Sandra's raspberry parfait was a disaster

I'm surrounded by cats today. Feral ones. There are so many of them that they are falling out of the bins. I went over to the bin hut earlier with a bag of rotten onions I found in my cupboard (don't ask) and bore witness to a cat-ocalyptic vision of what earth will be like when we all die of cat AIDS and the moggies take over. One of them already knows me. I gave him milk on one or two occasions. I now regret this, because he comes to the patio door every single night, stands on his hind legs like a human and just stares me out of it. He was perched on a bin today and as the rest of the cats stalked around oblivious to me, he stared, and stared, and stared. And then lightly trailed me back to the flat. I closed the curtains to hide from him. But guess what? He's paddling at the glass. Not scratching. Just paddling softly and knowingly. Brrr, that will probably be the eternal sound I hear when I wake up alive inside my coffin, just like my childhood nightmares predicted.


PSSST...Hey kid. Wanna play with my poop? It's both safe and fun.

Fun feline fact. There are two links between cats and schizophrenia. One is that there is a vicious virus in their shit called T.gondii that causes a psychotic deterioration in the brain similar to schizophrenia. The other link is that a famed painter of cats was a schizophrenic called Louis Wain who was popular at the start of the 20th century. His artwork is interesting because it documents the progress of his illness and is often used to illustrate this in abnormal psychology textbooks. His early paintings, while admittedly not exactly normal, are relatively naive depictions of anthropomorphic cats engaging in random human activities. Sorta the lolcats of their day.

However, as Wain's mind began to splinter and leak all over the shop, the cats did too. They first morphed into electrified kitties with waves of energy emanating from their fur. Soon their eyes and faces lost definition and dissolved into swirling wallpapers of repeating, paisley fronds. Finally, all that remained were shattered abstractions that bore little or no resemblance to the cats at all, blazing psychedelic overloads of fractals and colours that normally only occur when you lick the bark of special trees in the amazonian rain forest.

Look and see!

fig (i) Cute Cat


fig (ii) Did someone spike the kit-e-kat?


fig (iii) Ecto-cat


fig (iv) Hindu God cat


fig (v) 'your brain is an ego-devoid mess of fractal uncertainty' cat


And now an MP3. 'Emma Blowgun's last stand' is taken from the album when your heartstrings break, the fuzzy indie-pop highpoint of Beulah's catalogue. I adored this song when I was 19 and played it to death. I believe Beulah were the only band ever signed on the Elephant 6 Collective's label. Yup, contrary to what some might think about the Elephant 6 Collective, the bands didn't all share a label. And Beulah, their one signing, were more a band that they thought had potential than a proper member of the collective. Now, go pack that fact away and take it to the next nerdy table quiz in the Bernard Shaw.

MP3: Beulah-Emma Blowgun's last stand