

So yeah, don’t cancel Charles. He’s entertaining, he’s a unique voice, and he just hasn’t had his heart stolen by a cat yet. Someone take him to the local SPCA and find a nice fluffy Maine Coon who will sway Chuck to the dark side!

Study: More Than Half Of US Adults Haven’t Read A Book In A Year

Did you now? Little Buddy the Cat read an astounding 713 books last year and authored 43 of his own, including the bestseller “How To Handle Your Human Like A Pro: 10 Steps To Better Performance By Your Servant”

You read that right. According to a survey of more than 2,000 people from an independent industry research firm, 51.7 percent of American adults did not read a book in 2021.

More than one fifth (22.01 percent) haven’t read a book in three years, and more than 10 percent haven’t read a book in 10 years.

There are obvious reasons for that, including the choice of many other mediums for entertainment, plus an unprecedented volume of content offerings from streaming networks and traditional TV, meaning most of us have tens of thousands of movies at our fingertips through paid subscriptions like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, as well as free ad-supported streamers like Tubi and the Roku channel.

Then there’s internet doomscrolling, the endless consumption of news (of which I am guilty), social media platforms designed to keep people engaged, fan fiction sites and a million other leisure activities competing for our attention.

Yet none of those things have a quality that books do. When you read a book, you are entering a theater of the mind created by one mind. Not a movie that has 500 crew members in addition to its cast, focus groups, script writers, script doctors and script polishers. Not a TV show written by committee in a writers room to the specifications of network honchos. With a fiction book, you’re allowing one person’s imagination to usher you into a story, trusting in their storytelling skill to make the experience worthwhile. With a well-researched non-fiction book, you can travel back in time, reliving wars, coups and personal stories, events that shaped the world and events that meant the world to a few people.

Not surprisingly, the survey shows, the percentage of people who read books regularly is lower for younger age cohorts. Credit YA fiction, like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and similar series for turning at least some of them into readers.

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A curious kitty reading “The Art of Meowing for Treats” by Buddy the Cat. Credit: PITB

The publishing industry is in a sorry state. In lean times publishers and their imprints have become as risk-averse as major movie studios, so they’re far less likely to take chances on new authors with new perspectives than they are to fall back on the same handful of big-name novelists or surefire memoirs like Prince Harry’s Spare.

Because of that, publishing houses don’t invest in developing younger up-and-coming writers the way they once did, and there are fewer literary journals and genre magazines for new authors to use as stepping stones.

Compounding the problem is the echo chamber in publishing: Because many publishing jobs offer low salaries, most of the people who can afford to take those jobs are independently wealthy, increasingly concentrated in places like Brooklyn, and share similar perspectives. That has a pronounced effect on the kind of books they’re publishing.

Still, I think we all share in the blame. I read only 12 or 13 books in the past year. That seemed low but not so bad until I though about it. That’s a measly 120 books in 10 years. It doesn’t add up to much over a lifetime.

When you put it like that, you either want to make sure every book you read is a gem, or you get your ass in gear, put down the junk news articles and smartphone, and dive into more books. 

I am a science fiction junkie and wanted to read more female authors since my favorites happen to be a bunch of British guys — Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton — and managed a measly one fiction book by a female author in the past year, although it was pretty awesome. (Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes, also known as Stacey Kincade. I think she’s Barnes for science fiction and Kincade for other stuff.) I’ll definitely be down for the planned sequel, and I have Ursula LeGuin in the queue.

What are your reading habits? How many books do you read per year, and are you happy with your pace?