Pets

At this point many of you cat fanatics, much like most cats, are up in arms and ready to rearrange my various internal organs in a playful and festive manner.

"Rich 'Lowtax' Kyanka, you don't know what the heck you're talking about! My cat, Mr. Flushkins, is the most sweetest and gentle creature in the world! He lets me pet him and play with him all the time! He's great with kids! He built the Lincoln Memorial! He invented silicon! You obviously don't have any idea what you're talking about, and if my cat wasn't currently stripping all the flesh off my leg, I'd continue to assault you with a barrage of curse words and insults!"

While I freely admit that 99% of the information for my articles can be attributed to "wild speculation and flat-out lies", my knowledge of cats does not fall into this category at all. For one, I own a cat myself. This is because I live in an apartment and we're not supposed to own pets, so to skirt around that rule, I bought a cat, which is legally considered as "furniture."

In addition, I am also now the proud owner of a handy guide entitled "Cat Talk", which can be found at the checkout stand of many fine Vons grocery stores. This is one of those tiny booklets the size of a business card, aimed at the "over 100-years old" demographic that spends all their food stamps on tonic water, after dinner mints, and Lotto tickets. "Cat Talk" is one of the most informative and helpful books you'll ever have somebody literate read to you, and is full of highly useful factual tidbits as the following (which are really in the book):

"A cat is not a human: Bet you don't have many human friends who greet you by rubbing their cheeks against your feet, kneading your underarms or "mooning" you - yet these are traditional greetings practiced by even the most refined felines."

The book makes a distinguishing comparison right off the bat, proving conclusively that humans are in fact NOT cats. The age-old mystery that has baffled scholars and scientists alike has finally been solved, and you can pick up evidence next to the Bic cigarette lighters and AAA batteries at RevCo.

As I have demonstrated with my remarkable Photoshop abilities, cats do NOT equal humans.

"Myth: It's not safe to let the cat near your baby. It could smother or suffocate the infant. Truth: The old wive's tale about cats sucking the breath from babies persists, although it has no basis in fact."

I can vouch for that one. I mean, why the hell would the cat bother suffocating the baby, which can take up to 30 seconds of applied pressure, when it can simply leap onto the kid's face and perform a Mexican hat dance of painful shredding and clawing?

"Now that I'm three years old and weigh 12 and a half pounds, my 'feed the starving kitten' routine doesn't work as well as it used to, but that's OK, since I don't seem to have a kitten's metabolism anymore."

I think the author just kind of lost it at this point, because I find it highly dubious that her cat has the ability to type so coherently. I put my cat on my keyboard and all he was able to type was "jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj" before deciding my right hand was a scratching post, so I doubt anybody who writes grocery store books for a living has a cat that can do any better. I don't blame her though, if I had to write an entire book about cats and how they're the greatest pet in the history of the universe, I'd probably go nuts too. Shortly after stabbing somebody in a botched convenience store robbery, that is.