Chiff and Fipple Forums

PhilO wrote:Ok, Wombat, so I've actually been toiling for years for my cats without any remuneration at all - obtaining and preparing and serving them meals every day, brushing them, petting them, letting them sit on my lap whilst trying to read (I'm the one reading), and cleaning up after them! And what do I get in return? Just constant love and affection and eternal amusement (I guess I still owe them after all).

PhilO

Sorry, Phil. I alternate between being a cat person and a dog person. At the moment I'm a dog person.

Apology accepted

PhilO

This really cute. The funny part though is I live 20 minutes from Frederick and this is the first I heard of it. I wonder if they can be trained to steal Overtons and Albas.

Ron

You reminded me of an item broadcast on NPR a while back--June 2001--about a lady who studied starlings and mimicry and their apparent improvisation using sounds they've heard. This one whistles, too, and enjoys basketball games, shouting "Defense! Defense!"

Link to audio here: http://discover.npr.org/features/featur ... Id=1124847

5 mins., 36 sec.

M

Hilarious.

I recall that a story of a pet starling was featured in the Mabinogion, sent from a lady under durance vile in Ireland to fly back to Wales with a spoken message.

Sounds like they would make very interesting pets indeed!

Wow Jerry! That is so cool. They had to have seen people putting the quarters into the machine and figured out that they were inside and that they had to climb in and find them. Amazing! Thank god we don't have that problem with our 4 cats.

Dang, Jerry, you scared the heck out of me. I thought you had a batch of tweaked whistles ripped off and it would delay my order!!! (Thought I'd have to resort to the black market...)
Tony

Well, Tony ...

See, there's this bird that's been coming to the window a lot. I didn't think anything of it, but then I began to notice he seems to be attracted to bright, silvery objects. And he seems to have a fascination for the color blue ...

Best wishes,
Jerry

We lost a duck a couple month ago that way. He got copper poisoning from swallowing coins and other shiny objects. The Vet X-rayed her and found 2 coins, wire clippings and screws.

I had a parakeet that loved to pester me, especially when I played the whistle.

He would sit on my top index finger and put his beak up to the windway, then bite me when I had to move my finger.

He would try to sit on the neck of my bagpipes and talk, but he would always crap on my fingers and I would have to chase him off.

He would steal my lighter off the workbench and drag it off across the room.

When I would light the alcohol lamp or the propane torch, he would "flick his bic" as soon as he spotted me picking it up.

I really miss him.

Birds are evil. I learned that from a Hitchcock movie.

As a kid I had a parakeet. He had the run (flight?) of the house. We had this gigantic ventilation fan which vented air out of the house and into the driveway. Someone took the screen off to clean, forgetting about the bird being out. Bird flies in vicinity of fan, gets sucked in, whacked by a big metal blade and deposited featherless in the dirt on the driveway. Never knew what hit it. The feathers are quickly distributed evenly on the driveway.

We tell this story to a cousin of mine. When we get to the part about all the feathers being knocked off the bird, she asks "Oh! Did they grow back?"

We had this cat that would go up inside the engine area of a car to keep warm.

One day, I got in the car and started the engine and heard a strange noise. I backed the car up and suddenly a cloud of fur came up in the air from the grill of the car and this black streak of lightning (high-speed cat) shot across the yard at intense speed. I've never seen a cat run that fast before. It was so fast that it was like a blur.


The cat survived, but I don't think it went up into cars anymore.

Daniel, had a similar experience with an oppossum, once.

When we were first married my wife used to drive rather huge car, a late '70s Plymouth Fury (she's tiny - I swear she had to peer out through the steering wheel while driving). The size extended to the engine compartment - even though it had a V8 engine, there was a LOT of unused room inside the engine compartment.

At the time, we were living in a condo complex that was only a block away from a stream - though officially a "park" all this meant was that the area wasn't built up; it was as close to wilderness as you'll find in a major city, complete with animals.

One Saturday morning my wife asked me to check her car's oil level, so I went out (still half-asleep) to do so. I reached down, unlatched the hood, and leaned over the engine - to suddenly find myself face-to-face with a very large, very angry possum, who had probably climbed in the night before to enjoy the warmth from the engine.

Despite their reputation, when cornered possums are just as likely to fight as run - and I'd given it no time to run, anyway. Did you know they can open their mouth nearly 180 degrees? Or that they have LOTS of teeth? Or that they hiss? Add that to an appearance rather like an overgrown rat (think of a rat the size of a LARGE cat) and it was nothing you want to confront from a distance of 10 inches.

I yelled and leaped back; the possum stood it's ground and continued to hiss at me. I grabbed a (long!) stick and prodded it until (not without a few dirty looks) it gave up and clambered out of the engine and waddled off across the parking lot to hide under another car.

I must say that the experience did wake me up, though I still prefer coffee.

My house Polecat swipes anything he can lay his paws on. I recntly found a load of small change buried under the corner of a carpet and the flute cleaning rod that I swore hubby had moved. Some of the stuff he tries to swipe is bigger than him as well.