I like to play a little game with my cat. One of her favorite things to do is lick my nose, while a scritchel her along her spine (most especially at the base of the tail). A typical Pavlovian response, I start scritcheling her, and the tongue comes out, and begins rapidly licking my nose. So sometimes I’ll hold my face just out her reach, start scritcheling her, and her tongue will stick out and rapidly begin flicking the air, desperately trying to reach the end of my nose. And yes, I will scritchel for a second, stop, wait until her tongue stops moving, and then start scritcheling again to get the tongue going again, and repeating the process for as long as I can. 
These are great stories. 
One of my friends has a cat who is slightly athsmatic. She has learned to use this to her advantage. When I’m over at her house and happen to be eating something the cat finds yummy, she’ll come sit beside me, with her nose inches from my face. If you ignore her, she’ll begin to wheeze, ever so slightly. Continue to ignore her, and she wheezes more and more loudly. When you finally look at her, she leans in closer and widens her eyes at you with this look like she wants to eat you. By this time you are thoroughly annoyed/freaked out and give her a bite of what you’re eating. Wheezing ceases, cat disappears.
Not long ago, my cat Lloyd woke me up in the wee hours of the morning because he wanted to go outside. I was exhausted, and barely able to achieve consciousness, yet I had a great idea! Instead of walking all the way to the other end of the cold house, I would put Lloyd out the handiest window. (Lloyd and his brother Bruno have managed to remove nearly all of our window screens.) With eyes mostly closed, I applied Lloyd to the opening of the bathroom window, but mysteriously, he did not go out. I pushed harder, but still met with resistance. Finally, I opened my eyes to prepare for a ferocious effort…and found that I had been trying to squeeze the kitty out of one of the few windows that still had a screen.
Lloyd was then taken to the other end of the cold, dark house and let out, none the worse for wear, but a bit bewildered at the unprecedented mashing he had received.
I am enjoying this thread immensely! Thank you so much for starting it, Amazon Floozy Goddess. I needed some cheering up, and there’s nothing like cute cat stories to bring a smile to my soul.
I put a belled safety-catch collar on my Rio the other day to help reduce his hunting habit. Unfortunately, he freaked over the collar. The flipping and running I expected (especially with the bell). What I didn’t expect was for him to completely freak out and start gagging and puking even though the collar was quite loose! I had to take it off him. Dumb cat.
I know three cats who display this behavior – scritch them near their butt, and the wild licking begins. It doesn’t matter what is in front of them, they must lick it. And if there is nothing there, then licking air will have to suffice. Odd…
We had a black cat named Georgia. We had her spayed too late and she would go into heat so bad that porn stars would have been embarrased at her brazen performances. She would do an act with mine or my dads shoe, hugging it with all fours like a body pillow while making a strange half moan, half meow sound.
Anyway, we lived in a house where the living room at the front of the house was halfway between the first and second floor. So to go from upstairs down to the first floor meant six steps down to the living room, turn 180 degrees and then six steps down again.
Georgia was doing a pole dance with the railing at the top of the stairs when my dad took his dinner (A bowl of soup) downstairs on a tray. I’m sitting upstairs. I watch my dad disappear down the lower set of stairs as the cat experiences a particularly moving moment of desire and writhes on her back. And writhes right off the edge of the stairwell onto the lower staircase. She missed my dad, landing right behind him and then ran off to the laundry room. My sister was downstairs and said it was hilarious seeing my dad coming very carefully down the stairs when the cat falls out of nowhere and lands behind him.
Another time at the same spot:
The cat has killed a mouse. My dad calls us and presents said mouse, holding it by the tail while he stands on the lower stairs looking up at us. As he’s telling us where he found it, he lets his arm drop lower. He can’t see what we all see from above. The cat is still VERY interested in the mouse. So when he lowers his arm, the cat runs over and bats the mouse out of his hand. Dad freaks, thinking that the mouse is still alive. While he’s doing the panic dance, the cat grabs the mouse and runs off with her prize.
Cat! *CAT!!*CAT!!!
The joke’s on me. Arch himself would have made clear to me he was a cat, not a car–cars, after all, were driven (and manufactured) by silly humans like the ones who kept hanging around in his house. 
Pinkfreud, your Skunkie looks almost like Archie did, except the only part of his face that was white, was his whiskers and lower jaw. And he had sort of a “crest” in white on his chest.
But I just keep imagining this big wooly car going down the road…wind blowing the fur back. Like a mainecoon on wheels.
Be bugger to keep washed and brushed, though.
Well, with Archie the CAT we didn’t even try–we’re cat lovers from way back.
My sister once tried. She filled a bathtub full of water and brought him into the bathroom. I could hear him shriek! As if he were saying, “Janice, don’t you DARE put me in that water!!”
Minou is the French equivalent of “kitty”, so I’m surprised there aren’t more cats with that name.
Our 13yo daughter is very interested in languages in general. We got Paka before we got Minou, and he got his name because paka is apparently the Swahili word for “cat”. I am fluent in French, and lived France for several years, so minou was chosen for the second cat.
This gal has always maintained her queenly dignity (aside from the picture that is) except for one memorable occasion.
I had been scraping wallpaper off my bedroom wall with a putty knife to which I had tied a string with a loop in it because I got tired of dropping the darned thing then having to climb back down the ladder to retrieve it. I had laid the putty knife down on a chair when I was done for the day and forgotten about it. Until I heard this commotion and saw a black streak go whizzing by me with the putty knife bouncing along behind. Seems that my curious kitty had gotten her head through the string loop and been startled so she took off. Problem was this darned thing that kept following her all through the house. I was in the middle of changing clothes so I couldn’t run after her right away-also I was laughing too hard to stand up straight. I could track her progress through the house by listing for the thumping of the putty knife. Every couple of seconds I could see her racing by the doorway, getting lower and lower to the ground and accelerating with each pass. By the time I finally got my jeans on and went after her she’d managed to catch the string on a piece of furniture and break it. I found her hiding under my bed. It took some minutes of cuddling before she was over her fright. I’m not sure she’s ever gotten over my laughing at her.
Another one about Forbes. (pinkfreud’s story Leela finds a mousie reminded me of Forbes’s one and only encounter with a rodent.
Between assignments we would stay with a friend that was not in the running for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Sitting in the living room one afternoon, suddenly, Lori yeeped and Forbes bolted.
It took a second for me to realize he wasn’t scared, he was after something.
Being a totally indoor cat, the fastest thing he ever chased was maybe a Crane fly.
Lori then wispered “mouse.”
Knowing Forbes had never eaten raw meat, or anything except his Science Diet, I went after him. I found him in the bathroom closet. From my angle of vision, it appeared he was gobbling up the poor little mousie. But, no. Not Forbes… I said he was mellow, didn’t I? And friendly, He was a friendly kitty…
With paw firmly on the mousie tail, Forbes was giving the poor thing a bath!.. As well as a little mousie heart attack!
We put the mousie outside, and Forbes finished the bath on himself.
Ok, while I was listing a bit, I really meant listening for the thumping.
Reading about the cat car stories reminds me of Miracle cat. A friend of mine has two farms about three miles apart. He (the biped) has a thing about rats. With all the grain bins and corn, there can be a lot of rats depending on the season. The solution is to have a lot of barn cats at each farm. They provide huge bowls of cat food for the managerie but the fuzzie monsters come and go and propogate at will. **Miracle cat ** would jump on the back of the flatbed pickup truck and surf on the hay bales from farm to farm all the time.
They have a few indoor/outdoor cats as well. Momma cat (who is finally spayed) will not allow any biped to dane to touch her. It was a tin of tuna to finally coaxed her into the carrier to get her to the vet. I imagine the staff still has scars from that adventure. Two years ago (almost, as of May 25th) she gave birth to litter on a bed with a biped sleeping right there. This the cat who advoids all people, had here litter there, go figure.
I brought home two of the fuzzies. Both boys, one long hair and one short hair, both all black and white name Stan and Ollie. The funniest thing they do is to block the door and cry when I go to work each morning. Then they run to the window and watch me drive away. As soon as they hear the door they are at the door to say hi purring madly as I come in.
OK not a funny story, but that’s my fuzzie monsters and I’m their happy biped.
I’m presuming you haven’t seen Catbus, aka Neko Bus.
Here’s a real cat bus from Burning Man 2002.
This is about the first cat we had when I was a kid and also about my father’s first attempt at DIY. bear in mind that he is a proud man and doesn’t like to admit to his mistakes (well, who does). For the three days he was decorating the living room he had banished the rest of us, even my mum wasn’t allowed to peep.
Finally we were allowed to see the finished result, that’s me, my big brother, Mum and Sooty the cat, who had been wanting to get back in the room the whole time. The paintwork was fine, everything ok there, and as for the wallpaper, well, it was hung razor straight and the pattern matched up, but the bubbles, oh my god the bubbles! There wasn’t a square inch of that paper that wasn’t pockmarked.
Everyone stared around the room, “It’s lovely,” said Mum “It’s lovely.” we repeated, knowing our cue. Really everyone appreciated the work Dad had put in, we didn’t want to hurt his feelings and we’d get used to the bubbles, we would, they added texture, nobody else had paper like that! But the cat knew what we were thinking. His living room had changed and the humans were pretending to be happy but they weren’t. Even Dad wasn’t really happy though he was somehow responsible for the changes. Sooty inspected the room, sniffed at the new paint – the trouble wasn’t there. Sniffed at the wall, that was it! He reared up on his hind paws and methodically raked that bubbly paper, making three pairs of quadruple scoremarks before stalking back into the hallway, flicking his tail in disgust. He had never done anything so naughty in his life, not even as a giddy kitten. “Sooty!” said my my Mum. Transfixed we held our breath, waiting for my Dad to …
“Right,” said Dad “I’ll have to replace the lot!”
“Yes,” said Mum “we will.”
Nothing at all was said to the cat and nothing more about the disaster that had befallen Dad’s hard work. We had our dinner and Dad went back to town for more supplies – including as it happens a slightly more expensive paper (evidentally the bubbles were the result of not spending enough money). The following day the room was finished for good – this time with perfect, smooth, bubble free walls. This time our congratulations were unfettered, Sooty left the paper alone, and Dad admitted how relieved he had been to have an excuse to rip it down and start again. Clever cat. Subsequently Sooty confined his wallpaper shredding to the bit covered by the curtain in the upstairs hallway which we didn’t discover for ages. Very clever cat.
At least you didn’t suddenly have a boneless kitty. I once put a harness on Pythagoras, the dear siamese who went to live with my second husband after a long and heated custody battle. The way he let me know he HATED the harness, was to run, franticly once around the room, then fall at my feet completely limp. At first I tried to put him up on his feet, but he was boneless! For a moment I thought thst he had somehow broken is neck! I quickly took the harness off to better assess any injury, whne he popped back to his feet and gracefully walked away.
After that, I’d put it on him just to see if he’d still be boneless… Every time, once, for nearly an hour.
I love it. Love it!
I have another friend whose cat tries to lick their fish through the aquarium glass. Not to eat them up - there’s obvious affection there.