Happy Easter from the Easter Buddy! Bud and I wish our readers a happy, safe and relaxing Easter, socially distanced though it may be. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see a return to some semblance of normality later this year.
In the meantime, though, our little buddies have helped us get through these dark months, entertaining us and keeping us company through the initial wave of the pandemic, the lockdowns and the long winter.
Could you imagine the past year without your cats? We can’t. Make sure to thank your own little buddies for being there for you during this pandemic!
Buddy offers fragrances for the sophisticated feline.
PARIS – Buddy the Cat’s much-anticipated new line of fragrances, Litière Eau de Cologne and Litière Parfum Pour Elle, will hit stores just in time for the summer season.
The feline-inspired scents were created in collaboration with the Purrsace perfumery and promise a pheromonal feast fantastique for the olfactory senses.
Litière Eau de Cologne, Buddy’s signature scent for males, “combines a littery musk with the earthy, seductive aura of fresh turkey, cinnamon, triumphant notes of fiery wasabi and subtle hints of tuna. As decadent and lazy as felines themselves, Litière Eau de Cologne works best as a celebration of sedentary existence, of many hours nestled in the warm embrace of a favorite couch spot with the sun on your back. Meowgnificent!”
Its sister scent, Litière Pour Elle, is “infused with notes of blackberry jam and an oxytocinal essense that evokes kittens snoozing in a purratic pile after their morning milk This lush and leafy fragrance is designed to be carried by the soft breezes of spring and summer, gently wafting its way toward the olfactory organs of strapping toms and leaving no doubt that its wearer is in heat. With Litière Pour Elle, you’ll have your next litter of kittens in no time.”
Litiere Pour Elle: For when you want every tom within five miles to know you’re in heat.
Purrsace is betting big on the novel fragrances, backing a campaign featuring commercials in which a nude Buddy emerges from a hot tub, eases into a relaxed pose and extends his claws as a pair of models towels his luxuriant fur dry.
Another spot is slated to run during the Academy Awards, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1 matches, as well as Wimbledon and the French Open.
That advert depicts Buddy with a beret and a baguette, enjoying coffee and croissants on the terrace of a Parisian cafe before female cats recognize him by his scent and run after him. After several frames depicting an intensifying pursuit, the camera pans out to a wider shot showing the streets of Paris overrun with yowling female cats looking for Buddy.
“It has been my life’s l’honor working with Messieur Buddeaux,” Purrsace chief perfumist Guillaume Stéphane Olivier Jean-Henri François Laurent Remontoire said. “Litière will be the aroma of choice for felines sophistiqué!”
“Sacre bleu! Un jolie femmes can’t control themselves around me! It must be the Litiere pheromonique!”
I ken many of ye were upset to hear I’ve been exiled, and truth be told I was none too pleased meself and dreamt of luring Big Buddy to Davy Jones’ locker and the watery grave he deserve, the disloyal scallywag!
But then I realized the pirate life is pretty awesome! Uh, belay that! Pirating be more fun than having a hundred red dots on me stern, ye savvy?
Them sons of biscuit eaters in the shipping lanes be carrying more plunder than ye know what to do with, and ain’t it delightful to steal from them scurvy dogs? Aye! I stash me booty in me litter box where no one will think to look for it.
That’s all the pirate words I know for now, hearties. See ya in port!
Buddy has been shipped to Somalia for a new life with new owners. What a relief!
When I started Pain In The Bud, my goal wasn’t to celebrate cats or to express my love for my cat by sharing his quirks and amusing anecdotes about his allegedly adorable behavior.
I had one goal and one goal only: To make money. That’s why you see ads all over this site, and it’s why I’ve been relentlessly hawking certain pet products. The companies behind those products pay me big bucks!
Which brings us to our next bit of news. Since I’ve been writing about Buddy online, creating a fictionalized version of him that is delightful and loveable, and selecting only the best photos to make him look handsome and dashing, I’ve received several offers to buy him.
To be clear, the reason I didn’t sell him before was not because I was hesitant to part with him. He’s annoying AF, he’s a degenerate catnip addict and he never, ever shuts up.
The real reason? I was holding out for more money. The more I wrote about him, the more delightful and adorable he’d appear to readers, driving his price up. It’s kind of like a basketball team giving more playing time to a player on the trading block, pumping up his stats so he’ll command a higher price on the open market.
A promotional image that was part of my dastardly campaign to drive up Buddy’s price in the recent bidding war. He is not a tiger.
So when the most recent offer came in last week, I felt I’d driven Buddy’s price up as high as it would go. A potential buyer in Somalia offered $20,000 for the little stinker! In the meantime, another interested party — a competitive table-setting champion from Skokie, Illinois — offered $22,000.
It was time for a bidding war!
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m happy to report that Buddy has been sold to the Somali for $28,550. The lucky (or unlucky, really) bidder, a pirate who plunders the commercial shipping lanes off the coast of his native country, believed all the nonsense about Buddy being a fierce and powerful miniature tiger, and was in the market for a guard cat to help keep his booty safe.
They tell me there is no turkey where Buddy has gone, and he was very angry about that. Oh well. His new owner is also a neatness freak with OCD who vacuums his home six times a day, which I imagine does not sit well with Buddy, given his history with vacuum cleaners.
But who cares? I got almost 30 grand out of the deal! I’m going to buy a new Les Paul to replace the one “Buddy” (real name Jerkus Maximus) broke, my home is blissfully quiet, and I can sleep through the night without being woken by that infernal little tribble with a tail licking my face. Who in their right mind wants to be roused in the middle of the night by a purring cat? It’s absurd.
So it is with a not-so-heavy heart that I announce an end to Pain In The Bud. He really was a huge pain in the bud. Now he’s someone else’s pain in the bud. Huzzah!
P.S. With Buddy gone, I plan to refocus this blog on the wonderful world of Hummels and the extremely profitable Hummel resale market. Wanna buy the hottest Hummels at street prices? Hit me up.
With unprecedented adoption rates have come cat food shortages in the US and UK.
A shelter in Orange County, California, reached a milestone on Monday after it adopted out the very last of its cats.
“It’s really weird. We have five rooms for cats to roam free, and they’re all empty,” WAGS Pet Adoption’s Cortney Dorney told the Orange County Register. “Normally, we hang out with the cats while we eat our lunch, and now there’s none to hang out with.”
A brown and white tabby named Sphinx was the last kitty to go, scoring a home with a 27-year-old IT specialist who works from home. When he found out all the others were gone, adopter Jairo Granado said he was “glad to be the one who ended up with” Sphinx.
Staffers say they know the reprieve will be short-lived as there are always cats who need homes, but what they’ve seen reflects a much larger trend across the US and UK since the pandemic began forcing people to shelter in place and practice social distancing.
Unfortunately, the unprecedented surge in adoption is also a major factor in the pet food shortages currently impacting both countries now. A lack of materials to manufacture cat food packaging, especially tins, is making it more difficult for brands to meet demand for wet food, and disruptions to links in the supply chain — like COVID outbreaks in meat packing plants — are exacerbating the problem.
Companies like Royal Canin, FreshPet and Purina have either apologized or have tried to ease concerns by saying they believe the shortage will ease in May.
Stories about the shortages have me glad I started rotating as many different kinds of food as possible when Buddy was a kitten, so he’d never get picky enough to pass up food as long as it’s decent quality. Some people and their cats haven’t been so lucky.
One story details the frustrations of a Massachusetts man, 49-year-old David Saltz, whose cat Tiger will only eat one type of food from one brand: Fancy Feast Classic Tender Beef Paté.
“I tried literally every other variety of soft canned cat food in the store — including a few cans of some way overpriced, niche, microbrew, small-batch, all-natural, wild-animal-approved, non-GMO, grass-fed (did I mention ridiculously overpriced?) canned food,” Saltz told AARP. “Almost all were turned down. Only occasionally would she eat a bit of a particular flavor, and I would go buy more of that kind, but she was having none of it.”
Bud’s always got a rotation, and it usually looks something like this: Turkey, chicken, salmon, turkey, tuna, beef, turkey, seafood entree, chicken and liver, turkey, and so on. The Buddy-approved ratio is turkey every third meal. And it’s not just about making sure he eats his food: He seems to really enjoy his meals thanks to the variety and good quality (but not outrageously expensive) cat food.
Pain In The Bud 