Little Buddy the Cat tells humans how they can mark this day dedicated to the most awesome species on Earth.
Happy National Cat Day! To help us learn about this important day and what it means, we turn it over to Little Buddy the Cat:
“Ahem. Is this thing on? Okay. Good!
National Cat Day was founded to help buddies all across America find homes. Did you know about three million of us enter the shelter system every year? That’s a lot of cats who don’t have homes, couches, food bowls, toys, favorite blankets, regular meals, and most importantly love. They don’t have humans to tell them how amazingly cute they are, and to transform into Furniture Mode for napping on.
“Scuse me, but how am I supposed to sing the blues about being in the big house without a harmonica?” Credit: Pexels
The best thing to do on National Cat Day is to adopt a cat, but even if you don’t have room for Additional Buddies in your domicile, there are other ways you can help!
Volunteering at your local shelter
Feeding a cat (like me) extra treats
Donating to your local shelter
Buying toys for an athletic feline (like me!) who likes to play
Foster cats or kittens for your local shelter
Letting a particularly handsome furry fellow (like me!) lay down in your lap, absorb the warm and have a nice nap
Raise awareness of stray/homeless cats, so maybe someone you know might provide a good home for a buddy
Give a good girl or good boy (like me) some catnip and silvervine, then scratch our heads and tell us how awesome we are
tl;dr version: Help other cats, spoil your own cat(s). That’s what today is for!”
Larger Buddy has been playing some stupid game about building cities, but this one’s pretty cool ’cause everything’s named after me or other cats, and there are lots of homes for little buddies.”
A bowling burglar turned out to be a cute tuxedo cat looking for a warm, safe home.
Yianni Mavrakis already has a full plate as the owner-operator of two bowling alleys, so when the alarm at one of the locations kept going off in the middle of the night, he wasn’t a happy camper.
Each tripped alarm resulted in a response by police, and Mavrakis had to physically check the premises for signs of intruders in the Chicago-area business.
Eventually he found the culprit — a stray tuxedo cat he named “Dude,” after the beloved, bowling-obsessed protagonist played by Jeff Bridges in the 1998 crime comedy The Big Lebowski.
Credit: Yianni Mavrakis
After it became clear a huge space with lots of moving machine parts and noisy crowds was no place for a feline, Mavrakis took the little guy home, where he now has a much quieter, more calm territory to call his own.
Like his film counterpart, the Dude abides. Someone get that cat some bowling shoes and a White Russian!
A viral nightmare vet visit
A woman named India, who goes by the TikTok screen name “the_unhinged_queen” says her cat returned terrified and soiling herself after one of those “we have to bring your cat to the back” moments during a trip to the veterinarian’s office.
India related the story on TikTok and says the vet’s staff acted like all was normal despite the distress the kitty was in, except for calling her cat “difficult.”
“She was covered in urine, soaking wet. They plopped her in my lap, and she’s crying,” India said in a video she recorded about the ordeal.
Back at home, the distressed British Shorthair was dragging her back leg and was in pain. India says the veterinarian called later to apologize and conceded maybe the techs had pulled her cat’s leg “farther than what, maybe, was comfortable for her.”
An examination by a second veterinarian, India said, concluded the vet techs had pulled the cat’s leg out of its socket.
This is a one-source story based on a TikTok short, published by an online site that is often credulous, so caution is warranted. Grain of salt and all that.
Still, it reminded me of my own anxiety when two vet techs couldn’t handle Bud during a visit and did the whole “we’ve gotta bring him to the back” bit.
Unlike India, who insisted her cat is sweet and gentle, I gave ample warning to the vet techs.
“Don’t worry, we deal with cats like that all the time,” one of them said.
“I don’t think you do,” I told her, urging them both to be careful.
When he mauled one of them and the tech acted surprised, I gave her an apologetic shrug. I did try to warn her.
Then they announced they needed to bring him “to the back,” which was an examination room where, I presumed, they had equipment to constrain “difficult” cats.
I sat there wincing as I heard the carnage despite the closed door. In true Buddinese fashion, it sounded like an enraged Elmo murdering half the residents of Sesame Street. I imagined dismembered Muppets and humans retreating with deep scratches on their arms as I heard Bud’s kittenish howls of indignation.
When they brought Bud back to me in his carrier he had a look that said “Chumps think they can poke me with needles? Hah!”
But the thing is, it’s a matter of trust because you really don’t know what they’re doing back there. You’re at a veterinary practice, which means you’re dealing with people who chose to work with animals. That should mean they wouldn’t harm anyone’s beloved pet, but sometimes that’s not true.
It’s a good reminder for us to check that our feline overlords are okay after vet visits, even if we’re sure the vet staff is trustworthy. If a cat is in obvious distress it means the pain must be unbearable, but it’s precisely because cats are great at hiding their pain that we should be on the lookout for signs of something wrong.
The silver tabby cat has burst onto the Looksmaxxing scene, cultivating powerful aura with his effortless style.
NEW YORK – Jeffrey “Raddog” Raddatz brought an unblemished record, a 9.7 jawline symmetry score and prestige as one of the greatest Looksmaxxers of all time to the aura battle.
His opponent? A relative unknown named Buddy the Cat with impressive canthal tilt and enviable hair silkiness stats who was nonetheless untested in the brutal world of aura battles, where only the most symmetrical Chads and Chadettes can take the heat.
The crowd, which had already been whipped into a frenzy by a packed undercard, broke into raucous applause when 19-year-old Raddatz mewed to display his high cheekbones, then peeled off his shirt to reveal abs rated 9.3 and 9.1 respectively by Looksmaxxer and Aurascore.
Martin “El Capitan” Prado, 22, holds an aggregate 9.6729 Looksmaxxing score on AuraBattles.com and the Chadversity app. Known for his signature Riz Level Gain and highly rated hair, he’s considered one of the most formidable aura battlers in the western hemisphere.
“Siuuuu!” the Raddog taunted, imitating footballer Ronaldo’s signature celebration as he flexed chiseled pectoral muscles as he goaded his stoic opponent.
By the time Raddatz had finished his blistering attack the crowd was coursing with his zesty aura.
Buddy the Cat, however, had not moved a muscle. The 12-pound tabby remained in a nonchalant curl, eyes closed, his frame rising and falling in a gentle respiratory rhythm.
Onlookers exchanged confused glances at the lack of any response when Raddatz declared premature victory.
“This cat is cringe AF and has, like, no rizzitude,” he announced, just loud enough for the crowd to hear but not so loud as to appear desperate or cause any accidental damage to his own considerable aura.
Then he added a final taunt.
“What’d yah think about that, cat?”
Without so much as a twitch, Buddy answered with a thunderous fart that echoed off the nearby playground equipment and the glass-fronted buildings around the park, amplifying the flatulent sibilance to a powerful hum.
The crowd erupted in shock and disbelief.
“This cat just mogged my man without moving a muscle! Dayyyum!” said one onlooker who was streaming the battle to an audience of more than 3.2 million.
“An unconscious mogging!” another shouted. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Imagine the kind of aura you need to pull that off! This changes everything! It’s like historical and futuristical!”
Raddatz stumbled back in shock, a single tear heralding the imminent downpour as he realized his aura had been completely shattered.
Secretary of Aura Pete Hegseth, famous for his 9.5-rated jawline and widely admired silver mop, poses with teammate Zach Nunn during the 45-and-older doubles tournament at the National Aura Championship in June of 2025.A “looksmaxxing” app popular with Gen Z users instantly destroys their self esteem, then allows them to rebuild it using the magical powers of money and social media popularity.
Ethel Studebaker, who runs the “Explained for Seniors” page on Facebook, said terms like aura farming and aura battles may seem obtuse to adults, but they’re merely the latest spins on old concepts.
“Having ‘riz’ or ‘farming aura’ are just the latest terms for trying to look cool,” she explained. “In the 70s they would have been ‘far out’ or ‘groovy,’ in the 80s they would have been ‘gnarly’ and ‘bodacious,’ and in the 90s they’d be described as ‘fresh’ or ‘diggity diggity dope,'” she explained. “Although the battling itself simply by posing is a bit eccentric, and can be compared to the famous David Bowie-judged ‘Walk Off’ between male models in the movie Zoolander.”
Asked why generations Z and Alpha would prefer posing flamboyantly in “battles” rather than engage in time-honored methods like beating the crap out of each other, Studebaker was blunt: “Because they’re a bunch of good-for-nothing weaklings who stare at their phones 20 hours a day and can’t lift a box of Wheaties.”
Peters demonstrating his bone-smashing method for viewers on TikTok looking to emulate his legendary facial symmetry.
Braden Peters, the 20-year-old known as Clavicular, praised Buddy but said he would need considerably sharper facial symmetry to “hang with the top tier riz artists.”
“The road isn’t easy,” Clavicular noted. “Some of us have been at it for years doing it the hard way, spending tens of thousands on face creams and hammering our faces with chisels to achieve those elusive last few symmetry points. But the results speak for themselves.”
Cheesy Photoshops glorifying my egotistical feline overlord are fun!
Since hopping off the AI image bandwagon I’ve rediscovered the joys of crappy Photoshops and playing with typesetting. I took the photo yesterday and thought Bud looked pretty regal and majestic.
Here is Buddy transformed to Cosmic Tiger Buddy in all his glory with his name rendered in classic wildstyle, like something you might see on the L in the 90s Bronx…if someone were corny enough to choose Buddy as their tag.
(*) The second typeset is a modified font called Knotted Center, which may not score many points for legibility, but looks pretty cool in the proper context. The third typeset is a font called TrashBrutal.
Where does your feline master rank in the newly published list?
Luna and Milo are once again the most popular cat names in the US.
The annual list was published this week by US News and World Report, which tallies the most popular names from more than 3.5 million pet insurance policies.
Luna and Milo have had quite a run, appearing as the top names or within the top five since at least 2020. Lists from Canada and the UK are usually different, with names like Poppy, Jasper, Millie, Alfie, Smudge and Daisy, but Milo and Luna feature prominently in those lists as well, often appearing in the top 10.
Buddy, a name suspiciously absent from some lists, slides in at number 22 in the US News list.
Bella, Oreo, Simba, Cleo, Oliver, Charlie and Nala remain popular names, while Catticus The Destroyer, Buddy’s name for himself, is nowhere to be found.
