That Time Buddy Caused A Bidding War Among European Princesses And Other Admirers
Ladies bid furiously for a dinner date with Buddy the Cat.
Tag: Buddy the Cat
Happy Birthday, Flossie: World’s Oldest Cat Turns 30!
Despite her advanced age and loss of hearing, Flossie is still “affectionate and playful,” her human says.
When Flossie was born, Mariah Carey, Coolio and Pearl Jam ruled the airwaves alongside a band called Deep Blue Something with their hit, “Breakfast At Tiffany’s.”
Robert Deniro and Al Pacino were kings of the box office for their film, Heat, alongside Robin Williams’ Jumanji and Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride Part II. Bill Clinton was still serving his first term as president, and the internet was in its infancy as a network available to the wider public after years of use by the military and academics, with users connecting via cumbersome and painfully slow modems.
Your humble correspondent was just a kid, and Buddy wouldn’t be born for almost another 20 years.
Yet Flossie’s still going and just celebrated her 30th birthday on Dec. 29. The tortoiseshell was officially named the world’s oldest cat in 2022 when she was 26 years old. Flossie, originally a stray living near a hospital, was adopted by her first human, a healthcare worker. When that woman passed away, her sister became Flossie’s caretaker. And in August of 2022, having outlived two of her humans, Flossie was taken in by the UK’s Cats Protection, who carefully screened applicants until settling on Victoria Green, who lived in Orpington, UK.
“I’ve always wanted to give older cats a comfortable life,” Green said when she was chosen as Flossie’s caretaker.
Flossie was deaf and had “limited eyesight,” veterinarians noted when they helped Guiness World Records verify the long-lived feline’s age. But despite that, Flossie remains “affectionate and playful,” Green said.
“I feel like I’m not sharing my home with the oldest cat. I feel like this is her home and I’m encroaching on her space,” Green told Guinness World Records at the time. “She’s a very nice roommate and we get on very well. I don’t feel like I’m living with a senior.”
The oldest cat on record was Creme Puff of Austin, Texas, who was born in August of 1967 and lived until 1995, when Flossie was born.
We wish the birthday girl a happy one and hope she’s got at least a few more birthdays in her.
Felis Catus Navidad!
Zzzzzzz…zzzzzz…zzzzz…wait, what?! Oh. Merry Christmas!
The Buddies wish all of you a wonderful Christmas filled with warmth, love, turkey, and lots of awesome stuff from Santa Claws!
Thank you for reading PITB and for being advocates for our furry friends!
Festivus 2025: Sit Down, Because Little Buddy’s Airing Of Grievances Is Extensive!
Another year, another Festivus for the Rest of Us.
This year marks the 29th Festivus of the Festivus Revival Era, when Cosmo Kramer convinced Frank Costanza to bring back the beloved holiday that eschews the excessive commercialism of the modern holiday season.
We enthusiastically celebrate Festivus annually at Casa de Buddy and here on the blog, but if you’re joining us for the first time and you’re not familiar with the tradition, we can help get you up to speed by referring back to the wisdom of Frank Costanza, who founded the holiday:
Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way!
Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?
Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that, a new holiday was born. A Festivus for the rest of us!
Festivus was popularized by Seinfeld in the 1997 episode “The Strike,” and presented as a holiday celebrated by the Costanza family under duress, at the insistence of Frank Costanza, the insane father of George Costanza.
But the holiday was not invented for the show — it was a real tradition invented by Dan O’Keefe Sr., father of Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe, in the 1960s. The younger O’Keefe had no plans to work it into an episode of the sitcom, and blames his “loudmouth brother” for bringing it up at a party for the Seinfeld cast and crew.
O’Keefe pleaded with his colleagues not to write it into an episode, but by that point Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the main creative forces behind the show, were already intrigued and couldn’t be talked out of it.
In a 2017 interview, Dan O’Keefe said he believed his father’s made-up holiday was “too weird” for the TV audience, but Seinfeld has always been about the absurd and the nonsensical.
The audience loved it, and in the almost three decades since, Festivus has grown in popularity. It’s celebrated in homes, neighborhood bars, offices and other places as a non-secular holiday for which people don’t have to worry about bringing gifts and it’s okay to be a little grumpy.
As testament to its widespread popularity and its place in modern American culture, Festivus has been recognized as a culturally significant event by the Library of Congress.
On the surface, Festivus is superficially similar to Christmas. It involves a gathering of family and friends, a holiday dinner and a warm atmosphere.
But in a rejection of holiday consumerism, Festivus is not celebrated with a tree or candles. Instead, the primary decoration is an unadorned Festivus pole, usually made out of aluminum. (“I find tinsel distracting,” Frank Costanza explained.)
Festivus dinner begins with the Airing of Grievances and ends with the Feats of Strength.
The head of the family declares “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it!”
It should come as no surprise that cats, who have high standards for service, would have their owh list of disappointments. Behold, Little Buddy the Cat’s grievances for 2025:
Big Buddy: It has come to my attention that you portray me as a wimp on MY blog! Apparently your claims about me running from vacuums and the rustling of paper bags are running jokes in your posts. These heresies shall not go unpunished! I am a tiger!
Readers of PITB: Et tu, friends of Little Buddy? And here I thought I had admirers who appreciate me for being the dashing, beguiling, intelligent and meowscular feline I am. As punishment, I shall refuse to do anything amusing for at least a month, depriving you of stories about my witty ripostes and magnificent adventures.
Smudge the Neighbor Cat: Your time will come soon, my friend. Very soon. Nobody tangles with Buddy and…uh…gets untangled. Or something. You think I don’t know you’ve been surreptitiously marking my front door with your foul stench? I’ll be keeping a close eye on you, so you’d better not try any of your sneaky stuff!
The Jaguars of the Amazon: Once again, you my homies! You know how to make a fellow apex predator feel at home, and you can be reliably called upon when I need a vacuum destroyed or dogs intimidated. I got your backs! I love you guys.
Santa Claws: Last year’s gifts were a bit sub par, if I’m being honest. I’m a good boy, and as a good boy, I deserve toys! I have left the Christmas tree alone this year, I don’t scratch the couch, and I only puked on Big Buddy’s bed once. It’s technically my bed anyway, so it’s not like I did it on purpose. Trust me, I almost felt bad when Big Buddy had to replace the sheets and wash the old ones twice. And I don’t know what you may have heard regarding those vile rumors about me smacking Big Buddy in his sleep, but they’re really light taps with my paw. Smack is such a harsh word. Can I have new toys now?
What’s With The Stories Claiming Men Don’t Bond With Or Listen To Their Feline Buddies?
There’s a disconnect between the usually careful language of research studies and the exaggerated claims of news articles.
The headlines over the past few weeks have all been variations on the same riff: cats meow more frequently to male caregivers because we don’t know how to bond with the little stinkers, we disregard their feelings, and we ignore their pleas.
Others are more blunt in their assessment, like a story from YourTango that stated women “bond deeply” with cats, whereas we men are merely “manipulated” by them.
“Other studies have found that women are much better at giving their cats more attention, understanding their cats’ emotions, and are more likely to mimic their cats’ vocalization, too,” the YourTango story claims. “Whereas for men, the same cannot be said. Considering they tend to give affection more sparingly than women, it’s no wonder that the dynamic is different.”
Just picture it: women levitating above the rest of us, sharing their amazing Female Affection with the poor, emotionally starved pet felines who belong to men. If we’re trying to get rid of the “crazy cat lady” stereotype and spread the idea that cats are great companions for every kind of person, this probably isn’t helping.
So what’s the source of these claims?
Apparently a study out of Turkey that involved just 31 cats and their humans. All of the human participants were Turkish, and just 13 of them were male. All were recruited online. (And for some parts of the study, like the analysis of greetings by owner gender, only 26 participants were included because the other five did not submit complete data, including the ages of their cats.)
It’s important to make a distinction between what the study’s authors claim and what the media reports, because they’re almost always two different things.
The research team from the University of Ankara counted more meows directed at the 13 male caregivers in their study compared to the 18 female caregivers. In their paper, the team acknowledged their sample size was too small to draw any conclusions, and lacked the demographic diversity to rule out innumerable potential reasons why those 13 cats meowed more frequently than the 18 cats cared for by women.
Even with a more robust sample size including men of different ages, social classes, and nationalities, correlation is not causation, and it may be that the apparent difference in feline vocalizations disappears with a larger study group that more accurately reflects universal demographics.
Indeed, the study’s authors state clearly that feline greeting behavior is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that defies straightforward explanation.” (Emphasis ours.)
The conclusion, as always, is that we need more data, which is one reason why studies must be repeatable.
That nuance doesn’t make it into listicles or stories optimized for maximum shareability on Facebook, so instead we get headlines that present studies as the last word instead of the first tentative steps to understanding a phenomenon.
In case it wasn’t obvious, there is no data to support the claim that men “give attention more sparingly” than women, or that women are better at reading feline emotions. We don’t even have baselines or criteria for those claims. How do we objectively measure “better” when it comes to reading cats, especially when every cat and human bonded pair have their own pidgin “language”? What’s the “right” amount of attention?
As the loyal servant of an infamously talkative cat, I’m not sure gender makes any difference. Bud’s vocal tendencies were already present from kittenhood, and I simply nurtured them by engaging in conversations with him, giving him loads of attention and doting on him.
Often our conversations go like this:
Bud: “Mreeeoww! Mow mow! Brrrrrt a bruppph!”
Me: “I know, little dude. You told me, remember?”
Bud: “Brrrrrr! Brrrruppp! Yerp!”
Me: “Yes, but they’ve tried that already. It’s not just about tokamak design, it’s…”
Bud: “Merrrrrp! Mow mow!”
Me: “No, it’s about plasma containment. No containment, no reaction, no energy gain!”
Bud: “Brrrrr! Mrrrowww! Brupbrupbrrrruppp!”
Me: “Yeah, well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
I really do talk about science and science fiction with my cat, since he seems to respond to it. Of course it’s gotta be at least partially due to my tone, but strangely if I talk to him about other abstract things, he acts like I’m bothering him with so much human nonsense.
Regardless, Buddy and I object to the claim that a talkative cat is a disengaged or neglected cat. It’s not that he talks a lot, it’s that he never stops!
Pain In The Bud 