books – Page 3 – Pain In The Bud

The Cat Whose Voice Is Heard In More Than 300 Movies, Plus: Buddy Didn’t Attack His Sitter!

A 23-second clip of a cat growling and yowling has become one of the most-used sound effects over the past three decades. The Guardian traced the clip back to the man who recorded it and got the full story.

We’ve all heard Cheeta the cat yowling, we just don’t know it.

Cheeta was a house cat who belonged to Wylie Stateman, a sound engineer who lives in LA.

In 1988, Stateman recorded an argument between Cheeta, a “remarkably small” half-Siamese void, and her mate, a tomcat named Sylvester.

The 23-second clip made it onto The Premiere Edition, a 20-CD library of sound effects Stateman produced in 1990.

Stateman, called “one of the great recorders of the time” by a colleague, told The Guardian he brought his sound recorder with him everywhere he went for three decades, recording thousands of sounds that have been used in movies for 35 years.

Buddy is also an accomplished sound effects cat.

Cheeta’s yowls are one of his greatest successes. The cranky cat can be heard in Toy Story, Home Alone 3, Les Miserables, Pet Sematary, 101 Dalmations, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Babe, End of Days, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and many more.

Although it’s difficult to get an exact count, it’s believed Cheeta’s distinct voice can be heard in some 330 films over the years. If you’re interested in learning more, check out The Guardian’s deep dive into the sound effect and its origins.

Buddy the Magnanimous

I went to visit my brother and his family in Washington this past week, leaving Buddy in the care of my mom.

Regular readers will recall that Bud has a bad reputation for trying to maul his cat sitters, which obviously complicates things.

Sue, his regular sitter, has known Bud since he was a kitten. She’s literally one of the first humans he met, yet that has not stopped him from ambushing and attacking her. Incredibly, she still agrees to care for him in my absence despite his belligerence, though she’ll no longer play with him. She feeds him and gets out ASAP. I can’t blame her.

This time my mom cared for the little stinker. He’s also tried to murder her when she’s watched him on previous occasions, including one incident in which his bites and scratches necessitated a trip to urgent care and a round of antibiotics.

So yeah, the happy news is that he didn’t attack her this time, although she told me every time she came back, he’d be waiting right by the door, and when he saw it wasn’t me, he would sniff derisively before turning and padding away.

They have an uneasy truce, but I’ll take it. You know you have small dreams when you celebrate a trip in which your cat doesn’t try to maul anyone in your absence.

On a tangential note, I had a first phone interview with a wild cat conservation organization this week, and for the first time in a long time, Bud didn’t make a peep.

He’s meowed loudly during other phone interviews, he’s put his butt in front of the camera like it’s his job during video calls, and he won’t shut up at any other time, but the one time when having a cat might benefit me, he decides to be silent. Thanks, Bud. You’re the best.

House Cat Mistaken For A Puma, Plus: The Late Novelist Caleb Carr On His Love For Cats

Caleb Carr credits cats for showing him love during his difficult childhood when he was frequently beaten by his father.

A “mountain lion” spotted near a trail in Ventura County, California, was actually just a house cat, authorities said this week.

California’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife dispatched staff to the area in question, the Los Padres trail in Thousand Oaks, after neighbors there reported what they thought was a baby mountain lion. One family had footage of the interloper captured on a doorbell camera.

The alleged puma turned out to be a house cat, which is a surprisingly common outcome when authorities look into alleged mountain lion sightings. Despite their size, pumas are genetically closer to felines — small and medium-size cats that can purr and meow — than they are to panthera, the genus that includes tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards.

Their gait is almost identical to that of familiar felis catus, their golden coats can look dark at night, and cats can look like pumas — or the other way around — when there’s not enough visual context to gauge the animal’s size, especially in footage captured on cell phones and security cameras, which are almost always equipped with digital zoom instead of the true optical variety.

We know what you’re thinking: this house cat must have been an impressive specimen if it was mistaken for a puma, so there’s a good chance it was Buddy. However, we can confirm that Buddy the Cat definitely was not wandering around California this week.

Novelist found solace in the company of cats

Author Caleb Carr passed away on May 23, and the Los Angeles Times has a nice tribute to him by a reporter who bonded with Carr over their shared love of cats. The writer, 68, had been suffering from cancer for some time.

Carr was known for his crime thrillers (The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness) and military history books, and he spent part of his career teaching military history at Bard College in New York. (Just a short ride from our own alma mater, Marist College.)

Carr’s last book is a tribute to his cat and her species.

Despite his publisher requesting another crime thriller, Carr decided his last book would be about a cat. Specifically his rescue cat Masha, who helped him through difficult times, and the cats of his childhood who comforted him when he was beaten by his father, Beat Generation figure and author Lucien Carr.

“It’s amazing to think about it now, but there were cats, and other animals, that were trying to make me feel better,” Caleb Carr told the Times. “The idea of that was so at odds with everything I was experiencing.”

Carr credits those felines for helping him avoid the abyss, telling the interviewer he “could have been one of those dead-eyed drone troublemakers that comes out of an abusive household very easily, if it hadn’t been for cats.”

Some people were disappointed that Carr didn’t have another novel like The Alienist in him, but Little, Brown publisher Bruce Nichols liked the idea, and the finished book was titled My Beloved Monster: Masha, The Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.

Buddy The Cat’s ‘The Art Of Napping’ Debuts Atop NYT Bestseller List

The book received glowing reviews for its comprehensive approach to the world of slumber and promises something for every type of napper.

A new book on napping from the world’s most prolific snoozer has taken the sleep enthusiast community by storm.

“The Art of Napping: The History and Technique of Dozing Off” by Buddy the Cat bills itself as “the world’s most comprehensive guide to taking a siesta” and a “manual on how to commit yourself to a lifestyle of leisure and laziness.”

It includes an illustrated history of sleep science, from its superstition-mired origins to the highly specialized field of modern-day napology, following the rich sedentary traditions of various cultures.

“The chapter contrasting ancient Sumerian nap-walking with Syracusan Somnambulism is not only heavy with detail, it’ll put you to sleep almost immediately,” said Rusty LeFelino, chaircat of the Snooze Studies Department at the University of Catlanta.

“Nap on tatami mat under cherry blossoms” by Hirotaro Buddishida, 1646, is one of many historical depictions of shut-eye included in The Art of Napping.

Reviewers were equally effusive with their praise.

“Buddy the Cat dozes headfirst into the world of segmented slumber, documenting everything from Chicago-Style Snoozing to indigenous bedding techniques pioneered by the jaguars of the Pantanal,” reads a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. “Whether you’re a weekend warrior who enjoys drooling on your couch during baseball games or a committed napper who swears by episodic DaVinci Sleep, there’s something for everyone in this beautifully bound volume.”

The New York-based feline spent more than a year researching and getting paws-on experience for the book. He visited the California headquarters of Google with its famous employee nap pods, spent a week sleeping under the stars with the pumas of the Pacific Northwest, and interviewed lucid dreamers to find out whether it’s possible to nap within a nap a la Inception.

“Buddy leaves no pillow unturned in his quest for the truth, with spectacularly stale prose that will have even the over-caffeinated yawning into the back of their paws,” a reviewer for Narcolepsy Daily wrote. “Get yourself a cozy blanket, curl up with Buddy and let the Z’s commence.”

Jungle Napping — Southern Siesta: The author spent several weeks in the Amazon napping with jaguars, jaguarundis and ocelots, an experience described in a yawn-inducing chapter of The Art of Napping.

Sleeping_cat — “The ability to nap anywhere at any time is the mark of a master snoozer,” Buddy writes in his new book. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Bud’s Book Club: The Man-Eaters of Kumaon & The Game of Rat and Dragon

Join us in reading stories of cats in space and big cats in the jungles of India.

Welcome to the inaugural post of Buddy’s Book Club, where we’ll read stories about cats and stories involving cats!

We’re going to start things off easy with a classic short story of the cat canon, which is available for free online via Project Gutenberg, and a seminal book about big cats from a man whose name is indelibly linked with them.

The Game of Rat and Dragon (1954) by Cordwainer Smith

Read it here for free from Project Gutenberg, a collaborative effort to create a digital archive of important cultural literary works that have fallen into the public domain. For those unfamiliar with Project Gutenberg, it’s completely above-board, legal and safe for your devices, and the story opens in plain HTML with illustrations included as image files. You can read the story in a browser or download it onto a reading device, tablet or phone.

The Game of Rat and Dragon first appeared, as so much short fiction of the era did, in a digest. Although Smith had penned it the year before, the story was published in Galaxy Science Fiction’s October 1955 issue and became an instant classic among cat-lovers and science fiction aficionados. (There is considerable overlap between the two, not surprisingly: Introverts whose imaginations run wild when they look to the stars tend to have many of the same personality traits as people who prefer the more sublime antics of cats.)

The Game of Rat and Dragon imagines a far future in which humanity has become a star-faring culture, meaning we’ve conquered interstellar flight and have begun to colonize planets in star systems other than our own.

There is, of course, a problem. The dark, lonely void between stars isn’t as empty as we thought it was, and is inhabited by invisible (to the human eye), inscrutable, inexorable entities eventually dubbed “dragons.”

When dragons attack they leave only death and insanity in their wake, putting the entire idea of interstellar travel at risk. Imagine if there was a not-insignificant chance of your passenger jet being attacked by impervious creatures every time you hopped on a plane. It wouldn’t be long before the entire air industry collapsed and the world suddenly became a much bigger place, with other continents unreachable by air.

Who can help humans with this problem? Cats, of course! To say more would be to spoil the fun. Meow!

Man-Eaters of Kumaon (1944) by Jim Corbett

Available as an ebook for 99 cents from Barnes and Noble.

Jim Corbett was a sportsman, the son of a government official in the British Raj who was raised in India’s jungles and came to know them intimately. He’s best remembered as the fearless hunter who finally brought down the infamous Champawat tigress, who officially claimed 436 lives over a years-long rampage as a man-eater, and likely many more that went unrecorded.

To understand the gravity of Corbett’s accomplishments, it’s necessary to understand the effect of a man-eater on rural India. The people living in India’s tiny villages are subsistence farmers. If they don’t farm, they don’t eat.

But when a man-eater as dangerous as the Champawat tigress claims an area as its hunting grounds, everything grinds to a halt: Farmers refuse to tend their fields, villagers disappear behind locked doors, and a simple walk to a neighboring village becomes an impossibility unless escorted by a group of two dozen or more armed men. Even then it’s a risk, for as Corbett notes, when tigers become man-eaters they have no fear of humans and will kill people in broad daylight, even when they’re in groups.

And yet for all their power and predatory instincts, tigers are never deliberately cruel and don’t harm humans willingly. Tigers become man-eaters by unfortunate circumstance, usually due to negligence or stupidity on the part of humans.

The Champawat tigress, for example, was like any other big cat until a human hunter took aim and shot her in the mouth, destroying one lower canine completely and shattering another. The tiger could no longer take down her usual prey, or at least not without serious difficulty. At some point — perhaps after encountering the body of a person it did not kill — the tigress realized she could survive on human flesh.

If that hadn’t happened, those 436-plus souls wouldn’t have been lost, an entire region wouldn’t have been brought to its knees, and the tigress would have continued life as normal.

The vast majority of the time, tigers are content to let humans be.

“I think of the tens of thousands of men, women and children who, while working in the forests or cutting grass or collecting dry sticks, pass day after day close to where tigers are lying up and who, when they return safely to their homes, do not even know that they have been under the observation of this so called ‘cruel’ and ‘bloodthirsty’ animal,” Corbett writes.

Despite his reputation as the man to enlist when a man-eater terrorized a region, Corbett saw the way things were trending a century ago, and begged people to let the big cats live undisturbed.

“A tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage,” he wrote, “and that when he is exterminated — as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support — India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna.”

Corbett would undoubtedly be deeply disturbed by the situation today, with only some 4,000 wild tigers remaining in the entire world, and the glorious species mostly reduced to spending life in captivity, constantly sedated so that idiots can pay to take selfies with them.

The Man-Eaters of Kumaon follows Corbett on 10 hunts of man-eating tigers and leopards. It’s also a story of life in the British Raj, rural life in India, Corbett’s jungle adventures, his love for his loyal hunting dog and his turn toward conservation.

Schedule:

We can do the short story in a week, yeah? Let’s shoot for one week for The Game of Rat and Dragon, and two weeks for The Man-Eaters of Kumaon. We’ll adjourn and discuss in follow-up posts. Happy reading!